It is no wonder that in India divorce is a very late development, and that too happens only in a few well-educated, rich cities like Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta. But ninety-nine percent of India cannot think of divorce, for the simple reason that at least you have to see your wife before you can divorce her! You have to talk to her before you know what a bitch she is! She has to talk with you to know, “My God! What a macho fellow I have got!”

But these things don’t happen. Husbands and wives have no time, no space, no secrecy, no privacy. They meet deep in the darkness of the night when everybody has fallen asleep. And they make love as quickly as possible, because somebody may wake up.

When my uncle got married…I used to sleep in the same room, and I wouldn’t let him make love to his wife. Whenever he would get up from his bed and move towards his wife, I would start coughing. He would go back to his bed.

After a few days he told me, “This seems to be strange, that the moment I get out of bed – the whole night you don’t cough, only exactly at that time. What happens? Why do you start coughing?”

I said, “I don’t know. I was also thinking that there must be some connection – your getting out of bed and my coughing. I have been thinking, ‘What connection can there be?’”

But finally he had to open his heart. He said, “I know you. We have been married for five months and I have not even touched my wife’s body. And we cannot say that you should be removed from the room to some other room, because no other room is ready to receive you. And they will ask me why, and I cannot tell the true story, that for five months this boy has been torturing me!”

I said, “I have been doing that simply to make you aware – why make it such a secrecy? Why make it something ugly that you have to hide behind darkness? I have never stopped you, you can make love to your wife; I will be there just to see that everything is going right! And someday I am going to be married, then…? Who is going to teach me? You be my teachers, you both be my teachers.”

He said, “You are impossible. If you see us making love, you will spread the rumor all over the city. And the truth is I myself don’t know much about love, because it is never talked about, never taught. You simply get married – an arranged marriage, you have not seen the girl.”

In India, for ninety-nine percent of the people, marriage is still just fate; the astrologer decides it. They don’t even see the other’s photograph, they don’t know whom they are going to live their whole life with.

This kind of state causes many problems. Sexual abuse of children will be there; rapes will be there – because there are women who have not been able to find a husband, perhaps they have lost all hope of finding a husband. There are men who cannot afford to be married, who are somehow managing to survive, but what to do with the biology? They cannot even go to a prostitute, they don’t have the money. So rape remains the only possible outlet for their biological instinct.

Don’t be hard on the rapist. And don’t be hard on the woman who has been raped. These are problems created by the society. Be hard on it!