In the accident she had bitten her tongue, badly but not fatally. Later that afternoon, when she woke up at the  emergency room and learned what had happened, her first thought had surprised and frightened her. Instead of  wondering whether the injury might affect her ability to speak or to eat, she questioned her ability to kiss ever again; and not simply to kiss, but to kiss properly. (I am almost positive she added “properly,” which might have been a way to qualify and at the same time justify her concern, while also eliminating any doubts as to the kind of kissing she meant.) The more I thought about it, trying to remember and repeating to myself her exact words, and the more I realized that what had impressed me was not the nature or the feared consequences of her injury, as the fact that she had made it the pièce de résistance of her story, if not the highlight of the accident itself. 

That is how, in my thoughts (which were, I must admit, twisted by the circumstances if not by a fervid imagination), she gradually acquired a characterization, first as the Tongue-Biting Woman (or, in a more extreme incarnation, the Tongue-Less Woman) and then simply as Tongue Woman, a mythical creature or a super-heroine named after her most prominent attribute—an empowering and signifying wound. 

Such a prominence, of course, was due to this organ’s pivotal role in some fundamental activities, and consequently to the great suffering and privation that its damage or loss would cause. In a fit of empathetic concern, I considered all the things I would not be able to do if my own tongue were seriously injured or— heaven forbid—removed, and this inspired me to do some research on the topic. I thus learned that the surgical removal of the entire tongue or part of it, technically called glossectomy or hemiglossectomy, is almost exclusively performed when less drastic treatments of the cancer of the tongue have failed. Obviously, this was not Tongue Woman’s case, a simple but significant fact which I welcomed with a sense of relief, while at the same time realizing that it opened another front of inquiry. 

In fact, the gist of her story was neither the accident itself, of which she had said practically nothing, nor the accident-within-the accident, i.e., the tongue-biting, but her slow awakening to the reality of this injury, and especially her immediate and chief concern about being able to kiss ever again. After all, she could have worried about not being able to eat normally, or to eat certain foods, or to taste the difference between flavors. Likewise, she could have worried about losing her ability to speak or being forced to speak “in a  funny way,” like an old drunk, a nitwit or a lunatic. Most people in her situation would have been concerned about these two, arguably more vital, activities; but apparently she had given neither of them a thought. Instead, her only fear and stated concern had been of losing her ability and power to kiss, properly and in a  satisfactory way. To kiss, or not to kiss, that was the question for her. The real question, and the only  consequence of her accident that was worthy of her fear. Eating and speaking were secondary, largely overrated  activities, commonly pursued by individuals who had no experience or idea of the infinitely superior pleasures of kissing. And while she had not said as much, it was obvious that she meant kissing of a certain kind, in which the tongue not only is involved, but plays a major role. The kind of kissing that occurs at—and  necessarily implies—a particular relationship between two individuals, as well as an advanced or rapidly  progressing stage in such a relationship. In other words, what she feared she would not be able to do, ever again, was not only kissing but what is commonly referred to as deep, French, or soul kissing—or even, more  prosaically (but also more accurately) tongue kissing. 

A short but eloquent excursion showed tongue-kissing to be out of bounds to established and acceptable  lexicography. The Queen of Reference, for example, defines a kiss as “the act of pressing or touching with the lips  [the] cheek, hand or lips of another, as a sign or expression of love, affection, reverence or greeting”  (Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911, vol. XV, p. 837). A century later, this was somewhat expanded in “a touch or caress of the lips upon the lips, cheek, hand, or feet of another to signify affection, greeting, reverence,  or sexual attraction.” Yet, despite the addition of “caress,” “feet,” and “sexual attraction,” and the conflation of  love and affection (a modest but significant acknowledgment of the social and cultural changes occurred in the  meantime), there is still no reference to the tongue playing a role, let alone a main role, in the whole enterprise.  (For the sake of comparison, I should point out that eating and speaking, the two other activities in which the  tongue plays a driving role, are vulgarly dictated by physiological and social needs, needs that soul kissing  replaces with the much more uplifting experience of tongue-feeding, in which the organ acts simultaneously as vehicle and nourishment; even though, in doing so, it may prevent utterance and breathing, making these two  activities problematic and superfluous at the same time.) 

To find a meaningful reference to the tongue’s role in kissing, I had to go back several centuries to ancient Rome and medieval India. But while Ovid takes tongue-kissing for granted, teasingly twisting it into his verse, good old Vātsyāyana, always so punctilious and pedantic, turns out to be disappointing on this point.  Squeezed between the preliminaries of “embracing” and “scratching” (with nails or fingers), kissing falls  prey to the typical—and typically puritanical—attitude that affects the Master of Love’s entire opus, which is a complacent preference for classification and enumeration over the eloquence of detail. In the above-mentioned chapter, in fact, the tongue makes but a timid cameo appearance. Just like there are four kinds of love and four ways of embracing, there are also four kinds of kissing (straight, bent, turned, or pressed), depending on  the particular position or angle the two lovers assume in performing the act. At the same time (or perhaps not), kissing may also be moderate, contracted, pressed, or soft, based on “the different parts of the body which are kissed, for different kinds of kisses are appropriate for different parts of the body.” Here Vatsy does not say if two or more kinds may occur simultaneously, fusion style, but adds that a fifth kind of kiss, called the “Greatly Pressed Kiss” (Avapiditakam), “is effected by taking hold of the lower lip between two fingers, and then, after touching it with the tongue, pressing it with great force with the lip” (a rather complicated maneuver,  which Ovid rendered more concisely as illic purpureis condatur lingua labellis, and Marlowe translated “There in your rosy lips my tongue entomb”). Hardly a sign of brewing passion but a beginning of sorts. A slightly more enterprising use of the tongue occurs when one of the two lovers “takes both the lips of the other between his or her own” (something that a woman will do only if the man “has no mustache,” which seems fair enough). This is called a “clasping kiss,” and if one of the lovers “touches the teeth, the tongue, and the palate of the other, with his or her tongue,” we have the “Fighting of the Tongue” (Jivhayuddham). And this is all the Kama Sutra has to say on the matter. 

A “far more elaborate account of tongue-kisses (maraichignage)” is to be found in Padmaśrī’s Nagaraśarvasva, or “Complete Playboy,” an eleventh-century text which Alex Comfort (aka Dr. Sex), in the introduction to his English translation of the Ratirahasya, where the quote is found, calls one of the “minor and derivative works” inspired by Vātsyāyana’s alleged masterpiece. Like its more illustrious predecessor,  the Ratirahasya, or Koka Shastra, devotes a full chapter to kisses (cūsana), greatly expanding the previous catalogs and differentiating between “formal Kiss” (nimitaka), “suction kiss” (sphuritaka), “thrusting kiss”  (ghattitaka, when a woman “takes her husband’s lips and holds them gently with hers, covers his eyes with her hand, and thrusts her tongue a little way into his mouth”), “wandering kiss” (bhrānta), “crosswise kiss” (tiryak), “pressure kiss” (pīditaka), “upper lip kiss” (uttarostha), and “closed kiss” (samputa), which “becomes  tongue-wrestling (jihvāyuddha—maraichignage) when [the] two tongues meet and struggle with each other.” A footnote to the latter technique further informs the reader that “Padmaśrī (Nagaraśarvasva) gives also  three special tongue kisses—the needle (suci) when it is inserted pointwise in the woman’s mouth, pratāta when it is broadened inside like a leaf, and kari, when it is made to quiver.” Overall, I found that “tongue-wrestling” rendered much better than “fighting of the tongue” what was obviously the same thing. I also wondered about the use of maraichignage, which is French for French kiss, considering that its putative origin  in the marais (the marshland between Brittany and Poitou) remains obscure and enigmatic. 

My next and last source on tongue-kissing in the Indian erotic tradition was—predictably enough— the Ananga Ranga, or “Stage of the Bodiless One,” written in the fifteenth or sixteenth century by a princely poet named Kalyan malla or Kalyanamalla and, like the Kama Sutra, first translated in English by “A.F.F. & B.R.F.”, that is, Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot and Richard Francis Burton. Of the ten different kinds of kissing  considered, No. 6 (Pindita, or “lump-kissing”) and No. 10 (Samaushtha-kissing) are but variants of the Greatly Pressed Kiss described by Vātsyāyana, with the wife “taking hold of her husband’s lips with her fingers, passing her tongue over them and biting them,” or also “taking the mouth and lips of the husband into hers, pressing them with her tongue, and dancing about him as she does so” (the latter variant requiring peculiar acrobatic skills). But the Ananga Ranga’s real contribution to my inquiry was Kissing No. 3, called Ghatika, or “neck-nape kissing,” which in Arbuthnot’s & Burton’s translation “is done by the wife, who, excited with passion, covers her husband’s eyes with her hands, and closing her own eyes, thrusts her tongue into his mouth, moving it to and fro with a motion so pleasant and slow that it at once suggests another and higher  form of enjoyment.” If Kalyanamalla’s ghatika reads like a more detailed, embellished, and prurient version of Koka Pundit’s ghattitaka, the difference between the woman’s tongue being thrust “a little way into [the man’s] mouth” and “moving it to and fro with a motion so pleasant and slow that it suggests another and higher form of enjoyment” indicates a new sensibility and a greater liberty in the description of the woman’s  movements, which I suspected to be the influence of Arabic poetry and rhetoric. This became evident when I perused another translation that Burton and Arbuthnot published under the auspices of their Kama Shastra  Society, the “specialized” imprint they had created for the distribution of Oriental erotic literature—their unique contribution to the advancement and enlightenment of Victorian society. I am referring, of course, to Cheikh Nefzaoui’s “manual of Arabian erotology,” the legendary Perfumed Garden, in which the kiss is “assumed to be an integral part of the coition,” produced “by the movement of the tongue in the mouth and by the displacement of the saliva, provoked by the suction.” Suction—the terminology if not the action itself— seems to be the Arabian equivalent of the Indian pressing or fighting of the tongues, since it is mentioned at least once in the Arabian Nights, more precisely in the tale of the young Baghdadi merchant (nestled in that of the Christian broker, which is in turn part of the Story of the Hunchback), the mysterious woman he spends the night with starts by setting her mouth on his and sucking his tongue, thus prompting him to  reciprocate the favor. 

I shall conclude my excursion by mentioning, en passant, that at about the same time, in Renaissance  Italy, Pietro Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi (1526) pleaded, rather bluntly (and displaying the typical, childish insistence of the Italian lover), “Porgimi la lingua” or “Dammi tutta la lingua,” an invocation that two  centuries later would be resumed, almost verbatim (although in Venetian dialect), by Giorgio Baffo’s “dame la lengua in bocca,” and in due course by the more persuasive libertine command, “Donnez-moi votre langue,  petite friponne.” 

I now realized that the woman’s tale had focused on that part of her body I had not been able to see— her mouth and, by extension, her face. All I had glimpsed of her was the back of a pixie cut and a shapely nape, and even those from a distance that was more suggestive than revealing. This naturally increased my  curiosity and raised my expectations of a future encounter. By then it was not only her tongue, but her entire  mouth that excited my curiosity, tickled my imagination, and shaped my thinking. Because the tongue is just part of a whole, and it needs the rest of the mouth to perform all the sensorial, digestive, and linguistic tasks it is associated with—including kissing properly. Just like a bell needs a clapper to ring. 

As I pursued these thoughts, I gradually realized that it is in the anatomical and physiological  relationship between the tongue and the mouth—or, more precisely, between the tongue, the vestibule, and the cavity of the mouth—where both the mystery of language and the magic of kissing ultimately reside. In Gray’s Anatomy’s classic definition, the cavity of the mouth is “a nearly oval-shaped cavity which consists of two parts: an outer, smaller portion, the vestibule, and an inner, larger part, the mouth cavity proper.” The vestibule is “a slit-like space, bounded externally by the lips and cheeks; internally by the gums and teeth,” and it “communicates with the surface of the body by the rima or orifice of the mouth.” As for the tongue, it is “the principal organ of the sense of taste, and an important organ of speech; it also assists in the mastication and deglutition of the food.” All these functions (including kissing, which Gray predictably doesn’t mention) require a rather complex structure consisting of a root or base, an apex or tip, and a dorsum or back, plus various muscles, membranes, folds, arches, surfaces, ducts, grooves, glands, follicles, et cetera. 

The copy of Gray’s Anatomy I would consult years later, in South Mumbai’s Sassoon Library, was an  Edwardian reprint, complete with the classic illustrations by Henry Vandyke Carter, himself an anatomist and surgeon as well as a renowned artist. By the time the book came out, in early 1858, Carter was already in India, where he spent the next three decades working for the Indian Medical Service, teaching Anatomy at Grant Medical College, serving as secretary and then president of the Bombay Medical Society, publishing articles and books on leprosy and other infectious diseases, and crowning an illustrious career with a string  of titles and other professional honors. None of this, however, would have helped him save his old  collaborator, who had died of smallpox in London, aged thirty-four, a few years before Carter started  researching deadly diseases on the Subcontinent.