Malashri Lal

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 Se ee

a storehouse of tales
GaN lL Fe MtP? ORI A RY INDIAN

WOMEN WRITERS
 a storehouse of tales
CeOgN a ler eMEPAO RI AURLY, ILNDLIAN

WOMEN WRITERS

Edited by

Jehanara Wasi
Introduction by

Malashri Lal

Srishti
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 |
|Contents |

Delhi: City of the Dead

Jani’s Morning
Omens, Sacred and Profane
Cry, My Beloved Child
Give Me Back My Country
Simone de Beauvoir and the Manes
Chocolate
Twenty or Twenty-Five?
CO
RYN Fig Blossom
ONDA
Lifework 107
—
— =
=. A Toast to Herself
123 Recollecting Motherhood
The Rooster and the Hen 14]
Anadi’s Journey 153
In Memory of Meera 165
Bhadoo 183
 geetiadgvet),
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 Introduction

Malashri Lal

Once upon a time there was a grandmother, spartan and thin, a

bundle of energy in the kitchen, a storm of words in the zenana, a
storehouse of tales in the bedroom. As dusk gathered its golden
strands and passed into amorphous darkness, this grandmother
discovered her power in language in the stories she told —
innumerable, undocumented, intuitive creations —her rich quilt of
memory and social comment.
Despite cable TV, Dolby sound systems, computer graphics
and other wonders of cyberspace, the grandmother as storyteller
survives as a trope of Indian culture even if she is often physically
transformed or even absent. For women in India are born to
storytelling. Even as they imbibe, absorb, the circumstances of
their mundane, everyday lives, they create alternate and frequently,
better worlds in their fecund imagination. Like Emily Dickinson,
they might “tell all the truth but tell it slant” or like Mahasweta
Devi make it a mission to document “history in the making.” One
way or another, the woman storyteller has offered a different
dimension to civil society than men have.
At one time this contrast would have marked a difference in
subject matter that women write of interior and domestic spaces
and men write about the public domain. While there was
considerable truth about this perceived division of literary subjects
even upto the 1980s in Indian English writing, such distribution is
no longer visible, nor is it at all desirable. Remembering the contexts
of history and society operative for Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu
in colonial times, one can understand their acceptance of the limits
placed upon their literary expression. That women writers impost
colonial times, including the famous trio, Kamala Markandaya,
Anita Desai and Nayantara Sahgal, tended to tread softly on radical
grounds is a fact widely acknowledged. Yet, their novels and stories
were not endorsing tradition. If one read carefully, the womanist
strategy of a masked protest, a thoughtful, sometimes anguished
questioning of patriarchal conditions came to the fore. There was,
however, a compromise, a timidity which prevented most of the
earlier writers from declaring a feminist position even if critics
pointed clearly to the texts which were challenging social
constructions inimical to women.
Perhaps the problem lay with the term “feminist” or even the
African-American modification, “womanist.” In the debates in
India during the 1970s and 1980s it was repeatedly asserted that
the terms and their reference were “western” and therefore unusable
outside their originary context. Local, cultural vocabulary such
as “nariwad” or “narithwa” were suggested from Hindi but
somehow, did not gain currency. Yet Manushi flourished as a forum
for Indian women, and India’s first feminist press, Kali for Women,
gained prominence. Meanwhile theoretical formulations on
feminism, especially from the USA and France, began to show an
influential presence in Indian academia although there was a
growing resistance to using western frameworks to “fit” around
Indian texts. Within these volatile discussions, worldwide, about
“What is Feminism?,” another fissure opened up, unexpectedly,
between writers and critics. Highly reputed women novelists from
several countries disclaimed any allegiance to the underscored
category of “women writers” emphasizing that the creative
imagination could not be split by gender. Margaret Atwood in
Canada, Doris Lessing in Britain, Nadine Gordimer in South Africa
and Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande in India may be counted
among them.
Some aspects of these vital debates have subsided, while others
persist. The present collection of stories would be enriched if
contextualised within a discussion about literary issues today. In
an obvious declaration of separateness, the anthology foregrounds
women writers, to which there is the subtext that women have a
gendered voice. Manju Kapur’s Chocolate is a fine example of
revenge and reversal uniquely using tools available to women in
adverse circumstances. This story along with a few others (C7y,
My Beloved Child, Bhadoo) locates the site of discourse on the
woman’s body, the only space she can hope to claim as her own.
Understanding the intricate functions and emotions of this
femaleness, the writers speak of its moods, its desires, its protests
and submissions.
The woman as writer, as creatrix, is another subject this
collection addresses, which again challenges an old idea that men
are creative, women are procreative; or in book-market words,
“Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.” Well, are they?
At least two stories here (A TJoast to Herself and Simone de
Beauvoir and the Manes) argue for the honour of the woman
writer’s profession and refuse to see it, as Indian society often
does, as an unfortunate phase of dabbling with words, an excess
of fancy to be cured by a “suitable” marriage. Since I spoke earlier
about Indian feminism’s link with ideological developmgnts
worldwide, it is worth noting that on the aspects of the body and
the role of the writer, the premises of argument bear similarity
with statements made elsewhere. Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert
showed how the woman writer inscribes her own “madness” into
her imaginative fiction, Margaret Atwood thought up the image
of the “edible woman” devoured by an unthinking male companion,
the French feminists focussed on ecriture feminine based on the
structure of the female body.
Along with such common ground co-exists a great deal of literary
material that is specific to India. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita in the
two volumes Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present set
out to map “the practices ofthe self or agency and of narrative
that emerge at the contested margins of patriarchy, empire, and
nation.” Contemporary writers, featured in the present collection,
show a sensitivity to the transitions that are changing the face of
the post-independence nation in terms of class and caste. Bulbul
Sharma’s Anadis Journey, Madhu Kishwar’s Twenty or Twenty-
Five? and Shama Futehally’s Jani’s Morning take us into the
interiors of a cityscape or the corners of a rural hamlet to pause at
the doorstep of new vistas and new values to interrogate the nature
of the change from tradition to modernity. And it is not a clear
trajectory they notice.
There is humour too for the woman writer is not necessarily an
enumerator of miseries. Namita Gokhale’s story is about the romps
of a female yuppie in Rishikesh; Anuradha Marwah Roy smiles at
the self-indulgent complacency of the bored housewife.
What happened to the old pieties about “motherhood” and “son
preference” that featured so prominently in earlier discourses on
cultural leanings in India? Mrinal Pande’s thoughtful,
compassionate voice reflects upon the idea of the maternal with
the critical shifts in youthful thinking today.
India, that playful land of contradictions, is well expressed by
the contrast in the tales told by the “beloved witch,” Ipsita Roy
Chakraverti, and the social activist Manju Kak. The magic of
Wicca peers past the glorious edifices of Lutyens’ Delhi to reveal
essences of evil sunk deep into the foundations of the city’s wealth
and power. Kak takes us to another India of hill folks, superstitions,
anew found nationalism heady with brute strength. Madhu Tandan
adds that touch ofthe inexplicable to the common routine.
India, celebrating fifty years of independence, offered to the
audience a haunting remake of “Vande Mataram.” India entered
the new millennium singing paeans to information technology.
India’s writers, from Rushdie to Roy, spanned the diversity of a
nation which refuses to be defined by any consistent image. A
taste of this diversity is contained in this anthology of short stories.
As changeable as the monsoon sky, as exhilarating as a ride on a
village swing, as taut as the kite strings at Makar Sankranti, as
demanding of attention as the Ring Road traffic, these stories
capture today’s assertions — and yesterday’s nostalgia.
 Delhi: City of the Dead
Ipsita Roy Chakraverti

People often ask me what evil is. They feel I should know. Maybe
they’
re right. I’ve seen the workings of strange and hostile forces
wreaking their will on living beings and I have wondered if that is
evil. I’ve witnessed people confounded by that which they cannot
put a name to — and I have asked myself if this is the other face of
good. Where does one end and the other begin? Good and Evil—a
being with two faces — strangely enough, looking in the same
direction. Like an oriental deity, possessed of many arms but one
soul. And from that soul, like molten lava, streams forth the power
which takes a path, a way, through darkness or light. We are taught
that we should walk the lighted way — but oh, the beauty of
darkness, when all the senses come alive.
In the course of my work with Wicca and the working of men’s
minds I have come across complex puzzles and mazes when trying
* DELHI: CITY OF THE DEAD

to decipher what men call good and what they label evil. “Evil” is
what they do not understand, that which seduces them and taunts
them and lurks in the mist of their minds. “Good” is what they
have found in well thumbed scripture books and is well scrubbed
and intolerably antiseptic and it does not cause discomfort to their
conditioned convictions.
But whether they will or not — evil lives on. Where? Amongst
many other places, it lives where men have once trod. It persists in
places where he has loved and lusted and killed others and himself.
Insidiously, silently, it creeps into the present from a not so forgotten
past and makes its presence felt. Such is its nature and such is its
power. m
I once delved into the secrets of places which people calfevil
and haunted and I stumbled upon truths which amazed. I discovered
that often the darkest forces can lurk beneath the greenest grass. A
freshly painted wicket fence may conceal the macabre. I wished to
probe the haunted sites and houses ofthis fair capital of India —
Delhi. For I had been led to believe that Delhi is home to some of
the most sinister plots that |would ever come across in a career
devoted to the supernatural and the unexplained. This is of course,
a deliberate play on words, for I do not refer to the conspiracies
and assassinations and bloodbaths that have led to the seats of
power in Delhi. Generations ofinvaders have stormed this place
and intrigued and killed and ruled and have been slain. Blood has
seeped into this land and the spreading, old trees here have tasted
ofit.The grandest fort here, is made of red stone. Is it to celebrate
the blood which has been shed for power? This hungry land, soaked
 IPSITA ROY CHAKRAVERTI *

with yearning and lust does not sleep — and it is a land, ready to
devour and strike, if disturbed. But, in the course of time, men
forget and do turn the old soil to make way for the new And that is
when the restless dead arise...and walk again on this paradise on
earth.
There are many fair properties which consist of Lutyens’ Delhi.
The government’s bungalows for its very important persons, and
the verdant colonies with flats for its bureaucrats. There they nestle,
surrounded by high walls and lush lawns. There, every night, sleep
the country’s rulers and policy-makers — in the arms of those who
have not really departed.
How many know that many of the city’s present official
residences stand where erstwhile residents had lain down — albeit
unwillingly — in the hope of final peace? In making way for the
new, graveyards or kabaristans have been disturbed. And such
disturbances release hostile and darkened waves from the earth,
which rise with the heat and dust of Delhi’s gruelling summers —
and the cold mists of winter, seeking to vent their anger on the
living.
A former Solicitor-General of India, a man of learning and
worldly wisdom and with little time for whims or flights of fancy
had a strange experience to relate. During his sojourn at number 8
Krishna Menon Marg, some years back, he would often be
awakened during the early hours of the morning, by an undefinable
chill and a feeling that there was someone else in the bedroom
apart from his sleeping wife and himself. It was eerie. It was 4
a.m. one morning in October, when he suddenly woke up. It was
* DELHI: CITY OF THE DEAD

almost as if somebody shook him awake. The room was in semi-

darkness and a strange mist was gathering at the foot of his bed.
Then he could gradually see the face and figure of an old, bearded
man, in white robes, who stood and observed him with glazed
eyes, for what seemed to Mr. G., a very long while. Then the
apparition turned and crossed the room silently, towards the
window. Mr. G’s wife slept on. He did not mention the incident to
her. A few nights later, however it was she who shook him awake
and cried out that she had had a strange dream. She talked of
having seen a man in a white robe. An old Muslim holy man, she
said. Mr. G. saw this entity a few more times before political
changes took place and he felt it expedient to move.. A
Who is this disturbed entity at number 8 Krishna Menon Nfarg?
Can anyone ever be truly happy or content there? I went to
investigate the place once, just before Mr. G. left. Perhaps he was
happy enough while he was there, but the point is that circumstances
did not allow him to enjoy his position or the house for very long.
When I last saw him in that house, he was sitting, a bit forlornly in
his study, overseeing the packing of heavy legal books into cartons:
A wispy shape overlooked the details. _
There is a bungalow on Motilal Nehru Marg, whose entrance is
placed at an odd 30 degrees to the main road. It is number 3 and
the bungalow needed a facelift when I last saw it. However the
member of parliament and his wife who occupy it, have made it
comfortable within. Still, whenever I have been there, I have felt
eerie eyes watching and waiting — for something to happen. Each
gust of wind sets up a weird rustle in the old trees outside. I feel
 IPSITA ROY CHAKRAVERTI °

that in spite of its smiling green gardens, the earth forces there are
sinister. Strangely enough, sooner or later they seem to affect the
hearts and fortunes of the man of the house. Former Congress
heavyweight Arun Nehru, lived there at one time. He suffered a
massive heart attack. His fortunes declined. Former Congress
Union Minister, Jaffer Sharief lived there too. His heart problems
came later, but he could not escape the curse. Strange rumours
abounded while he lived there. Some said he kept camels on the
grounds, which he had served up on the dining table when the
fancy struck him. The house started getting a bizarre reputation.
People said it brought no good to its occupants. And strangely:
enough the present resident, even though he divides his time between
there and his own flat on Aurangzeb Road, has been suffering
from cardiac problems. His career has seen frustrations. He was
an ambitious man.
I personally experienced and witnessed the strange goings on at
Block E, Sector 13 of Ramakrishna Puram. I moved into a lovely,
sunny, ground floor flat in the summer of 1993. It seemed spacious,
welcoming and smelled offresh paint. There were two verandahs
on either side. One overlooked the kitchen garden, where winter
saw a profusion of tomatoes, carrots and cabbages. The other
verandah, was enclosed by ornamental wrought iron grills and a
door which led onto a huge lawn which remained green even at the
height of a Delhi summer. There were a few flowering trees in
white and yellow and I planted a gardenia bush which bloomed
almost immediately. All seemed well. The first week was busy but
uneventful. But from the second week onwards, there was no
* DELHI: CITY.OF THE DEAD

denying it.
I would frequently hear loud thumps outside as a heavy weight
or a body falling on hard ground. Practically every morning,
between 4.30 a.m. and 5 a.m. there would be scraping sounds of
furniture being dragged across the room, emanating from the floor
above. This would continue even when the flat above fell vacant.
Tentative taps on closet doors was a common feature. Once or
twice, at dusk, I caught glimpses of a woman shrouded in grey,
near a bougainvillaea bush. At such times, my dog would start to
bark uncontrollably — even though investigations outside revealed
nothing amiss.
Then something happened to further rouse my suspicions about
the block. An officer and his wife had moved into a flat dgathe
sixth floor. Within a month, they were out of there in a panic. Not
much was divulged but rumours went that the lady, normally a
very practical and cheerful wife, was unable to tolerate the
inexplicable gloom and sense of impending doom in that flat. Some
said she started to have morbid hallucinations. Anyhow, without
stopping to find out what was causing those chilling disturbances
the couple fled from there and chose to put up with the relative
discomfort of a transit flat. The irony lies in the fact that evil
generally shows a charming face — maybe to entice and beguile.
And Block E of R.K. Puram is certainly charming. A quiet, tree
lined road leads upto it. In summer it drips with golden laburnum
and in autumn with some sweet smelling blossoms I could never
put a name to. Drive down there on an evening, when you have
nothing else to do.
 IPSITA ROY CHAKRAVERTI °

I did ask some old residents about the background of that site
or that building. An elderly maid who worked for me said that
many people there kept hearing sounds in the evening. Then in
hushed tones she reported that about five years ago, a woman who
worked for a family on the sixth floor had fallen to her death.
‘How?’ I asked. ‘Was it an accident?’
“No, many people said it wasn’t,’ she answered grimly. ‘But
who’s to know what goes on behind doors?’ She left it at that but
added, maybe as an afterthought, ‘The land here has a curse. These
curses never die. They make people do bad things. Who’s to say
whose fault it really all is?’ Very profound, I thought.
Was it the same curse that dogged the house across the way
from Block E? A certain Union Minister, an erstwhile ruler from
a princely state, chose to build a marble mansion for his daughters
in that very area. It was a strange, huge house with very few
windows. A journalist once commented that it looked like a
mausoleum. However it was nobody’s business what a house chose
to look like. But it was true that the house seemed to take a long
while to complete. The minister soon started ruling. He retired
from public life. His daughters moved into the gift from their father.
Soon before I moved away from R.K. Puram I heard of a dreadful
tragedy in that very house. One of the sons-in-law, started suffering
from depression there. He ended it by shooting himself.
There are other places in Delhi, haunted and sinister. Houses
built near mazaars or burial places. Come to think of it, Delhi’s
like one huge graveyard, where the living and the dead sit side by
side and dine and wonder at how dreams and desires never really
* DELHI: CITY OF THE DEAD

die. The lust for gold and power still stalks the land and turns to
exhilarating evil. And of course, evil never rests.
In Kaka Nagar stands a guest house which faces a mazaar.
There is another old tomb across the road from it. Old survey
maps say that at one time long ago, kabaristans extended from
Sujan Singh Park right upto Purana Qila. But to return to the
guest house, there are no ghosts here that I have seen or heard. But
those who have sojourned within its rooms, complain of peculiar
shifts in personality. Meaning that the worst and the weakest in
them, inexplicably comes to the fore. ‘Thoughts which I would
never entertain at other times, or at all, seemed to overtake me
there,’ said somebody who did not wish to be named.
I spent a few nights within its walls. I wished to experiotmec its
ambience. It was some time in early April and the garden in front,
was wilting but still pleasing to the eye, with late blooming petunias
and marigold. I occupied a suite on the ground floor. It was well
appointed and furnished with the usual comforts—but a trifle chilly.
I don’t think it was my imagination, but I definitely felt swirls of
cold air there, in different areas at different times. The ni ghts were
restful till about 3 a.m., when something would disturb and prompt
one to get up and go into the small living area. There, the air
would be heavy with something, I can only label as sadness. I
would sit down with deliberate detachment and with the air ofan
observer. I was aware ofthe unfriendly, resentful currents criss-
crossing the room. One night, from the bedroom, I heard the sound
of voices raised in argument coming from the adjoining room. Of
course there was nobody there. The only sign of alien presences
 IPSITA ROY CHAKRAVERTI *

was in the shape of a broken glass which lay on the floor. I do not
know who could have knocked it down. It seemed to have been
smashed against the door. I also marked the fact that the staff
were not too keen to stay late. This I at first put down to the
common laziness of those who serve, but then I noticed that at
other times they were relatively hardworking and attentive.
However, as evening approached they were eager to serve me a
hasty dinner and then wishing me goodnight, retire for the night to
their quarters which, were in outhouses at a little distance from
the guest house. I do not think that they guessed the real reason for
my sojourn there and I did not enlighten them. Only once did I ask
one of the bearers if the suite I was staying in, was one of the less
frequented ones. He looked at me with a startled look and after
stuttering for a bit, protested that no, it was very busy. In fact, all
the rooms were popular with guests. By the time he had finished
explaining the situation, he looked quite ashen. I did not press on.
After all, he had a job to do. But I think the place had taken a toll
on those who worked there. They were silent, nervous. Somewhat
unhappy. I wonder what they had seen and heard there, in that
house, built near an old mazaar.
Then there’s the story about that corner house on South End
Road, facing Lodhi Gardens. It’s a two-storeyed house with an
unlived in air. An early morning walker at Lodhi, told me this tale.
‘That house is occupied by an MP now. But that’s only for now.
The spirit who lives there will see to that. He does not allow
anybody to settle down. Many people have seen him. He comes
out every day at dawn, takes a turn around the tombs and disappears
¢ DELHI: CITY OF THE DEAD

into the mist. He wants that place for himself.’ It’s true that for a
house that’s supposedly occupied, it looks bleak and deserted, even
in the afternoon sun.
As for the well-known VIP houses which carry a curse or a
story on their heads — it’s a fact that a certain lady politician was
once advised to move from her Janpath residence, because it seemed
to bring her only bad luck. The wife of a previous prime minister
warned her about how ill it had been for her family. People who
knew, said that an old mazaar lay in the compound. I myself have
felt the vibrations which emanate from a very old peepul tree in
the compound, near the bungalow. It talks of peace which never
comes in Delhi, in life or in death. Those who lie there under the
earth smile at human ambitions and vow that they will newer let
others have, what they themselves can no longer taste. This lady
politician often stands under the tree or near it, when the sun is
hot, and talks to visitors. She seems very attached to the house.
Maybe it is too late now and the house will not allow her to move.
Like the tree, it has spread out its many roots.
And so it goes on in Delhi. Amid the power and the pomp, the
greed and the treachery, the intrigue and the lust, the restless dead
continue to haunt the places they once knew. Are they angry? It
would seem so. But they will eventually get what they want. In
one way or the other. They always have. And they can afford to
wait.

10
 Janis Morning

Shama Futehally

The mug was greeny-blue, the colour of magic. Every morning it

showed another mug shining in the mirror. They were both full of
delicious things. And every morning the mug was waiting for Jani.
Because he had to wash everything. The yellow toothbrush, the
blue toothbrush, Baba’s funny stick and the other soft black brushy
thing. He was reaching for it now, on tip-toe, stretched till it seemed
he might suddenly coil backwards. In his woolly pyjamas his bottom
stuck out like that ofa little fat duck. Stretch ... stretch ... the taut
finger wagged from side to side. All at once the finger hit the mug,
it toppled and crashed into the basin.
There! Now he would start. He was tugging at the tap, and the
knobbly steel hurt his fingers. He pulled and pulled. At once the
tap gave way and there it came, exactly the same straight gleaming
line. (Jani was always a little afraid that the gleaming line would
* JANIS MORNING

be different.) He put four fingers in the water and waited for them
to curl back all by themselves. He did it again. Then he moved his
hand around in the water to feel the funny tingling in different
parts.
Jani picked up the yellow toothbrush, held it under the water,
and put it carefully in the soap dish. When he began to wash the
small blue brush a miracle happened.
“Jani!” Amma called from her room. “Put the paste on my brush
and I’Il come and brush my teeth with you.”
Jani felt as if someone had given him an ice-cream for no reason.
He hadn’t said it. He hadn’t cried or tugged at her dressing-gown.
She said it all by herself. They would stand in their special place
under the golden globe, and up and down, up and down, together
they would produce the white foam. They would have a tooth-
brushing race. When he wasn’t looking, Amma would tickle him.
O what a tussle there would be! He laid the brush in the dish. He
would be ready, ready, ready.
A little later Amma came in. Now she seemed a little different.
Her hair was already combed. “Oh Jani!” she said. “What are you
doing?”
In the way that always happened with grown-ups, suddenly
everything was different. Amma was putting everything back into
the mug and from the way she was doing it Jani knew there would
be no race. His lips began to feel soft and trembly. Now Amma
was squeezing her own paste! And grief rushed at Jani like a slap.
It rushed around inside his chest, swelling it up. His eyes closed
tight, and a howl emerged from Jani.
 SHAMA FUTEHALLY °

Amma stopped squeezing and looked at him with set lips. Jani
couldn’t stop the howl, it kept coming and coming like an endless
puffy train. “Stop yowling!” Baba shouted from the room. They
were both “like that” today. But Jani’s chest was full of sobs,
round red gulpy ones. Because that was the best part of all. To
squeeze Amma’s green paste, to hold the tube tightly in both hands
till his very last bit of breath was gone. And then the slow beautiful
reward crawled out, a green snail of paste all made by Jani. With
intense care he would drape it on the brush.
“Pll do it! Pll do it!” Jani was shrieking through his sobs.
Resignedly Amma gave him the toothpaste and brush. Still
gulping he began to squeeze. But he couldn’t, not while Amma
watched with her tight face. “Hurry up!” she said. And the train of
howls began to rush out of Jani’s chest once more.
Then Amma changed. Her two large arms in their woollen
sleeves came round him. The tiny woollen hairs on her dressing-
gown were tickling his face. “There,” she said. But Jani was never
going to smile again. Amma gave him a peck on the nose. Never,
never. Then Amma became properly herself. She drew her arms
tighter, screwed up her mouth, and gave hima long, chewy, noisy
kiss on the cheek. And Jani looked up with a small smile of
forgiveness.
Now they were in the room, and Jani’s shirt was over his head.
His little shoulder-blades stuck out like wings. His arms couldn’t
find the right holes. Round and round he went, like a trussed
chicken. Amma and Baba were both being best. They didn’t tell
him to hurry. They didn’t say you’ll learn when you’re bigger.
¢ JANrS MORNING

They stood by him, shouting nice things. “Push just a little.” “Photo!
Everyone smile for the photo!” 1>?
Suddenly — shoosh! His arms slid
through. Cheeks flushed, eyes shining, the face of a hero emerged.
Amma and Baba began to clap, just as you do for babies like
Munni. But Jani knew they wanted to please him so he clapped
too. At once he stopped and shot a glance at Baba. “I want the
story about the hairy bear,” he said. Jani could seize an opportunity
as well as anybody.

“Then,” said Bai, “the lion said, “What! Another lion! And he
jumped into the well.” “~
“Then,” breathed Jani.
LNG eV eW ne wer thay:
“No no!” shouted Jani. “He didn’t die.”
“Of course not,” said Bai at once. “Then he climbed out of the
well and went home and lived happily ever after.”
Jani breathed a long sigh of pure happiness. Nobody told a
story like Bai did. Amma couldn’t roar properly — she just made a
little no-good sound — and Baba didn’t care whether the lion climbed
out or not. He was gazing at Bai as if he would burst. Then he
didn’t know what to do so he jumped up with a shriek and jumped
again and fell down in the grass. He lay there with little things
tickling his neck, and the funny light feeling of the sun on his face.
They were on the grass beside the garden tap. It was Jani’s
favourite place, where he always hid when he played I-Spy with

14
 SHAMA FUTEHALLY »°

Bai. Under the tap there was a little brown shining puddle with
yellow leaves. And next to it grew a small stiff bush with purple
flowers. Without warning Bai plucked a flower and stuck it behind
his ear. “Girl! Girl!” she shouted, running away.
“You girl,” said Jani, puffing after her. “You girl.”
When she reached the swing Bai waited for him with her arms
wide open. He ran straight at her and buried his head in her frock.
Bai had a different kind of smell. She was usually in the same
frock, white and green with a beautiful tear at just the right place
under the arms. And Bai wore a purple sweater right through the
cold and now she was still wearing it even though it was so hot.
Her hair was very oily and was tied back in the thick plait. Her
dark skin shone like her eyes.
“What do you want to do now, Jani?” asked Bai tenderly. “Do
you want to sit on the swing?”
Yes Jani wanted to sit on the swing. But it was very hot. Slowly,
secretly, he was thinking what it would be like to be drinking lime
juice.
Jani loved juice and he always wanted Bai to have some too.
But when Ayah made his juice she never gave Bai any. When
Amma gave him biscuits she always said, “Give one to Bal.” You
must always share, said Amma. But once when he said to Amma,
“Some juice for Bai?” she didn’t answer and Bai only laughed.
“The juice is all for you, Jani,” she said.
Now Bai was setting him on the swing. “I'll bring your juice
from the kitchen,” she said practically. “Would you like to come
to my house and drink it?”
* JANrS MORNING

Oh yes. Jani loved Bai’s house. It was in the little lane behind
their own house and it was dark and cool with beautiful blue walls.
On one wall there hung lots of shiny coloured pictures together,
looking like an enormous flower. Underneath there was a little orange
light. Jani thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
And he had never forgotten the time when he ran away to Bai’s
house very early one morning. It was like a haven of cosiness. All
over the floor there were long parcels covered in quilts. Then Bai’s
brother’s head emerged from one. Her father’s from another. You
never knew whose head was going to appear next.
Clutching Bai’s dress with one hand, holding his mug ofjuice
in the other, Jani stepped importantly into Bai’s house. He knew
what kind of awelcome he was going to get. Bai’s uncle Titsed
himself on one arm. “Well, Jani Babu!” he said. “You forgot us
yesterday.” Bai’s uncle lived on a string bed in a corner of the
house. Bai’s mother looked up and smiled. She was pumping the
stove. That was another thing. In Bai’s house there was a beautiful
round golden stove right in the middle ofthe floor. Now it was
squeaking ... deechoo ... deechoo ... deechoo ... Jani held his
breath. It would come. Dhoosh! With a thud a flaming blue circle
leapt up around it. It was thudding and thudding, as if it wanted to
catch him. Jani could never see it often enough. It was like the
time when Baba took him to see the aeroplane and he saw it tear
down the road in a frenzy and without warning enter the sky.
The flame was shouting away. On his small mat in the corner
Jani felt very safe. “Will you have a chapati, Jani?” said Bai’s
mother.
 SHAMA FUTEHALLY »

“Yes one chapati for me,” said Jani. “Just a small one” — he
remembered his manners just in time. And Bai’s mother rolled
him a special baby chapati and put it on the stove.
It was also different and nice, sitting on the mat, eating chapatis
in the middle of the floor. Something began to fill up inside him.
He looked shyly at Bai. Bai looked back at him, eyes shining.
When they were in her own house, Bai never talked much. She
just kept looking first at him and then at her uncle or mother, as if
she were proud of something.
“The chapati is very hot, Jani,” Bai said for something to say.
And Jani gravely blew a huge breath on it.
While eating he was looking at his favourite picture. “What is
in that picture?” he asked Bai’s mother. He knew the answer.
“That is God, Jani,” she said in a different voice. “Fold your
hands and do pranaam.”
Jani had put down his chapati and was ready. Feeling very
serious, as he did when he was being a very good boy, he folded
his hands and bent his head. God was a pink man with lots ofhair,
who was sitting in a blue sea and appeared to be enjoying himself.
Amma had told him that God lived in the sky, and Jani always
spared a glance or two for Him when he left Bai’s house.
“Jani is a good boy,” said Bai’s uncle, when Jani finally peeped.
“And how old are you, Jani?”
“Two-and-a-half,” said Jani carefully.
“So much! And when is your happy-birthday?”
“Soon.”
“And whom will you ask?”
¢ JANrS MORNING

“T will ask Bai and Bai’s Amma and you. And Amma and Baba
and Munni.”
They roared with laughter, as they always did. Sometime Jani
would find out why. When he thought of his birthday, he imagined
them all sitting on the floor at home and eating cake, just as they
were eating chapatis here. But right now he wanted to roar with
laughter and beat his knee like Bai’s uncle. Amid the beating and
the laughter came an important message for Jani.
“Lunch-time, Jani,” Ayah was standing in the doorway. “Come
along.”
Jani stopped beating his knee and jumped at Ayah. “Bye-bye!”
he shouted to Bai’s house.
“Will you eat all your curds today?” Ayah called to his bate.
“All!” Jani was halfway down the lane. “AIl!”’ he raced into the
house. “All-all!” down the passage. “All-all-all-all-all-all-all-all!”
round and round the table. He had become a plane.
 Omens, Sacred and Profane

Namita Gokhale

Vatsala Vidyarathi was a literary lady. She had eyes like almonds,
and a double helix drawn with black eyeliner stabbed her forehead.
She had a vaguely Egyptian look, and favoured the South American
writers, although she feared they were becoming passe. She
despised alliteration, colour coordinates, synthetic gold zari, Dubai
expatriates, and Gulshan Kumar’s bhajans.
Vatsala worked with an advertising agency. She had done a
stint in Bombay before settling down in Delhi, where, alas,
the scene was not ‘professional’. She had faced heartbreak
thrice, twice in Bombay, and once in Hissar, where she had
lost her heart to a dairy-farmer. Vatsala had gone to Hissar to
get the feel of the place for a new account. The dairy-farmer
was a consultant to a new Indo-Danish collaboration, and she
had succumbed to his manly charms amidst the mooing of
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

cows and malodorous whiffs of manure.

But nothing came of it. Back in Delhi, life continued as before.
It took half an hour in a sputtering auto-rickshaw to get to her
office in Connaught Place, sometimes even forty-five minutes. She
retraced the same route across the Ring Road in the evening,
through the dull Delhi dusk. She had sold her olive-green Maruti
800, bought on a Citibank loan, after a rogue tempo had run amok
and repeatedly rammed into its defenceless body as it stood parked
outside her ground floor Vasant Kunj flat.
The flat was pleasingly done up in muted shades and natural
fabrics. Vatsala had a small study, where the pixels on her monitor
flickered into the late hours of the night. ‘Thus shone the lonely
light in Milton’s tower,” she murmured to herself, as she la\gyred
away at the verse-drama in eighty-four stanzas with which she
hoped some day to stagger the world.
She then retired to her quiet air-conditioned bedroom, where
photographs of her nieces and nephews hung next to the bathroom
door, and a poster for a bull-fight which she had picked up during
a holiday in Spain was pasted to the wall above her bed.
The guest room, done up in anaemic pastels, was reserved for
her family. When Vatsala’s parents came down from Dehra Dun,
she felt a bit cramped, but dutifully put up with everything, even
the familiar programmed remonstrations about finding herself a
nice boy soon.
At the age of thirty-five, when her firm conical breasts had
mysteriously enlarged from 34B to 36, Vatsala Vidyarthi suffered
a spiritual crisis. It began with a nagging question. ‘To what

20
 NAMITA GOKHALE °

purpose?’ Vatsala would ask herself, as she gazed sorrowfully at

her bowl of muesli in the mellow Delhi morning. ‘To what purpose?’
she would ponder, as the auto-rickshaw raced through the traffic,
past the outstretched hands of beggars and babies-in-arms, through
the familiar tired tenements of our country’s capital, until the
gracious arches of Lutyens’ folly welcomed her back to work.
‘Whatever for?’ she would ask aloud, as she scanned the
agonisingly cute copy for yet another brand of baby food. As she
left office in the evenings, the mandatory black coffee still bitter in
her mouth, she would resolve to find a good chartered bus that
suited her timings. Then again the tired traffic, snaking across the
congested arteries of the Ring Road until the Qutub Minar, lit by
powerful strobes, its phallic lines cutting across the comatose sky,
shook her back to the immediate concerns ofexistence.
Which were: fresh bread and eggs, lonely nights, power cuts,
the search for a good dhobi, and the subconscious reaching out
for another presence as she held her pillow through the long lonely
night.
You might exclaim that this is merely common or sparrow angst,
the city-dweller’s ennui. Those of you with a humbler vocabulary
may even bluntly call it loneliness, or ascribe it, in the fashion of
the times, to the ever-worsening pollution in our cities. But no,
Vatsala knew there was more to it, she was searching for something,
and having worked in Bombay and priding herself on being a
professional, she knew she would not rest until she had found it.
Now Vatasla Vidyarthi was a literal lady. To search, as in to
quest, to seek, to look, to find, became a pitiless exercise in self-

21
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

discipline and logistics. She took up yoga, and woke at dawi to

contort herself mercilessly into a million pretzels before setting
out for her office. She joined a pottery class in Garhi village, taking
time off from the agency to shape damp clay into function and
meaning. She took up good works; registering with an NGO to
counsel late-night suicide calls. But no one called, and she had the
sensitivity to see that her pottery was ungainly, and the yoga made
her irritable and exacerbated her sinus.
The agency experienced a mild upheaval when her boss left,
along with four colleagues, to start an advertising firm of his own.
He was replaced, so swiftly that it might have been providential,
by a live-wire Madrasi with a thing about the rural market. Mr
Raman, ‘Manny’ to this friends, was a hyperactive, hypSekolic
wog with an unerring ear for punch lines. Before she knew what
was happening, Vatasla was packed off to the Kumbh Mela, (about
which she later wrote a piece for A & M). New accounts were
pouring in, and Manny instructed everyone in the agency to
subscribe to at least one vernacular newspaper or magazine, in
the language oftheir choice, to keep in touch with the masses.
Vatsala’s odyssey to the real India began to tell on her copy.
She wowed one and all with her artful espousal for Dunkel
(sponsored by a progressive multinational) on behalf of DRAG,
which, as everyone knows, is the Directorate for Research on
Agriculture. A simple smudge of Awmkum replaced the ornate
artwork ofthe double helix bindi, and she regretfully bid adieu to
salads after the rural E Coli bacillus had played havoc with her
digestion. She decided that nail varnish did not let her toe-nails
 NAMITA GOKHALE »°

breathe, and even contemplated letting her 36B breasts out of the
unnatural restraint of an underwired bra. But that would be rash,
keeping in mind the turbulent daily auto-rickshaw rides through
Delhi’s pot-holed streets, and she decided regretfully to settle for a
colourful ghagra-choli on weekends.
Vatsala Vidyarthi was an Indian lady, and when she was
dispatched to Rishikesh to background a new account that Manny
was gunning for, she went with a distinct sense of piety and
reverence.
The product was a dual-purpose herbal incense-cum-mosquito
mat, to be christened after the holiest river in India. The Ganges,
which had already endorsed products as diverse as soap and mineral
water, remained for her the river of her childhood samskaras. After
stopping for a night with her parents in Dehra Dun (her mother
was down with a flu, her father had spondilitis again), she left the
next afternoon by taxi for the Ganges Riverside Retreat, which,
she had been assured, was a most suitable hostelry for a single
unescorted lady.
Two things happened to Vatsala in Rishikesh. She found a man,
and quite coincidentally, herself. Unrepelled by the mosquito mats
of solitude and sadness with which she had surrounded herself,
propelled as it were, by pheromones, he came into her life.
He was a Slav, and although he was dressed all in saffron, he
had the acrid manly smell of tobacco and sweat and meat-eating
flesh. He strolled into her room quite by accident, mistaking it for
his own. Vatsala had dutifully checked the safety-latch before
settling down for the night, but of course it didn’t work.

23
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

She welcomed him in as an old friend. There was something

disarming about the set ofhis eyes and the surprising purity ofhis
face. He wore heavy mountaineering boots, and a string of prayer
beads hung around his neck. In his sturdy orange robes, he looked
like a Buddhist monk returning from his travels.
They sat down together in the small balcony that overlooked
the river, and listened peaceably as the steady sound of the water
punctuated the silence of the night. They might have been friends
forever, so instant and complete was the understanding between
them.
A cold mist rose like a wraith from the river, enveloping them
in odd intimacy. The stranger took out a cheroot from his
voluminous rucksack. When the match burst into flame the tPagaguil
contours ofhis face lit up for a brief second, and Vatasla longed to
reach out and touch him.
“We cannot isolate mind from matter, nor separate the soul from
the body,’ he said, in a pleasantly accented voice, as he stripped
off her night-shirt with clinical precision, and got to work with
fanatical passion upon her body. Vatsala was so startled that she
didn’t protest at all, but gave herself
up to the moment with feelings
that bordered on detachment, if not resignation. The holy river,
the early-winter mist, the smoke from his cheroot that seemed to
have penetrated her every crevice; she felt as though she were
floating out ofherself, escaping the confines of skin and nail and
shampoo into a world of extraordinary immediacy. They sported
together late into the night, until the stranger shuddered to a climax
somewhere deep within her, and no, it was not as it had been with

24
 NAMITA GOKHALE °*

the married man or the dairy-farmer.

‘Now | am seeing for the first time, seeing directly without the
intervention of mortal eyes’, Vatsala said, only half to herself.
‘I am him and he is me, we are in the river and the river is
within us. There is a cosmic connectedness in it all. We are Yin
and Yang, egg and yolk, Shiva and Shakti. I can, here in Rishikesh,
transcend the barriers of time and space. Vasant Kunj was a dream,
and the auto-rickshaw drivers, a nightmare. And even if this passion
with a strange man is a sin, I can, after all, wash it all off in the
Ganges tomorrow!’
The next morning she awoke with a bodyache. She was alone,
naked in her bed in the hotel room, without so much as a coverlet
over her. The stranger, if he had come at all, had disappeared
without a trace.
Vatsala put on some clothes and phoned room service for a cup
of tea. The squat Garhwali waiter hung around stubbornly for a
tip. It was when she looked into her purse that she realised that she
had been robbed. No wallet, no watch, no money, not even any
change. Even the credit card had gone. She scrambled around,
willing it to be an absurd mistake, rummaging through the dirty
clothes she had thrown into the cupboard.
The waiter shrugged insolently and left. The tea turned cold.
Vatsala watched as a fly settled on the skin which had formed over
the tea. It drowned before her eyes.
She did not know quite how she could explain her predicament
to the hotel, or to the police. Wearily, she decided to phone Manny
at the agency. He would know what to do.

25
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

She couldn’t get through to the operator. Vatsala sleep-walked

to the front desk, where she was sure the receptionist, who was
covered in layers ofartificial diamonds, gave her a knowing look.
Summoning up all her self-possession, Vatsala gave her the number
of the agency. She ordered another cup of tea for herself and waited
for the call in the small deck that overlooked the sparkling waters
of the river. A flight of steps led down to a private bathing area.
Ancient, decomposing garlands of marigolds floundered around
the black rocks.
The receptionist informed her that the line to Delhi was down.
‘After all, this is UP,’ she said consolingly. Vatsala felt so lost and
alone that even this note of minor sympathy was enough to breach
her defences. She found herself telling the receptionist thither
wallet had been stolen.
‘So why don’t you call the police?’ the receptionist asked,
scratching her underarms as she spoke. Her cream coloured blouse
was circled with lines of brown sweat. Vatsala realised anew that
she was well and truly marooned.
‘Actually, there was hardly any money in it,’ she said hastily,
but she was an ineffectual liar, and the receptionist arched her
finely-pencilled eyebrow in a manner that could have signified
anything from scepticism to boredom. Vatsala affected an air of
brave unconcern. ‘I’m not the sort of person who bothers about
money. The police can be such a bore,’ she said, wishing, not for
the first time, that she was better at untruths.
Since she wasn’t sure about when she would be able to contact
Manny or the agency, she decided to get down to work anyway.

26
 NAMITA GOKHALE »°

She resolved to walk so as to save money, and set off on foot

towards the town.
Her brief was to scout for locations for Manny’s new obsession,
the Ganges Herbal range of incense-coated mosquito repellents.
‘It’s penetration we’re looking for,’ Manny had said, for the
umpteenth time. ‘The sex is in the volume. I want you to look
around, soak in the atmospherics. We’re marketing a concept along
with a utility. It’s important to understand the mindset of the base
customer. Remember, he may be illiterate, but he’s no fool.’
Armed with these wise axioms and dutifully equipped with a
camera and a notepad. Vatsala set off. The town appeared dirty,
and not particularly holy. The river seemed tantalisingly close. It
could be glimpsed, glistening like a golden ribbon, through the
shanty-shops and diesel trucks that lined the road.
Vatsala was tired, her head ached and her feet hurt. The dust
tickled her sinus. She retraced her way to the Ganges Riverside
Retreat and ordered herself a taxi. ‘Put it on my bill,’ she said
with as much authority as she could muster.
It was a new diesel Ambassador. It worked. The driver was
polite and courteous. When they hadn’t run over man or dog by
the time they reached Muni-ki-Reti, Vatasla decided that her luck
must have changed.
‘There is an air of eternity, even timelessness, to this place,’ she
noted mentally, when she saw the river again. But Vatsala detested
cliches. Reproaching herself for visual laziness and a dependence
on preconceptions, she set about re-examining the scene. The
sunlight glinted joyously on the waters. There was a silence in the

2a,
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

air, a stillness, which was quite removed from the clatter of horns
or the barking and squealing of street dogs. The water was cleaner
than she had imagined it would be. A sense of gladness descended
over her like a benediction. ‘Who am I?’ she asked herself, ‘and to
what purpose?’ but the old question stood shorn of tension and
ambiguity. She even suspected that someone, somewhere, might
know the answer.
A sadhu in a saffron Joincloth was observing her intently. He
was muscular and sinewy and his eyes were hard and observant.
She felt herself blush under his gaze, and hurried on. Small children,
bleached urchins with the sun in their eyes, sold her little polythene
packs of fish feed. They ran away clutching the money she gave
them, the sounds of their laughter only adding to the silenca
She was giddy with the sun and the heat and a strange, unfamiliar
sense of elation. A ferry-boat slithered up right in front of her, and
before she knew it she had purchased a ticket, and was halfway
across the water.
The boat was full of people, people in polyester shirts and
synthetic zari-bordered saris, the great Indian masses. She looked
at them curiously, searching for signs of communality. ‘Not that I
feel superior,’ she told herself hastily, ‘it’s just that our backgrounds
are so different.’
The woman to her right, her face covered with a ghungat, threw
some pellets of fish-feed into the river. Huge fish crowded by the
prow of the boat, greedily gobbling up the brown pellets before
they dissolved in the muddy water. They looked fat and grubby,
obese and dissolute. ‘They feed on flesh,’ the woman on her right

28
 NAMITA GOKHALE °*

said shyly to no one in particular.

A rush of river-air hit Vatsala in the face; it was an exhilarating
bouquet of fish-pong and iodine. She felt complete, liberated from
her skin, forgetful of her many failures and recent humiliation. ‘Is
this an epiphany?’ she wondered aloud, then reproached herself
for being too dissective.
Across the river the atmosphere was quite different, more
charged. Everything, from the ambling cows to the brass amulets
piled up for sale by the riverbank, reeked of the sacred.
Vatsala Vidyarthi was a hard-working lady. She sat down by
the steps of the bathing ghat and meticulously set about noting
and tabulating her impressions. But the steep winding road, the
pamnam chadars, the fragrance of marigolds: these images moved
her to poetry and she decided to pen a free style haiku instead:

The river flows

on and on
even as the flowers
are caught in the eddies

Then decided it was not very original.

By now she was feeling very hungry. The distinctive aroma of
parathas frying on the griddle, bathed in real ghee (a smell she
normally despised), lured her up a narrow lane. A fat man, fatter
than a circus lady, dressed as a Bhahurupiya, simpered invitingly
at his customers. A sign behind him proclaimed ‘The one and only
Chotiwala! Please try for taste.’

29
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

The idea came to her in the conventional shape of a bulb, a

thousand watt bulb. This was the perfect setting for their product.
It would zap the rural psyche. It was endorsing Ganges Herbal
incense mosquito-mats! It was original, it was authentic, it was
humorous. It would give Manny a real rush.
Vatsala ordered herself a full meal, and gorged herself on alloo
and puri and raitha rather as the grubby fish in the Ganges had
done. ‘They feed on flesh,’ she said to herself reflectively. At the
next table, a silent South Indian family was pensively contemplating
a plate of vegetarian chow mein. When Vatsala realised that she
had no money, she looked around her widely, wondering what to
do. The establishment did not look inclined to credit. Perhaps the
South Indian family might lend her some cash. “~
A male presence settled itself on the chair across hers. The
acrid smell of marijuna clung to him like a blanket. He smiled at
her from deep within his Slavic eyes, and companiably offered her
a drag. Vatsala looked at him with shock and horror and revulsion.
When he touched her a shiver rippled through her body. Fighting
back her tears, she rushed out, weaving her way through the
crowded tables until she was finally on the narrow lane outside.
Something would not let her go and she found herself turning back,
searching through the squeeze of customers. A sweaty waiter was
handing him her bill, along with a steel bow! containing a residue
of aniseed and sugar. He took out his wallet and paid up with good
grace, counting out the money in crisp new notes. An amused
smile lit up his tranquil features. He was a detestable villain.
‘At least the bastard paid for the meal,’ Vatsala muttered to

30
 NAMITA GOKHALE °*

herself, wiping her eyes with the corner of her chunni. In the right
light, the episode could even be viewed as funny. In fact, it was
hilarious. She would tell Manny about it, and he would realise
that she was not just a blue-stocking, that she could be quite daring
when she so chose.
When she returned to the riverside resort there was another
young woman, also draped in artificial diamonds, stationed at the
reception. She handed the room keys to Vatsala with an elegant
sigh, then resumed the thoughtful scrutiny of her scarlet finger
nails.
The room had been freshly sprayed with a powerful and
malodorous insecticide. Hordes of delicate moths lay shuddering
in their death throes by the balcony. The sharp smell of the
chemicals assaulted her larynx. ‘What they need is some Ganges
Herbal incense mosquito-mats,’ she said to herself, quite loudly
this time. It was becoming a habit.
She looked down at the Ganges. It looked no different from
yesterday, the same damp river-mist, the lapping waters by the
shore, the steady rhythm of the mainstream. Across the river a
rectangular line offire lit up the sparse forest cover. A corpse was
burning merrily.

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain,

swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
where ignorant armies clash by night.’

Vatsala recited dreamily. For some reason, Matthew Arnold

31
* OMENS, SACRED AND PROFANE

seemed particularly appropriate for the time and moment. The

phone rang. It was Rita, the girl from the reception. ‘We met in
the morning,’ she said. ‘I have to speak to you.’ It sounded
serious.
She arrived at the door so quickly that Vatsala concluded that
she must have telephoned from the next room. She was clutching
her handbag, and fingering her fake diamond necklace with her
shell-pink extremities. She was so excited that she practically fell
into the room. ‘I’ve recovered the money,’ she said, emptying four
thousand rupees in cash, two gold bangles and a credit card on to
the double bed that straddled the room. ‘It was the waiter! I don’t
know how he managed to get in! Perhaps you forgot to lock the
door or you’d gone for a bath.” “~
Vatsala remembered that she had been quite naked when she
awoke, without even the benefit of acoverlet. She blushed, and
stuttered her thanks.
‘The management has already fired him,’ the voluble Rita
continued. ‘I always suspected that there was something wrong
with him. I’m very intuitive, you know. I think you’d agree that
we needn’t call the police.’
Vatsala wondered what his name had been, and if she would
ever find out, now. He had made love to her, and he had paid for
her lunch. Vatsala Vidyarthi was a lady, and she wondered at her
own behaviour.
‘I think Il return to Delhi now,’ she said faintly. Before she
knew it she had paid the bill, and was bundled into an Ambassador
car, a ramshackle one this time. She debated about whether to
 NAMITA GOKHALE *

stop over at Dehra Dun and visit her parents, but she decided
against it.
Vatsala Vidyarthi was a real lady, and decided to keep the
incident to herself. Whenever she remembered it she felt a deep
sense of regret, followed by an inordinate relief. Sometimes she
would sigh when she scanned a page of particularly tedious copy,
or penned a haiku, or read a poem by Matthew Arnold.
‘Perhaps,’ she would think — ‘who knows!’
A short story is supposed to snap shut at the end with a sort of
satisfactory click, but it would be difficult to distort this tale to fit
such an artistic purpose.
My quarrel with the short story is precisely that it imposes a
false order and symmetry on events, forcing impressionable young
minds to anticipate a similar state from the inchoate mess that is
generally life.
Even Mr Raman (Manny to his friends) agreed in the course of
an abstract discussion that a punch line is not always essential to
a good denouement.

33
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» We af
 Cry, My Beloved Child
Vandana Kumari Jena

It’s raining. I love rain. I love making paper boats and floating
them on open drains. I love getting drenched and swinging my wet
hair from side to side as the water dribbles down my back. I love
the smell of the mud, the richness and the fragrance of the rain-
washed earth. The cry of the peacock as it breaks into a dance. So
different from a baby’s cry.
As if on cue, you start crying. Your face puckers up. Tiny, red-
faced, like a little Hiawatha. Your hands balled into little fists.
Eyes charcoal! black. Not mine. Mine are hazel, flecked with gold.
Then whose? I do not know. I will never know.
But you are flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. Eyes puckered,
as if shielding themselves from the harsh glare of the world. The
nurse has come. I know what she will say. “Lift up your blouse.
Feed the baby.” Feed you? Allow you to drain me completely? To
e CRY, MY BELOVED CHILD

sap my energy, and leave me exhausted, an empty shell of what I

once was? For three days, I have stood the pain. I can’t bear it any
more.
“Sister, Ican’t feed him, take him away from me,” I say. But no
sound emanates. I can hear my silent pleas. But they can’t. Am I
dumb? Or is everyone here deaf?
The face of Sister Nivedita intrudes. “Lift the child,” she says,
persuasively, and my hands move to pick you up. “Feed it,” she
commands and instinctively, I obey. Nivedita. The name sounds
familiar. Namita. Nivedita. Nivedita. Namita.
What do names matter anyway? For me, everything is a haze, a
blur. Sometimes, I think I am losing my mind. My past — that is a
slate, wiped clean. There is a medical name for it, my cond tan. I
forget what it is.
“It’s a trauma. It has resulted in loss of speech,” the doctor
said. Perhaps.
Sister Nivedita is here. She asks me eagerly, “Do you
remember?”

“Remember me till I’m dead ... Oranges and lemons, sold for a
penny ...” A picture swims before me, wearing a blue pinafore
and a white blouse, hair tied up in pigtails, jumping around the
playground. What school was it? The name eludes me. But it was
just down the road. It was lined with ‘gulmohar’ trees, whose
crimson flowers in full bloom always reminded me ofa forest fire.

36
 VANDANA KUMARI JENA °*

And my house, it had a name. Yes, it is coming back to me. I

have a name too. And a big white house with a courtyard. Where
Masliced up slivers of mangoes and put them out into the courtyard
to dry, filling up the entire house with the aroma of raw mangoes.
Where large bottles of ‘aam ka achar’ were then kept in the sun
till the raw green skin turned a deep yellow which melted on your
tongue. Where I would steal the ‘achar’ and eat dollops of it along
with a crisp, six-layered ‘paratha’ straight from the ‘tawa’.
Yes, it exists. You, my dear child, will no longer be homeless.
When I get out of this place, this sanatorium, or whatever they
call it, you and I will go look for our house. We’II trudge along,
with you nestling in the crook of my arms while we search for our
house. And Ma will be so happy when I get back. For years, she
and I were the only ones after father died.
You and I, my little one, share a similar destiny. |never saw my
father. He died in an accident before I was born. And you will
never know yours. But there is a difference. My father’s photograph
hung from the drawing room wall. And, as Ma and I made garlands
to hang around his photograph, I could feel him smiling
benevolently at me. But you?
But wait, there is something wrong. There will be no Maat the
gate. I last saw her covered in a white sheet, as the neighbours
whispered, “What will happen to Namita?” Me.
And then Baba’s relatives took charge of me. “Come back to
us,” they said. And I left my home.
“Will you be able to get there on your own?” Ravi ‘chacha’,
my neighbour, had asked, at the station.

37
* CRY, MY BELOVED CHILD

“Of course ‘chacha’,” I had said, smiling through my tears.

The train was due to arrive at noon. But it broke down en route.
“God knows when it will reach. I hope you have someone to receive
you?” enquired a fellow passenger. I hoped so too, especially as
the evening had melted into the night bythe time the train arrived
at the station.
But there was no familier face waiting for me at the station in
this unknown city. No scooter or taxi was willing to go either, as
the house was every close to the station.
Dejectedly, I started walking with my suitcase in my hand. And
then, they came. They appeared to be shadows which suddenly
detached themselves from the wall and assumed human — no,
demonic-shapes. “~
They were four of them. They headed straight for me. And I,
disoriented and fatigued by the journey and the sweltering heat,
wondered what they wanted. They laughed. And I knew. And hoped
that I would die.
But I didn’t. Not when they dragged me, kicking and screaming.
Not when they threw me on a sagging old cot. Not when they put
their smelly, sweaty hands on my mouth to smother my screams.
To choke my cries. I struggled. I fought. I kicked. I bit. And cried
some more. But there was no escape.
“After every night, however dark, there is a dawn,” says Sister
Nivedita. But she, in her white gown, dedicated to the love of
God, what does she know of life, of its todays and tomorrows?
What does she know ofthe pain, that tearing, searing pain, which
is tearing me apart? Of humiliation? Of rage? There will be no

38
 VANDANA KUMARIJENA °*

escape and there will be no rescue for there are no heroes in this
world, only villains.
And Iam left to die, day by day. With these white-gowned nuns
who found me almost comatose and took me in. To nurse “the
wonder that is growing within you,” they said. Did they not
understand that I loathed you, my son, all these months? Loathed
the blood that mingled with mine to give birth to you? But Icould
not tell them —I had already drifted into a soundless world.
It was when the police came for questioning and asked me my
name that I realised I had lost my voice. And my memory.
“Trauma,” they said. I hated it, hearing but not being heard,
screaming silent screams of anguish. Not remembering my own
name.

But now, I remember everything. My childhood, my youth. And

the dark alley into which they dragged me, the cot on which they
threw me on and the sweaty hands which clasped my mouth.
Like this.
The vice-like grip on my throat.
Like this.
Blotting out my cries.
Like this.
My limp, silent form.
Like this.
Sister, what is wrong? Why doesn’t anyone come?

39
* CRY, MY BELOVED CHILD

Oh, she’s here. Why is she eyeing me so strangely? Why has

she taken you from me? How did you get all those red weals on
your throat? Why are your lips so waxen and pale?
Oh, my son! You were crying so lustily just moments ago. Why
have you stopped? Why are you silent now? Cry once, just once.
Cry, my beloved child, cry.

40
 Give Me Back My Country
Manju Kak

Growin g out of buttresses and arches, cutting through the cracked

masonry of pigeon encrusted domes are bastard pipals taken root
in the sun drenched stone of the Red Fort. They grow sometimes
tall, like that one there, to shelter barbers, madmen, charlatans,
and shrines. And a paan wala who lifts bold black eyes to stare
into mine, safely distant, in my balcony. The Fort has long
disembowelled dynastic power, all human life. Only the bastard
trees remain. Knowing this, still |mourn?
There are many houses tucked away in my memory. They seep
into my vision, layer by layer, like the trifle Reva loves. There are
those in which I lie vacant nights in open spaces looking up at
marigold garlands of stars, there are tiled grand galleon ones when
Iam contained in cotton quilts of winter warmth. Ones vaunting
head dresses of stucco crosses, embroidered shields, vain guldastas
* GIVE ME BACK MY COUNTRY

sprouting wispy clumps of dry thicket, twirling emblems all, of

kingly masonry embossed upon colonial red brick. And there is ...
this. If I shut my left eye I will not see the reinforced concrete of
the projecting balconies of other flats. I will see nothing but the
sky and the foliage of a lone inflamed gulmohar weeping copious
red tears and once more ... I will be home.
Could I have picked up the reddish roof tiles mouldy with age
and used them in my new apartment? I could ... and yet, they
wouldn’t hold the same way because they wouldn’t be in that same
house down the lane behind the railway siding nor would I hear
the hooting of the coal-engines drawing up at Prayag Raj station.
I really can’t build another house, tile by tile, can I? But I can
build it on paper, word for word, and it will share the same®weet
fragrance of that one, because it will again be the selfsame
configuration of smells and thoughts. Except ... for one thing.
The people. I have to bring the old people back, people whose
smells clung to the spidery cracks of limewashed walls, smells
long buried yet not banished. Yes, there will have to be smells and
sights ... and weddings.
And ... Sarju Yadav. Sarju will have his strong mustachioed
body lurking in the shade of the deep veranda where he will be
talking to Reva ofthe University, of the lightning strike his Union
has called. Sarju will have his motorcycle gang wearing little
green flags stuck in their headbands. They will be the green gold
bandits of the KBD and they will bike down Katra, block all traffic,
stacatto gun shots from their bikes rallying spirits, righteous in
youth, raise slogans strong with sound. Shops will crank shutters

42
 MANJU KAK °

and, again, nothing will come of the day.

Sarju Yadav will drive his motorcycle upto my gate, watch
Reva get off it, patiently explain why it is wrong for her to live
like this. Reva will glance back and not see me watching through
the wire mesh door because it will be dark inside and Reva will
agree with him yet, tremblingly bolt back the fragile eggshell of
understanding, culled from books and theories vaguely digested,
fearful of not being able to mend the fragments it will shatter my
life into. Fearful of betraying the house that has held her father’s
dreams and mine.
But Sarju Yadav will be strong with muscular bands about his
arms. Sarju Yadav will be real. And Reva will feel him broad
beside her, And, tossing back the slippery strands of her washed
hair she will go with him, riding against the wind. Sarju will take
his motorcycle down the road blowing his horn and the public in
the bazaar will cleave aside. They feel his power, the power of the
students behind him. He will topple vendors’ stalls straining under
fruit, cheap plasticware, fresh greens. Reva’s head will half-turn,
glance at the bruised goods, at the eyes of the hawker, victim once
more, of the selfsame power they shout slogans against and she
will wince. But she will not murmur words of rebuke that hover
upon the threshold of her mind, she will say nothing because Sarju’s
arms will be around her and she will be flying high, exhilarated.
And the house sticky with night mist will be left mourning.
Houses have a will of their own. They grow into spaces, spilling
like saucers of milk finding the slope in the floor, and when they
don’t want to see the worlds around them changing they slip filmy

43
* GIVE ME BACK MY COUNTRY

masks over their heads. Houses hold secrets. Houses wear clamps
of steel that won’t let those they hold within, stray. But Reva strayed
when she sat on Yadav’s motor cycle.
Reva had a gift to dream, a gift she had from me. I wear that
mask, a membranous embryo, and in my space-ship I leave here
and go where my heart will take me.
Sarju Yadav always wanted Reva from the time that he lurked
in the dark shadowy veranda of my house not daring to come in.
For inside he would recall the smell of tobacco from my husband’s
cigar, the mustiness from rich dank carpets laid in a monsoon
room lit by a stream of dim yellow light from a hanging grape
chandelier and the misty white streak of a ventilator ray, none
bold enough to dispel gloom. He would hear a whip lash*imethe
curling ends of my questions. Sarju Yadav’s rippling muscles grow
slack and limp under the glistening threads of his terricot kurta
worn over light brown terylene pants split apart at the seams and
flaring out ever so slightly that give them away as second-hand.
They are a bit incongruous on his broad muscular frame. I smile.
This man dressed so, cannot trouble my ordered world. But he
steps back. He has delivered the letter that has come in my absence
at the outhouse he inhabits. And he will retreat. He must retreat as
he has always done, as his father did when he toiled in my garden.
Wait, he has stopped by the gate and he is thinking. He turns,
strides back with the tail of his kurta sashaying behind him, a
duck’s fin, his firm steps slow as they climb up. He coughs against
the wire grill door. “What is it?” | ask sharply. “It’s Reva, bibiji,”
he says. My voice turns sharper. I do not like him using her name

44
 MANJU KAK °*

like he was her born equal. “Reva bibi,” I snap. “What of her?”
His voice turns off-key, unable to toss his defiance in the sure
manner he wants to.
“Tt’s Reva,” he repeats, petulant insolence lacing his voice, “who
was caught in the gherao today.” A cold coil in my stomach. Which
gherao this time, I question myself uselessly, for Iknow the pattern
of it all. “The Committee members bailed her out,” he informs
flatly. He’s sent them to, I know. “Send her in when she returns,”
I command, chilly, my fear hissing out. But I should know better,
“No, Wait. Let her come on her own.”
I do not want him carrying messages. Do I see a grin on his
face? How can I see his face, it’s his retreating back that I see but
his back is grinning, his broad chest is grinning, that thick curly
crop is ... my heart misses a beat, he oils his hair till it glistens
and the sweet sticky perfume of Cantharadine clings to the mesh
door. “Wait,” I call, shrill. He stops. He was expecting me to.
“Wait, you. Yadav, was she hurt?” I do not want to ask him but
the words come, laced with Bailey’s Irish cream in the afternoon.
He turns his head ever so slightly — will not come up to me or the
house but from out there yells back.
aNoe
Just no, a bald no.
I have betrayed my inner health, the sanctity of my inner life to
him with evidence of my anxiety, and he has understood. My
anxiety, strung a live tension wire links me with his retreating
body, stretching like the Wrigley’s Reva’s chewed as a child. He
knows, he will let it draw and then snap at will, his will.

45
¢ GIVE ME BACK MY COUNTRY

Why did the good man keep poor students in his outhouses? He
should have left them be where they belonged, but he wanted to
help bring change, to do his bit as his mission school teachers had
taught him, as he had felt the stirring in the cold fog of Leeds
returning from classes in tropical medicine. But, just now I cannot
think of him, I can only think of her, with rage. She wraps that
dupatta about her neck and strides the University’s campus
shouting slogans. They put messy oily hands about her smooth
arms and shoulders and smoke bidis passed from mate to mate.
The sweet smell clings to her clothes. | made her wear a cotton
voile saree and my seed pearls and how beautiful she looked
standing in the whitewashed portico of our house receiving
Professor Joshi and his wife and son, an engineer from IIT."gkey
could move in here, they could have all the rooms even. I would
keep the back room, lock it, then go to Brindavan. See other widows
bathing at the ghat, take a room at the ashram and watch the sun,
red orb, setting on the pale rippling water of the Yamuna. I could.
Is Reva hurt? Could she be? She will brush past the wrought
iron gate, the metal nameplate vibrating with her motion, her soiled
khadi kurta clinging about her slim body, her cloth bag sprouting
notebooks slung carelessly upon her shoulder.
She will not look at my face, eyes puckered, anxious, brow
tense. She will walk straight to the kitchen and poke about, not
care for the things in the fridge but pick up the leftover rotis ayah
has made and slopping some cold sabzi, roll it up and eat, hands
unwashed. I will walk down the veranda into the garden, my eyes
will be behind me, watching inside out, unseeing what lies in front,

46
 MANJU KAK *

but visualising each step my daughter takes. I will shrivel at her

dirty fingers doling cold food onto a steel thali but Iknow I cannot
turn around and put a cloth on the table, lay a mat and dainty
dishes. I know I cannot give her boiled water she will scorn. Too
long she has stood alongside queues where women line at pumps
and water comes in a trickle from a sputtering tap, watching.
She will not tell me of the arrest. And I cannot tell her I have
learnt of it through Sarju Yadav. But he will ask her if |know. He
will joke with her about me. He will question her about the intimate
details of her life. He will smoke didis, sweet, meet other mates’
eyes, lashes dipping upon irises of yellowing hope, will loll on his
charpai and she will be amongst them, and the smell of his oil will
cling to her clothes.
Sarju Yadav will graduate this year. But he bathes his buffalo
with the same vigour as his father did. Reva says to him, Sarju
teach me, and he holds her hand under his and alongside, and
gently they feel the teats. Their hands go up and down in motion.
Sarju Yadav’s /ungi strides up and slips open. In modesty he stands,
folds it in half and tucks it about his waist. Now he squats, the
checked cloth taut against his hairy thigh. She squats too, having
tied her dupatta across her waist. Then he holds her hand and
raises himself slightly, holds the teat and presses it down. She
does the same. They do it in unison. Her hands over the plump
healthy flesh and his firm dark ones over hers. I can shout, I could
call out. She will look defiant, and he will wear that amused look.
He will finally know about us.
There are days when I lie in bed, as if asleep but sleep won’t

47
* GIVE ME BACK MY COUNTRY

come. I strain to hear sounds from Reva’s room, of her putting

away pens, books, of the clatter of a pencil falling, of the soft
strain of the light from her lamp, the same lamp she used to read
Pinter, Chekov, medical manuals from. I dread it most when there
is no rustle, when there is no light, when the lamps go off, when I
cannot hear the sounds of her sleep. I dare not get up, I dare not
see her bed unslept in, have small footfalls taken them away through
the creeking swing door of the pantry? Fancy has paved a road for
her that will take her off on an aeriel highway to his room, a room
filled with laughter of raucous friends, and she will roll into the
dip of his charpai, snuggle against him and his mates, and they
will again pass arms about her shoulders; comrade, some garam
chai, they will nudge. Come my Reva, come comrade of my figeat:
and in the morning again I will see his face. Screams will split
open my mind and I will spit on that ... Sarju Yadav.
He would not dare, he would not ... not when the good doctor
was alive ... no then the smell of his cigar had kept him
obsequiously at the door, where it was decreed he should remain.
Hush, hear, what is it, that ... that noise building up. So early? It
comes louder. Who are they? Why ... it is those Yadavs and Mewas
and Jhurris! Again in procession? They are stopping at my gatepost.
Why are they stopping by my gatepost? Look, they are holding
aloft those green flags again. They are shouting slogans ... about
caste, about liberty, about land ... whose land? They are shouting
against an old lady, living ina large sombre house full of memories,
while they, youth, memories to make, live in outhouses? Their
shouts grow louder, throw out the nefas, throw out the teachers ...

48
 MANJU KAK *

throw out this old... witch ...? Is it... 1? But... this my home ...
is this not my land. :
What has the good doctor done, serpents in my bosom, what
did I do wrong? I kept them in my home, they used my water, my
electricity ... they used my daughter ... and now ... they want to
take my land too? Yooou bi...cchu Yadav. Reva, oh my Reva is
she too with them? Who will tell me?
She comes running, in her outstretched hand a green banner,
she comes running towards the gate, her hair streaming. She slams
it, is locking it and sticking the flag upside down to bolt the gate
post. They are chasing her but she is holding the bamboo post of
the banner horizontally between her chest and gate. She is barring
them with her frail body. They are screaming at her to let them in
and she is shouting back. I cannot hear what she says but I see
Sarju Yadav, taller and stronger than the lot, pushing his way to
the front and begging her to move away. He is pointing a finger at
me proud and distant in my porch and she Is beating her chest and
pleading with him. He is cursing, raising his hands threateningly,
but she holds steadfast. The crowd is surging. They want to burst
the gate open and trample over her, they look sullenly at Sarju
Yadav. Why won’t he let them, why is he arguing with this ... slip
of a girl who lives in a large house and cannot choose? What use
can she be to them? What power can her dimunitive form hold
over him? But she is standing still, she is taunting him, she is ...
spitting on the ground.
Iam frozen with fright, |cannot move, | want to run to her and
hold her in my arms. But | know all my strength cannot hold the

49
* GIVE ME BACK MY COUNTRY

mob. It will come in like the deluge, it will take her and me. Wait
... somehow something has stood still. Ican hear only her voice,
only hers ... Sarju Yadav is still and so are those others. Slowly
the kaleidoscope of people shift, colour, a new pattern I see ...
they are drifting, the people ... they are melting. As they scatter
away I see the last of them leave. My body defreezes, the ne-ves
that have tensed slacken and I move very slowly towards her, but
she is immobile. I walk erect and proud to the gate. Beyond, there
is no one. I cannot believe a minute ago it was crowded. I move
slowly and reach my daughter and I put my hand to her shoulder.
‘She shakes it off. Slowly I place it again. I feel the tremor. I know
she is crying. Ah Reva, She has ... chosen.
“Come,” I tell her. Leak
“Come Reva, your tea has grown cold.”
We sit in the dining room where the evening sun streams in, we
see Sarju Yadav’s buffalo lowing, but the outhouses are bare.
Tomorrow he will take his buffalo away.
Tomorrow I will call my lawyer. He will talk to brokers. I need
anew house, we need to move away from this crumbling mofussil
town where the good doctor and his father practised, to a new city,
a strong city where there are people on scooters and cars, where
there are shopping malls and cinema halls and colleges where there
are no strikes, where on Sunday evenings you can go to the club.
I need to play cards again. It isn’t so difficult to build a new house.
I can always take my things from here, cupboards, tiles.
And Reva? ... I know what my Reva wants. I know what her
body longs for. It is for the warm strength of Sarju Yadav, for the

50
 MANJU KAK °

muscled tensile strength of his large hands to wrap themselves

about her slim body. She wants to feel their coarseness, the smell
of oil in his hair, the shape of his brass Jota, its heavy round
bottomed metal in her hands. She wants to fuse her body onto his
on the taut twisted hemp of his charpai. She wants to feel it swing
below their weight. She wants it to sink, sink down as she feels
one with Sarju Yadav. She wants to enter his spirit, she wants to
steal some of it for herself. She wants him to be part of her, his oil,
his Jota, his hands that milch buffalo, the heady smell of stale
sweat, she wants him and through him ... she wants to inherit her
country.
I cannot let her have it.

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 Simone de Beauvoir and the Manes*

Lakshmi Kannan
Translated from the original Tamil by the Author

“On yes, there’s no doubt about it, whatsoever. You’! definitely

grow and develop like the French writer Simone de Beauvoir some
day. All in the course of time.”
They said the same things, almost all of them. But when Uma
heard it for the fifth time, it took her well beyond the jaded surprise
to the annoyance caused by the repetition. The statement now
seemed to stand in front of her, where she could see the two ends
of it, visibly drooping with fatigue on both sides. Also, she got a
creepy feeling that the ones who made bold to say this were doing
so with a glib ease. Because what they said had the ring of a well-
rehearsed line.
Uma was not getting any younger. She remembered how scared

* Manes: Ancestral spirits or the spirit of adead person regarded as an object to be venerated
or appeased,
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

she was once, of the prospect of growing old. She was twenty-five
then. She thought that old age would catch up with her one day
abruptly, like some terrible disease. Only now she realised that
ageing was more like a long, extended twilight that slowly,
relentlessly, crawled upon you. Even now, she continued to hear
the same line : ‘You’llbe like Simone de Beauvoir’. She heard it
again and yet again like a tune from the one-stringed ek tara. Only
different people plucked at the solitary string in different ways
and made different sounds.
Uma flushed with embarrassment when she remembered her
twenty-fifth year. She had written some shallow poems and some
lightweight articles and she had carried them around in a basket
on her head, hawking her wares in the market-place of magazines
and newspapers where there was a shrill sales-pitch. She
remembered all that disquietingly. Once, something she wrote
had been rejected three times in the market-place, shattering that
very brittle thing called an ‘ego’. It was then that she had heard
the reference to Simone de Beauvoir for the first time. Uma
remembered how she had collapsed on a chair, thoroughly
demoralised by the third rejection-slip of her writing. And Shekar
had materialised in front of her, to sprinkle her back to life with
refreshing rose-water.
“Really Uma, you must believe in yourself. At least believe me
when I say that you’ II certainly develop like Simone de Beauvoir
some day. I’m sure about that.”
She drank it in thirstily, and was eager for more.
“Yes indeed. Have some faith in yourself. Actually, what you

54
 LAKSHMI KANNAN °

need is a proper climate for your writing. And a congenial

companion who understands what writing is all about. Given these
conditions, your writing will bloom and flourish. You'll then see
for yourself how you’ ll develop into yet another Simone...”
Shekar was thirty-seven. His words spilled out firm and rounded.
A firmness which supported her young spine like a strong pillar.
He took her hand resting on the table and held it in his: “Your
writing is like you, very, very delicate. Both need to be protected.”
Holding on to her hand, he had said: “All these things — a family,
parents, a home, uncles, aunts, festivals, weddings — they make
such a din that your writing will wither away if you allow yourself
to be overwhelmed by them. Entrust yourself to the care of a
suitable companion, the way Simone de Beauvoir did.”
This man Shekar. He has written three full-length novels, a
play and many short stories. He is already well-known. And yet
he respects me, me/ And my writing... She mused over his words.
A small voice protested from a corner of her head. Fool, you can’t
hold a candle to Simone, it whispered. How can you be compared
to Simone? Why, it’s absurd, you greenhorn. You’re much too
young yet and have a long way to go. And you’Il have to work a
lot, lot more to develop into anything like Simone.
Besides, like her, you need to be creative about your own life.
You’ll have to dissolve yourself in life, like Simone did.
Experimentally? May be, but she did nevertheless. She dug up
deep with courage and surfaced with some bitter truths. Look at
you. Still imprisoned within the narrow confines of what you call
‘beautiful poems’. Trapped within that, you’re locked up in your
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

petty little ideals, objectives. Learn to suspect yourself, learn to

suspect the very ideals you’
ve set for yourself. They just protect
you from what is unknown. Break those dwarfish walls, smash
them down and put your neck out into the wide world, even if it
hurts. Come on!
“What are you thinking about, Uma? Do you think I’m
extravagant in drawing parallels?”
Uma was stumped by his shrewd guess.
“Look Uma, let’s make a pact. From now on at least, let’s
dedicate ourselves to writing. Totally. Don’t look upon my wife or
your parents as big hurdles. Let each of them stay in his/her/their
own context. We’ll keep them as a kind of background music. You
and I are gifted to create. We'll have to distance ourselves from
these mundane social roles and lead our lives independently.”
Back home, Uma’s mother Mangalam came down hard on her
husband.
“But I told you about him a long time back, don’t you remember?
This boy Rajan, he comes from the family of Sundaram’s father-
in-law. I was told he is highly educated. Has good prospects in his
profession. He is good looking too. What’s more, his family looked
so eager when they asked for our Uma in marriage. Why don’t
you clinch the matter quickly before the coming month of Thai*?
You drag your feet so sluggishly ...”
“But Mangalam, Uma wants to complete her Ph.D. before she
gets married. She also wants to go abroad ona scholarship. That’s

“Thai: Name of the tenth Tamil month from mid January to mid February, considered very
auspicious for marriage.

56
 LAKSHMI KANNAN *

why...” her father could not complete his sentence,

“Ask your daughter to complete her Ph.D. after marriage. And
tell her we'll allow her to go abroad only after she has had her first
child,” said Mangalam, firm as ever.
“Oh Mangalam, then everything will get so complicated for the
poor girl,” the father remonstrated with her.
“T know what’s best for her. We can’t afford to go lax. On Uma
rests the continuity of a whole generation of our family. Moreover,
a lively, educated girl needs to be protected even more than a girl .
who stays at home. Don’t you know this simple truth, as a father?
You've no wisdom, none whatever.”
Familiar noises. Now they reached Uma with a fading exigency.
Was Shekar right after all, about the way things fall back as some
kind of a background music when one withdraws? A music that is
mild, even dispensable? From now on, let me live for my writing
alone, thought Uma...
“Uma, life is short, very short indeed. Don’t waste your time,”
said Shekar, his voice low as he bent forward to hold her hand in
his. She did not pull her hand away.
“No I won’t,” she had nodded, earnestly. “I promise I'll never
waste my time.”
She imagined herself writing copiously on sheet after sheet of
paper. They fluttered and flew around her. She stayed awake for
long hours in the night and wrote furiously. She dreamed that she
toured all around the country and met people from different walks
of life. The name ‘Uma’ was splashed in every newspaper and
magazine. She saw her name shining luminously. She was
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

determined to write more and more, and bring out full-length books
one by one, just like this Shekar here...

~~

Back home from work, Uma hardly had the time to eat her meals
or rest. She could not sit down to write, or even spend some quiet
moments thinking about what to write. For as soon as she reached
home, the telephone would ring. Incessantly. At the other end of
the wire, Shekar’s voice was snappy, crackling with annoyance:
“Where on earth have you been? When can we meet? I never
find you in the university.
“Where do you hide yourself?”
Eventually, Shekar resorted to hijacking her on the way’ffome
from work.
“It’s been a long time since we met. You’re always in a great
hurry to go home, saying your father will be angry if you’re late.
Hell, what a life.”
“Shekar, I’m working on a book. I’ve been busy...”
“Oh, shut up. Come on, let’s get out of this damn place. Tell
you what. I’m going to Jammu next month on work. Join me there
and we’ll go up to Kashmir. I'll book a cottage for the two of us in
Pahalgam.”
“Shekar! Really, you’ve impossible ideas. I can’t do that.
Besides, I’ve just started writing something and how can you, of
all the people, ask me to drop this work and ...”
“Ha! Composing a great epic, are you? Tell me frankly once
and for all. What’s more important for you? Me or your silly

58
 LAKSHMI KANNAN °

scribblings?”
Uma was speechless with shock. She turned and left for home.
Simone, Simone, Simone. And Sartre, Sartre, Sartre. Why did
I allow myself to be led on to build dreams around this couple and
us? Why did I nurse notions about them when I know next to
nothing about either of them, when | haven’t even bothered to
read about their lives. I just went along with whatever Shekar
said, and today my half-baked knowledge is responsible for this
impasse. I can only blame myself for that...
For the next few weeks, something egged her on to hunt for
materials regarding Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
From various libraries, Uma gathered all that she could lay her
hands on — their works, critical works on their books, their lives,
their memoirs, their articles, interviews and autobiographical
excerpts. Gripped by an enormous hunger to devour the details
and facts culled from the books, she immersed herself in their
lives, ignoring the telephone which continued to ring maddeningly.
Her parents exchanged curious glances, and the phone rang out
hysterically in the silence of the living room.
“Uma, why do you pore over books all day and night. You'll
ruin your eyes. Just look at your face, it’s looking so tired. You
don’t have to do research like this, at the cost of your health,” said
Mangalam.
“Your mother is right. Be more outgoing, meet your friends,
enjoy yourself. You’re too young to be cooped up indoors all day
with books,” said her father.
Uma absorbed what her parents said. Just like she absorbed

59
¢ SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

every single detail about Simone and Sartre culled from books
and old journals. In 1929 Simone shone as a star-student of
Philosophy at the University of Sorbonne in France. Sartre was in
the same department. Steadily, the two of them always held on to
the top positions in their classes and evolved as fine, articulate
intellectuals.
How Simone and Sartre got acquajnted with each other, became
close friends and eventually decided to live together without the
ritual of marriage, an institution they scorned; how they lived for
a long time as an exemplary literary couple; how they faced the
inevitable problems of opting for an unorthodox lifestyle - Uma
avidly assimilated all the details. She noted some familiar
paradigms that surfaced. Sartre could always count upon Sfi@ene
even as he gathered many girl friends on the side. His affairs with
these women were accepted in a ‘wifely’ manner by a stoic Simone.
As a gesture of equality, Sartre suggested that Simone could have
relationships too with other men if she wanted, but Simone could
not/did not/would not compete with Sartre in this. She remained
choosy and mature about the friends she made.
Sartre got his women easily. Some of them were ‘conquests’,
even so he just as easily tired of them and had no hesitation in
unceremoniously shaking them off to resume his writing again,
undisturbed. When he felt the need for women again, he found
them.
Meanwhile, Simone got very attached to the American writer
Nelson Algren. She respected his work and was so happy in his
company that whenever she was with him, she sensed her own

60
 LAKSHMI KANNAN °

womanhood blooming alive as a thing that was whole and complete.

Nelson Algren. Within his embrace, she enjoyed the new freshness
of her own body, the curious feeling it gave her of stepping away
from herself to experience a new tangible womanhood within her
being. A small universe, lovely, clean and gentle, germinated
magically between them. But there came a day when even Nelson
Algren burst out in exasperation: “I don’t like this arrangement at
all. The way you come from Paris so casually to visit me in the
US, like you’re on a holiday or something, to spend a couple of
days, after which it’s time for you to return to Paris. This is no
good.”
“But what can I do. Nelson? I’ve a house in Paris. I’ve my
work too.”
“You’ve your Sartre in Paris, say that. Iknow you go back for
him, I know that only too well.”
“Nelson, please,..”
“Look, I can’t stand this any more. It’s agonising. Sartre
possesses you totally. You only throw the crumbs of life at me.
You belittle me.”
“How can I leave Sartre ...?”
“See, I was right in my guess, wasn’t I? You go on as if you’re
his wedded wife. Simone, listen to me. Forget about Sartre and
move over to the US. Live with me.”
“Oh, but how can you suggest ...?”
“Fine then, if you don’t agree to that, don’t visit me like this.
There’s no point. Don’t torture me like this. Unshackle me Simone,
please.”

61
¢« SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

Simone had steeled her heart and returned to Paris, resolving

not to meet Algren ever again. All through her journey the questions
chased her, haunted her : what urged her to continue living with
Sartre? Was it a dependence, a kind of bondage, or merely a force
of habit? What’s the nature of this relationship? Some answers
surfaced but her mind refused to accept them. The answers winked
at her surreptitiously, even as they went about their convoluted
ways to soften the edges for comfort.
The truth surfaced more naturally, through her body. It expressed
itself in her health. It was the same truth that exploded in subtle
ways in her novel Zhe Mandarins. In the novel, a woman is nearing
middle age. She has a young daughter. The woman who is the
mother, returns home after bidding a last and final farewell f@ber
lover, after they take a mutual resolution to stop meeting each
other. The woman reaches home, locks herself inside her room for
days on end and sits within, brooding over her life. Her young
daughter tries her best to coinfort her, she serves her meals, makes
tea, pours wine and talks to her soothingly. But the woman seeks
the privacy of her room and shuts herself in. After an interval,
when she comes out, her appearance alarms her daughter. Is this
my mother? How can she age so drastically, within a few days?
She looks like a building that is in ruins. My mother? Who until
now, in her late forties, had looked so very youthful, so very
attractive. ..God, what’s happened to mother?
Outside the novel, Sartre does not fail to notice the drastic change
that has come over Simone. However, he turns to his girls and
pursues his writing. Writes extensively. The Nobel Prize comes
 LAKSHMI KANNAN °*

his way. He rejects it, and by doing so, his fame touches an all
time peak. Half of the western world gets hooked on to his
Existentialism. He writes a lot, struggling more and more with his
failing health. And when he falls sick, Simone nurses him tenderly
— like a mother, a sister, like a wife, or a faithful maid. Again the
questions rose from within her and got quelled: what’s this
relationship? What’s special about this?
Is there any real difference at all between living like this and
living within the sanction of marriage, as husband and wife?
Perhaps a man-woman relationship runs on a familiar, beaten path
with these recognisable patterns and paradigms... ?
Simone gathered the silent questions together with the silent
answers and offered them up to the next few generations to evaluate
as they pleased. She offered her remarkable books — The Second
Sex, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstances and many, many
more before she finally went to sleep.
“Uma, why are you nibbling at your food?” demanded
Mangalam angrily. “At this age you should be eating well, you
should have enough milk, butter, youghurt, sweets and so on. But
look at you. You look pinched, you’ve become dark and thin. Is
this what your great ‘research’ is all about?”
“Also, you’ve become rather listless, my child. What’s the
matter?” enquired her anxious father. “Take some leave. Let’s all
go out. Let’s go home. I’! show you some beautiful temples.”
“Tt’s all because of you,” said Mangalam, descending on her
husband in rage. “I asked you to get her married by the month of
Thai when we had such an excellent offer, but you wouldn’t. You

63
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

crawl through life and look what it has done to Uma.”

Back stage sounds? They were loud and clear as the on-stage
ones.
The telephone rang relentlessly. “What are you scratching your
head about?” said an irate Shekar. “If you don’t like the idea of
Kashmir, let’s go elsewhere. But leave the choice to me. I'll think
of some nice, cool getaway.”
“That’s a wild, impossible idea,” said Uma.
“What now! And here I am, thinking that you’ll become like
another Simone de Beauvoir, independent and bold. Hell! You’re
just a very ordinary girl, as ordinary as they come. Damn!”
His voice and the telephone calls retreated, faded off as
background music, or more precisely, background sounds. “~
It was the late 1970s. Feminism as an ‘ism’ was still an emerging
force which had started surfacing in different ways in different
areas. Places swarmed with various seminars and conferences in
departments of sociology, economics, literature, psychology and
so on. In the literary forums, one repeatedly heard the names of
Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir
amongst others. Literary scholars wrote about Simone as a fine
example of one who lived her life like her books, of one who
followed a unique lifestyle. Quite a few men also joined in the
critical writings and discussions. That is how Uma happened to
meet Mohan Mehta at a seminar in Chandigarh and later again, in
Pune.
A lecturer in English, Mehta had a choice vocabulary. He could
conceal himself behind the elegance ofhis expressions.

64
 LAKSHMI KANNAN *

“Uma-ji, I’ve read some of your stories. As for your poems,

I’ve even learnt a few of them by heart,” he declared and went on
to recite smoothly, the lines flowing out without a single mistake.
Uma felt her goose-flesh prickling.
“Hush, don’t. Please don’t!” she protested.
“Sorry. I know how you feel. It would be embarrassing if
someone were to hear me. Shall we go to the lounge? It’s quiet in
there”
They ordered some tea.
“How do you like this seminar?” he asked. “You know, I wanted
to get up and ask the speakers why they go on and on citing western
examples. Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Simone de Beauvoir and
what have you. Why don’t they cite Indian women?” he asked, his
face intense.
“Perhaps our women haven’t attained an international reach
yet. There have been some good writers, to be sure, but that’s
about all. No one has written anything that stimulates or provokes
the consciousness of an entire nation, let alone the world. At least,
not yet,” said Uma.
“No, no, Uma-ji. Time will tell. We’re a young country, but
I’ve confidence in our women. Take someone like yourself, for
instance. If writers like you try, you can really achieve this reach
you talk about. Then you’ll also be like a Simone de Beauvoir,
some day.”
Uma laughed.
“Why do you laugh? Because you haven’t found a Sartre?”
Uma laughed even more, her shoulders shaking as she tried to

65
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

control the laughter. She flicked away a tear that threatened to

spill with her laughter.
“Mohan-ji, I’m surprised. Because just now you objected to
our servile dependence on western models, western examples, and
now you...”
“Heh, heh. ..actually, what I meant to say was that we should
acknowledge our own writers, our literature first of all, although
there is a lot to learn from the west. One can learn valuable things
from the lives of Sartre and Simone. Come to think of it, Uma-ji,
that we’re born Indians is a mere accident, a freak of fate. True,
we’ve our familial ties here, husband, wife, children, parents and
so on. But to attain a quality in both writing and in life, we need to
protect and preserve our individuality, you see. If you’ve noSgrious
objection to the idea, we...”
Since then, Uma had counted many birthdays. It had been a
time of search, just as it had also been a time of reckoning. Patterns
appeared and reappeared, but with changing complexions, changing
equations, changing values. The various seminars pushed into the
front seasoned speakers who were articulate, smooth, even glib
talkers. They invariably received a loud cheering and were
applauded by the audience. Because the speakers said what the
audience liked to hear.
For Uma, as for her peers, there were the usual pressures, of
work, of career, of research, both institutional and private study.
Things blew around her and her contemporaries, but she got a
strange feeling that she was standing at the centre of it all, severely
alone, absolutely alone. The 1970s rolled on towards the 80s and

66
 LAKSHMI KANNAN »*

the 80s unfolded, bringing with them some confusions and half-
truths that were perhaps characteristic of the times. Even for Mehta
here, it must’ve surely been a time of uncertainties and uneasy
truths, Uma conceded, silently.
“I can understand your hesitation, Uma-ji. I think I can guess
the reason too, if Imay say so. You may have heard this several
times, right?”
“Oh, I could never even dream that I can be like another Simone
de Beauvoir,” said Uma, as calmly as she could.
“What about me? Do you think I can be like Sartre? Still, if we
have the imagination, and the will...”
Swallowing the 1970s, the 80s reached the 90s. Now the ‘ism’
of Feminism tcok a foothold as a fierce movement. Newly recorded
facts emerged from various disciplines, clinical psychology, agro-
economics, eco-feminism, social anthropology, literature and the
arts. They ignited sparks of cognition everywhere. The prescribed
curricula in schools and colleges, the works of writers, films —
just about everything came under a merciless re-evaluation. They
were examined, analysed and judged unsparingly. Few areas
escaped the new scrutiny.
Inside Levi jeans. Blue Lagoons, trousers or shorts, inside skirts,
salwar-suits and stylishly trimmed hair a young femininity woke up
on the strength of its own innate forces and impulses. Young women
from different walks of life, with different cultural and professional
conditioning, articulated their reactions with hard-headed clarity.
“Kate Millet really opened our eyes. Now we can never see
D.H. Lawrence, or Henry Miller, or Jean Genet with the same

67
* SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE MANES

eyes. We can’t. Millet has stripped these writers stark naked and
they now stand defenceless!” said a young girl. Her friends agreed
with her. But they had no problems getting on with the young men
they studied or worked with, or went out with. When the young
women discussed things amongst themselves, one could see that
Simone was not a forgotten figure.
“It was a fatal mistake on the part of Simone to have given
herself, her entire life in fact, to Sartre on those terms,” argued a
young woman, hotly.
“Yes. A woman doesn’t need a crutch to lean on in order to
grow or develop in her art or in her writing. If only Simone had
decided to stay alone, independent of Sartre, she would have evolved
in more strikingly original ways.” ~e.
“Maybe she would have then ushered in the new times earlier
than she did.”
“Yes. And yet, Simone was a fine intellectual. An excellent
writer who not only had what’s commonly termed ‘intellectual
honesty’, but had the rarer thing, an emotional honesty. Sartre’s
oppressive presence eclipsed her somewhat, and dimmed her natural
lustre. Simone should’ve got married to Nelson Algren, who was
a damn decent guy. That would’ve been sensible. Then Sartre
would’ve realised what ‘Existentialism’ was all about.”
“Correct. We see this anomaly in our everyday life too. These
men are torn apart by a paradox within themselves. Wonder how
they handle it? Won’t they split apart someday?”
“But they keep trying. When I was in the Mussoorie Academy
for my IAS training, a guy told me that I was ‘smart, talented’ and

68
 LAKSHMI KANNAN °«

that if I pair up with him, the two of us can show the world that we
are ‘yet another Simone-Sartre!’ I smashed the mouldy myth that
had wrapped around this couple and showed him what it was like
for Simone, in reality.
Know how he reacted to that? He stopped talking to me, even
stopped greeting me with a ‘Hi’ whenever he saw me,” said the girl,
laughing. Sounds of hearty laughter from the rest of the young women
wafted on the air, borne aloft by the wind changing its course.
Even now, Simone continues to be a disconcerting presence, in
her ‘tangible absence’. She is analysed, probed, examined and
argued about. Many of the new women are angry for her. They
are angry about some of the decisions she took. Angry that a fine
intellectual and sensitive writer like her should’ve lived with Sartre
as less than a wife and with a blind devotion. It’s all so unnecessary,
they argue.
Slowly, time rolls out the balls of pindam* on the smooth banana
leaf. They show Simone in different colours as she retreats into
some far-off point in the distant past. In between the rolling balls
of pindam, whenever an occasion presents itself, Simone keeps
tempting and seducing a Shekar or a Mehta or a young, potential
bureaucrat in the Mussoorie Academy or wherever. She appears
and re-appears.

*Pindam: Balls of cooked rice offered to the manes in the Hindu ritual of obsequies in Tamil
Nadu. The manes, i.e. the spirits of the ancestors, are worshipped as guardian influences.

69
 amr
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 |
Chocolate

Manju Kapur

Tara was fat. Her husband made it clear that it didn’t do his image
any good to have her waddling around, jiggling rolls of flesh.
“T dont waddle,” she said, hurt.
“You do,” said Abhay and that was the end of the matter. So far
as words were concerned it was an established pattern that he had
the last one.
Later she cried. She wiped away the tears that rolled down her
soft, slightly flabby cheeks with a handkerchief clutched in a
smooth, plump hand. She would like to be slim and svelte, a credit
to her husband, but it was no use. Life without food, especially
chocolate was not worth living.
Her husband couldn’t be too serious about her losing weight,
after all, he was her main supplier. She thought of his latest offering
from Europe. Twenty bars of Swiss chocolate, seductively wrapped
¢ CHOCOLATE

in green, orange, blue, and red, with gleaming pictures of fruit,

nuts, and glasses of wine, rolls of marzipan, with a grainy paste of
almonds covered with chocolate so smooth, it dissolved on the tip
of her tongue, and the piece de resistance, two big boxes of cherries
in liqueur set in cups of dark chocolate. Even when she wasn’t
eating them, she could feel in her mouth the sharpness of the liqueur,
the bitter sweetness of the liquefying chocolate, the tanginess and
gentle crunch of the cherry.
He was always assiduous in catering to her tastes. As he handed
the chocolate to her he would tell her how busy he had been and
how much he wished it were possible for her to accompany him.
Then he would lightly rub the roll of fat around her belly to prove
his love. At times the rub would get a little hard, but fesks of
physical affection between them were rare, and she took what she
got.
When did it happen that Tara first got to know about her
husband’s affair? Something that the readers of this text will find
obvious to the point of banality? A man who is stuffing his wife
with chocolate in these quantities has to have an ulterior motive.
A short history ofher life will place her stupidity in perspective.
School: Ages 3-17. Convent, all girls. Strict emphasis on studies
and nothing else. Tara’s free time is taken with going to dance and
music classes. Her mother says these things are important. Give
grace to a girl.
College: Ages 17- 20. An all girls’ college. Her parents don’t
think it wise to send Tara anywhere else. She chooses English
Honours, considered a soft option. She isn’t very clear what to do

72
 MANJU KAPUR °*

with her life, and English seems a good no-purpose subject. Besides
she has always been fond of reading.
English Honours turns out to be not such a soft option after all.
She had never thought reading could be so strenuous. Literature
didn’t seem to be about stories. All the emphasis was on ideas,
history, context, marxist-feminist interpretations, and a pursuit of
meaning that went beyond the obvious into the totally obscure.
Tara spends her time in college going to films with her friends,
bunking classes. She complains to her mother about how hard her
teachers expect her to work. Her mother consoles her. She has to
somehow graduate, then she will get married.
The wedding preparations coincide with the prep leave for the
exams.
“What to do, beti?” her mother says when Tara protests. “I
know it is a bad time for you but then these are the auspicious
dates.”
“But Amma, how will I study?” complains Tara.
‘Well the boy is good. And the family is very keen. Some things
cannot be put off.”
By the time Tara’s results are out, she has come back from her
honeymoon. She has got a third division, and is mildly surprised
that she has passed at all.
Her husband thinks she is upset.
“Never mind, darling,” he says clutching her in his strong, manly
arms, “You have me.”
Tara’s heart beats fast, as she feels herself squeezed in that
marital embrace.
* CHOCOLATE

‘Yes, it’s true,” she whispers. “I have you.”

The family then waits for the children to come. In time it becomes
evident that if they came at all it would have to be through divine
or medical intervention.
Tara started with the medical intervention front first.
“Maybe we should go and see a doctor?” she suggested to her
husband.
“You go if you want to,” replied Abhay. “ There is nothing
wrong with me.”
After the doctor had examined Tara, she said there was nothing
wrong with her either, and maybe a look at the husband was in
order.
“But he doesn’t think so,” said Tara mournfully. »
“What rubbish!” exclaimed the doctor, who was sick and tired
of encountering such attitudes in her practice. “You tell him it is
not only the woman who is responsible for bearing a child. The
sperm has to be healthy. It may be that he is infertile, it may be
that his sperm count is low, it may be that he has been drinking too
much, or that he has some kind of latent infection. It may be any
number of things.”
Tara blushed. How was she supposed to convey all this to her
husband?
Abhay agreed to see the doctor after a somewhat acrimonious
discussion, in which he pointed out to Tara how completely wrong
she was.
“Shouldn’t I come too?” asked Tara, as Abhay was going.
“No,” he said briefly. “Vl deal with it on my own.”

74
 MANJU KAPUR

So Tara never knew what happened at the doctor’s. Abhay came

home tight-lipped and cross, and refused to comment.
“But what happened. What did she say?” she asked several
times.
“She’s a fool. Huh! No point in your going to her either.”
Medical consultations were not possible after this.
On the divine intervention front, Tara was told she should take
a trip to Vaishno Devi crawling on her hands and knees.
After she had crawled up Vaishno Devi on her hands and knees,
she decided to do the hands and knees stuff at other shrines. She
had thought she would feel embarrassed, but she didn’t. This was
routine at these places.
Her husband thought all this was a great idea. So did her mother-
in-law.
“Poor Tara!” she heard her say once. “She is trying so hard,”
and then in a lowered voice, “but she is unhealthy from the inside.”
When there were no signs of conception after all this, Tara took
to wearing certain stones around her neck and fingers, and her
husband took to feeding her chocolates.
It was chocolate that drew her attention to a certain lack of
something on the part of Abhay. He became casual in getting her
what she wanted.
After an excess of peppermint she hinted that she would look
forward to more variety. He had complained.
“T don’t get the time,” he said. “All I can do is pick up these
things from the airport, and peppermint is what airports happen to
have.”

12
* CHOCOLATE

“But so much?”
She turned the green and white boxes over in her hands.
Edwardian Mints, Creme de Menthe Mints, Bitter Chocolate Mints,
Wafer Mints, After Eight Mints, After Dinner Mints, Mints in
White Chocolate.
She felt sick at the idea of this much mint. But her craving for
chocolate was so strong that she ate them all anyway.
And then he did it again.
“Didn’t you remember?” she asked.
“What?” He looked preoccupied.
“What I said last time. About the mints.”
“Last time? Oh, oh, yes, of course. But you see the airports...”
She looked at all that revolting peppermint. ~o
“But before you managed ...”
‘“‘Well you know these airports. Not very imaginative.”
That’s not what Tara would have thought as she remembered
the brochures that Abhay frequently got advertising this airline,
that airport. They seemed to contain virtually everything under
the sun.
After Abhay left, Tara remained lost in thought. It was odd that
he had forgotten her request — her reasonable request — about the
mint chocolate. Abhay had a good memory. But then he was always
so preoccupied. And hardly ever at home.
And in between these two thoughts, sequences in a chain,
suspicion pounced and bent the links in another direction.
Within a matter of seconds, Tara was convinced she had found
the clue to much of Abhay’s behaviour. Could it be, could it be

76
 MANJU KAPUR *

that what she had read about in her college days, could it be that
the Other Woman had appeared in her life as well? She made up
her mind to spy on him. The results were predictable.
After she had gone through the gamut of emotions ranging from
shock, confusion, despair, anger and resentment, she toyed with
the idea of knocking her brains out. To help reach a conclusion
she automatically went to the fridge to take out her chocolates.
She needed consolation. Absent-mindedly she bit into one. It tasted
like sawdust. She bit into it again and gagged. This was the only
pleasure she had in her life. What was happening to it?
She felt a burning sensation at the back of her throat, and the
sour ugly taste of bile. She quickly put the chocolate back into the
fridge and closed the door. Nausea overcame her, and she barely
made it to the bathroom.
She never ate another piece of chocolate again. Everytime she
looked at the dark shining pieces glistening invitingly at her, she
saw Abhay’s eyes sunk in them, tempting her to bite into a piece
and get fat.
She lost weight. The feeling of nausea she had about
chocolate helped put her off eating. She grew thinner, thinner
than she had been in years. She took the rings off her fingers.
There seemed little point in wearing them now. From saris she
moved to salwar-kameez. She looked younger. She felt more
alert and alive than she had for a long time. She began to think
about strategies.
She must win him back she thought. She decided to joi cooking
classes. The way to aman’s heart was through his stomach. Abhay

14
* CHOCOLATE

hardly ate at home. But now.... She must cook. She would be the
source of all things delectable.
Tara joined Mrs. Singhal’s Cooking Classes, which guaranteed
mastery of Cordon Bleu, Continental, Chinese and Indian cuisines
in just a year. Tara discovered in herself a light hand, and a flair
for improvisation. Her teacher praised her too, and that helped.
No one had ever praised her learning anything in her life, academics
was out of the question, and even her dancing and singing teachers
had felt that she neededto apply herself more.
For Mrs. Singhal a meal was not just eating. It was an Aesthetic
Experience. The table, the colours, the setting, the flowers,
everything had to be perfect.
Tara dived into Experience like a duck into water. Cooking was
endlessly creative she discovered. The taste which she had exhibited
in doing up her home, had scope that was infinitely various on the
site of the dining table. She experienced the joys of putting before
a husband — however errant — things he could not resist. He became
quite greedy and demanding, entertaining small numbers of friends
more often at home.
Imperceptibly Abhay began to put on weight. Tara could see
for herselfthe fruit of her labours, and her sense of power grew.
New thoughts began to enter her head. She increased the cream in
her desserts and began putting more cheese in the Italian dishes.
Abhay’s clothes did not fit him any more. He began to talk seriously
of dieting.
At this point Tara looked him over speculatively. In her mind’s
eye she saw him as she herself had once been. “You waddle,” he

78
 MANJU KAPUR °¢

had said at the beginning of the story, and she predictably female,
had replied in pain, “I do not.” Now she wanted him to waddle,
though her position might not allow her to rub his nose in the fact
as he had done hers.
When Abhay’s affair broke up, a certain moroseness tinged
and deepened the yellow of his already saturnine complexion. For
consolation he turned to serious eating. He listened to music, he
drank, and he demanded hot and spicy tit-bits from Tara’s ever
fertile kitchen.
When he began to waddle, she, trained to find her husband
beautiful in all his manifold aspects, started to find him ugly.
Given the circumstances of her revenge, she needed an affair
to give it a finished ending. She chose a friend of his, the
most convenient male to hand. The friend had dropped certain
hints, Tara decided to pick them up. She indulged herself with
him without taking precautions. She had long given up the
possibility of conceiving, and when she found herself pregnant,
she was exhilarated. The first thing to do was to get rid of the
friend.
“Abhay suspects,” she told him.
Then she told her husband, “I think perhaps it has been your
improved health,” she said. “You look so much better now: Before
you were too thin. That is why I have been blessed with this baby.”
A puzzled look crossed Abhay’s face as he took in the air of
quiet triumph in his wife’s manner. He started spying on her, but
her affair had been so brief and circumspect that he found no
traces of it.

79
¢ CHOCOLATE

When Tara’s daughter was born, she crooned her lullabies of

brave women warriors, and made sure that all her education was
oriented towards a career that would make her independent.

80
 Twenty or Twenty-Five?
Madhu Kishwar

For Heaven’s sake, Bhagwati, must you go around looking so

miserable? So what if you’ve lost one house? You’ll soon find
another!”
“Tt’s not so easy. It’II take at least 15 to 20 days, even a month.
How will I manage till then? Bhagwati answered, dejection writ
large on her face, tears filling her eyes.
How strangely attached Minna is to this Bhagwati! If Bhagwati
seems even slightly depressed, Minna grows restless, almost begins
to blame herself. She may even end up scolding Bhagwati: “Why
should you make yourself miserable over that good for nothing
fellow? It’s not as if he’s of any use to you. You’re earning your
own living. So why don’t you just forget about him, and stay
happy?”
Sermons of this kind make Bhagwati smile. Sadly. What can
¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

she say ? She, whose husband has never contributed a paisa to

running the house, nor spoken a decent word to her in ten years of
married life. Sure, he forces a child on her every year or two. And
also gives her a thrashing every second day. As for her mother-in-
law and sister-in-law, they turn away their faces, like Bapu’s
monkeys who have sworn to see no evil and hear no evil. But if
Bhagwati ever dares say a word in reply to her husband’s ravings,
they hear her fast enough.. Both of them pounce on her : “You
shameless hussy talking back to your husband!”
Perhaps Bhagwati would put up with all this, but there, is one
insult which makes her blood boil. On the one hand, this man
keeps giving her one child after another, climbs on to her whenever
he feels like it, beats and kicks her when she resists, yet on fee
other hand, he has a mistress too. Sometimes he disappears for a
night, sometimes for a whole week. That’s where all his earnings
go. Of course, when he has thrown away his own earnings on
drink, he can always beat up Bhagwati and snatch the little money
she has, to give to that other woman.
If one advises such an ill starred woman to stay happy, will it
not seem as if one must be joking? So Bhagwati smiles. The smile
seems to say: “Happiness is for bibis like you, who have every
comfort, whose husbands come and hand over their salaries to
you, and never say a harsh word. Where can women like me find
happiness ?”
Her sad smile hurts Minna like a taunt. Whenever Bhagwati
comes to work with a bruised body and swollen eyes, Minna starts
tingling with anger, and bursts out: “Why can’t you leave that

82
 MADHU KISHWAR °

good for nothing wretch? After all, you earn enough to feed,
yourself, don’t you?” “Maybe I can wash dishes and earn enough
to feed the children, but where will I stay? Rent for the smallest of
huts is Rs 100. How can I pay Rs 100 for a hut out of a total of
150 ? In any case our biradari people will make my life even more
of a hell if] start living alone. Women can’t do such things in our
community.”
Minna and Bhagwati have repeated this conversation dozens of
times. It is Bhagwati who gets beaten up, but it is Minna who flies
into arage. Sometimes she feels exasperated with Bhagwati. Why
must she look so forlorn and dejected ? Why doesn’t she feel any
anger? There she is, working away, dejected, mechanical. And she
will do as much work as you ask her to. She just doesn’t know
how to say ‘No.’ That’s why the dibis in all the five houses where
she works are in a constant state of mingled annoyance and
affection. Once she goes into a house to work, there is no knowing
when she will emerge and proceed to the next house.
But perhaps Bhagwati has, a special fondness for Minna. And
why does Minna get so perturbed when she sees Bhagwati
depressed? How easy it is to get exasperated and say: “Why don’t
you leave that wretch?” but the words which should follow stick
in her throat : “You can come and stay with me...” How many
times she has thought ofsaying that, but has not been able to work
up the courage. Where can she possibly accommodate Bhagwati
and her three children? True, there are three rooms in the house,
but Minna has three children of her own, besides her husband’s
young brother staying with them. The children have already started

83
¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

saying they need a separate room for study. The saving grace, she
thinks, is that they managed to rent this house five years ago at Rs
650 a month. If they look for another house like this one now,
theyll have to pay at least Rs 1,500. Sure, her husband is a
government officer, and earns Rs 1,900 a month. He keeps Rs 400
for his personal expenses and hands over Rs 1,500 to Minna. It’s
up to her to manage the house on that. The family is small — two
boys, one girl. But it seems to her that the Rs 1,500 is hardly in
her hands before it is all gone — 650 for houserent, 250 for the
children’s school fees. And 600 left over for the whole month’s
rations, milk, vegetables, electricity, water, and dozens of small
things like soap, oil, toothpaste.
And how is she to make the same Rs 600 pay for the chitdgen’s
books, summer and winter uniforms, shoes, socks ? Minna doesn’t
remember a single month when all three children at the same time
had a decent pair of new shoes each. How could they, when the
most ordinary pair of shoes for a two-year-old costs Rs 35? Minna
almost shrinks from going to the market. A shopping trip sends
her into a depression. At home, Rs 300 looks like such a big sum.
One thinks one can buy a great many things with it. But when you
reach the market and start asking prices, your heart begins to sink:
“Peas Rs 8 a kilo, Rs 12 for a packet of Surf, even a pair of socks
for a small child costs not less then Rs 6!”
Only Minna knows how difficult it is for her to eke out 30 days
on those Rs 1,500 and what mental acrobatics it involves. The
newspaper is full of comments on deficit financing whenever a
new budget or five year plan is being floated. Minna often wonders

84
 MADHU KISHWAR *

how the government will ever manage to repay the crores of deficit
that accumulate each year. If she’s even 15 days late in paying the
grocer’s bill, how embarrassed she feels to go to the market ! Her
husband feels he has done his duty once he has handed over Rs
1,500 to her. He also feels entitled to expect at least dal, one
vegetable and raita at every meal. As well as special dishes on
Sundays and holidays. There was a time when pulao and raita
were considered a special Sunday meal. Now he turns up his nose
at it. “Oh lord, that same old pulao ! Why can’t you learn to make
something interesting, like noodles, for example?”
Last Sunday, she made kheer, and he was ready with his nasty
comment : “What was the use of my looking for an educated,
modern wife, if lam doomed to spend my life eating kheer ? Why
don’t you read Femina or Eve s Weekly? Last week, I was leafing
through one of them and I saw a recipe for a fantastic pineapple
pudding. Or why don’t you take a cue from Mrs Mehra — she’s
always turning out a Chinese meal, or a French pudding. After
all, there ought to be a difference between your cooking and my
mother’s cooking. You’re an educated, modern woman!”
Minna has grown so used to hearing such speeches that she
doesn’t think it necessary to answer. In the early years of their
marriage, there used to be heated arguments whenever Ravi made
such remarks. Here she was, emerging hot and bothered from the
kitchen, and there he was, ready with a new sarcasm each day.
She would fling a retort at him : “Why don’t you go get yourselfa
five star cook from Hotel Maurya, or better still, go and marry a
cook? Here the kids need socks, and Sonu has to have a winter

85
¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

uniform. Should I worry about that, or about your noodles?”

Ravi would flare up immediately: “Time enough to worry about
their socks when you are through with your saris and fashions.”
Hearing this, Minna would feel as if she was on fire, body and
spirit. How she longed to pick up the bowl of kheer and throw it in
Ravi’s face. But how could she, when she knew it would be a good
six months before they could afford to buy a new bowl? Hot tears
of helplessness would sting her eyes as she spat back: “Who’s
talking of saris? I haven’t been able to buy myself a single blouse
from your salary in these five years! I’m still wearing the clothes
my mother gave me.”
That was enough to make Ravi pick up the bow1 of kheer, hurl
it to the floor, and stamp out of the house. What a fine end.to the
special Sunday lunch! Ravi could smash the bowl and then storm
out. What was there for Minna to smash — her own head?
But how long can one carry on like this, smashing crockery,
and fighting like cats and dogs? What with the children watching,
and picking up their father’s ways, gradually Minna had to teach
herselfto swallow her anger and remain silent. Now she either
turns a deaf ear to Ravi, or offers herself a reasonable explanation
for his behaviour: “Poor fellow, he works so hard all day. Naturally,
he expects a good meal when he returns home.” She tries to save
money in every possible way. When Rahul’s sweater tears, she
unravels and reknits it into a warm vest for Sonu. instead of giving
the children’s clothes to the tailor, she stitches them at home. She
used to love reading, but since the children came, she hasn’t been
able to buy herself. single book. She consoles herself
by thinking:

86
 MADHU KISHWAR »

“This is not the age for me to read. It’s enough if we can somehow
manage to educate the children.”
Educating them is hard enough now that a four- year-old’s tuition
fees are Rs 75 plus busfare, uniforms, books, notebooks, and
dozens of incidentals. Far from buying herself a sari, months often
pass before she can bring herself to buy a new pair of slippers,
when the old pair gets torn. “How often do I go out ? At home,
anything will do,” she tells herself, “And even when I do go out,
my sari hides my slippers.” As for saris, her mother gives her one
or two a year, or her brother sends her one at Diwali. She is so
careful with them that her marriage saris still look good as new.
When a sari does get worn out, Minna can’t bear to throw it away,
so she stitches it into curtains.
In spite of all this, she has to hear the same irritable remarks :
“Heaven knows how you manage to make a whole month’s salary
disappear in 15 days !” At such times, Minna reminds herself that
she is more fortunate than are many others. At least, Ravi always
hands over the major part of his salary to her. Just look at poor
Uma next door. Every morning, she has to tell her husband what
she needs to buy, whether milk or vegetables, and he then puts the
exact price of it into her hands. On days when he is in a temper, he
doesn’t even deign to do that. The poor thing has no idea how
much her husband earns. Ravi has never humiliated her by making
her beg for each five rupee note, nor has he ever asked her to
account for what she spends. He keeps only Rs 400 for himself,
and he too has difficulty managing. By the end of the month, Minna
usually has to pay for his cigarettes from the vegetable budget.

87
« TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

After the tenth of the month, when she has paid all the bills, Minna
has to stop and think every time she spends a rupee.
But today was only the third of the month, so Minna was feeling
quite carefree.When she saw Bhagwati nearly in tears, Minna
couldn’t restrain herself. “How much did that bibi pay you?”
“She paid Rs 25. That was the money with which I bought
vegetables once a day. In the morning I give the children dry roti
with salt, but in the evening they like to have a little dal or vegetable.
Now what will I eat and what will I feed them, out of Rs 125?”
The words slipped out of Minna’s mouth : “Listen, you wash
the clothes in my house from this month.” Then your children
needn’t go without their vegetable.” She had said it— and she had
wanted to say it — but immediately she felt upset. “Another added
expenditure. And she’s sure to use more washing soap than I do.
If Id just asked her to wash the clothes, she’d have happily agreed
to do it for 15 or 20 rupees. But now perhaps she’Il expect me to
pay 25 since the job she has lost used to pay her Rs 25.” But
looking at Bhagwati’s tearful face, Minna couldn’t bring herself
to do such petty bargaining. How could she haggle over five or ten
rupees when confronted with that sad face?
So from the third of the month, Bhagwati began to wash the
clothes as well, besides continuing to wash the dishes and clean
the house. Minna had been paying her Rs 50 a month for those
two jobs. Minna feels quite pleased that this payment is higher
than the “rate” prevailing in the colony. There is not really so
much work to be done in her house. Minna never cooks lunch on
weekdays. The children come home from school at 4, Ravi and his

88
 MADHU KISHWAR °*

brother return around 6.30. In the morning, she prepares a packed

lunch for each of them. Why cook lunch just for herself at noon?
She manages with a cup of tea. After all, she rarely gets to have
breakfast before 11.30. When everyone leaves at 9, the house looks
as if it has been hit by a tornado — dirty clothes lying all around,
wet towels on the beds, one of Sonu’s socks under the bed and the
other out on the verandah, Ravi’s soiled vest draped on the sofa or
thrown on the ironing table. It takes her at least two hours every
day to set the house in order. Bhagwati is supposed to do the
cleaning, but is sweeping and mopping all the cleaning that is
required?
Minna gets up at 6 in the morning and starts preparing for the
five of them to leave. When they finally depart at 9, she feels as if
she has entertained a marriage party and sent it on its way. Ravi is
no better than a child. He can’t even take his own clothes out of
the cupboard. Voices echo all around “Mummy, where is this?
Minna, where is that?”
After tidying the house, Minna spends one and a half hours
washing the clothes. She tries to get an hour’s rest in the afternoon.
But her mind refuses to rest. It recalls that Sonu’s vest has to be
mended or Ravi’s shirt has to have new buttons stitched on. From
6 in the morning to 11 at night, there is always something or other
to be done.
The work never shows any signs of getting finished. Now that
the children are somewhat older, she gets six or seven hours’ sleep
at night. When they were small, night and day seemed to merge
into each other. Minna felt like a nurse who for years has been on

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¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

24-hour emergency duty, without casual leave, without sick leave,

without a Sunday off.
Now that Bhagwati has started washing the clothes, Minna gets
a couple of hours’ rest in the afternoon. She borrows some books
from the lending library, but ten years of not reading seem to have
taken their toll. She finds it hard to concentrate, even on a novel.
After reading four or five pages, her eyes begin to shut. She has
been working non stop from 6 to 12. Where is she to find the
energy to read ? Well, at least she manages a nap.
The dilemma continued in her mind: “How much should I pay
her for washing the clothes? Rs 15 is too little. I think 20 should
be all right. But she must be expecting 25. It’s all my fault — I
should have put things more clearly.” “~
As it was Minna found it difficult to pay Rs 50. She often
thought that if she were to do the dishwashing and the cleaning
herself, she could save some money and buy some fruit for the
children. But 75! The thought of it made Minna regret her soft
heartedness.
On a day when there was a big heap of soiled clothes, bedsheets
and bedcovers to be washed, Minna’s heart would melt: “Poor
thing, where does she get the energy to do the work of five houses?
I find it hard enough to manage my own.” This feeling would lead
her to decide: “T’ll give her Rs 25. Let her make something out of
the deal.”
But on a day when there chanced to be fewer clothes, Minna
would begin hesitating all over again. “Rs 25 for a few clothes
like these. And they’re hardly even dirty. All one has to do is soak

90
 MADHU KISHWAR °*

them and rinse them out. No one else would pay her more than 15.
Pll give her 20 — that’s more than enough. In any case, what about
all the other things I do for her. I gave her an old sari last month,
and I’m always giving her the children’s outgrown clothes. These
days, how many people would give away old clothes when one
can get a good steel bowl in exchange for three old saris.”
Once she got into this frame of mind, she would reckon up
every cup of tea, every left over scrap of food or old sari given to
Bhagwati, and would end up feeling quite pleased with herself for
her noble, charitable impulses. “After all, 1 give her a cup of tea
every day. Such a big cup of tea would cost at least 50 paise in the
market. And then I give her all the leftover food, even though left
overs don’t go bad these days. I could easily keep them in the
fridge and use them two days later.”
Every day, sometimes several times a day, Minna’s mind would
swing like a pendulum between 20 and 25. The day Bhagwati
took a holiday, Minna would decide on 20. But the day Minna had
guests and Bhagwati uncomplainingly washed piles ofdishes, or
the day Minna cleared out the storeroom and Bhagwati spent an
extra hour helping her, Minna would feel ashamed of herself.
“Poor thing, she never calculates the way I do. She ungrudgingly
does all the extra work I pile on her, yet I am so stingy with
every five rupees | give her. I don’t worry about the money spent
on the kids. I’d cheerfully spend my last paisa on them, Yet who
knows, when they grow up, they’II probably turn their backs on
us.”
But the dilemma persisted. Was it at all possible to resolve it?

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¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

If one considered what Bhagwati needed and deserved, even Rs

50 would be too little. Minna well knew how much energy goes
into washing clothes. “But how can I be responsible for her needs?”
she would think irritably. “Why has she gone and produced three
children, when she doesn’t know where her next meal is coming
from?”
Her irritation couldn’t last long, however. She well remembered
the day when Bhagwati’s husband had beaten her black and blue
because she had gone with Minna to the hospital, and had had
herself fitted with a loop. He hadn’t given Bhagwati any peace till
she got the loop removed.
When she saw Bhagwati look tired and ill fed, Mina often felt
like giving her a glass of milk, but then she would think of hefewn
children : “They are hardly swimming in milk and butter,” and she
would stop herself.
By the 29th of the month, Minna had still been unable to resolve
the dilemma of whether to pay 20 or 25. She tried to shake herself
out of it : “Why am I acting so petty and mean ? As if a saving of
five or ten rupees will make such a great difference to the house !
Anyway, who is going to give me any credit for such an
accomplishment?”
It was easy to give herself a sermon, but she knew that it was
only by saving such small sums that she was able to maintain the
veneer of “respectability” in their household. She had never let
herself spend Rs 2.50 on a scooter even when she came home
from the market, laden with three heavy shopping bags full of the
month’s rations. No, she would wait half an hour in the hot sun

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 MADHU KISHWAR *

and travel in a jampacked bus. Then how could she so easily bring
herself to spend Rs 25 on getting clothes washed?
That day, Ravi came home in a very good mood. “Minna,
remember Rakesh, that old friend of mine? He’s been transferred
to Delhi. I’ve invited the whole family to lunch on Sunday — that’s
day after tomorrow. Just see that there’s a real daawat, OK? He’s
avery good friend of mine. Whenever I’ve been to Kanpur, he’s
entertained me like a prince. Don’t forget to make chicken curry.”
Minna gazed openmouthed at him. “My dear sir, do you realise
that you are ordering this feast on the 29th of the month ? Where
do you think the money for the chicken is going to come from?”
“Oh come on, don’t give me that line. As if I don’t know that
women always put by a nest egg from their husbands’ salaries.
And Rakesh isn’t just any friend. He’s a very special friend.”
It was useless to argue, so she fell silent. And sure enough — the
chicken, the pulao, the jelly and custard were all prepared, besides
the usual dal and vegetables.
“Tf this is what makes him happy, well and good. After all, he’s
earning the money. What right do I have to refuse?”
Minna immersed herself in preparations for the guests.
Everything went off well on Sunday, but in the midst ofthe gaiety,
suddenly Minna’s face grew pale. Where had Ravi got those four
bottles of beer from ? Two days ago, he had asked Minna to lend
him money for cigarettes. Struck by a thought, Minna put down
the dish she was holding, and went into the bedroom. She opened
the cupboard and exclaimed aloud in anger. Her small piggy bank
was lying there — open, empty. All the money she had saved up so

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¢ TWENTY OR TWENTY-FIVE?

painfully, by selling old newspapers and old tins — gone. She had
intended to buy Sonu’s winter uniform with that money I She felt
like going and hitting Ravi on the head with the piggy bank.
Paralysed by rage, she sat there without moving’for a good 20
minutes. She altogether forgot that she had put the chicken curry
on the gas stove, to get warmed up. After a while, Ravi called out:
“Hey madam, have you gone off to sleep or what? Can’t you smell
the chicken burning?”
Minna got up, startled. Why throw a tantrum in front of guests?
When she went into the drawing room, she had the same smile
plastered on her face, she was once more the ideal wife and gracious
hostess.
After lunch, Rakesh and Ravi sat down to cards, while Rdteagh’s
wife helped Minna to clear away. There was a whole heap of dishes.
Bhagwati had spent the afternoon at Minna’s house, to help out
with the extra work. As per Minna’s instructions, she had worn
specially washed clothes, in honour of the guests. Two days ago,
her husband had beaten her badly, because she had admitted her
eldest daughter into school, without taking his permission. Her
body was still covered with bruises, and her left elbow was aching.
Still she had mopped the floor twice over today, and washed all
the crockery with great care. She had peeled the vegetables, and
ground the spices for Minna. She finished her work in the other
houses as quickly as possible so as to be back in time to help
Minna serve the food. It was three in the afternoon, and Bhagwati
was still busy in the kitchen.
“You have your lunch first, and wash the dishes afterwards,”

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 MADHU KISHWAR °*

Mina told her. She heaped a plate for Bhagwati, and then set to
cleaning the kitchen shelves. After a short while, she sensed that
Bhagwati had finished eating. Without turning to look at her, Minna
said in a low voice: “Listen. From tomorrow, you need not wash
the clothes. I'll wash them myself. I get fed up with having nothing
to do all day long.” And with that, she hastily went out of the
kitchen.

25;
a aubnahan
 Fig Blossom
Sukrita Paul Kumar

The fig tree and I grew up together in the garden. We are both
situated at one end of the garden. The back garden. In the front, in
that huge bungalow lives Minu who does not play with me. For
fear of messing her starched dresses. But Chintu steals out
sometimes, not caring for what he gets when he goes back into the
house. Their mother is a doll with honey smiles at the front door
and a screeching witch at the back door, hounding and threatening
whoever came her way. I have always thought of her as two different
women!
My fig tree and I. Fresh air, some rain and a bit of sunshine...
that’s all that was needed to make us rise from the ground. We
have no brothers or sisters. If they do exist, we know not what
may have become of them. We have after all each other to love,
and to quarrel with. I remember how I would pull at those tender
* FIG BLOSSOM

arms branching out of him in all directions. And he’d pinch my

baby-skin bloody red with the milk spurting out of its cracking
limbs. I called them white tears. I wish I could produce them too.
Mine were so inane and colourless and ineffective. Nobody would
ever notice them.
Amma has been washing the pots and pans of the big house day
after day. From the time she was thrown out on the streets by that
quiet burly man with his eyes popping out. All those long, dragging
days, those eyes had hung over me, heavy with love. I lay groaning
in the clutches of some devil; he focussed, glared and shooed the
fever away. He cared. Amma was always busy with Kanti. Every
day some time in the morning, he walked into the house with heavy
army boots demanding immediate attention, “Hey, fetch mea glass
of water”, “Go get me some tea”, or “can’t you give me some rag
to wipe my sweating forehead?” and then he would grumble, “this
brat of yours will never learn to attend to one coming from outside”
after which he’d burst out, “Wait till I lay my hands on you.” “A
spoilt chhokra!” I clenched my teeth, itched to punch his belly but
helplessly tried to avoid him. He was a bully. But I had a silent
bonding with the other man, the one with grey eyes. I knew he was
my father though Amma tried to convince me that it was Kanti
and that I should love him.
I never liked Kanti, the man who would twirl the thick bushes
of his moustaches that crept into his nostrils whenever he broke
into his loud guffaws. The bushes would droop back heavily on
his lips the moment he stopped laughing. God knows how many
progeny Kanti had scurried into Amma’s dreams filling her with

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 SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR °

promises of his future prosperity. Amma, so wise and clear-headed,

could not see what I, a child of four years, could so easily perceive.
Kanti was a hoax, a fraudulent lover who may have declared
himself a slave of many women, only to be a diabolic master of
all. He kept coming to Amma even after we landed in the shanty
given to her as the utensil cleaner of the big house. One day Kanti
disappeared. Just like that. But long before he went away his
fearsome moustaches had succeeded in shunting me out of that
dark hole, “my home”. I would keep away outside, away into the
other corner where my friend, the fig tree had been planted the
very day we had come to this house. Amma was made to carry
several bags of soil from the other end of the garden for the infant
fig sapling to find its roots. I planted myself next to it happily.
Amma and Kanti could not help demonstrating their pleasure at
having me out of the way. I had actually found my own freedom
and my own companion.
I had craved for this... the freedom to allow the image of the
‘burly man’ come to my mind as my father, the freedom to talk
about him with my only friend swinging on its already firm roots
and by now reaching the height of my waist. With me on my knees,
we'd be face to face: “Hey, Bachoo!” >?
I’ve always called him
Bachoo, the little one, as Iwas so much bigger when we first met.
“Bachoo, I see those grey eyes out of their sockets planted in the
black sky of the night staring down at me. That man had cared for
me quietly. That look goes deep into me. How can he not be my
father? I could not be anybody else’s. Kanti and Amma had turned
him wild. He suddenly awakened and threw her out. Me too, I also

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* FIG BLOSSOM

drove her out of myself then. You know, Bachoo, those eyes and I
share so much!”
Bachoo let a whiff of air rustle through its tender leaves in
perfect communion. And then, there would be moments of tangible
silence, my eyes welling up, and I’d gradually change my position,
lie flat on the ground with my palm feeling Bachoo’s tough roots
covered by the soft ground... Bachoo, my friend... Bachoo, my
son.... Bachoo, my father...
I felt my branches swinging with Bachoo’s till we’d both be
lulled into another world, the world where Kanti did not matter,
and Amma too was not visible. But soon their images would crawl
back into me like termites, when Amma would suddenly come and
shake me: “There you are again! Always lying around in thigcomer.
Why can’t you hear me the first time? Come, have your rofi... I
have to rush back... Memsahib’s got some guests. And remember.
You are not to be seen by them... remain at the back. I’1l pull your
ears red if my Memsahib finds you anywhere around and I get to
pay for it. Don’t even venture to the front of the house, or I’ll
break your legs!” Amma’s face, the face of a ferocious cat, loomed
over me with her bright red tongue flapping quickly, and the
frowning forehead dancing over her fiery eyes. The very same
Amma, who used to turn into a gentle cow in the presence of that
man Kanti. It was some mesmerism. Whether I actually went and
ate that roti was not her anxiety. But I did learn to eat for my
survival. Whenever my body demanded, I would go up to the shanty
and locate a half-dried chapati, sometimes even half-eaten by mice.
But that was not to go on for long. Because soon, I explored the

100
 SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR °*

huge back garden which had much more to offer: green mangoes
and raw guavas, carrots and radishes! Even Bachoo, had gained
such height in just two or. three years that it overtook me and
showered all his love for me into his fruit ... the deep red figs
which I devoured.
“Bachoo! I too want to create such capsules of love. I too want
to glut you with love...” and Bachoo would shed some more of its
figs as though unable to contain the abundance. In the sweltering
heat of the summer months, I would often bring buckets of water
to bathe Bachoo’s dusty leaves and pour it on the dry cracking
earth, over its roots, around the base of its trunk. I would pour the
water slowly, watching it rush into the cracks impatiently. I specially
enjoyed doing this because there was always such shortage of water
and most of the garden was left half-thirsty by Puttu-da, the maali
who’d come early in the morning to tend to the plants. For
emergency, there was a tank full of water stored in the backyard,
from where I stole some each day for my dear old Bachoo, who
looked so parched with just a few hours of the scorching sun.
When I ran the bucket of water over Bachoo, my soul danced._in
glee, bathed in streams of joy.
With the very first monsoon showers, there are rows of big,
glistening black ants crawling on Bachoo’s sturdy trunk. They
march out oftheir holes as soldiers in helmets celebrating freedom
from the steaming earth. They look so disciplined. Once, when I
clasped a thick branch and my fingers came in their way, they
didn’t like it at all. Their movement was disturbed by the enemy.
They panicked and ran all over my fingers, creeping up my arm,

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* FIG BLOSSOM

and finding their way to the rest of my body, biting and stinging
wherever they got a chance. They clung on with their stings hooked
into me, each sending a lightning pain down my spine. One by
one, I pulled them out and crushed them with a stone in utter
vengeance... the crackling sound startled me. And then, rows of
them reached out to their dead comrades, lifting and dragging the
corpses ceremoniously, in respect for the dead. I have never had
the patience to see exactly where they took their dead. I know they
don’t abandon them. Such battalions of them. Bachoo seemed most
unaffected. Not even a leaf would stir while scores of those little
monsters would be biting through the bark making deep holes into
it.
I reached the insides of one such hole after watching they crawl
into it in one continuous line for a long time. In the darkness of
that dome, I saw those eyes shining, the eyes of my Abbu popping
out at me. “Come, my son, I have been waiting...” And then that
deep sigh, ... my fever, the devil and he, my saviour. I stayed with
him for a long time, with no words between us. I tried to remember
the sound of his voice. Always, what I hear are eerie sounds of
exasperation or the silent sighs of love. Nothing in between.
The black hole was so warm, and... and... cosy, so much like
home. But the wide, open sunlight behind me called out and loomed
over me with naked threats. And my Abbu. “Why son, why do
you have to go? Stay!” The voice trailed through the dark, from
the very heart of Bachoo. Those eyes ... he is so safe in there. |
cannot be there for long ... that is, if |want to preserve it all. One
day Memsahib’s eyes fell on me when I was with my Abbu. “You

102
 SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR °¢

there, you good-for-nothing brat! Why can’t you help your good-
for-nothing mother inside? Another one of those sacks of rotten
potatoes like you! Such lords... as if they own this place!”
I dragged myself away from Abbu, came out into the sunlight
baffled, and ran to reach Amma panting. She stood scrubbing the
utensils vigorously, with all her anger and fire in her hands while
the water gushed out of the tap with full force. She lifted her left
arm to wipe her sweating forehead with one end of her sari pallu,
while I pulled at the other. “Amma, Amma, listen to me, Amma!”
I whispered to her urgently, snuggling closer and closer to her.
Only I could get her out of her misery. I thought the time had
come. “Amma, III take you to Abbu... let’s finish this work and
get out.” She had been totally oblivious of me till now, getting
consumed in her own fire. Suddenly she was alerted. I thought I
saw anger slipping out of her. Her forehead knitted into deep
thought, she frowned, was almost startled. This was the first time
I had mentioned Abbu to her. I had crossed into the forbidden
zone.
She paused, looked deep into my eyes and then all at once, she
raised her arm as if to strike me. She changed her mind and pinched
me hard into my side. ““Soo..er ke bacche! Why can’t you leave
me alone ... as if |don’t have enough problems feeding you. I have
always known ... you have never belonged to me. To come plaguing
me about what you call Abbu! Let me tell you today, he is dead
and thankfully gone. They found him dead drunk and breathing
his last on the streets, a long time ago. And you will take me to
him! Maaf karo, | want to live and find my Kanti. I will not stop

103
¢ FIG BLOSSOM

you, you can go to the dead!”

Amma had become a total wreck by now. Kanti had smothered
all life out of her but she continued to pin all her hopes on his
coming back. And now, I had found my Abbu, my home, my
Bachoo and had nothing to do with the inhabitants, or their doings,
inside Amma’s room. Those four walls did not mean anything to
me. Amma and her thoughts of Kanti filled up every nook and
comer. Her presence somehow included the presence of Kanti.
This kept me away from the room, from Amma and indeed from
Kanti. That is what I wanted the most. With Kanti gone, Amma’s
behaviour towards me did not change. In fact she was all the more
irritable and resentful with me after he stopped coming. As for
Abbu, he had never existed for her anyway. His death thea nade
no difference. She never even mentioned his death to me. All the
better. Yes, Abbu’s death would make no difference to me either.
Since for me he’d always be there. To either of us then, the news
of his death would not change the situation. He remained intact in
the dark depth of the nightly skies, as also in the black ant-hole, in
the warmth of Bachoo’s heart.
Why had I reached out to Amma? She had looked so sad and
forlorn. I thought Abbu and I could support her. She had no idea
about the home ] shared with Bachoo, and now with Abbu too.
Little did she know about me... or my sounds, the voices, the eyes,
the figs, the ants ... She barked at my offer. Is she right? Does she
know more? Is she wiser? I don’t care. She certainly does not
know what I know and what Ifeel. The boundaries between us are
steadfast. Occasionally, Amma and I come out of our worlds,

104
 SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR °*

into the no-man’s land in between. Only to realise again, the

separateness of our existence and then to withdraw quickly, unable
to cope with the shadow of the other.
Now onwards I found myself a prey to Memsahib’s wish to see
me working, to extract as much work out of me as possible. “Why
can’t you take a brush and scrub the floor today?” “Go, remove
the cobwebs from the verandah, your mother never gets time for
that!”, “Puttu has not come today, surely you can water the plants
today!” 17?
She always thought of some chore for me. The price I had
to pay for living in her garden! “Bachoo, watch out, if she could
have her way, she’d make you sweep her floors ... may her eyes
not fall on you my friend...” Flocks of twittering birds would fly
out of Bachoo’s mass of green when he giggled and shook his
branches in protest.
Bachoo had spread out like an emperor. Tall, well-built and
muscular, with broad, big and deep green leaves waving proudly
and majestically. Like elephant ears. The legendary fig-leaves!
OK, I see the point. I have had a long, ancestral relationship with
Bachoo. Lying under the dense foliage, I looked up and saw bits
of the blue sky spilling and peeping down at me ... the strong
summer sun weakened and cooled through Bachoo. And then,
through the figs, the leaves and the branches, through the tree
itself, I see those eyes again ... the eyes that dig into my bare soul,
pouring love into my blood stream, arousing my nerves and
capturing me totally. “My son, you are with me. We are together.
We are family. My boy...” They say Abbu is dead! But he is more
alive than ever. I look intently into those eyes. Is there death

105
¢ FIG BLOSSOM

anywhere in them? Not a trace of it. I do not blink lest I lose him.
I look, keeping looking as I rise to reach out... to Abbu through
Bachoo. “Bachoo ... don’t stir...” I whisper under my breath, my
skin taut with anxiety, “Don’t move ... I don’t want him to
disappear...”
I rise up on the tips of my toes, stretching myself to the fullest,
my arms raised. I see more than the eyes now ... the contours of
the rest of Abbu ... the space around, filling up with him. On the
tree ... on top of the figs, over the canopy, rest Abbu’s feet. I feel
them as I climb my way up, hugging Bachoo. The black ants crawl
all over me. I too crawl with the ants around the black holes, my
eyes tied to Abbu’s, my limbs around Bachoo. As I reach the top,
flocks of cheery birds spring out of the figs and take to thei @wgs.
Abbu’s body bends over me, cupping my face with its warm
flapping leaves. Bachoo and Abbu and I whistle with the breeze
and push deeper into the soil, the soil rich with water and fertilised
by love.

106
 Lifework

Anuradha Marwah Roy

Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya switched on the light to peer at her watch.

The thick hand was quite far from six. Too early! The time was
probably a few minutes past five. Now where were her glasses?
She rummaged around her pillow, shivering a little. She got out of
bed and turned off the air-conditioner. The glasses were sitting on
a table nearby. Why on earth had she kept them there? As soon as
she put them on, blurred lines sharpened and her day began.
It was only a quarter to five. Nobody else would be stirring yet.
There were expensive arrangements in this house to preserve sleep
till the sun was overhead. Even if the power supply faltered which
was fairly often in this colony of too many air-conditioners, noisy,
pollution-spreading generators would come on to keep them
spewing cool air..In the villages of this country, on the other hand
... None of her business, really! She wanted her morning tea. Could
¢ LIFEWORK

she dare to make tea in her daughter’s house? Stir the hornet’s
nest?
“Mama, how often have I told you not to tire yourself? Don’t
you realise you are getting on? Why couldn’t you ring for Ramlal?”
Mikki would scold.
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya would then feel constrained to point out
that Ramlal, the cook, was as old if not older than her and had
only gone to bed an hour after she had turned in. And of course,
her mother championing the cause of the underdog would be a
flaming red rag to Mikki’s upper-class bull.
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya wanted no arguments today, her special
day. Today of all days, she didn’t want her daughter to look at her
with exasperation and say, “Oh Mama!” as though dealifigewith
an old, cussed harridan.
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya made the tea nevertheless, missing her
late husband’s elan. Throughout their twenty-six years together
he was the one who had begun the morning chores, she had been —
as he used to put it — the lady of the (k)night. She used to surface
after he had filled the buckets in the bathroom, made tea and poured
her two efficient cups, and more often than not, added to their
fund of jokes about her reluctance to wake up. Now she woke
many times at night. These days it was such a relief when day
broke. Finishing her tea, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya found herself
carefully rinsing out her cup, and the teapot. She even emptied the
electric kettle to hide all evidence of her foray into the kitchen.
Slightly amused at her pusillanimity, she padded out into the garden.
It was breezy and cool. She kicked off her slippers to feel the

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 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY °

dew on her soles. She started walking purposefully, up and down,

up and down the lawn. She could feel the edges of her sari getting
wet. If Jnandeb were here, he would have teased, “Your sari,
Mahasveta! Must you try and sweep away the dirt everywhere?”
He knew how prudish she was. He knew she would rather take on
extra washing than hitch up her sari and let her calves show. Her
legs were startlingly white in comparison with her sunburned arms,
neck and face. He was the only one who had known her buttery
smoothness. “Greta Garbo!”
“Kothai chore galo re?” she asked the gaudy red and pink
bougainvillea that was nodding in the breeze, as his absence smote
her like physical pain, “Why did you go away by yourself?” Lately
she had taken to talking aloud to her dead husband. It comforted
her. Today there was a lot to say. She was going to be felicitated
by no other than the President of India. This is why she was in the
capital, in their daughter’s home. Their ‘selfless service to society’
was going to be rewarded.
“T have finished for you,” she said to him. “I know awards
don’t mean much but this one means we’ve done it. It also means
I was right in rescuing you from your mashi-pishis in Allahabad.
I was right in dragging you away from addabaazi at the collapsing
University. You were meant to educate people and that’s what we
did — you and I — in our unknown hamlet. We have put it on the
national map: Karera, Rajasthan, where every child goes to school.
Ihave finished your lifework for you.”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya walked faster. She was a stately woman
with waist length hair that she bunched impatiently into a bun

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several times a day. Her face was small, her eyes very dark and
flashing. People had always turned to stare at her.
“I know you missed Shona-di’s dohi-maach throughout,” she
accused her late husband, playfully. “But you’ll have to admit I
became quite good at cooking fish myself - not that we could get it
too often. And I know you were very happy with me — far happier
than you would have been with that naika-moni Shona-di wanted
you to marry. She always blamed me — the Calcutta-girl — for
spiriting you away. Now, after this public recognition of our
achievement would she still say I dragged you down?”
Theirs had been a whirlwind romance followed by a marriage
that left both the parental families feeling indignant. Before the
relatives could recover from the shock of the precipitate marfiege,
the newly-weds announced their decision to leave for Karera. A
new chapter began in their life then. They started their work with
the underprivileged. Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya initiated it as she began
everything they did together. And after a few good-natured protests
about being buried alive by a sandstorm, Jnandeb allowed himself
to be sucked into the large sensuous space of her creativity. The
gates of their intimate world clanged shut at that point.
Disapproving relatives found themselves excluded, disregarded.
She conceived plans, he wrote them out as proposals developing,
amending and getting them passed through crusty bureaucratic
procedures. Those were heady times. Together they were converting
ideals of their youth into projects. Later, Jnandeb began to express
the wish to reconnect with the extended family. But with an intuitive
fear of other claims, and perhaps an unacknowledged resentment

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of their earlier rejection of her, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya resolutely

kept the door shut. All in all, there had been two bald patches in
the tussocky comfort of their marital life: Jnandeb’s relatives, and
their daughter Mikki.
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had named her only daughter Shubhangi
but Mikki spent all her growing years resisting that name and
everything else that her mother tried to give her. What a spitfire
she had been!
“Mama, why can’t I go to Geeta’s dance party? Why? Why?
Why?”
“Mikki, it takes two hours to reach the city. How will you come
back? And I don’t like the idea of you staying there overnight.”
“This place is a sinkhole. What should I do now that the exams
are over?”
“T would love to have you over for the school-festival tomorrow,
Mikki. There will be dancing too.”
“You must be joking, Mama — You want me to dance with the
village-women in their stinky /ehengas?”
“Yes, I don’t see what’s wrong with participating in their
dances.”
“T hate you, Mama. I’m sure it is only because you don’t want
me to ever have fun. I hate you.”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya hadn’t known how to deal with her,
neither had Jnandeb. It was as though their daughter grew up to
speak a foreign language. She travelled two hours to school and
then college everyday and it seemed that her real home was in the
city, away from her parents. Mikki was very bright and very

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contrary. At times they wondered what would become of her. That

she would end up as a docile daughter-in-law and a loving wife in
a big family home, was a thought that couldn’t have been further
from their minds.
The news that Mikki wanted to marry Ajay had come as a shock
to both her parents. After having met Ajay precisely ten times at
Geeta’s house — he was Geeta’s cousin — Mikki had dropped the
bombshell, “Yes, I am going to marry Ajay. He is rich, comes
from a good family...”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had dismissed all these virtues rather
impatiently, “Oh yes, he is rich. But Mikki is that enough? He
isn’t even a graduate.”
“And how willa degree help in his export business?” “ew
“You know I am not talking about his business. I thought you
wanted to train as a psychologist. Now you want to marry even
before your Masters.”
“T can still do it.”
“What about the scholarships you said you would apply for?”
“I can study in Delhi. And I will be going abroad often enough.
We are going to Switzerland for our honeymoon.”
Ajay was handsome and mild-mannered. He dressed
extravagantly: designer jackets and jeans. In vain, Mrs.
Mukhopadhyaya tried to explain to Mikki that he belonged to the
other side: the selfish, complacent upper class they had been fighting
all these years. How could a Mukhopadhyaya ever adjust to their
ways? But Jnandeb had been very quiet. He even exhorted her to
leave Mikki alone.

ee
 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY *

“Perhaps you were right about Mikki, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya

conceded still walking like a woman possessed. “She seems
exceptionally well adjusted. She has recently been elected president
of a ladies club called Inner Circle. What a name: Inner Circle!”
She stopped short. She sounded condescending even to herself.
Jnandeb had once said to her, “Mahasveta, you must learn to respect
people who are different from you. You can’t go through life being
dismissive of everybody.” Had there then been too much self-
righteousness in her disapproval of the match? Ajay was essentially
good-hearted. When Jnandeb died he had stood by her, more like a
son than son-in-law. He had been the only one to understand her
need to lose control. While others concentrated on shushing her,
he alone offered his shoulder, “Cry, Mummy. Don’t bottle it up.”
She had collapsed thankfully and wept for hours. He had also
taken over the arrangements for the funeral.
Later on, his expressions of grief started to irritate her, “Mummy,
I can’t let you stay alone. What will you do in this place?”
“T have my work, our school. How can I leave it now that he’s
gone?”
“No, no! You must move in with us. Our house is big enough.
There’s no need for you to work now.”
The need to work! Couldn’t he understand it was work that
needed her, pulling at her hem like a child. The grant from Norway
had not come through then. It was only now after she had utilised
it to start free computer classes in the school that she could think
of retiring — although not in the way Mikki and Ajay meant.
She sighed! No matter how she put it to herself, Mikki had fet

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them down. “You wouldn’t have liked these things either,” she
said sadly to Jnandeb’s absence. “Mikki has grown too far from
us. You and I were different right from the beginning. We married
at that time without the usual pageantry. I didn’t even wear the
customary ‘loha’. People called me a witch. But we never bowed
to social pressure. Even now, I never wear that horrible stark white,”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya said, gulping painfully.
“And Mikki!” She continued, complaining in real earnest, “She
seems to bend backwards for social approval. Remember her
wedding reception! Remember the food, the kind of people, the
empty talk! She’s become just like them. It’s as though she was
never our child!”
Marriage had transformed Mikki: she wore single diamegds -
solitaires — in her ears, and diamond rings that sparkled like little
lights on her fingers. She hosted parties, yelled at her servants,
and shopped compulsively. She had of course already touched
the nadir of ostentatiousness much before — when Mrs.
Mukhopadhyaya saw her wearing a seven string diamond necklace.
But in spite of her, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had been unable to stifle
a gasp at the stars around Mikki’s white neck. Dressed in pink,
Mikki had seemed like a princess that evening. At the five-star
reception hosted by Ajay’s parents, in stark contrast to the Spartan
wedding at the Mukhopadhyayas, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had been
dumbstruck for a while. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she
had caressed gems and doubted herself. Her lovely daughter! What
right had she to have kept her in rags and soot?
Both she and Jnandeb had been tearful and contrite. Had they

114
 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY °

actually given their daughter nothing? How would Mikki’s in-laws

respond to the meanness of her origins? Would they cherish her
ultimately or would they always be condescending: dressing her
up in their expensive clothes, embellishing her with their jewellery?
But that mood had passed quickly with the evening. That mood
passed when they saw the obscene quantity of food on the dinner
table. Outside the hotel they had already spotted two shrivelled
urchins scratching at car windows, selling mogra garlands for one
rupee apiece. Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya, her heart melting with
tenderness, had bought ten. So, by the time Mikki and Ajay came
to them for aashirvad, tears had dried up in their eyes. They had
been unable to share Mikki’s enthusiasm for the bridal suite (with
compliments from the hotel) and the honeymoon trip to Switzerland
(a present from her in-laws). In fact they had left Delhi precipitately
the very next day. Safely ensconced in their village home, they had
distributed Jaddoos among the school children. Jnandeb had sighed,
“She seemed happy. That’s all we should ask for.” Then together
they had relinquished their daughter — making a mental kKanyadan
which was far crueller than the ritual they had refused to perform.
Letters kept plying between mother and daughter but they were
stiff little notes. Are you well? Yes I’m well. How is Ajay’s business
doing? We have bought a new car, a Honda Accord this time. The
Governor came to the school, state scholarships for three children.
Mama, I am pregnant. Hope you are eating well.
“She’Il even bear her children according to their wishes. No
doubt there will be a second pregnancy soon. Her mother-in-law
was saying it’s high time,” grumbled Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya. It

115
¢ LIFEWORK

was getting warm but she was unmindful of the perspiration

dripping down her neck.
Soon after Mikki’s delivery, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had travelled
to Delhi bearing gifts for Ajay’s family — silk kurtas and Daccai
saris, spending far more than she ever had on clothes. These were
peace offerings, bought with mutual consent. Jnandeb and she were
excited at the idea of a grandchild of their own.
So extravagant had she been that Ajay’s mother protested, “Why
are you spending so much? Such gifts are given only when a boy
is born. You are not expected to do all this for a girl.”
Bristling with indignation, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had looked
at Ajay and Mikki hoping for a retort. None came. Beautiful Mikki
wore a bovine expression. In the exclusive nursing home the labour
had been long and tedious, ultimately resulting in a Caesarian
section. Throughout her one month stay Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya
tried several ways to get through to her daughter but perhaps she
had left it too late. Mikki was impatient, rejecting outright her
mother’s suggestion that she enrol for a course at the Open
University, and use the years of parenting that would keep her
home, gainfully. “I have no intention of retiring from active
partying, Mama,” she replied scornfully.
However, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya found it impossible to overlook
the conventional gifts of fortune in Mikki’s life —there seemed to
be many. Although it was ‘only a girl’, Ajay and his parents regaled
the mother and child with their brand ofcare and concern. Ajay’s
mother climbed three flights of stairs to buy a special crib-mobile
—a feat that was exclaimed at by everyone who knew how difficult

116
 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY °

it was for her to even walk. A nurse was hired to look after the
baby at night, as Mikki was ‘too weak’, this was in addition to the
ayah who was there all day. When Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya came to
know what was being spent and offered to do the night shift, Ajay
was indignant to the point of being rude.
Strangely, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya found that she could talk more
easily with Ajay’s family than with her own daughter. She would
tell the plump, good-natured couple about the desert, the feuds
fought over a bucket of water, the gruelling poverty. They listened
with distracted admiration. That admiration became focussed when
Ajay saw the Minister of Education at his father-in-Iaw’s funeral;
now with the national award Mikki’s marital family was eager to
co-opt her as their own. Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya had been welcomed
far in more warmly this time than she ever had before. No doubt,
they would say at their innumerable parties — Mikki’s parents,
you know, the well-known social workers ....
Perhaps the achievement of this acceptance had also been a
part of their work. Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya smiled somewhat
mockingly: “Mikki’s at last got what she wanted — high-powered
parents!”
She felt a heady sense of release. She had made her peace, even
with Mikki. Now perhaps the time had come at last to close her
eyes and cease. After Jnandeb, it had become very difficult to
carry on from day to day. She was very, very tired. It was Mrs.
Mukhopadhyaya’s unshakable belief that death would be hers for
the asking, as life had always been. She would switch off the light
by which she worked and it would be pitch dark. She did not

Wy)
* LIFEWORK

admit twilight to her scheme of things.

“Shuncho, it’s all taken care of. Ican come too,” she said aloud
like a young wife. eager to wind up and join her husband for a
holiday.
Suddenly there was a sound behind her. It was Mikki.
“Mama, are you mad? What are you doing walking around in
the heat and muttering to yourself?”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya allowed herself to be ushered indoors.
Seated in Mikki’s bedroom, she noticed that her daughter’s eyes
were swollen and red.
“You really are the limit, Mama...” Mikki was saying.
“Mikki, what happened? Have you been crying?”
“Mama, I am pregnant...”
“Oh! Where is Ajay?” ~
“Out.”
“So early?”
Mikki did not reply.
“Why have you been crying Mikki?”
Pine edon tae
“What is it? You might have a son this time. Everybody in your
family has been waiting for this.”
“I don’t want to have another child.”
“Have you spoken to Ajay?”
“He says he will take me for an amniocentesis, if it is a girl I
can have it aborted ...”
“What if it is a boy?” asked Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya sharply.
“Then, I will have to go through with it. Mama, I nearly died

118
 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY »*

with the first one, I don’t want another...”

“You didn’t nearly die with the first one. You had the best
possible medical attention and then no two deliveries are the
same.”
Mikki broke down. Loud sobs racked her body, “Is this all you
can say? Is this all anybody can ever say to me, look at how much
you have, count your blessings, count your diamonds, your cars. I
am sick of this Mama, I can’t, I won’t give them a son in return. I
won't go through the whole thing again.”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya sat stunned. Mikki hadn’t ever cried like
this before. Never!
“Why don’t you tell Ajay you don’t want another child?”
“Tt’s no use. He just parrots his mother.”
“Mikki, that’s not being fair. Your in-laws are decent people.”
“So, what should I do? Become a child-bearing machine in
return?”
“You can refuse to have the baby.”
“T don’t know ... I don’t know ... I wish I hadn’t been pushed
into this...”
“Pushed? Pushed into what?”
“Into this mess...into this marriage...”
“What do you mean? You married Ajay by choice.”
Mikki reared up from the bed, “Choice? What choice did I have?
I hated the way we lived — dingy, horrible, hot. And you didn’t let
me do anything I wanted. I didn’t want to study further but there
you were pushing me for all you were worth. I just said once in
passing that I like psychology and you had my future chalked out
¢ LIFEWORK

as a Clinical Psychologist with a degree from — from — God knows

where!”
Mikki ranted on. “Did you ever try to find out what I really
wanted? I didn’t want laurels and awards, I wanted to have fun. I
hated your principles, your negation.”
“My what?”
“Your negation. No new clothes for puja because it was against
your principles, no jewellery because it was against your principles,
no parties because you had no time, only talk, talk, talk with people
in shabby clothes...”
Mikki sobbed and sobbed, “I didn’t want to be you. I didn’t
want to look like you — so eccentric. And you kept pushing me,
pushing me. If I hadn’t married Ajay, you would have Bat what
you wanted — a clone.”
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya sat immobile, a statue. Thoughts were
whirling too fast inside. Fun? So, you’ve had your fun. Do you
know the price you paid to enter the circus? Was it worth it Mikki?
But she didn’t say a word. She had just realised the price she
would have to pay in order to say this. Just when she was putting
down her tools her daughter had returned scorched with her own
fire. Work at rebuilding a life was pulling at Mrs.
Mukhopadhyaya’s hem again.
With a hand at the end of an arm that seemed to weigh a ton,
she reached out to push back Mikki’s hair from her forehead, “What
do you want Mikki?”
“I don’t know,” said her daughter taken aback by her mother’s
gentleness.

120
 ANURADHA MARWAH ROY *

“Then I — we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

Mikki was silent.
“Shubhangi, my daughter, will you come home with me?”
Mikki looked up surprised, “For what?”
“You can take back Baba’s reward to the school.”
“T can’t be away for too long,” Mikki replied reluctantly.
Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya put her arms around her daughter. They
sat with scarcely a movement, three generations locked together.
After a while, Mrs. Mukhopadhyaya’s eyes rose to the window,
“A last-minute emergency. But I’II set her right in no time,” she
said silently to the bougainvillea.

121
 A Toast to Herself

Raji Narasimhan

Shall we see Dr. Kesavan one of these days?”

Priya looks up blinking. Time has a way of splintering and
colliding in this house. Kesavan is a suitor of hers. An undeclared
one, the kind that goes out of sight for years together and then
shows up one day with the same desires, frisking his eyes.
“Yes, of course, mother,” she says quickly, to still the squall
gone up in her. She is expecting a review of her latest book in the
papers. The suspense and its symptoms are familiar: a muted
whistling like the inside of a telephone, in her stomach, and criss-
crossing her head, a throbbing. Joshi of the Herald has told her
he’ll be publishing it soon. Soon means now, the swollen present,
holding time in its maw. Her fifth book. She measures her age
against her books and her writing career. Tall in their book-case,
her books assure her that she is fifty years young. But fifty vanishes
¢ A TOAST TO HERSELF

when she sets it against her flirtation with Kesavan. She becomes
twenty then, the years when she thought about independence a lot
and always found it leading her by the nose into a sexual muddle.
And when it comes to her mother, when she acts her fifty years of
experience and pain against her mother’s crumbling frame and
still doughty eyes, she becomes the baffling woman, perennial and
beyond age.
“Good. Let’s hear what Kesavan has to say about this bag of
stale blood.” Her mother points at herself, laughing, and turns to
go into the kitchen with a sudden spurt of energy.
Alone in the verandah, under the dense vines, Priya tosses to
collect herself. She wants to think coolly about the coming review,
and see for herself the spartan and committed writing persofshe
knows herself to be. But her thoughts slip to Kesavan. Sex always
lurks in some fold of her mind, vying with writing for the possession
of her.
Years ago, Kesavan had called her into his clinic when he need
not have, and had given her an injection in her buttock.
“A precaution, no more,” he had said, looking through semi-
closed eyes at the raised hump of her posterior. He explained that
there was a virus raging in the air: She had accepted his explanation.
She was far too miserable, what with her divorce, her mother’s
active and open hatred of her for it, her joblessness, and her
mother’s active and open hatred of her for that, her youth, her
insecurity.
“Tt won't pain,” Kesavan poised the syringe above her rump.
“And when are you going back to your husband?” his voice

124
 RAJI NARASIMHAN °*

glided smoothly to the question.

Her answer came just before the needle’s plunge. “I’m not
going back.”
The sharp pain of the needle stung and subsided.
He kept his eyes averted when she sat opposite him at his desk
and he passed his prescription slip towards her. “It is going to be
difficult for you,” he said, still looking away. Minutes passed. He
seemed about to make a proposal. She might even have accepted
him. But he didn’t. All his natural caution exerted its weight
against his urge to speak out. The minutes passed on. He made
no proposal. It was clear that he wasn’t going to make any.
And then what happened?
The sequence fades in Priya’s mind. She rubs her eyes. There
are dark half-moons under them, she sees, without having to look
in the mirror. And she feels, without touching, the roughened,
coarsened skin on the moons. The knowledge of ugliness puts her
back in tune with herself as a writer. She stands up, hardy and
striving. Should she telephone Joshi and ask him carefully, casually
about the review?
But her mother is back, standing before her. |
“Not at work yet, I see.” She’s not really being sarcastic about
her incomeless work. Only, she still finds it necessary to state
these queer things about her It’s her way of finally accepting
their queerness.
Priya gives the bright, watchful smile she gives whenever these
asides begin with her mother.
“I’m a useless old body, aren’t 1?” her mother hovers close for

125
* A TOAST TO HERSELF

a near look at her daughter who could seem like a stranger for all
the fights they’d had. “Uneducated, unfit for anything except
brewing rasam and sambar. What is it you are writing now?
Story? Article? Why should you tell me? Will I understand?”
“If I were not your daughter, mother, you would. You would
even like what I write,” Priya laughs to sound sporting.
Her mother laughs too, reading Priya’s afterthought.
“Tell me, they pay you well now, don’t they? They pay you a
decent amount for your efforts, don’t they?”
“You know very well, they don’t. Two hundred, two fifty is the
most I get for an item.”
“But you do four items a month, you must be! Writing all the
time! A thousand you make then!” “~
“A taxi driver makes more!”
Her mother closes up under the sudden rasp of Priya’s voice.
Priya laughs to soften the outburst. But she’s driven to more.
“And [ll remain poor. You know that as much as me. So stop
your make-believe.”
Her mother is silenced. She’s too old to snap back and bandy
words. But as always she’s succeeded in stirring awake the fear
of poverty latent in both of them. Priya keeps a stiff face. She
will not rise to the bait. She will not let her mother get away with
her tricks.
Her mother recedes into herself. Priya knows exactly how she
will spend the afternoon. She will stand pressed to the gate looking
out for the postman to bring her her widow’s pension for the month.
It isn’t due yet. The month isn’t over yet. But she will still stand

126
 RAJI NARASIMHAN *

there glued to the gate, forgetting to eat.

“Come back, mother. It is not the first yet. You won’t be getting
it,” Priya will call. And her mother will answer without taking
her eyes off the road. “Last time he brought it on the twenty-
sixth.”
Priya sighs. How often has she assured her mother: “Your
money is your own, mother. I want none of it. I can fend for
myself.”
“You'll live like a sanyaasini, then? Your writing brings you
pebbles.”
“But I want little, mother. I don’t want much, honestly. I can
never make you understand. | don’t understand it myself.”
She really doesn’t. Her wants have shrunk suddenly ever since
she went into writing. The substance rising and forming within
her seems too fine for the normal plenitudes. It seems to want
tending most of all, tending that consists of intensive communication
with the eyes and turns of voice, and encouraging gestures with
the hands without close touching. It keeps her cheerful even when
hunger charges into her and chaps her lips and a crumpled kurta
pulled out of the dhobi’s basket makes up her clothing.
The pension money has bloated her mother’s savings. She isn’t
sure, but it would be sixty, or seventy thousand at least. Sitting
under the thick vines, wracked with anxiety about the review, the
face of Kesavan prying in and out in a degenerate sexual recall,
Priya slides off to a calculation of her mother’s assets. Seven
hundred and fifty rupees a month in the bank for eight years.
Amounts to seventy-two thousand rupees. Seventy-two thousand.

127
*« A TOAST TO HERSELF

In ten lives she wouldn’t see such a sum.

“You must be thinking me a greedy old crone,” her mother flits
around her table sometimes, watching her intent writing look
with jealous scrutiny and smudging it wantonly, boldly.
‘What do you want me to say, mother?” Priya snaps, her brows
unlocking under the impact. “I will not play Mother Comfort!
Enjoy your guilt yourself!”
It’s lulling under the vines. Priya disengages herself from its
protective warmth and goes to telephone Joshi. How much should
she have to put a stop to this insidious tribute to money her mother
forces out of her? She is thinking this out as she walks to the
phone. Against her mother’s seventy-two thousand how much
will she need as fortification against these maraudings inher
privacy?
Joshi’s number is engaged. She tries again. Still engaged. The
downward beeps of the engaged signal carry her down with them
to memories of Kesavan.
Her next memorable meeting with him was in the flush of her
wrestles with her first novel. He'd been sent for by his mother,
“Why have I sent for you, doctor?” Her mother had lain back
stagily in her chair, pressing the all too true, far from sham pains
in her heart. “What does it matter if this rickety heart stops?”
Tut-tutting and cluck-clucking, composing her with his
competent medical hands, he had fixed inquiring and accusing
eyes on Priya. He didn’t need to ask if she’d joined her husband.
Her defensive and hostile eyes told him all. She hadn’t aged unduly,
he hadn’t failed to notice. He smiled in spite of himself.
 RAJI NARASIMHAN *

“What are you doing these days?” He was playfully possessive.

“Writing!” Her mother snapped.
“Stories etcetera?” Layman’s curiosity shone in his eyes.
“Sort of,” she smiled formally.
“Why don’t you let me see them?”
The dumbkopf would never have known what to make of them.
He didn’t really know English even though he spoke it. She was
afraid, suddenly. What if he quizzed her? What if he got out of
her all those little secrets about writing that formed from the
duplicities of making art from life?
Kesavan saw her fidgeting. It revived his own inhibitions, and
at the same time his sympathies. Priya felt herself go woman and
winding like a mermaid. She would have liked to rest her head on
his chest and take the male comfort she had rejected all these years.
She wished she could take a respite from the exacting taskmaster
of writing to which she had bound herself.
“Tell her, doctor,” her mother wailed, face turned full to him,
and in sharp profile to her. “Explain to her that writing is for
those with money. For those like her, it is a hobby only. Explain
that to her, doctor, make her understand.”
Joshi’s number is still engaged. In the waiting for the line to
clear, her anxiety about the review mounts. What is a review? Just
words. One more noise among many. “Will you stop writing if
this review doesn’t appear?” she asks herself sternly, and hears
herself whine. “Yes, I might.” “Yes, you might,” the pronoun
changes as she addresses herself, linking up with her ventriloquist’s
voice. “Something will break in me.” “Something will break in

129
* A TOAST TO HERSELF

you,” the pronouns clash. She moves away from the telephone,
needing distance and space. From the balcony she sees her mother
down below shuffling about the patch of grass. Later in the
afternoon, at four thirty, she’s able to contact Joshi. “It’s coming
this week,” Joshi sounds light-hearted. The pages must have been
made up and put to bed.
Now the fear is close and biting like a mask. Her movements
retract inwards, stiff jointed. Twice in the night she wakes up and
tries to push away the boa’s fangs of fear.
In the morning the paper is on the porch. The judgement on her
lies in its folds. Under stress Priya’s reading becomes a crab-like
backward and forward movement. She alights somewhere in the
middle of a sentence, goes up a little and then skims down, picking
out words that seem key and leading. “Sensitive,” she picks Out. A
cliche, but encouraging. “Imbued with life,” she takes in and winds
back quickly to the head of the sentence. “Characters are,” is the
head. She smiles severely. Cliche, cliche. Who is the reviewer?
The name is vaguely familiar. “A welcome addition to the growing
body of ...” Shut up, shut up, shut up, she grimaces in pleasure
and disgust. Well, it’s a nice review. Flattering even. Elation
possesses her. She lets herself be possessed by it before good sense
and anticlimax catch up.
It is night. A navy blue sky lies looped above. Priya, Kesavan
and her mother are on the lawn, sipping lemonade. The doctor is
tearing the skin of the night to see her face. He has seen it already.
It wasn't dark when he came, and he has seen the still presentable
face and form of her. But he wants to see them again to make

130
 RAJI NARASIMHAN

sure. His fluttery voice sails up to her in the dark. “So you’ve
become a big writer. I saw a review of your book in the paper
today.”
Priya pauses before the next sip of her lemonade. She doesn’t
think it necessary to reply to him. She gives a polite laugh. She
can feel the doctor’s smile and attention hammering her. She lets
them hammer her on.
“How muck royalty has she got? Ask her that! She has got
nothing! Tell me if I am wrong!” Her mother may not sound
bitter about her poverty, but she’s insulting all right under her
open manner.
The doctor is confused as usual. “Money isn’t everything,
Amma,” he murmurs. And then he turns to Priya, suddenly
aggressive.
“Why don’t you let me see all that you’ve written these years?
Why are you still hiding them from me?”
“Very well! I shan’t hide them!”
Her response catches them unawares. Gliding along the cool
grass she goes in and comes back with a full set of her books. She
puts them on the table.
“There, that’s the lot.”
She steps away from them and in the dark sees them huddled
like children separated from their mother. Wrapped in their jackets,
they do seem like her physical offsprings, sprung from the clay
and kiln of her body.
The doctor picks up the ones on top, feeling their girth and
shape. “They’re all yours?” he asks in wonder.

131
« A TOAST TO HERSELF

“They are,” Priya laughs.

He picks them up one after the other, till they are spread in both
his hands. His hands become heavy and populous with them. For
many seconds he stands thus, laden. Then he begins to put the
books back on the table, offloading them like prize cargo. “I will
read them,” he says solemnly as if taking a vow.
He never will, Priya knows. They’re not popular reading. And
her English, made heightened and subjective, will be a sore trial to
him.
Her mother has melted too. “Haven’t you really made even a
paisa from them all, Priya? For all the hours you’ve spent on
them, not a paisa you’ve made.”
Tomorrow she might well change. Tomorrow in the clear light
of day her mother might well not be any more the kindly person
she is now. But tomorrow a lot of things might well change.
Kesavan’s growing up may no longer mean anything. The review
will certainly fade into the irrelevance it is. Tomorrow she will be
again at her game of worming into herself and seeing what she has
come up with. But that’s tomorrow. Today she will joke with the
doctor. She will laugh with her mother, She will drink lemonade.
She will forget and drink a toast to herself.
 Recollecting Motherhood

Mrinal Pande

A close, reading of women’s writings from the Therigatha (The

Songs of Buddhist Nuns), to Mahasweta Devi’s and Ambai’s fiction
reveals that motherhood as women truly experience it and
motherhood as a much glorified institution are as separate and
distinct from each other, as Gandhiji is from Gandhianism. As an
institution, motherhood comes to young women, as an already
perfected idea, a system built by a patriarchal society. And when
the family elders bless them and say “may you be the mother of
many sons’, it has all the heaped force of custom and tradition,
behind it. Actual motherhood as women experience it, however, 1s
an immensely personal and intense experience, that fuses mind
and body as nothing also can.
On the surface many things have been changing for our women
since Independence, including the concept of motherhood. By the
* RECOLLECTING MOTHERHOOD

1970s, a young woman from a liberal urban middle-class family

could enter college, move around the campus with boyfriends;
postpone marriage till she had rounded off her studies well, and
then postpone child bearing for sometime till it was convenient to
have a baby. But now, when one thinks about those years, even
then those seemingly wider choices were strictly limited. One had
the choice for example, to study further and (having armed oneself
with a degree), to compete in an economic system with confidence.
But you could do it, only if the men of your family (read father,
father-in-law, husband) permitted you to do so. One of the routine
questions asked at job interviews of women remained: Do you
have your father’s permission?
Once you got married, motherhood as an institution togk over.
Even the most liberal families conveyed to you (through mother,
older sisters, mothers-in-law) that they would now like to see you
“settle down”, with a baby, hopefully a boy, to carry on the line.
Neither the women go-betweens nor the glossy magazines and
books, that they left suggestively for the young woman in question,
spoke to her about a young wife’s own feelings of conflict, her
problems with a sudden loss of her name, her identity, and of the
freedom to work at her own pace. All well-bred young women,
whether working or not, were supposed to integrate themselves
unquestioningly into the unchanging, age-old social structures, that
had made it impossible for their well-educated mothers and aunts
to have independent careers, and develop as individuals. It was a
situation tailor-made for rebellion. Men too married around the
same age, yet fatherhood was not expected to become their full-

134
 MRINAL PANDE *

time vocation, at the cost of their job. Why should a woman’s

reproductive role then subsume her productive one? But when one
raised such obvious questions, it was as though one was talking in
an obsolete tongue. At best it was: “She will get out of it by and
by” and at worst: “How dare she? Was this why we brought her
into the family, that instead of producing sons, she should leave
home each day to go out and work?”
The 1975 report on the status of women made it clear how for
the poorest (i.e. three-quarters) of women, things were terribly
grim, and that the thought that women are intrinsically as human
as men was simply unavailable to our planners and policy-makers.
But what went largely unreported was how things were hardly
better for the women from the so-called privileged classes. There
was a reason for this. Almost all our movers and shakers were
upper caste men from the upper classes. And in most cases even in
the families of our top politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists,
women were being idealised and exploited at the same time in the
name of tradition and motherhood. One met and heard these women
at social-dos and formal official get-togethers quite frequently,
and saw how in order to survive and to win social approval, most
of them had accepted the traditional concept of motherhood, where
being a wife and mother was being a person with no need for a
further identity. As the wife and the mother, they lived at others’
pace, fitting all their needs and energies to groom and protect them.
They were all uniformly isolated and somewhat bored, but what
the hell, this was a glorious sacrifice. A virtue that was its own
reward. No one took notice if some of them talked to friends about

is5
> RECOLLECTING MOTHERHOOD

experiencing baby-blues, and uncontrollable rages that ended in

migraine and hysteria.
Nor did one open one’s mouth about the stress of being made
solely responsible for the children and the near-total lack of privacy,
self-esteem and sleep it entailed. Most seemed to accept this unfair
stereotype as a woman’s biological karma. If women spoke of
occasional bursts of a murderous anger when husbands took to
keeping crazy work-schedules and children became too noisy or
disobedient, it was treated as a joke. If they left the children at all,
to meet friends or see a movie, the young mothers were made to
suffer pangs of terminal guilt for this derel.ction of maternal duties.
They hardly ever remembered what they saw or read or discussed
while they were away from their maternal watch towers, Most
confessed they had forgotten when they last read a whole book or
even skimmed through newspapers.
But some did not give up. They were trying to go beyond, as
they struggled to bring back their own intellectual lives into focus.
At the staff-rooms of the various universities - where I taught, and
later among young women journalists, I was overwhelmed by a
discovery of wonderfully vibrant minds that traditional maternity
had failed to subserviate. Between discussing literary criticism
and contemporary political situations, these women talked freely
of their lives as a working mother, who was suspect in all eyes,
including her own. Of how annoying it was to want to be human,and
be told you must be a mother first. They saw nothing wrong abut
complaining freely about those ridiculous family-dos and parties
at which men formed tight little Freemasonic clubs and talked of

136
 MRINAL PANDE °*

the Future of India, while women with minds and vocations of

their own, were made to sit in little giggly clusters and were lectured
to by supercilious and dismissive matrons, who had dedicated their
own lives to their children’s welfare and their husband’s careers.
Slowly the anger dissipated and the working women of the 1980s
rediscovered their lost sense of humour.
They then laughed about mothers and mothers-in-law who
bustled about to get a cup of hot tea for those terminally fatigued
men at the end of the day, and they laughed at how they darted
poisonous glances at their equally tired working daughters and
daughters-in-law and made nasty wisecracks about those who
succumbed to selfishness, pride and avarice and predicted that
working women would break up the happy homes they had built.
But this was a very long journey.
Once in a while fellow-writers say this to many of us: why do
you limit yourself to “soft issues”, and travel so much to rural
areas to report on women? Why not write more about contemporary
(read male) politics, about the process of democratisation? If you
must, why not write about motherhood as a positive influence that
has shaped your own personality? Look at the men. They do not
complain. Their bonds with their mothers, and wives, daughters,
their girl-friends are so positive and have produced such literary
gems. How is it that you do not say how it is the supportive family
man who allowed you to be what you are? Come on, give credit
where it is due!
After some some 30 odd years, I think I can answer this. It is
like this. Before you can recollect the past creatively, you need to

1317
* RECOLLECTING MOTHERHOOD

experience a certain tranquillity of soul. Men have no idea how

rarely women get to savour it while they raise families. And it was
exactly in search of that tranquillity that I absented myself from
traditional mothering and entered the world of writing. It became
to me, as to countless others like me, a fabled room of my own
where I regained my lost identity. And it was not as though children
did not matter or were shut out totally. Even as one wrote, one still
had to uproot oneself frequently to answer their needs. Also answer
the door, the phone, to do a car-pool turn, or the laundry; or help
with a school project or keep sick-bed vigil. But through all the
tedium such chores generate, it was the writing that relieved the
stress and allowed me to love my daughters, without recrimination
or guile. They in turn, learnt to respect a mother’s privacy. Topether
we survived the demanding and chaotic careers of their parents
and their equally chaotic school and college lives. And in this
process all became individual survivors, with minds and fulfilling
lives of their own. Strong ties still continue to connect us in sickness
and in health, but we do not need to resort to emotional blackmail
or spectacular tantrums to get attention or to tie each other down.
My generation of working women has taught me, that we have no
reason not to express our feelings out loud and clear, sometimes
even in violent tones. That unless we take ourselves seriously, no
one else will. Tapping ancient lore has told us how we can be both
the calm Saraswati and angry Kali, the benign Lakshmi or the
matricidal Matrikas. And this is what motherhood ultimately is: a
swirling blend of pain and pleasure, frustration and fulfilment,
angry resentment and pure unalloyed love. This is the motherhood

138
 MRINAL PANDE °*

tradition mostly chose to censor in our lives. And, of course, it has

never been mentioned in (largely male-written) formal histories,
where fatherhood alone means legitimacy and motherhood remains
a tightly controlled and guarded area, where once a mother always
a mother.
But how little we have heard of what happens after the progeny
has flown the coop, and the uterus has called it a day. This truth is
one that history has ignored, which women have refused to
acknowledge, and which fellow poetesses and seers among women,
from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, have recorded:

“ _. Wherever my son is I do not know.

This is the womb that carried him,
Like a stone cave
Lived in a by a tiger and now abandoned.
It is on the battlefield that you will find him.
Kavar Pentu
I died for no one, O Shiva, and none shall die for me.
Look within Laldyad, my Guru said, to me,
And I, Laldyad, began to wander
Unrestrained.”
Laldyad’s Vakh

It is out of these wanderings that great literature of the 21"

century will be born.

139
 - 7

Bou! Ca > uve “axa = eafdd.

 The Rooster and the Hen

Sujata Sankranti

WV
A
fter months of scouting and hunting I came up on the house. It
was tucked away behirid one of those busy important roads of the
city. A cool, high ceilinged bungalow surrounded by shady trees
and an ill-kempt garden, a walking distance from my work place.
Straight from the Registrar’s office we drove down to the house.
Malini’s and my parents were too willing to set us up in a plush
flat in a posh locality. But we would hear none of it. It didn’t
matter; we had only a big bath-attached room and a strip of a
veranda at the rear portion of the building. When I gave our address
as 12 Jai Singh Road, rear portion, I felt good even though it was
discriminatingly demarcated — the ‘rear’. After all tt was our own
dwelling. Father and mother said, it was heartless on my part to
have rejected their plea to bring the bride home, as was the custom.
Rituals and customs, all sentimental stuff, I am sick of them.
¢ THE ROOSTER AND THE HEN

Hollow words! Bourgeois hypocrisy! I will raise a family on

different lines. Mother says I will change though. She reminds me
of my ‘tavarish’ days. After gruelling sessions of ‘self-
examinations’ and ‘self-criticisms’ with the comrades, I had gone
on a rampage in Mama’s beautiful garden uprooting green grass
and flowering plants. Until my hands bled I had pulled at the roots
which had carved a crisscross of veins under the earth. Those
were the days when I had dreamt of a new earth and a new heaven
in the order of Lenin and Mao. As a fifteen-year-old hardcore
activist I wanted to replace grass and flowers with ‘cabbages and
cotton’. Now people quote tauntingly in my presence ‘perestroika’
and Tiananmen Square. Russia and China are not my conscience
keepers. The leaps and falls of giants do not rattle me. I haVemay
own convictions and visions.
A one-room dwelling! How can I cook, sleep and receive guests,
in a single room? Vallabh says, cook in the veranda. That means,
parading myself to the prying eyes of dhobis, maalis, and sweepers.
Of course I do spend half the day staring at them simply because
our home looks straight into the servant’s block. That was
something Vallabh had not bargained for. Perhaps he was too
anxious to settle the accommodation he didn’t think of the ugly
rows of these one-roomed shacks, directly facing the back portion
of the building. He does feel bad about it. But we cannot afford to
leave the house as yet. Vallabh doesn’t call these shacks servant
quarters. He has christened them ‘satellite’ houses, I don’t know
why. I know, they exist on the borrowed strength of the bureaucrat,
housed in the bungaiow. But most of these domestic-he!ps have

142
 SUJATA SANKRANTI *

planted themselves here as permanent fixtures for decades. Basanti,

the sweeper tells me, the old tailor staying in one of the quarters
has been here for the past four decades. As a young man he had
stitched shirts and smocked gowns for the British family, which
had lived here during colonial times. Babujis come and go once in
three or four years, but the dhobis and sweepers are here to stay.
Finally I decided to design the kitchen in the bedroom itself. I
divided the big room with a decorative screen into two neat sections
—a kitchen corner and a cosy sleeping-shrine. A table lamp by the
side of the bed and a brass flower vase — the room now looked
pleasant enough. I knew Vallabh would frown at me. He wanted a
place to live, he said, not a museum for displaying acquisitions.
He wanted me to make only functional arrangements; he always
reminded me, aesthetics should not be our priority. Yet when I
turned the veranda which had a flimsy jafery door, painted in a
cool shade of green into a mini sitting room Vallabh was not too
unhappy. He helped me pull three huge tin trunks together. I fixed
a few padded cushions on them and covered them with a flowery
sheet and there it was — a functional seat and a beautiful settee! It
is now Vallabh’s favourite seat. He spends his mornings, huddled
on it, his hands wrapped around the tall mug oftea, and enjoys
planning his day ahead.
The new tenants at the back seem to be decent folks. The old
spinster, the drawing teacher at the government school had lived
here over twelve years. When Bablu’s papa had brought me to the
quarters as a bride, that was twelve years ago, she was there. |
cleaned the room and washed clothes for her and whenever she

143
 * THE ROOSTER AND THE HEN

had her rheumatic attacks I used to massage her legs and back
with herbal oils. Basanti, there is magic in your hands, she used to
tell me. But what a miser she was! She wouldn’t give me a pie
more than fifty rupees, which was the salary fixed ten years ago.
The new memsaheb is young and kind. She has promised to pay
me two hundred rupees. She got married only last month, she tells
me. I can’t believe it. She wears no jewellery, not even bangles on
her wrists. No sindoor. No new clothes. I have never seen her in a
sari. She always wears slacks and shirts like a man. | told her this
would not do. If you want to keep your man you must take care of
your looks. I don’t know why she went into a fit of laughter.
You should have seen Basanti’s face when I told her, I had
brought from my parent’s house neither jewellery nor any trottygau.
In fact I had refused to carry with me, the utensils, the furniture,
the quilts and the embroidered sheets —- my mother had been
hoarding for me ever since I was born. She sat down on the floor
with the mopping cloth, her mouth wide open, Saheb took you
without any dahej? And his parents? They had not demanded
anything? She refused to believe. What do you think marriage is?
An exchange of cattle? Dahej! My foot! You think I would allow
my parents to buy for me a bridegroom? She wasn’t prepared —
and I knew it went above and beyond her head — for one of those
fiery speeches, I am so used to making, at the women’s development
centre.
‘ [don’t like the idea of Basanti working in the house. After all a
one room boarding and lodging is something Malini and I should
be able to manage our selves. But Malini says Basanti is so hard

144
 SUJATA SANKRANTI °*

up she needs money to feed her four children and her loafer husband.
She is too proud to take anything free. We are only providing
employment for her. Well, That is a heartening thought. But for
Malini, here is an excellent opportunity. She does not have to step
out of the gate to complete her project work on the dalit women.
All the data is here, in these one-roomed shacks!
= Vallabh says I am unnecessarily getting involved with Basanti.
Take her up only as your case history, he tells me. But Basanti is
such a dear thing. Her quarters are nearest to our veranda. So I
see her every day. Her day starts at five every morning, summer or
winter, rain or storm. She scrubs her brass vessels with charcoal
and sand until they shine and neatly puts them away in a wire
basket to dry. Then she would go straight to the night jasmine tree
and shake the flower laden branches delicately scented small
flowers, they have bright orange colour stems and soft pearly white
petals. Usually these flowers which have only a night’s life, fali
off on the ground by morning, spreading under the tree a soft coral
and pearl carpet. Basanti told me, the flowers fallen on the ground
are not to be taken for pooja. So she would collect them in her
pallay. She would tuck the flowers safely into the folds of her
pallay and with a small bowI of milk in her hand would set out to
the Shiva shrine, at the back of the house. All married women
must worship Shiva, she told me once, and should do abhishek,
bathe the Shivaling with milk. That was the right way to ensure
long life for one’s husband, she told me as though she was warning
me! I wonder why she wants that brute ofa husband to live long.
When I see her fawning around such a useless man — simply because

145
 * THE ROOSTER AND THE HEN

he has given her married status — my blood boils. For days and
days he roams around the city gambling and drinking. Yet when
he comes home she treats him like a king. She lays a feast to
welcome him! Whenever she comes to borrow from me cloves and
cinnamon I know the prodigal husband has returned. She wants to
make for him chicken khorma! All that she had saved during the
entire month, sweeping and swabbing the bungalows of Babujis,
would go into that one meal. She would place the shining brass
thali on an embroidered red scarf and place the delicacies — a
mound of rice, puris puffed into golden domes, daal and curries.
She would then spread a durry on the floor and the children would
conduct him to his seat. Basanti would be sitting a few feet away
and fanning — I always wondered whether she was fanning her
husband or driving away flies from the thal. Babloo, Bittu‘and
Guddi would squat around their father and solemnly watch him,
chewing the chicken bones and smacking his lips. If he left a few
' pieces of chicken Bittu and Babloo would fall on them. I asked
Basanti why the children were never allowed to join the feast. The
man of the house must eat first and then the boys would eat;
whatever is left the girls should eat. Basanti had the answer ready.
As night falls, I would hear screams and yells from Basanti’s
quarters. The next morning I would see her limping around with
her limbs beaten black and blue. And the vagabond of a husband
would have once again taken to the road. Basanti takes everything
as her fate, as if nothing can ever be changed. What a miserable
lot! Before I leave this house I must rescue Basanti.
Padlock on the jafery door? I have not taken with me the

146
 SUJATA SANKRANTI °

duplicate key. I never felt the need for it. Malini hardly ever goes
anywhere without telling me. It is half past six, in fact an hour
later than my usual time. Why am I feeling so piqued? Do I expect
my wife to stand at the door straining her ears for the footsteps of
her lord and master? What is happening to me? Is Basanti’s idyll
slowly worming its way into my mind? I must say I feel a bit
envious of her loafer husband. The fellow doesn’t have to raise
one little finger, pampered by his wife and children, fed with
delicacies; he is a real emperor in his hut. Sitting on the floor
fanning him and his food, furtively, throwing at him sidelong
glances; even the plain-faced portly Basanti looks charming. How
would Malini look with a red bindi on her broad forehead, and the
sari thrown over her head? Like a full moon, no like the fourteenth
day moon, how can there be a day-moon? Oh, my aesthetics is all
wrong. I must say lyrically, in the native way ‘chaudh-vin ka
chand’. .
I wanted to be back before Vallabh returns. The temple was sol
crowded. And Basanti insisted we should wait for the arti. Ienjoyed
the colourful crowd, the keertan, the bells and the flickering lamps.
It was like a psychedelic dell. What a thing to say about the temple!
I hardly looked at the idol. When Basanti pleaded with me to visit
the temple with her I had no heart to say no. I was worried, what
Vallabh would have to say when he saw me all decked up. I thought
the bindi didn’t look too bad on me. And my unusually long neck
looked slightly better with the strings of pearls around it. A little
bit of beautification — why should it irritate anybody’ eyes? As I
walked in I saw Vallabh’s face anxiously looking into mine. Did I

147
 ¢ THE ROOSTER AND THE HEN

imagine a flash of appreciation in his eyes? On the day of karva

chauth, seeing your husband’s face, after spotting the moon,
Basanti had told me, is very auspicious. I felt strangely elated.
‘.\ Memsaheb tells me I should send Guddi to school. If she goes
. to school who will look after the baby when I am off to work?
Memsaheb doesn’t know Guddi goes to wash the utensils in two
houses two streets away. When I told her Babloo’s Papa wants to
take the boys off the school and send them to the carpet factory in
Punjab she threw such a tantrum! She said, she would inform the
police and we would be punished for making children work. I
believe, there is a rule, children below fifteen should not be sent to
work. How can I make her understand? For us more children means
‘more hands for work. Am I going to make Babloo and Bittu
‘collectors? She says I am not giving enough food to Guddi. 1%id
her, girls should not be pampered. Who knows what is in store for
them? Memsaheb says I have got everything wrong. She tells me
my hard-earned money is not to be given away to Babloo’s Papa.
It is true he blows it up, gambling and drinking. But how can I
refuse him? He beats me to pulp. Last time he came home I said I
had no money and it was a fact. Whatever I had earned — weaving
baskets at the centre where Memsaheb goes — | had handed it over
to her and she had put it in the bank. He ransacked the rice tin and
toppled the flour sack, the usual places where I hide money and
then threatened me if I don’t stop working for Memsaheb he would
kill me. Someone had been filling his ears. Memsaheb always tells
me I should fight back with Babloo’s Papa. But the house where a
woman raises her voice is doomed. That was what my grandmother

148
 SUJATA SANKRANTI °

and my mother used to say. My mother-in-law had told me the

same thing. “They have all been telling you lies,’ Memsaheb
screamed at me. r
| 5)
tar
||

I don’t know how to save Basanti. This time, her husband had |\”
come home with a girl. He told the dhobi, she was his niece. But
everyone knew he was bluffing. Vallabh tells me he had seen him
suspiciously sauntering near Jyoti cinema. Someone had told him
he was a pimp. When I heard Basanti’s loud wailing, I couldn’t
just control myself. I rushed to their quarters. Her husband was
sitting cross-legged on the charpai outside the room as though
nothing was wrong with anyone at home. The girl who sat by his
side stared at me and giggled. The man faced me with a kind of
contempt against which I felt awkward and defenceless. ““You have
come to tempt my wife away? Bring police, bring all those slogan-
screaming women from your blessed centre. Let us see who will
win?” He looked at me up and down as though he was sizing me
up. So bold, so brazen, I was shocked. I saw him getting up and
pulling his short frame up with glee as though he knew exactly
how to deal with me. It was I who did not know how to deal with
him. Slogans and speeches didn’t come to my rescue. I stepped
back impulsively. Basanti was standing near the window; her face
looked red and swollen as though a beehive had broken loose and
descended on her.
“Memsaheb, you told me I should protest; I told him, I won’t
let him take the boys off the school, I won’t send them to Punjab,
I won’t let this slut in. Look, what he has done to me! Get away
Memsaheb, leave this house and go. I don’t trust this man. He can

149
¢ THE ROOSTER AND. THE HEN

harm you.” I heard her wailing after me.

Malini told me about her harrowing misadventure with Basanti’s
husband. She shouldn’t have worked herself up, especially, now,
as she is right into her fifth month. Iam quite upset. But I am glad
Malini had realised all those enforcement schemes are not so simple
as they are made to sound on the podiums. How am I going to tell
her our landlord, the bureaucrat, has asked us to vacate the house?
She would jump to the conclusion that it has something to do with
the morning’s mishap. Yes, now that I think of it, it is possible,
somebody might have complained...
“Malini, you know my Maasi’s flat, the one who has gone to
Canada, is lying vacant. Why don’t we move into that flat? You
will soon need somebody to help you. How can we keep ag maid
here?” Malini raised her shapely eyebrows. “Okay... Malini, Iwon’t
say maid... hmm — we need a domestic help.” Malini looked hard
at me, obviously not very impressed. It took me almost one week
to convince her.
Malini sorted out the clothes and the kitchen stuff and I piled
books and files into cartons. As I was separating the trunks and
dismantling the settee on the veranda, I heard the shouts and yells
outside. Dhobi and his son, Babloo and Bittu were all on the run.
With sticks and poles in hands they were chasing someone. Who
were they chasing? I called out to them.
“Babuji it is the hen,” Dhobi shouted back. “One of the hens
has crowed. You know only roosters must crow. It is not natural.
It is a bad omen. Something terrible may happen. We must kill
this hen.” A hen crowing? Nonsense. I knew for sure, it was one

150
 SUJATA SANKRANTI °*

of their antics to scare Basanti. Pakado pakado pakado...... Catch

her, catch her ... They were again at it. I could see the poor hen
running for her life. Scrambling over the spinach field, she even
tried to lift herself up on to the roof, failed and fell on the ground.
At last near the fence one of the boys caught her. A frantic flutter,
a squeak, a thud — the hen lay limp and lifeless on the flowerbed.
Kokaree ... ko ... The rooster seated theatrically on the tin roof
of the poultry shed crowed — a single triumphant call. The red
flower on his head gleamed like a crown against the twilight. The
hens enclosed in the shed huddled together and clucked ominously
in chorus. I pulled the curtains close and shut the green jafery
door firmly behind. Good, Malini had not come out. It wouldn’t
have been a good sight for a woman who was expecting her first
child.

151
 os a

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 Anadi’s Journey
Bulbul Sharma

In the drowsy heat of the afternoon, the pond lay still and only the
shadows of the coconut palms danced on its surface. The air smelt
warm and damp as if it was going to rain. Anadi gathered the
bundle of wet clothes which his sister had just washed and carried
them to a patch of sunlight which fell in a jagged circle near the
pond. He lay them out one by one, chasing away the butterfly that
swarmed around his head. His mother had told him that if a butterfly
ever sat on his right shoulder he would never get married and even
at the age of ten Anadi longed to be a householder. He wanted a
big house, a pretty wife and tall sons. But the house would not be
a thatched one like his viliage home, which swayed and moaned
during the monsoon rains. It would be built with red bricks, held
firmly together with cement, have painted walls and a high iron
gate and it would not be in Bishtupur but somewhere far away in
« ANADPS JOURNEY

a shimmering city which Anadi was not certain existed outside his
imagination.
Anadi’s father had died when he was six months old and his
mother, too sick and frail to look after this child of late middle age
had given him to her eldest daughter who had no children of her
own. Anadi spread the clothes out to dry and then sat down in the
shade of the mango tree to read the new book his brother had sent
him from Calcutta. Books were not easy to find in this small village
of Bishtpur which was a five-hour boat journey from the nearest
town. It took two days by boat steamer, train and then finally by
bus to reach Calcutta, a city which seemed to Anadi as awesome
and unattainable as paradise.
Anadi went every evening to watch the boat arrive at thegiver
bank which was just a few minutes away from his house, behind a
grove of banana trees. He sat under a tree, a little away from the
crowded jetty, and watched the passengers as they came off the
boat, carefully looking for any signs that would tell him something
about the city they had just visited. But the men looked as ordinary
as they had done when they had left Bishtupur. Their faces did not
wear new expressions nor were they surrounded by shining auras
which a visit to the city should surely have marked them with. The
journey they had undertaken, so full of mystery, danger and
excitement, did not seem to have changed them in any way. Anadi
often followed them home, listening to their conversation but their
voices were the same and they still talked about their debts, about
the rice crop and the recent haul offish as they did when they sat
in their courtyards at home. These men had been to Calcutta, the

154
 BULBUL SHARMA *

very name made Anadi breathless with joy and fear, They had sat
in a train, seen motor cars, heard their blaring horns, and walked
down streets lit by gas lights and heard the radio and yet they
remained unchanged, still talking like ordinary men of debts, rice
and fish.
Anadi felt his ten years a heavy burden which clung to his
shoulders, never allowing him to be free. And it was not just him,
everyone in the village remained weighed down, standing still in
one place, as if afraid to move. The old men sat in a shaded corner
of the courtyard, their gnarled hands always holding the stem of
the hookah in the same position. The children played the same
games over and over near the pond, their bodies thin and agile
forever. Their mothers too always wore the same expressions as
they quarrelled and laughed amongst themselves. His house,
surrounded by evergreen banana and coconut trees, remained
unchanged in every season and, day after day, his mother sat in
the same dark corner of the kitchen, cleaning an endless quantity
of rice.
Anadi knew that another world existed somewhere far away on
the other side of the river but he could never reach it because
Bishtupur would never let him go. Each day he watched the boat
leave Bishtupur without him, feeling as helpless as Kanu the blind
boy who could not walk to the pond though he knew it was there.
“Let the boy stay at home now and help you. He is old enough,”
his mother said, her voice faint with fever, “schools and studies
will only make him grow wings and fly away to Calcutta.” Anadi
sat near her bed, hoping that if he did not make a noise they would

155
¢ ANAD?PS JOURNEY

forget about taking him away from school. “No, Ma, he is a very
bright boy and studies hard. Not like the other boys in the school.
This one will go far, maybe even to an English college in Calcutta.
Let him finish his matriculation and try for a scholarship,” his
brother-in-law said. Anadi suddenly felt free, as if all his fears
had floated away out of the window above his mother’s bed and,
no longer afraid to be seen, he ran out of the house. It seemed to
him that the entire village had changed and the people, the houses,
the trees all swirled around him and even the pond was no longer
stagnant and still, but rippled with new shades of green.
The boat tossed about on the edge of the bank, its ropes straining
as the passengers pushed their way forward to find a place. As the
boat moved away, Bishtupur became smaller and smaller artgtgen
finally disappeared. Anadi felt it had merged into the world waiting
for him across the river and he knew he was not leaving but only
forming a bridge between his childhood and adult life.
The dolphins jumped out of the water, forming an arc over the
waves and then disappeared into the sea. Anadi waited for them to
appear but they seem to have vanished deep into some secret hiding
place beneath the ocean. The ship moved in a wavy, uneven line
cutting through the grey blue waters like a blunt knife. Anadi
wondered ifthe river in Bishtupur had also merged into this vast
ocean and leaned over the railing as if he could see traces of the
muddy river in the ocean and then he laughed at his own foolishness.
“Not seasick any more, boy?” asked an elderly Bengali
gentleman as he strolled past. He wore a white suit with a big hat
and carried a cane which he kept tapping on the deck like a blind

156
 BULBUL SHARMA °*

man. “I tell everyone it is the boiled cabbage on the ship that

makes people sick, not the sea. Though we have been away from
Calcutta only for a week I already miss my mother’s cooking.
Mustard fish and banana flower curry ... coconut prawns ... Oh
Ma...,” he sighed as he looked far into the ocean as if waiting for
his mother to suddenly emerge out of the sea. Anadi was surprised
that such an old man still had a mother who was alive. She must
be ninety at least. My mother is a hundred and one years old and
still supervises the cooking at home. My wife is terrified of her,”
said the old man suddenly breaking into English. “Must practice
your English, young man. Practice makes your English perfect.
Every morning, while brushing your teeth, recite to yourself all
the difficult verbs, especially the present continuous tense which
we Bengalis find so difficult,” he said and began to mutter, “have
been eating, have been bathing, have been sick...” Then he walked
away tapping his cane.
Anadi wished he had stayed back to talk to him. He seemed like
a well travelled man and would know everything about England.
It was lonely on this huge ship which was as big as all Bishtupur
and had more people in it. Anadi could not stop comparing his
village to every new thing he saw. Calcutta, frightening with its
endless streams of people and black clouds of smoke had seemed
to him like a monster raging in a storm. This was not the city of
his dreams. But he had spent three happy years in the Scottish
Church College where he had got a scholarship to study after his
matriculation from the village school. He remembered how the
entire village had come to the river bank to see him off and his

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 « ANADPS JOURNEY

mother too had come out of the house for the first time in his life.
She seemed much younger in the daylight, almost like a stranger.
“Bathe every day and do not eat beef,” she had whispered to him
and then left without looking back. Her face appeared before him
now and he felt like crying out “Ma...” like the old man had done.
He knew he would see her again when he returned home because
she would never leave her dark corner in the kitchen.
The dishes swayed gently on the table and Anadi hesitated though
everyone else had already begun to eat. “Is it beef?” he whispered
to the old gentleman who was sitting next to him. “No, it is veal,
delicious, but put some pepper on it first.” Relieved because the
aroma from the steaming dish was making his mouth water, Anadi
quickly began to eat. a
«\© “Thad to throw my sacred thread into the river after that. How
could I explain to my mother that veal was not related to seal?” he
said as the laughter died down. His German was quite fluent now,
in fact much better than his English which held traces ofhis village
accent. In London, the other Indians had often made fun of his
English and he remembered his first day at the Royal College of
Mines. “Just arrived from the paddy fields?” A tall young man
asked him in Bengali, mimicking his village dialect. “Yes, do you
know my village — Bishtupur?” Anadi asked eagerly. “No, my
friend, I don’t. But I can smell the mustard oil and recognise those
Kahnai tailor clothes from far,” he replied in English as the group
of boys cackled with laughter. England was freezing cold with
grey skies and greyer buildings. It never stopped raining. This
was not his village rain which raged through in a brie$ flash of

158
 BULBUL SHARMA °

temper, washing the trees clean and making the coconuts and
mangoes drop into their courtyard. It was not the frightening
monsoon which created havoc but then receded to leave the land
fertile and green. The rain here was like the continuous weeping
of an old woman to whose sorrow everyone had become indifferent.
People did not stay indoors when it rained, watching it fearfully
from their windows as he had done, they put on their raincoats,
opened their umbrellas and walked about as if it was normal
weather.
Anadi was happy to leave England and sad too because he had
made friends with a few English boys. But the last four months
had erased the picture of a glorious, golden land which he had
read about and admired all through school and college. This was
not the England of his dreams and these timid, grey men, always
clutching umbrellas, were not the mighty rulers of his country but
imposters who had somehow taken over England.
Calcutta, London... both the cities had let him down like old,
trusted friends who had turned into enemies. But Frieburg, a small
town in Germany that he never knew and which had no expectations
to live up to, was perfect. Anadi liked the unhurried, friendly pace
of the town and its crowd of young students. Old men sat in sunlit
parks and children played familiar games on the empty streets. In
1931 Germany was brimming with over confidence and it infected
the youth and filled them with a sense of their own importance.
“Anadi, you must eat well or you will become thin and what
will your mother say?” said Mutti as she placed a huge plate of
meat and potatoes in front of him. Knowing well that his mother

159
 « ANADPS JOURNEY

would rather he starve than eat beef, Anadi quickly began to eat
before the muttering of his mother’s voice in his head became too
loud. Mutti, his landlady, had adopted him from the first day he
appeared on her doorstep, lean and hungry, unable to speak a word
of German. He looked at her kind face and wondered if she had
been his mother in another life.
Ls When he received his Doctorate in Engineering, she was the
\ ‘Ss
one who celebrated with a huge cake and tears of joy while his
own relatives in Calcutta were somewhat bewildered. “You went
to become an engineer but now you say you are a doctor?” The
day he left Germany, Anadi heard Hitler’s voice on the radio and
as the words raged in anger, he suddenly knew that the world he
was leaving would never be the same again. ~e
“The girl is very pretty but she has lived in Delhi most of her
life. Hope she is not too smart,” his uncle said. Anadi nodded
vaguely, too nervous to speak. “The girl’s father is aGovernment
officer, plays tennis with the British but luckily her mother is very
orthodox. So shake hands with the father and touch the mother’s
feet.”
Anadi, overcome by stage fright, did exactly the opposite much
to everyone’s amazement. “He has just come from Germany,” said
his uncle and the relatives, assembled to inspect him, seemed
satisfied with this explanation. Since the father was ‘modern’, he
was allowed to see the girl. But her face was a hazy blur and all
that he could remember was she was very short and had thick
wavy hair. “Wasn’t she slightly plump?” he asked his aunt, hoping
she would describe her. “It is good to be plump. Some clever

160
 BULBUL SHARMA »

mothers make their daughters wear two or three petticoats to make

them look nice and plump,” said his aunt, who was pleased with
the match.
Ch
After fifty years and four children, Meera was as plump as _—

ever with a thick mane of gleaming black hair. Anadi was terrified
of his wife whose diminutive size packed a fiery temper which
flared up at the oddest of things but remained calm in the face of
danger. Though just nineteen, she had travelled with him to the
lonely towns in remote areas where his work as an engineer took
him. In Giridi they had lived in a huge, dilapidated bungalow which
was haunted and Meera read The Canterville Ghost aloud every
evening hoping to lure the resident ghost. In Bhilai she had turned
a snake filled pit into a lovely garden and when he landed the car
on the verandah during his first and last attempt at driving, she
had just laughed. In Burnpore she taught herself the correct English
etiquette to deal with the haughty British ladies. Mutti had taught
him how to eat with a fork and knife but he still got confused
sometimes and had once tried to cut through a layer of spaghetti
as it streamed down his chin. The entire restaurant had applauded
him when he finally succeeded with one final slash and cut off the
spaghetti like an expert barber chopping off a full grown beard.
Meera and he had lived in so many different homes; in so many
cities yet he remembered the name and number on each gate, the
colour of the curtains, the trees in the garden, the names of their
neighbours and the dogs they had had. “This is a Burnpore story.”
“No —a Bhilai one, it has Honey and Sarala in it ...” his children
would argue when he travelled back to retrace his life. His children,

161
 * ANADPS JOURNEY

of whom he was so proud, were very different from him and he

wondered what they would say if ever he took them back to
Bishtupur. Would his son, a brilliant student at the medical college,
sit under the mango tree and read all through the day as he had
done? His daughters, so smart and knowledgeable about everything
in the world, who had already travelled to various parts of the
world at an age when he had never set eyes on a bicycle, would
they walk to the pond to collect mangoes after a storm?
oe Bishtupur was so far now, much further than the outside world
had been when he stood by the river, waiting. It was in another
country now and his village existed only in his memory and yet it
was closer and more real than ever before.
Anadi put his book down on the table and looked out af the
window. A strange sound, which he had heard half a century ago,
suddenly floated up to him. He opened the door and went out. An
old man stood at the gate carrying a basket full of small paper
packets. “Sahib, you want coconut sweets?” he asked in broken
Hindi. “Are you from Khulna district?” Anadi asked, his tongue
savouring the dialect after so many years. “Yes ... yes ... Dada ...,”
the man replied, happy to speak in his own language in this strange
city. They both began talking at once. Coconut palms swayed above
him and the pond rippled in the sun. Anadi could smell the wet
earth by the river and he heard the village women call out to their
children in shrill voices.
When the youngest daughter came home from college, she found
her father sitting on the floor of the drawing room with a strange,
bedraggled man in a white dhoti. Sounds of laughter filled the

162
 BULBUL SHARMA *

house and their voices spoke in a strange language which sounded

familiar but she could not understand a word. Her father’s voice
had lost its firm deep tone and he now talked in an excited, high
pitched, almost childish voice.
Anadi saw his daughter watching him from the door but did not
call her in. What could she have to say to this old man from a
village near Khulna? He was as alien to her as she was to him and
only Anadi could link them together. This stranger who sold coconut
sweets and jaggery from door to door understood him more than
his beloved daughter.
“Tell me did you have a deaf teacher in your school called
Kanai?”
“Yes, and a headmaster who gave us a holiday every second
day because he wanted to sleep.”
“Do you remember the fish that swam into the paddy fields
after the rains and the way the coconuts fell on our heads during a
storm?”
Together, they created their village once more. It was as if he
had left his beloved family, this house built with bricks and cement
in a city he admired, and slowly erasing the decades ofjourneys,
years of adapting to the unfamiliar, he had now gone home to
Bishtupur.

163
 msait beh
rl] 5 ¥ ~ ite, reels afr) al

-
lina
' 7:
 In Memory of Meera

Madhu Tandan

The strangest events happened after Shanta attended a prayer

meeting held in remembrance of adead woman. A woman she
had only vaguely heard about, but never met. Shanta’s father
had rung her to say that Meera, a distant relative, had died
three days ago. Since Meera had lived all her life in the hills
and few knew her in Delhi, could she come and attend the prayer
meeting?
When Shanta arrived there were ten or twelve people sitting
quietly facing a garlanded photograph, in front of which incense
sticks burnt steadily. The picture was that of a woman in her mid-
forties; my own age Shanta had thought with surprise. Her eyes
were gentle, tinged with a thoughtful sadness, as though she had
seen suffering and had tried to understand it. Despite that, the
woman in the photograph smiled with genuine warmth that drew
° IN MEMORY OF MEERA

Shanta to her. She is a person I would have liked to know, Shanta

admitted to herself, and was startled by her own thought.
After a few minutes one of the men rose and said, “Meera didi
was a very upright woman, a true pillar of strength to her family
and friends. Her goodness of heart and generosity of spirit will be
remembered by each of us. She may have broken the prison of this
body and left, but she will remain in our hearts guiding us with her
strength and wisdom.”
These were standard words spoken at prayer meetings for
the dead, but they said nothing of who this woman was, and
perhaps no one really knew. There is something about a prayer
meeting that reminds you that, one day, your own garlanded
photograph may be resting on a similar table and other pgople
will gather together to condole your death. And what will they
say about my life, Shanta mused? Probably, that I was an
ordinary receptionist, in a Government hospital, and that my
life was far removed from the world spinning around me. A
world of computers, travel and change. Yet no change intrudes
my world, where every day I sit behind a desk whose hinges
are broken, and make one folder after another for the endless
line of patients waiting to be seen. A hospital where the doctors
are overworked, the medicines are in short supply, and the
sanction for new equipment never comes.
The hospital Shanta worked for was on indefinite strike, so she
went home after the prayer meeting. An odd restlessness overtook
her as she confronted the lonely silence of her home. Her work at
the hospital left her so tired, that besides cooking herselfasimple.

166
 MADHU TANDAN °*

meal at night, she had energy to do little else. She was a shy person
who had few friends, and no hobby to fall back on. She considered
switching on the television, but all the serials she enjoyed watching
came after eight o’clock in the evening. What was she to do with
herself now?
Then, something odd happened. She suddenly felt she was not
alone in the room. Startled she looked around, but found no one.
I’m just lonely, she thought, but could not dispel the feeling that a
moment ago someone had been standing right behind her. Shanta
shook her head to banish the thought and went to the tiny kitchen
to make a cup of tea.
While she sipped her tea she looked up, and there, for just a
moment, was Meera’s face imprinted on the opposite wall. Shanta
blinked, looked again, but it was gone. I’m imagining it! I don’t
even know who this woman was. Why should I see her face? But
Meera seemed to have been asking her a question, and Shanta had
the oddest feeling that the silence in the room was waiting for her
answer.
Shanta’s life did not afford her the luxury of flights of
imagination; what she could not see, touch, taste or hear did not
really exist for her. Yet why was she left with the sense that there
was someone in the room, even though her eyes could not see who
it was? A humming sensation began in her head. It filled her ears
and shut the world outside. Without her conscious volition she
took a pen and began to write. Barring the occasional letter to her
mother, Shanta had never written anything before, but now she
was writing as though she was long familiar with the art. Her pen

167
¢ IN MEMORY OF MEERA

moved fast across the page as she wrote:

Since the age of ten my eyes perceived the world differently

than other people. Life seemed like a web offorces, whose
intersecting points I could see. Below the known, I often
glimpsed the unknown.

My mother once said to me, “Uncle Rajendra is coming

to see us at tea-time.’
J

Instinctively Ireplied, “Oh! But he won t be able to come.

He'll be called away.”

Uncle Rajendra did ring, shortly before he was due ta

arrive, apologising to my mother that he would not be
able to have tea with her as he had been unexpectedly
detained.

After such episodes had been repeated a few times, my

mother would entreat me, “Don t say such things because
when you do, they seem to come true.”

I wondered what made me say the things I did? Soon I

recognised that I saw behind the swirl of everyday events
another reality, which knew the real outcome of an event.
And I, for a while, became its wise and innocent voice.
People often thought along a particular line, but the event
was moving. in Just the opposite direction. And I had to.
hold the knowledge of both worlds simultaneously,

168
 MADHU TANDAN °

When I met people, sometimes, I saw images flash past

me, as though Iwas being shown snapshots of their lives.
They seemed to hover over their heads, like when my
cousin Arati, was enthusiastically recounting how she
had been accepted for her first job, Isaw avery different
image surround her.

Instead, of an office, I saw her dressed in bridal clothes.

I dont know what everyone must have thought when I
interrupted the conversation by saying, “You are going
to get married soon.” Arati stopped mid-sentence, looked
at my mother as though I was crazy and said, ‘Meera,
you have not even been listening to what I have been
saying.”

Before Arati could join work, her parents introduced her

to a boy settled in America. Three weeks later they were
married, and Arati had flown with her husband to
America.

This power found expression in my life in another form

when Moti, my cocker spaniel, my one companion in my
solitary ways, fell ill. When I was a child, Moti would
put his head on my lap as I read, would walk with me in
the green sanctuary of trees behind our house, and sleep
at the foot of my bed every night. He was all I needed for
company. But one day he began to vomit and soon he
could not retain any food. My parents and I rushed him

169
¢ IN MEMORY OF MEERA

to the doctor, but none of the medicines had any effect.

He just lay ina corner with his eyes closed, neither eating
nor drinking.

My father said gently to me, “I think he is dying, Meera.”

I wept and kept saying, “He cannot Papa, he is my best

friend.”

My father held and rocked me in his arms.

That evening I put Moti on my lap and gently ran my

hands over his golden fur again and again. I had no idea
how long I sat there; all I know is that my hands ht@.,
became hot and sweaty, and his fur damp before I fell
asleep. On the second night, as I sat stroking Moti, he
opened his eyes and tried to sit up. By the third night he
sipped a little water, and after that he slowly began to
recover. My mother told everyone, “It was Meera’s love
that brought Moti back to life. It was a miracle.”

I never knew what it really was. The only memory I had

of those dark nights was my hands turning soft and limpid,
Jollowing some invisible rhythm. Maybe that was the first
time Ifelt that the wounds ofpain can draw out the hands
that heal.

My mother felt it too. Whenever she had a headache, she

would ask me to place my hands on her forehead. Then I

170
 MADHU TANDAN *

would press her temples and move to the centre of the

forehead and feel her flesh first crease then ease under
my fingertips. Slowly, she would relax and murmur, “You
have magic in your hands, beta.”

The phone rang four times before Shanta heard it. The pen
dropped from her hand, she felt she had been jerked out of sleep.
She stared at the page and slowly began to read the words. It was
her handwriting all right, but nothing else belonged to her. Neither
the story, nor the words. It was too far removed from anything in
her life. The phone continued to ring. She walked towards it, in a
daze, unsure what was happening to her.
It was her father: “Beta, your aunt Anju wants me to go to
Maniagar, the small village in the hills where Meera had lived.
She needs someone to sort out her papers and clear her belongings.”
Shanta felt surrounded by Meera. She did not respond to her
father’s words.
“Hello, Shanta, can you hear me?”
Finally she replied, “Yes, Papa. How come none of us ever met
Meera?”
“She was a recluse who never came down to the plains.”
“What did she do there?”
“She was some kind of doctor or healer. Her mother always
said that Meera had magic in her hands. She had the power to
heal.”
Shanta put down the phone and groped for a chair to sit down,
feeling loose-limbed with shock. A healer... Meera was a healer,
and the words that had poured out of her, a few minutes ago, was

Nfl
* IN MEMORY OF MEERA

the story of just such a woman. What is going on! What kind ofa
bizarre coincidence is this? I’m writing the story of a dead woman
I never knew. Shanta shook her head in disbelief. This cannot be
happening to me.
Shanta got up slowly and looked out of the window where she
saw other sooty multi-storeyed buildings, point their dirty fingers
to the sky. The walls of her home, and hospital were the limits of
her world. They protected her from the unknown. When she looked
into the mirror, she saw tired eyes that expected nothing from life
but the safety of habit. No all-consuming love had ever crossed
her path, nor searing hate had ever ripped her asunder. She lived
in a twilight zone where the depth and height of her emotions were
confined to the simple and acceptable. To discuss a recipewith a
colleague, to talk about the water shortage in her flat, or predict
the outcome of the next episode in her favourite serial were the
definitions of her reality. But suddenly something strange had
walked into her life, and she was afraid. Maybe I need to get out
of the house and not think of this again, Shanta thought. She quickly
went to the table, collected all the pages she had written, and tore
them into tiny bits, throwing them into the dustbin. She then left
the house.
That night she had a vivid dream:

Meera was sitting at a large desk, worn old with use.

Scattered over it were books and papers. She looks up
from her writings and says, “Won't you help finish my
story? I couldn tfinish it because I had to leave suddenly,”

172
 MADHU TANDAN *

Early in the morning, with her eyes still closed, Shanta’s mind
swam for a few seconds between dream and reality. Where was
she? Slowly the bedroom came into focus with the familiar calendar
of Ganesh on the opposite wall. This was her own room but why
did she feel she had actually spoken to Meera in some other house...
a house with a study and an age-worn desk and chair, which had a
dull maroon cushion on it.
‘Won’t you help me finish my story? I couldn’t finish it...’
Meera’s words hung in the room when Shanta questioned aloud,
“How can I? Why should I? ....” Then she remembered that, in the
dream, Meera had gently requested, and not ordered her. The dream
was so real that Shanta felt she had finally met Meera for the first
time.
The clock by Shanta’s bedside ticked away, measuring the
minutes of her indecision. Finally she rose from her bed and rang
up Aunt Anju, the only person who may know something more
about Meera. “I hear you are going to sort out Meera’s papers in
Maniagar,” Shanta said.
“Thank God! Your father is coming to help me.”
“Aunt, did Meera ever write anything? I mean was she some
kind of writer?”
“T believe so. She had published a book on medicinal herbs
found in the Himalayan foothills. Ihave not read it. She was such
a private person. All her life she lived in that tiny cottage, tending
to the sick villagers of that area. Her mother said that she would
retire to her study in the evenings and write.”
“Had she started writing down anything about her life, I mean

173
* IN MEMORY OF MEERA

about her own life story?”

‘Not that I know of.”
There was a pause in the conversation; Shanta prolonged the
silence giving herself time to make up her mind. She held her breath
and then slowly let it out. She then asked quietly, “May I come
with you and Papa to Maniagar?”
“Of course, my dear. I’Il welcome an extra pair of hands. It’s
always so difficult, and sad, to clear up the house of someone who
has gone.”
They reached Maniagar, on a May afternoon. The wheat was
ripening on the terraced hills, and the mountain air smelt of pine
and resin. It was a small cottage, with a sloping slate roof and
wooden beams that were dark with age, tucked away behifig.a
clump of pine trees. Ganga Singh, the old retainer of the house,
who had served Meera for twenty years, came out to greet them.
Quietude descended on Shanta as she stepped into the cottage.
The owner had left her presence like a prayer in the rooms. It was
not just the sheer simplicity of the cottage with its three chairs in
the lobby, a small bedroom where a rolled up mattress, a chest of
drawers, and a bookshelf were considered the only necessities,
that struck her. It was more the feeling that the person who had
lived in this house knew that her sojourn in this life was that ofa
traveller who was passing through, and who could not afford the
indulgence of creating the illusion of permanence. Meera had lived
in this cottage for twenty years, but probably had left it without a
backward glance. Except maybe for one room whose door was
closed.

174
 MADHUTANDAN °*

Shanta asked Ganga Singh, “Is this another bedroom?”

“No, that is Didi s study. She used to work there. I’ve not touched
anything because she liked her papers to remain as she left them.”
Shanta felt a reluctance to enter the study, as though that would
signal her commitment to a dead woman’s request. But Ganga
Singh had already opened the door and was beckoning her to enter.
In the centre of the book-lined study was a large age-worn desk
and chair identical to her dream. The chair had the same dull
maroon cushion on it! Shanta felt if she looked at the desk from
the corner of her eye, she might see Meera sitting on the chair, and
quietly asking her, ‘Won’t you help finish my story?’
And this time Shanta knew she had to give an answer.
She moved towards the desk with a familiarity born from her
dream. All kinds of papers lay on the desk — notes on patients she
had treated, recipes of herbs, account papers, and books. Instinctively
she started rummaging through the papers, searching for something;
something she was not even sure existed. Then she saw a faded blue
folder in which she found some typewritten sheets. It began:

Since the age of ten my eyes perceived the world differently

than other people. Life seemed like aweb offorces, whose
intersecting points I could see. Below the known, I often
glimpsed the unknown.

My mother once said to me, “Uncle Rajendra is coming

to see us at tea-time.”

Instinctively Ireplied, “Oh! But he won t be able to come.

175
* IN MEMORY OF MEERA

He'll be called away.”

Uncle Rajendra did ring...

Every incident from Uncle Rajendra coming to tea, to Arati’s
wedding, to Moti’s illness and her mother’s headaches had already
been written by Meera before she had died. How was I sitting
three hundred miles away, writing the same story, without knowing
anything about Meera? Shanta held her head in her hands totally
stunned. This was a dead woman’s unfinished manuscript about
her life.... What is happening to me, Shanta thought? What am |
doing-here? Why is Meera asking me to finish her manuscript for
her? lam no writer. But I didn’t write the story; it seemed to have
been dictated to me. And, what is the rest of her story?
Shanta decided to go for a very long walk. When she ritirned
she went straight to Meera’s study, sat down and began writing:

In these hills, I have seen the face of courage. If the rains

come late, the crop dies, and the villagers go hungry. If
the rain comes too soon, the wheat rots and again they
have little to eat. Yet there is no searing sense of injustice
in their hearts as they battle with their poverty, the poor
soil, their lack of education and health care. They seem
to know that there will be no real changes in their lives,
and that their small and fragmented land holdings will
never be enough to feed them. Yet they are capable of
such generosity of spirit as they unexpectedly turn up at
my doorstep with a little curd, milk, or ghee as a gift.

176
 MADHU TANDAN °*

There is so much I want to do for them. But for the time

being the back of my house has become their dispensary
where some medicines, antiseptic, cotton and gauze helps
me dress a Sickle wound, or attend to a persistent cough,
or treat a sprained wrist. And there are other times when
I just sit with my hands on the ailing part of a child,
letting that mysterious lifeforce quicken within my hands.
Where does this power come from which clears my mind,
so that not a single thought defiles it, as itflows silently
to bridge the distance between that crying, sick child in
my lap and the hands that heal? I do not know who does
it or how it happens. All I know is that the hand I place
on the child soothes it, so that its persistent crying
quietens down to find relief in sleep.

First only the men came. Then they brought their women
and children, till one day I was surprised to see one of
them carrying a sick goat in his arms to be cured. Then
followed a blur of humans and animals sitting on my
back veranda waiting their turn.

When I lay my hands on the problem area something

strange begins to happen. Ifeel the sensation ofpinpricks
on the tips of my fingers as heat pours into my hands. I
know then that it has begun. When my hands begin to
cool and stiffen I know I can do no more. I withdraw my
hands and then wait for the tide to come in again. A

177
¢ IN MEMORY OF MEERA

power greater than the body, wider than the mind, deeper
than heart heals the sick, and I, for a while, become its
privileged witness.

Shanta stopped writing and looked out of the window. The

evening hour was galloping towards darkness, the trees silently
accepting the verdict. She looked at the pen lying across the paper
and realised that she liked the woman she was writing about. No
falsity marred the gift Meera had. She seemed to act like a caretaker
of a power, which she dispensed willingly, without making any
claims of ownership.
There was a knock on the door. Ganga Singh entered with a
cup of tea. She asked him, “How had Didi died?” 7
“She died in her sleep. The entire village collected outsidée
house when they heard the news.”
“Probably, they loved her very much.”
“She helped so many of us. We believe that God had given her
a gift. Whenever we laid a sick child in her lap, we were sure the
child would recover. She helped all of us till she was exhausted.
But she knew other things also.
“Once a villager said to her, ‘I hope the rains come on time.’
“She said gently to him, ‘Ramu, they could be delayed this
year.’
“And sure enough they were.” Ganga Singh said with respect
in his voice.
“If we went to sell our potatoes she would say, ‘You'll get a
good price this year.’ Whenever she said that, we would.”
“She died young,” Shanta remarked.

178
 MADHU TANDAN °*

“But she knew about her death,” Ganga Singh replied promptly.
“What do you mean?”
“Fifteen days before her death she stood outside this house,
watching the sunrise, when I brought her a cup of tea. She turned
to me and said, ‘Gangada I won’t be here for long. My time has
come. It has been a good life, and I have no regrets.’ Then she
shook her head as though to deny her own words. ‘No I have one
regret. A deep regret. I could not pass on what I know to someone
else. Who will look after my people when I am gone?’”
Ganga Singh’s eyes filled with tears, “I remember her so often.
But she warned me that she was going. Only I wouldn’t believe
her.”
His words echoed in the air, long after he had left. Meera knew
of her death and the only regret she had was not for herself. Who
was this woman called Meera? No sooner had the thought crossed
Shanta’s mind that she felt a strong bond with this woman she
never knew. She seemed like an old friend she had lost contact
with, but had now rediscovered. Her life and mine are as different
as chalk and cheese. Yet, I am sitting on her desk as though by the
strength of a long association. She fills this room with her presence,
and now by a strange twist of events my life too.
Next morning Ganga Singh came to Shanta and said, “A man
from the adjoining village has come. He had not heard about Didis
death, till I told him. Your father and aunt are asleep. Would you
like to meet him?”
Shanta walked through the house to the back courtyard. There
stood a villager with a crying child in his arms. The villager said

179
* IN MEMORY OF MEERA

sadly, ”I didn’t know Didi had died. I cannot believe it. I have
walked two hours to get here, only to learn she is no more. Six
months ago Didi helped me when a nail got embedded in my heel.
She pulled it out and dressed it. Now where do I go with this
child?”
“What is wrong with your child?”
“She does not eat anything and cries all the time. She has become
so thin that she is wasting away.”
“You must show her to a doctor.”
“Which doctor? Where? They are miles from here.”
“T wish I could help you, but I do not know what is wrong with
your child,” Shanta had to raise her voice above the shrill cries of
the child. eae
Her father rocked the child while Ganga Singh went to get some
water, to moisten the child’s lips. She only bunched her small fists
and cried louder. Huge tears drenched her eyes as she tried to
express her discomfort in the only way she could.
“Where is the child’s mother?”
“She is tending the cattle. Only one of us could come.”
Shanta turned to Ganga Singh and asked, “How far is the nearest
doctor?”
“About fifteen miles away.”
“Can we take the child there?”
“Yes, we can, but it will not be open at this early hour.”
“We'll wait for a while. In the meantime, Gangada, could
you make this man a cup of tea? He has come a long way.”
When the tea arrived, Shanta went forward to relieve the

180
 MADHU TANDAN °*

villager of his crying child. She put the child in her lap and
rocked her for a few moments. She placed her left hand on the
child’s brow and soothed it. Her other hand she rested on the
child’s hollow stomach. Shanta felt heat rushing to her palms
as they travelled to her fingertips, in a mysterious dance. The
bleating of the goats, the rustle of trees in conference, the gentle
hum of the wind all seemed to stop for a moment in expectation.
Nature seemed to pause. Shanta, however, heard none ofthese.
Her whole body seemed motionless, lost in some deep reverie.
Only her hands moved gently over the child’s stomach. When
Shanta came around she realised that the child had stopped
crying.
She looked up to see Ganga Singh and the villager staring at
her as though they had witnessed a miracle.
It was then that Shanta knew that she would not be leaving the
hills of Maniagar, ever.

181
 on y

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ripe vey i re 7 =
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 |Bhadoo|
Uma Vasudev

Mrs Dixit’s husband had already signed the rent lease for a year
for their new house when she learnt that their landlord was going
to be the notorious Bhadoo, the lecherous old grain merchant who
was known to have an eye for women in general and little girls in
particular. Mrs Dixit was horrified. Her own daughter was just
eleven. Niloo. Born after years of repeated disappointments. At
50, Mrs Dixit felt almost shy at being her mother, but she was
fiercely solicitous nevertheless, perhaps because of it. So
everything regarding Niloo had to be perfect, and perfect, to the
determined meticulousness of Mrs Dixit’s character meant just
right. The right food, the right clothes, the right friends, also the
right feelings. For, felt Mrs Dixit, there must be a decorum not
only about behaviour but even about one’s inner motivations. She
saw to it therefore that Niloo was properly impregnated by the
 * BHADOO

values that she herself cherished above all, decency, courtesy and
truthfulness. Naturally too, Mrs Dixit was particularly careful
that Niloo should not be impelled to draw upon an awareness that
she was arich man’s daughter.
It had been a blow to Mrs Dixit to discover that she couldn’t
expect the same teaching for Niloo from her school. Her teacher,
a pretentiously adolescent creature, had once scoffed at Niloo’s
complaint that she feared her pen had been stolen by exclaiming:
“So what? You’re a rich girll Why don’t you ask your parents to
buy you another?” She had even made it a point to single out
Niloo again and again to taunt her about her advantages when the
rest of her schoolmates had to make do with ragged comforts.
That was the worst, thought Mrs Dixit of small town minds, But
_ with her usual determination she decided that Niloo must be made
to feel as normal and ordinary as any other little girl of her age. It
was to the greater credit of Mrs Dixit than to the natural innocence
of a child that Niloo, despite having everything, never turned into
one of those obnoxious brats that spring from over-indulgent
parents.
Nor indeed did she develop, and that of course she owed to the
fortune of her circumstances, that pathetic maturity which comes
with the early assumption of responsibility which marked her poorer
counterparts, especially in a small town such as they lived in.
Like them, she might have had to be helping her mother with the
cooking, or looking after a baby brother or do the marketing and
become so imbued though unconsciously with the gestures of
womanhood that it was never difficult to associate them with its

184
 UMA VASUDEV °

fundamentals. Little women they were, with their saris draped

round their in-grown contours and their soft hair drawn tightly
into a bun and their faces looking pinched with a forced courage.
It was quite tragic, and Mrs Dixit, at times, could not bear to see
or even feel it. You could visualise them being seduced she would
realise and not be shocked. That was what was so horrible, Perhaps
that is how Bhadoo... But Niloo, Niloo remained the child that she
was, with soft grey eyes, deep brown hair braided into two plaits
and a shy, tender, smile. It was unthinkable that Niloo ... that
Bhadoo ... that it could be at all. It was unthinkable anyway for
Mrs Dixit was a deeply. deeply moral person with a persistent
faith in human nature. Her sense of discipline was itself controlled
by a warm sympathy and if she was offended by an act of
impropriety she was equally hurt by the motivations of evil.
But for the first time Rami Dixit did feel afraid. And for the
first time she felt she couldn’t tackle the situation with that calm,
practical sense and resilient will that marked all her other actions.
How was she going to cope with a year, a year.of what would
have to be unbearable surveillance? Strangely enough, when her
husband came home from work in the evening and she saw his
pale, nervous face as he said, “I couldn’t work at all. I'll never
forgive myself if anything happens to Niloo,” she found herself
hardening instead of being able to offer him that tearful sympathy
that he possibly expected of her. A show of weakness always did
that to her. It acted like a challenge to her immense reserves of
fortitude. She squared her shoulders mentally. It was a man they
had to deal with, after all, she thought, not a beast. Whatever it

185
* BHADOO

was that had raised him to the level of the human must and could
be turned towards rational behaviour. She did not quite realise
how vast was the significance of her faith, nor indeed, how much
of it she was going to put at atake ...
““We’ll not allow him to enter our flat, even ifhe is our landlord,”
Kundan was saving, “I shall write to him if there’s anything to be
said about the house. You must warn Niloo that he’s no manu or
chahcha and if ever | learn that she has accepted sweets or
chocolates from him or even waited to hear him say anything, I
shall thrash her blue.”
“Kundan!”
“You don’t seem to understand what we’re up against, Rami. I
wouldn’t stay here a minute if Icould help it.” ~
“But he can’t be so bad. Why do they let him live amongst
them? If he were so dangerous ... ”
“He’s rich,” said Kundan simply. “What’s more, its the regard
they had for his father. A jewel ofa man, I’m told. Its his memory
they keep inviolate by being tolerant of the son. You know the
fetish we make ofloyalty ...”
lotta
She knew, for instance, that Dadu Narendra Singh, the head of
the oldest and most respected families of the area, wore diamonds
in his ears, but it seemed to enhance the manhood ofhis strong,
burly figure as she had seen him many a time standing in the corner
of a room at a party, his embroidered shawl thrown across his
chest and over the shoulder, and in summer, in his white, muslin
kurta, elegant dhoti and the tight juties turning upwards at the

186
 UMA VASUDEV °

toes, embroidered in silver and gold. Some of the younger ones

would stroll down the main street of the little town on summer
evenings with a garland of motia flowers wound lightly round
their wrists which they would raise to their faces from time to time
and smell with exquisite shivers of delight. The motia flower had
a unique, nostalgic fragrance which wafted through one’s blood
the recurrent nuances of India’s past, sensitive as the smell of a
woman’s skin, and as evocative of timeless associations. Oh yes.
Rami Dixit had a ‘thing’ about the motia flower. But when it
came to seeing poor Bhadoo no, no, the wretched Bhadoo, clutching
the delicately woven string of flowers in his hand, she made herself
see in it the smell of decadence; of the flower that cloyed over
sweet in the greedy hands of pimps at prostitute corners, so that
Bhadoo could not, must not, must never seem to her to be the
affluent simpleton that his obvious status and manner suggested
but as one of those shrill-eyed, eagle-mouthed males with
mascaraed lashes and pungently perfumed clothes who stood as
the heralds of lust in the dark: lean, nightmarish creatures, she
remembered as she was driven through that area one night, whose
long, yes, long and supple fingers clawed at the closed windows
of the car ina preliminary attack of seduction as it crawled past in
determined opposition. But Bhadoo was fat. A fat pimp. The
mere idea would generate a faint rumble in her stomach which
would turn into a grunt and a roar and ultimately into boisterous
laughter. Make her blind to danger. To Bhadoo. To Niloo’s
threatened childhood. Did she lack that moral compass she thought
in panic, which could point the direction in critical times to right,

187
* BHADOO

wrong, good and evil, to the north, west, south and east of value
....2 To have to decide for yourself each time how irredeemable a
human being was can be shattering. Yes, shattering decided Rami
Dixit. Not that it was wholly a matter of knowing. Knowing
made one cruel. Instinct was her compass. Bountiful, tolerant,
invariably connecting only with shades of goodness. She sighed.
It always landed her into trouble.
It made her lonely too, for her argument then had to interact
only with itself, and not with the more arguable, established
precepts and their cut and dried protagonists. Like her husband,
for instance, who could say that “good is good and bad is bad.” It
was the easiest way out. So that then she could spit at Bhadoo as
if he were a pariah dog and not a human being. a
He was certainly fat, thought Rami Dixit, as she saw Bhadoo
for the first time that morning. But there was no lascivious glint in
his eye as he spoke softly and obsequiously: “Is the Bai comfortable
in her new house? The roof didn’t leak In the rain last night, did it?
I thought I should find out ...”
“That’s kind of you, thank you, Everything is all right. My ...
my husband will talk to you ifthere’s anything that ... er... we ...”
“T hope we meet often, being such close neighbours now. Is Mr
Dixit home? What time does he return from the courts?”
Niloo was plucking at her sari.
“Niloo, love, run along ... There’s nothing to be done about the
house, thank you, Bhadooji,” said Rami, adding the respectful ‘jv
with dignity, “It was nice of you to enquire ...” and she began to
close the door gradually, inch by inch.

188
 UMA VASUDEV °«

» “Pl call again when Dixitji is home, eh? We should be like

brothers now!”
“Yes, of course, yes.” She bolted the door and then fell
tremulously against it. He must have seen Niloo, she thought.
But his attention hadn’t wavered for a second from what he had
been saying. And then, oh, she thought, I can’t believe it. He
didn’t seem so bad. Perhaps it wasn’t true what they said about
his fascination for little girls. You could think of evil in the abstract.
But you couldn’t see a man, talk to him of normal things and
brand him irrevocably evil. At least she couldn’t. Specially if it
were a fat man, she argued and found that insidious laughter
beginning to ruffle her body. How was it possible to associate
Bhadoo’s flabby features and rotund belly, a sort of a benign,
good-humoured belly, it seemed, with such a deliberate vice?
Perhaps he didn’t exploit his weakness with a knowing zest.
Perhaps he was subject to an impulsive lust which he couldn’t
control like a seed within him that burst not into flower but into
pus and smell and black blood in which case, he was ill, not evil.
No, no, no, he was bad. He must be wholly bad. She must think
of him as bad, evil. She had to be careful, wary, tense. She had to
make herself afraid. Afraid of this fat, sloppy man with his nervous
mouth and his childish desires to please.
So when she happened to meet Bhadoo on the stairs, on the
street or in a shop, and she saw his well oiled hair turned to a curl
on one side ofhis forehead, she told herself it was grotesque, not
amusing. She knew that many men belonging to landowning
families indulged in idiosyncrasies of fashion bequeathed by an

189
¢ BHADOO

age and time which didn’t pit manliness against a desire to decorate
themselves.
“The bastard. He pretends he’s insane whenever any charge is
proferred against him, and to prove it, he actually rushes off to the
asylum in Nagpur and lives there for two or three months till
everything blows over!”
Mrs Dixit’s fears dissolved and a lightness blew through her
comfortable body like a mass of feathers teasingeach point
they touched into an irrepressible giggle, into ripples of hysterical
amusement. What an infectious bit of roguery that, the thought,
trying hard to keep a straight face, as her body heaved and turned
and gushed with silent laughter. At the same time she felt another
fear taking root. the fear of not being afraid. ~-.
“Oh, but imagine going off willingly to an asylum!” she couldn’t
help exclaiming. “Like one goes for rest to a hill station!”
Kundan looked aghast at her levity. “Have you gone crazy?”
The next morning she found Bhadoo at her doorstep, peering in
through the half open door. Fat, grotesque, lascivious, as her
husband had said. But with a timid manner and eyes blood red
from a constant intake of bhang, he had added sternly as if to
rebuke her for her “unfortunate lack of proper appreciation of the
situation.” He wondered how any aspect of this matter could induce
in her even the tiniest fraction of a smile. Rami Dixit sighed.
Kundan was indeed a very intense person. Not that there was
anything in Mrs Dixit either that was frivolous. In fact, that way
they were an ideally suited couple, and beneath the regard they
had developed for each other over the years, there was sometimes

190
 UMA VASUDEV °

a gesture, sometimes a look which indicated a more tender base,

so that you could say, if it could be applied to so staid, proper and
dignified a couple, that they were in love with each other. No.
Mrs Dixit was not frivolous at all. It was just that she wouldn’t or
couldn’t draw a rigid enough line between what was generally
considered good and what was generally considered evil. “Good
is good,” Kundan would say, “and bad is bad.” But this was one
point on which Mrs Dixit felt unable to give him her usually very
willing wifely support. Somehow a person entered into it Mrs
Dixit would feel and alter the whole of one’s conception. A person
with a certain background, a certain ideal and a certain compulsion.
“There’s nothing whatever about Bhadoo,” said Kundan
anticipating, from habit, her possible reactions, “that can be said
to be a mitigating factor. He’s an unspeakable rascal and he also
looks it.”
But the more she heard about Bhadoo the more difficult did she
find it to conform to the general impression about him. She began
to feel that her own ideas might be a little warped, for she could
not help feeling a bit sorry for one so beleaguered by his own
temperament. It was only a few weeks after they had moved in
that Bhadoo became the subject of another scandal. She got it in
devastating sequence from a number of people. It was at the weekly
market, the Monday following the weekend she knew he had spent
in the lugubrious company of his wife. She had heard all the
fights, arguments, laments that marked the relations of the two
and indeed she had to plug her ears with cotton wool for a time to
shut out, not Bhadoo’s, but his wife’s shrill abuses. The woman

191
* BHADOO

had erupted suddenly into this querulous barrage till Bhadoo had
said assuagingly, “Come on, come on, have some bhang,” and
they had both relapsed into some sort of coma for the day. “Yes,”
the people said, “They’re both addicts, you know. You wouldn’t
believe it if you saw her. She looks so incapable ... of anything.”
He must have woken up with a vengeance. He had sauntered out
to the market. But what a mistake he had made! He was caught
plucking at the pallus of two women at the market. They had
turned out to be the wives of respected local citizens, women he
had never seen before but about whose manner for once his
practiced eye had deceived him. He had mistaken the freedom with
which they had moved about for the immodesty of their lesser
sisters, When the crowd closed in to thrash him at the behest dthe
indignant husbands, the trader Jumna Lal and cinema proprietor
Kukam Rai — alas, he knew them he had cried out, making matters
even worse. “But I thought they were the local Vaishyas.”
‘If they had been, you scoundrel, you’d have known them.”
“Help!” he had shouted when the first blow struck.
He had kicked aside the sacks of wheat that were ranged around
him and fled, his fat stomach quivering like jelly. It had been a hot
day and he had taken off his shirt and kept it by while his servant
had fanned him: now he was seen running in a /ungi and the
grotesqueness of his fat and loose stomach bobbing up and down
in such ludicrous despair had become too much for the crowd. It
had lost its hostility and plunged into waves upon waves of mirth.
The buyers had stopped buying, the little boys had stopped weaving
in and out of stalls, the women had stopped haggling and the

192
 UMA VASUDEV °

screaming and the shouting and the noise just stopped as the entire
market gave itself up to uncontrolled merriment.
Bhadoo had run faster from the laughter. His vanity was hurt
but anger and fear had alternated like uneasy masks on his face.
He had wiped the sweat that flooded his eyes from the
unaccustomed exertion and hurled imprecations over his shoulder
as he ran.
It was only when he reached Urku’s tea shop that he stopped to
catch his breath. Urku of course was astonished, and this part of
the story Rami got from Urku himself who told her maid servant
who told her.
“Bring me a towel,” Bhadoo had ordered. He had stood and
wiped his steaming body but when it came to the legs he couldn’t
reach them for the stomach that stood in the way.
“Here, rub my legs,” he had said brusquely to the servant boy
in the shop.
The boy had sniggered and bent down to do so. Bhadoo whacked
him on the head.
“That was my boy,” Rami’s maid servant added angrily in
parenthesis.
“You’d smile, would you?” Bhadoo had expostulated, and then
thrown a five rupee coin at the boy. “Go, get me two cigarettes
from Anokhey.”
The boy disappeared, and Urku had insisted tremulously
overawed by Bhadoo as he usually was. “But w-what happened?
“The swines there. Send their women out like shameless wantons
and then curse me because | take them for Vaishyas last time.

193
« BHADOO

“Did you ... er ... I[mean, was ...”

Bhadoo cleared his throat roughly and spat through the door
outside with the precision and crack of a pistol shot. “No, you
fool, I didn’t have time to do anything. Last time I brought one
away. She was a beauty. Full figured and cheeky, not above
sixteen. Those sons of pigs. They all know that at the Monday
market the women come to be seduced, eh? You know, Urku,
don’t you?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it, Icouldn’t ...”
‘Well, to be fair, some women come with that idea. But they
shouldn’t let their wives out if they’re going to be so cussed — you
should have seen those two. They were swaying like the seconds
hand of the big clock in my verandah you’
ve seen it, havenit your”
Urku had nodded, his eyes hungry for details.
“You should have seen him,” the servant boy had added his
own account to that of his mother, he was so eager, his mouth
watering, “Ah, and my own son?” his mother had rejoined, and
the boy, only 15, had had the grace to blush.
“From side to side, like this,” Bhadoo had continued, and cupped
his hands so lascivously round empty space that he made it look
as if it were the hips of awoman that he was fondling. He had
looked thoughtful for a moment and then murmured. “Though I’d
prefer, say, this size, and brought his hands closer.
“You know why, don’t you, Bai Sahib? Why he made it smaller?
Oh, the rogue, the wretched rogue that he is,” the maid servant
had exclaimed.
Poor Urku’s eyes had steamed with excitement. He was

194
 UMA VASUDEV °

incapable of reading the nuances of Bhadoo’s gestures but he was

inflamed by assured references that Bhadoo made to the great
subject of his confidences, women.
“Do you blame me if] found it irresistible? They should keep
their bloody wives locked up in their homes to cook and feed the
children. Has anyone ever seen my wife, eh? Have you, Urku?
Can you say you have, eh?”
eNownor not.
“You see, no chance for her to play dirty.”
And then, God knows, what had come over the timid Urku that
he said, in spite of himself, vaguely. “There’s always the servant.”
“Eh, what?”
“The servant, the s-s-servant in the — the h-house.” he had
stuttered, straining backwards in his chair.
“Mean fellow,” Rami commented.
“No, no Bai. Its possible. You don’t know what goes on in
these big houses?” the maid servant insisted with that profound
acceptance that marked her class. “You wouldn’t blame the woman,
would you? Imprisonment it is, nothing less. I wouldn’t stand for
it. Specially when my husband played around with others the way
~ Bhadoo Bhaiya does.”
“You did leave your husband, didn’t you?” Rami asked her.
“To each his own,” shrugged Sundari, “he found somebody
better — so he said — so I let him go.”
“And you?”
“T like it alone.”
When Urku had made that remark about the servant, Bhadoo

IOs)
* BHADOO

seemed to have been shocked into silence.

The same night he beat his wife. Rami and Kundan heard him.
“You bitch,” Bhadoo had shouted, “from tomorrow you’ll have
only a maid in the house.”
Well, that was that, thought Rami. She was glad it was all
confirmed. He was as unspeakably disgusting as they said he
was. It was such a relief to feel it wholly without doubts. He was
bad, evil, cruel and she would be doubly wary. She didn’t care
about the women, how many or what he did nor even that he beat
his wife — no, she did care. She couldn’t forget the poor woman’s
face as she had called out about ten o’clock over the wall that
divided their courtyards at the back and begged for some milk.
“It - it - g-got spilt over and there’s none for tea in the morMeag.
Can you share some, behen?” One side of her face was swollen
though she tried to keep it covered with her pal/u and Rami didn’t
ask her about it. She just said while handing her the milk, “Oh,
I’m dreadfully sorry.” Perhaps the compassion in her voice was
more than the spilling of the milk, warranted; the shrewish face
across the wall seemed to soften and the tears welled up in the
small, shrunken eyes. “Thank you, behen,” said Bhadoo’s wife,
and disappeared from view.
For some time after that she didn’t even see Bhadoo. Perhaps
he was a little ashamed ofthat fracas in the market and deliberately
kept out of the way. She never let Niloo alone anywhere and even
her obsessive vigilance seemed to turn gradually into another one
of her well regulated habits.Suddenly they heard that Bhadoo
had gone off to Nagpur again. To the asylum. “He’s given a

196
 UMA VASUDEV °*

special room, pretty nurses, they must be pretty, knowing Bhadoo,”

said Kundan, “distributes flowers, tips lavishly and makes himself
rather popular generally. The doctors make a pretence of treating
him. Perhaps they do. Perhaps he does talk of what matters to
him. Anyway it seems this is the only time he can spend money on
himself without being told off by his wife. Perhaps he too enjoys
the relief of her absence who knows? I do.” Kundan looked quite
cheerful. “It’s good to know the scoundrel isn’t around.” But their
relief was short-lived. Two months later Bhadoo was back, and
Rami heard it from the most unlikely source—Niloo. For a moment
she had felt so weak with fright that she had had to sit down and
her hand had flown to her heart to stop it from exploding out of
her skin. “Ma, ma,” Niloo skipped in suddenly waving her hands
excitedly in the air. “Bhadoo chacha met me on the stairs and
gave me this box of sweets. From Nagpur, he said, specially for
us.”
“Ust?
“He’s waiting outside. He was shy to come in.”
“Oh, God.”
Before she could say anything, Niloo went and brought him in,
holding him by the hand. Rami thought that contact was the most
heinous she could behold. She felt her skin shrinking with distaste.
“Niloo!” she screamed. Bhadoo took a step backward and his
big, fat, childish face turned pale, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have
come in like this.”
“No, no, please forgive me. I was angry with Niloo for going .
out. I h-had told her not to.”

197
¢ BHADOO

“Niloo is such a sweet child. She reminds me of what my own

children used to be like”, sighed Bhadoo, “before, before ...”
“Before what’?” asked Rami disarmed,
“Before my wife turned them against me,” said Bhadoo simply.
The fellow was physically repulsive. But Kundan was mistaken.
The face before her was not that of a rake and lecher, but of a
precocious child gone wrong. A corrupted child. The knowing
air went ill with the chubby innocence of feature and in a full
grown man this was an offence ... to good taste. It put her off.
But the creeping sense of tolerance she felt inside — was that not
an offence? Shouldn’t one take a stand against evil? He was
standing at her doorstep. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she
asked. His response was eager. As with a child you are contitally
nagged by the faith that things can never be irremedial, that behind
the spoilt exterior must lie a basic vulnerability so with Bhadoo
she felt this irrational belief that the man was basically good. But
then weren’t all men good in that way?
She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. In spite of everything —
his vulgarity, the unforgivable beatings he gave his wife, the stories
she had heard about his treatment of his children. If anything was
wrong she argued to herself it must be with the whole family, the
wife particularly the shrew that she was, and not with this childishly
silly fellow standing in front of her and exuding such a thick air of
sentiment.
“Please sit down, she said,”
She gave him some tea.
“It is perfect,” he said. It is such a pleasure to have good tea.

198
 UMA VASUDEV °

Won’t you teach me how to do it, Bhai Sahib? Then I can tell my
wite.”
“There’s only one secret,” she smiled, quite relaxed. “One has
to make it with feeling.”
“Feeling?”
“With love.”
“Oh.”

Bhadoo had never been entertained alone before by what he

would term a woman of class. He couldn’t ascribe any motives to
Rami Dixit. Her figure and manner defied such an idea. But
there he was safely ensconced in a modern looking drawing
presided over by a woman of charm and intelligence. Poor Rami.
She did not know that the remark about making tea with ‘love’
had set off the most amazing mechanism of emotion in the heart of
the man sitting opposite her. He dared not, he absolutely dared
not think that her attitude could stem from anything but the concern
of a well bred woman for a sorry creature like himself. But he
was overwhelmed. He cast shy glances at her. His heart was
hammering inside him. He got up, his bulbous belly slithering
like jelly and went towards her. Rami cowered in her chair. What
had come over the man, the silly fool? But Bhadoo had no such
intentions. How could he dare. She was like a goddess. He
flopped down flat on the ground, all the full length of his body,
and laid his head at her feet.
“Tam your slave,” Bhadoo said. “I will be your slave forever.”
Rami Dixit felt the first faint rumble of disbelief tickle her
stomach. Then the merriment began to mount up like a storm

199
* BHADOO

within her. She must stop it, she thought, but she could not. Her
body shook and trembled, the tears streamed down her face as she
sucked in gusts full of air to try and arrest the onslaught, but it
came... peals upon peals of laughter that erupted from her body in
uncontrollable spasms as she saw Bhadoo raise his head and his
shocked, hurt, bulbous face swim before her eyes.
 Contributors

Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, journalist, teacher, counsellor and painter,

has worked tirelessly for bruised and battered women. In fact, she
has been felicitated by the Japanese press for being a champion of
downtrodden Indian women. The first and only Indian member of
the Society for the Study of Ancient Cultures and Civilisations in
Montreal, Ipsita is at present considered one of the foremost
authorities on Wicca in the world. She has done extensive Wiccan
therapy work in India and is a healer of repute. Ipsita is a recognised
researcher into the properties and ancient usage of rock quartz.
Some of her findings are considered to be breakthroughs by
conservative science.

Shama Futehally studied English at the Universities of Bombay

and Leeds and taught English and Cultural History at Bombay
University and the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad. Her
publications include Zara Lane, a novel published by Ravi Dayal
(1993) and In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera
(HarperCollins International, 1994). Shama’s short stories are
included in The Inner Courtyard (Virago Press, 1990) and Jn Other
Words (Kali for Women, 1992). Journals such as Namaste and
Kunapipi, an international magazine ofthe arts, have also carried
Shama’s stories. Currently she is Associate Professor (Western
Drama) at the National School of Drama, New Delhi and reviews
regularly for literary journals.

Namita Gokhale studied at Delhi University and Lucknow, UP.

She has been a consultant in a Japanese firm and at present writes
regular literary columns in The Hindu, Delhi Times and other
newspapers. Namita attended the Cambridge Seminar in 1999 and
has visited a number of countries in Europe, America and Asia.
Her publications include Paro: Dreams of Passion (1984), Gods,
Graves and Grandmothers (1994), A Himalayan Love Story
(1996), The Book ofShadows (1999) and Mountain Echoes (1998),
an oral history.

Vandana Kumari Jena, a recipient of several scholarships and

prizes, has worked as a lecturer at Lady Shri Ram College (1977-
1979) and joined the Indian Administrative Service (1979) in the
Orissa cadre. Her short stories have appeared in leading magazines
and newspapers such as Femina, Savvy, New Woman, Women’s
Era and The Statesman. Vandana’s poems have been published in
Femina and The Asian Age and she has also written extensively
for children in Tinkle, Children s World and Target. Currently she
is working as Education Adviser in the Department for International
Development, British High Comission.

Manju Kak, who wields her pen like a paint brush, is the author
of two works of fiction, First Light in Colonelpura (Penguin,
1994) and Requiem for an Unsung Revolutionary (Ravi Dayal,
1996). In 1995 she received the Charles Wallace Fellowship for
Creative Writing at the University of Stirling, two fellowships from
the Department of Culture in Literature and Culture, and recently
for the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She has done research in
the Kumaon Himalayas on Women, Myth and Ritual, and on
Woodcraft.
Lakshmi Kannan, is a bilingual writer who writes in English and
in Tamil. She uses the pen-name ‘Kaaveri’ for her writings in
Tamil. She has presented papers on the gender issue, on the art of
translation, on the power differentials in language and on the post-
colonial literary scene in several national and international seminars
at home and overseas. She has also attended literary programmes
at home and overseas as an invited writer. Presently, she is an
independent worker and is engaged in her writing assignments.
Kannan writes poems in English, fiction in Tamil, and has translated
extensively into English, her own works as well as the works of
other writers. She has also widely published her critical articles in
English. Lakshmi has translated and published her own work as
well as the works of other writers into English. Four of her titles
have appeared in English translations: Rhythms, Parijata, India
Gate and Other Stories and Going Home. Besides novels, she has
translated stories and poems forjournals and anthologies. Some
of her translated stories have appeared in The Journal of South
Asian Literature (Michigan State University, Michigan, USA);
Stories from South Asia, Ed. John Welch (Oxford University Press,
Oxford UK); Wasafiri: Caribbean, Asian and Associated
Literature in English (London, UK); The Inner Courtyard (Virago,
London, UK); In Their Own Voice: The Penguin Anthology of
Contemporary Women Poets, Penguin India; Truth-Tales, Kali
for Women, Delhi; maging the Other, Katha, Delhi and in others.

Manju Kapur teaches English Literature at Miranda House, Delhi

University. She is the author of Difficult Daughters, a novel which
won the Commonwealth Eurasia region prize in the first novel
category. Currently she is working on her second novel.

Madhu Kishwar, Editor of Manushi and Reader, Satyawati College,

Delhi University has several awards and publications to her credit.
She is the recipient of the Vidula Samman (1998) instituted by Vikas,
an institution dedicated to the cause of education and knowledge,
Calcutta, Prabha Puruskar (1997) and the Chameli Devi Jain Award
(1986) for the best woman journalist. Some of Madhu’s books
include: Off the Beaten Track: Rethinking Gender Justice for Indian
Women, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999; Religion at
the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays, Oxford University
Press, New Delhi, 1998; Editor, 7ie Dilemma and Other Stories
by Vijaydan Detha, translated from Hindi by Ruth Vanita, Manushi
Prakashan, 1997; Co-editor (with Ruth Vanita), Jn Seareh of
Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi, Zed Books,
London, 1984. Also published in Japanese by Akashi Shoten, Shoten,
Tokyo, 1990, third edition, Manohar, Delhi, 1996. Editor, Women
Bhakta Poets, Manushi Prakashan, New Delhi, 1989.

Sukrita Paul Kumar is a Reader in English at Zakir Husain

College, Delhi University. She has been a Fellow at the Indian
Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla (1987-1990), a British
Council visitor (1994) and a recipient of the Bharat Nirman Award
(1991), Rockefeller Award (1991) and research fellowship by the
Shastri Indo Canadian Institute (1992). Sukrita’s collections of
poetry include Oscillations, Apurna and Folds of Silence, critical
works such as Man, Woman and Androgyny and The New Story
and translations of stories like Breakthrough and Mapping
Memories. Her latest book is Ismat: Her Life, Her Times published
by Katha, 2000. Currently she is busy with a major UGC project
and was also Director, Translation Project for Katha.

Anuradha Marwah Roy teaches English at Zakir Husain College,

Delhi University. Her first novel The Higher Education of Geetika
Mehendiratta (New Delhi: Disha Books) came out in 1993. Her
second, Jdol Love (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher) in 1999.
She has also written academic and general articles, poems, reviews
and screenplays.

Raji Narasimhan, who writes in English, was a journalist before

she turned to creative writing in the late 1960s. A work of literary
criticism and the second of her four novels to date have been set
texts in Indian universities. Her short stories have been translated
into German and Gujarati. Her fifth novel, Atonement has been
published recently. She is a regular translator from Hindi to English.
In 1998, her translation of the novel Nishkavach by the well-known
Hindi writer Rajee Seth, appeared in the Macmillan series, Modern
Indian Novels in Translation.

Mrinal Pande writes in both Hindi and English. In English, she

has two novels and a collection of essays entitled The Subject is
Woman to her credit. Her first novel in English was Daughter
Daughter and My Own Witness is her most recent work. Mrinal
has been editor of Vama, Saptahik Hindustan, Hindustan Dainik,
and senior Editorial Adviser to NDTV (Star News). Currently she
anchors Hindi news for Doordarshan and writes a column for The
Hindu and Punjab Kesri.

Sujata Sankranti was born in a small town, Mavelikkara in Kerala.

Educated in Delhi, she is currently teaching in the Department of
English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. Her short
story The Warp and the Weft was adjudged as the overall winner
in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition organised by CBA,
1998. Subsequently the story was broadcast in all the
Commonwealth countries and published in the journal
Commonwealth Currents. The story has also been translated into
Hindi, Malayalam and Urdu.

Bulbul Sharma is a Delhi based artist and writer. She has held
several solo exhibitions of her paintings since 1987. Her works
are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit
Kala Akademi, Chandigarh Museum, British Council, UNICEF
and the Nehru Centre, UK as well as in private collections ®8he
has published three collections of short stories: My Sainted Aunts
(HarperCollins), The Perfect Women (UBSPD) and The Anger of
the Aubergines (Kali for Women). Her first novel Banana Flower
Dreams was published by Penguin Viking in 1999. Her short stories
have been translated into French and the novel into Italian. She
has contributed to various anthologies which include Something
to Savour and Second Skin (Women’s Press, UK) and Jn Other
Words (Kali for Women). At present, she is working on a series of
nature books for children. Bulbul Sharma also works as an art
teacher for children with special needs and conducts regular art
and writing workshops for underprivileged children.

Madhu Tandan is a writer who, along with her husband, chose to

abandon a comfortable city-life to join a small self-sufficient
community in the Himalayas where they spent seven years. This
experience inspired her first novel, Faith and Fire: A Way Within.
She is currently working on her second book, A Dialogue With
Dreams.

Uma Vasudev is an author, journalist, filmmaker and Director of

In Group’80: The Media People. Her books include Indira Gandhi:
Revolution in Restraint, Two Faces of Indira Gandhi, The Song
of Anasuya (a novel), Shreya of Sonagarh (a novel) and Issues
Before Non-Alignment. She is currently working on a book entitled
The Making of an Opposition, a study of India’s evolutionary
pains as a parliamentary democracy. Uma’s short stories have
appeared in Short Story International, New York, Hong Kong News
and in several Indian magazines.

Jehanara Wasi (General Editor), who holds degrees in History

from the Universities of Delhi and Oxford, is a writer, editor and
researcher. She has worked with such leading publishers as Oxford
University Press, Macmillan, Vikas, Tata McGraw-Hill, Rupa and
NCERT in Delhi, has been a literary columnist for The Economic
Times, and a regular contributor to other papers on literature,
history, the visual and performing arts. Her work has been published
in The Times of India, The Fountainhead, The Sunday Observer,
The Hindustan Times, Indian Horizons, The Education Quarterly,
Saturday Times, The Statesman, Travel Times, Vidura, Design,
Destination Traveller, Indrama, Discover India, Swagat, City
Scan, The Patriot, Link, The Financial Express and First City.
Currently Jehanara is engaged in documentation for Span
magazine, research projects for international organisations and
editorial assignments for Indian and foreign publishers. Several
publications, both Indian and international, have been coordinated,
evaluated and edited by her. She broadcasts frequently, is a regular
script writer and presenter of programmes on All India Radio.
External Services, English Talks and the National.Channel and
also voices commentaries for short TV films and documentaries.
Jehanara takes on work in editing, re-writing and documentation
and obtains detailed factual information for writers, academics,
business consultants and administrators. She has evaluated
examination papers and scripts in Creative Writing for the Indira
Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU).
 h refuses to be defined by
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as taut as the kite strings at Makar
manding of attention as the Ring
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