by Poorna Bell
After we land in its main city, Guwahati, I’m concerned this is just like any other part of populated India. A smattering of the rich among the swarm of the poor, interesting signboards such as ‘Fooding and Lodging’, mini eruptions of garbage and cows sauntering across lanes of traffic with their standard ‘fuck you’ attitude.
But after a few hours, Guwahati gives way to the more remote road leading to the Kaziranga national park. It has only just opened after the monsoon, and people are scarce on the road. After settling in, early next morning we decide to take a guide and a Jeep to do a little exploring.
If Guwahati was a clenched fist of smells and smog, Kaziranga is the undulating back; broad, open plains and wetlands and tall green grasses petering into pools of rainwater. In the morning, she looks wild, vast and empty, like a beautiful woman roused from a deep sleep.
Clouds gather low at the line of dark hills in the distance, as a steady pink glow rolls across the earth, capturing the sun’s yawning reflection in the still, blue water.
The reason we are here is because it’s the one place you can get very close to rhinos. Unlike elephants, who like the nuzzle and comfort of a herd, rhinos don’t like anyone near them, least of which, other rhinos.
Suddenly we see one – a leathery Moses that looks as if it’s standing on a lake of water. Somewhere beneath its toes must be a hidden bank of earth.
As the Jeep picks up speed again, I ask my parents if my grandparents ever came to Assam.
No, Mum says. They did much bigger things. In 1956, less than ten years after independence, her father, KK Shetty, decided to apply for a job in Ethiopia. He had never been to Africa, and back then there was no Instagram, no hashtag vacay, no way of knowing about a place unless you read a book or someone you knew had been there.
The reason he applied was because he perceived he was turned down for a job in India due to the rigged nature of the caste system. The job he wanted went to a Brahmin – a higher caste than him – who was less qualified.
Three years after the entire family moved to Ethiopia, my grandfather discovered an injustice regarding pay.
‘He found out that the pay for teachers doing the same job was based on where they came from,’ says Mum. ‘Americans got top pay, then English and so on, and the Indians were one up from the bottom, which was the Ethiopians!
‘He had fought for independence and equality and was not prepared to be insulted, and so when a job came up in Ghana – which had also just gained its independence – we all went there.’
They stayed in Ghana for six years, and during that period they went twice to Europe as a family, and once to the United States as a couple alone.
I can’t imagine the scale of ambition, first for my grandfather KK to move to a continent he had never been to before, and then to amplify that ambition by taking themselves and their kids to places other immigrants could only dream of at that time.
I marvel at the bravery, and I think of all these incredible parents and grandparents who are hidden away in plain sight.
Grandparents may not seem incredible, at first. They may be camouflaged with cardigans and comfy chairs, they may ask you the same question an insane amount of times and have a wonky knee that always dominates talking points, but like a diamond covered in soot, dust off your apathy, spend some time with them and you may just find stories that will help guide you and give you the courage to do what you really want to.
My grandmother on my father’s side was called Parvathy. We share the same nose and face shape. She was a firecracker of a woman: beautiful, with a signature look of red lipstick, glossy black hair and big sunglasses. My father’s father was called Babu, and there is no one who doesn’t describe him as a truly moral man. He worked high up in local government as the Commissioner of the Corporation of Bangalore, and was known for being scrupulously honest. He and KK were in fact friends, and he was so clever and won so many book prizes for academic excellence that KK had to help him carry the books home.
Although he was quiet and solid, and my grandmother Parvathy was the sparkler at any party, they complemented each other perfectly. It also makes me aware that, for most of my life, I’ve also chosen quiet men – men who are completely different when it’s just me and them, but who in a crowded room veer on being solemn.
‘To us he was serious and quiet,’ my dad said, ‘but he accomplished a lot academically and had immense moral fibre. But he also had a dry sense of humour. I remember my mum had a gold chain and it had these mangoes hanging off it. One day, one of the mangoes fell off and he said: “I think it got too ripe.”’
Dad laughs, his eyes crinkling at the memory.
On Mum’s side, Nagaveni, my maternal grandmother, was a miracle baby. Her mother didn’t have her until she was a lot older, at the age of forty, and because she was her parents’ only child and her father was so paranoid about something happening to her, he wouldn’t let her take swimming lessons. ‘If you want to swim,’ he said, ‘swim on the bed.’ A confused Nagaveni tried paddling in a swell of sheets and gave up.
By the time she met KK, her parents had passed away, and KK was busy working as a teacher and being part of the Gandhian freedom movement against Britain’s colonial rule (he went to jail for cutting a telegraph wire). They met at night school, where he was teaching.
‘Wait,’ I interrupt my mother in the middle of telling this story, ‘she was his STUDENT!!!!’
Apparently, Nagaveni wasn’t a coy, impressionable little flower. ‘She was his most difficult student,’ Mum says, ‘always giving him trouble. But that’s what he liked about her.’
Even the Jeep driver has pricked up his ears.
‘Well,’ says Dad, ‘that’s also how my dad met my mother.’
‘WHAT!’ Mum and I both yell.
‘Yes,’ says Dad, ‘he was her teacher.’
‘Was it night school?’ Mum asks. Dad says he thinks it was.
If the driver wasn’t paying attention before, he definitely is now.
While Mum and I are still reeling at the news that our entire bloodline is based on the success rate of teacher–student relationships, Dad tells us that, actually, his father’s family didn’t want him to marry his mother, Parvathy.
‘But why?’ I ask. ‘She was a total babe.’
The reasons are lost with the ashes of my grandparents, unfortunately, but what follows next is like something from a film script. Despite being from the same caste, Babu’s family disapproved. A secret meeting was arranged for him to meet Parvathy’s family, but on the day, his family caught wind of what was going to unfold.
To prevent him from going to meet her, they locked him in what was known as the ‘bootha room’, which a lot of bigger family houses had. Bootha in our language means ‘spirit’, and it’s a room set aside for the spirits of our ancestors. Generally it’s considered to be the spookiest room in the house, so presumably they were trying to make him scared. ‘And I don’t think it helped that there were actual bats flying around,’ says Dad.
Babu decided a bootha room was not going to stop him seeing the woman he loved. So what did he do? He escaped through the roof. Then they married, without his parents’ blessing.
Nagaveni and KK weren’t allowed to be together either because they were from different castes.
Their only wedding guests in 1947 were KK’s sister Radha and her husband, who had also been shunned for marrying out of caste. I’d only ever known these people when they were much older, and I wish I had known about this fire, this effort of will they had once possessed to do what they wanted for love, even if it meant no one accepted it.
Apart from all that, two things stand out in my mind about my grandmothers.
Parvathy managed to put four kids – one fighter pilot, three doctors – through school after Babu died, and she did so with her intelligence, wit and tenacity. It was no mean feat in the 1960s as a single Indian woman. When we were growing up, I knew she had been widowed young but I never stopped to th
ink what that must have been like for her. Now that I know from personal experience, there is only admiration.
The second was that Nagaveni used to go to the hospital to give birth on her own because, back then, childbirth wasn’t really a big deal. Forget the husband coming with you and an overnight bag – when she felt her contractions, she’d take her bag, stop at a local café she liked on the way, have her meal and then went on to have her child.
When I knew her, she was already old, and I was one of the youngest grandchildren. I just knew her as the grandma who was lovely to us and made an amazing chicken curry but who wouldn’t let us watch Thriller because she thought it was too scary for our tiny child brains. Who knew that she carried all of this strength, all of these stories around with her? I certainly didn’t.
Our guide signals us to be quiet – he’s spotted a rhino with her baby and they are so close I can see the pockmarks on her hide. The baby’s tail is waggling as it feeds hungrily from its mother, mud washing over both of them as they move around in the water to keep cool.
We move on to give the rhinos some space, and our path cuts to the wide, open plains again.
India uncurls east like an arm outstretched, and in her palm are lagoons of green, and broad, open skies that echo only with the flutter of birds.
She’s known for being hectic, high-maintenance with her traffic, teeming with too many people. But like the humans who live on her surface, she’s not any one thing; she has so many different faces.
Now she turns to me, and her eyes are lake water and her lips red earth.
I carry all of this new knowledge with me, these stories of unconventional beginnings.
My grandparents and parents had far fewer choices than I do, yet they made bold, brave choices.
KK moved his entire family to Africa, and this was a time before email, Facebook and WhatsApp. They kept in touch mainly by letters. Phone calls were a rarity and placed through the operator, and telegrams were greeted with fear because they were expensive and usually represented bad, urgent news.
It turns out even my great-grandmother didn’t give up on the idea of having children, considering how late she had Nagaveni.
When we get back to Guwahati, it’s the birthday of Gandhi, which means no alcohol is sold anywhere. Our hotel is perfectly adequate, but it’s one of many crammed on a busy stretch of road near an open sewer, and mine is a room with a view. Of the sewer.
So we all take ourselves off to a boat ride along the mighty Brahmaputra, one of India’s most famous rivers. It’s called mighty because it is a beast of a thing, born in the crystal-clear waters of Tibet from the Chemayungdung glacier, and is just under 4,000km long. It runs through the Kailash range of mountains – the birthplace of the Hindu god Shiva the Destroyer – and its delta is home to 130 million people.
When it floods at the right level, it brings moisture and minerals to crops, provides fish for people to eat. But when it spirals out of control, it is called the Sorrow of Assam because of the high numbers of people it kills.
On the day of Gandhi’s birthday, it’s not flooding. The waters are remarkably calm after a long and trying monsoon, and the sun has chosen garments of lilac and peach as it makes an exit.
Boats are always pot luck in India – you never know if you’re going to get something decent or a rust bucket two screws shy of sinking into the water. But our boat is surprisingly comfortable – there’s even a menu for fried chicken drumsticks and puffy potato bhajis.
Towards the back of the boat is a small stage and a Casio keyboard decorated in flashing lights and plastic flowers. Karaoke?
No, it turns out. A middle-aged musician with skin the colour of dark chocolate eases into the chair, his pot belly just about fitting under the keyboard. He coughs, plinks on the keys a couple of times, and then starts singing Bengali love songs.
To pass the time, and because I’m curious, I ask Mum and Dad how they first met. ‘Well,’ says Mum, ‘that story begins a bit before our first meeting.’
At the time, Mum was living with her parents in England. They had left Ghana because of the coup d’état that deposed Kwame Nkrumah, and sailed in one of the original migrant boats to England for their education.
Mum started working for a fruit and veg exporter in Spitalfields, and during that time, Parvathy had come over for a visit to see KK and Nagaveni. Mum was a bold little firecracker even back then, so she’d act as the official tour guide for visitors. She offered to take Parvathy out. They hit it off – ‘because we were so similar,’ Mum says – and in the camera department of Selfridges, Parvathy revealed that she would have loved to have Mum as her daughter-in-law.
‘I asked her, as a joke, whether she had a son lurking under the bed. She said she had a son in medical school who she would like to marry me. I thought she was joking and didn’t really say anything further at the time.’
But Parvathy wasn’t joking, and a few months later, she brought up the topic with Mum’s parents. It was then agreed that Mum would meet Dad when she was over in Bangalore visiting her sister Meera, who was pregnant at the time.
I ask Mum whether she had dated anyone before or whether she always knew she’d have an arranged marriage, and she looks thoughtful. ‘We were raised mostly in Ethiopia and Ghana, so I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to make friends, let alone meet boys, because most of our classmates were often ten to fifteen years older than us due to the inequality of education over there. So I suppose I did always think I’d have an arranged marriage.
‘The only exception was when I went to college and met a really nice chap named Lawrence. He asked me to marry him but I panicked and said no.’
Dad hoots with laughter, so I swivel my attention to him. I knew Dad was in a long-term relationship before he met Mum, so he didn’t always believe he’d have an arranged marriage. ‘So what did you think when you met Mum for the first time?’ I asked. Ever the economical wordsmith, he said, ‘I thought, okay, she looked nice.’
I try to imagine being a fly on the wall of the first meeting of Ashok and Jaya Shetty, but all I can imagine is Dad in bell-bottoms being extremely shy, and Mum with that 1,000 kilowatt smile. Above all, I can’t even imagine how awkward it must have been. Or maybe it wasn’t – maybe I’m just projecting how awkward I’d feel in such a situation.
‘Alright then,’ I ask Mum, ‘what did you think of Dad when you first met him?’
She looks shifty. ‘Well, he seemed shy but I really liked that he didn’t try to impress me by boasting, and when he spoke or asked a question, it was something he genuinely wanted to know the answer to.’
‘And?’
‘And . . . okay, I wasn’t bowled over at first – he had this Mexican-style moustache and oil on his hair,’ she admits, ‘but he did have a good figure.’
Once the marriage was arranged, Mum had to go back to England, but flew back a few weeks before the wedding.
Even though it was an arranged marriage, and they didn’t know each other very well, it was clear from the smallest of gestures that they both wanted and believed in a life of romance.
‘When I went for the wedding,’ Mum says, ‘Dad would come and see me every day.’ In classic Dad mode, he wouldn’t say much, but a few days before the wedding, Mum says, ‘He asked me to go for a walk with him in the night and he held my hand for the first time – so sweet. Just like Hollywood!’
We all burst out laughing. ‘Or more like Bollywood,’ she cackled.
‘But hang on,’ I say. ‘When did you arrange to go to England?’
My grandparents KK and Nagaveni had moved to England from Ghana in the 1960s when there were no visa restrictions, and, as their child, Mum had indefinite leave to stay. One of the conditions of the marriage was that Dad would move over and settle with Mum in England.
Shortly after their wedding in September 1974, they were then apart for six months, while Dad started the process to get his visa. ‘SIX MONTHS!’ I exclaim to Mum and Dad. When Rob an
d I got married, I couldn’t have imagined being apart from him for six weeks, let alone half a year.
‘But, Poorna,’ Mum says, ‘we didn’t even question such things, in the way you’d question it now. We didn’t even really think for ourselves – our parents did that for us. We just did what was expected.’
As each generation grows and evolves, they move one step further from the expectations laid out for them by their parents. But we never evolve beyond a set of expectations – they simply change shape. Present day, most people in the Western world aren’t expected to marry for political or economic reasons, as they once were. Men aren’t expected to be economically responsible for their families in the same way. Women aren’t expected to stay at home and look after the children.
But those expectations still persist on some level, and endeavour to shape our lives.
Mum and Dad may have done what was expected, but they also evolved their own way of dealing with the consequences of those decisions.
While apart, Dad wrote her letters, and they kept the tiny flicker of that flame alive, that began between two people who barely knew each other but wanted to build a life together.
Eventually, he came over and started studying for his Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons (FRCS), the qualification for senior surgeons. I marvel at how many threads pulled together to enable them to marry, for Priya and I to be born, and for Leela to come into this world to carry on our stories and our lives.
By this time, night has fully settled in around the boat, and it’s no longer possible to see down the length of the river as it stretches towards the Bay of Bengal.
Everyone’s eyes swivel to the tiny stage where our musician is transitioning into ‘party mode’ as the tunes change to more upbeat Hindi songs.
‘Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls,’ he says. ‘I would like to invite you all to dance.’ He gestures at the small area in front of his keyboard.