by Kapur, Manju
Yesterday a huge demonstration was held at Jallianwala Bagh criticizing the Punjab Government for not controlling prices and checking profiteering. With so much agitation there is bound to be some positive outcome. Then they will have less reason to pressurize me to move.
My bua has arrived from Kanpur. Apparently my mother had asked her to get my horoscope read by a more learned astrologer than our pujari. Although I do not believe in all this nonsense, my horoscope has turned out to be an unexpected ally in our union! This my sister Guddiya told me, as she was giving me breakfast. Normally she just leaves the tray in the room and goes, but today she hovered around.
‘Guddiya?’ I said. ‘Is something the matter?’ I thought she might be having a problem with the last book I gave her to read.
She smiled. ‘Bhaiyaji, they were discussing your horoscope.’
‘And?’ I pricked up my ears.
‘The Moon and Venus are together in the seventh house –’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You don’t know, Bhaiyaji?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, the seventh house is the house of marriage – among many other things!’
Even this ten-year-old girl knows such a thing. How we fill our children’s heads with rubbish!
‘So?’
‘So, in your case, they are inspected by the tenth aspect of Saturn, therefore two marriages!’ And she ran off giggling and looking very naughty.
Next day, next instalment.
‘Bhaiyaji,’ she said.
‘Guddo,’ I said, catching her by the arm, and holding her chin with my hand. ‘Let me see if you know how to give news. Imagine you are writing a composition.’
‘Who will read it? It is not like “My Favourite Book” or “My Holiday”, is it?’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Compositions are supposed to teach you how to tell things clearly.’
She told me that she had heard (or made it her business to hear) Buaji tell Ammaji that even if she tried she could not stop my second marriage. Fate worked in strange ways, and she should accept whatever happened with good grace. Amma kept crying throughout but Buaji said that you were from a good family, how much worse would it have been if I had come home with an English mem? And she said I was doing my duty by the family, and trying to pay back my debts as fast as possible, even though no one had ever asked me for the money. If they tried to restrict me too much, they might end up losing me altogether.
I could not have put my case half so well! I told Guddiya that I was very satisfied with her powers of expression. She looked pleased and ran away.
Friday, 15 December, 1939
K.L. is coming tomorrow. I do not know how many more times he will be allowed to see you. Even this much has been an unexpected piece of good fortune.
Darling, you say your family is questioning your years of studying. One of the benefits of education is that it teaches us to think for ourselves. Even if we arrive at the same conclusions that have been presented to us, our faith in those beliefs are stronger for having been personally thought out. If, as sometimes happens, our education leads us to question some of the value systems by which we live, that is not to say that we are destroying tradition. The tradition that refuses to entertain doubt, or remains impervious to new thoughts and ideas, becomes a prison rather than a sustaining life force. Even the smallest one of us has a social function, but that function is not to follow blindly beliefs that may not be valid.
Do you know how an earthworm lives? It inhabits an extremely limited space, its whole life is spent within the darkness of the soil. It can neither feel nor see. Uneducated people are like that. We are being murderers towards ourselves if we do not develop our intellect. Any part of us that is not used will atrophy and die – the same is true of our minds. Remember, it was through your desire to learn that we were first drawn to each other.
Then Vir, consider, what is it that takes me away from the woman I live with? Apart from the planets in the house of marriage, of course! She is a good woman, runs the house to perfection, looks after my family as though they were her own. Despite all this, I am lonely, lonely, lonely. We have nothing in common. I once wanted to share my interests with my wife, felt her pain at my estrangement from her. But she will not change. Will not – cannot – I do not know.
Who is responsible for this state of affairs? Society, which deems that their sons should be educated, but not their daughters. Society that decides that children – babies really – should be married at the ages of two and three as we were. As a result, both of us needlessly suffer for no fault of ours. I cannot be an adherent to stultifying tradition after this, but Viru, you must make up your own mind about these matters. You are intelligent and capable.
This has been a very long letter – to make up for your very short one! Do not disappoint me again, in this respect, darling.
All my love,
H.
Thursday, 4 January, 1940
Vir, darling,
So long, and no word from you! It is with an uneasy heart that I contemplate this silence. Kanhiya said you had no letter for him. He said nothing else, and I did not like to probe further.
Today is the last day of the Scout Mela. It has been almost a two-week affair, with seven thousand scouts and guides congregating from all over India. I would have thought a more natural venue would have been Lahore, but I suppose the powers that be thought that Amritsar should get its fair share of (what?) attention, I suppose. One can hardly call it culture.
Thanks to the Scout Mela, Amritsar was graced with the presence of Jawaharlal. We Indians have an innate need to worship, I think. The day he came, the market shut. At Malviya Nagar, where he was to give his address, two lakh people congregated. Two lakh! Imagine! By the time J.L. came, they were so excited they broke the cordon and swarmed all around him. Such was the press and swell of the crowd that he even fell off his horse. His pleas for order, as well as repeated injunctions over the loudspeakers, had no effect. In the end he left in disgust. The crowd disbanded and collected at Jallianwala Bagh where rumour had it he would appear. At five, J.L. finally came back and gave his speech!
I give you these snippets of news, but my heart is not in it. Please Viru, write to me. That I should have to plead with you! I will send K.L. again to your house, and again and again, until I hear from you. This misgiving that I feel within me is hard to bear.
H.
Can it really be a mystery to you why I have not written?
They have told me that your wife is pregnant. Apparently Ganga had come to announce the happy news. At first I did not believe it. How could it be true?
They have let me out of the little room on the terrace. I cried when I left. That was my house of dreams, when I still believed in you. Thank God their problems are over, Mati said, and my daughter is safe. Now she has to come to her senses
On her next visit she asked to see me. They forced me to go.
When I saw her I could see that it was true. Mati told her it will be a boy, and this is what every man wants, even if he is educated. She blushed, and smiled, and I knew that the place next to you was rightfully hers.
Tell K. there is no need for him to visit.
I understand. She is your wife after all.
Goodbye, goodbye forever,
V.
No, Viru no. Will you brusquely cut me off, will you really condemn me without a word from my side? Day and night I move with your invisible presence next to me, my love for you quickening my heartbeat with life and vitality. What you imagine happened seems so insignificant, hardly worth talking about in comparison to what I feel.
I find it hard to unravel the tissue of domestic strife and obligations that I find I am the centre of, but I must try.
You will say, why did I not walk away, why did I succumb? You think I am no longer faithful – that I am incapable of it – that I want a son, and believe the things the whole world tells you to believe.
It was not for a son that this happened. It was no
t because I wished to reaffirm the physical bond between my wife and me.
My love, what can you understand of these things? You who are so innocent and inexperienced.
Picture to yourself a man so in love, he cannot call his soul his own. Out of consideration to his family, he tries to hide his deep involvement with the girl. They are used to his preoccupied demeanour, no one is close enough to know the state of his emotions.
Then one day the girl tries to commit suicide. The man breaks down completely, the inmates of his house become privy to his secret. His wife cries, threatens, demands reassurance. She does all this softly, bit by bit, with half-sentences, and tear-filled eyes. She burns the food. His mother takes her part.
The man needs to be left in peace. What has happened to his loved one has so shattered him he finds it difficult to think coherently, finds it difficult to resist the relentless appeal to what was made out to be his moral responsibilities.
He does what he can to bring back domestic harmony. He feels guilty about ignoring the suffering of one who is also in a way blameless. An act is performed mechanically, with what result you have already seen.
Sweetest, it does no one any credit, the story that I have had to reveal to you. Yet I was vulnerable, and in this moment of weakness it seemed I could not in all conscience ignore the claims of those around me.
Vir, revile me as you wish, curse me, berate me. Only do not punish me so harshly as to deny me yourself. If I have sinned against you, it has never been in spirit, my darling, never that. My love and devotion has remained ever yours, it is that which gives my life its meaning.
This time I have called Kanhiya Lal, and begged him to take this letter to you, as soon as was feasible. I had to tell him that there was a misunderstanding between us, and he must insist you read it. I know your feeling for me will not allow you to refuse this plea.
I enclose a small poem. Not as part of my letter, but rather as a supplement to it. You are too perceptive a reader not to sense its application to my poor situation.
I live only when I hear from you again.
Still, and forever, your
H.
LOVE’S UNITY
How can I tell thee when I love thee best?
In rapture or repose? How shall I say?
I only know I love thee every way,
Plumed for love’s flight, or folded in love’s nest.
See, what is day but night bedewed with rest?
And what the night except the tired-out day?
And ’tis love’s difference, not love’s decay,
If now I dawn, now fade, upon thy breast.
Self-torturing sweet! Is’t not the self-same sun
Wanes in the west that flameth in the east,
His fervour nowise altered nor decreased?
So rounds my love, returning where begun,
And still beginning, never most nor least,
But fixedly various, all love’s parts in one.
Thursday, 1 February, 1940
Please do not go on sending K.L. with demands for a reply. It is kind of you to show such interest in me, and to try and educate me by sending me poems, but I am still not advanced enough to understand them. It seems to me the poem is saying that you can do what you like so long as you go on saying you love. I know this cannot be true. In my family marriages are not made like this.
Now I know there is still some life in your feelings for your wife – as it is proper there should be – it would be very wrong of me to come between you, especially when there is going to be another baby. But for the pregnancy, I would never have known.
What has happened has happened for the good. In which world was I living, to be so caught up in the illusion of your love? Just as you must do your duty to your family, and your wife, so too I must do my duty to mine. My people have always been straightforward people, Pitaji and Bade Baoji have always been known for their honesty and high standards. People blindly trust my father in business, our community respects us. I am proud that I belong to such a family, and I must keep up its traditions.
I am going to Lahore to do my BT. I want to be a teacher like you and Shakuntala Pehnji. Perhaps my family will also benefit by what I do, as yours has done. As for me, I never stopped learning from you, whether it was in the classroom or outside.
Mati says at least I wouldn’t be at home to remind her of the eternal disgrace I am to everybody. I, too, want a fresh start. It will be a great relief for me to leave this house. Maybe Bade Baoji will consent to come here after I have gone.
I hear them say to each other, ‘Poor thing, it is not her fault she has been taken in. She is so simple. Once she is out of here, the situation will improve.’ They haven’t talked so nicely about me in a long time.
I have learnt from my experience, but this much I also know. You did not mean to deceive me. What has happened is God’s will. I was unreasonable ever to mind.
I thought you would appreciate the fact that I was not going to stop my studies – you were always so pleased when I learned anything.
V.
Wednesday, 7 February, 1940
Sweetheart,
For that you will always be, no matter what you say – how can I stop writing to you? How cease begging, pleading, imploring you to have a little mercy upon me? You are the air I breathe – you may as well ask me to avoid eating or reading.
And the tone of your last letter, how cold, how indifferent, how determined. You thank me for my interest in you. Good God! Can I be merely interested in someone whom I have banded round my heart with hoops of steel! That is doing me a gross injustice, darling! I had rather you abused, damned, anything but this deadly polite tone.
At another time I would have rejoiced that you are going to Lahore. I have a friend there – you remember I used to talk about him sometimes – the one who teaches in Government College, we were at Oxford together. He was responsible for bringing me to Amritsar. His father was asked by someone on the AS College board to recommend an English teacher.
Can this be of interest to you now, when your calmness strikes terror in my heart, when it seems immaterial to you whether we meet or don’t? I, who love you so truly and so ardently have become an enemy in your eyes. I cannot bear this. I realize I am repeating myself, but the pain I feel is not subject to variety.
Sweetheart, I do not send K.L. with the intention of extracting a reply. I am too miserable, too deeply troubled. Any distance from you, not physical distance, for that we have experienced and survived, but any alienation of the spirit, leaves me but half a man.
I must hear from you soon, I must. Every minute of the day will be passed in waiting.
Yours, ever and always,
H.
27 February, 1940
Dear Sir,
It is not as though I do not value your friendship. Nor do I purposely sound cold and cruel, as you put it. I just described what seemed obvious.
When I first heard, how I suffered, how I cried. I thought, this is the real punishment for what I have done. I had to be strong to bear the pain, silently, without anyone knowing. I did not want them to believe I was so stupid that no matter what you did, I would go on fighting with them over you. I had already caused enough grief by trying to be different from what was expected of me. No, it is better to do as they tell you. It is safer. Then the family protects you if things go wrong. At least I would not be as lonely as now.
So it hurts when you talk of my not caring for your misery. Do you really think I could so quickly forget all you were to me? It’s only that you were not mine to care for.
Shakuntala Pehnji has suggested Rai Bahadur Sohan Lal Training College for Women. It is small, attached to a school in the same compound, and away from the fashionable part of the city. They have approved the place. All I want is a change from my old life and the chance to do something useful. I do not mean ever to marry.
I have heard that a hostel has opened for girls in the medical college. There are families who wa
nt a career for their daughters. Nobody wanted anything for me except a husband.
How is your wife? She looks very nice these days. The way she walks, I too think you will have a son. I see her talking to Mati sometimes, but thankfully she has not sent for me again.
I do not think we need to write to each other after this.
V.
XV