by Ira Pande
This curious dichotomy would create a lifelong tussle in Diddi’s life as she struggled to reconcile her naturally liberal personality with the strict patriarchal morality of her mother’s Brahmanical world. Diddi disapproved loudly of what she saw as threats to a ‘moral’ way of living—marriages outside the community, divorces, live-in relationships, back-chatting elders, questioning unfair traditions. Yet, paradoxically, she wrote novels and stories that had strong women characters who rebelled against all such values and social inequalities. This also accounted for her lifelong fascination with those who lived on the margins—mendicants, lunatics and lepers. Time and again, she returns in her short stories and novels to characters drawn from those to whom rigid social values cannot be applied.
She took an unreasonable dislike to a friend of mine who had divorced her husband and was living with a married man. Things were so bad that whenever this friend came to visit me, Diddi would not come to the dining table. ‘What childishness is this?’ I asked her. ‘If I had done what my friend has, I could perhaps have understood your behaviour. But this is absurd— how can you be so insulting to a guest?’
‘You know what I feel about women who break up homes and marriages,’ she replied sulkily.
‘Then what about your friend S in Lucknow?’ I asked, naming a close friend of hers who had created a stir when she married a famous surgeon of the town, forced him to abandon his first wife and family and move in with her.
Diddi flounced out of the room. Logic and reasonableness were unknown commodities in Ama’s daughters. And although they laid the law, they seldom followed it.
~
Ama
Diddi writes:
The delightful aroma of fragrant tobacco came out to embrace us lovingly as soon as we reached my Nana’s house in Lucknow. Inside, in Nana’s sitting room, my mother’s brother (whom we called Mama) sat playing bridge with his friends, a hukka in one hand and cards in the other. Mama’s bridge buddies— among them the famous lawyer Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and Rajrajeshwar Bali—were sprawled comfortably against the bolsters and sparkling white sheets spread over the carpets. Drinks were being served and delicious snacks, such as tender green peas cooked with spices, sent up from the kitchen. It seemed to us children, fresh from Almora and another grandfather’s house, as if everyone in this grandfather’s house always laughed and had fun. Never have I heard such happy laughter again—the open and pure sound of it still makes me smile.
Mama went to the university in the morning in his buggy that would arrive on the dot of nine to wait for him in the porch. As soon as we heard the tinkle of the bells and wheels, we’d race down and dance round the horse, chafing and stamping his feet impatiently. Mama’s bridge game had still not ended and paans were now being served in the sitting room. Garlands of them strung from silver chains emerged from the huge paandaan that my Nani presided over. We could hear her grumbling, cursing the bridge players as she sent in tray upon tray of food and paans to Mama’s guests.
Someone would come and announce that we were being called inside for breakfast, which was invariably hot jalebis from a shop near the pir’s grave. These were fat, juicy sweets we washed down with glasses of hot milk topped with thick swirls of cream. Mama would finally deign to go to the university, and amble towards the porch. The coachman leapt to his seat and his valet, Mahabali, would take his position behind him. The tall and menacing Mahabali wore an amulet round his neck to ward off the evil eye and we wondered who would dare to cast it on his fearful face.
The buggy set off in a tinkle of bells and, with Mama’s departure, the rhythms of the house changed dramatically. A new stream of visitors now entered the house via the courtyard: the first to arrive was the naoon (the barber’s wife), to give the women an oil massage and bathe the children. She went from house to house carrying gossip and with each drop of oil she rubbed in a fresh scandal about the families in the area. Next came the bangle-seller, who arrived every fortnight to change our bangles. How she coaxed those dainty glass bangles over our wrists without breaking them was a mystery to me. ‘Nani, please,’ we pleaded, ‘can we wear different ones this time?’ According to Nani, if young girls did not wear bangles, their wrists became hard and tough like a man’s. Since they had a functional, rather than a decorative, purpose another set of plain bangles replaced the old ones. ‘No, you will wear what I want you to wear!’ was the verdict. Nani hated having her decisions crossed and her face would flush ominously. Even when she was past seventy, my grandmother, with her Grecian nose, rosy face and delicate eyebrows, was beautiful. Her hair always smelt of the fragrant jasmine oil that came specially for her from Asghar Ali’s and her regal bearing remained unchanged till the end.
The women would now sit in the courtyard to cut vegetables and clean the rice and dals. As visiting granddaughters, Jayanti and I were given lighter duties. Her old maid, Ramdeyi, would tease Nani, ‘Bahuji, don’t spoil these girls too much! Sons you can wear like tilak on your forehead, but girls must be taught how to stoke the fires in the kitchen.’ Ramdeyi, a childless widow, had moved into my grandfather’s house to work in the kitchen after she retired from her job at Balrampur Hospital.
My grandfather was the leading doctor of Lucknow and laid the foundation of the city’s landmark Balrampur Hospital. He was the family physician to the Raja of Balrampur and had persuaded him to donate some land for a charitable hospital. Nana also persuaded another rich patient, Lala Puttulal, to open a purdah school for girls: Puttulal donated a house for this and this is how Lucknow’s famous Mahila College was started off. Among its first five students was my mother; she had a photo album she won as a prize with an inscription from Harcourt Butler, the British Resident of Oudh: ‘Presented to Leelawati Pant for standing first in the eighth class.’
I also remember a huge oil painting of my grandfather and a bust made by a grateful patient that used to hang in the sitting room. Pandit Motilal Nehru came once and all of us peeped from behind curtains to catch a glimpse of him. On another occasion, Raja Saheb Manda (whose son, Viswanath Pratap Singh, later became a prime minister) took off his Karakul cap and placed it on a table nearby. My cousin Krishna, always up to mischief, ran away with it. The uproar that took place as servants chased Krishna all over the house to get the cap back is another memory.
But let us return to my Nani’s courtyard where lunch is over. It is the turn of the hawkers and vendors to walk through the lanes behind the house and tempt us. On the dot of one, I swear you could set your watch by this, we heard the voice of a man who sold sugared fruits. For two paise a piece, you could take your pick: mangoes from Malihabad, grapes, jamuns, louquats and ripe speckled bananas. Next came the ice-candy man, with bottles of lurid colours to sprinkle over chips of ice shaved into a terracotta cup. One anna was his price. Then came the vendor of combs, mirrors, paste jewellery, ribbons and kohl. Occasionally, a Bengali sari-seller would call, Kapod! And we’d race down to see what saris he had in his bundle. At the sight of his lace-trimmed petticoats (straight from Calcutta, Didi, he claimed) our hearts swung like a pendulum as he held its swaying folds in front of us. A little later a Gujarati couple came with their bioscope. For two paise we saw a dhobin who weighed nine maunds, Mecca and Medina and a lover pulling a thorn from his mistress’s foot. No matter how often we heard the old man’s sing-song commentary, we never tired of the magical, moving pictures.
The only pleasure banned to us was a visit to a nautanki. And there was a reason. Apparently, a simple Pahari servant from my Nana’s staff once went there and lost his heart to the leading lady, fell hopelessly in love with her and committed suicide. Once, only after days of cajoling, my grandmother allowed us to go and see a show with Mahabali the Fearful as our escort.
Occasionally, Mama would take us to Aminabad to eat chaat at a famous shop that stood near the Begum Hazrat Mahal Park. Run by an old man who wore the typical dupaliya topi of those times and a starched white chikan kurta, the shop opened only at five in the evening and
people thronged to eat the golgappas and hari matar ki chaat he served. To wash it down, he sold an ambrosial drink made of iced aniseed balls. It was said that this drink was the best guard against exposure to the dreaded loo winds.
~
Years later, when my mother lay dying, she asked me once,
‘Will you take me one day to Babu’s kothi?’
I knew that the old house was a ruin now and a shanty town had sprung up on its sprawling grounds. It had passed through many hands and all that remained of the old days was a pair of marble lions on the gates. They say my grandfather’s name (Dr Hardutt Pant) can still be read on the marble nameplate studded into the gates.
We both knew that my mother’s request was a like a child asking to be taken to the moon. She could neither move nor see. What will you do if I take you there, I asked her indulgently.
She looked at me with such longing in her eyes that I caught my breath.
‘I’ll shout: Amma! I’ve come back to you!’ she replied.
~
A photograph of my mother, we called her Ija, taken just after she was married used to hang in her father’s house and later in Kasoon. It is imprinted in my mind so clearly that I can still see her solemn face gazing at the camera. Her tiny frame is almost smothered in a heavy silk sari with a rich gold border and every bit of her is dripping with ornaments—ropes of pearls round her neck, long earrings, bangles and rings.
We never actually saw these historic jewels except in that photograph for by the time we grew up, Ija had given away every one of them or used them to buy whatever was needed to bring up the family after she was widowed. ‘This necklace,’ she pointed out a heavy diamond-studded piece in the picture to us gawping children, ‘was given by the Nawab of Daulatpur when I got married, these bangles by the Raja of Gauba…’
‘But where are they now?’ we asked.
‘That one I sold to marry off Nan Gusain and build his house, these bangles I hawked when I married Panchi Bai…’ she listed the lost treasures without a trace of regret. Like the Statue of Liberty, Ija turned our house into a shelter for the homeless and destitute. Among the many people my mother collected around her was a beautiful child widow called Mohini, who was about my brother Tribhi’s age. Mohini, called Munna by all of us, was sent back by her husband’s family after his death so that she could be looked after by her brothers. Munna’s brothers were friends of my father’s only brother, a bachelor all his life who later became a hermit. The older one, a handsome rake called Chani Mastan (Merry Chani) went hunting one day and never returned. They found his body three days later in the jungles behind Cheena Peak in Nainital. Her second brother, called Dajyu by everyone for his generous nature, was a university teacher. After he died of tuberculosis, my uncle took Munna to Ma Anandmayi’s ashram for how could he, a bachelor, look after a young and beautiful girl? When Ija heard this, she went flying across to the ashram to rescue her. Munna was scheduled to take her vows as a nun the next day, and they were preparing to shave off her hair. Ija’s heart melted at the sight of this beautiful girl, sitting quietly with her head resting on her knees, and she decided then and there to take Munna back with her and bring her up as her own child.
‘How can a girl of her age be forced to forsake the world?’ she asked my uncle angrily. ‘Munna will stay here and become my tenth child. She will go to Santiniketan with Jayanti and Gaura and that is that.’ So Munna came with us when we went back to Santiniketan that year and became a disciple of Nandlal Bose in Kala Bhavan. Before she left Almora, my mother slipped glass bangles on her wrists, threw out her white widow’s weeds and gave her a stack of bright saris to wear. Ija then put a bindi on Munna’s forehead and told her, ‘Remember Munna, if you have a clear conscience then there is no need to fear anyone. Forget what the world will say—why care for people who will talk anyway?’
No one can understand now how radical and subversive this decision was in Almora in those days. For years, a whispering campaign was launched by spiteful people against Ija. People even said that she was grooming Munna to join the Nawab of Rampur’s harem as my father was the Home Minister there. Ija stood her ground: she dared anyone to come and say this to her face. No one did.
~
In one of her last letters to me Ija wrote: ‘I have seen more deaths than I care to remember and God knows how many more I am destined to see… The biggest curse of old age is that people hide things from you, assuming that they will not be able to deal with bad news. What rubbish this is! Old age can dim all your senses but your sixth sense becomes more acute as you grow older. I can hardly see any more, my hearing is not what it was but my personal warning system alerts me about which of my children is in trouble.
‘How are you? What exactly is wrong with you? One last order from me to all of you: none of you are allowed to leave this world before me. I have taken so many knocks that I do not know whether I care to take another…’
~
What knocks she had weathered! The death of my sister Chanda and her husband, who left two small infants in her care. Then my father went, a few years later his brother too and with them the days of happiness and plenty. It was as if a macabre game of snakes and ladders had cursed her to come down to 2 after having reached 99. Perhaps it was this that made her treat life as a joke to be laughed away. Till her death, she kept us amused with her antics and her sharp tongue spared no one. One incident brings out her spirit of resilience most vividly to me.
A few years ago, kerosene oil went underground in Almora and the grocer who had opened a shop just outside Kasoon promised to send her some. Ija sent him four empty bottles for refilling. And waited. Then she was told that the wretch had sent the whole consignment to some officer in the town. She sent her servant to ask him what had happened to the promised bottles of kerosene. He was sorry there was just enough to fill one bottle, he replied, and the servant flashed the solitary bottle in front of Ija’s furious face. ‘Wait,’ she told her servant. She hobbled across to her secret hoard, pulled out two bottles she had stashed away and added a box of matches and wrote a note to the grocer. It read:
‘You wretched worm, I am sending you some bottles of kerosene and a box of matches. Pour the oil on you head and set it aflame with my matches. Today is Baikunth Ekadasi, I promise you will go straight to heaven.’
~
Ama
My sister Mrinal writes:
‘…When arthritis and failing eyesight had practically confined Ama to her chair and forced her to come and live with my mother—the daughter she fought with, scolded and loved the most, I spent a long lazy month with her in my mother’s house in Lucknow. As she reminisced about her past, I began to see an Ama I had never known, and in whose life-story I saw the tragedy of a whole generation that was great and sick at the same time, and the beastly double standards that romanticized this frail little woman, yet made near-impossible demands on her.
Ama was married to my grandfather at the age of seven, when her husband was eighteen. Her first child, a daughter, was born when she was fourteen. This daughter was also married at the age of twelve and gave birth to a son next year, so Ama became an Ama at the age of twenty-seven. The youngest child of an eminent doctor from Lucknow, Ama had grown up in the cultured and liberal—if somewhat decadent—ethos of a feudal Lucknow. She recalled many all-night concerts of classical music and dance when she sat with her parents and saw stalwarts like Kalka-Bindadin perform. Ama spoke no Kumaoni till she got married. Her in-laws, the long-nosed Pandes of Kasoon, were aristocratic, aloof and extremely conservative and spoke only Kumaoni at home. Her father-in-law was an eminent Sanskrit scholar and a terror in the town of Almora. In the early twenties, when Ama was a young bride, he was spearheading a local campaign against the Brahmin who had chosen to go to Japan for ‘further studies’ and returned with a degree in medicine. This young doctor demanded he be rehabilitated after the routine prayaschit (expiation) performed by the licking of the panchgavya (a mixture of five purifying el
ements including the dung and urine of a cow). The Kasoon stand was that if this young impudent Anglophile was taken back into the fold, not only would the purest of the pure Kumaoni Brahmins be polluted, it would also encourage all like-minded young aspirants to go abroad and eat cow-flesh, and then come back and demand to take panchgavya and be purified again. No! he thundered, once a mlechcha (outcaste) by association, always a mlechcha!
The liberals among the Kumaoni Brahmins, one of them Ama’s doctor father, were in favour of elasticizing the rigid boundaries of Brahminism. He felt that if they continued to be rigid, they would lose most of their intelligent young men. (One of the chief reasons for the doctor’s stand was that his own son was by then studying law in England.) Enraged by the betrayal of his own kinsman, Ama’s father-in-law ruled that thenceforth she was not to step into her father’s house. If she did, he’d get his son another wife. So the battle-lines were firmly drawn. The conservatives, headed by the Kasoon clan, were grouped on one side and the liberals, headed by the doctor and his relatives of the local Champa Naula clan, were on the other. All interaction between the two groups ceased. When Ama’s only brother, the England-returned barrister, got married, she was not permitted to attend the wedding, but made to put on her heaviest jewellery and her finest clothes and shower flowers on the wedding procession from the rooftop as the wedding party passed the road below Kasoon.