by Ira Pande
Thankfully, he carried out neither of these threats—my ears are intact nor did he report me to my elder sister Jayanti. And I can proudly say that I can remember every bit of the grammar that I learnt from him.
Often he would invite the whole class over to his home to stargaze. ‘Go run, all of you,’ he’d dismiss us. ‘I have to meet Gurudev (or, I can’t teach at this hour). Come after dark to my cottage—we’ll hold our class there.’ I don’t know how teachers today would react to such unorthodox methods and timetables. But I tell you we loved it. We followed our gurus wherever they went like enchanted children behind a Pied Piper. That is why I cannot understand why we hear of students who hold demonstrations against their teachers and, worse, cheat at exams or threaten to stab them, and force them to retire before their time. Perhaps the definition of a guru is not the same as it was for us.
What will never change though is the memory of those mobile classes and those magical hours we spent stargazing with Panditji. He pointed out the stars to us, and one constellation after another took shape before our eyes. ‘There is the Big Bear,’ he said, tracing a circle with his thumb on a palm. He called it Sapt Rishi, the Seven Sages.
‘Where, Panditji?’
‘Arrey, this idiot Kusum can’t see her own nose on her face. There, you ass!’ he would point it out again.
Then he showed us the magical Milky Way. My little son recently told me how the Nainital Observatory had acquired the latest telescope. ‘You know how huge it is?’ he tried to tell me. I nearly laughed as I watched him struggle to explain. How could I puncture his earnest enthusiasm by telling him that the ‘telescope’ that had showed us the night sky was better than the best that money could buy. As Panditji pointed out one constellation after another, we were convinced that all the shining stars in the sky bowed as they introduced themselves to us, and became our friends for life. We had no telescope, no complicated instruments: just one crazy astronomer whose deep voice and expressive hands described the world of stars to us. Lost in the vastness of the sky and Panditji’s stories, we often forgot the time, and remembered that we were hungry only when we heard the gong chime out the summons for dinner.
The next scene: a grammar class with Panditji. Today, he has brought Tagore’s new novel Char Adhyaye to class. He read it aloud to us and this went on for several days. One day he came across the line Deke ano Balukdangar Pandit Hajariprasad ke (Go fetch Pandit Hajari Prasad Dwivedi from Balukdangar, the kindergarten) and guffawed over it for a long time. I must tell you about Panditji’s guffaw.
Just as a jeweller knows the difference between a genuine and a cultured pearl, I can tell a heartfelt guffaw from a polite titter. The true guffaw rings out over the room and flows from the heart like a natural waterfall. And like the waterfall, it sprays all who stand near it with joy. Panditji had that kind of pure laugh. Perhaps it has changed now, but as far as I know, a true pearl does not age. Panditji’s whole body would shake with mirth when he laughed. When his laughter floated over the Ashram, it spread a smile over every face. As our classes were held in the open air, every head would turn to his class at the sound of Panditji’s guffaw. It was as if a multitude of bells tied to a single string were set in motion and a ripple of happiness ran through the entire Ashram.
‘So, Kamla,’ he said one day. ‘I saw your brother wearing a red loincloth exercise at the crack of dawn today,’ and roared with laughter. The rest of us laughed along with him, tickled to death at the thought of someone in a red loincloth doing his morning workout.
Panditji once decided to grow a beard and all of us got after him. ‘Chhi, chhi, Panditji! It is disgusting. You look like some sadhu baba—you’ll have to get rid of it!’ Poor Panditji tried explaining that he had boils on his face that made shaving painful but no one was ready to hear any excuse. I smile as I remember how easy it was to bully him.
And this was a man regarded as a colossus in his field! I wonder what he made of this spoilt class that argued with him on the merits of a beard.
A few years ago, he took time from his busy lecture circuits to visit me. He was the same—the same delightful smile, the same shabby horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. The only thing missing was his carelessly draped shawl. I had sent him a book I had written on Santiniketan and he had replied: ‘I read the book you sent me. You have brought alive the Santiniketan days so vividly that they haunted me for a long while. Your little book has been able to paint a picture of the Ashram that many scholarly tomes have failed to do. You have the marvellous gift of bringing alive an era through personal anecdotes.’
That book never won any awards, although my publisher was sure it would win some important ones. Yet, believe me, that letter from Panditji means more to me than any award. His letter gave me the courage to write regularly and henceforth I never let any critical review or comment cow me down: Panditji’s certificate gave me an armour that I wear proudly. Yet now as I sit down to paint a portrait of my guru, I feel curiously tongue-tied. A kaleidoscope of images flash past my eyes: Panditji rocking and reading the ‘Sundar Kand’; roaring with laughter over the sight of Kamla’s brother in a red loincloth at dawn; threatening to pull my ears from my jaw; Panditji’s fat finger pointing out the stars to us. And now, there is another Panditji, one who wears a silk kurta and emerges from a sleek car. How do I focus my camera? Every good photographer looks for a good background before composing a portrait. My camera falters as I try to locate the one that I search for in vain: Panditji in his little thatched cottage in the Ashram, wearing crushed clothes and a shawl carelessly thrown over his shoulder. Under his armpit he carries an orange attendance register with Viswabharati stamped on it.
He had once written to me: ‘How can I ever forget my students? All you little children stand eternally in front of me. How can I ever forget you? If I have been busy and not kept in touch, how can you say I have forgotten you?’ Then he quoted me a poem of Tagore’s:
‘If a traveller cannot see the stars in the sky or the flowers that bloom along his path, can you say that he has forgotten them? They are the fragrance of his soul: they are the memories that fill his loneliness with joy. Is this forgetfulness?’
Gurupalli filled my soul with sweetness; its fragrance fills my loneliness with joy.
How can I ever forget you, Panditji?
4
* * *
Diddi and Babu
Diddi finished her BA from Viswabharati University in 1943 and returned to Almora: she had a BA honours degree in philosophy. This was soon after her father had died and the family had lost its money. In fact, the last year of her education at Santiniketan had been partly funded by my aunt Jayanti, who was teaching there, and partly by Hamid Bhai, an old family friend from Rampur, whom Diddi regarded as her true brother till his death in the late seventies.
The golden age of Kasoon was over and Ama battled hard to bring up her brood of children without any support from her relatives. There was a small pension from Rampur but how far that went is anyone’s guess. I once asked Ama what was stored in a huge wooden chest in her room. ‘Oh that,’ she waved at it carelessly, ‘that was for the silver vessels I was given when I got married.’
‘Where are they now?’ I asked. Ama laughed and pointed to her round stomach—‘Here!’ she twinkled. Only one silver thaal remained as a token from that collection, and her gods sat on it in the puja room.
My uncle Tribhi, himself barely out of Santiniketan, soon found himself a job in Tikamgarh as the private secretary to the maharaja of Orchcha and left Almora with his young bride. He had been recently married off to the sweet and submissive Kumaoni girl Daya, who Lohaniji had once been sent to approve and was my mother’s lifelong friend and confidante. It was on her persuasion and partly because Diddi could not bear to burden her young brother’s family with an additional presence that, within a year of her return from Santiniketan, she agreed to marry my father, a young widower called Shukdeo Pant.
The story of Diddi and Babu, as we
called our father, is a labyrinth that is dark and full of shadows.
My father’s first wife, Ganga, and the story of their love for each other could be straight out of an eighteenth-century romantic novel. He was a young and earnest student, terribly reserved and quiet. A brilliant student, he had topped the Allahabad University in chemistry and taken the ICS exam. Everyone expected him to sail through it but he did not make it and was forced to take up a job as a schoolteacher. Worse, he fell violently in love with a beautiful and spirited girl called Ganga. When he told his father he wanted to marry her, the heavens fell. Are you mad, his father exploded in anger. She has tuberculosis! In those days, TB was the scourge of Kumaon and there was hardly a house that had not been ruined by it. Those who could afford it moved the patient to a sanatorium to save the rest of the family but, invariably, such stories had tragic ends and there was virtually no Kumaoni family where a daughter or daughter-in-law had not lost her life to tuberculosis.
My father apparently rode out his father’s anger and married Ganga anyway. They say she fainted at the wedding itself and was carried over the threshold in my father’s arms. I try and imagine the stir this must have created in the Almora of those days. Husbands and wives were never allowed to show any affection for each other in public and touching your wife was scandalous beyond belief. Within a year, they had a daughter, my half-sister Binu, and in a few months, Ganga was so ill that she was shifted to a sanatorium in Gethiya, near Nainital. However, neither my father’s devoted nursing nor the doctors in the sanatorium could save her. Ganga died within two years of marrying Babu, leaving behind a small daughter. The child, named Veena, but always called Binu at home, was sent to live with her mother’s family in Nainital and my grandfather began to pester my father to remarry. A winter’s night and a man’s youth, Diddi writes in ‘Lati’, stretch endlessly. Perhaps for this reason, or more probably because there was a small child to bring up, my father married Diddi in May 1945. My sister Mrinal was born exactly nine months later, in February 1946.
Typically, Diddi hardly ever spoke to us about why she submitted so tamely to a match that must have shaken her life. Nor did she ever speak of the hardships she must have endured as she and Babu came to terms with each other’s personalities and she adjusted to life in a conservative Brahmin home. Babu’s salary was pitiful and Diddi, never a careful housekeeper, struggled hard to make ends meet. Years later, when she had worked out the bitterness from her system, she told us funny anecdotes from those days. The hardships she reserved to narrate in her novels and stories.
Diddi went to Tikamgarh to be with her family when her first child was due. It was Ama who insisted that Binu be brought back from her grandparents and be brought up along with Diddi’s own child so that the two would grow up together. Thus, Babu was sent to Nainital soon after he and Diddi were married to collect Binu from her grandparents. Years later, Diddi told me in a rare mood of confiding of a scene reported to her by someone who was travelling on the same train. Apparently, Babu was standing holding Binu’s hand at the platform on Kathgodam waiting for the train to arrive. Binu was distracted by a basket of chickens that was to be loaded on the train and kept pointing to them to draw Babu’s attention. Babu, however, stood looking at the far horizon, oblivious of the child tugging at his hand. His mind must have been seething with so much: painful memories of Ganga, fears of the future, despair at his financial condition. The unbearable poignancy of the scene haunts me, as it must have haunted Diddi and impelled her to tell me all those years later and in it, I think, lay Diddi’s protective attitude to Binu. Till the very end of her life, Diddi would never gift Minu and me anything without gifting it first to Binu. In her will, she left a special bit for Binu alone and it speaks immensely of their mutual generosity that Binu promptly shared it among us all.
Binu was a sickly, rickety child and no wonder as her mother was almost riddled with TB when Binu was in her womb. Like any child, confused after being tossed from one house to another, she was sulky and wilful as well. A photograph in my mother’s album shows Binu when was about five and Minu about three. Minu is happily cuddling a rabbit while Binu, dressed in an identical frock, wearing her mother’s necklace with a bindi on her forehead, scowls into the camera. That photograph speaks volumes for the kind of tough task that Diddi had on her hands. ‘Look Gaura,’ Ama had told her, ‘bringing up someone else’s child is like trying to eat the flesh of your palm but promise me you will never make a difference between your own children and your stepchild.’
Diddi rose to the challenge and the whole Kasoon clan entered into a conspiracy of silence. Not only was Binu’s mother’s name never mentioned in our presence, I never saw a picture or heard of her until much, much later.
Soon after Minu was born, my parents moved to Nainital where Babu was appointed the chemistry teacher in the newly opened Birla Vidya Mandir, a public school set up by the Birla Educational Trust. Diddi’s foster-sister, Munna, was by now the matron there and Diddi had her hands full with looking after two small girls and taking care of her father-in-law, who died soon after they came to Nainital. I arrived in 1951, and by then Babu had joined the government service and was back in Almora posted as the District Inspector of Schools. Three girls and a small salary—as if this was not enough to crush her spirit, there was the clash of two strong temperaments as Diddi and Babu adjusted to each other.
When I look back, it is so clear that the two of them were polar opposites in many matters: she was fun-loving, gregarious and outgoing. He was quiet, moody and introverted. She was a spendthrift, he careful with his money. She hated housework and the drudgery of the kitchen, and never sewed or embroidered. Babu, on the other hand, wanted her to be the kind of housewife that other women of her generation were— efficient and thrifty in household matters. Diddi loved meat and non-vegetarian food while Babu was a fastidious vegetarian. Diddi was fond of telling us that apart from a kite, she had eaten everything that flew and, but for a cot, everything with four legs. She chewed the bones and sucked at the marrow of the bones whenever meat was cooked, slyly watching the disgust on his face. She walked in the house with wooden clogs on— knowing that Babu was allergic to noise of any kind. He hated strong perfumes—Diddi loved burning incense sticks that you could smell from a mile. Violent arguments took place and ended in long silences. I think she took a peculiar pleasure in provoking him and would deliberately do all the things he most hated to prove that he could never, ever, crush her spirit. Oddly—or perhaps, predictably—she became a vegetarian after his death. She would still cook delicious kababs and meat curries for us, but would never touch a morsel of meat herself. No matter how tempted she was—she once told Minu that she could kill for a tin of sardines—she never broke that vow of abstinence she imposed on herself after Babu’s death.
Despite their volatile rows and her deliberate defiance, Diddi’s dependence on Babu was pathetic. A frown from him diminished her and no matter how much she grumbled and resisted his laws, she submitted to his will each time. Babu was the archetypal stoic: when faced with stress, he lapsed into a brooding silence. Looking back at our childhood, I can count scores of occasions when Babu would sink into one of his black moods, to remain silent and uncommunicative for days, weeks almost, and no one knew what had triggered it off. When that happened, we pussy-footed around him, ran away from any chance of an encounter and hid behind books and homework to avoid him and the thick atmosphere between our parents.
Diddi made it no easier by letting us know, without ever referring to the cause of Babu’s mood, how miserable she was. She would go around with a red nose (and we privately called her Rudolf, after the red-nosed reindeer), with a tragic air of injured innocence. In the manner of all children who opt for desperate remedies, I remember wishing that one of them would die and then dream about the tragic consequences were that to happen, and imagine our heroic handling of it. To date, nothing upsets me more than a moody silence and my nervous chatter is a habit cultivated by the oppre
ssive silences I have heard in my childhood. I was deeply envious of children whose parents were happy and spoke lovingly to each other, of those families that went on holidays together and of homes where money was not the cause of thick silences.
However, I can also now see how wrong it was of Diddi to load her misery on us, for even though she never spoke directly of it, her unhappiness was evident to all of us. An offshoot of this was that Babu became a figure of fear to us children: a man to be kept at an arm’s distance. We created our relationship with him by following the lead he showed us: if he was happy, we smiled; if he was silent, we kept out of his way. And how we looked forward to the times when he went out of town on a tour! As soon as Babu stepped beyond the gate, a collective whoop of joy would ring through the house. Someone would switch on the radio and put on loud film music, we would jump up and down on Babu’s bed and heave a collective sigh of relief that the source of our tension had vanished. For the next few days, our house was full of fun and laughter. All this ended as soon as it was time for him to return from his tour. Years later, when I saw the film Sound of Music for the first time, I understood perfectly the terror that Christopher Plummer struck in the hearts of his children. Unfortunately, my mother was no Julie Andrews and contributed substantially to isolating Babu from his children. I can now see him as a lonely man, unable by his taciturn nature to come close to us or participate in our childhood. His moody silence was a concession of defeat to a woman whose vivacious personality and quick wit had granted him the respect of his children but left him out of the circle of love they shared with their mother.