Diddi

by Ira Pande

  Our attitude to Babu changed radically after we were married and visited Lucknow where he and Diddi spent their last years together. He was gentle and soft-spoken as always but also so tolerant of the noise generated by his high-spirited grandchildren that we had to pinch ourselves to remember that this was the father who hated us thumping up and down the wooden staircase at Priory Lodge. Now there were conversations between us and he enjoyed listening to our funny stories about our husbands and their families. Diddi and he were closer than we had ever seen them and she had become a devoted wife. When he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver—after a bad bout of hepatitis—she nursed him uncomplainingly and was all alone when he died. She rang up the relatives to inform them of his death and organized the money that would take care of the expenses of the funeral rites.

  In their last years, my parents were inseparable. Diddi no longer itched to go visit her mother and her Kasoon relatives and Babu’s support for, and quiet pride in, her writing meant more to her than we ever realized. When her children left to live their own lives, Diddi surrendered herself totally to Babu. And after his death, whenever she spoke of him it was with such love and respect that I often wondered whether I was wrong in remembering her Rudolf days. All his eccentricities and moodiness were now funny stories that she told our children— there was no trace of bitterness or any anger at all. My niece, Radhika, once brought a form for eye donation and asked Diddi to sign up. ‘Nonsense!’ Diddi replied. ‘If I die and go sightless to heaven, how on earth will I find Babu? Suppose I cosy up to the wrong buddha!’

  Then, I remembered a short story, called ‘Band Ghari’ (The clock that stopped working) that she had written in the early sixties, when we were at Priory Lodge. It has a thinly disguised autobiographical character, Maya, possibly Diddi herself. I could not trace the story until Binu located it for me in an old collection of her short stories and sent it across, long after I had completed this chapter. However, I knew immediately that it had to be included because it brings out the relationship that Babu and Diddi shared so clearly. More importantly, it mirrored my memories of Priory Lodge and the heavy atmosphere I remember so clearly even after so many decades that it was gratifying to know that I was not completely wrong in my assessment of that time. Babu’s moods, his sudden and inexplicable temper eruptions and the joy that we all felt when he went on a tour—all these are described by Diddi in moving, but humorous, detail.

  So by the time I put the finishing touches to this chapter it was evident to me that Diddi came to acknowledge a fundamental truth about Babu after he died: that her birth as a writer was prompted by Babu’s personality. She had embarked on her writing career as a defiant gesture against the suffocating laws of his family. Yet, as her popularity grew, she became more famous than him. Alarmed at this wholly new reversal of roles, she not only underplayed her place in the world, she tried hard to include his contribution in whatever she had achieved. For she knew—as her mother did too—that if Babu had left her to run wild, as my aunt Jayanti’s husband had done, Diddi would have become a charming eccentric who told delightful tales and nothing more. Ama once told Binu that Diddi was like a spirited filly: ‘It was only your father,’ she told Binu, ‘who could control her.’

  This is why, after Babu died in 1974, Diddi was completely devastated. For the first time in her life, she was left without a guiding male presence and she realized how valuable his steadying presence had been both in creating her into a responsible woman and giving the children a set of laws within which to develop their talents. In an article she wrote on him soon after he died, Diddi paid him a tribute that came straight from her heart. I reproduce just the opening of that article for not only is it very painful to see her naked sorrow as it develops, its idiom is difficult to reproduce in English without marring it. Yet it showed me clearly what I never understood when I saw Diddi and Babu inflict each other with cruelty in my childhood—that she loved him deeply and was dependent on him in a way we never understood. That without Babu, there would have been no Diddi.

  ~

  Babu

  Part of the article Diddi wrote on Babu’s death (1974):

  Where shall I start? From that balmy spring evening when he came to our haveli in Orchcha, which was festooned with garlands of mango-leaves and glittering with lights? Riding an elephant as he led the wedding procession, he was greeted at the gates by the court singers, Idiya and Koel. The evening hummed with the music of the traditional bannas as they welcomed my bridegroom.

  Shall I start with the first time he held my hand? Or with the day before his death, when he heard me weep quietly in the dark and groped to hold my hand in a silent goodbye? My pen hovers between the two memories. The first one recalls the joy with which I agreed to abide by all the rules of a good Hindu wife among the chant of the Sanskrit mantras. The second takes me cruelly to the cold, hard steps of the Sati Ghat in Haridwar to remind me where that journey ended and I stood alone under the sultry monsoon sky looking at the serene waters of the Ganga.

  I climb down the steps and wade waist deep into the cool waters of the river. Our family priest, Pandit Hariramji, avoids my eyes as his deep voice asks me to take a handful of the holy waters and say ‘Chitadahashamanartham’—with this water, I cool the embers of your funeral pyre. However hard I try, I cannot erase the sight of the funeral pyre and his body burning on it. My lips can hardly mumble the words.

  Another bullet is ready to pierce my ears. As Hariramji goes on with the chants, he suffixes pret (spirit) to the name that I loved above all. A dagger twists itself into my heart each time and I turn my gaze away from him and it falls on my son. His young face is steeped in a sadness he can hardly comprehend as he repeats the mantras after the priest. Each line hammers one nail after another into our hearts.

  It is time now for molten glass to be poured into our ears. ‘Take all his everyday belongings and throw them into these waters,’ we are told. My son bends to pick them from a bundle at our feet and I watch each one float away as it is dropped into the flowing river. The last to bob away are his spectacles. They raise their head from the waters and the sunlight glints on one lens as it tries to catch my eye, then gives up and quietly sinks.

  Across the river are the Shivalik hills and behind them the sky stretches in an endless sweep. The sound of the river and the waves lapping against our wet bodies come with one message: you are no more what you were. You are alone, looted of all your wealth, your identity. No woman can be given a harsher punishment than widowhood, can she?

  For me, his death has robbed me of not just a mate, a spouse but my finest reader, my most honest critic.

  ~

  Band Ghari

  A short story by Diddi (early 1960s):

  Maya lifted the green curtains in Chaya Jiji’s house and peered out—she could hardly see anything through the panes frosted over with moisture. A dense mist had smothered everything outside and all that was visible was the twinkle of street lights shining intermittently though the swirling moisture like glowworms. A sharp clap of thunder announced ominously that a strong downpour was on its way any minute now. ‘Jiji still hasn’t finished her rounds at the hospital,’ Maya thought. ‘Who knows when another expectant mother may decide to go into labour? The children must have come back from school by now.’ She dropped the curtain with an irritated twitch of her hand and called Jiji’s khansama. ‘Tell Jiji I came,’ she told him. ‘Tell her I waited a long time for her—I’ll come again tomorrow.’

  She stepped out into the clawing mist and fumbled her way homewards, cursing her sister who had let her down once again. She had been dying to see Love in the Afternoon and Jiji had let her down. There is just one more day of freedom left before the chains would be back on her ankles, she calculated, for Girish was returning on Wednesday. Let’s hope she can come tomorrow, Maya thought, and that some patient doesn’t mess up our plans.

  Her house was ablaze with lights—the drawing room ones as well. A chill wind enveloped Ma
ya’s thudding heart—O God, did this mean that he had returned earlier than he was supposed to? As soon as she let herself in, Sonia came running to her. ‘Mummy,’ she whispered conspiratorially, winding her little arms round her mother’s knees, ‘Papa is back from his tour and his mood is terrible! This terrible,’ she spread her little hands wide to show her mother how much. ‘Know what, Mummy,’ she went on, ‘he said, “Son of a pig” to the driver and…’

  ‘All right, enough,’ Maya shushed her hurriedly and disentangled herself.

  Suddenly, the bathroom door burst open and a lion emerged. ‘So, you are back, are you?’ the lion asked. ‘Here I come through storms and blizzards, driving across mountains and valleys in a jeep and what do I find? No wife, not even a cup of tea! So why don’t you go out again and have some more fun?’ His cruel eyes pinioned her where she stood.

  ‘I hadn’t gone anywhere special—just to Chaya Jiji’s,’ Maya replied as calmly as she could and put her bag down with trembling hands.

  ‘Very kind of you, I’m sure,’ Girish spat at her and settled down with the newspaper.

  Maya turned to go to the kitchen, hot tears of anger and humiliation blinding her as she groped her way. ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ two-year-old Atul clung to her, followed by Rostry, their Alsatian. Rostry’s tail waved so vigorously when he saw his mistress that it knocked over a huge brass flower pot and it keeled over with a resounding crash. Girish lowered his newspaper and kicked Rostry aside, ‘Get out, you stupid hound,’ he yelled. ‘Can’t a man expect two minutes of peace in this benighted house?’

  A deathly hush fell over everyone, including the slinking dog. The ayah came and scooped up Atul, muttering, ‘Is the sahib a bomb or what?’ to herself. Maya locked herself into the bathroom and Sonia took out a rough notebook and started drawing hideous faces in it. She wrote ‘Papa is a devil’ under the first one. The next one, an even more frightening monster face, had ‘Papa is a big fat devil’ under it. At this point, Pratul returned from his friend’s place, where he had gone to hear some pop music. He entered, wearing a new pair of tight drainpipe trousers, humming and whistling Lipstick on your coha-llar, his eyes blind to Girish behind the newspaper. Suddenly, his eyes fell on the brass flower pot on the floor and his horrified gaze turned to the chair where his father sat looking at him coldly.

  ‘Akkhha, welcome, Prince of Wales,’ Girish greeted him, smiling through tight lips. ‘So how many films have you seen? Is this wonderful song about lipstick from some new Hollywood hit?’

  ‘N-no, papa,’ the poor boy stammered. ‘It is from the Binaca Hit Parade.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Girish went on in the same voice. ‘Your poor father toils and sweats his life away so that he can hear his beloved son whistle Lipstick on your collar to him! Go,’ he thundered, ‘change out of these effeminate trousers immediately and wear something decent. How dare you whistle in front of your father? And obscene tunes like the one you just did? Bring your maths books and come back here! At your age, I used to recite Chakravarti’s algebra, not these obscene songs! I wish you knew your sixteen times tables as well as you know these Binaca Hit Parade tunes. I just don’t understand what we pay the school for! Useless teachers and even more useless students! These are the times we live in!’

  Pratul quietly left the room to change his trousers.

  Girish Chandra Sharma was the most respected and renowned engineer of the irrigation department. He was entrusted with the task of creating new roads in the most difficult mountain areas and his skill at using dynamite to blast new pathways was well known. He ran his department with an iron hand and drove everyone hard by setting an example of unflinching devotion to duty. His attitude towards his family was no different, yet he was unable to see how his strict discipline had gnawed away whatever love his children had for him. This was why whenever he went on a tour, the house burst into a frenzy of celebrations. Maya would dump Atul with the ayah and go off to her sister’s. The two of them would gossip for hours and when she came back after sunset to her own house, Maya wished her life was as uncluttered as Chaya Jiji’s. How lucky her sister was! No fractious children, no tetchy husband and black moods to deal with. And Chaya would think enviously of all that her sister had—three loving children and a handsome husband. I wish I was Maya, she would sigh. Chaya was plainer than Maya but what a brain she had! Maya, on the other hand, was pretty but had none of her sister’s self-confidence. Both the sisters had been brought up by their father, a renowned surgeon, and surrounded by love in their childhood. Maya was the spoilt one and her father had taken special care to choose a husband worthy of his pretty, but spoilt, younger daughter. His eye had fallen on Girish, a brilliant student who had just passed out of the Roorkee Engineering College with flying colours.

  Girish knew that his father-in-law respected his brilliance but had made it very clear to his wife that he would never be overawed by her rich and spoilt childhood. Both stood their ground, and whenever they argued, which was often, neither would yield an inch to the other. Maya would get emotional and tearful and Girish hated tears and tantrums. She loved bright colours but Girish would dampen her efforts immediately by saying something cutting. ‘If you had killed a mouse and painted your mouth with its blood, you might look even better,’ he once told her after she had put on some lipstick. Maya thought that bliss was nothing compared to gnawing at a leg of roast chicken and Girish was a strict vegetarian. If meat was ever served, he would leave the table and pretend he was too nauseated to finish his meal.

  Chaya was quite adept at extracting information from Maya. ‘This is the limit!’ she once said to a tearful Maya. ‘Is he a father or a monster? I’m going to speak to him tomorrow.’ Yet, secretly, she also knew that her sister’s relationship with her husband had a deep undercurrent of passion and that their sparring was part of the game of love that they played between themselves.

  For his part, Girish could not stand his sister-in-law. Ever since she had been transferred to the same town, he felt he had lost his wife to her. Their conversations were now reduced to grunts and monosyllables, and the iron hand of his discipline became even more pronounced to protect his turf from his sister-in-law’s constant intrusions. The result was that everyone forgot what it was like to laugh and joke and mealtimes were a trial. Ordinary arguments between the two became full-fledged wars and the children lost their sparkle. They now resembled toys that have been displayed for too long in a shop window. As the tensions of the house grew, they began to spill outside it. Memsahib would pick on the servants and sahib made life hell for everyone in the office: the clerks and peons trembled in their shoes whenever Girish summoned them.

  It was March—a month when all the accounts of the department had to be submitted to the government auditors; there were bills and files piled all over the office. And to top it all, Girish’s wife and children had shut him out of their lives. He realized the sympathies of the children lay with their mother and this made him madder still. Stung, he made life hell for everyone in the house. If the cook had made parathas for dinner, he would ask for a phulka; he hated moong dal but now would have nothing but watery moong dal every day. Thalis would fly off the table if the food was not to his liking and glasses flung if the water was not cool or warm enough. Maya, for her part, would answer by clanging pots and pans in the kitchen. Her frustration and irritation manifested itself in the angry clatter of tongs and ladles. Matters finally reached such a head that the entire home seemed in imminent danger of being swept away on the tide of their anger.

  Then, one day, as Maya was unfolding a packet of turmeric to put away in a bottle, her eye fell upon the newspaper packet that the grocer had put the spice in. ‘Death of a twenty-year-old woman’ read the headline. ‘Fed up with the constant bickering and domestic violence in her home, twenty-year-old Mrs Kher poured a bottle of kerosene oil and set herself aflame.’ Maya reread the news item: a minute of pain and then bliss forever from the eternal squabbling for Mrs Kher, she thought. Her eyes s
hone with excitement as she resolved to do exactly what that poor suffering woman had had the courage to do. That’ll teach Girish a lesson, she thought spitefully. Serve him right if he has to take care from now on of the dhobi and milk accounts. I’d like to see how he runs this house on the meagre allowance he gives me. Let’s see what he does if Atul gets up in the middle of the night burning with fever. But the mere thought of little Atul suffering weakened her resolve: Atul was her darling and every night he groped to hold the gold chain round her throat before he drank milk from his bottle. If she wasn’t there he wouldn’t sleep. She came back late from Chaya’s house one day and Atul threw such a tantrum that he developed a fever as a result. Sonia has to be hugged before she goes to school and bribed with small change to buy something for herself from the tuckshop. And her spoilt brat, Pratul! He claims to get constipated unless he reads comics in the loo, so Maya has to run her house on a deficit budget to buy him ten comics every month. As for Girish himself, for all his screeching and shouting, is there anyone but Maya who can pacify him?

  To hell with all of them, she thought defiantly. Her chest swelled with pride as she made up her mind and then tears filled her eyes as she imagined her death scene. Sonia will come back from school and not see her beloved mummy at the tea table with fresh snacks made for her. Her horrified eyes will go to the floor where her mother’s body lies covered by a shroud. The culprit Girish will be slumped in a chair and little Atul will throw his arms round her inert body and lisp, ‘Geth up, Mummy.’ At this point Girish will burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping and beat his chest wailing, ‘Why have you punished me, Maya? Why?’

  Maya smiled to herself as she collected a bottle of kerosene oil on her way to the bathroom. Then suddenly she remembered the new olive-green Kanjeevaram sari that Chaya Jiji had just gifted her. She hadn’t worn it even once! Shouldn’t she wear it for a last time today before she died? Maya washed her face, put on her new sari, tied her hair in an attractive bun and carefully put a pretty bindi. She looked at herself with the eyes of a martyr in the mirror and fell in love with what she saw there. I wish I could see Atul just once more, she said and tiptoed quietly to the drawing room. Atul was sitting there by himself and rolling a round box of boot polish on the floor. Rostry would run and pick it up and bring it back to his little master and the game would start again. Atul clapped his hands in glee each time his trusty dog came back with the box. Maya’s eyes filled up at this happy scene, but she steeled herself and tiptoed away. This time she must not falter in her resolve, she thought, and she picked up the bottle of kerosene oil and a box of matches and turned towards the bathroom. ‘Mummy,’ Pratul had said this morning as he went to school, ‘I need a fresh white shirt for this evening’s school debate. Please sew that missing button for me, will you?’ She pulled out the wretched shirt and sat down to put the missing button in. Little would anyone know that this was the last button she ever sewed on for anyone, she thought. Her eyes filled up again and she could hear Atul’s little hands clap and his gurgle of laughter as Rostry and he played their little game. She must stop this, she had to lock herself into the bathroom and…I can’t burn this beautiful Kanjeevaram sari, she thought. They could give it to Sonia when she got married. Why don’t I pull out some old sari and wear that instead? Maya drew a deep breath and got up once more when her ears pricked up as they heard the unexpected sound of Girish’s laughter. ‘What is this, you rascal? Have you seen your face, you monkey? Ha ha ha…’ She had yearned for so long to hear it that she had almost forgotten what it was like to hear him laugh. ‘Oh, my word! I can’t believe this…’ Girish’s voice went on and another guffaw followed.