by Ira Pande
‘Why, what has he done, Papa?’ Sonia and Pratul ran and then the sound of delighted laughter rang through the house. Maya threw the bottle away and ran to see what had happened. The clock showed two in the afternoon—damn! Had it stopped? She took it close to her ear and, sure enough, there was no ticktock to be heard. The children and Girish had come back from school and the office and she hadn’t even got the tea going, she realized. At this point, her family walked into the room in a curious procession. Perched on his father’s shoulders was little Atul, behind them were Sonia and Pratul and the rear was brought up a grinning Rostry, his tail waving wild circles of delight.
It was as if an overcast sky was suddenly pierced by bright sunshine and Maya’s sad face lit up at what she saw. Mr Atul Kumar Sharma, his face painted with circles of black boot polish, wore a huge grin that displayed both his teeth to his admiring audience. Maya looked at her husband’s face and silently held out a treaty. As soon as he saw his mother, Atul began to fidget to reach her. Maya spread her arms wide to receive him and accidentally touched her husband’s shoulder.
Girish quietly pinched her arm, unseen by the children. ‘Oof,’ she said in mock anger and began to kiss Atul. ‘How foolish Chaya Jiji is!’ she thought silently. ‘She calls my husband an unfeeling bastard. If only she could see him now, she’d never say this again.’
‘What time is it, Sonia?’ said Girish. ‘I have a meeting at quarter past four.’
Sonia ran to see the clock. ‘O Papa,’ she came back laughing, ‘this clock is a gone case. Do you know what time it says? Two o’clock!’
Maya looked at the clock in gratitude. She felt that there could be nothing more beautiful in the world than the stilled hands on its face.
5
* * *
Priory Lodge
My brother, Muktesh, was born in Almora in 1954. The joy and happiness that his birth brought to my parents is a distinct memory even though I was just three at the time. He was born in the afternoon and Tara Didi, Ama’s Sancho Panza, came running in to announce the great tidings to the waiting family. Ama blew a conch shell to thank the gods for finally giving my mother a son, and Tara Didi caught hold of me and smashed a lump of jaggery on my back in gratitude for bringing a brother behind me. From that day on, my brother was everyone’s favourite child.
A few months later, Babu was transferred to Lucknow and we left Almora to go to the plains. It was our family’s first step outside the secure cocoon of the mountains and the Kasoon clan.
Lucknow is a hazy memory: I remember a small flat in River Bank Colony, hot summer nights spent on the terrace and the desolate ruins of the Residency that we could see from our balcony. Then, Babu was sent by the government to Canada and the US on a study trip and for the first time since she was married, Diddi got a chance to be herself without Babu or her Kasoon family to cramp her style. It was roughly around this time that Diddi started writing short stories under the pseudonym of Shivani—a synonym of her name, Gaura. She also took up occasional work with the All India Radio, often gave talks, and wrote features and radio plays. Binu was sent to learn music at the Bhatkhande Academy and Minu to learn Bharatanatyam. I was enrolled at La Martiniere’s School for Girls and it pleased Diddi no end that all of us excelled at all these various places. Binu sang so beautifully that she was often on air on children’s programmes and Minu was the star performer at her school. So in the year that Babu was away in Canada Diddi quickly started off what she had been itching to do for a while: give her children a taste of life beyond school and the family.
River Bank Colony was a U-shaped complex of flats and we soon got accustomed to living within earshot of our neighbours’ lives. After the isolated life in the cantonment house in Almora and the noisy family at Kasoon, living in such close proximity to families that we were not related to was a new and exciting experience. The flat on our left was shared by three bright young women—Leela Khazanchand, Leela Joseph and Sushmi Matthews. Leela Khazanchand’s father was our family doctor in Almora and later the director of the famous Bhowali Sanitorium; Leela Joseph taught at the Mahila College; and Sushmi Matthews was a senior scientist at the Central Drug Research Institute. Their flat was full of comings and goings and had an aquarium with goldfish that fascinated me. Sushmi Diddi nicknamed my brother Micky and we kept in touch with them for several years later. In the flat on the other side lived the Chaturvedi family, many brothers who were doctors and an old mother everyone called Chachi. Sandwiched between them, Diddi’s family swung its eyes from one house to another as if a giant tennis match was in progress. One of the Chaturvedi doctors fell in love with one of the young girls on the other side and Chachi went into convulsions over the prospect of Christian blood polluting her pure Brahmin bloodline. Upstairs was a family where someone played the sitar and Diddi named them Da-da-da-dyaoon after the scales that hit the air each morning. Diddi’s fertile mind constantly filed away incidents, characters and romances and she revelled in the rich lode of stories that life in River Bank Colony provided her. For years she would use these days as plots or characters.
We came to Nainital in 1958, a return to Kumaon after four years in Lucknow. Our new home was called Priory Lodge, a huge gothic pile with so many rooms that I don’t think anyone ever counted them. One part of the house was ours and the rest belonged to Babu’s office that smelt of old files, wood smoke from the sigris to warm the clerks, and their bidis. Diddi found out that it had once been run as a club by an old Englishwoman and she and her khansama had died in a fire that broke out. Sometimes, Diddi claimed, she came with her khansama to walk over her old rooms and had been spotted by our servants. She promptly christened this resident spook Miss Perry, after a particularly strict teacher in my brother’s school who used to beat the boys with a feather duster.
Priory Lodge was situated in a thickly wooded area of Nainital called Ayarpata where Jim Corbett once lived. His old house, Guerney House, was close by and a cemetery with tumbledown graves dating from the Raj was my favourite Saturday afternoon haunt. With a makeshift broom made of twigs and branches, I used to sweep the old graves and place flowers on them, much to Diddi’s amusement. Like all old cemeteries, this one, too, had its share of sorrowful epitaphs—a child who had died in infancy; a young officer who was done in by the tropical climate of India; and a whole family of missionaries, whose graves lay in a cluster at the far end. All around our house were the estates of the erstwhile royal families of Uttar Pradesh and Diddi was delighted to be surrounded once more by the kind of life that she had seen in her childhood. Her novels and short stories of the time now had characters that present a vignette of life in the hill stations in the fifties, when India had just become a republic and the old princely states were disbanded. The estates had names such as Vienna Lodge, The Retreat, Fern Cottage, Strawberry Lodge, Ellesmere and The Hive. They lay shut most of the year and came to life when the ‘season’ started in May. Suddenly, the hills came alive with exotic people from the plains who came to their summer retreats to escape the dreadful heat of the North Indian plains.
Vienna Lodge had an old dowager maharani whose companion, Miss Brown, and private secretary, Mr Joshi, were characters straight out of a Raj film. Diddi became friends with them and we soon gained access to the library at Vienna Lodge. Mr Joshi once gave me the Complete Works of Somerset Maugham as a gift and my brother a beautiful wooden box of oil paints. Below their estate on the same hill was The Retreat where a Rana family came from Nepal every summer.
Their house remained as quiet as a tomb all morning and came alive from about noon, when the Rana awoke from his drink-induced stupor. Bright young maids, perhaps his concubines, fluttered around him like butterflies as they massaged his limbs and fed him his breakfast from a huge silver thali in the sunny forecourt. We would hang shamelessly from our veranda that overlooked their lawn and watch the tableau that was being enacted on the facing hill. Above Priory Lodge was Fern Cottage and a ferocious Sikh grandee, called Tikka Raja, took re
sidence here in summer. He had hooded, puffy eyes and his face twitched constantly, making it even more grotesque. Once, when he came to call on my parents, we were summoned to the drawing room and a fit of giggles broke out among us as he turned to us, his face twitching in all directions. ‘What charming and pretty daughters you have,’ he told Diddi. ‘Always smiling—I like that. My sons are always scowling!’ If only he knew the source of our smiles!
Every evening, these exotic neighbours would dress to their teeth, the men in expensive suits and their wives in glittering jewels and silks and chiffons. They would then be loaded into their dandies (litters that were carried on the shoulders of their liveried staff) and wind their way down to the Boat House Club, to drink, play cards and drink again. How we longed to go there ourselves but, of course, our parents were different. So while everyone went to the flats to hear the band that played lilting music that floated up in tantalizing snatches on the wind that blew across the lake, we sat over our books. Babu disapproved of going down to the town except once a week. And none of us dared to challenge his writ.
My aunt Jayanti’s sons, Pushpesh and Muktesh, came to live with us in the early sixties and the six of us still believe that the time we spent together at Priory Lodge then was the most delightful time of our lives. Diddi ran her house pretty much like Ama ran Kasoon. Much to my father’s chagrin, the run of the house was given to the servants while Diddi wrote stories and novels she read out aloud to us each evening. Babu’s office had a vast collection of old journals and back issues of The Listener and the old Kumaon Gazette and they provided us with hours of reading material. Thankfully, we were all voracious readers and devoured everything that came our way and something about the liveliness that accompanied Diddi wherever she set up camp encouraged us to write and perform plays, bring out house magazines and become the epicentre of the neighbourhood’s cultural life. Almora, Kasoon, the mad aunts and uncles soon receded from our childhood and significantly, even though Almora is a mere two hours from Nainital by road, we never once visited it in all the sixteen years we were in Nainital. The umbilical cord was snapped firmly and we were now on our own.
What I remember most from that time was a lack of money— Diddi herself had two sets of saris for going out and a couple more for everyday wear. We had our school uniforms and two sets each. We read from second-hand books in school and made our shoes last as long as they could before we dared to ask Babu for a new pair. I was so accustomed to hand-me-downs that I soon accepted that school textbooks would be handed down from cousins and friends and only in special cases could we ask for a new set. Most of my textbooks, thus, came down to me from yobs who lavishly added rude margin notes and lewd illustrations. I tried hard to cover my dog-eared textbooks by keeping them wrapped in clean brown-paper covers. One incident from that time still makes me laugh. Our Hindi textbook had a poem by the well-known poet Sumitranandan Pant. I was asked one day by my Hindi teacher, Miss Sood, who knew my mother wrote in Hindi, ‘Ira, is Sumitranandan Pant a relative of yours?’ Since my name was Pant and I was aware that almost all Pants, Pandes and Joshis were related to each other, I looked into the open book in front of me: whoever had used it before me had added a bindi and earrings to a hideous sketch of the poor poet, known for the effeminate ringlets he sported. It was impossible to tell the sex now, so I assayed a wild guess. ‘Yes,’ I replied confidently. ‘She is my aunt.’ Diddi had a good laugh when I told her about it and related this story to everyone who came home. In fact, it became a kind of party piece and I was asked to narrate it, mimicking Miss Sood’s voice, to guests, who always roared with laughter at the punchline. By picking out the absurd and teaching me to laugh at it, she inoculated me from any false sense of shame at not being as rich as the rest of my schoolmates. It was a lesson I never forgot.
All around Priory Lodge were the summer cottages of the rich and privileged. We saw their lavish lifestyles from our veranda and created stories around these glimpses into another world. Yet I cannot recall being ashamed of what we did not have. On the other hand, since we all did outstandingly well at school, we had a healthy contempt for those who had rich parents but miserably boring lives. Their neat houses had no resident spooks and, above all, they did not have a mother like Diddi. In fact, parents from the neighbouring houses sent their children to our house every evening when Diddi sat with us over our homework. Diddi could make the most boring lessons interesting: she had stories about characters in history that fixed them permanently in our minds; devised clever sutras to help us learn dates and timelines; and helped us with our compositions and essays. Even later, when she came to visit us, her grandchildren used to ask her to help out with their holiday homework. One of the children had to once write an essay in Hindi on ‘The autobiography of a crow’ and just could not get started. It was Diddi who suggested that she try a variation of the Ugly Duckling story and make one up on how this crow was a foundling left by a koel in a crow’s nest and how it always puzzled her that her voice was so different from that of her siblings. Thrilled with this tip, the child wrote a great essay and was rewarded later for it. Diddi supervised all our school work except maths. Maths was Babu’s domain and how we dreaded those sessions. I wonder why, though, for he never raised his voice and, unlike Diddi, never smacked us. Yet something about him so pulverized my brain that I would get the easiest problems wrong.
The children’s room—a huge draughty hall on the other side of the house—had six beds for the six of us and lively games were played into the night. Going to pee at night was a nightmare because the way to the loo was through the rooms haunted by Miss Perry. So whenever one child got up, the rest of us followed in a file lest we were forced to make the journey alone later. My cousin Pushpesh had created a Sanskrit mantra that he claimed would protect you from ghostly visitations if you recited it loudly. So the six of us would march in a procession, with Pushpesh leading us, torch in hand, and recite: Pant putt mutt / Visarjan tarr-tarr sutt (The Pant children are going to pee and as they pee tarr-tarr, please protect us!). We were poor, but as Diddi often reminded us later, like the Cratchits, we were happy and united in our poverty.
Perhaps it was the lack of money that was Diddi’s motivation for taking up writing as a profession because she wrote furiously all the time. There is one story, among the earliest ones she published in Dharmayug in the fifties, called ‘Lal Haveli’ (The Red House) that has a haunting sense of regret for a life left behind. I think it has a subtext we all missed when we read it all those years ago.
~
Lal Haveli
A short story by Diddi (late 1950s):
Tahira glanced at her husband sleeping on the adjoining berth, sighed and turned over. Rehman Ali’s paunch, swaddled under a blanket, was vibrating in consonance with the train’s rhythm. Three hours to go. Tahira looked at the diamond-studded wristwatch on her slim wrist and cursed the damned thing. How slowly its hands moved! She hadn’t been able to sleep a wink all night. She looked at her husband again and then at her daughter—both were dead to the world. Then a sudden attack of panic gripped her—whatever had she been thinking of when she agreed to her husband’s proposed trip to India? She could have easily made some excuse and wriggled out. Time and a resolute blanking of memory had barely healed her wound— what had possessed her to scratch it open again?
At last the train steamed into the station and Tahira quickly covered her face with her silk burqa. Rehman Ali busied himself with getting their luggage sorted out, then helped his wife so tenderly out of the compartment that you would think she was a china doll that may break. Salma had jumped out first and a short, fat man huffing along the platform, cap in hand, had swept her up in his arms. Then he turned to Rehman Ali and embraced him tightly; their eyes were streaming with tears. So this is Mamu Bitte, the short uncle, Tahira realized, named bitte after his diminutive form. Mamu turned to Salma and kissed her: ‘She is the replica of Ismat, Rehman,’ he declared, caressing her face, ‘those features again, the same
face. Ismat’s gone, so Allah sent us another Ismat.’