by Ira Pande
Tahira watched their reunion numbly: who would ever understand or see the turmoil that was raging in her heart? This railway station, the kaner tree—had nothing changed here in the last fifteen years?
‘Come, my dear,’ Mamu said, ‘the car is waiting outside. It is a small district but this is Altaf ’s first posting. Inshallah, the next time we will go to a larger town.’ It was for the wedding of Mamu’s only son, Altaf, that Rehman Ali had come from Pakistan. Why on earth had destiny chosen to send Altaf as police inspector to this town, of all places in India, Tahira silently cursed.
When they reached home, the old grandmother went mad with joy. She hugged Rehman Ali and kissed him, then clasped Salma to her chest and forgot all about Tahira. ‘Ya Khuda! What is this game You have played? You have sent my Ismat back to me again!’ Both the daughters-in-law also echoed her, ‘Truly, Ammijan, this is really Ismat Apa all over again. But won’t you see the new bride’s face? Here, give her this gold coin.’
Quickly, the old lady handed the coin to Tahira and lifted her burqa. ‘Allah,’ she exclaimed, ‘this one is a beauty. Look at her— she is like a flame in a golden lamp.’ Tahira blushed and bowed her head. This was her first visit to her in-laws in the last fifteen years and even now they had managed to get a visa to visit India for three days with great difficulty. But how would she last through these three long days?
‘Go, child, go and rest in the room upstairs,’ Mamu Bitte’s wife suggested kindly. ‘I’ll send your tea there.’ Tahira was taken upstairs, while Rehman Ali settled down with Mamu to catch up with the family’s news. Salma was pulled into the grandmother’s lap and the old lady ran her hands over her face and head repeating wonderingly, ‘Ismat, my child, my dear child.’
In the privacy of her bedroom, Tahira flung off her burqa and opened the window. Then, she shrank back in horror— staring at her was the Lal Haveli. She quickly shut the window and stumbled to the bed. ‘Oh God, why have you decided to torture me like this?’ she sobbed. Who could she blame? She had known that the town that she was going to visit in India would open old wounds: how was her poor husband to know? The innocent Rehman Ali who worshipped Tahira and kept her in the lap of luxury—what did he know of her past ties? What could she say to him?
Tahira’s story was of one of the many tragedies the Partition spawned. She was just sixteen at the time, and then a girl called Sudha. Sudha had accompanied her cousin to a wedding in her uncle’s home in Multan when riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims. It was Rehman Ali who came like an angel to save her from the clutches of a horde of hoodlums who would surely have ripped her apart. They refused to let her go, saying that they were avenging what the Hindus had done to their women, but Rehman Ali managed to calm them down. A slim, dark youth, Rehman Ali took her under his wing and Sudha was saved as Tahira. Rehman’s young wife had been killed by just such a mob in Delhi; he had managed to escape but what remained was a broken and saddened shadow of his former self.
Sudha held out against Rehman’s proposal for a long time, but finally, on the condition that they would draw a veil of silence over her past, agreed to become his wife. Rehman Ali worshipped Tahira: if she had asked him to, he would have plucked the stars from the heavens and brought them to her. One smile from Tahira and Rehman Ali would be over the moon. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter and Rehman Ali forgot his past completely. He was convinced that Tahira had brought him good luck. Earlier, he had a small cloth shop in Karachi; today he was the owner of a departmental store, where attractive Anglo-Indian salesgirls sold imported stuff. The slim Rehman Ali filled out, acquired a paunch and his whole bearing changed. Even his speech had a trace of an American drawl now.
Decked with jewels, Tahira would toss restlessly on her huge carved bed. When March heralded the start of summer, Tahira was like a fish out of water, as she yearned for the fun-filled Holi of India. Where in Pakistan would she find the light-hearted banter that went with Holi? She remembered with pain one particular Holi and the pale pink muslin dupatta that Amma had trimmed with a golden border. Her young husband was reading some fat tome in his study and a lock of hair had fallen on his broad brow. A burnt-out cigarette dangled forgotten from one hand and as soon as he saw a flash of that pink dupatta, he bowed his head even deeper into the book—how shy he was with her! Sudha crept up silently behind him and rubbed colour on his cheeks, then darted back into the kitchen and began helping Amma with the gujiyas they used to make for the festival. Later, when her mother-in-law was not looking, she had poked a saucy pink tongue at him as he passed the kitchen door.
When she was leaving for Multan, how he had pleaded with her to not go: perhaps he had a premonition of what would happen if she went. He had come to see her off at the station— the same station she came to this morning—with its yellow kaner tree and its green railings. Sudha’s face was covered with a veil then, yet as the train was steaming out of the station, she had peeked from behind it to see him standing on the platform— that was the last time she saw him.
But Sudha was dead and she was now Tahira. She went to the window once again and opened it with trembling hands to see her father-in-law’s Lal Haveli once more. She could see the raat ki rani creeper on the terrace, and the third room upstairs where she had spent so many delicious nights in his arms. I wonder what he must be doing now, she thought; perhaps he also remarried and is playing with his children. Her eyes filled with tears as her heart considered these possibilities.
‘Tahira, where are you?’ she heard Rehman Ali call. She quickly wiped her face and started to wrestle with the bedding roll. One look at her tear-stained face and Rehman knelt near her, ‘Now, now, biwi, what happened to you? Is your head hurting? Go on, go and lie down. How many times have I told you that you mustn’t take on strenuous work, but who listens to me? There, lie down, and I’ll tackle the unpacking.’
Tahira was made to lie down on a velvet mattress that had silken sheets: someone ran to fetch her a cool drink. Salma began pressing her head and Bari Ammi, the grandmother, declared it was the evil eye for sure! Najma was dispatched to fetch some red chillies and lime to throw into burning embers and avert the effects of this. Someone said it may be palpitations of the heart—the preserve of gooseberries would help.
After showering her with their loving advice, they all finally left. Rehman Ali, lying next to her, snored gently. Quietly, Tahira tiptoed to the window and stood gazing at the haveli. She was like a parched soul who had suddenly found a lake of clear water after an aeon—no matter how much water one drank, the thirst could not be quenched. A light was burning on the third floor. Dinner was always served rather late in that house and she used to carry a glass of milk to his room after it. Even after all these years, she remembered his every habit just as clearly as she remembered the arithmetic tables she had learnt as a child. Sudha, her conscience smote her, what were you thinking of when you agreed to marry someone else? Couldn’t you have jumped into a well to save your honour? Had all the wells of Pakistan dried up? You may have given up your religion, but can you ever give up those traditions and rituals that were a part of you? You may have diverted the stream of your love but the chains that bind you to your past are unbroken. Every Holi, Diwali, Teej pierces your heart like a thorn. And why does Eid not fill you with the joy that others feel? There is your haveli, the home of your husband, go and fall at his feet and beg his forgiveness. Tahira stuffed her dupatta in her mouth to silence her sobs.
The bed groaned as Rehman Ali turned over in his sleep. Tahira tiptoed back to lie next to him.
The next day, the sound of shehnais floated up and the sound of rustling ghararas and dupattas scented with hina and motia filled the house. The police band was ready with the players smartly decked in their crisp uniforms and impressive turbans. All the women of the house would also go in the barat: young girls, with surma in their eyes and their rainbow-coloured wedding clothes, were falling over each other to get into the bus. A silken sheet had been drawn over the
windows to shield them from male eyes and the older women, collecting their paandaans took a more leisurely attitude to the boarding. Covered in a black burqa, Tahira hung uncertainly on the fringes of this merry crowd. It was just such an evening, she recalled, when she had come to the Lal Haveli as a bride, covered in a red chunari. And here she was today, shrouded in a black burqa, aware that its blackness had snuffed out her old life completely.
‘Did someone send a message to Vakil Sahib’s house?’ Bari Ammi called out and Tahira’s heart froze.
‘Yes, Ammi,’ Mamujaan replied. ‘He is not well and asked to be excused.’
‘Such a decent man,’ Ammi went on, as she opened a small box and stuffed a paan in her mouth. ‘His father is the town’s leading lawyer but he has no wife or child. I believe he lost his wife in the riots, so he decided to never marry again.’
It was a grand wedding and they returned with a doll-like bride. That evening everyone decided to go to see a film: the bride and groom, Bari Ammi, the girls and even the maids decked up for the outing. All except Tahira, who had a migraine—she felt she just did not have the energy to see some silly romantic rubbish. All she wanted was a darkened room and peace. She wanted to spend her last day in India all by herself.
The whole party left. Tahira got up, switched on the lights and stood in front of the mirror. Time and circumstances had not robbed her of any beauty—large eyes, flawless skin and a body made of marble. Who could say that she had a grown-up daughter? Tomorrow morning she would leave at four: could she not take just one look at the man who had taken a vow of celibacy after losing her? Her eyes shone like a naughty child’s as she considered this.
She quickly flung a burqa over herself and came out of the room. With rapid steps, she ran to the haveli and stood outside it, sweating. She remembered the staircase at the rear that led straight to the small window in his room. Her feet seemed to have turned to lead and she felt she would suffocate with the excitement as she climbed to the room. She was no longer Tahira, but a sixteen-year-old called Sudha, who used to sneak past her vigilant mother-in-law to slyly visit her husband and colour him on Holi. Rehman Ali and his distinguished Sayyid ancestry receded from her mind. As she stood on the last step, she shut her eyes and muttered, ‘O Baleshwar Mahadev, I will place this diamond ring at your feet if you allow me to see him without his knowing I am there watching him.’ How could Lord Baleshwar not have granted her wish—after all, it was so long since he had heard his favourite devotee’s voice! With tears almost blinding her, Sudha saw him. A grave man now, the love of her life was clad in a sparkling white pyjama and muslin kurta, looking just as he used to all those years ago. On his table was a picture of herself that her brother had once taken.
‘Run now, Tahira, run!’ it seemed to Sudha as if Lord Baleshwar himself was commanding her. She snapped out of her trance and Sudha became Tahira once again. She gazed at him one last time and, silently bidding him goodbye, ran to the small temple of Baleshwar Mahadev. How many boons she had sought here: today she would ask one last favour of him. Spreading her dupatta before his idol, she prayed, ‘Keep him happy, Bholenath. May he never be hurt.’ Then, she left her diamond ring at his feet and ran back.
Rehman Ali took one look at her pale face and immediately felt her pulse. ‘No fever, I hope? Where is your ring, my dear?’ He had given it to her on their wedding anniversary not long ago.
‘I think I dropped it somewhere,’ she replied wanly.
‘Don’t worry, love,’ Rehman Ali kissed her fingers tenderly. ‘As long as these fingers are mine, I’ll cover them in diamonds. I’ll order one from Teheran on our return.’
Tahira was gazing over his bent head at the Lal Haveli. Darkness was descending over it and the light in the third window was switched off. Tahira got up and shut the window.
Lal Haveli sank into darkness.
6
* * *
Binu
Iwas almost twelve before I discovered that Binu was not our ‘real’ sister. I must have been singularly foolish to never reflect on the fact that there was a striking lack of resemblance between us sisters. Minu and I shared the same colouring and features while Binu was entirely different: she had curly hair where ours was straight. Her eyes were larger, her skin darker and she was thin, whereas both Minu and I were plump. One of the first questions that most outsiders asked was why Binu looked so different from Minu and me. Diddi, however, was so good at deflecting these queries that both my brother and I were completely oblivious of the fact that Binu and we had different mothers.
When they were small, Diddi dressed Binu and Minu as twins and tried as hard as she could to make them look alike. I once asked Diddi who had given us our nicknames. Binu, she said. Binu insisted I call Minu ‘Minu’ because she was called Binu and you were called ‘Mau’ by her. (Apart from my father, no one else called me by that name, and Binu is still the only one who calls me ‘Mau’.) But who named Binu ‘Binu’ I persisted. Oh Binu came to me as Binu, Diddi smiled. And I went away satisfied that—like some self-realized saint—Binu was, and will always be, Binu.
I remember very clearly how I learnt the truth about Binu. I was fond of wandering over to the office section of Priory Lodge to tap on a typewriter or just scribble with some pencils and paper. The clerks were more than happy to take time off and I chatted for hours with them about their families. ‘So where is your stepsister?’ one asked me one day. ‘Stepsister? Who do you mean?’ I countered. ‘Oh, you mean you don’t know?’ he said and then shut up as someone else probably kicked him under the table. ‘My God, what a woman your mother must be!’ he muttered to himself.
I raced up the stairs and burst into my mother’s room. Diddi was, as usual, writing. ‘Di!’ I blurted out, ‘Is it true that we have a stepsister?’ She looked up from the page in front of her. ‘Who said that to you?’ I named the clerk downstairs in Babu’s office. ‘How many times have I told you not to go to the office?’ she said angrily. ‘Babu will be furious if he hears you went there. Go outside and play or read a book or something,’ she said.
But the cat was out of the bag. Later, of course, there were other people who dropped bricks about this subject and I came to accept that Binu was our half-sister. Strangely, this made all of us even fonder of her and I remember vowing that I would never hurt her by ever saying a cruel word. Minu and I, on the other hand, fought all the time. But Binu was the one person whom none of us ever had a problem with: when I look back, I realize she was a sort of surrogate mother to Micky and me and made up for Diddi’s absent-minded mothering by being loving and kind.
As we grew older and she accepted that we had found out her secret, Diddi would occasionally let slip a word or two about Binu’s mother. How they were friends before she was married to Babu. How when she and Jayanti came back from Santiniketan, Ganga borrowed a blouse of Diddi’s to copy its pattern. Yet nothing deeper or more painful ever escaped her lips. No confidences on what she felt when she was married to a man who had lost his wife a bare year ago, nothing about bringing Binu into her life or the first few days. Nothing.
After Diddi’s death, one day as Binu and I were sorting out her books, papers and photographs, I decided to ask Binu about something that had troubled me for some time. Isn’t it strange, I remarked to Binu, that there is no picture of your mother among Diddi’s things? Wait, said Binu mysteriously, I have something to show you. She took out an old tin box from her cupboard and out came a handful of pictures of Ganga and my father. Diddi gave this to me along with my mother’s jewellery when I got married, she told me. And we pored over the studio portrait of Babu and Ganga taken shortly after they were married.
I cannot tell you what it was like to see my father standing next to a wife who was not Diddi. The photograph blurred before me and then came back into focus again. I looked carefully at the face of the woman who had been an unspoken ghost in our lives for a lifetime. No one spoke of her and no one dared to ask what she was like. After I got married, I hear
d of her from my mother-in-law, who had been friends with her in their girlhood. She was a spirited young thing, I was told, and your father and she faced such opposition from his family before they were married! She loved eating red chillies and sipping hot tea with them. The day before she got married, she ate so many raw apricots that she got the runs and fainted halfway through the wedding. Your father had to carry her home…
I looked critically at the picture again. She died when she was not even twenty-five years old, my mind kept repeating, not even twenty-five. She was beautiful in the wistful and innocent way unique to all those who die young. Ganga was dark, she had deep pools of sadness for eyes and she was dainty and small. If she had lived on, would she have retained that delicate beauty or would she have bloated into a fat, ungainly shrew? Who knows, but what I came to realize was that this is the picture of Ganga that Babu must have frozen in his heart. ‘Forever will he love and she be fair…’ I remembered Keats as I looked away from her face to my father’s, and saw the love and pride in his eyes. His brooding silences and inexplicable black moods began to acquire a shape in my mind now.
It was at that moment, and for the first time, that I began to understand what it must have meant for Diddi to marry a man who still grieved for his first wife and what it must have meant to Diddi to remain second best all her life. Her eagerness to get Babu’s approval, a kind word, a compliment—all of this had a history that I was beginning to see for the first time.
At fifty-two, I was able to understand more than I could take at twelve. At twelve, when I first realized that Binu had lost her mother when she was one or so, my sympathies were for her. Now, they swung in the direction of a woman who was young, talented and a free spirit, popular among her friends and admired for her mind and voice at Santiniketan, who had to forget all she was the day she became my father’s second wife. In ‘Lal Haveli’, Tahira is forced to forget her past and adopt a new life; it was a pain that Diddi had known too.