Diddi

by Ira Pande

  Why did you never put a picture of your mother in your home after you got married, I asked Binu. I just never could: I never knew her, Binu said simply. Diddi was the only mother I knew and I could never get myself to put my mother’s picture as long as Diddi was alive or ever find the courage to ask Diddi or anyone else what my mother was like. I had decided very long ago to respect the silence that she left in our lives. And now that Diddi is gone, this is just a picture, she said, and put the photos back in the box.

  And yet, Diddi did write of Ganga and my father. In a poignant short story, published in the sixties, called ‘Lati’, Diddi told her readers the truth about the love of Babu’s life.

  ~

  Lati

  A short story by Diddi (late 1960s):

  The sharp rays of the sun pierced the tall deodars stooping over the roof of Gethiya Sanatorium and bounced off its shining windowpanes. The patients inside opened their eyes, blinking at the brightness of the morning sun and, for a brief while, their wan faces lit up.

  Today, when tuberculosis is considered almost as harmless as a bad bout of the flu, it is difficult to describe how once the mere mention of its name sent shivers down your spine. In those pre-penicillin days, the sanatorium at Gethiya was in greater demand than the even more famous Bhowali Sanatorium. Its cluster of cheery red roofs nestled in the hills above Kathgodam looked like a bright bouquet buried among the deodars.

  Captain Joshi had paid double the normal fee for Bungalow Number Three to personally nurse his young wife, Bano. He placed an armchair next to her lounger in the veranda and would spend the whole day at her bedside, filling her temperature chart, or carefully measuring out her medicines before handing them tenderly to her. Their daily romantic tableau was a source of great pleasure to the patients in the neighbouring cottages, who watched these lovebirds with envy and indulgence. There seemed no end to the man’s patience: he’d even brush his wife’s hair! And occasionally, when he sang Pahari folksongs to her, his voice reminded them of the sound of the deep cowbells they’d heard in their childhood. ‘Don’t stop, captain,’ they cheered him on. ‘Come on, give us another song.’ And the captain obliged them after a long, loving look at his wife.

  Her illness had given Bano’s face a pleasing pallor and made her large eyes enormous. Their serene gaze constantly followed her husband. This was their honeymoon really, for although they had been married for two years, this was the first time there were no in-laws to keep them apart, no cruel barbs and no errands for Bano to run. It was as if someone had miraculously opened the door of her cage but, sadly, her weak wings no longer had the strength to fly. Her slender wrist almost disappeared in the robust clasp of her husband and the bangles she wore on them now slid up to her elbows.

  The director of the Gethiya Sanatorium was a Swiss doctor. One day he sent for the captain. ‘You are a young man, captain,’ he said, ‘and I want to warn you that this disease thrives on young blood. I notice you take no precautions to save yourself from getting infected. But I’d like you to remember, young man, that no amount of love can defeat this disease.’

  The captain flushed with embarrassment. His parents had already written countless letters, pleading with him to return home. ‘I don’t have any other son,’ his mother had written, ‘so why are you deliberately courting death?’ Yet the captain refused to leave his wife’s bedside. He kissed her hair, her silky lashes and stayed on in defiance of all advice. Once in a while, he would walk across to the Private Ward next door and visit the fat and jolly wife of a rich contractor, Guman Singh, affectionately called Bhabhi by everyone.

  Bhabhi was the one ray of sunshine in an atmosphere heavy with intimations of mortality. Her round, fair face was always smiling, and everyone wondered how TB had managed to make a dent in the well-fortified walls of her frame. Once in a while, especially when she was in pain, she would let loose a hail of curses against the world. Often the target was her father-inlaw: ‘The old man owns half of Kumaon but does he care if his daughter-in-law is going to die? No sir!’ she would declare to the delight of her audience. ‘Lift the tail of any male in my family, and you’ll discover a cunt not balls!’

  ‘Bravo! That one was straight out of Punch magazine,’ the captain applauded. ‘You’ve made my day, Bhabhi,’ he told her. Encouraged by his response, she took off, ‘And then there is my husband, the son of a bitch. I’m sure he must be lying drunk in the arms of some trashy white tart. D’you know that it’s been two months since the bastard came here? May his bones rot— see if I mourn him when he dies!’

  ‘Oh come on, Bhabhi,’ the captain ribbed her, ‘why curse your own husband?’ She hooted with laughter and her eyes filled up as she looked at him with love. ‘Hats off to you, son, for the way you care for your wife. When I see you with her, I swear my breasts fill up with milk… And look at my bastard! I tell you I’ll stuff his whiskers in his mouth if he comes anywhere near me!’

  The captain doubled up with laughter and he ran to share this latest gem with his Bano.

  Then one day, the captain heard an incessant, hacking cough from the direction of Bhabhi’s cottage. He ran across to see her lying in a pool of blood. Her vast body was lying inert and her face was deathly pale. So Bhabhi had left before she could stuff her husband’s whiskers in his mouth. For a few days, a pall of gloom descended over the captain’s life and Bano’s large sad eyes grew larger with fear. If such a healthy, happy woman could go like a puff of smoke, what hope was there for her? She was so frail that even a whiff of a breeze could blow her away like a fluffy ball of cotton. Bhabhi’s death had brought them a message they had ignored for so long—that there was some respite, never a reprieve, from death. But it also made them determined to extract what they could from these last days of happiness—Bano became like a spoilt child, demanding attention all the time, and the captain played along with her, pandering to her every ridiculous whim. He took her to sit in the moonlit garden, swaddling her in his army greatcoat, and cuddled her close to his warm body. For a long time, they gazed at the stars under the whispering deodars, lost in their own thoughts.

  Exactly three days after they got married, he had left Bano to go to Basra. Overwhelmed by his huge physique and bushy moustache, Bano ran away shyly each time he came near her. Her dainty hennaed hands covered her face and it was with great difficulty that he had managed to get her to tell him her name. With his uncle sleeping in the next room, all conversation between them had to be conducted in furtive whispers.

  ‘What is you name?’ he whispered, tilting her pointed chin in his hands.

  ‘Bano,’ she fluttered through downcast eyes.

  ‘Sounds like a Muslim name to me,’ he joked.

  ‘That’s what everyone says,’ her large eyes filled up. ‘It’s not my fault!’

  ‘I was just joking! It’s beautiful and such a delightful change from the usual run of Pahari names—Saruli, Paruli, Rama, Khashti… How old are you, Bano?’

  ‘This summer I’ll be sixteen,’ she said proudly as if she had reached a huge age. The captain shook his head at her innocence as he gathered her to his breast. What a child she was! When his father and uncle had decided on Bano, he had been livid. How could they think of marrying him, a man about town, to a girl fresh out of school? But now, he had lost his heart completely to this little schoolgirl.

  Three days later it was time for him to go to Basra. When he went to say goodbye to her, Bano was sitting in a corner, cutting suparis. Her eyelashes were wet and the moment she heard her husband’s footfall, she buried her head in her knees. He bent and quickly kissed the top of her head and his throat contracted as he strode out.

  Leaving a three-day-old bride was a harder prospect than facing the cannon fire of the enemy lines. For two years, he was in Basra and then in Burma. All his friends succumbed to loneliness and the charms of the local Burmese beauties but not the captain. Yet when he returned home two years later, he found everything had changed. Bano had spent those years listening to the
barbs directed at her by seven sisters-in-law, washed mounds of their children’s clothes, knitted dozens of socks for the captain’s uncles and her father-in-law, and ground mountains of urad dal to make baris and mungauris that she had to dry on the tin roofs of the house. She had no idea where the captain was: one day they would tell her he was lost in some battle, another that he would never return. With this came the curses on her head for bringing such bad luck to their home that they had lost their only son. Finally, TB hunted her down and she was packed off to a sanatorium. To the great disappointment of his family, the captain rushed off the very next day after he returned from war to see Bano at the sanatorium.

  When he saw her lying in the sanatorium bed, his heart skipped a beat. In two years, it seemed to him, she had regressed further into girlhood and looked like a child lying there. Her eyes registered her disbelief and then the tears started to flow. There was no need for words—her tears had laid bare all her suffering. That is when they both realized that this was their only chance of time together and it was running out fast.

  The captain and Bano mourned Bhabhi’s death for about three days and were back on their honeymoon on the fourth. Bano asked him to take out her trunk of saris and get them ironed. Then they played patience for a long while but by the evening, Bano started to wilt. She had been running to the toilet all afternoon and when the runs come to a TB patient, death cannot be far behind. In those days, the sanatorium heartlessly turned out a dying patient to save the rest of the inmates from getting affected by a death on the premises, for death was cruelly debarred from entering the sanatorium gates. As he made his evening rounds, the doctor called the captain outside and handed him a notice: ‘You will have to take her home tomorrow. I give her two-three days,’ he said. ‘I doubt she will last longer in her condition.’

  The captain’s face went white. How could he possibly take her home now and erase these three months of bliss to return to the misery of his parents’ home? He knew of a place near a tea shop at Bhowali where he could take her to die. The owner always understood the predicament of those who had been sent a passport to another world and kept some rooms open for them.

  ‘Let’s leave the sanatorium, Bano,’ he announced cheerily to her that night. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow. I’m fed up with the place— aren’t you?’ Bano blanched: she was no fool and understood immediately what the doctor had said to her husband a while ago. She had been given the notice to leave Gethiya.

  That night, he nuzzled her neck on the pillow with his face, ‘Bano, my Banni, Bannoo!’ he whispered to cheer her. Finally, when she dropped off, he lay down on his bed and slept.

  The next morning he awoke to find Bano missing. At first he thought she must have dragged herself to the loo. Often she would do that rather than ask for help but when she did not come out for a long time, he ran to bang on the door. Bano was nowhere to be found. He ran all over the sanatorium but no one had seen her. Soon the room filled up with anxious doctors, nurses and the security staff. Nothing like this had ever happened at the sanatorium.

  The next day they found her sari at Rathighat and everyone deduced that Bano had decided to meet death before it could come and drag her away. There was no doubt that she had committed suicide. Maddened with grief, the captain hugged her sari and dredged the river but Bano was gone.

  His youth stretched ahead of him like a long winter’s night: how long could he stay alone? Within a year, his family married him off again and this time his father and uncle made sure that the girl was healthy. The captain’s new wife was a tall and strapping girl, and had a master’s degree to boot. Her father was a major general and when he flashed his row of medals at the wedding, the poor captain knew he was outshone by far. Prabha, that was her name, was an only and spoilt child used to having her way. Her unending commands and high expectations made the captain forget how to crack jokes or even laugh.

  Over the next four years, Prabha gave him two sons and a daughter and then turned her attention to saving money. After sixteen years, when Prabha decided they had saved enough, she agreed to visit the hills for the first time and they decided to go to Nainital for a holiday. The captain now had a neat little paunch and his face, though still good-natured and decorated with a bristling moustache, lacked the freshness of his youth. His sons had got their army commissions and the daughter was studying at Miranda House in Delhi.

  As they drove up from Kathgodam, old memories came crowding into his mind at each turn the car took. And when they passed Gethiya, the captain lapsed into a moody silence.

  Prabha had booked them in the Grand Hotel in Nainital and after unpacking, she said, ‘Come on, darling, let’s go for a drive. I want to see Bhowali.’ She ordered a picnic hamper of sandwiches and roast chicken and they both drove off. Just short of Bhowali, Prabha, glowing in her Chanderi sari and sleeveless blouse, patted him with a plump hand. ‘Stop! Let’s stop at that darling little tea shop and have a Pahari-style glass of tea, please!’

  ‘And what about a major’s dignity?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, to hell with it,’ she laughed and got off, balancing herself carefully on her pencil heels.

  The tea shop had a solitary wooden bench and the tin roof was grimy with years of woodsmoke. The poor owner was overwhelmed at this sudden invasion and tried to fiddle with the kettle boiling on his stove.

  ‘Two hot glasses of tea, Pradhan-jyu,’ the major said to him in Pahari to put him at ease. The man’s jaw dropped open at someone like the major speaking the local patois. Had they lost their way? Why on earth would a dazzling couple like them visit his humble dhaba, he wondered.

  He was still brewing the tea when they heard ‘Alakh, Alakh’ and a band of Vaishnavi sadhvis descended. ‘Oh ho, guru,’ said the leader in a deep contralto. ‘Thought we’d drop by at your shop and give my flock a glass of tea made by a Brahmin’s hands.’

  ‘Good, good,’ the shopkeeper smiled. ‘Have you brought Lati as well?’

  ‘Where else would she go, poor thing?’ replied the head. And the major and Prabha turned their heads to see who they referred to.

  She stood like an apsara among this band of old, withered women and revealed pearly teeth as she smiled in acknowledgement. The major went numb: it was as if Bano had been miraculously cured and was standing before him. Her cheeks were pink with health and her face looked even more beautiful and innocent now that she could not speak any more.

  ‘Poor thing, is she dumb?’ Prabha asked the head Vaishnavi. ‘My god! What a beauty!’ she turned to her husband for corroboration.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ piped in the shopkeeper. ‘She has no tongue.’ The major felt as if a huge weight had suddenly been lifted from his chest.

  ‘What is her name?’ Prabha couldn’t take her eyes off the vision.

  ‘God knows, memsahib,’ the head Vaishnavi said. ‘All that went a long time ago. Our guru maharaj found her floating in the river one day. Her tongue had been bitten off. Must have been married because she was wearing a mangalsutra but who knows who her husband was or where he went. Our guruji gave a mantra to cure her of the terrible TB she had. She used to vomit buckets of blood when we found her but after guruji took her under his wing, she was completely cured. Show them your tongue, Lati,’ she commanded.

  The beauty just smiled but refused to show her tongue.

  ‘Can’t follow anything, the stupid cow,’ the Vaishnavi explained helpfully. ‘All she does is eat and crap. She’s lost it, I think, doesn’t follow my orders at all.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Prabha said. ‘You mean she’s even forgotten her husband?’

  ‘Who knows?’ replied the Vaishnavi philosophically. ‘The past is the past. She doesn’t remember anything. Just smiles all the time, the cow. Who does she have now but God to look after her?’ Then she turned her attention to the shopkeeper. ‘So how much do I owe you, guru?’

  She paid up and with a loud ‘Alakh!’ her band followed her out of the shop. Lati sat on, and the major could not take his eyes off h
er. Dr Dalal and Dr Kakkar had failed to cure her— could it be true that she was cured by a guruji and that this was his Bano?

  ‘Get up!’ the head Vaishnavi gave Lati a jab with her toe. Lati turned once to flash a smile at the major and then followed her leader down the hill.

  If he nuzzled her neck with his face and said, ‘My Bano, Banni, Bannu!’ would it unlock her frozen memory, he wondered as he watched her walk away. But how could that be possible? He had taken another path, climbed another mountain. Moreover, he said to himself, has anyone ever gained anything from glancing over his shoulder to pick up the pieces of the past? He had two grown sons now, and a daughter. And what of his wife, Prabha, with her plans for their future? What would he say to them if he brought a dumb beauty into their lives?

  ‘Come, darling,’ Prabha said. ‘Let’s have lunch in Garampani.’ The major got up slowly, like a man who has aged suddenly. He was numb and empty.

  His Bano was dead. And now God looked after Lati.

  He followed his wife dutifully to the car.

  7

  * * *

  Jayanti Jerja

  My aunt Jayanti—brilliant and kinky in equal measure— and Diddi were kindred souls. In the years that we were at Priory Lodge, we frequently visited Mukteswar, where Jayanti Jerja (this is what we called her, a title that means older mother in Kumaoni) and her doctor husband lived. Today, Mukteswar is merely an hour’s drive from Nainital but in the sixties, you had to spend almost three hours in a jolting bus, and fight the nauseating diesel fumes it belched as it climbed the steep bends and twists. It was a journey that left us puking and dizzy when we disembarked. Jerja could never get herself to brave this journey and so, although her sons studied in Nainital, she rarely came to visit us. And when she did, she came in a dandi, borne on the shoulders of Nepali coolies—an expedition that took almost two days.