by Ira Pande
This curious caravan (with two or three servants and several pieces of baggage, carried by still more coolies) was a visit we really looked forward to. Jayanti Jerja would unpack her bright parcels and huge tiffin carriers of food almost as soon as she got off. Out would come home-made Gujarati pickles and savouries, delicious milk sweets prepared in her kitchen from the rich, creamy milk of her hybrid cows and fresh fruit and preserves made from her garden produce. Every night, we would snuggle close to her bed while she told us macabre ghost stories and sang songs in Gujarati and Bengali to illustrate them. What stories they were—tales of ghostly apparitions, sadhus who could foresee dire events, magical tortoises, and stars that came at night to whisper secrets into her ears alone. Of course, we believed her implicitly. She convinced my little brother Micky, who she loved above us all, that he was born after she had made a special prayer for him at the Shiva temple of Mukteswar Mahadev and jumped through a hole in a rocky outcrop at the far end of the town. This is why he was named Muktesh, she said. According to another magical tale, she and he were two divine storks in their earlier life. Reunited in this birth as human beings, she called him ‘Bagula’ (Mr Stork) and made him call her ‘Baguli’ (Mrs Stork), a name that he continued to call her by until she died. In short, Jerja was a one-woman entertainment industry: she could conjure spirits from the vasty deep and make you believe in them.
The minute she stepped into Priory Lodge, the strict rules of our house were magically relaxed. Among the most hated of Babu’s commandments were no reading novels in the forenoon, no eating between meals, no standing on a bed or running up a staircase, no reading comics or romantic, mushy pulp fiction, no laughing loudly, no listening to film music, no playing cards and gitti… Jerja’s children broke all the rules that we were subjected to: they ate in bed and never brushed their teeth before sleeping; they seldom had a bath; they did not make their beds or fold their clothes and—to our great envy—they got away with all these violations. When Jerja came to Priory Lodge, even Babu, who seldom stepped into the children’s room, found his way there to listen to her fascinating tales. Mealtimes were disrupted and, for once, Babu allowed someone else’s writ to run his house. Jerja’s servants were given a kitchen downstairs where they cooked for themselves and their chatter filtered up to our rooms, yet Babu never frowned at this just as he no longer frowned if we laughed loudly or banged doors. Diddi and Jerja would lie on adjoining beds every afternoon, with the maids pressing their feet, as they exchanged stories and confidences. To prevent any eavesdroppers from listening in, they switched easily into Gujarati or Bengali and this was certainly my first lesson in the two languages.
Jerja was the archetypal Earth Mother. She loved bright colours and wore a large bindi on her forehead and vermilion in the parting of her hair. Her dainty feet were covered with toerings and tinkling anklets while glass bangles covered her arms. Her Mukteswar bedroom had a glass case with colourful glass bangles and she would change them each day to match her clothes. She ordered by post any hair oil or perfume that caught her fancy and had all manner of herbal concoctions on her bedside table. Many of these she had created herself and they had hilarious names and histories. One that caused much merriment among us was christened ‘Krishna mastana tel’ and smelt of jasmine. It was a massage oil she had created to madden the senses of her husband, Krishna. Jerja had small hands and feet but was deep-bosomed and exuded a fecundity that was warm and perfumed. She did everything with a joyous abandon—I cannot think of any other phrase that could better describe her free and open nature. Her love for her family and the complete lack of any self-consciousness in displaying her love for her husband is what I remember most, for it was a quality I missed in my parents’ relationship. I do not ever remember Babu touching Diddi in our presence, whereas Jerja and her husband called each other ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ freely. At night, she would slip into his bed, without caring whether the child sleeping with her that night (she always had one snuggled next to her, like a hot water bottle) was awake and watching.
Her Mukteswar house was a child’s paradise: a vast library that had hundreds of books, including many that she had rescued from termites and silverfish in Kasoon. The walls of her sitting room were covered with family portraits that had the whole Kasoon clan framed and preserved. Everything was painted a dark green and Jerja’s taste in decor ran into the baroque and bizarre. There were clocks and paintings my uncle had bought from departing Englishmen who sold their apple orchards in Kumaon after 1947, when many of them returned to their own country. These sat uncomfortably with the baubles that Jerja collected from everywhere: a shell from Puri, a doll from Bhopal, a rug from a passing Tibetan vendor, huge spring beds that we bounced on, and curtains with frills. Her house also had several cats and when you were not tumbling over them, you ran into a servant. It was a mini-Kasoon, for several old servants from Ama’s home had migrated to Mukteswar and were now part of Jayanti Jerja’s colourful household. Among them was Khyali, Lohaniji’s son, who had blue eyes and spoke in English to us. Khyali sat on the front veranda, trimming the betel leaves that arrived by post every week from Banaras for my uncle.
Kishan Bhinju, Jerja’s husband, was a fastidious sahib but soon, under the influence of Jerja’s crazy lifestyle, he went native. He gave up his tweeds and flannels and, after his retirement, wore only saffron-coloured clothes to indicate his retreat from worldly desires. However, Jerja managed to infiltrate even this retreat and had exotic chiffon kurtas made for him and teemed them up with khadi pyjamas or trousers. She, of course, always dressed in the brightest saris with the loudest prints. Their bedroom always smelt of musk and saffron because of the scented tobacco that my uncle was fond of chewing.
Every summer, the Mukteswar house would fill up with guests—some, like us, were family, others were old friends from Santiniketan and some were just friends of friends. Jayanti Jerja was in her element then: cooking, talking and matchmaking. Someone had gifted Pushpesh and Muktesh a tape recorder—a new gadget for us in the sixties—and Pushpesh and my sister Mrinal wrote plays that were enacted by all the children gathered there and played to the family after dinner. The sunny front veranda had a swing (in memory of their Gujarat childhood) and we fought with each other for the privilege to swing and read on it. Like Ama, Jerja seldom went anywhere but seemed to know of all the town’s gossip and took an active role in other people’s intimate family problems. She encouraged children to gossip—to our great delight—for we all loved reporting to her. Over the dinner table at night, she would proceed to tell the family of all that she had garnered from her army of reporters: the compounder at the hospital was having an affair with the staff nurse’s daughter. The headman of a neighbouring village had reported how they had cut off the balls of a young boy who had dared to sleep with a girl of another caste… It was better than reading the morning newspaper and bred in all of us a great taste for the sensational and bizarre.
Mukteswar’s modest government-run primary school was little better than a village school. So Jerja gave her children lessons at home until they were ready to enter the university. This is when Pushpesh and Muktesh came to stay with us in Nainital. Pushpesh was just sixteen and Muktesh a year older. By the time he was twenty-one, Pushpesh had finished his Ph.D. and left to teach at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Unlike our house, where Diddi and Babu kept a stern watch on our school performance, Jerja’s children never felt intimidated by exams simply because they never went to school. Pushpesh and Minu were phenomenal readers and thanks to Diddi and Jerja’s unorthodox teaching styles were fluent in Sanskrit as well as English. I hero-worshipped them both and aped their reading habits and speed. Thus by the time I was twelve or so, I had read whatever books the house had—an eclectic mix of adult books and romances ranging from Aldous Huxley to Pearl Buck. Of course, I did not understand most of them but it gave me a great sense of power over my schoolmates who were still reading Enid Blyton and Georgette Heyer.
A
fter they left Mukteswar, Jerja and her family moved to Bhowali, where they lived in a cottage called The Hermitage. Soon this began to resemble the Mukteswar house and my children insisted on a mandatory stop there on our way to Almora each summer. My cousin Muktesh, who never worked all his life and was never asked any uncomfortable questions regarding this, was generally to be found reading in a bed and received visitors in a supine state. Jerja would take the children on a conducted tour of the house and stop every now and then to point out a special feature and to show them her books and treasures. Then she would tell them about all the spirits who had visited her recently. Finally, we were given pumpkins and fruit from her garden to take to various people in Almora as gifts. Why she imagined pumpkins would be welcome as a gift we never asked and tried to make place for them in the car. One year when we reached her Bhowali cottage, she was standing waist-deep in a drum, washing a vast cotton durrie by treading on it. She looked as happy as if she was pressing juice from grapes in a vineyard and waved cheerily to us as we climbed the hill to her cottage. She seemed to be having such fun that my children promptly took off their shoes and socks and took turns jumping in and out of the drum. Her magic was undimmed by age and she could still charm the parrots off a tree.
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A River That Lost Its Way in Sand
Diddi’s article on Jerja, written in the early 1990s, is my personal favourite among all the obituaries that Diddi wrote. It still brings tears to my eyes when I see the Jerja we all loved emerge from Diddi’s pen.
The hot summer has melted into an unbearably humid rainy season—whatever happened to the refreshing coolness of the month of Asadh, I wonder, mopping my brow. Then, out of the shimmering heat, a beloved face floats out and I can hear her voice reading Kalidasa’s immortal lines from Meghdoot to me: Dhrumjyoti salilmara…
Jayanti was the second of us seven sisters. Early this year, news of her terminal illness reached me in Lucknow and I rushed to Delhi to her bedside. What I saw shocked me: gone was the glowing olive colour of her skin and her musical voice was now a whispered croak. She held out her thin arms to embrace me and started to weep. I had never ever seen her cry and we both realized that this was probably a prelude to a final separation. As I held her trembling body, I felt unable to bring myself to say anything at all. We both knew it was too late for all that.
She drew back, passed a loving hand over my head and said sheepishly, ‘I don’t know what happens to me nowadays, the waterworks just don’t stop. How are you?’ One claw-like hand clasped mine and the other trailed like a withered creeper across the bed. Her arms had become so thin that the bangles slithered up to her shoulder. Her eyes, clouded with cataracts, were straining to focus on my face and I was almost glad that she could not see it. Nor could I answer her loving question. With a long sigh, she closed her eyes, folded her arms over her chest, closed her eyes and withdrew to some inner world.
Earlier, when she did that Jayanti meditated, and her face would turn luminous with peace. It was her secret way of communing with her inner self and her mind. And what a mind! The Banaras Hindu University once conferred the degree of Sahitya Mahishini on her. From her childhood, she had lived with our grandfather, an awesome scholar of Sanskrit, and her skill at languages was legendary. Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Hindi, English, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit—she was fluent in all of these. At Santiniketan, she studied Chinese under Professor Ta’an but Sanskrit was her mother tongue. When she wrote, it was like a piece of jewellery: sparkling and pure. So when in her old age, her hand started to tremble and her halfblind eyes no longer obeyed her, it made me weep to read her scrawl. Reading was her life and when her eyes failed her, she died a little each day.
For some reason, she never pursued her skill at storytelling. Had she done so, I am convinced she would have been one of the finest writers of her generation. Chand and Hans had published her early writing and one of her stories was included in the academic syllabus of the Viswa Bharati University but then, for some inexplicable reason, she stopped writing. Her collection of letters alone was fit for a museum’s collection. Premchand, Jainendra, Rabindranath Tagore, Nandlal Bose, Alice Boner, Acharya Kriplani, Madan Mohan Malviya, Balraj Sahni—Jayanti used to correspond with all of them. How I wish I had asked her for these letters before she died. I cannot remember how many letters Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi had written to her. Gurudev painted a portrait with colours she herself had collected from wild plants, after consulting the Vanaushadhi Parva of the Amar Kosh.
Last year, the Bengali magazine Desh published a letter by Tagore where he mentions how his beloved student Jayanti had collected haridra, khadir, palash and burunsh to extract vegetable colours for his paintings. I sent her a cutting. When I met her a few months later, I asked, ‘Did you read that article?’ ‘I can’t find it,’ she replied. ‘I’d put it under my pillow and it seems to have disappeared. What did it say?’ she asked me disarmingly.
I shook my head in exasperation. Her ‘pillow bank’ was a notorious Bermuda Triangle where things mysteriously vanished. You could find everything from dried fruits to old photographs to forbidden sweets (she was diabetic). Surrounded by such distractions, what could that poor article have done but disappear?
Jayanti’s tragedy was that she never gave her genius the honour it deserved. That honour was given it by Gurudev and the gurus of our Ashram. Hajari Prasad Dwivedi used to say, ‘One day, Jayanti will inherit my pen.’ Gurudev had nicknamed her Bharat Mata, or Mother India. With her thick khaddar saris, hitched inches above her ankles, her abstract gaze and remote expression, she evoked laughter from some and envy from others. Her closeness to Gurudev was for all to see—he showered her with such love and attention that many declared Jayanti had become proud.
This was not true: pride and Jayanti could never be synonymous. Although, God knows, she had every reason to be arrogant. She was beautiful, accomplished and respected in the Ashram. Her beauty—which shone through the hideous homespun saris she wore—was incandescent. This was evident from the proposals that my mother began to receive for her when Jayanti passed her Intermediate exam. But Jayanti had announced long ago that she would never marry. My mother used to coax her saying, ‘Look Jayanti, proposals such as these don’t come every day—where will you find such boys and such families? You are eighteen—your elder sister was a mother at fourteen. This boy has gone abroad to take his ICS exam…’ But Jayanti was adamant: she would never marry.
Among her suitors was a dandy, nicknamed ‘Lord’, who found many excuses those days to pass our house. I remember how livid Jayanti was when she saw him—resplendent in a tweed jacket, cigar in hand—eyeing her from the road outside our house. ‘Listen,’ she told me. ‘I’ll give you five rupees—spit on his brilliantined hair and tell him, “My sister will never marry you.”’ I accepted the offer with alacrity—five rupees was a lot of money in the thirties. The next day, Lord came on his usual evening stroll and stopped outside our house—as he often did then—preparing to strike the appropriate pose for gazing at Jayanti. I had lovingly nursed a ball of spit in my mouth all evening for just this occasion. The missile went flying out of my mouth and landed neatly on his pomaded locks. ‘Scram,’ I yelled rudely. ‘My sister has said she will never marry you.’
That was the last we ever saw of him but I still blush when I remember my uncouth behaviour. Years later, the poet Sumitranandan Pant wrote a story on Lord’s proposal in a collection of stories called Paanch Phool.
Meanwhile, Jayanti was determined not to marry. She had by now passed her MA and was offered a wardenship at Santiniketan, where she also taught. Most of her time, however, was spent with Gurudev at Uttarayan and whenever he went to Mussoorie or Almora, Jayanti was his constant companion. When Mahatma Gandhi visited Santiniketan, Jayanti was chosen to receive him. A photograph taken by the famous photographer Shambhu Saha shows Gandhiji getting out of his car, his hand on Jayanti’s shoulder, Ba on one side and a loving Rabindranath looking on.
&nbs
p; Last year, I asked her, ‘Where is that picture? Or is that lost as well?’
‘God knows who flicked it from my album,’ she said ruefully.
‘And that poem written for you by Gurudev from Darjeeling? Where is that?’
‘Lost as well,’ she said.
I used to get livid with her—what treasures she had managed to lose! Yet there was one she never let out of her sight—this was a portrait of her painted by Tagore with the colours she had mixed for him. Inscribed ‘Jayanti ke Rabindranath’ (To Jayanti from Rabindranath), it was always on her bedside table.
Come to think of it, Gurudev was not wrong when he named Jayanti Bharat Mata—she was a born social worker. I have lost count of how many students she taught and how many destitute girls she educated and married off. Her husband was a doctor (Yes, she did marry later. It was a fairly radical event for those days.) and they lived in an idyllic house in Mukteswar in the Kumaon hills. They had a garden full of flowers and fruit trees, dozens of helpers—Jaikishen, Bishandutt, Daulat, Salim—and two fat Australian hybrid cows. Virtually all of Mukteswar had free access to her dairy and there was no expectant mother who did not receive a pail of pure milk from Jayanti’s dairy. She would make the most delicious rasgullas and sandesh and I can vouch that even Bhimnag and Bambajari in Calcutta never produced anything like her sweets. Married to a doctor, Jayanti naturally offered free treatment and medicines to everyone.