by Ira Pande
I remember a particularly gruesome incident. A grass cutter was attacked by a bear who clawed out his nose while the man was out in the jungle. However, his doughty wife packed the mauled nose in snow and husband and wife landed up at her house (I was spending a vacation with Jayanti then) at two in the morning. It was bitterly cold and a snowstorm was raging outside. Several tall deodars, unable to bear the weight of the snow on their branches, had snapped like matchsticks and keeled over. Power lines had collapsed and there was no light anywhere except for the deathly white glow of the snow around us. Only the truly mad would venture out on a night like that.
Naturally, we stepped out, and the half-frozen woman, holding up her fainting, noseless husband, fell at our feet. ‘Help me, Dactrani-jyu,’ she called out to Jayanti. ‘Please save my man’s life.’ I took one look at the hideous, noseless lump of bleeding flesh in front of us and ran inside. Within minutes, there was blood all over the veranda, squirting in a steady stream from the hole in the man’s face. Jayanti came inside to persuade my sleeping brother-in-law to take the poor man to the hospital and he erupted furiously. ‘Who can I call to the hospital at this hour? You know I am on leave. Tell them to go to Dr Sen.’
‘How can you say this?’ Jayanti was livid. ‘I don’t care if you are on leave or not—you have to take him there.’ When she gave orders, everyone listened to Jayanti, I can tell you.
Her husband tried to wriggle out saying, ‘I’ll take him in the morning. Tell them to go and sleep in Daulat’s room.’
‘I’ll assist you.’ Jayanti would not be dissuaded. ‘And you know perfectly well that Daulat won’t allow even a bird to share his room.’
She was absolutely right. Daulat was a part of my mother’s huge retinue, now with Jayanti. For twenty-five years, he had spread terror in my mother’s household. Finally, she could take no more of his filthy temper and packed him off to Jayanti’s house. Daulat’s effeminate ways were the talk of the town and, when he draped his dhoti over his head and snaked his way down a road, people would openly titter at him. My elder brother used to call him Damyanti but with a temper like his, perhaps Durvasa would have been a more appropriate nickname! He ruled over Jayanti’s kitchen like a tyrant and his waspish tongue could flay the skin off someone’s face. When Jayanti lost her favourite pen, she sent someone to ask Daulat whether he had seen it. ‘Yes,’ was the reply sent through the trembling courier, ‘tell her I am signing the chapattis with it!’
There was no question of Daulat allowing anyone access to his room at that hour of the night. So my brother-in-law, Jayanti and I stumbled with the injured man and his wife to the hospital in the freezing cold at two-thirty in the morning. ‘Where is the nose?’ my brother-in-law asked.
‘Here,’ said the wife and carefully unwrapped it from a fig leaf. It took some two or three hours to suture the nose back on to the man’s face and I was amazed at my brother-in-law’s courage in tackling the job, without proper assistance, no lights and just his wife and a hysterical twosome as audience. Would any modern surgeon even dare to take on such a job? Miraculously, the man recovered, and why not? How could there have been any chance of an infection when nature itself had sanitized the whole atmosphere with a thick blanket of snow?
Two years later, the grateful patient returned, a huge grin under his restored nose. In his hand were two containers for the doctor and his wife—one with fragrant honey and the other brimming with pure ghee from his village.
Another time, the X-ray technician lost his wife at a game of cards. The poor girl, a pretty young thing, came sobbing to Jayanti. ‘Save my honour, Dactrani-jyu,’ she wailed. ‘This bastard has sold me for three thousand rupees!’ The perpetrator of the crime stood next to her, weeping and speechless with shame. Jayanti saved his wife but forbade her to go back to her husband. She arranged to have her trained as a nurse and gave her an income to live a life of honour and independence. Years later, I used the incident to write a story called ‘Piti Hui Gote’.
Then came the doe-eyed Bhagirathi—slim, sultry and sirenlike. Married to an alcoholic much older than her, who used to beat her every day taunting her childlessness by saying, ‘Whore, you haven’t even produced a mouse in the four years we have been married,’ Bhagirathi ran away and arrived at Jayanti’s doorstep. Dressed in the ghagra-choli of a village belle, she was quite an attractive bundle. My mother took one look at her and said sharply, ‘Jayanti, pack her off right away, I tell you. Otherwise you will regret your generosity. I don’t like the look of her—her nara is dangling and that, my child, is the sign of a harlot.’
But once Jayanti made up her mind, could anyone persuade her to change it? Within a year, Bhagirathi became a different thing. Her large eyes were lined with kohl, her hair sported a saucy red flower and the ghagra was replaced with a sari with a jaunty pallu that fluttered with every step she took. I renamed her Sujata, after the famous Bimal Roy film of those days, because she reminded me of the actress Nutan.
My mother’s prophecy proved true. Sujata first fluttered her eyes in the direction of my mother’s house. My elder brother’s cook, a handsome young man called Dilip, was her first victim. When the vegetables started to burn, Jayanti realized that she must cut short her visit to my mother’s house before worse things happened. Sujata was taken away but her lover could not bear her betrayal and Dilip committed suicide. Eventually, her husband and children told Jayanti that Sujata must leave. Jayanti agreed reluctantly but got her a job as a gram sevika before abandoning her to her own devices. She was followed by another siren and, finally, Jayanti vowed never to take on the cause of young women. Then, as if to test her promise, a mad woman landed up at her doorstep and refused to leave. She would lie around the veranda, singing, dancing and generally entertaining the house. Apparently, her husband’s affair with another woman had turned her mind crazy. ‘I stole all the jewellery and wear a loincloth, hahaha…’ she told Jayanti one day and vanished. A few days later, they found her body on the streets. After her came a leper from Bhimtal—he was installed under an apple tree in the garden. ‘I know Dr Moses of the Almora Leper Asylum,’ I told Jayanti. ‘Let me send him there—you must think of your children and husband too.’
‘No.’
It had been like this with her ever since she was at school. When we were in Gujarat, my mother had adopted an orphan girl called Panchi Bai. The village headman had left her in my mother’s care after she lost her parents in a flood, so my mother became her ‘Ba’ (mother in Gujarati).
‘Ba,’ Panchi Bai declared one day, ‘I want a man.’
The whole house was stunned at this shameless declaration. All except Jayanti, of course, who went and found her a suitable boy, another orphan called Jiwaram. One day, Jiwaram arrived resplendent in a saffron turban and stood with folded hands before my mother to seek Panchi Bai’s hand.
Jiwaram had no home and no job. ‘How will you look after her?’ my mother asked this hopeless suitor. He looked bashfully at the ground and replied, ‘Annadata, you are there, aren’t you?’ So Panchi Bai was married—my mother gave her the dowry she would give a daughter and the barat started at our front door and went round the house to end at the kitchen door. Jiwaram was given driving lessons (Jayanti organized that, of course) and became our driver.
When we went to Tikamgarh, Jayanti picked up a girl called Lalita, who had just one good eye. When her husband abandoned her for this reason, Jayanti took her in hand. She groomed her, taught her and, within a year, Lalita was a changed girl. One day, her husband saw her at a fair, fell in love with her and took her back!
Meanwhile, in Rajkot, Jiwaram and Panchi Bai embarked on Project Family with such enthusiasm that within a few years there were several children—Popat, Radhabai and god knows who else. Then, tragedy struck and Jiwaram died of TB. Where else could poor Panchi Bai go but to her Ba’s home? She arrived with her football team and stayed on for thirty years, travelling with us from Bangalore to Almora or wherever my father’s work took us. Finally
, she retired to her beloved Kutch.
After my father’s sudden death, Jayanti became the head of the family. Our education, our travels across the country—all became her responsibility. Sometimes I wonder how she did it all. Yet I always knew that she was a born mother and that ultimately she would not be able to resist domestic bliss. Years ago, worried about her vow of celibacy, I had asked a mendicant who used to visit us from time to time. ‘Yes, your sister will marry one day,’ she had said emphatically to me.
Jayanti married someone of her own choice but in her inimitable style, and after great opposition from the family. My brother-in-law was a handsome surgeon, westernized in his education and bearing. He had had a brush with tuberculosis in his younger days. TB was considered a curse then, a sure sign of early death but Jayanti cared for no one’s advice. She and her husband were devoted to each other and when she lost him a few years ago, she lost her own will to live.
After her husband’s death she only visited me once or twice and when she came to Lucknow to receive an award from the Hindi Sansthan, all our time went remembering the past. It was on the same trip that two of her Buddhist friends came visiting. The two monks had travelled from Gorakhpur to ask her to read two manuscripts in the Kharoshti script, which she did in minutes, translating them effortlessly into Sanskrit. On a trip to Kathmandu, she composed a Sanskrit hymn in praise of Pashupatinath and gave that to the priest as an offering. At the age of seventy-five, she trudged up 14,000 feet to visit the temple of Tunganath and recited some rare Sanskrit slokas to the priest who fell at her feet. ‘Ma, you are Saraswati,’ he said to her in awe.
‘No, not Saraswati, Pujari-jyu,’ she replied, ‘just her devotee.’ The more I remember what she was, the more I feel Jayanti was, in Tagore’s words, a river that lost its way in the sand.
She was in unbearable pain in her last days. Her feet were swollen, for her kidneys had failed, and she would float in and out of consciousness to look around her restlessly when she was awake. I stayed a few days and then when I went to say goodbye to her before leaving for Lucknow, my eyes filled up. She could recognize me but her sad eyes were dry. I think the searing pain of one’s last few days dries up all one’s tears. And that sad face, shrunken and forlorn, is the one that floats before my eyes when I recall her now.
With time, I feel, relationships have changed radically. I don’t see in this generation the love we had for our siblings. We fought and said cruel things to each other but when it was time to part we felt as if a limb had been cut off. My sister Manjula and her husband had moved in with Jayanti to look after her but she was away that day. So was Jayanti’s devoted son, Pushpesh, who had to go to the university for a lecture. So she and I spent one last day together. She bared her heart for the first and last time that day. Her loneliness after her husband’s death, and what it was like for her to be cut off from her children’s lives and the world around her—all this and more…
‘You had once written in some story that a man’s umbilical cord is cut twice—once when he leaves his mother’s womb and the second time when he gets married,’ she smiled and pressed my hand gently. That touch said more than a thousand words to me.
Finally, it was time to leave her.
‘Jayanti, I am going,’ I said softly. She looked at me with unseeing eyes and turned her head away. She had withdrawn from this world already.
I am told she returned to her old self a few days before she died. But I am haunted by that last goodbye—her touch transferred all her pain to me that day. Lying alone in a house, no loved ones around her, all she did was live in the past. Santiniketan, Shillong, Bangalore, Orchcha, Rajkot… Do you remember, she asked me that day, Ija’s sweet voice singing:
Aaj to sapna ma mane
Dolna dungar divyajo…
(I dreamt of the rolling mountains today…)
With death hovering over her head, I am sure she could see the mountains we saw from our grandfather’s courtyard in Almora—Kamet, Nanda Devi, Trisul, Banari Devi…
God knows what pain she took with her when she died. And perhaps it was this that took her mind into a peculiar direction. She began to take an unhealthy interest in other people’s lives, a weakness cruelly exploited by some relatives. They would first encourage her to talk ill of someone, then it would be spiced up and spread around. So one often heard ‘Jayanti said this or that about you…she’s become senile…’ and so on. But how many, I wonder, saw her brilliance? Or her heart that was as clean as a mirror? So generous, that she gave away all she had to whoever asked for it. Did anyone ever realize that she gave away so much that finally she had nothing left for herself? They stopped giving her money because she spent whatever she had in hand. She had already donated all her pension—yet she swore that a yogi had once given her a ‘magic tortoise’ that would always keep her in clover.
‘Touch a copper penny to it and it will turn into silver,’ he had told her. We used to titter behind her back but nevertheless went furtively to touch its metal back. I myself tried it many times, and I have to tell you it worked. Some forgotten royalty cheque or other would land up after that magic touch.
A few months before her death, knowing how she yearned for the old days, I told her, ‘Jayanti, you have a cottage in Bhowali. Why don’t you go back there? Isn’t it better than lying alone here in Delhi? I may be younger than you but even I know one does not die of any disease—it is the memories of the past that eventually kill you.’
She smiled through cracked lips, and that smile went like a dagger to my heart. She took my hand in her trembling and feverish clasp and whispered:
Sar sookhe, pachchi ure aure saran samae
Deen meen bin pachch ke, kahu Rahim kahan jaye?
(Birds fly from a drying lake to seek another perch But where, O Rahim, shall a wingless fish flee?)
8
* * *
Hamid Bhai
As I translated one article after another, fascinated by the life that was unfolding in another language, I realized that there could be nothing modest about this book. Diddi had always commanded total attention and, even when she was alive, she had the capacity to use up all the oxygen in a room. Now, she leapt at me from every line that she had written. So many characters and events I encountered were familiar and everywhere, beneath the surface of the written word, I could see a history that was ours as much as it was hers. True, Diddi had made us into what we were but it was equally true that we had made her into what she was. Yet I constantly worried whether in writing of her I was getting distracted into writing about us, not her. Before me was a giant jigsaw puzzle—a nose peeped from one corner and a leg from another—where should I start to begin piecing them together?
My task was not made easier by Diddi’s restless writing style. Not for nothing had we nicknamed her Virginia Woolf because she was known to destroy a conversation by suddenly asking a question or introducing a subject that had nothing to do with the matters being discussed. Worse, she would get up abruptly and leave a bewildered roomful of people behind. Telephone conversations with her were hell—she used the telephone as a means of passing on or receiving urgent news. If there was none, she could not bear to waste her time on inane ‘So what’s happening?’ kind of chatter. ‘Click’, and the line went dead, your conversation was cut off, for she had heard and said all she wanted to hear or say. When I started to translate her work, I found myself struggling to keep the narrative going in a coherent, orderly progression. More often than not, an idea or character would emerge, begin to acquire flesh and shape and, suddenly, Diddi would be off at another tangent because she remembered another story, another episode that she had to squeeze in. It was exhausting to keep pace with such a mind.
And then there was the mystery of her pseudonym, Shivani. ‘Shivani’ at first seemed a mask that gave her an assurance because of its anonymity but, as I read on, I realized it was much, much more. Diddi was actually two people, and she used the two personas as identical twins do: to confuse and
confound. Like them, she had mastered the art of switching from one to the other so seamlessly that even she did not know any more who she was. So the person she was, the person she wanted to be and the person that, unknown to all of us, she really was was someone called Gaura, Diddi, Nani, Dadi, Bahuji and Shivani. And yet, there was a core of Diddi that remained inviolate and secret all her life. She hid her fears and pain from everyone— even herself. Her writing was for her a way of recording people and events that she could not bear to speak about. Diddi was a master in the art of hiding her grief. Some of it she buried in her writing; the rest she buried inside her. Her writing was thus a huge ruse to keep her pain away from those whose pity she did not want yet she left this pain for some of us to discover.
After Babu died in 1974, Diddi was allotted a flat in Lucknow as an accredited journalist and she started writing a weekly column for one of the local newspapers. The subjects she chose ranged from local issues of civic concern to musings on life, or interesting characters she had come across, obituaries, and reviews of concerts and recitals. Week after week, whether ill or well, she churned out these columns because they gave her a roof over her head. The column called ‘Jalak’, or window, became hugely popular and it reached out to a vast readership. From college teachers to her milkman, her fan following grew day by day. There was no place, whether a bank or a shop, where people would not rise reverently to greet her when they saw her. An interesting incident illustrates her popularity among her fans best. Diddi was once travelling to Delhi by train from Lucknow and reached the station only to discover that she had forgotten her box of tobacco (she was addicted to perfumed chewing tobacco). She reached her compartment and the ticket collector came to greet her, for he had seen her name on the reservation chart. ‘If there is anything I can do, Shivaniji,’ he folded his hands as he got up to prepare for the departure of the train in a few minutes, ‘just call me.’