by Ira Pande
‘Now that you say so,’ replied Diddi, ‘I wonder if you could get me a pouch of tobacco from the station shop. You see,’ she told him disarmingly, ‘I can’t last till the morning without it.’
‘At once,’ the man said and went personally to fetch it.
‘And he delayed the departure of the Lucknow Mail by five minutes,’ she told me proudly when she arrived, ‘so that he could fetch me my tobacco!’
At the same time, she wrote short stories, travelogues and serials to earn enough to live by. Babu and she had married the daughters off, but they were left with virtually nothing for their old age. But it was beneath Diddi to seek help or pity. Like Ama, selling off the family silver to keep the family afloat, Diddi hawked her talent to earn enough for herself and the families of the helpers she had around her. They ate what she ate, lived as she did and shared her life more completely than any of us imagined.
Thus it was that for nearly thirty years, Diddi became a fixture in Lucknow’s Gulistan Colony: every child and resident there knew who she was. She hardly ever visited her neighbours, but she always knew that when the need arose she could depend on them. In a sense, they became her surrogate family. A daughter-in-law from a nearby flat would come to Diddi to complain about her mother-in-law and a little later the mother-in-law would follow with her tale of woes. Every Holi, the entire colony would come to her to wish her and she made huge quantities of gujiyas specially for them. The vendors and workers came to her for loans, for a rest and a cup of tea. Their lives nourished her and dispelled the loneliness of a mother too proud to tell her children she was tired of living alone. Over time, we all began to believe that she actually preferred to stay in her crumbling flat—or perhaps it suited us to believe this myth of the fearless matriarch who preferred to live alone. She often joked that a new neighbour once asked her, ‘Shivaniji, are you childless?’ because we started visiting her less and less. Instead, she would dutifully come and spend time with each one of us.
There was another reason for Diddi’s withdrawal from us as we grew older. This stemmed from her inability to confront adult problems. She always had a special affinity with children— whether her own or those that were attracted to her warmth and lively personality. Yet when they grew up and developed into difficult adolescents and adults, Diddi ran away from their problems. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she often said when one of us embarked on a particular problem in our lives. ‘I can’t bear to hear of your unhappiness.’ She hated being exposed to the pain of the ones she loved the most and several times I had to almost drag her to visit an ailing cousin or aunt. In her own life, as in her writing, Diddi was the quintessential escapist.
Yet I know of no other person who could laugh at herself (and others) with such openness and who had such a perfect crap detector. I like to think this is a gift that Diddi passed on to all of us, even my children. Whenever she came to visit one of us, she brought such cheer and laughter that even our servants would beg her to extend her stay. It was a joke with us that Diddi came with a small overnighter when she came to visit us. For the time she was with one of her daughters, she loved wearing our saris because she was fed up with hers and gave them away readily so that she could be rid of something that had no novelty for her any more. It was also her way of letting us know that she was here for just a few days: her real home was elsewhere.
The day started with her puja—she sang beautifully as she bathed her gods. Her voice rang over the house as she ordered her tea and newspapers and we woke up. The cook was told what to make and how to make it and pickles, chutneys, sweets that were laden with forbidden calories came out of our kitchens long starved of such rich food. The grandchildren pestered her for stories that were told night after night as serials through her visit. She loved spoiling her grandchildren—encouraging them to swear and deliberately said irreverent, un-grandmotherly things to shock and amuse them. In the evenings, the servants sat around her as she watched TV, making rude remarks about political figures to their huge amusement. ‘This one’s mother or father,’ she said once looking at a well-known politician with prominent teeth, ‘was definitely a rabbit.’ Among her regular TV viewing was the programme that flashed the faces of people lost and found. For some odd reason, she watched each face intently and often commented, ‘This one is better lost.’ And then looked around for the round of laughter and applause that inevitably followed. In short, she cultivated the persona of a clown and entertainer to deflect attention from the overwhelming question that haunted her: how long would she be able to stay alone in Lucknow? And when the time came for her to be cared for by someone, where would she go?
She never came as close to voicing these fears as in an article she wrote on the death of Hamid Bhai, her friend and surrogate brother. His lonely death frightened her: she herself was a diabetic, had had several close shaves—a burst appendix followed by peritonitis and tubercular glands in her neck. What if she were to slip into a coma and none of the children were near? In a rare moment of seriousness, she once told me, ‘I don’t want to get used to such love as I find in your homes. Nor do I want to get accustomed to air-conditioned rooms. When I am here and see the tensions in all your lives, I want to run back to Lucknow and live my solitary life. If I don’t see you all, I know you are well. But just picture me as I enter my house when I return to Lucknow. As I open my front door, I shut my eyes against the stench of an old, crumbling house. I can’t sleep many nights and lie awake thinking of you all—I hope Minu is less stressed, I hope Micky is not travelling in a plane that may crash, I hope you are sleeping enough and I hope Binu eases up on worrying eternally… When I am not with you all, you all are with me. All the time.’
This could have been Ama writing to Diddi: Diddi was slowly morphing into Ama.
~
My Brother
An obituary by Diddi (late 1970s):
… This time I returned to Lucknow the day before Eid. I waited for a long time for Hamid Bhai to arrive for it had never happened that he did not visit me on Eid, carrying a bowl of sevian wrapped clumsily in a kerchief. And this was a man who had no kitchen to call his own. He lived alone in a hotel, yet whenever his friends or relatives sent him sevian on Eid, he would carefully keep aside a portion for me. I can never forget the taste of that bowl of sevian, a combination of many flavours, redolent with the aroma of so many kitchens. When he did not arrive this time, it struck me as ominous that he had not replied to my letter written from Bombay. Something was wrong, I thought, and quickly called up a mutual friend. ‘Oh, didn’t you hear? He passed away this May,’ she said. ‘He went to sleep one night and just never woke up.’
I was numb with guilt. Why had I kept silent after writing him just one letter from Bombay? After all, I could have written to someone else and asked about him. He and I may not have been born of one womb but would I ever find a brother like him again? My brother had gone, my brain kept repeating, and I did not know till now.
Every Holi Hamid Bhai came to my house to eat gujiyas even though he hated the festival. ‘Lahaul vila quvat!’ he spat in disgust. ‘What kind of festival do you Hindus call this? Here I was in my white achkan, but do you think that stopped those goons from spraying me with some vile colour? May the bastards rot in hell!’ When my husband was seriously ill, he came silently to sit at his bedside. ‘Go,’ he would tell me kindly. ‘Do what you have to—I’m here to look after him.’ Often I would keep him there for hours as I combed little-known shops tracking down ingredients to concoct the potions my husband’s Ayurvedic doctor had prescribed: ashwagandha, punarnava and god knows what other herbs. I would return sheepishly to find Hamid Bhai sitting patiently waiting for me. When even those potions failed to save my husband’s life, I felt as if I was adrift, alone in a dark world. My relatives dispersed as rapidly as a crowd after a street show is over, to avoid shelling out money, I suppose. There was just Hamid Bhai who was always there for me. ‘Look, child,’ he put his hand on my shoulder, ‘if you don’t keep your chin up, t
here is no hope. Put this behind you and move on. Inshallah, He will lend you a hand.’
When I look back to those dark days, I realize I was given my armour by Hamid Bhai, and my weapons for survival by Nagarji, who said, ‘I want you to live with your head held high—not weeping and whining.’ My patience came from my guru, Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, who quoted a line in Sanskrit to the effect that adversity lends one patience, his eyes streaming with tears as he blessed me with this sloka.
My first memories of Hamid Bhai are from our childhood in Rampur, the golden years of my life. I remember Khas Bagh, Mustafa Lodge, Rose Villa, Meena Bazar, and the gifts that Dawn and Wali Ahad, the nawab’s children, used to send us. Our servants swim next before my eyes: Chaman Khan, Munne Khan, Sikander Mian, Jumman, Muhammad Ali Peshkar and my father’s steno, Alawi Sahib. I remember the fragrance of hina and shamatulambar, and beautiful eyes peering at us from behind the lace eyelets of a burqa. Our house, Mustafa Lodge, was a huge bungalow and my father was the first Hindu home minister of the state. Hamid Bhai’s uncle Sir Abdul Samad Khan’s house, Rose Villa, was next door. Hamid Bhai was the second son of Abdul Wahid Khan. He had no sisters of his own, so he adopted us girls as his own. I must have been about eight or ten years old then. Whenever he came home for his vacations, he would bring me a gift—a beautiful dress, or a doll or crackers from the Army and Navy Stores that showered little gifts on us when we pulled them apart. And on Eid! No matter which corner of the world he was in, Hamid Bhai never forgot to send me ten rupees as my Eidi. He was such a dandy in those days. My father once warned my mother that as Hamid was coming for tea, she had better make sure it was served properly. Hamid Bhai had just come back from abroad and was a little particular about these niceties.
In looks, Hamid Bhai was the exact opposite of his handsome father: dark, with a long nose and huge hairy nostrils, hooded eyes that always appeared half-closed, thick, fleshy lips, short and very, very fat. When he sat on a sofa, it would groan as it sank under his weight; when he laughed you would think a bolt of cloth was being ripped. And yet he had an aura of elegance about him. I remember he once took us children for a drive in his gleaming new Morris to Bilaspur tehsil. Along with us on the seat sat a many-domed tiffin carrier and a hamper with white, starched napkins and cutlery that you could see yourself in. When we sat down to our picnic, we were terrified that we’d pick the wrong fork and watched him to pick the right one in case we disgraced ourselves.
Sadly, I was also a witness to the twilight of his life. He lived in Room Number Two of Burlington Hotel in Lucknow, a Shah Jahan trapped in a cell. Peeling plaster on the walls, cobwebs swinging from the skylights, a sagging bed with a carelessly thrown cheap bedcover that half-covered its spotted sheets and a depressing, dank air that suffocated one’s throat. I found him once eating off an enamel plate, which had leathery chapattis, and a pair of chipped bowls with some watery dal and rice.
As I watched him eat that day, I recalled an entry from his diary he had given me to read once:
The nawab sahib used to be seated on a divan that had silver legs and every guest to the meal had an appointed place. My uncle was given a place of honour as the nawab’s general. The food was served in large round silver plates and came in courses: first came two kinds of salan, seekh kababs and pulao. Then sweet rice and phirni. Several bearers would stand holding silver goblets, their mouths covered with a red cloth and stamped with a seal. Each time, the nawab sahib asked for water, a court official would break the seal and as the nawab took his first sip the hall would resound with a loud ‘Bismillah, ur-Rehman.’
Had Hamid Bhai been able to erase the memory of those royal meals I wondered as I saw his pathetic fare that day. ‘Join me?’ he asked and then in the next breath, ‘God forgive me, child, how can I even ask you to share this swill?’
Every Sunday, he would eat his lunch with me. He had spent a long time in the hills, so was very partial to Kumaoni food. Each Sunday, at his special request, I cooked him a ‘Garampani meal’: hot round puris, yellow potato sabzi and a tangy raita made with cucumbers and a touch of mustard. Gradually, he became weaker, developed some heart trouble and his knees started to trouble him as well. He would drag himself upstairs to my flat somehow but, later, even hauling himself out of the rickshaw became difficult. Yet worse than the betrayal of his body was the betrayal of the relatives he had loved. His nephews, whose expensive school education he had funded, went away to settle abroad. His father died in an accident and his younger brother, incarcerated for years in a mental asylum, died as well. Suddenly, all his family seemed to have deserted Hamid Bhai and he was left all alone in the world. He realized then that many of them had merely made use of him when he had something to give: when the money ran out, so did they. This turned him in his last days into a misanthrope and he took to cursing them whenever he found a listener: ‘So-and-so did not take me to that walima; that one did not reply to my letter; such-and-such Chachi came to Lucknow and did not even care to visit me; my nephews write, come to us, we will send you a ticket—and it’s been three years since that offer. Bastards! Do they have the balls to send a ticket? Even if they sent one now, I would tear it and chuck it out of the window!’
His pride forbade him to seek pity. As I read through his diary, I realized why:
Jalaluddin Khan and Sadaullah Khan had been shot for their participation in the 1857 revolt. This Sadaullah Khan was my grandfather. After his death, his wife Qudsia Begum took her family to Rampur, whose nawab, Yusuf Khan, was her kin. The nawab had recently been decorated with the title of farzand-e-dil-pazir-daulat-e-inglisia by the British, with whom he had a cordial relationship. How could he possibly give sanctuary to the hot-blooded Rohilla family of Qudsia Begum? My grandmother was a woman of great dignity and sagacity. The minute she sensed the nawab’s hesitation, she quietly left with her family for Moradabad…
The same Pathani blood ran in Hamid Bhai’s veins to the end. I also knew why Hamid Bhai had taken a vow of celibacy. The one he wanted to marry had ditched him despite many promises of undying love for him. Then she married someone else and migrated to Pakistan. In his last days, this came back to haunt him and one day, after ages, she suddenly arrived to visit him unannounced. He came straight to me after he saw her off. ‘Child, she came today!’ His face had a flushed look as he announced this.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Who else?’ he laughed sadly and recited:
My youth is long past, yet
The pain of love
Hurts as sharply now
As it did then.
‘That one,’ he elaborated. ‘Came from Pakistan.’ How could I have been so obtuse the first time, I thought. ‘Why didn’t you stop her, Hamid Bhai?’ I asked. ‘I believe she is a widow now.’
‘My dear,’ he said, after a long sigh. ‘When I had a strong voice and a heart that beat, I couldn’t stop her. Do you think she would hear me today when I can hardly hear myself? As for my heart, I have given it to Dr Mansur [his cardiologist] now. Once I loved three things: good food, good drink and good clothes. Life seems to have taken them all away from me.’
I was witness to all these three loves. He had had to quit drinking a long time ago, Mansur Mian had made him give up good food and his tight purse strings took away the good clothes as well. Who could say looking at him in his later years that Hamid Bhai’s clothes once came from Phelps’, his shoes were polished for hours and whenever he went on a tour, his valet would scurry behind him carrying a bag with shoe polish and brushes to clean them after every ten steps. You could smell his aftershave from a mile off. And now? Torn socks and ancient gloves with three fingers peeping from the holes in them. I knitted him a new pair but he lost them. His huge body was stuffed somehow into the rickshaw and reminded me of the enormous quilts we used to stuff into holdalls when travelling, worried that the belt would give way! Patched clothes flapping about him, he would call from the road outside my house: ‘Child! Are you home?’
In the last
year, he could not even get down from the rickshaw and I would take his thali down to the rickshaw to feed him. Then, he did not even have the strength to eat properly and I used to worry that if something were to happen to him outside my flat, on the street, what would I do? To make matters worse, he had now become like a Lear—demented with grief and sorrow. He forgot who was dead and who was alive. ‘Go, call them down!’ he would command me. ‘Tribhi, Shukdeo—where are they? I have come all this way to meet them. Why can’t they come down to meet me?’
When I reminded him gently that my brother Tribhi and my husband had gone, he would say, Gone where? Why can’t you go and call them? I wish I could, Hamid Bhai, I’d reply. Then go! I am ordering you to, the old Pathan would thunder. No one can go there, Hamid Bhai—not even a farzand-e-dil-pazir daulat-e-inglisia, I once tried a weak joke. He became livid. ‘You have the audacity to laugh? I’ll knock your teeth in if you do that again. Go, call them!’ Curtains twitched in my neighbourhood and curious eyes and ears strained to hear the string of curses that Hamid Bhai then hurled at me. To me, these were like the curses that a Sufi fakir hurls to the heavens to have them return as blessing on him—but who would believe that? His old rickshawallah—whom Hamid Bhai called his friend, philosopher and guide—shook his head sadly, ‘Sahibzada has gone crazy, bahuji,’ he said. ‘Allah Mian should call him now. He has done so much for me, bahuji, that I cannot thank him enough. He took me to see Pakeezah twenty-five times, and made me sit in the box with him! Was there a single film that the Sahibzada ever missed?’
Films were his obsession—he often sat through three consecutive shows. Then, when that too became impossible, Hamid Bhai became a fakir. He wandered about the lanes of Lucknow in a rickshaw—Mahanagar, Nishatganj, Nakkhas, Aminabad: each locality had someone he knew but they began to shun him after a point. He came to me one day and I was in my puja so it took me a little while to go down to him sprawled in his rickshaw. He’ll curse, I was worried, but that day, the river of fire had cooled to a different mood. His forlorn face and brimming eyes accused me silently. Could I not have cut short my puja for once, I thought guiltily. This was the man who I would race down to receive as a child, ‘What did you bring for me?’ and today I had made this old, old man wait for me! ‘Forgive me, Hamid Bhai, I was doing my puja…’ my voice tapered off.