Diddi

by Ira Pande

  She banged the phone down and turned to me triumphantly. ‘I learnt that one from my father-in-law, mahtari. He was a khansama with the Angrez sahebs, was the old man. If that fool can understand English, he will keep his mouth shut after that!’

  It worked: that fool never rang again.

  Her simple faith was truly touching. I can never forget one particular incident. When I returned from Haridwar after performing my husband’s last rites, my own house appeared strange and new. However hard I tried, I could not sleep at night. On one such night, oppressed by the heat of the summer and my heavy heart, I dragged a chair to the terrace and sat down. As silently as a cat Ramrati came and sat at my feet and put her head against my knees. ‘You know, Diddi, when you were not here, saheb came every day…’

  ‘What rubbish is this, Ramrati?’

  ‘Believe me, Diddi, every evening he would come and sit at the threshold of your room.’

  She explained then how a sparrow came every one of those ten days that I was away and sat at my doorstep, darting looks all round the room. He came alone, according to her, accompanied by no mate, no friend. ‘When I lit the evening lamp and put it outside, I would fold my hands and tell him, Saheb, it is getting dark now. Perhaps it is time for you to leave. And he would quietly fly off.’

  I could picture the scene: the sparrow at my doorstep and Ramrati, her face veiled modestly, both her hands folded reverently, telling the sparrow, ‘Saheb, it is getting dark now. Perhaps it is time for you to leave.’

  I could not laugh at her then, nor can I laugh now. I did ask then, ‘So why does your saheb not come any more, Ramrati?’

  ‘Why should he come now, Diddi? You set him free at Haridwar.’

  After her daughters were married, she had to face the same problems that all mothers of married daughters face: have to send gifts on the birth of a grandchild, on Karva Chauth, clothes today for a son-in-law, money to a daughter at some festival or other. Every day she came with some request for help. Occasionally, I would lash out. ‘You are going to clean me out, Ramrati. Do I have a gold mine here? Why don’t you ask someone else for help?’

  Head bowed, she stood silently. Then, she said in a resigned tone, ‘Where else can I go, mahtari?’ I kick myself today for my harsh words and remember another poem from Tagore:

  These hands spread before you seek

  Not alms, but a giver…

  In all her years with me she only asked for two favours: one, that I should give her daughter Kiran away when she married and two, that when it was time for her to go, I would make all the arrangements for her funeral. ‘Phalane will never have money even for that! And I don’t want to be covered in a shroud paid for by my daughters, Diddi!’

  She was my soulmate and that is perhaps why I was able to honour both those promises. Her body had barely turned cold when my sister called me to tell me that Ramrati had died. And I immediately arranged money for her last journey. This year on my husband’s death anniversary, I missed her the most. Each year, on this day, she would arrive at the crack of dawn, clean and sweep the doorstep of the house, anoint it with cowdung and reverently carry the food to be given to the cow. Once when my son was performing the ritual anniversary puja, I saw her wipe her eyes with her sari. ‘What made you weep today?’ I asked her later.

  ‘As I was watched Bhaiyya perform the rites at the puja, the sacred thread shining on his bare shoulder, I realized that I have no son, Diddi. Who will do this for me when I am gone?’

  ‘Why, you have daughters, don’t you? Their sons…’ ‘Go on, Diddi…’ she laughed. ‘A son is a son. Want to know what I have to say about sons of daughters? A daughter’s son is like a donkey’s piss on the sand…it vanishes!’

  And we both laughed merrily.

  I can’t laugh today. After my son was asked by the priest to remember all his ancestors and pray for them, he said finally, ‘Now you can remember all your dear ones and pray for them as well.’ It was at the tip of my tongue to say a prayer for her, no blood relative yet dearer to me than my own children. But dare I voice such heresy? The Hindu religion has a forbidding code of conduct and no one can subvert its laws. As a woman, I cannot play a part in any ritual relating to death. Nor can I place the sacred thread on my bare right shoulder and pray for the moksha of Ramrati’s soul.

  Yet this I will say for her: Anadi nidhano Dev shankh chakra gadadhar, akshay pundareekasho prêt mokshaprada bhav. (O Lord of the small and poor, you who hold the conch, the mace and the chakra, release her from the eternal cycle of birth and death and grant her soul moksha.)

  10

  * * *

  The Last Chapter

  Her life in Lucknow fulfilled Diddi in a way that I can now understand, for it gave her a strength she lost when she was in a boring, normal, domestic situation. Like a Samson shorn of his locks, Diddi lost her energy when surrounded by placid people. Unfortunately for her, we were all married into normal households where things ran smoothly and kitchens and store cupboards were neatly arranged. Ever since I can remember, Diddi generated noise and excitement wherever she was and in whatever she did. When she went into the kitchen, she had to have at least two people in attendance to fetch and run for her and she banged lids, cursed bottles that she could not open and yelled when she could not find a ladle or spoon or whatever. Minu used to say that if Diddi ever stubbed her toe, she slapped the first child she met. But at the end of this drama, she produced delicious, finger-licking food although the kitchen looked as if a tornado had swept through it. She always left the debris to be cleared by those who put store by neatness and orderliness: her job was to create the meal.

  In Lucknow, installed in her lively court, she was surrounded by those who looked upon her as their saviour and this encouraged her to become more and more eccentric as she grew older. She was the source of the strength and succour of her staff—outside Lucknow, she felt this identity was erased and she became an appendage to the lives of her children. Nothing was more difficult for her to accept than this secondary status: she was accustomed to being the centre of her universe, so to become a mere satellite in other lives was an unacceptable alternative. She would have dearly loved for us to visit Lucknow regularly but when we started to visit her less and less, she accepted that it was time to let us go. So although her life in the last decade or so was lonely beyond compare, it was a solitary imprisonment that, like Ama, she chose to inflict on herself.

  Then one day, in April 1997, while she was alone in Lucknow, she went to the bathroom at three in the morning and vomited blood. Being Diddi, she did not wake up Kiran, Ramrati’s daughter, who always slept near her bed. She waited till the morning to tell her so as not to alarm anyone. Kiran rang me up at six in the morning, sobbing into the phone. ‘Come now!’ she wept.

  I called the others and all of us rushed to book ourselves on whatever was going to Lucknow—plane, train or taxi. By this time, Diddi had been rushed to the hospital by her neighbours and Anil, the doctor who lived a few flats away, gave her a Vit K injection to stem the haemorrhaging. Then he took her personally over to the hospital and stayed until my brother reached a few hours later. The diagnosis numbed us: Diddi had cirrhosis of the liver and she was bleeding from a ruptured blood vessel.

  The next few days were a nightmare. I lost count of how many times she was rushed to the ICU as she bled from a fresh source. Fifteen days later we were still in the hospital and Diddi had become as weak as a kitten. It was imperative to take her to Delhi as none of us could stay on in Lucknow much longer and the doctors warned us of dangerous infections that she may pick up from the hospital the longer she stayed there. Twice we booked ourselves on a plane to Delhi and each time a fresh crisis erupted and the tickets had to be cancelled.

  Diddi’s illness was reported widely in the local papers and the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, Motilal Vora, sent his secretary to us one day offering us the state plane to fly her out to Delhi. So we reached Delhi in the Uttar Pradesh state plane and drove her straigh
t from the airport to AIIMS, Delhi’s premier medical institute. Among the doctors who treated her were many who had read her works and, all day, doctors and nurses would troop into the room to ask for her autograph. Their care ensured that she recovered and she was told she had been granted a fresh lease of life. However, we were warned that she must get herself checked every month so that the doctors could investigate if any fresh bleed was imminent and take remedial measures. I think this was the first time I saw her submit meekly to us and she spent the next six months in Delhi, moving from one child’s house to another’s. When she realized that she was better, she began to fret about leaving Lucknow for so long. ‘I am fine,’ she told us and bullied the doctors until they allowed her to return once more to her lair.

  For the next seven years, she fooled us all into believing that she had made a complete recovery. And indeed, although she was a frailer, much reduced shadow of her former self, she did not stop writing or travelling. She went to Boston, where my brother had gone in 1999, to see his new house and to London to deliver a lecture at a World Hindi Conference. She was above seventy by now, yet she travelled alone, braving a journey that would intimidate most people of her age, leave alone someone who was as ill as she was by then. Diddi’s younger sister Indira and her doctor husband had migrated to Washington several years ago and Diddi spent many weeks with them. My aunt Indira’s sons and daughters-in-law were well-known doctors and one of them taught at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital. They offered to get her checked by the best doctors in the US. ‘Do you know,’ Diddi told me on her return, ‘the doctor who checked me called his students to show them a woman of seventy-five who had all her own teeth and perfect blood pressure. I told you that you panic unnecessarily: I will live to be eighty.’

  Diddi almost made it to eighty. Then, in April 2001, she was violently ill again. This time, she had acute acitis—fluid had bloated her stomach as her liver withered and she could hardly breathe. All that could be done now was a periodic draining of the stomach cavity. The doctors would insert a long needle to aspirate the fluid from her abdomen but, because her liver was slowly failing, it would fill up again in a few weeks. It was a painful procedure but Diddi bore it without a murmur. She would lie there in the hospital bed, a huge vat on the floor collecting the fluid drained from her body and calmly read a book through the entire procedure! All around her were moaning patients. Some she wrote about, and around some she created funny anecdotes to regale us with. But her eyes told a different tale. They were full of a knowledge she tried to hide from everyone: that she was living on borrowed time.

  That August, she went to Boston once again, and met all her grandchildren who were by now either studying or working there. She called my niece Radhika, Mrinal’s daughter, so that she could bless her first great-grandchild, Arnaaz, and my brother organized a party for her birthday in October with all the grandchildren there. She returned in late October and after a few weeks with Mrinal in Delhi flew off to Lucknow, despite all our pleading. She looked fine to us and we gave in once more. She sounded tired on the phone whenever I called her but brushed off all requests to come to Delhi fast.

  She had hardly been there three weeks, when Kiran called me one day. ‘Iru Diddi,’ she said in a low voice so that Diddi could not hear from her room, ‘she is really bad now. Hamko dar lag raha hai, I am scared, what shall I do? Yesterday Diddi and I went to the hospital and—’

  ‘How did you go?’ I interrupted, knowing that my mother had no car and the hospital was a good hour’s drive from her flat.

  ‘Diddi called a taxi and she insisted on walking down that long corridor to reach the doctor’s chambers. He took one look at her and said, Shivaniji, either you get into hospital now or else go to Delhi immediately. So,’ Kiran quickly told me, ‘I have rung up Bhaiyya’s office and they are sending a ticket across— she will be with you tomorrow.’

  I had just taken up a new job—and my publisher wanted me to go to Calcutta to attend the book fair to launch a book there. It had involved days of setting up press interviews, appointments with authors there and, besides, how could I possibly tell him that a week after I had joined I wanted out? My plane took off from Palam airport as hers flew in. Mrinal and my husband were at the airport to take her straight to hospital, where her doctor had been informed she was coming in a very distressed state. But when things go wrong, nothing goes your way. On the way from the airport, their car was stuck in a traffic jam for an hour or so; my husband tells me she could barely sit—there was so much fluid in her body that she found it difficult to hold herself upright. She had asked to come to my house but obviously the hospital was where she had to be taken first. She asked where I was, because if I had told her that I was going to Calcutta, she would have checked into the Lucknow hospital and not come to Delhi at all.

  I was shocked to see how frail she had become even in the three weeks that she had been in Lucknow. Her face was grey with exhaustion and she could hardly walk or even stand for more than a few minutes. ‘I have come to your house to die,’ Diddi said by way of a greeting, echoing the exact words that Ama had said to her when she came to Diddi all those years ago to spend her last months. Both of them had a very clear premonition of their impending death and knew that their time was up. Diddi used to say that Ama had even predicted that she would die on 18 March. By a strange coincidence, Diddi was to die on 21 March.

  So this is why she had insisted on going back to Lucknow, I realized. She had gone there to say a final goodbye to her home and settle her bank and tax matters there. She told me the name of her bank manager who had promised to help out with the formalities when the time came. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked her angrily. ‘You will be fine. Haven’t we pulled you out of every crisis so far? Don’t be dramatic.’

  ‘This is the end,’ she replied quietly. ‘When I can face it, so can you. Now listen carefully: this is my will, these are my bank papers and Kiran knows all about my contracts and publishing details.’ She handed me a file, turned her back and marched to her room.

  This time, the acitis had gone beyond the stage where a periodic draining of the fluid in her body would work. Diddi’s lungs were now filling up as well and her kidneys were failing. It was hopeless: just as the doctors dealt with one problem, another organ would signal distress. Every morning I got up with a sick feeling in my stomach: was today going to be her last? Finally, I called my brother in Boston and he flew down immediately. This, I knew, is what Diddi had always wanted. She told me, in her inimitable fashion, that if she ever died and he was not present, I was to put her body in a freezer until he came. She could not bear anyone else but her son to light her pyre. Binu came from Dehradun and Diddi said wryly to us one day that at last she had all her children next to her. ‘It took a crisis like this to get you all here—if I had known, I would have offered to die years ago,’ she joked.

  What she could not bear, Diddi turned into a joke. These were sometimes off-colour and sounded very inappropriate. But there was no stopping Diddi—often she was criticized by our relatives for this and it hurt her deeply that they could not see what was so apparent to her and some of us. That life was a huge joke played on us—making sense of it would only make one mad. I remembered the time when both her eyes developed cataract simultaneously and she could barely see. She refused to acknowledge that it had started to become dangerous for her to continue staying alone and refused all offers of help to get her eyes checked up in Delhi. By now, it frightened her to spend so much time out of her lair in Lucknow, and then there was the question of finances. She was too proud to take help from any of the children. So she continued to go for her morning walks with Kiran shadowing her anxiously. Diddi laughed as she told me that she had once folded her hands in greeting to a tree because she thought it was someone she knew. Both of us laughed at the spectacle this must have presented to a passer-by.

  One day, Binu called up and said, ‘Please take her to Delhi and get her cataracts removed: she i
s virtually blind and I’m scared she is going to hurt herself one day.’ The next day, Kiran called me up while Diddi was bathing so that she would not hear: ‘Iru Diddi, I am afraid she is going to get hurt one day, she is walking into furniture and may stumble on the road.’ With great difficulty I persuaded her to come and accept Micky’s help in the expenses of the operation. While taking her to the hospital, I automatically held her hand as we climbed the stairs; she rudely shook me off. ‘I’m not blind,’ she barked and promptly stumbled. That night, as we lay in the peaceful private ward, both of us were worried: she about her surgery, I about the fact that I had a house full of guests, the twins had their final exams coming up and all my staff were on leave. ‘Iru,’ she called out. ‘I’ll pay you for the operation, why don’t you get your eyes done, too? Think of the break you could take,’ and we burst out laughing. Something she hated was pity: to her it was a great admission of failure.

  And now, in her final days, she was determined to go down with the mask in place. Her jokes were a ploy to keep us from becoming sentimental and weepy—something she hated—as much as they were a wish to go when all of us were laughing together. She spent time with each one of us alone, and together. And all the while when we joked, or remembered the old days, we could hear the hours that were ticking away. ‘You will be fine,’ her doctor told her one day. ‘I just had a patient who was over ninety and he went smiling from here.’

  Diddi smiled at him. ‘I am prepared to die, doctor,’ she replied. ‘I have had a good life—I have four wonderful children and I am so proud of what they have achieved. I have eight grandchildren and have seen and played with my greatgrandchild. I have lived life on my terms and will pay for my own funeral. Why should I want anything more?’

  Sadly, her body could no longer carry on: first her liver, then lungs and finally her kidneys started to give way. She had to be moved to the Intensive Care Unit and was taken away from a private room. For almost a week, she was kept there, unaware of the time or whether it was day or night. Worse, all around her were people in terminal conditions and, in fact, at least five people died in the week she was there. Her mind, sharp and alert to the end, registered all this and she no longer asked me restlessly when she was going to be released from the hospital.