by Ira Pande
It was no longer possible for us to ignore the truth: Diddi had just a few more days left. She must have seen our sorrow when we were allowed to visit her for a few minutes at a time, and that snapped her out of her own depression. One day, while she was still in the ICU, she told me, ‘I know why I’m not getting better. The person in front of me is ugly as sin—if he were at least worth looking at, I might have tried getting better. As for my neighbour in the next bed…’ At this point, I looked furtively at the comatose patient in the next bed, tied to tubes and instruments, his stentorian breathing through a ventilator shaking the bed. ‘That one?’ I asked. She nodded, ‘All of last night he kept singing Chalo man Kanpur ke teere, Kanpur ke teere… First, he can’t sing to save his life, he was disgustingly off-key throughout, and then,’ she smiled at me, ‘he got on my nerves. Finally, when I could take it no more, I pulled off my oxygen mask and said, Bhai sahib, drop me off at Lucknow on the way there.’
We both laughed and a passing nurse smiled—Diddi could not bear to see long faces around her and so to the end she kept the nurses and us amused with jokes and risqué comments about other patients. The nurses came to her for a break. ‘Shivaniji, today your Keshto,’ (another patient who had alcoholic cirrhosis and she had named Keshto after the famous actor who played drunks to perfection in Hindi movies), they would tell her, ‘is making all of us really run.’
‘Hasn’t he died yet?’ she asked them, quite aware that she herself had cirrhosis and would very soon probably be in the same hepatic coma he was in.
I have seen many die but no one went like Diddi. She had slipped into a coma in the last few days and I hope she was spared the pain that her body registered as one organ after another shut down. Her vital organs had collapsed: all that beat steadily to the end was her extraordinary heart. When it became apparent that nothing would save her now, we decided to pull out all the tubes and leave her with just the ones that fed her vital fluids. We also insisted she be moved out of the ICU and brought back into her room. All of us were there: all her children and their spouses and Kiran, her faithful shadow. I do not know whether she could hear us but we said all her favourite prayers and transmitted all our love. We were all standing around when the end came, looking at the monitor that showed her pulse slowly winding down. I saw a tear trickle from her left eye and then a flutter on her breast as the last heartbeat signalled the end. And she was gone. It was just getting on to five in the morning of 21 March.
She had always said that she would go at the Brahma Muhurta. This is that magical hour before dawn when the gods take all souls straight to their bosom, she used to say. As we returned from the hospital, a balmy spring breeze was blowing and I swear I felt her last caress on my cheek as she went to their bosom. The town was stirring into life: the azaan was calling the faithful to the mosque, shabads floated out of the nearby gurdwara and temple bells were ringing.
It was exactly the kind of closing chapter that my mother, with her strong preference for dramatic endings when writing her books, would have scripted.
~
* * *
Epilogue: Pootonwali
This is among the last long stories Diddi wrote. It appears to me an epitaph she wrote on her generation of parents.
He went through Chutke’s letter once more, then neatly folded it and hid it under the newspaper. If Parvati’s eyes spotted it she’d drive him mad with her questions: What has he written? When does he want us to go across?
How was he going to tell her, ‘Parvati, your Chutke has not given the slenderest hint of when he wants us to come.’ He had already written thrice to Chutke that his mother was not well at all, and that she had actually fainted a couple of times while working. You know, he’d written, that your mother’s eyes are getting clouded over—one has glaucoma and the other a cataract. The doctors have warned her that if she doesn’t get them seen to in time, she might lose her eyesight altogether. I don’t have to tell you what this village is like for medical help: there is a hospital but no doctors. If you could arrange to get her seen by a proper doctor, it would give me a lot of relief…
His clever son, however, had gauged his father’s intentions, so his reply was full of his own woes. I am due to be transferred this April, he wrote back. I’ve spent five years here and they have become very strict about extending tenures in Delhi, so I must return to my parent cadre. I am in such a fix, Babuji: Sujata is in her final year at school and Ronnie has just got admission in a new school with great difficulty. Sheila will also have to quit her job, else I’ll have to leave the family behind in Delhi and carry on alone. But that means running two establishments…
So he had made it quite clear that, given his own troubles, a mother turning blind for lack of attention and a worried father were very low down on his list of priorities. Parvati came in quietly and put his cup of tea near him. ‘I am sure,’ she said in her soft voice, ‘that we will hear from Chutke today.’
‘To hell with Chutke and his letters,’ he growled at her and watched her flinch. Instantly he regretted snapping at her: she’d become so frail, so slight that he was reminded of the cruel game he played as a schoolboy, when he loved to poke an earthworm with a stick. At the first jab of his stick, the creature would curl up into a little ball to protect itself from further torture. Parvati’s pale face and stricken eyes reminded him of that cruel childhood pastime. Shame on me, he thought, what pleasure does one get from torturing the tortured? What joy have you ever been able to give her, his conscience smote him. In these forty-five years have you even put a drawstring in your pyjamas by yourself? Did you ever sew a button on to a shirt? What did you ever do for this woman who uncomplainingly brought up your family of five ungrateful sons? All she could ever afford to wear were the cheapest saris and petticoats but did she ever complain? Has any one of you ever given her even a plain gold ring to wear? If her father had not given her those twenty tolas of gold when she got married, would you have been able to bring up your family? Three of the daughters-inlaw were given their ornaments from that hoard (the other two were given nothing because they were brought into the family by the sons without consulting him).
Parvati’s father had been forced to keep that gold aside for his daughter because he realized that without that added allure his plain daughter may remain unmarried. She was illiterate, unremarkable in face and feature and so short that she could be mistaken for a dwarf. Added to this, she was timid beyond belief, a result of her mother’s early death. Her father was the headmaster of the village school and had indeed sent her to school but she was so dumb that she failed three years running in the first class itself. In the meantime, her father remarried and Parvati drew further into her shell when she confronted her mean-eyed stepmother. Like a mesmerized rabbit when her stepmother was around, she ended up botching even the simplest task assigned to her. When she cooked, the vegetables would either be swimming in salt because she had added it twice or the rice was hard and inedible because she had drained too much starch and half the rice with it as well. Her trembling hands spilt the oil and milk with alarming frequency. Her stepmother screamed at her and Parvati wilted under the streaming abuses from her mouth, while her father stood like an impassive tree near a turbulent stream. Every year, Parvati’s stepmother produced a new son and her father, overwhelmed by gratitude for this rich crop, became like putty in her evil hands. His mind, warped by the stepmother’s lies and tales, made him blind to his daughter’s misery and soon, encouraged by his new wife, he took to thrashing Parvati regularly. Ultimately, relief from this miserable life came when Parvati’s father’s sister found her a suitable boy.
‘They are asking for a lot,’ she told her brother, ‘but then you won’t easily get another boy like him.’ And she was right: the boy was tall, handsome and well educated. Parvati’s father decided that a generous dowry may wipe the cruelty he had heaped on his motherless daughter and quickly agreed to all the demands the boy’s father made.
Shivsagar Mishra had p
assed out of the Kashi Vidyapeeth and just joined his first job. When he went home that year, his mother informed him that his father had chosen a bride for him: the daughter of one Harmendra Shastri of Faizabad. He lay awake that night wondering about his future bride. They had told him she was pink and white and he remembered meeting her father once, a handsome man with sharp features. So the daughter must be pretty, he deduced dreamily. The romantic lines of Kiratarjuna’s Sanskrit verses came to his mind: ‘Manini, my love, still your lovely hands that tremble like leaves / Else the bees that hover here, may fly away… Are these your eyes or the petals of a lotus? / Your eyelashes appear like a swarm of bees covering them… Is this your smiling face or the fragrant bloom of a royal lotus?…’
Shivsagar created a heroine in his mind and fell in love with her. Their marriage would be like the divine coming together of Shiv and Parvati, he dreamt on, and he would strut like a proud peacock as she followed him coyly when they returned with the marriage procession. He would lift her veil gently and be dazzled by what lay behind it…
But the truth was far from this dream: his Parvati sat on the bridal bed as gracefully as a dhobi’s bundle. And when, after an inordinately long wait through the never-ending wedding rituals, he finally lifted her veil, his romantic fantasies stopped performing cartwheels in his head. His bride barely reached his knees and her blank gaze reminded him of a dumb mule. He could not find one feature in her that would inspire him to remember the lyrical conceits of Kiratarjuna’s verses. Slowly, he learnt to live with the compromises his romantic soul was forced to make. His stern father would never understand his frustration even if he ever dared to voice it, and his mother was so delighted with the submissive Parvati that there was no point even reproaching her for saddling him with such a bovine wife. Parvati’s dowry of twenty tolas of gold, the cows and buffaloes that she brought along with her and her humble, submissive nature were all Shivsagar’s mother had ever wanted in a daughter-in-law. To add to her joy, Parvati produced five strapping sons in the next seven years. She never asked to visit her father’s home nor did she ever fall ill. Above all, she appeared unfazed by her husband’s deliberate indifference and followed him dutifully like a shadow.
When her youngest son, Chutke, was three years old, her father-in-law passed away. Yet, even after both his parents had died, Parvati refused to give up the veil and always covered her face modestly. Shivsagar was now the headmaster of the school and his house had a radio and two steel almirahs. He had also built three rooms on the first floor. Their sons were called Akhil, Amit, Ajay, Anil and Aditya—their far-sighted father had carefully chosen these names so that he would never have to look too far for the results of any competition to search for them. The boys did brilliantly in school and Parvati was often congratulated by the older village women on her good fortune. You are a true pootonwali, Parvati, they’d say, a blessed mother of sons. The boys were so good-looking that Parvati waved chillies and coals over their heads every Sunday and Tuesday to avert the evil eye. They grew up and, one by one, they all flew away to study. And Shivsagar and she were left all alone in their village.
They had lived together now for forty years and the placid tenor of their life had hardly rippled with change. Shivsagar was a little deaf but even now there was not a single strand of grey in Parvati’s hair. She still woke at four in the morning, bathed and brought him his tea at his bedside. A little later, she dragged a chair in the sun and placed next to it a glass of milk, a bowl with five almonds, the newspaper and his spectacles. Then she went into the kitchen and started cooking. Over the years, perhaps out of years of practice, she had evolved into a superb cook and her food—whether a plain khichri or the elaborate meva ki gujiya—were renowned all over the village. ‘Aji, there is no one who can cook like her anywhere in the village,’ her mother-in-law boasted. Once, stung by his father’s paeans of praise in honour of his wife’s culinary skills, Shivsagar had commented sarcastically, ‘You know, Babuji, a friend of mine says that the uglier a woman, the better her cooking.’ His father had roared with laughter, for he thought his son was trying to provoke his bride but after that day, Parvati’s veil came down a notch lower. Shivsagar could see that she was weeping behind it and was irritated at the thought of how ugly she looked when her nose turned red after a howl. He never forgave his father to the end for tying him down to such a cow.
Although Shivsagar refused to speak to his wife, Parvati never confided her misery to anyone in his family. So what if he never spoke to her—hadn’t he given her five handsome sons? Would anyone believe her if she told them that her husband spoke directly to her for the first time after ten years of being married? He came to her only to satisfy the hunger in his loins but that day, when he went to the kitchen and found nothing to eat, he went furiously in search of her and found Parvati lying in her room, burning with fever. No doubt the boys had polished off whatever they found in the kitchen when they came home in the afternoon, for every jar was empty.
Searing loo winds raged outside, else he would have gone to the local halwai’s shop. So Shivsagar stood at the threshold of her room and yelled, ‘Parvati, is there nothing to eat today? I haven’t had anything to eat since the morning.’ Parvati sat up quickly and even through the haze of her fevered brain, her husband’s furious voice sounded to her like the sweet peal of temple bells. ‘Did you say something to me?’ she asked him softly, her eyes fixed on him as innocently as the clear gaze of a frightened faun. She could not believe that her husband, who had never so much as glanced her way and whose touch was a furtive, angry fumble on an occasional night of passion, would call out her name. She preened herself like a peacock and a joyous anticipation lit her face. ‘Who else would I be talking to?’ Shivsagar muttered ungraciously. ‘I am starving.’
So far the only hunger that she had ever known him capable of was the stirring of his loins, but today he reminded her of one of her sons who said, ‘Amma, give me something to eat. I am starving!’
She threw the sheet aside and made her way to the kitchen. Her head was throbbing with pain and her eyes were burning, yet she dished up hot puris and a delicious potato curry in record time even though her hands were trembling. She set the food on a thali and placed it before him. Within minutes, he had polished off a mound of puris, drunk a chilled glass of water and left for the school. Parvati could not lie down after that and that evening she made a meal fit for the gods to make up for keeping him hungry that morning. When the sons came home, they fell upon the food like an army of termites and licked their platters clean. Chutke asked her, ‘What is so special today, Amma?’ and she had no answer. Would the innocent child even understand what she was celebrating if she were to tell him, ‘After ten years of being married to him, your father spoke to me for the first time today.’ In any case, the boys were so full of their own news that no one waited for an answer.
The boys made their way out of the kitchen noisily, but there was no sign of their father. Night had fallen and the boys were fast asleep—Parvati was burning with fever again but waited patiently for her husband to eat her own meal. Shivsagar came finally and Parvati got up and went out with a lota of water for him to wash his hands in the courtyard. Silence. She took his thali, set out with the special meal and placed it on his usual table. Then she hesitated, almost expecting him to say, ‘Go, Parvati, get your thali here as well. We’ll eat together.’ But there was not a word from Shivsagar. Then she heard Chutke talking to himself in his sleep and Parvati went slowly to her room to spend another lonely night. And the pootonwali, the blessed mother of five sons, curled her body into a small bundle as she carved out a place between her sleeping sons and prepared herself to be flailed by their thrashing limbs all night.
For years she had slept on this hard wooden takht with her sons, while Shivsagar slept in another room. If the sons were awake when she reached the room after locking up the kitchen for the night, a war would erupt for the privilege of sleeping next to her that night. And each time, Chutke
would claim that place as his birthright and wrap his thin arms round her soft stomach so hard that she felt her intestines would pop out. Parvati had accepted her lonely life without a murmur, but that night she wept silently, feeling as if someone had snatched away a jug of water after offering her a drink. The tears continued to fall and soon turned into hiccups. She quickly stuffed her sari into her mouth in case she woke Chutke. What would she say to him if he asked her, ‘Amma, why are you crying?’
She had long suspected that he wasn’t unaware of his parents’ relationship and one day, when they grew up, the boys were bound to find out. By the time they left their childhood behind them, they all knew that Babuji never spoke to Amma and yet their respect for their father remained undimmed. They heroworshipped their tall, good-looking father and one roar from him turned them into submissive lambs. When the five boys sat with their father to do their sandhya in the puja room, Parvati’s chest swelled with pride at the spectacle her handsome family presented. They say that a mother loves all her children equally but the truth is that every mother is especially partial to the weakest in her brood. Her Chutke was Parvati’s favourite— a sickly child in his infancy, he was also the sweetest looking, his effeminate looks and innocent smile remained unblemished by puberty. The other boys had four sounds come simultaneously when their voice broke, but Chutke’s voice, even when he became a man, always retained its sweet, flute-like pitch. His eyes filled up if anyone raised their voice at him, yet he was ahead of all the rest in class. Truly, all Parvati’s sons were extraordinarily bright and, as they grew older, she began to believe the village women when they said she was a pootonwali—a blessed mother of sons.