Nimita's Place

  When she resurfaces from the sea of embarrassment, it is to a murmur much like the singing games she and her friends play at Kinnaird. Yet it is not a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” but a chorus of “Terrible, just terrible, what happened. That poor—”

  “Man,” Karan says, probably meaning the policeman.

  “Boy,” Daddy and Dilip-Praji say, definitely meaning the Malhotra son.

  It has come to light that the Malhotra boy was not the instigator of the riot. Much of the blame should fall on that Virendra Tiwana, who started the morcha in the first place. But his parents have pulled some strings with the Punjab Unionist Party and so Jagan Malhotra will pay the price.

  The Malhotras are sending Jagan and their younger daughter to their aunt in Dharamsala. It is trouble upon trouble for the family that has already had to close its sports goods import/export business with Hong Kong. Then it took several agonising weeks for news to come that the older son and daughter-in-law had got on the last boat out before the Japanese occupied the port. Luckily, money is no problem for the Malhotras and they are hoping to solve this current problem with their wealth.

  The dead policeman’s family will receive a monthly pension of one rupee, because he died in the line of duty. It is not much for a family of five, with two sons to settle and two daughters to marry off.

  “Mr Malhotra is giving a full 500 rupees to the widow. As a trust for her children. Out of good will,” Prem says. It is an astronomical sum for someone who manages a household on 15 rupees a month. It is maybe one fewer annual holiday in Hong Kong for the Malhotra family.

  Nimita raises her head at that and looks at her father. She is thinking of Mrs Dalhousie, who once, at assembly, read the story of how the Christian God Jesus was sold to the police by one of his friends, for the sake of thirty pieces of silver. “Every man has his price,” Mrs Dalhousie said. “Girls, you must strive to be priceless.”

  If God can be sold for thirty silver coins, what is the price of a policeman?

  As though conscious of his daughter’s gaze, Prem coughs.

  6.

  The season is turning, the cooler weather adding a last blush of sweetness to the flowers in the Khosla garden. From her bedroom, Nimita can look down into red blooms of hibiscus, waxy white frangipani and orange marigolds, dots of colour against the deep green of a well-watered lawn.

  The colours of the garden are echoed within the Khosla bungalow, two rooms piled with heaps of soft, rich fabrics for Nimita’s trousseau. Pink, yellow, red, green, ochre, all the colours of earth and fire and life chosen for her sets of matching salwar kameezes and chunnis as well as the saris she will wear more often in her married life.

  Charan-Mamaji and Mummy went several times to Naseem Jewellers on Curzon Road to order the new sets of jewellery Nimita will take with her to the Sachdev household. There are the sets she will inherit as well, ropes of pearls from Hyderabad that Daddy’s dead mother kept for her grandchildren, gold bangles that Mummy took from her late mother to be passed on to the granddaughter.

  Nimita is the only child of the Khosla family but also of her mother’s family since Mamaji never married, having devoted his life to the army and to his sister.

  Charan-Mamaji is only supposed to give a single set of jewellery for the wedding, during the sagai or engagement. He went to Daddy with folded hands requesting that he be allowed to give more.

  “I have no children, Sharada is like my own child. Nimmy is my niece and my grandchild,” he said while Daddy hugged him and tried to unclasp his hands and finally, after much embracing and crying between both men, agreed.

  Nimita saw it and knows she shouldn’t have: the two men she loves best in the world crying over her and her wedding. Daddy pushing away Charan-Mamaji’s hands, saying: “Please, I am ashamed before you”, and Charan-Mamaji replying: “If you consider me your elder then allow me humbly to do this”.

  The sight made something rip inside her, a soft pain, that the matter of her clothing would mean so much to these two men whose own wardrobes are in sober shades of grey and black and white picked for them by Mummy. Charan-Mamaji’s uniforms and medals are perhaps the only clothes Mummy did not put in his cupboard.

  Nimita knows she should be enjoying all of this, the soft silks and cottons, the rich embroidery from the hands of Rukhsana Sheikh and choosing the designs to be stitched into the sets that will be gifted to the women on the Sachdev side. She should finger the shining fabrics and appreciate the glittering riches being exchanged between the Khosla and Sachdev households. Sets are being sent over to her mother-in-law-to-be and elder sister-in-law, and Urmila-Auntyji in turn has sent gold—thick necklaces, bangles and earrings to be worn for the engagement.

  The Sachdev share is tip-top, best quality gold and the latest designs, but Nimita knows that the jewellery she will go with is more elegant. It has hints of diamonds, rubies and emeralds, tastefully set so as not to deliberately outshine her new in-laws, but certainly making it very clear that she is the bride. Timeless designs, filigree and inlay and work that will not only look good on a blooming teenager, but twenty years later as well, when she stands at her own children’s weddings.

  Nimita is taking her inheritance with her. The gifts going with her are a tangible expression of parental love condensed into gold, gems and land title deeds. Dowry, perhaps, but to show she is valued. “This is our treasure, please treasure her too,” the cloth and gold say.

  Some of the wealth flows back to the Khoslas. The Sachdevs have the textile business and almost as much land as the Khoslas, so for the sake of her family’s honour, Urmila Sachdev has told the Khoslas that Nimita must only come to them in her marriage clothes. This is no mere lip service as Sharada Khosla once feared. Urmilaji goes so far as to send not one but two sets of clothes—with matching jewellery—for the engagement and wedding day.

  The jewellery is one new set also from Curzon Road but from Naseem’s brother Ashraf, and one obvious heirloom meant for the second daughter-in-law. There are pearl-studded gold flower earrings only a little smaller than the ones Nimita has seen Shanti-Bhabhi wear, along with pearl-studded bangles and a heavy gold choker of pearls and uncut diamonds.

  Nimita will be expected to display her jewellery after marriage, just as Mummy never takes off her gold marriage kadas. The clinking of the bangles has soothed and comforted Nimita through childhood fevers and nightmares. The sound does not comfort her now, accompanied as it is by Mummy giving orders for the coming wedding.

  Nimita takes the invitation cards to Kinnaird College and distributes them to her classmates and her teachers. All congratulate her, some look happy, some sad. Mrs Luthra and Mrs Singh tell her “BA (Fail) is also a qualification” and “Maybe your husband will let you come back some time?”

  She saves Mrs Dalhousie’s card for last. When the principal calls for her to come in, her legs tremble so much that she can barely walk through the open door. She falls into the chair before Mrs Dalhousie and holds out the wedding card, printed on thick cream bond paper with the invitation carefully lettered below a stylish “Aum”.

  Mrs Dalhousie takes it and reads it carefully. “So you are leaving us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nimita says. “I’m getting married, ma’am.”

  “Are you happy?” Mrs Dalhousie asks, so gently that Nimita answers honestly. She shakes her head and then she nods, eyes closed, trying to hold back tears.

  Mrs Dalhousie sits back in her chair and lets the teenager cry.

  After the wet handkerchief is put away, she raps on the desk. “Who is the governor of Punjab province?”

  “Lieutenant-Colonel Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana,” Nimita says automatically.

  “If Lieutenant-Colonel Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana one day came and said: ‘I’ll give up the governorship of Punjab to get married?’ what would people say?”

  “That he’s a fool,” Nimita says. “Men don’t stop working when they get married.”

  “Yes,” says Mrs Dalhousie, who
had refused to marry until she was 26. Only then did she meet the twice-her-age and madly smitten Captain Alex Dalhousie of the British Indian Army, who had agreed to her condition: to let her continue her career as a teacher.

  Twenty years later, Captain Dalhousie and their son are both dead in the Burma war. Mrs Dalhousie has continued to teach, reading the morning prayer without stumbling even on the day the telegram from Rangoon arrived.

  “Please think about what I have said, Nimita,” Mrs Dalhousie says. “Thank you for the invitation.”

  The conversation has continued to ring in Nimita’s ears, drowning out the noise of the sawing and hammering. Carpenters and painters and other workers arrive daily at the Khosla bungalow, painting, repairing and preparing the house for the ceremony in two months’ time. Gifts for relatives and guests litter two bedrooms, from saris to packets of auspicious comfits such as dried figs and apricots and almonds wrapped in fine muslin and tied with gold ribbon.

  Kanta-Bibi and Ghanshyam spent two days packing the gifts under Mummy’s eye but Mummy and Nimita are checking the packets one more time.

  The scent of the dried fruit stirs Nimita’s stomach, which has not had its usual 11am snack. She takes a packet from her mother and begins munching.

  “Nimmy!”

  Nimita refuses to look at her mother. This is the only act of rebellion she has allowed herself since returning from the Punjab Club on the day of the riot. That and her daily contemplation of Mrs Dalhousie’s handwriting. The piece of paper with the address of an engineering college lies on her dressing table in the carved musical box that holds the ribbons and bobby pins she uses on special occasions. She opens that box daily to hear its tinkling song and be reminded of what one person thinks she might achieve, apart from matrimony.

  Almonds crunch in her mouth, drowning out the voice in her head that reminds her that her life is slipping through her fingers. That the likes and dislikes of a complete stranger will rule her days, whether or not she likes it.

  She opens another packet from the basket meant for Urmila-Auntyji’s sister.

  “Nimmy, stop that. Now look, we’ll have to make two more packets. Really, you’re the limit. Bibi! Bring water!” Sharada shouts as Nimita chokes on a bit of fig. “Why are you eating so fast? Didn’t you have breakfast properly?”

  “Slowly. Slowly now,” she says, patting Nimita’s back, bangles chiming.

  Water is brought and drunk, Bibi’s exclamations about the ravaging heard, dealt with. New bags are prepared, order restored.

  Nimita blinks away tears, rests her head on her mother’s shoulder. Mummy strokes her hair.

  “It has to happen to us all, beta,” she says softly. “We all have to leave our homes and go. I also, when I was your age.”

  “It’s not fair,” Nimmy says.

  Mummy begins unravelling Nimita’s plait, loosening the three thick interwoven ropes of hair and massaging the scalp. “I’ll oil your hair properly tomorrow. It’s getting dry.”

  “Mummy.”

  “Ssh, beta. You know your Nana was from Delhi? Karol Baug. The house I showed you that time? I had to leave it when I was even younger than you are now.” Mummy’s hands pause. “There was an ice-ball man in the neighbourhood who sold those ice-balls made of shaved ice and red syrup. Every day in the summer he would come to our house in Karol Baug and your Nana would buy enough for the entire household. Even the servants and sweepers. He was that sort of man.”

  Nimita rests her head more comfortably against her mother. “And Nani? What was she like?”

  Mummy laughs. “She would always say your Nana was being too generous, what was this sort of nonsense? But everyone knew the truth and when they needed help, they looked for her first. One time—”

  She stops, wondering whether to tell the story to her daughter. Nimmy is going to be married, but is she too young to hear about this sort of thing? Although Sharada was not even six years old when she realised how often women came to the Chauhan household, bleeding, battered, pleading for refuge. They received it and they received justice too, Dipti Chauhan would send her gate guards to bring back the errant husbands and give them a thrashing in full view of the women they had wronged. Then she would send the women back with a few rupees, or find them work as domestic servants.

  She decides Nimita can hear a version of the truth.

  “If anyone even looked the wrong way at a girl, even a sweeper woman, your Nani would take her slipper and give the person a thrashing.” She hugs Nimita.

  “And even your Nani had to leave her home to set up another one with your Nana. That is the way of the world.”

  “I hate the way of the world,” says Nimmy. “Just because someone says: ‘This is how it should be’, I should leave my home? Because it is the way of the world?”

  Mummy pats Nimmy’s cheek. Not a slap but a reminder of reality. “Don’t be silly. In school, didn’t you have to go to class at a certain time? Didn’t you have to do your homework when your teacher told you to? Those rules were there for a reason.”

  “What’s the reason a woman has to leave her home and go to some stranger’s house?”

  Mummy doesn’t answer immediately. She strokes Nimmy’s hair for a long time.

  “I lost my mother at such a young age that I can’t explain it to you. You know your grandparents passed away in a cholera epidemic when I was still young? I had to go stay with your Charan-Mama in Simla, in military quarters, and I think that is why he never married, just so he could bring me up.”

  She blinks away tears. “He was so careful with me. Even if I wanted to stay the night at a school friend’s house, he would take me there himself and talk to the parents and then be at their house in the morning so he could be sure I went to school on time. Anything I wanted was mine. Anything he could give me—clothes, dolls, holidays.”

  “Then?”

  “Then what?” Mummy laughs. “One day your mama came home and told me: ‘I have found the perfect match for you.’”

  “So you said yes?”

  “No. I cried and I cried. I told him I didn’t want to marry. Just like you.”

  Nimita sits up.

  “Your Charan-Mama was very patient. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life taking care of me? That is not what I want for you. I want to know you will be taken care of after I’m gone.’

  “Again and again I told him: ‘Why do you want to send me away?’

  “He said: ‘Do you think I want to send you away? I will only send you to someone who will keep you like his own daughter. At least meet the boy.’

  “So I met your father. And six months later we were married.”

  “How did you know you wanted to marry Daddy?”

  Mummy’s eyes are very bright. “I didn’t. But your mama has been my father and mother. If he said to me that the sky is green, I would believe it, just because he says so. He told me your father would take care of me and he was right.

  “In all these years, you know, Nimmy, your father has never said one angry word to me. I had no mother, His mother was long gone. I had to learn everything from Bibi, not Kanta-Bibi, the Bibi back then. Everything, even how to keep a house. In Simla we had the orderlies and batman, they did everything. But He never got angry even once.

  “And I learnt. And then you came.”

  Nimita picks at the bedcover. Mummy shakes her lightly.

  “If not marriage, what do you want to do?”

  “Study.”

  Mummy laughs. “Beta, after marriage no one is stopping you. If Karan and Urmilaji don’t mind—”

  “Mummy, why is it that a man can study after marriage but I will have to take two people’s permission?”

  Mummy says nothing for a very long time. Then: “What do you want to do with all this studying? You can read and write English and Urdu. You are a BA (Fail), the certificate will also come.”

  “Mummy, have you really, truly never thought,” Nimita swallows, “that I could become an engineer?”


  Mummy looks away and laughs a little.

  “An engineer? Doing what, building roads and laying telephone wires? Standing in the hot sun and fighting with labourers? Are you mad, Nimmy?”

  “Why not?” Nimmy says, but the image Mummy has conjured is daunting.

  “Why not? Oh God. Listen, Nimmy. We’ve been lenient with you all your life, you’ve never learnt the realities of this world. Now you will have to learn.”

  “What lenient? I’m not asking you to send me to Edinburgh, I’m talking about colleges in India.”

  Mummy shakes her head. “When you were born, Brij Sahi only said: she’s very stubborn. So on his advice we named you Nimita. As a reminder, Nimmy. As women, our destiny is fixed at the time of birth. We are wives and mothers, our duty is to our family and the next generation.”

  Nimita shakes her head too. Mummy slaps her. Lightly. A love tap, a reminder.

  “Not now, but later you’ll agree with me.”

  Nimmy begins to shake and Mummy folds her in her arms again.

  “Listen, Nimmy. You think we’d send you to just anybody? The minute I think you’re unhappy, or badly treated, I’ll come myself in the Packard with Charan-Mama’s gun and bring you back. But that will never happen with the Sachdevs. Karan will treat you with love and respect.”

  “How do you know that? How do you know?”

  “Well,” Mummy says. “I wasn’t going to tell you but maybe it’s better you know. The marriage was Karan’s idea.”

  Nimmy freezes. Mummy holds her tighter.

  “He saw you playing tennis with Roshna at the Punjab Club one day. Urmilaji says that was it. Dhoom! Lightning. She sent the rishtaa a few weeks later.”

  Nimmy absorbs this new knowledge. A little flame of excitement kindles in her stomach.

  “It’s a good thing for a man to love the woman first,” Mummy says. “That is the best sort of beginning. You don’t worry, Nimmy. Everything else will come naturally afterwards.”