Nimita's Place

Nimita makes herself hold the baby boy until Najma has adjusted the child in the bundle, opened the front of her shirt and begun to feed it. Nimita tries to pretend this is all normal, handing the boy over when Najma gestures. The woman settles her son on her lap, joggling him and feeding him with one hand while supporting her tiny old-man baby with the other arm.

  Nimita watches the expert handling of two children. She has the feeling that this is the easiest task Najma has had to perform. Her face softens under the pull of the baby’s mouth, her free hand caresses the boy’s face in between feeding it little balls of paratha. Nimita feels both ashamed and honoured to be watching this intimacy that should be granted only to mothers, aunts, sisters and other close relatives. She is none of these. I am the same age as this girl, she remembers with a shock.

  When the children are fed, the boy puts his head in his mother’s lap, hand reaching out to the bundle that is his sibling.

  “So you came from Ambala?” Nimita says.

  Najma grunts. “From Calcutta,” she says. “A long time ago.”

  Not a very long time in terms of months. Her story is typical of many others from the east of India this year. Najma was married to a tailor; his second marriage, her first and a very good one for someone of her farmer family’s standing. It was thanks to her brother, who was a soldier fighting in the Angrez war. His pay meant a good dowry, enough to snag this tailor with a three-room house in Calcutta, who was a decent enough man to a bride half his age and even kinder when the first child, a boy, was born.

  Then came the rice shortage. First the dry fields, which forced her father and mother and younger sister out of the fields and into Calcutta, shamefully begging a place in their son-in-law’s home until their son could return. He didn’t and who knows what happened to him? But he must have died well-fed at least; the Angrez government took all India’s rice for her soldiers fighting that faraway war.

  Her husband, a good man, did not say anything, letting her family stay even when the city was down to long lines in front of government granaries, begging for handfuls of grain. Even when you walked down the streets and saw mounds and mounds of cloth and sun-dark skin, people sleeping, starving to death on the handful of gruel they got from the government. Those were the lucky ones, who slept. Others stayed awake while the dogs and vultures came. The animals lived well in Calcutta in those days, or so she heard. Later even they starved, unable to make much of a meal of skin stretched over bone.

  What was there to be done? Her husband, God rest his soul, never shirked his duty as a good Muslim. Before matters got too bad, he married off her younger sister into a friend’s family, so she was safe, unlike the other daughters and sisters whose menfolk either killed them or sold them, thinking either fate was better than slowly starving to death.

  Najma was at the time pregnant with a second baby. By God’s grace, Najma and the baby boy survived, though she didn’t realise how, until her parents, who had grown thinner by the day, began coughing and then lay down with a fever and never got up again. Her husband followed, soon after. Then their son. But before dying, He cared for her parents as though they were His own, finding a burial ground and a maulvi to speak for them instead of abandoning them to the huge funeral pyres the kaffirs and Angrez were building to clean the streets of the dead.

  With her husband and first child dead, she turned to her sister who lived nearby. For a time she was absorbed into another household. But the lines continued to grow longer for fewer handfuls of grain and her sister’s belly began to swell with hunger, not new life. Najma took her baby and went looking for the Angrez troops who, it was rumoured, were gathering people and putting them in trains for the villages. Perhaps if she returned to her parents’ village, it would be better. It couldn’t be worse than staying on in Calcutta, being responsible for more deaths at the expense of her own life or worse.

  But when she got to the station with the baby (it is at this point that Nimita realises that the older child is the baby who survived; she does not ask about the infant Najma is breastfeeding) everyone said the countryside was worse, skeletons the only crops growing in the fields. People were crying and begging and hugging the soldiers’ feet, begging not to be sent back. Najma held her baby and watched one man being kicked aside by an officer and shoved on the train by two Sikh soldiers. The man screamed as they put him on the train, calling curses down on their heads, curses on the Sikhs and Hindus and Jat Punjabis who were hoarding their grains and refusing to send them to the hungry in Bengal, purposely letting the Muslims of Calcutta starve for the sake of a few annas and rupees.

  “What nonsense,” yelled another man being shoved on the train. Perhaps he hoped for mercy from the Sikhs.

  “It’s true,” the first man yelled back. “Ask them. Ask them!”

  But the train station filled with soldiers and police officers with sticks and Najma, heart in mouth and child in hand, prayed only that the train would leave without her on it. She ducked into the crowd and made herself part of a group of dead-eyed women sitting on the side. Even in these times, nobody would lay a hand on women, who, it was expected, would move with their men.

  “It is nonsense,” the Sikh soldiers reassured each other after the train left. “Bloody Bengalis. Train after train is coming in with wheat and rice from the Punjab. Every day.”

  If that was true, then—Najma walked around until she found the place in the station with the most guards. Yes, they were unloading sacks and sacks. Of food? For Calcutta? Maybe. Maybe not.

  Exhausted, unable to think, she somehow climbed into the goods train, fell asleep and was found on it a day later. The guard let her ride all the way to Ambala, even fed her. Kindness of a sort.

  From there, a servant’s situation that became unbearable. (“They were not good people,” is what Najma says, leaving Nimita to wonder what could be so bad, so unbearable to this woman who had already seen so much, lost so much.) Yet another journey, and then another, from situation to situation as one became worse than the other and too bad to bear. Finally she ended up in Lahore, the other side of India and now here, in this temporary camp set up by Mrs Dalhousie.

  “How did you meet Mrs Dalhousie?” Nimita asks but this is greeted by silence and sullen rocking of her children.

  “Ask her,” Najma says.

  Nimita doesn’t press.

  Najma needs more than cloth from her. She needs—justice, Nimita thinks haphazardly. A roof over her head. Shelter for her children. A place that will not be taken from her again. She needs—

  “Can I do something for you?” she asks Najma. Hard grey eyes look at her and into her and Nimita flushes, understanding.

  The first thing Nimita can do is to leave. No well-brought-up woman would eat without offering food—feeding children is different, of course. As long as Nimita is in front of her, Najma cannot have her own meal.

  “Please think about my question,” Nimita says, rising to her feet. “I’ll come again.” To her own surprise, she means it. Turning, she bumps into a black-veiled figure.

  “Nimita-Babyji? Here? What are you doing here?” Reheza’s naturally loud voice rises to a grating screech. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Nimita opens her mouth to explain her presence but the woman who inked her hands with henna for her wedding has taken those same hands in a tight grip. “The henna has barely faded from your hands. What is Sachdev-Bibiji doing, letting her new bride come here? No, no, no, Babyji, this is not right. Come away. Come away.”

  Nimita tries to resist politely but is being towed away. Ramu, her silent shadow, has his mouth open at this newest twist to the morning’s drama. “Reheza-Bibi, what are you doing here?” she asks but receives no answer from the iron-willed woman dragging her out of the courtyard.

  “Nimita,” calls Mrs Dalhousie, walking over from her consultation with the YWCA women. “Ah, salaam,” she says, spotting Reheza. “You must be from Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam. Thank you for coming.”

  Reheza has to let go of N
imita to properly respond to the greeting.

  “Thank you for coming,” Mrs Dalhousie says again. “As you can see, we need a lot of help.”

  “We will do what we can, in Allah’s name,” Reheza says.

  “Shall we go to my office and talk?” says Mrs Dalhousie.

  Reheza looks back at Nimita.

  “Ramu, take Nimita-Bibiji home,” Mrs Dalhousie orders. Nimita wonders when her former principal learnt the young boy’s name.

  “We’ll talk more later, Nimita,” Mrs Dalhousie says.

  “No,” says Reheza. “I mean, this is work for grown women. This is not the place for…” she runs out of polite ways to avoid saying what she really feels.

  “I think Nimita can make up her own mind, na?” says Mrs Dalhousie. “Anyway, now, as you say, it is time for grown women to talk, so let’s go to my office.”

  Nimita and Ramu walk to the college gate and the waiting tonga. The hockey girls have finished their game and are talking in a huddle. One or two of them recognise Nimita and wave. She waves back, feeling as if she has stepped into another world.

  Arranging herself in the tonga, lost in thought, she hears Ramu tell the driver to take them back to Temple Road.

  “No,” she says, leaning over to speak to the driver herself. “Take me to Model Town. I’ll pay properly,” she adds when the driver begins to argue.

  3.

  For the first time in her life, Nimita looks forward to a meeting of the Punjabi Hindu Women’s Association. She dithers over her clothes for that afternoon’s party, finally choosing a dove-grey salwar kameez embroidered with pale pink roses. She is out of the house quicker than Urmila-Mummyji and takes the car out of the driveway with a screech that raises the dust.

  Urmila-Mummyji smooths her blue crepe-de-Chine sari. “A little slower, beta,” she murmurs when Nimita misjudges her speed and hits a pothole.

  Nimita bites down on her anger. She is extra irritable these days, the thrill of coming up with a plan to help Najma warring with the remembered weight of Najma’s child, the smell of that temporary camp and Mrs Dalhousie’s knowing grey eyes.

  Am I a child to be kept from the reality of the world? No, Nimita tells herself, angry for the part of her that wishes she were a child and didn’t have to think of these things.

  Urmila-Mummyji adjusts the top mirror to reapply her lipstick. “We both look very nice, beta,” she says, smiling at her daughter-in-law. “You really have a good eye for clothes.”

  A wave of love swamps Nimita. Yes, Urmila-Mummyji’s clothes cost enough to feed a woman like Najma for a month and at lunch, she takes a heaped spoon of every dish—“just a taste”—and barely eats half of it, throwing the rest away. But she is a kind woman, doting on Nimita as much as she does on Roshna. She will share a mango with three people before biting into her part of the fruit. And in this last month she has been suffering so much from heartburn that she can only keep down curds and lassi and a bit of rice, a terrible fate for someone who loves to eat as much as she does. “God’s way of reminding me I have to keep my figure,” she jokes, patting tummy rolls of fat.

  Nimita slows down a little. The plan is to cosset and cater to Urmila-Mummyji today, to keep her happy and use her influence to guilt the other association members into helping Mrs Dalhousie’s refugees.

  When the older women gather around Mrs Malhotra’s card table for the first rubber of bridge, Nimita listens with half an ear from her position among the daughters-in-law. The coos of appreciation over clothes and jewellery are changing into pregnancy tales.

  “Try lime pickle,” says Archana Kaul, now Archana Chopra, resplendent in diamonds after the birth of her son. “Just a bit of lime pickle on the tongue helps the vomiting.”

  Shalini Malhotra smiles. Nimita is in awe of the Malhotras’ pregnant daughter-in-law who was born in Bombay, married in Hong Kong and escaped to Bombay just as the Japanese army invaded. It is adventure and excitement even beyond the scope of Agatha Christie and she is dying to ask Shalini all about life in the foreign city. One look and you can tell she is foreign. Her loose but very fashionable straight-cut kurta has a bandhgala just like the one Jawaharlal Nehru wears. Parallel pants add to the male effect, but the light green and gold weave is very feminine and complemented with rosettes of thick ribbon.

  Archana casts a practiced glance at Nimita’s figure, finds nothing to complain about later, so compliments her effusively on the embroidery, the colour, the “darling little pearls so perfect for an afternoon event”. Words that, of course, draw attention to her own dangly diamonds, the solitaire on her finger, the lavishly embroidered suit she wears, covered with peacock feathers realistically picked out in threads of blue, green and gold silk. Very daring and unusual.

  Nimita returns the compliment, smiles at Shalini and asks her which tailor she uses, while trying to hear what is happening at the elders’ table.

  “I had this very nice Chinese man who makes all my suits in Hong Kong,” Shalini says.

  “A Chinese tailor?” Archana finds this screamingly funny. “Of course, that explains the cut.” Also the bandhgala and the rosettes, which are very Chinese.

  “Very nice, very fashionable,” says Nimita quickly, completely forgetting to listen to the bridge table. “Very Western. I’m thinking of getting the same made here.”

  Shalini smiles happily and says something about how Lahori cotton is Lahori cotton and maybe Nimitaji can give her some ideas about her winter wardrobe.

  “Is there winter in Hong Kong?”

  “It’s like Bombay,” Shalini says, a born-and-bred Bombayite, longing for home. “We’ll be going there soon for my delivery but He, of course, wanted to spend some time with Sushila-Mummyji first.”

  Nimita has never visited Bombay. Her travels have been confined to the north of India. Bombay might as well be Hong Kong for all she knows about either city.

  A burst of laughter and groans. When Nimita looks over to the bridge table, Mummy is complimenting Urmila-Mummyji and Mrs Kaul on their skill. “No, no, pure luck,” both say happily. “One more rubber?”

  Sharada tries not to catch her daughter’s eye. Losing to Urmilaji is one thing, but to eat dirt before Kamla Kaul…the things mothers do to help their daughters!

  Mrs Malhotra, conscious of her hostess duties, calls everyone to the table. “Let’s eat something before the next rubber. Shalini beta? Call Neelu.”

  The servant is called, the food laid out hot. The women gather around the table and help themselves. Then more bridge. Urmila-Mummyji loses this time but still seems to be enjoying herself.

  The daughters-in-law continue to talk, even Archana is fascinated by Shalini’s stories of Hong Kong. To Nimita’s disappointment, the talk is limited to food and entertainment. Entertainment sounds a lot like Lahore, movies, theatre, roaming storytellers and magic lantern shows. The food, however, is delightfully exotic.

  Archana disagrees. “We also have them here. We call them momos. Those Nepalis make them,” she tells Shalini. “Like steamed bhajias except the vegetables are covered in a thin casing like roti, not fried.”

  “The dim sum can be steamed or also fried,” Shalini says. “They are not all vegetarian. I’ve eaten crab meat. And chicken feet.”

  This is beyond surprising. “The feet of the chicken?” Nimita says, not sure she heard correctly. Those scaly, three-toed claws?

  “Yes. The Chinese love it.”

  “I could never eat the feet of a chicken,” Archana declares. “Imagine. The feet. How horrible.”

  Mrs Malhotra and Mrs Tiwana have made an intimate pairing on a diwan. Nimita can’t hear what they are saying but Mrs Tiwana has Mrs Malhotra’s hands in hers, and every now and then, one or the other of the ladies wipes away a tear.

  Archana leans forward. “You know that he is being sent to Delhi?”

  “Who?” Nimita asks.

  Archana looks meaningfully at the pair of weeping ladies. “Virendra Tiwana. After that incident last year, he got in
to a lot of trouble. He hasn’t passed his exams either. So they’re sending him to Delhi to work in his phupha’s business.” She looks at Shalini, who she expects will approve of this better-late-than-never punishment. “They say he is not completely right. Here,” she taps her head. “He has nightmares.”

  Shalini sits back a little. “Some chai?” she asks, deliberately turning to look at Nimita.

  As tea is poured, the bridge ladies put away their cards and come and sit on the sofas and diwans. Interesting as the game is, it is more interesting to view the reconciliation between Mrs Tiwana and Mrs Malhotra, who have been at odds for months over Virendra’s accusations and Jagan’s exile.

  The two women conclude their chat and turn to look at the rest, smiling bravely. Mrs Kaul and Mrs Sinha make clucking noises and press tea into the hands of their hostess and Mrs Tiwana. “Only we mothers know how we suffer,” says Mrs Sinha.

  Urmila-Mummyji and Mummy make for the seats next to Nimita. “Beta, next time you must play. I’m losing my touch,” Mummy says.

  “No, no, what are you saying Sharadaji? I’m only hopeless without our daughter.” Urmila-Mummyji squeezes Nimita’s hand affectionately before taking a thin Royal Doulton cup full of hot black tea and a spot of milk. “Two spoons please, beta,” she says as Shalini offers the sugar pot around.

  “It is your big heart that you say this, Urmilaji,” Mummy says, taking a sip of her own tea. “I heard from Nimmy about your charity to those poor women also.”

  “What is this? What is this?” asks Mrs Kaul.

  “Urmilaji sent some clothes to these poor women Nimmy’s teacher is helping. That Mrs Dalhousie of Kinnaird.” The word “Kinnaird” is uttered with quiet pride but Kamla Kaul snorts.

  “Those women that Mrs Dalhousie picked up? From Heera Mandi?”

  You could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows. A spoon tinkles, Mrs Sinha dropping hers in shock and the anticipatory glee of gossip.

  “What is this you’re saying?” Mummy asks, very quietly.