Nimita's Place

“All of Lahore knows. That Mrs Dalhousie was at the bazaar and saw something happen and she,” Mrs Kaul’s voice drops, “she took the women away. From, you know. The seller.”

  Nimita’s cup shakes in her hand. So does her mother-in-law’s. They put the tea down, their actions noticed and deliberately overlooked at the general outcry of “Hai Ram! What is this?”

  Archana Kaul is leaning over excitedly towards her mother, hands clasped. The Sachdev daughter-in-law helping prostitutes? Oh, this is too delicious!

  Mummy’s voice cuts calmly into the hubbub. “Kamlaji, since you seem to know so much, why don’t you tell us all?”

  Mrs Kaul bridles. “I don’t know anything. Only what my servant said. We had given Archana’s sitar for restringing”—a very proper and cultured occupation for a young woman, playing the sitar—“and you know all the best places are near Hazrat Baba’s shrine.” A better way of referring to the red-light district is to talk about the shrine of Pir Hazrat Baba Nauguzah at its tip, a holy place much visited during the Islamic holy days.

  Mrs Kaul’s servant had left Archana’s sitar at the shop, when a commotion near the shrine caught his attention. His first instinct was to turn and run. However, the movement of the crowd forced him towards the shrine, where a man holding a long, curved knife was being stared down by a woman in a cream sari with a blue border.

  Between them lay a heap of brown, sobbing. A woman. It seemed she had fled the man beating her and had come all the way to the mosque and shrine seeking sanctuary.

  But nobody interfered, of course. Who would step forward between a man and his woman, especially a man holding such a knife? An old maulvi had obviously tried; he was being tended to by younger men.

  The man with the knife was about to take back his possession when the woman in a cream sari stepped forward and said: “Take one more step and I’m calling the police.” Her face was that of a white woman and even in these times, people knew better than to court a fight with the British. The man with the knife stood, clearly torn, until the young men finished tending to the maulvi and came up to the woman, adding their shouts to her silence.

  Mrs Kaul relates this with great enthusiasm, but has to rely on imagination for what happened next. Apparently Mrs Dalhousie bent down and spoke to the woman, then to the maulvi and then to the police. The officers of the law were directed to a small two-storey building where there were about twenty other women being kept prisoner. They spoke no Punjabi, their language was strangely accented and it was Mrs Dalhousie who identified them as Bengali, from villages in the east. Promised husbands or proper work and brought instead to the Punjab for this.

  That was the history of the women Mrs Dalhousie currently had camped in the grounds of Kinnaird.

  “Poor things,” Mummy says into the silence. “What a terrible story. It is very good that Mrs Dalhousie was there.”

  “Poor things,” agrees Urmila-Mummyji. There may be scoldings later in private but in public there will be a united front. “To be taken from your home like that.” She clucks her tongue in sympathy.

  The tension in the room loosens only slightly. Archana and Mrs Kaul look at each other. Of course, Sharadaji and Urmilaji have to say this to protect their daughter—but prostitutes from Heera Mandi? Who knew how long they had been there? And now coming up with some sob story to get sympathy.

  “I’m told the man who brought them here was one of those people,” Mrs Kaul says, not saying the word “Muslim”. “What can you expect?”

  What indeed can you expect in a country where years of war and a recent famine have so beggared the East and parts of the North that fathers dance for joy at the chance to sell their daughters into slavery? At least the girls will stay alive and their price feed their families.

  “Poor things,” echoes Shalini, and the room turns to see the Malhotra daughter-in-law sit absolutely rigid, tears running down her cheek.

  The older women look at each other guiltily. Of course, here is a girl who left her mother’s home in India to live in a strange new country and then was pushed out of that home too by the deadly advance of the Japanese. They have all had to deal with wartime rationing but Hong Kong was much, much worse. At least Lahore was never bombed or shelled.

  On top of that, Shalini is pregnant.

  Mrs Kaul and Archana descend on Shalini like mother hens. Mrs Malhotra calls her daughter-in-law to sit near her and calls loudly for Neelu to bring more tea.

  “Tea with sugar, that’s the best thing,” Mrs Tiwana says, patting Shalini’s hand while mother-and-daughter Kaul hover uselessly. “Don’t think about it, beta, don’t think about it.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. It’s a happy ending for those poor women,” coos Mrs Kaul. “Isn’t that right, Nimita beta?”

  Called to the frontline, Nimita says: “Er.”

  “That’s right,” says Mrs Kaul, ignoring her. “That Mrs Dalhousie is a lioness, she will take care of everything.”

  “With the help of big-hearted souls like Urmilaji,” Mummy says gently. “Without your kindness, Urmilaji, who knows what might happen to those women?”

  There is a general murmur of agreement. It has been established firmly that Nimita’s presence at Kinnaird was an act of great piety and social service and certainly not something that can ever cast aspersions on her character.

  “Mrs Dalhousie was very grateful, Mummy,” Nimita says. “The poor women need a lot of help.”

  “Of course, Urmilaji can’t do everything on her own,” Mummy says. “Who else did Mrs Dalhousie ask for help, beta?” The unspoken implication being that only the truly big-hearted and wealthy had been approached in the first place.

  “I saw women from the YWCA. Haan and Rehezaji was there.”

  “Very good, very good,” says Mrs Kaul, nodding. She has been proven right. Those people are responsible for this mess, so those people must clean it up.

  “So these are all Muslim girls, beta?” Mummy asks.

  “No,” says Nimita. “There are Hindus as well.”

  Her words fall like a drop of black ink into clear water. Tense waves ripple through the room, turning the faces of most of the older women dark with thought. The baptising and converting religions, Christianity and Islam, are ministering to Hindu refugees?

  “There are Hindu women there as well?” asks Mrs Malhotra. Mrs Tiwana sets her cup down in solidarity. Already convinced their children are being persecuted for no good reason by those M people—boys make mistakes, it’s understandable, why make such a big deal out of it?—they are outraged that Hindu women in need will receive it at Muslim hands.

  “Hindu women as well?” says Mrs Kaul, wife of the Congress partyman Manohar Kaul. She knows very well how votes and support are bought and sold before elections. What would these women do for the sake of food and clothing? What would they not forsake, given that they have long-surrendered their honour?

  “We must do something, certainly,” says Mrs Malhotra, and Mrs Tiwana nods.

  “A few of us should go see Mrs Dalhousie and find out what these women need.”

  “Maybe Mummyji, you can take one in? You said Neelu wants to go to her village,” says Shalini. She is petted and patted and offered tea and told not to worry about such things.

  Take them into our households indeed. Such women!

  Two weeks later, the refugee camp at Kinnaird has disappeared, the women and their children rehoused and redistributed by charity groups, Hindu and Muslim. Some are given low-rent housing and the rudiments of a tailoring business. Some are taken on as sweepers by Kinnaird College and Saint Joseph’s Church. Some are given railway tickets back to Bengal, as they had pleaded. A couple return to Heera Mandi.

  One takes up residence in the small gardener’s shed created for the storage of shovels and sickles. A separate two-room brick structure will be made later for Najma and her children. They enter the Sachdev household despite the mutterings of Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam and the slight pursing of Urmila-Mummyji’s lips.


  But nothing can be denied the younger daughter-in-law, who it turns out is going to gift the family a new child in seven short months. As Nimita tells Karan: “Share and care, as Urmila-Mummyji only said.”

  “Share and care,” he agrees, happy that there is no more talk of engineering college.

  So Najma and her children, Kabir and Shabbo, move in, their duties to sweep and tend the garden and stay out of the way of Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam. Najma receives five rupees a month and cooks separately for herself and her children. Though Nimita tells her: “You can eat whatever you want from the kitchen. Or the garden.”

  To prove it, she makes Ramu break mangoes from the tree for Najma. The sweeper can hardly believe it at first. It takes a long time before she accepts such gifts, let alone smiles.

  4.

  The atom bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A plane crash kills the leader of the Indian National Army. Neither news is heard on the RCA Victor radio, for the Sachdev household is in the 12-day mourning period after the unexpected passing away of Urmila-Mummyji.

  She dies in her sleep, after long months of mild heart attacks brushed away as heartburn, indigestion, until the final bout of arrhythmia which stops her breathing in the middle of the night.

  At least there was no pain, Dr Iqbal assures the family once he is convinced that her body is as it was when discovered by Shukla-Bibi. Not even a hand flung out from under the sheet to turn on the light or call someone. Nothing disarranged on the bedside table. She died in her sleep, peacefully, undisturbed.

  She died so peacefully that Shukla-Bibi did not even realise for several minutes that she was speaking to a corpse. Only after drawing back the curtains and receiving no reply to her repeated “Bibiji, chai” did she approach the bed, touch her mistress’ neck and flee to the kitchen to inform the elder daughter-in-law of the house.

  Shukla-Bibi’s incoherent “Badi-Bibiji won’t get up. Shanti-Bibiji, please see” sends Shanti running up the stairs to check her mother-in-law’s pulse. Finding the neck and hand cold, she puts a hand mirror against Mummyji’s lips. When no moisture obscures the surface of the glass, she turns to Shukla-Bibi. “Turn off the fire. Send Radheshyam next door to tell Bakshi-Bibiji.”

  Shanti leaves the bedroom to see Nimita coming out of her room at the other end of the corridor, ready to head down for her first meal of the day. “Where’s brother-in-law?” she asks, the curt question surprising her sister-in-law.

  “Bathing. What happened?”

  Shanti takes Nimita’s hand. “This will come as a shock,” she says.

  Who to tell next? What to do? The one thing Shanti remembers from her grandfather’s death is that no fire must be lit in the house of mourning. For 12 days they must live off the kindness of relatives and friends, who will bring them food, help them make the funeral arrangements, leave them time and space to do nothing but mourn.

  It is meant to be a kindness, this funeral tradition, but as the minutes tick past, it is more a curse, leaving Urmila-Mummyji’s daughters-in-law little to do but watch the grief of her children. Roshna, newly admitted into Kinnaird College and still sleepy from a late night over her homework, can hardly believe the nonsense Bhabhi is saying. She walks in to her mother’s room to see Karan, white-faced, holding his mother’s hand. Her sobs wake Tony-Baba, and then Dilip-Praji who calls louder and louder until his wife helps him into his mother’s room. Nimita stands by the wall feeling lost, sad and most important of all, hungry.

  A cold breakfast of fruit and milk for her until Pam-Auntyji arrives from next door in a neatly pressed and beautifully plain white sari of mourning. She brings vacuum flasks of hot tea and fresh parathas wrapped in a cotton napkin. Radheshyam is despatched to Model Town, to inform Nimita’s parents and to send a telegram to Meena-Badi-Maasi, Urmila-Mummyji’s real sister in Simla. There was a brother who died, and Meena-Badi-Maasi will have to inform his children. They are in Amritsar and nobody can find the little blue diary in which Urmila-Mummyji carefully noted down everyone’s name and address.

  Five months pregnant, Nimita has long overcome the nausea of the first trimester and is itching for things to do so she can stop thinking of her last interaction with her mother-in-law. Her nightly conversations with Urmila-Mummyji had taken on new significance since her pregnancy. Content with one grandson, Urmila-Mummyji was hoping for a girl and she was knitting a set of pink booties for the child, who is due in January. The booties lie unfinished in a basket on the side table, as does the Agatha Christie novel Urmila-Mummyji was halfway through.

  “Don’t tell me the murderer’s name,” she begged Nimita the night before, “but give me some clue.”

  Nimita has many reasons to be upset over her mother-in-law’s death, but the two oddly uppermost in her mind are that first, Urmila-Mummyji never finished the novel and second, the novel’s title was Death Comes as the End.

  But it seems death is only the beginning. First Dr Iqbal must be called to give the death certificate, after which Mrs Bakshi and a newly arrived Sharada Khosla compose the notice to be put in the Tribune and Dawn and other important daily newspapers. The body must be washed by the women of the house, Nimita and Shanti-Bhabhi given the task of stripping their mother-in-law of her nightie and cleaning away the dark fluids released in her final moments. The body must be dressed in a fine sari and then the members of the household brought in to pay their final respects.

  Her children line the wall as Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam come in to touch the corpse’s feet and fall down sobbing. Shukla-Bibi is so overwrought that she makes no move to stop Najma, who comes in and looks to Nimita for guidance. “Touch her feet,” Nimita says, realising yet again how different Najma’s experience of death must be from hers.

  There is no reason to wait to cremate the body. The pundit is called, the appropriate things said. Connections of the Sachdevs and Khoslas gather, from the Malhotras and Kauls and Sinhas to the Khans, Qureshis and Damanias. Karan, Prem Khosla, Manohar Kaul, Ghanshyam and Radheshyam lift the bier carrying the body. They leave the house for the cremation grounds near the river Ravi.

  By tradition the women should stay at home but someone needs to drive Dilip-Praji to see his mother’s last rites. “I’ll take Praji,” Nimita says and nobody stops her, not her mother, not Pam-Auntyji, though Mrs Kaul does make some remark about it being inauspicious for a five-month pregnant woman to go there.

  “I’ll go too,” Shanti-Bhabhi says, so the two daughters-in-law of Urmila Sachdev are there at Ramu Bagh, supporting their mother-in-law’s eldest son as her body is carried around the pyre, as the fire is lit, as the final rites are begun.

  Back home there is a telegram from Meena-Badi-Maasi. She is coming with her eldest son and has passed the message on to Amritsar. Pam-Auntyji and Mummy offer mattresses and blankets—not that much covering is needed in the August heat. The Kauls and Malhotras and Sinhas politely draw up a rota for the sending of food to the Sachdev household while Justice Qureshi and Inspector Khan sit quietly with the Khoslas’ son-in-law. They barely know Karan but feel for him, only 22 and head of this household.

  Over the next two weeks, many come to express their sorrow. Meena-Badi-Maasi enfolds her nephews and niece in her arms and engulfs the household in loud torrential sobbing that sets Roshna off, making her too upset to eat.

  Dilip-Praji has been badly shocked. Dr Iqbal is a daily visitor. He tells Dilip-Praji to eat, his mother would want him to. He prescribes vitamin pills for the exhausted Shanti-Bhabhi, who has her hands full tending to her husband, caring for her son, sitting with Meena-Badi-Maasi and listening to her interminably boring tales of her childhood. Urmila-Mummyji is a pale lieutenant in these adventures, Meena-Badi-Maasi the heroine, but Karan and Dilip-Praji take comfort in every mention of their mother’s name.

  With Shanti-Bhabhi fully occupied, Nimita finds herself more and more in the kitchen, ensuring that the courtyard is swept, the milk and fruit keep coming in, the sacred incense is lit before the black-and-white p
hoto of Urmila-Mummyji, the pundit called on the appropriate days to say the right prayers.

  Her status in the household changes. No longer Choti-Bibiji, she is just Bibiji, quietly agreeing on the day’s menus with her mother and the others who supply them, ensuring that her sisters-in-law, brother-in-law and husband eat and rest.

  It is she who ensures there is hot water for Meena-Badi-Maasi’s bath, who pours tea from the vacuum flasks for each new guest, who sends messages to the Bakshis’ place when they need food and drink that can only be prepared on a household fire. It is she who touches Pam-Auntyji’s feet daily in thanks for her guidance and domestic help and who makes sure Karan politely refuses Mohinder-Uncleji’s offer to “help out” at the mill.

  It was also she who thought of sending a message to Canal Bank Road that first day so Karan’s clerk could come home to pay his respects and take his orders for the next two weeks.

  Her back is rounded by the growing weight of her belly, the pressure on her bladder forces her to the bathroom an embarrassing number of times, but there is no time to think of these things. She is needed and no one else will do.

  She has been afraid of motherhood, while also holding in her heart the secret anticipation of seeing a child with both her features and Karan’s. Motherhood means deferring her dreams of an engineering course at Roorkee. Motherhood is an accelerated advance into an adulthood Nimita is not really ready for.

  But she has to be ready now. As Roshna cries herself to sleep in Nimita’s arms, as Karan rests his head gently on her stomach and whispers incoherently until his shoulders relax, Nimita feels deeply protective. In their grief and helplessness, her husband and in-laws have offered a way for her to practise maternity.

  She finds she is good at it.

  On the 13th day of mourning, the fires are relit, a simple meal of dal and paratha and Urmila-Mummyji’s favourite spinach is cooked. The Bakshis and Khoslas come and eat, as does the pundit. When everyone leaves, the bereaved Sachdevs look at one another with a renewed sense of loss. Now they have to pick up their lives and no one seems to know how this can be done.