Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

  Sharada nods. “Charan-Bhaiya will have a place for us.”

  “Mummy, Charan-Mama will retire in a few years. Then what will we do, eat his pension? No, the only solution is for me to start working somewhere.”

  She shows Sharada the jewellery and her mother’s hand covers her mouth. “I didn’t think,” she says, tears seeping from the corner of her eyes. “I didn’t think to bring anything.”

  “How could you think at that time? I brought what I could.” She shows her mother the chains, the earrings, the daily-wear bangles that Sharada took off the hour her husband died and left on the dressing table, uncaring.

  “My big bangles that I would have given to Baby on her marriage, the wedding set in the locker, the Rajasthani set your father bought me for our tenth wedding anniversary, all those,” she breaks down thinking of it. Nimita hugs her.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mummy. Look, what we have is so much more than what a lot of people have.” Nimita can be brave because she has never really known hardship.

  “What will we do now?” says Sharada.

  “I’m going to work, Mummy, and you’re going to help me convince the others.”

  “Work? You, work? What can you do?”

  It is on the tip of Nimita’s tongue to say, if you had sent me to Roorkee, I could have been an engineer. She merely tells her mother: “BA (Fail) is also a qualification, people keep telling me that. Remember that Mrs Dalhousie from Kinnaird College? She’s in Bombay now, a principal in a girls’ school. I’m going to write to her.”

  Writing to Mrs Dalhousie unfortunately means writing to Roshna. Nimita has been putting this off, though Shanti-Bhabhi sent a telegram to Anand Bhargava’s house in Bombay the day Nimita arrived. Roshna deserves the full story but until Karan returns, what can Nimita say?

  Even Charan-Mama has been unable to find a trace of Karan’s presence. This could be, he says in a very expensive telegram, because he has to focus on sending outriders with all the trains. Muslims killed all the non-Muslim passengers on a train towards Amritsar, so Sikhs sat by the railroad coming into Lahore with sharpened swords, waiting to avenge themselves on Muslim bodies. Only the Gurkha battalions are trusted by both sides, after seven guards died fighting to protect Hindus and five more were hacked down trying to protect the Muslims.

  When Charan-Mama finally arrives in Delhi, his head is bowed in shame—he has no news of his nephew-in-law. Nimita waves that aside. “Mamaji, I have to leave this house,” she says.

  “I don’t know yet where I will be posted, beta, but as soon as I have quarters, you must come,” he says.

  Nimita folds her hands. “Mamaji, I beg your forgiveness but please listen to me before saying anything? You promise? Mamaji, Urmila-Baby was born into a family with everything, name, respect, wealth, land. Now all she has is us.” Nimita uses the royal “we” to placate Charan-Mama.

  “Mamaji, I want my daughter to have everything she was born with. How can she ever have those most important things, name and respect, if she grows up seeing her mother dependent on the kindness of anyone else, even her closest relatives? No, please, Mamaji. Listen to me.”

  Charan-Mama sits back down.

  “Mamaji, Shanti-Bhabhi and Dilip-Praji love Baby like their own daughter but she is not their daughter, she is mine. I will make her not BA (Fail) but BA (Pass) and MBBS and PhD and anything she wants to be. I want her life to be the kind where she will not have to beg anyone for anything and that means I too cannot beg anyone for anything. Only one time will I fold my hands and beg you: I want to work and settle in my own house, Mamaji. For that I need your help and your blessings.”

  Charan-Mama is silent for a long time, then looks to his sister. “This is why you named her Nimita, na? Hard-headed, strong-willed, she will not change. You are exactly the same.”

  Sharada laughs. It is the first time she has laughed in three weeks and her daughter and brother smile at the sound. “Bhaiya, I am not unhappy. Let her fight against her destiny and what has been ordained for us. Right now even I feel the fates are too cruel.”

  Charan-Mama presses her hand, then asks his niece: “So, work. What work?”

  What work indeed? There are not many options open to a BA(Fail) woman of genteel family. A man with the same qualification could do many things: man a telegraph office, work as the factotum of a stockbroker or factory owner, sit for exams and apply for a clerk’s job in the civil service. Nimita has fewer options. Working for a publishing company like the one run by Pratik Lal Chand would be ideal, but the same argument that will not let her stay too long in this man’s house will not let her apply to him for a position either. In addition, the man’s own daughter does nothing to help run the family firm; what chance would an outsider have of doing well in this business?

  She might start a fashion boutique for the upper-class Delhi women, but that would require capital and that would mean selling the jewellery brought from Lahore. Even then it might not be enough. And what does she know of managing accounts, credit and debit, the incoming and outgoing stream of cash? Karan was able to do that—Karan. She cannot think about him or she will be unable to keep going.

  The other possibility is to become a teacher in some good school. Charan-Mama likes the idea but dislikes the thought of Nimita going all the way to Bombay to teach, if Mrs Dalhousie comes through.

  “It’s not a bad idea, Bhaiya,” Sharada says. “Delhi is becoming over-full of people and with the stories we are hearing, who knows when more riots may break out?”

  “Also Roshna is married there,” Nimita reminds him.

  Her uncle’s brow clears. The Bhargavas are a good connection and likely to be helpful to Charan Chauhan’s niece. “Yes, Lalit and Anand will arrange things until you settle down.”

  “Let me write to Mrs Dalhousie first,” Nimita says.

  She only has a vague idea of the school’s name, Alexandra Girls’ English Institution, none at all of the address, so she addresses her appeal to her former principal in a letter tucked inside a longer one for her sister-in-law.

  The letter to Mrs Dalhousie takes a day to draft, the letter to Roshna twice that time. In the end, Nimita sticks with the facts: her father’s death, the exit from Lahore in Charan-Mama’s jeep, and finally this about Karan: “Unfortunately your brother didn’t get the news that we had left Lahore and went to fetch us. We expect him in Delhi any day now.”

  That is not a lie, even though the appeal to Mrs Dalhousie is because Nimita is almost certain her husband is no longer in this world. She writes other letters too, to anyone she thinks can help, getting Mummy to write to Pimmy-Aunty in Simla and ask if anyone they know has influence in the girls’ school they both went to and might be willing to hire a new teacher. Mrs Kaul comes to lament and Nimita listens quietly to her wailing, probes her for potential job leads and then gives that up as a bad job—the woman’s only sphere of influence is in her immediate kitty party circle and she is all consumed with her daughter Archana, who has just left Amritsar for Delhi.

  Delhi is not a place where Nimita can set up her own home, for it would reflect badly on Dilip-Praji. No matter that these are modern times and a woman is going to be the education minister of India, a man is still supposed to care for the women of his family.

  She asks Charan-Mama to write to friends in Dehra Dun, to Hyderabad, anywhere where anyone he knows has some connection with a girls’ school. If she is to make a home somewhere that is not Lahore, then anywhere in India will do. But it is Bombay she keeps coming back to in dreams, the still unknown, still unseen city, as exotic to her as Hong Kong.

  As light rains relieve some of the summer heat, as the Loo wind sweeps in dust and fever, she dreams of Karan calling to her from an island surrounded by glittering silver waves. Bombay is by the sea, a body of water larger even than the giant rivers that feed the Punjab and pass through Lahore district. Larger than the largest river she has ever seen, yielding fish unlike any she has ever seen or tasted. She thinks of these thin
gs when Urmila-Baby laughs and her heart catches, realising that she will never again hear the man her child inherited those tones from, that there will never be another child with a combination of her and Karan’s characteristics. Dreams of Bombay keep her aloft as Shanti-Bhabhi presses to know about all these letters she is sending out and Radheshyam returns from the station, dragging his feet and empty-eyed, every day.

  On the 24th day he doesn’t. Except the figure coming home with him is no one Nimita can immediately recognise.

  5.

  Before he takes a sip of water, let alone washes his hands and face, Karan wants to see Dilip-Praji. Half-carried by Radheshyam and Nimita, he staggers into Shanti-Bhabhi’s bedroom and sinks to the ground after touching his brother’s feet. “Forgive me,” he says, laying his forehead on the sheets. Tears moisten the fabric.

  Dilip-Praji sits up, strokes Karan’s dusty hair. “You’ve come finally. That’s all that matters. I thank God a hundred thousand times that you’ve come back safely.”

  Twice Karan starts to speak, to explain what has happened, but each time the effort is too much. He breaks into tears. Dilip-Praji cries too, hand touching Karan’s head, shoulder, as if to check that he is truly there. “Never mind,” he says. “We’ll talk later. Go have a bath. Eat something. Sleep, you must be tired. We’ll talk later.”

  Karan lets himself be led to the bathroom. Shukla-Bibi has brought hot water from the kitchen and filled a bucket. Radheshyam stands ready to assist, but Nimita shoos him away, closes the door and then begins unbuttoning her husband’s shirt. Close to his body, between the inner vest and skin is a pad of cloth stained brown. “I forgot it was there,” Karan says, the childlike simplicity of his words chilling Nimita to the bone.

  She eases him onto a stool, tests the water in the bucket with a finger and pours a mug over Karan’s head. He closes his eyes and lets himself be bathed like a child. Only once, as Nimita soaps his shoulders, do his fingers find hers. “You are fine. Baby is fine,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “I nearly went mad.”

  “Ssh. Nothing happened. Everyone is fine.”

  Later he will tell Dilip-Praji, Shanti-Bhabhi, Mummy, everyone a bit of what happened. The bare facts.

  The details will become known to Nimita over months, through recollections spat or cursed or cried out during sweat-soaked nightmares. Karan has a new fear of the dark and sudden bouts of uncontrollable weeping in the bed they share after Mummy moves in with the children and Shukla-Bibi.

  Because of Karan’s fragility in the first few days after his return, Nimita will not tell him of the horrors she experienced during her escape from Lahore. Later, wanting him to put this part of his life behind, she will decide never to share the details. Part of her will always regret that he had not been there in Delhi when she arrived so she was forced to find her footing on her own.

  But that is what she was named to do, after all. To meet her destiny head on.

  When Karan left for Lahore, it was with the horrific expectation of rescuing his wife and family from the bloodbath every newspaper insisted was continuing in the Punjab. To his surprise, the train from Delhi chugged on as normal, too slowly for someone beset by visions of his wife and daughter screaming for help. Caught up in his thoughts, he barely registered the hours passing or day turning into night, though he must have slept sometime. He was woken by the increasing thumps and bangs coming from the ceiling of his first-class carriage. His bleary eyes widened as the railings of the windows were replaced by multiple fingers and then gnarled, dusty feet.

  People were clambering all over the train and when the attendant opened the door, it sounded like a fish market outside. “Hut! You can’t come in here,” the attendant shouted, before the door closed.

  Karan rubbed his eyes and realised he was the only occupant of his berth. He got up and walked to the facilities, splashing his face and cleaning his teeth with his finger. On his way back, he passed a group of bearded men fashionably dressed in long bandhgala kurtas. Their conversation stopped as they looked up at him.

  “Salaam,” he said, “What is happening?”

  “Since we passed Nabha, people have been climbing on the train with their mattresses and belongings,” one of the men replied. “It looks like entire villages are trying to move to Lyallpur.” He named an exceptionally fertile area in the west of the Punjab, farmed by Sikhs in the past and now clear for new Muslim occupation.

  Karan thanked him and turned back to his seat.

  “Are you going to Amritsar or Lahore?” the man asked. When Karan said he was going to Lahore, the group relaxed subtly. “Sit with us,” the man said, politely indicating the full seats. The men shuffled up obediently to allow him a few inches of space.

  Karan thanked them and exchanged names. Immediately the tension returned. Too late, he realised what the question had meant—are you going to Sikh central or to the new homeland of the Islamic faith?

  Still, he made polite conversation with the group until the next station, when he excused himself to check on his bags. It was a good thing too that he left, for police officers were entering the carriage, running their lathis over the window bars and poking under the seats. Karan had to rescue his small suitcase from a suspicious constable who wanted to open it and check for explosives.

  “Do I look like someone who carries explosives?” Karan said, feeling a vein begin to throb in his forehead.

  “Open it,” the constable said, even as the carriage attendant arrived and began to fight with the forces of law and order for the sake of keeping a first-class customer and potential heavy tipper happy.

  Karan opened his suitcase for the sake of peace and the constable moved on unhappily to the group of travellers in the next berth. A heavy black curtain protected the privacy of the berth beyond that, so the constable had to content himself with asking rhetorically: “Your wives?” and demanding that the baggage be passed out for inspection.

  The carriage attendant meanwhile lavished praise on Karan for his generosity and magnanimity in allowing his baggage to be searched. “Sahibji is of course above all this,” he said, “but Amritsar is in shambles. There is so much loot-maar on the streets that even people of good family are carrying guns and shooting at shadows.”

  In a recent incident on this very line, a gang of Sikhs attacked a train of mostly Muslim passengers en route to Lahore. “When the train pulled into the station, there were only corpses on the seats,” the attendant said. “But then a few days before that, the Muslim gangs threw a boulder on the tracks so the train had to stop, then they boarded and butchered all the Sikh and Hindu passengers.” He pursed his lips to spit, then remembered where he was and whom he was talking to.

  “What is the news from Lahore?”

  The attendant shook his head. “Whatever you read in the papers, it is worse than that.”

  The short distance from Amritsar to Lahore took the train nearly three hours. Destitute villagers or pioneering new settlers waited in groups on the tracks at every signal, boarding as soon as the train showed signs of slowing. Sometimes the train stopped for no reason, the carriage attendant disappearing and thunks and rattles from atop the roof causing Karan’s blood to freeze.

  If only he had listened to Daddyji and removed Nimita and Urmila-Baby to Delhi earlier. But who was to know things would get so bad?

  Finally, the train began to slow in familiar surroundings. Karan peered out of the window, recognising landmarks by the golden glow of—what? It is too late for sunset, too early for dawn.

  Then his brain registered why his eyes were tearing. Massive piles of wood, cardboard and other flammable materials had been set alight along the railway line. No, not piles of wood. Homes. These were the huts and homes of those who lived along the railway line and they were burning in the height of summer.

  Yet the train chugged on calmly, not stopping until it reached the station platform. Karan jumped out of his seat and found the carriage exit blocked by the family g
roup he had made painful conversation with earlier. Only after the women and children had been helped down by their men could he finally leave, descending into a scene of utter chaos.

  Men in simple cotton clothes squatted on the platform as if it were their home. Occasionally they were stepped over or impatiently tapped on the shoulder by men in uniform who strode everywhere with a purpose Karan could not identify. In the corners and the darker parts of the platform were huddled bunches of coloured cloth: women and children. Some were trying to light a fire to cook and being told off by the men in uniform.

  Even with Lahore burning, men have to make a living so there were several tonga drivers vying for Karan’s custom. Until they were told of the location.

  Finally, he offered a full two rupees and found a driver willing to take him to Temple Road.

  Two rupees could buy enough shaving blades for a month or pay the cleaning woman’s wages for a fortnight, but Karan did not care. All that mattered was getting to Nimita and Urmila-Baby, whose faces in the past half-hour appeared to be calling to him from the horrific pyres that had lit his rail journey home.

  There is a rifle at home, he remembered with a surge of hope that died as quickly as it had flared. Nimita had never learnt to use it and in an amateur’s hands, a gun could be as deadly to the user as the target.

  Yet his wife was strong and sensible, he reminded himself. There were knives in the kitchen, a spade and sickles in the garden. There would be none of those horror stories he had read about where women held their children and jumped off roofs or into wells. His wife would be alive and well with Baby. Wounds would heal, lives could never be restored.

  If only we were Sikhs always armed with kirpans, he thought as the tonga cantered down the street. “Here,” he shouted and the driver slowed the horse.

  Karan jumped out and saw the shattered wooden gate leading into a dark courtyard.