Nimita's Place

by Akshita Nanda

  Three weeks later, I was in bed recovering from the microsurgery and under strict instructions to stay still so the tender ligaments would heal. My period started, my body confirming what my head knew within seconds of the fall. There was no pregnancy, never had been a pregnancy. The low-level bleeding that month proved it.

  Thank God.

  It had only been a dream. A stupid, stupid dream, two children playing at being grown-ups and pretending to themselves that they were capable of dealing with life, with love, with each other.

  Who or what should be blamed for this? Him or me?

  The woman, na? The woman should change the beast into a man, lift the curse with her devotion?

  One loop of DNA here, one unexpressed gene there and Vicky is a beast, not a man. Shouldn’t I, the genetic engineer, have been able to cure him? What was lacking in my DNA that I was so much less than a woman should be?

  On the drive home to Mumbai, I needed distraction so I asked Dadi: “Why do we both have the same name? Isn’t there some Punjabi rule against it?”

  “But we don’t have the same name, darling,” she said. “It’s spelled that way in English, but my name is ‘Nimitta’, to rhyme with ‘limit’. You are ‘Nimita’, to rhyme with ‘Gita’.”

  “It means the same thing though.”

  “No, not really. You see, my name means ‘what is fated or destined, what is fixed’. Your name…” She laughed.

  “What?”

  “Janaki wanted to call you ‘Namrata’, softness, but I thought that was not right for my granddaughter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Softness is a lovely thing, beta, but for you I wanted, I want, something more powerful. The ability to survive what life throws at you. To make your own destiny and not be tied to what is fated. So you are Nimita, the fixed, enduring one. Life will change around you but you will stay constant. You will survive whatever forces are against you. Not just survive, thrive.”

  I rested my head on her shoulder, half asleep. She rested her cheek on my head. “I wanted a name for you that said: When life throws things at this girl, she will not break, she will rise above them.”

  I started crying and Dadi rubbed my shoulder. “Poor baccha. It hurts, na? Never mind, we’ll be home very soon.”

  Part Eight

  1947–1950

  1.

  The family is silent, hearing Karan’s tale. Then Sharada Khosla weeps. “You are alive, that’s all that matters,” she says.

  “Yes, you are alive, what else do we want?” Dilip-Praji says.

  Fine words, deeply meant but the truth is that they need money. How long can Nimita and Karan impose on Pratik Lal Chand and Kunti?

  Just for a few days more, until Karan recovers, until one of Nimita’s many appeals is finally answered.

  A week after Karan’s return, the miracle happens. Mrs Dalhousie writes back from Bombay, offering Nimita a place teaching English in the girls’ school she runs. “Of course we can use your help. We’re taking in more girls next term, so we need more teachers.” The salary is a good 150 rupees a month, with free accommodation in the school. It is nothing for the wife of a factory- and landowner, but everything for two refugees with nothing but clothes and a handful of jewellery.

  It is nothing but good news, Nimita thinks, but it leads to the first big fight she has ever had in her married life.

  For Karan, who even in wartime was used to thinking in terms of hundreds of rupees, and managing a factory and the rents from his family’s land, the job offer is almost worthless.

  It makes him feel worthless. Instead of being the one everyone looked to and relied on, he must now make do on pocket money from his wife? The wife he rushed to Lahore to save, but who saved herself and also nursed him, bitter irony. Not to mention the money he failed to bring back from Lahore. Mr Qureshi may do as he promised, but it will take time and what are they to live on until then?

  “What is this salary?” he laughs, pretending the amount is the problem when the problem is that he is not the one providing it. If it were a job as a watchman in this school, he would take it to feed his family. But they are not yet reduced to his being a watchman and his wife going out to work. Surely Mr Qureshi will come through. Surely there are people in Delhi with connections and suggestions. Surely, surely.

  And he thinks this even as the trains steam in from Lahore, from Rawalpindi, from Kalka, disgorging the hungry and desperate, as boatloads of Sindhis set sail from Karachi. On one hand, Hindus and Sikhs and Christians flee the approaching reality of the Islamic State of Pakistan; on the other, Muslims stagger, bewildered, out of India.

  “What is this?” Nimita repeats, not understanding. “This is the answer to our prayers. This is our chance to set up a new life.”

  “A new life doing what? What will I do in Bombay?”

  “What do you do in Delhi?” Nimita says, thinking nothing of the words. To her, they are a statement of their reality.

  To Karan, they are an unbearable taunt. He gets up and begins to walk out of the room.

  “What’s the matter?” Nimita calls after him.

  “What’s the matter?” He comes back. “You are asking me what’s the matter?”

  Nimita is getting angry, but she is also conscious of the ears everywhere. This is not their home, there are rules for the behaviour of guests in a stranger’s home and that is the problem, that this is not their home and she always has to be demure and polite and think of what other people are saying. What does Karan know about it? For him, this is his brother’s house and so his house. He does not realise how it hurts and chafes to be useless in another woman’s domain, reduced to asking “please” and saying “thank you” just for the milk to feed her own child. Milk that used to go to nurturing the tulsi plant in the back courtyard in Nimita’s own house, she has to beg for that milk now. She, who used to snap her fingers and say “Is anyone there?” and have three people running in to attend to her needs.

  She closes the door and comes back, tight-lipped, to stand in front of her husband. “Lower your voice. We can’t shout in here.” Again, a statement of fact that Karan finds an unbearably patronising instruction.

  “We can’t go on like this,” she begins.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Karan says, not yelling but certainly not lowering his voice as much as he should. “You think I don’t know our position?”

  Nimita will never know what it is like to be thrown down from the highest place and suddenly made dependent on another for the slightest thing, even if the other person is Dilip-Praji. Dilip-Praji, who Karan has always said is Rama to his Lakshman, but is, now he realises, Arjun to his Krishna, a person he will defer to happily as long as it is clear who is really in charge. It is Karan who serves perfectly, devotedly, but it is also Karan who held all the power in the fields and factory. Only Mummy could gainsay him and even she had stopped giving him too many instructions the year he was married. Now Karan is reduced to begging, and begging not just his brother but his brother’s in-laws. The shame of it! Begging! When he used to snap his fingers and thirty, forty people would run to obey his orders. Is he now to be reduced to this?

  “I have not fallen so low that I must live on my wife’s earnings,” he says.

  Nimita’s mouth opens. She tries to say something but cannot.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about it,” Karan says, watching her face.

  Her silence should please him but he is beginning to wonder if it is the silence of a properly chastised wife or the quiet between lightning and the rumbling of thunder.

  Nimita takes a long, deep breath, willing the red to clear from her brain and leave her voice. If I were a doctor who had studied in Edinburgh, he would not dare say this to me. If I had gone to Roorkee to study engineering, he would not have said this to me.

  It is because I didn’t go that he thinks he can say this to me.

  “So a wife can live off a husband but a husband can’t live off his wife?”
she says.

  “Don’t act like a child. This is the way of the world,” he says.

  For the first time in her married life, Nimita wants to throttle Karan. For a few seconds, she can cheerfully think of choking the life out of her husband, whose supposed death reduced her to a weeping ghost for weeks, whose miraculous return brought the sunshine back to a house of mourning.

  Instead, she shakes her head. “Maybe that was the way of the world, but that is not the world we are living in now.”

  “Don’t say childish things.”

  “Childish? Look at this world around you. Is anything the way it was before?” She looks him in the eyes and takes great pleasure when he looks down at his feet.

  “You are talking like a great landowner. I am talking like the daughter of a great lawyer. But who are we in this world now? Who? What do we have but the clothes on our backs and a few pieces of gold?

  “For so many days I thought you were dead and you cannot imagine what it felt like to be so useless, so helpless. I had to ask Shanti-Bhabhi for everything, even milk for our daughter. I was unable to provide food for my daughter and my mother, forget a roof over our heads. I will not be that helpless again, Karan, ever. You cannot make me feel that helpless again.”

  Karan sits down on the bed. “How helpless do you think I feel? Better that I had died in Lahore than be like this, unable to feed and protect you.”

  Nimita slaps him and then bursts into tears. A stunned Karan folds her in his arms and hopes that nobody heard this last part. Men are known to beat their wives in the Punjab but the other way around? And he would never raise his hand to Nimita. If he did, he is very much afraid she would go to Bombay without him.

  2.

  Nimita and Karan achieve a wary truce. She will write to Mrs Dalhousie accepting the offer and asking if she also knows of something Karan might do. If there is, then he will have no hesitation coming with her to Bombay. If not—well, he will look around further in Delhi. She and Urmila-Baby and Mummyji can go ahead.

  It is impossible for Nimita to leave her newly returned husband. Telling him this with sobs somewhat thaws their relationship.

  The next day, a letter arrives from Roshna Bhargava, begging for news of her brother and threatening a visit if she doesn’t hear from them within a week. The letter was clearly sent before the telegram announcing Karan’s return was despatched, and requires a long reply from both brothers.

  Karan spends a long time staring at his handwriting before sealing the letter in an envelope.

  “Roshna’s mother’s home is gone,” he tells Dilip-Praji, who bows his head.

  The mother’s home is the one refuge all married women have. Its disappearance adds new urgency to Nimita’s request that they set up house on their own. Dilip-Praji’s in-laws’ place can never be Roshna’s refuge, but her other brother’s own home certainly can.

  The day after that, Pramila and Mohinder Bakshi come to visit. They decline refreshments and sit in Dilip-Praji’s room. He welcomes them with folded hands and makes to switch off the RCA Victor with its alternately grim and joyful headlines. His hand rests on the knob just as the announcer says: “The boundary line between India and the new state of Pakistan is close to being finalised.”

  “Leave it, beta,” Mohinder says. “The line is already drawn and through our homes. All this rest is naatak-baazi to make people feel the politicians are doing something.”

  Pam-Auntyji hugs Nimita and coos over Urmila-Baby. “We were so worried about you. We hoped you had escaped, but we didn’t know whom to ask and where to find you. Then luckily Kamla Kaul came to visit and told us where you were.”

  “Those lucky Kauls, shifting here properly. We came to Delhi with only a few clothes and have to start absolutely from scratch,” Mohinder says, even as Sharada Khosla notes the gold rings on his fingers. Pramila has expensive diamond bracelets on her hands and the quietly flashing solitaires in her ears are neatly shown off by a daring Western bob-cut. The sari is, of course, purest silk.

  “Beta, I’m sorry, I did my best but they tore your house apart,” Mohinder says. He relates his part of the story and then Karan tells them that the servant is recovering in hospital.

  “Thank God,” says Pam-Auntyji. “It was horrible to hear him.” She looks sideways at Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam, who made excuses to stay by the door of the room, happy to be in the presence of this small connection from their past.

  Pam-Auntyji envies the Sachdevs. She is training a new batch of domestic help and sorely missing her well-trained servants from Lahore. She gave them some of the little money she had at home to go back to their villages and explained where the Bakshis could be found in Delhi if they managed to make it there, but who knows if they will come? And the house has to be maintained.

  There is so much to do in Delhi now, an entirely new life to rebuild. With the new government of India coming in with big plans for developing the country, new infrastructure will be needed: buildings, roads, expanded railway lines. There will be plenty of opportunities for a canny contractor with a good history on the Ugandan railway line. All that is needed is to throw a few parties to make new friends, starting with the guest list suggested by Manohar Kaul.

  “What are you going to do now, beta?” Mohinder says.

  Karan spreads his hands. “I haven’t thought of anything yet.”

  He hasn’t mentioned my teaching job, Nimita notes.

  “If you haven’t thought of anything, there was one thing maybe you could help me with,” Mohinder says. “Has it occurred to you that with Pakistan being formed, their mills may no longer supply Amritsar and Ludhiana? And all the jute fields are also in the land those people are taking over.”

  “But Uncleji, trade must continue.”

  “Haan,” Mohinder sits back in his chair, “but will Sikh distributors take cloth from Muslim mills, you think? After what has been happening in recent days?”

  The entire room considers this.

  “Of course, Birla has the Delhi market sewn up, but what about further west? There are business possibilities, I think, for mills from elsewhere in the country. Ahmedabad. Bombay. Jute suppliers from the southern parts for the north.” Mohinder notes that Karan has perked up. “Haan, Bombay is where your sister is married, na? Fine place, fine place. I have some friends there. Maybe you could think about it? Come over tomorrow morning and we’ll talk more.”

  So it is settled. Karan will go from mill-owner to middleman and salesman, two steps above jobber and slightly below contractor. He will represent one of the large mills in Parel, owned by Mohinder Bakshi’s good friends, and try to open up new trade routes in the Punjab and Central provinces.

  “Punjabis will talk to Punjabis,” Mohinder tells him. “These Marathas speak a very slippery language. If they offer you water, you must take it immediately. If you say ‘no’ once, they will never ask you again.”

  There is no mention of a salary, only the nebulous understanding that Mohinder’s good friends will take care of Karan, another good friend. Perhaps it will be on a commission basis. Karan tries asking but is told not to worry, have another drink and discuss it with Uncleji’s good friends when you get there.

  So they are going to Bombay now, Karan and Nimita and Urmila-Baby and Sharada Khosla. Mummy is relieved because while she would have supported a widowed daughter who wished to work, she was hesitant to offer her support to the Bombay project when her son-in-law was alive and clearly against it.

  Karan is relieved because there is the hope of a good job waiting for him, even if the rewards are not quite clear.

  Nimita is relieved because the fight is over, but she will remember, for the rest of her life, that when the family was in trouble, her husband had hesitated in letting her lead them out of it.

  So they are in Bombay in August, when two nations declare independence within a day of each other, celebrating with cheers and dances for the cameras of the world and then, when the lenses are elsewhere, privately drawing dag
gers and slashing at the neighbours who belong to the wrong religion.

  They are in Bombay, Karan and Nimita and Urmila-Baby and Sharada and also Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam, who cried and fell at their masters’ feet and insisted on coming along. They are cramped into a two-room space with hardly enough work to keep the servants occupied and more than enough work to drive the masters mad.

  Nimita must learn to understand the odd slang of market Marathi. The language is so different and yet so similar to Hindi with blunt consonants, pointed vowels and an abrasive tone, quite unlike the liquid, soft Urdu.

  She and Mummy and Shukla-Bibi must try to understand the strange vegetables available on sale. Here, human beings eat the long, stringy beans that in the Punjab were only fed to cattle. The radish is bitter, not sweet. Rice is cheaper than wheat.

  Karan must meet the friends of Mohinder-Uncleji and impress them and extract more than promises from them. It turns out that the job is on a trial and commission basis, and it is Nimita’s salary that will feed them for a few months at least. Bitterly disappointed, he sets off as soon as possible on his first sales trip, leaving behind the wife he had crossed a country to find.

  It becomes easier with his going. The two rooms are less crowded and Nimita can leave the housework in Mummy’s and Shukla-Bibi’s hands while she prepares for her first year of teaching. Radheshyam makes himself useful around the school as an unpaid peon and soon manages to get a small allowance that is useful for the cheroots he likes to smoke. He starts saving for new clothes that he knows his mistress might not be able to buy for him this Diwali.

  Roshna Bhargava cannot understand why Nimmy-Bhabhi and Auntyji don’t just move in with her while Karan-Bhaiya is away. She invites them almost every day to meals at the Bhargava home in the faraway Defence Colony area. It takes such a long train ride to get there that Nimita and Mummy go to spend the night one time and afterwards Nimita is glad that the Bhargavas live so far away, simply because the dinner was so good, so like what she was once used to. She would be tempted to drop in every night if the Bhargavas lived nearby.