Nimita has a headache, but does not ask her chattering daughter to keep quiet. Urmila-Baby is growing into a young woman now and the slightest thing can make her burst into tears or stay silent and moody for days. Only Karan or Deepu can charm her out of such sulks. Nimita does not always have the patience for it.
“You were like that too, at her age,” Mummy says, but Nimita doesn’t think so. Neither does she know where Urmila gets this moodiness from. Her father can flare into anger but these fits of temper are short. Even during the worst years, when he and Nimita could barely stand to speak honestly to each other, he always looked slightly ashamed of his outbursts and spent more time trying to speak sweetly to make up for them.
The sounds of All India Radio greet Nimita and Urmila as they enter the house. Shukla-Bibi, stooping now with age and slower too, though she would never admit it, likes listening to the Binaca Geetmala countdown of film songs.
Radheshyam is watering the plants Nimita ordered put into the strip of mud that differentiates the house proper from the compound wall. Deepu is playing in the mud, still in his uniform, as he is absolutely not supposed to be doing. But when he looks up and shouts “Ma!” and runs towards her with his arms half-outstretched, Nimita can’t bear to scold him.
“Didi, see what I found,” Deepu tells Urmila, holding out a long brown-pink strip. Nimita steps back immediately, Urmila steps forward, brows knitting in interest.
“It’s an earthworm,” she tells Deepu. “You must put it back so it can continue doing good work.”
“What work, Didi?”
“If we put it near the plants, it will make holes in the soil so the roots can breathe.”
“After you put it back, change your clothes, Deepu,” Nimita says. “Urmila, make sure he does it.” Her children nod but they are fascinated by the earthworm and already deciding whether it should be put near the little papaya plant or the fledgling mango tree.
Maybe there’s a BSc in Urmila’s future, Nimita thinks as she enters the house, washes her hands and heads to the kitchen to speak with Mummy and Shukla-Bibi.
“I heard on the radio about Flora Fountain,” Mummy says. “Was everything all right at school?”
“Everything was fine,” says Nimita. “Shukla-Bibi, a cup of tea please. Readymade.”
“Where are the children?” Mummy asks.
“In the garden. Thank you,” Nimita says as Shukla-Bibi hands her a cup of tea. “Please tell them to wash their hands and do their homework.”
Mother and daughter sit silently in the kitchen. The setting sun comes in through the far window, its rays green through the mogra bushes and ixora Nimita has had planted outside. It is like being in a sunken garden, a secret cave of green.
My secret garden, Nimita thinks, fond of the book she and her students are reading in class. In the story, an orphan girl leaves India and goes to live with her uncle in England. She hates it until he lets her have a bit of garden to grow things in.
“Is there reason to smile?” Shukla-Bibi says, re-entering the kitchen.
“What happened? Are the children being naughty?”
“Those angels? Never. I’m talking of those devils in the street demanding a pure Maratha state and firing on innocent people.”
Nimita sips her tea and lets the sugar sweeten her temper. Shukla-Bibi is growing more afraid the older she gets. “Nothing will happen, Shukla-Bibi.”
“We’ll have to get up and leave our house again.”
“Nothing will happen, Shukla-Bibi,” Mummy also says. “Have you had your tea and biscuit?”
“I don’t want tea,” Shukla-Bibi says but she drinks the tea after Nimita gets up to make it. She has the sugar sickness, Anand says. If she doesn’t eat regularly, she has mood swings. Often she is thirsty beyond bearing but then urinates frequently. She sleeps in Mummy’s room to be near a bathroom at night.
Nimita has her now cold tea while Shukla-Bibi eats a Marie biscuit. “You wait and see. They will throw everyone out who is not a pure Marathi,” the servant says.
Nimita laughs. “If it’s pure Marathi they want, we’ll make Deepu-Baba and Urmila-Baby talk to them. When the colony’s children are playing outside, I can’t make out which voices are my children’s and which the neighbour’s.”
Mummy sighs. “Today, I spoke to Deepu in Punjabi and he said: ‘Nani, what are you saying? Say it in Hindi.’”
“Mummy, you also speak Hindi. You were born in Delhi and brought up in Simla.”
“Yes, but I was in Lahore for all my married life. My Punjabi is better than yours.”
“At least Urmila-Baby knows Punjabi,” Nimita says.
“But her accent is so bad,” Mummy says, then bursts out laughing. Nimita joins in.
“Don’t worry, Bibiji, we’ll make sure she marries into a proper Punjabi family,” Shukla-Bibi says.
“Don’t talk of my baby’s marriage. She’s not even reached fifteen years.”
“Hai Ram. You were seventeen when you came to our house,” Shukla-Bibi scolds. “You should start looking around now. As it is, Karan Sahib is hardly at home. It will take double time to find a suitable match.”
Karan has been trying to find more takers for his textiles. The purchase of the house wiped out all the savings they had rebuilt after buying into the Bafna business.
“Karan travels a lot. Maybe he’ll find some suitable boy on his trips. You should tell him to keep an eye out,” Mummy says.
“Hai Ram. You want Babyji to marry a Madrasi?” For Shukla-Bibi, any land below the Punjab is Madras, a place of dark-skinned creatures who eat only rice, not roti.
“My baby is not marrying anyone until she has a degree,” Nimita says with finality. “A proper degree, BA (Pass) and not BA (Fail). Maybe a BSc.”
“What will she do, so educated?” Shukla-Bibi says.
“She will do anything she wants,” says Nimita. “Who knows, we might even have a woman leading India soon.”
Deepu comes in to show his washed hands and a test paper marked Very Good. He wants gulab jamun as a reward. “Deepu, beta, it takes a lot of time to make gulab jamun,” his grandmother tells him.
This reminds Nimita to go through the kitchen shelves and check on the store of flour, ghee, sugar and other essentials. Urmila-Baby comes in while she is making a note of what to buy. All India Radio has switched to the news.
Schools will remain open tomorrow. The governor of Bombay will meet with the leaders of the Sanyukta Maharashtra movement. It all sounds very familiar. The partition of Bombay state is well underway.
“They will throw out anyone who is not Marathi,” Shukla-Bibi says again.
“Then we’ll fool them. We’ll put Urmila-Baby in a nine-yard sari and Deepu-Baba in a dhoti kurta and tricorn cap,” Nimita says, shooing the children out to do their homework.
“How can you make light of this?”
Nimita takes a bottle out of the special cupboard, the one only she and Karan and Mummy can touch. “What else should I do instead? Cry? Beat my hands on my forehead? Mummy, let me talk,” she says when Mummy tries to interrupt. “Shukla-Bibi, God would not be so cruel as to let what happened in Lahore happen again. Surely God wouldn’t. I believe that very strongly.”
“What if he does?” Shukla-Bibi says, lips trembling.
Nimita laughs. “Before that, we’ll learn to speak Marathi like Urmila-Baby and Deepu-Baba. Then no one will take our place from us again.”
The conviction in her words hides a tremor in her heart. For all her outward bravery, an incident like today’s reveals the vulnerability beneath. With Karan away until the weekend, even the tranquillity of the garden and the cries of herders calling buffaloes home are not enough to calm her.
On nights like this, she turns to the imported Scotch whisky she has developed a taste for in the last 13 years. Mummy disapproves, so Nimita drinks it by herself in her bedroom. She pours her whisky and water after a bath, often with Karan holding a similar glass. They maintain the fiction of pr
oper behaviour outside the room but within, they pretend to get tipsy and speak to each other in Scottish burrs.
“Can you believe we did this?” Karan said, their first night in the new home, after Anand and Roshna and their children had left.
“I imagined it and now it’s coming true,” Nimita said, revelling in the heady combination of drink and new home and relaxed husband.
Karan laughed. “What do we do now? I feel so free. Like anything is possible.”
“Edinburgh,” Nimita said.
“What?”
“This whisky was bottled in Edinburgh.” Edinburgh where she once wanted to study medicine. “I suppose whisky is medicinal enough.”
Karan clinked his glass against hers. “To Edinburgh.” And now whenever they want a quiet moment, a quiet drink, one of them will say to the other, “Let’s go to Edinburgh,” and they will retire, giggling like naughty children, holding the bottle, water and two glasses.
The expensive warmth of the whisky unsettles Nimita’s stomach on hot days, but it soothes her mind with its reassurance that they are financially stable now. A good thing, she thinks, that neither she nor Karan developed a taste for whisky when they could actually afford it. It is easy to fall into habits and hard to break them.
It is only a taste for whisky, not a thirst. The real thirst she has is for land. For property. Now that they have one house with a little garden, she is already imagining another, a bigger bungalow with a proper field of green, where the children can run until they tire themselves and not come to the boundary wall. But this second house will be in some other place because experience has taught her not to acquire too much land in one area. Land is immovable and if God is cruel again, it cannot be rolled up and taken along.
Her bangles clink as she lifts the glass for that first sip. She keeps the bangles on all the time, like her gold chains, never removing them, not even to bathe. This is traditional and expected of wives, but she keeps them on in case, God forbid, she is ever told to run again. Then she will be ready, with her wealth on her wrists and her neck.
Nimita wants to buy another house, Karan wants to buy a car. She also misses the freedom of having her own vehicle, especially when she walks to the market and back with a heavy bag, the cyclists spattering her sari with monsoon mud. If she drove a car to market, the fisherwomen and vegetable sellers would not laugh at her bad Marathi. They would know who she was, had once been.
So many of us, she thinks as the whisky ignites its fire. In 13 years she has seen Sindhi children sell their mothers’ silk shawls and chunnis cut into handkerchiefs. She has seen her father’s old friend, Feroze Damania, the owner of a bottle factory, reduced to running a café that provides breakfast, lunch and tea to factory workers. The café has done well though. His son runs it now and there is also a bakery that is becoming famous for its butter biscuits and cakes. Yet in those first few years, when they passed each other on the street, both Nimita and Feroze-Uncleji pretended not to know what the other was doing to make ends meet. They would say: “You all must come home, beta” and “Uncleji, please come home” but it never happened.
How ridiculous we were, Nimita thinks. But we saved our pride. It was all we had to save. Nothing else came with us from Lahore.
There are letters that come sometimes. Shehnaz-Auntyji, writing of grandchildren, of Assad-Uncleji’s passing. Sharada and Nimita write back, but there are fewer letters now. Easier to let the past be in the past, rather than trying to string out a painful connection.
The next sip of whisky ignites another thought, a thought that she can disclose to no one else, not even to those she loves. The thought that for all that they lost, there are small compensations in the life she now lives.
In the Punjab, would she have had a career as a teacher? The best thing she ever did in her life, the only worthwhile thing, was offering a home to Najma. And how long would that have lasted anyway, with Shukla-Bibi growing angrier at her presence every day? Partition prevented Nimita from having to find out.
She may have little money now, compared with her past, but she is a respected teacher whom even industrialists court in the hopes that she will give tuition to their children. She can educate her daughter to her heart’s content, push her son to be whatever he wants, doctor, lawyer, engineer. Both will need to work because there is no land to support them.
But the deepest, most important compensation of all is knowing—and she really cannot say this to anyone—is knowing that she has survived. She has survived what so many have not, survived with husband and mother and children and even old servants. She has so much compared not to her own past, but to the present of so many others.
So if she dreams of Lahore in the night, she wakes in the morning determined to concentrate on simple pleasures: that she lives in Bombay, the busiest and most complicated city in all of India. That she can walk to the market and buy fresh sea fish—so light and non-bony, unlike the fish of the rivers Sutlej and Ravi. That she can cook prawns in coconut curry, like Mrs Mandore taught her; that her husband and she can giggle over whisky and talk all night, even after 15 years of marriage and two children.
Maybe Karan and she should take a cruise holiday, instead of buying that Vespa. Somewhere far away and exotic. London might be too expensive. Hong Kong? Singapore? She will ask Karan when he comes home.
It will be her birthday soon and this year they plan to hire a car and drive out into the hills surrounding Bombay. Somewhere in the Western Ghats, they will stop and picnic with the children, letting them have a taste of cold mist and a view of never-ending rolling greens, so unlike the fields of the Punjab.
But it is a beautiful green, as good as London and England, Nimita thinks. In places like Lonavla, you can walk in clouds, see flowers of all colours and shiver happily while drinking hot chai. The thing about Bombay is that there are no proper winters when you have to wrap yourself up in blankets and warm the mouth with tea and roasted corn so sweet that it tastes like sugar on the tongue.
The last time they drove out into the hills and stopped, below the tea stall, she had seen a perfect little house with a red roof, green walls and a garden of exquisite flowers in pink, white, blue, red. One day she would like to own a house like that, fall asleep among the flowers and wake up knowing that all this beauty is hers.
A house like that to live in with the children… Shukla-Bibi cooking in the kitchen, Mummy ordering Radheshyam around in the garden, maybe growing strawberries and other rare English fruit. That little doll house in Lonavla would be perfect for them; it would allow their children to experience proper winters, like they had in the Punjab. Cold so pure that the air feels heavier, bends the light differently. The trees are different, some asleep, others awake in their uniform of spiky green needles. Going out in this weather is both a delight and a torment to the skin.
The children must experience this, going out in the cold, because only then will they realise the joy of returning home to blankets and warmth. Nimita will be waiting for them, wrapped up herself, dozing and waking only at the sound of running feet and the sweetest noise in the world, which is her children saying: “I’m home!”
Acknowledgements
It would take another book to name and thank the army who soldiered behind the scenes of this novel. Publisher Edmund Wee started the Epigram Books Fiction Prize to invest in Singapore stories and I’m grateful he took a chance on mine. Eng Chun Pang created the striking cover design, Yong Wen Yeu laboured over the layout and Nimita’s family tree. Jason Erik Lundberg and Eldes Tran executed the extensive, invisible, exhausting tasks of editors with superhuman speed and focus.
This book would not have been written at all without the urging of Clarissa Oon, and the support of my editors Helen Chia, Warren Fernandez and Tan Hsueh Yun at The Straits Times. My parents Avalokita and Vijay Kumar Nanda and my brother Trilok Prakash Nanda encouraged me through many drafts, as did my aunts Anila Nayar, Rohini Mahindra, Deepika Chadda and Aditi Pant.
Adeline C
hia, Diane Chang and Chia Aik Song were my first readers, urging me to do better. Jayapriya Vasudevan and Helen Mangham of Jacaranda Literary Agency took me on based on a paragraph. Smita Khanna went through the text with an eagle eye and coaxed me through highs and lows. Thank you, all of you, for helping my story have a happy ending.
References
Ahmed, Ishtiaq. 2004. “Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts”. http://www.sacw.net/partition/june2004IshtiaqAhmed.pdf.
The Bombay Rents Hotel and Lodging House Rates Control Act 1947
Bourke-White, Margaret. 1949. Halfway to Freedom: A Report
on the New India in the Words and Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence. New Delhi: Penguin India.
Butalia, Urvashi, ed. 2015. Partition: The Long Shadow.
New Delhi: Zubaan/Penguin.
Dawn archives, from 70 years ago
http://www.dawn.com/news/1097121
http://www.dawn.com/news/1104077
http://www.dawn.com/news/1115124
http://www.dawn.com/news/1154026
Department of Land and Building, Govt of NCT of Delhi, http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/doit_land_building/Land/Home/Evacuee+Property.
Kanwaljit Kuar. 2010. “Riots, Refugees and Rehabilitation: A Case Study of Punjab 1946–1956”, doctoral thesis submitted to Punjabi University Patiala.
Keay, John. 2014. Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. London: William Collins.
Palekar, Shreekant A. 1957. “Real Wages in India 1938-1950”. The Economic Weekly Journal, (Jan).
Paul, Amrita and Prithvish Nag. 2015. “Pattern of Post 1947 Refugee Resettlement in India”. International Journal of Geology, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, 3, Issue 1 (Feb).
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