Life Among the Scorpions

by Jaya Jaitly

  Mid-April, in 1956, my father decided to take me to Paris for a week before I went back to Ashford. My mother stayed behind. We drove to the Ritz Hotel where bookings had been made. The Indian Ambassador and his daughter were received with bows and flourishes and led to an opulent room. We enjoyed the style of it all until the omelette at breakfast came with a tag that worked out to sixty Indian rupees. It was like a six-hundred-rupee omelette today. We made an effort to behave like suave aristocrats but deciding to share the omelette and eat the rest of our meals in cheaper restaurants in the city. We had to express our dismay, suppress our laughter and make alternate plans in Malayalam so that the waiters would not understand.

  On 26 April, my father decided to come to drop me back at school. He was to retire at the end of April at the age of 55 but had been given an extension by the Government of India and was to be posted to Venezuela as Ambassador for India in July. The thought of going to South America was terribly exciting. It was to be my last term at school where the only thing that was going to be sad was leaving my friends, especially Patty Ann from ‘BG’. I proudly showed off my father to my school friends and teachers and took him to see my classrooms, dormitory, friends and playing fields, to which I had finally become quite attached and familiar. My parents had also discontinued telephoning every weekend as I was now well settled and confident.

  My father returned to Brussels on Saturday, 28 April 1956, and went out on Sunday morning, the 29th, to play golf. At noon, I received a message to go to the principal’s office. She told me my grand-uncle who lived in Croydon was coming to fetch me as I had to go back to Brussels. At the London airport, he said I should be brave. About what, I wondered.

  At the airport at Brussels, Sophie met me and told me that my father had had a heart attack while playing golf, and had died instantly. He had not suffered. My mind went blank. The only thing that engaged it on the long drive to the Embassy residence was that all the traffic lights along the way were green.

  ~

  My fourteenth birthday was just six weeks away, but I grew to be an adult overnight.

  The Embassy shutters were down, the drawing room was full of Indian ladies sitting around my mother, bedraggled and wailing. The atmosphere was horrible. The dining room had been converted into a European funeral parlour with black drapes and white flowers, and my father was laid out on his usual bed, as if peacefully asleep. He was embalmed and scheduled to lie in this state until the cremation on Thursday. I stared at all who faced me in silence. Then I asked my mother to go upstairs, wash herself, change her clothes, comb her hair and lie down. I asked for a doctor to give her a sedative, and requested the visitors to leave her to rest for a while. In the days that followed, I met every dignitary who came to pay his respects, saw to the kitchen arrangements, and attended the cremation while my mother stayed home, screaming from the window. The guilt of having harboured so many petty antagonisms against my father, and of having been the one to separate him from his beloved daughter, by deciding to send me to boarding school, must have compounded her agony. She never really let go of that guilt completely, and I never could discard my grouse against her for making his last days unhappy.

  The sight of my father’s body gliding on smooth tracks into the furnace finally made me start shaking. Sophie led me out towards the car. After a while, when I turned to look back and saw smoke coming out from the tall chimney of the crematorium, and realized that that was all that was left of him, I broke down and cried like the child I too had left behind.

  7

  DELHI AGAIN

  But a Different Life

  AFTER MY FATHER’S DEMISE, WE had to leave Brussels and return to India. I had packed the entire house while my mother grieved at each object that brought my father’s loss back as an intractable fact. The trunks were in a storehouse somewhere, and our Cadillac sold at a loss by my mother’s brother who had no head for business. We boarded the SS Himalaya for Delhi in late July 1956. This was one of the last ships to pass through the Suez Canal which was closed soon after. The closing of the Suez Canal was a short-lived but highly significant event in which Egypt, to retaliate against the attack on it by Israel, UK and France, closed the port to any traffic and thereby trade by these countries. This affected consumption patterns in these countries heavily, especially in France and Britain where supplies of milk and tea stopped. Everything had to go around the southern cape of Africa, causing the prices of petrol and other commodities to shoot up. As I learned to adjust to a huge change in the pattern of my life, these countries suffered huge losses too. A coming together of events linked it all together. It was the last of my cossetted and fairly luxurious life just as it was the last of these important journeys along the Suez.

  Khushwant Singh’s family was on the same steamer, and Rahul, his son, and I were a part of a group of young teenagers who spent most of the time swimming and running along the decks and innards of the vast steamship, irritating the more staid passengers who wanted to lie back on their deck chairs and doze off. It seemed to us as if everyone on the ship was over seventy.

  In Delhi, we came to live with my mother’s first cousin Gouri Bhadran, whose husband was in the Indian Forest Service and posted in the Ministry of Agriculture. Suddenly, there was no home of our own, no luxuries and no feeling of independence that a child has when living in her own home with her parents. My aunt and uncle were extraordinarily kind and loving in their own way, and it must have been hard to accommodate a widow and a child used to life abroad. The systems in the household were different and all that was my own here was my bed in a room that I shared with my mother. My mother made friends amongst the neighbours and had my aunt for solace. I had no one, and hid my sorrow in silence lest my mother became upset. I joined the Convent of Jesus and Mary and soon made friends who are as close to me now as they were at that time. The government of India gave my mother a meagre pension since my father had died ‘in saddle’, and allotted a bigger house to my uncle so that we could be accommodated more conveniently. So we shifted from Bapa Nagar to Humayun Road where my mother hired a piano for me to learn. I hated it. I wanted to learn Kathakali instead, but did not dare insist upon my wishes.

  School became the mainstay of my life, and I was soon among the highest scorers in class tests. As young teens, we made eyes at the boys at St Columba’s adjoining the girls’ convent school, spent hours chatting to friends on the telephone exchanging notes on what to wear, who said what to whom, which our favourite song was on the Friday night radio programme, A Date with You, and cycling to Khan Market for an ice cream in the afternoon heat. My aunt’s maid and cook from Kollengode and valet from Darjeeling, had not seen such activity in this childless household. They regularly reported to my aunt about the length of my telephone conversations, who, in turn, lectured me on how onerous her responsibilities were in looking after a fatherless child.

  When my uncle retired, they left Delhi and the government allotted my mother one-and-a-half small rooms in the barracks of Kotah House on Shah Jehan Road, two minutes away from where we were earlier. I was desperately keen that we should have a home of our own. The houses in the nearby Golf Links cost a lakh and a half rupees at that time. It was a quiet and beautiful residential colony. However, my mother said we did not have the money to buy a house there, that my father’s entire legacy was equivalent to that amount. I argued that we could rent one floor for an income and live on the other floor. She refused, saying she could not see herself in the role of a landlady. I asked why we could not have a home where there was a kitchen. She refused again and said she was not prepared to spend her time counting out the daily rations of rice, oil, salt and cooking coal. Anyhow, my mother intensely disliked cooking and had never been interested in even making a cup of tea. Thus ended my quest for an independent home of our own.

  Perhaps at fourteen, I had not fully grasped the economics of our situation and no one cared to explain the details to me. I adjusted reluctantly to the reality of life in Kotah Hous
e. Khan Market was nearby and school was no farther, but now there was no servant, no kitchen and no car. I had to get used to sharing a ‘single meal tray’ that came from the main dining room of Kotah House. My mother ate the rice and dal while I had the rotis and vegetables. Sometimes we switched. We set dahi or yogurt on the shelf of the linen cupboard in the bathroom, and I cooked our dog Trixie’s meal on a stove on the bathroom floor when I got back from school in the afternoons. Once, she tipped the entire vessel over in her excitement. There was greasy meat soup—globs of meat and bones—all over the floor. I cried bitterly as I cleaned up the whole mess, wondering why my life had to change so drastically and what I had done to deserve all this.

  A year later, a maid came from Kerala. She cooked delicious sambar, rice and vegetables for us on that same tiny heater on the bathroom floor near the linen cupboard. At least we now had fresh hot meals, the dog, and we were cared for.

  ~

  By 1957, my mother had taken up the post of Social Secretary to the American Ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, as a means of getting her mind off the tragedy of my father’s death. This is the first time in her life that she had ever worked in an office for a salary. We both adjusted to our new circumstances in our own ways: my mother tearfully but courageously, and I, silently. Occasionally, I shed a few tears too on my pillow at night when my mother was asleep. I wondered how life had taken me so suddenly from elegant mansions and vast manicured lawns with tennis courts, to a single room where, to escape from the summer heat, I had to set a block of ice in a vessel and place it between me and a table fan. In the early days of my life I never experienced the presence of an air-cooler; an air conditioner entered my home only when my son presented me with one forty-three years later.

  Nevertheless, despite what could be perceived as a comparatively impoverished way of living, life at Kotah House was fun. Shankar Roy and his younger brother Bunker, who later became a pioneer of professionalized non-government development work, and I, became close friends. They went to Doon School in Dehradun, but in the holidays we raced around Kotah House on our bicycles, haunted Khan Market and saw movies together. As boarding school approached, they would leave their extra pocket money with me like they would in a bank, with dire threats of retribution if I dared to mention this to their mother. Sanjeev Mukherjee, son of Air Marshall Subroto Mukherjee, was another friend. His father died choking on a piece of meat during an official visit to Japan. The dread of revisiting a scene of a father lying lifeless paralysed me. I could not get myself to visit Sanjeev and his mother till many days later.

  ~

  In 1958, I passed my Senior Cambridge examinations with a first division and high marks in English Language and Literature. Most of us chose to join Miranda House at Delhi University, and divided ourselves between English, History and Philosophy Honours. With good grades, upper middle-class backgrounds and fluency in English, we soon became the ‘power bunch’ among the first-year students. Anjoli Ela Dev, later famous contemporary artist, Lalita Katari, daughter of the Chief of Navy Staff, Barota Dey, daughter of S.K. Dey, the Minister for Rural Development, were the seniors we emulated and befriended. They looked askance, rather arrogantly, at the ‘pass course types’, who followed a simpler and more generalized syllabus requiring lower marks for admission. These students could barely speak English.

  In college, a part-personality-part-beauty contest faced first-year students; these were pre-feminist days. We had to walk on to stage where a desk with four or five judges from among the seniors sat to ask each of us freshers some questions. Then we were asked to turn around slowly just once, for the audience of students to examine our dress and posture, join our hands in a namaste greeting the audience, and walk off. The decibel of applause indicated the level of approval. The exercise was quite timid; neither sexy nor glamorous in any way, and everyone revealed a sense of shyness rather than any kind of competitive spirit or vanity. I was astounded when they announced that I had been chosen Miss Miranda 1958. Soon after though, I was brought happily to ground in the excitement that followed when someone asked me to demonstrate whether I had nice feet to match my face.

  While in college, I was one of the few who cared to read the newspapers set out in the reading room. Perhaps my education abroad contributed to this interest in the world outside the confines of our college. We were all young then, and were expected to just do well in our studies and not think too far into our future in the world we were being prepared for. My work in class was of a high standard, thanks to the time I spent at Ashford School for Girls. English, in all its nuances, came easily and naturally to me. With a deeply ingrained love for books and writing, studies were a breeze at Miranda House, considered the most progressive women’s college in Delhi at the time.

  8

  SMITH COLLEGE, USA

  Savouring Literature and Freedom

  IT SO HAPPENED THAT AMBASSADOR Ellsworth Bunker’s sister and brother-in-law, Katherine and John Parsons, came to visit India. My mother was keen to take them all on a visit to her beloved home, the palace in Kollengode. With the help of her cousins, a ceremonial reception with caparisoned elephants and attending fanfare was organized for them. My mother was proud to show off her background and they got a taste of India they could not have had as easily. On their return to Delhi, they invited me for tea, and casually asked if I would like to study in the United States of America. Equally casually I answered in the affirmative. The Parsons set the ball rolling on their return home.

  Bunker, and John Kenneth Galbraith, the succeeding US Ambassador to India, actively encouraged by their wives, oriented me for an education there. I was to apply for a full scholarship to either Smith or Vassar Colleges. I had to fill in a fairly simple form of which the important part was an essay on why I wanted to study in the USA. There were no formidable application processes with complicated acronyms in the late fifties. Eventually, I was transported to one of the most eminent women’s higher educational institutions in that country. Amidst a world largely dominated by men, what Smith College in Northampton (Massachusetts) fostered was, as they put it in their own brochure: ‘an uncompromising defense of academic and intellectual freedom, an attention to the relation between college education and the larger public issues of world order and human dignity, and a concern for the rights and privileges of women.’ These were principles I was to later imbibe.

  I would like to believe that my education at Smith, although not for the full four undergraduate years, played a major role in my personal and public attitudes, and actions throughout my life—far more than any other educational institution I have attended. Even the writing of this book, highly modest and miniscule in comparison, draws from the qualities that an institution like Smith College helped develop. It gave the world great authors like Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road), Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) and Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind). Other ladies who are ‘firsts’ in other ways, are first ladies Barbara Bush (wife of George H.W. Bush) and Nancy Reagan (wife of Ronald Reagan), both of whom stood out as symbols of poise and independence. Today, there are heads of financial institutions, neuroscientists, CEOs of major corporations and other pathbreakers who have added to the illustrious list of the Smith alumnae. Published in 2010, Orange is the New Black, a bestseller based on which a television series came to be produced, was written by Piper Kerman, a Smith alumnae who went to jail on drug charges and wrote brilliantly about those experiences. I thought, in a few moments of dark humour, that I may now be another Smith alumnae who is under trial for charges related to conspiracy and corruption and might just follow in her footsteps. That would make this memoir quite a sensation.

  Interestingly, Smith has steadfastly insisted on remaining a solely women’s institution, priding itself on reserving a preciously guarded space for women to develop freely and exclusively without having to compete in the intellectual field with louder, more aggressive, atten
tion-getting members of the opposite sex. It was an oasis during the period between mixed high schools and the larger, often patriarchal, world. It worked just fine.

  In my first few weeks at the college, I got quite a culture shock. I had to shed my shyness and bathe completely nude in a common shower room often with five other girls. No coy sari-wrapping as women did in public bathing places in India. Most girls smoked in those days, and felt unpopular if they didn’t have a date on a Saturday night when they got out of their shabby blue jeans and dressed up. Girls needed one night a week to express their femininity, I guess. I would gather slots of evening duty at the reception for those who went out but once got chased by a boy around the room with a pair of scissors as he had decided to amuse himself by threatening to cut my long plait off while waiting for his date to come down the stairs. Very long hair, a funny English accent and brown skin were exotica in those days. I was also pursued by our Gillette House ‘housemother’, Ms Stillwagon, who was what was then called an Evangelical Christian; now, she would be called a ‘Born Again’ Christian. For her, my being a Hindu was the same as being a heathen who needed to be shown the light. She would often slip letters under my dorm door asking me to embrace Jesus Christ to be on the right path if I wanted to be saved from the burning fires of hell. Hugely amused, my friends and I joked about my plight, but I also studiously avoided Ms Stillwagon as far as I could while living under the same roof.

  Students travelled and lived freely with their boyfriends, and Barbara Dodd, who was president of the Smith Alumnae of our class of ’63, was a talented modern dancer who spent her summer holidays dancing at a famous nightclub in New York. Students married their professors and had babies during their student years but work pressure was the opposite to what students faced in Indian colleges where we only got serious about studies just before the examinations. We had to learn to type, and often submit five or six originally researched papers every week no matter what other engagements we were involved in. Some did wilt under the pressure. I had to uphold my own self-respect so I worked hard, with a very modest $200 per term as pocket money from Ellsworth Bunker’s sister and husband who were my local guardians. I couldn’t afford to eat out or buy anything extraneous to basic necessities but it was enriching to use one’s mind creatively. I was selected to be Gold Key guide by the administration. These Gold Key wearers had to guide prospective parents around the college and were supposed to be an example of how good, well-spoken, diverse and presentable Smithies were. As the only Indian girl among two thousand students, I was expected to be an Ambassador for India as well. It was a huge honour which made me mighty thrilled. My friends would all tease me saying, ‘June Jayalakshmi, how will our poor American parents understand your accent?’