My grandmother, Rajmata Sudershana Kumari was extremely happy to welcome her grandson’s bride to the family and there was a lovely get together at her apartment in Laxmi Niwas. Some wonderful black and white photographs were taken at the time, and they now serve as permanent record of the event.
In the evening, there was a display of fireworks following the banquet. The organiser of the fireworks display had been specially called in from Jaipur, and he must have been extremely inept as he managed to set himself on fire, which was a bad omen for the marriage. Despite having three lovely daughters, my brother and sister-in-law’s marriage was never a happy one and eventually they agreed to part ways and live separately.
We were still very young when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru approached the various Rajput princes of Rajasthan, enquiring if any of them were interested in marrying their daughter to Crown Prince Birendra of Nepal, as the Royal family of Nepal also happen to be Rajputs. My father replied that since both his daughters were very young at the time such an alliance at present was out of the question. Perhaps it was just as well, bearing in mind the grisly end that the entire Nepalese royal family met at the hands of Crown Prince Deependra in 2000.
It was during the Indo-Pak War air raids during 1971, and soon after my brother Narendra’s marriage, that early one morning my grandmother Dadisa had a stroke. She probably realised that her time was coming to an end; her maids said that unable to speak, she pointed to the photograph of my father, meaning that she wanted him sent for, he was her favourite child, and she simply adored him. By the time the maids summoned the ADC on duty at Laxmi Niwas and he rang my father, precious time had passed during which she lapsed into an irreversible coma. By the time my father arrived, all he could do was to sit by her beside and wait. He immediately summoned the best doctors from Delhi, but they could do nothing for her and she passed away
Her funeral procession left from Lallgarh Palace, where she had come as a young bride many years ago. Normally, for senior family members the funeral procession begins from Junagarh Fort but in the case of his mother, my father made the exception of the cortege leaving from Lallgarh Palace since this was her express wish. It was the end of an era for the family and with her passing away, the Laxmi Niwas wing was shut down for many years thereafter.
I was in college then and I recall one afternoon when I was getting ready, my Suket aunt came into my room and announced in a very matter of fact way that my grandmother had passed away and that we were expected to leave immediately for Bikaner. I will always remember how impersonally that critical piece of news was conveyed: no sympathies, no emotion, merely granny has gone and off you all go to Bikaner. When we reached Bikaner the funeral had already taken place. In most Hindu families, when there is a death the male members of the family shave their heads as a sign of mourning, and it was so saddening to see my father with all his hair gone. He was deeply affected by the death of his mother, and understandably so, as they shared a close bond. Shanta Bhua who was with granny during her final hours told us later that my father had cried like a baby at the bedside of his mother. We tried to cheer him up as best as we could, but the next twelve days of mourning kept us all fairly busy as a steady stream of visitors came and went.
The twelve days of mourning that follow a death in every Rajput family were carried out in grandmother’s apartments in Laxmi Niwas with the ‘baithak’ for the ladies being held in grandmother’s first floor sitting room, while the men convened downstairs. Hundreds of people, locals from Bikaner and princely families from other states came and went during that time. Rajdadisa Badan Kanwar of Jodhpur, grandmother of Maharaja Gaj Singh ‘Bapji’ comforted my father and my aunt when they greeted her with tears in their eyes: ‘Till I am alive, you will always have a mother,’ she assured them. She was a gracious and big hearted lady. Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur also came for a condolence visit: these ladies had been very close and held similar political views and had remained in close touch during the many elections that had taken place since India’s independence.
Once the mourning period was over, I was set to work with my paternal aunt, Bhua Maharani Sushil Kanwar of Udaipur, to carry out a comprehensive inventory of grandmother’s possessions in her apartments at Laxmi Niwas. My aunt was an extremely organised lady and used to tell me how despite her privileged position, she did all her own paper work to include filing her own tax returns which was very impressive. This was easier said than done, as the first floor was a rabbit’s warren of rooms and small stores. We spent hours painstakingly going through one room after another making lengthy lists and just when we thought we had finished we discovered yet another little cubbyhole or store room with more things piled inside. Finally, when it was all done, the more important and precious articles were removed and the rest of the rooms were covered in dust sheets and closed down. Once all of grandmother’s jewellery had been listed my father made sure that one item of jewellery was given to each and every one of her ten grandchildren, which was incredibly thoughtful of him. I was given a beautiful ruby and diamond choker that I wore for many years afterwards. Grandmother was indeed a unique human being.
My father was most particular that we drank water from home as far as was possible; it was taken to such an extreme that my father only drank the water from the Karni Sagar well in Bikaner. It was thought to yield sweet water, as compared to most of the water sources in and around Bikaner which yielded brackish water, which is the culprit behind Bikaner’s numerous kidney stone patients. In the time of great grandfather and grandfather, water from the Karni Sagar well was even sent abroad in large metal containers called ‘toongs’and I believe the water supply lasted them till they reached Aden by ship. Father continued this practise but limited it to within India and thus, every time we went to Bombay or Delhi, regular supplies of water were dispatched to either destination by the Comptroller of the Household, Thakur Kishen Singh. Finally after serving several generations of the family faithfully, the Karni Sagar well ran dry and is now out of commission.
Keeping up the tradition, father insisted that we had to carry our own flasks to school to our great embarrassment since the rest of the girls all drank from the water cooler. Nevertheless, despite all the precautions taken, I succumbed to jaundice when I was eleven. The culprit I believe, were the ice lollies we used to greedily suck on during the long hot summer months. Jaundice is a very common ailment in India and many people succumb to it particularly during the summer months. It is a debilitating illness and saps one’s strength, besides damaging the liver. My parents were in Bikaner when my governess Mrs. Edwards informed them that I was quite ill. They were entertaining some guests. One of them fortunately happened to have a private plane of his own and flew my father back to Delhi so he could be with me. In all medical emergencies in my early life it was always my father to whom I turned for comfort and reassurance and he never ever let me down.
My father thrived on medical dramas and went into overdrive, supervising my medication and special diet prescribed by Dr. Dhanda, our physician. Someone persuaded him that the best way to ward off the evil effects of jaundice was to do ‘jhara’; it is a form of mumbo jumbo when a ‘shaman’ of some kind spouts various mantras verses and is supposed to be most effective against snake and scorpion bites and also certain illnesses. It is all superstition and many people have died in villages as they would rather go to the local ‘shaman’ for ‘jhara’ rather than to a hospital for treatment. Anyhow, this elderly Muslim Maulana was summoned from Bikaner and he performed all kinds of actions on the palm of my hand and muttered various incantations for the next several days although I am not quite sure if this was of any help.
A friend of my father’s very kindly lent me a whole stack of girl’s annuals and comic books that had belonged to her daughter. That helped me to while away the time as I was confined to bed to some extent, for several weeks. Most of my time was spent reading and listening to Beatles records. The one highlight of the day was that I was allowed to
eat ice cream and drink sugarcane juice every day which was a treat, as the bland food that I had to eat for almost six weeks, and have my blood tested constantly was not much fun. I am also very grateful to Thakur Devi Singh of Malasar, he was an integral part of our childhood and was almost like a real uncle who played games with us and kept us amused. He took the time to come and be with me during this long period of convalescence. We played card games and he kept my spirits up and distracted me when it was time for more blood tests. His presence made everything more bearable.
It was at this time that the film Howard Hawks’ film, ‘Hatari’, was about to be released. It was about a spectacular safari adventure set in the heart of Kenya released in 1961 and had an impressive cast of John Wayne, Hardy Kruger and Red Buttons and centred on the lives of a team who caught and procured wild animals for zoos and safari parks. I loved animals and longed to see the film, but could not because I was laid up in bed. My sister and Eddie and everyone else went to watch it, much to my chagrin and told me all about it, which made things much worse. It was and still remains one of my favourite films, but when I saw it again recently I was struck by how morally and ethically unacceptable it was by current standards of animal conservation. To capture wild animals many of them endangered and pack them off to zoos and circuses is quite unacceptable, I believe that now most zoos trade animals among themselves rather than procuring them from the wild.
Having completed our primary education, it was time for my parents to decide which secondary school we would attend. I was of course heavily influenced by my close friends and the schools they had opted for, whereas my parents on the other hand, were more practical. Finally, after a lengthy tussle between us it was decided that all three of us would attend the Convent of Jesus and Mary (CJM) near the Gole Post office in Delhi. I started in the sixth standard and fortunately with a kind teacher like Miss D’Lima who was blessed with a calm and placid personality. The Convent was then being administered by Irish nuns; Mother Superior, Dorothy De Sales was at the helm of affairs, and was most ably assisted by her second-in-command, Mother Katherine or ‘Ma Kat’ as she was popularly known. She had a severe, almost masculine face, with pale gray eyes with which she fixed one with an icy stare whenever she was displeased. She wore small rimless glasses, and was incredibly strict, striking terror in our hearts She was, however, never aggressive in any way and had a lovely Irish brogue when she spoke.
The other nun at the convent was the gentler Mother Mary of Grace who was a great favourite with us all; she was much younger in age and had a very fair complexion which turned pink in the Delhi heat. The two main red brick buildings were divided into the senior wing and the junior wing, and flanking the buildings were a number of little offices, the school book shop and the residence where some of the teachers lived. The Cathedral stood squarely in the middle with the girl’s school on one side and the boys school, St Columba’s, on the other.
The Convent of Jesus and Mary was an excellent school; the students came from all walks of life and in fact, it also happened to be very popular with the diplomats posted to Delhi, most of whom sent their daughters there. We had friends from Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Romania and the United States and many other countries; it was a great way to learn about different countries, cultures, religions and languages. Every morning after assembly, we all trooped off to our respective classes and the first class of the day would be moral science for the non-Catholic girls, while the Catholic girls all went off for catechism. The Catholic girls, to my mind, all seemed like they were members of a select club which we could not join.
At no point of time during our years there did the nuns in any way try to convert us, though we were encouraged to attend Church and participate in Church ‘bazaars’ and other related activities to raise funds for the school for the underprivileged which was situated in the same complex. Charles Moore in the first volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher expresses a similar thought: ‘Margaret herself recalled being envious of Catholic girls because of the ribbons they wore for First Communion.’ It was very much like that when the Catholic girls went off to confession and also went on retreats during Lent when they were permitted to stay overnight in school: they wore special badges, and of course human nature demanded that we always coveted and envied those activities that we could not join.
Mother Katherine was an absolute stickler for discipline. Every morning after assembly, after the usual Christian hymns were sung, she would file past us inspecting our hands and shoes reprimanding us in her broad Irish brogue. We had to wear white sports shoes as part of our uniforms that had to be kept pristine at all times which was hardly possible for many of the girls. The unfortunate girls always got a public ticking off after assembly was over. Once she stopped by me, my heart missed a beat or two, as she carefully surveyed my short nails and then my shoes, and then to my surprise remarked loudly ‘Very good, nice, clean and white, good child’. That was the height of praise indeed, but also deeply embarrassing to be singled out during assembly, and in any case I could hardly claim credit for my clean shoes since it was poor old Champa Nani who used to clean them for me!
As will happen in schools, there was an incident when I was in the eleventh standard, just before my graduation, in 1970. Our classroom was at the end of a corridor, close to the washrooms. One day, there appeared on the walls of the washroom a large graffiti sign that read, ‘Mother Katherine is a lesbian.’ When one of the cleaners, Banarsi, who was a terrible sneak, saw this—though I am sure he did not understand the content, but was deeply aggrieved by the defacement of the washroom walls—he duly reported the matter to Mother Katherine who was incandescent with rage. The next morning after assembly our class was especially singled out, being closest to the washrooms, and it was rightly assumed that the perpetrator belonged to this class. ‘Confess who did it,’ demanded Mother Katherine, her face turning puce with indignation. ‘Or turn in the girl who did, or else, you will have to all stay in at break time,’ she raged on. Though we knew very well who the culprit was and she will remain nameless to this day, we refused to betray our friend and instead suffered through break time, writing an essay instead of eating peanut brittle and chips that were sold by a vendor who came by daily during recess with little waxed packets which he stored in a metallic trunk during break time.
The boys at St. Columba’s caused many a female heart to flutter. We were not normally allowed to mix but it was inevitable when school gave out at the same time in the afternoon. The senior classes also had a social at the end of the year when the boys from St. Columba’s were invited to our school for a tea and dance and it was all in good fun. If I recall correctly, my mother had issues with us dancing with the boys, but since she was physically not there to stop us, we rarely followed the Bikaner house rules. A particularly popular and handsome boy had several admirers in our class and so volatile was the atmosphere that once it almost spiralled into violence. Mrs. Furtardo, who was our history teacher, intervened and pleaded with them ‘Girls, girls! No boy is worth all this aggravation,’ and although peace was restored then, a fierce rivalry continued.
I was a student at the Convent of Jesus and Mary for about five years; looking back, they were perhaps the best and most carefree times of my life when the only thing I had to worry about was failing an algebra or geometry test which I did, quite frequently. However, all was not smooth sailing as there was a problem in the seventh standard when I was assigned to the section of Miss Blanche Rondo. She was an absolute tartar the ‘dragon of the seventh standard.’ All of us used to quake in our shoes at the very sight of her severe face short grey hair and slight and wiry build. I dreaded the thought of being in her section, but there was no avoiding it. Some of my luckier friends were assigned to the more benign Mrs. Goswami, or the amusing Mrs. Andrews. Miss Rondo was an Anglo-Indian spinster and I think she must have spent her entire life teaching girls like us. She used to live in a small apartment on the school premises. The moment someone started t
o argue, the dragon in her became apparent. Her favourite expression was, ‘you slovenly girl! I will lay a ruler across your knees!’ The threat was quite sufficient for us, though I never saw her actually hit anyone!
She was harsh and strict, but not unfair. I hated being in her class to begin with but soon got used to her gruff ways and she was quite fond of me by the end. For some of the preliminary months, life was one of great misery, but as soon I got to know Miss Rondo a bit better, things fell into place. In the beginning, I was so scared of her that I refused to go to school in the morning. I had never come across any one like her in my life before. Finally, after much questioning, Eddie wormed the truth out of me and she then told my father. Both Eddie and my father came to the school one day and met with Mother Superior. I am not sure what exactly transpired between them but the end result was that Miss Rondo became somewhat softer in her approach to me.
She was actually quite a kind old lady, and very devoted to teaching. She encouraged and even prompted the girls to work hard and put them through some difficult paces. When we moved on to the next standard, I was thankful to her for instilling a sense of discipline in me, and also the worth of hard work. I remained on cordial terms with her for a very long time, and exchanged Christmas cards long after I had left school, and she had retired and gone to Bangalore. She was one of the teachers who made a deep impression on me and I never forgot her.
Mother Mary of Grace was in charge of the junior wing of the school. We were, of course, young had deeply ingrained in us notions of Barbara Cartland’s romantic novels, and there was incessant, never-ending speculation amongst us as to why a young and attractive woman like her had become a nun. The common opinion was that there might have been a doomed love affair that had led her to the cloistered walls of the convent. Being in our early adolescence, we had many romantic notions about nuns and what motivated them to join the order and shun a normal life. The nuns’ apartments were situated on the first floor behind the auditorium and we were all strictly forbidden to go there. However, since we had to do what we were categorically told not to, one day we sneaked a quick peek behind the dividing curtain and discovered nothing exciting, to our utter disappointment. Their room was as partan dormitory, a long rectangular room with beds on both sides, completely bare and simple.
Palace of Clouds Page 21