Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  People filed past us, expressing regret, offering us a hug or an anecdote about Ma. Towards the end, some journalists walked up to us. Tasha-di was swift in leaning forward and offering us details of how they knew Ma, but all I could absorb was the knowledge that they had known Ma before her world had been limited to ours. One of these journalists, suave, poised, their voice deep with authority, said to me, ‘Your mother’s passing fills me with endless regret.’

  I handed Maya the letter and closed my eyes. Who had it been who had spoken those words? As the memory struck me, I had felt sure that it was a man, but as I focused, on the heat of the temple and rush of the mourners, I found I couldn’t be certain. Maya had been convinced the letter writer was a man, and perhaps my memory was coloured by her conviction. What if it had been a woman, confident, successful and glib, who had mouthed those words?

  My head swam, and I looked up to see that the fan hadn’t been turned on in the room. The air hummed with humidity, the ceiling was laced with damp, and as I inhaled, I saw a lizard streak past the lights overhead. I looked at Maya, who was carefully folding the letter in exactly the same manner we had found it.

  I thought again of the words I had heard in the temple: ‘Your mother’s passing fills me with endless regret.’ Had it been a man? I closed my eyes again, trying to remember the voice that had articulated the sentence. I retained an impression of ease, of words that carried an effortless heft; were they definitely spoken by a man? There had been a richness to the voice, a huskiness, but that didn’t necessarily make the speaker male. And if the speaker was male, who had it been? Had it been an old man, a tall one, or one with a moustache? The words buzzed in my head.

  The heat rose, and I leant back towards the wall. Surely I would have remembered. The words, extraordinary as they had been, had stuck in my mind. Perhaps, if I focussed, I would be able to remember a detail; a scar, a mole, a distinctive scent. I tried again to identify the owner of the words Maya cradled in her lap, but it was no use. I only remembered the rush of the evening, and an interminable line waiting to pay its condolences. Faces blended into one another, as did genders and clothes and colours and ages. There had been a polished smile, a grimace, that distinctive sorrow expressed, but all else remained stubbornly amorphous.

  VIII

  We visited Tasha-di at the end of the week. Ordinarily, it was she who came to us, but she didn’t ask us the reason for our visit, busying herself instead with bringing refreshments out for us, and I took the chance to refamiliarize myself with her living quarters. These remained the same as they always had been, bohemian and a little chaotic, with books and photos of friends lining up on each shelf. A woven sari was flung over her coffee table, potted ferns dotted the space and crystal acquired through trips to Europe sparkled on her dining table. Bright scarves hung off sofas. As a child her flat had seemed magical to me, every item precious and deliberate in its presence, and the passing of time had done nothing to diminish my wonder. ‘It’s still the same,’ I whispered to Maya. ‘It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been before.’

  As I looked around, I was struck by the photos on her mantelpiece. There was a photo of her in a sunlit terrace in the Mediterranean, one of her hiking in the mountains, then one of her with Ma in a sequinned sari, but what I noticed for the first time was that most were photos taken in the past. I remembered when the photo with Ma was taken. It was for a family wedding, and both women had gone to the salon to have their hair and nails done. Maya and I were both still at school, and this photo from well over a decade ago seemed to be the latest one taken. There had been nothing since, and I realised for the first time that Ma’s passing had been a loss for Tasha-di too.

  We tiptoed around the topic of the letter. I raised an eyebrow at Maya as I sipped at my tea, and though she nodded, she made no move to introduce the subject. Talk turned to Ma, which provided us with the perfect opening, but nether Maya nor I spoke about the letter. We hadn’t discussed it between ourselves, and we both had kept our thoughts on the subject to ourselves. I surmised that an unwelcome advance of some sort had been made, but wasn’t sure if Maya had reached the same conclusion. There was an unwillingness on both our parts to broach such personal matters, and we now hesitated to raise them with Tasha-di.

  It was Tasha-di in the end who broke the logjam. She saw me looking at her sari-decorated coffee table and smiled. ‘It’s so nice to see you here, Siya,’ she said. ‘When you were little, you would love to hide under this table.’

  ‘It was like Aladdin’s cave for me,’ I told her. ‘Your entire flat was.’

  ‘But,’ she said. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’ She spoke kindly, but there was no disguising the wistfulness in her voice.

  ‘Tasha-di,’ said Maya, as if to reproach her, but no further words suggested themselves to her, and she reached instead for the letter she carried in her bag. This she now presented to the older woman, biting her lips as she waited for a reaction.

  Tasha-di didn’t speak for an age. Her eyes moved slowly down the page, and though I grew impatient at the time she took to read through a couple of lines, she didn’t hurry. She looked up at us, then at the page again. This she perused once more, taking her agonising time. At length, she folded the paper neatly, placing it on the sofa next to her. She nodded, once then again in quick succession, and then she rose. She looked at us for a moment before leaving the room.

  Maya looked at me. We didn’t exchange a word, and we both felt as if we were waiting for Tasha-di’s verdict before committing to an opinion on the subject.

  Tasha-di returned, holding up a pair of glasses, which she slowly put on. She didn’t look at us or speak. Returning to the letter, she read it through one more time, her fingers tracing the lines as she read them. She finally looked up, and I realised I had been holding my breath.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well,’ replied Tasha-di. She smiled at us and dragged her chair to between us. She took our hands in hers, and said, ‘Do you children remember your mother as a journalist?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, as my sister stayed silent.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Tasha-di said slowly. She seemed to be composing her thoughts. Her speech had a measured air, and I wondered if her trip to the hallway had been more to consider her words than to find her glasses. ‘But,’ she was saying, smiling broadly, squeezing our hands, and I found myself smiling in spite of myself. ‘She was one hell of a journalist, your mother.’

  ‘What about…’

  Her smile widened. ‘Did you know, girls, that she planned to launch a magazine?’

  Maya half nodded. She looked at me, and then said, ‘I thought it was a dream, like the dolls we played with, but I have an impression of a magazine, and Ma in her white blouse…’

  ‘It wasn’t a dream, darling,’ Tasha-di was saying. She rose again, letting go of our hands, and walked into the innards of her home. There was a louder noise now, a dragging out of a heavy object, then the turning of a lock, and both Maya and I were up on our feet and in her room in an instant. Tasha-di smiled to see us, gesturing us in. She waved an old magazine at us, and asked, ‘And this. Do you remember this?’

  I looked at Maya, who shook her head. The magazine was placed in her hands, and as I huddled in for a better view, I saw that it wasn’t a glossy production. The colours were a little less vivid than I normally saw, the paper thicker, and the whole thing felt like a magazine had been photocopied and stapled together. ‘Look,’ Maya was saying, pointing at the title, and I saw the words ‘The Satirist’ emblazoned on the cover.

  ‘This was your Ma’s baby,’ Tasha-di was saying, but we barely registered her words. We were turning through the pages, noting the contents, flipping through the articles and the comment section before turning back to where Ma had penned her first—and it appeared, last—ever editorial. I leaned forward in my eagerness to get a better view, jostling against Maya, but she appeared not to notice. ‘Look,’ she was saying again, indicating towards the words
Ma had written, and I read:

  The future has never looked brighter. The Cold War has ended, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and it seems like the dream of peace will finally become reality.

  At home too, I see shoots of promise. Our economy is opening up to the outside world, our computer scientists are joining the engineers and doctors who have long been associated with excellence across the globe. The fires of communal tension that raged so violently earlier this decade appear firmly to have been vanquished. More women are entering the workforce than ever before, and everywhere I look, I see new possibilities. I see dialogue, I see tolerance, and I see openness. I see hope for myself and my colleagues, and for the two daughters I am bringing up to be fearless inheritors of this earth.

  As we throw off the shackles of an insular, socialist past, The Satirist will reflect a modern, confident India. By focussing on agents of change, whether in the fields of law, medicine, cinema or gender equality, we will seek to inspire a new generation. By championing the invisible—the poor, the uneducated, the unrepresented—we will hold a mirror up to ourselves. And by poking fun at ourselves, we will make sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

  I found it for all of us who have dreamt of a brighter tomorrow. And I found it to show my daughters that the new dawn I tell them about is firmly within their grasp.

  We stayed with Tasha-di late into the evening. The magazine sparked endless questions. How many issues of The Satirist had been published? Who worked alongside Ma? How had it been received, and why had it been shut down? And, the question we seemed not to have received any answer to: who had written the letter that had lain among Ma’s most treasured belongings?

  Tasha-di insisted on cooking for us before talking further. I was impatient, and worried she was being evasive, but she took me to the little square kitchen that remained as it always had. She made me open a cupboard and take out the Maggi noodles she had always prepared for us as children. ‘These you remember, right?’ I nodded, and she set to preparing carrots and peas to drop into the boiling mix. ‘We need to add some nutrition,’ and I thought of how much Ma had hated Tasha-di cooking us the snack. ‘They’re full of rubbish,’ she’d complain, but Tasha-di would throw in some vegetables to pad out the food. ‘There,’ she was saying, ‘Even your mother can’t complain now.’

  ‘Tasha-di,’ I said. Maya had been silent after reading the magazine, not contributing to the conversation or pressing Tasha-di to answer my questions, and I asked her again, ‘Why aren’t you telling me about the letter?’

  ‘You were both so young.’

  She had been impossible to pin down all day. ‘Tasha-di!’

  She held her hands up. ‘Really,’ she said, placing her hands on my shoulders. ‘You’re focussing on unimportant things.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘What you haven’t realised is how magical what I showed you was.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your mother single-handedly founded a magazine.’ Tasha-di saw me beginning to speak, and shrugged. ‘I helped, of course, but my main contribution was organisational. I was a glorified secretary, if you will.’ She waved away my protests. ‘Really, Siya, you won’t remember what your mother was like then.’ I shook my head, and she said, ‘She was a star. She was driven and determined, and she was the one who put together the staff and raised the funding for the entire magazine.’

  I was on the backfoot, but I tried again, ‘But…’

  It was no use. Tasha-di was ploughing on. I heard the scraping of a chair from the living room, and Maya emerged to join us. ‘What’s taking you so long?’ she asked, before she spotted the three steaming bowls of Maggi. ‘Ooh,’ she cooed, thrilled at being allowed a frowned-upon treat, and I wondered if she had ever indulged in a forbidden passion in her life.

  ‘Come, come,’ Tasha-di said. ‘I was just telling Siya about how spectacular your mother was.’ Maya nodded. ‘She was the one, girls, who put together all the layouts. She was the one who chose all the cartoons and who managed all the deadlines.’ I nodded, trying to reconcile my memories of Ma with the picture Tasha-di painted. ‘She called me her partner, but really, it was she who was running the whole show.’

  I tried. Several times after we had finished the food and washed the dishes, I would try to reintroduce the topic of the letter, but Tasha-di seemed unwilling or unable to provide more information. Maya’s curiosity seemed to have fixed on the magazine itself, and it was on this subject that Tasha-di proved most communicative.

  ‘We had offices,’ she told us. She smiled as she spoke, stretching out in her chair, and it was clear the memory was a happy one. They would have chosen the space together, her and Ma, and have decorated it. Trips would have been made to the shops around our school hours to choose all the paraphernalia of running an office; desks, chairs, lamps, paper, printer, and Tasha-di’s ubiquitous ferns. ‘We weren’t far from your school,’ and as I frowned, trying to picture an office complex nearby, Tasha-di said, ‘There was an army officers’ site nearby. They had blocks of flats, and one of the officers rented his space out. Each room was an office housing a different company, and the kitchen was a communal space. We had the use of the balcony and living room for meetings. It was a nice space,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you would remember it. It was a five minute walk from your school’s front gates.’

  She was looking at us, and though Maya nodded to indicate she knew the location, I shrugged. ‘There were five of us working for The Satirist,’ she said. Tasha-di was smiling again, revisiting pleasant memories, ‘It was me, your mother, and three women journalists your Ma had met along the course of her career.’

  ‘An all woman office, then,’ said Maya thoughtfully.

  ‘See,’ I called, triumphant, but this didn’t square with my memory of my mother. The Ma I had known had filled Maya with all her fears. The Ma I had known had taught Maya that women always faced obstacles. This fearless, pioneering woman seemed a chimera.

  ‘Yes,’ Tasha-di was saying, smiling as a memory returned to her. ‘There was a man, Jitu, who came in to do the illustrations, but he was only there on a part-time basis. Most of the time, it was just our merry band of wonderful women.’

  ‘Sounds fantastic,’ I said.

  ‘It does sound fantastic,’ echoed Maya. More than me, it was she who was struck by the life Ma had once lived. I knew Tasha-di wasn’t lying, but I still only half believed her account. For Maya, though, the pages she had seen earlier in the week had awoken in her the earliest memories she had of Ma. It was the Ma in crisp white blouses she remembered, and the Ma with strings of beads and bright red lipstick she thought of. ‘Yes,’ she repeated softly, ‘it does sound fantastic.’

  ‘It was, girls. How proud you would have been to see your Ma then. And how proud she would have been…’

  Maya interrupted. ‘Why was it shut down, Tasha-di?’

  A sad smile followed. Tasha-di straightened out her kameez and sat up. ‘It never really took off, beta.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Maya. ‘It’s such a hard path for…’

  With a forlorn shake of her head, Tasha-di said, ‘The funding your mother was promised never materialised, and everything had to be given up. The offices, our brave band of journalists, everything.’ She was nodding, as if to convince us that the end she described hadn’t been as catastrophic as it sounded, but I saw her lips tremble as she spoke. There was a brittle shrug, and another quiver in her lips as she said, ‘It happens all the time in business apparently.’ An over-loud laugh, and her hands thrown up in the air. ‘Deals fall through all the time.’

  She was looking at me, waiting for my reaction, and I frowned. Incredible as it had been for Ma to have launched a magazine with two young kids in the house, it felt more remarkable still that she had let it die. I would never have done the same. I would have laid off staff; I would have let go of the offices, I would have pared down my offering, but I wouldn’t have let my dream die. Deals did fall through all the time, b
ut for Ma to have allowed her business to fold showed a lack of resilience. This was the Ma I knew; living in shadows, so scared of disappointment that she never took risks. And then I thought of myself in my over-large flat in London, unable to change out of my pyjamas, unable to muster the enthusiasm to apply for jobs I knew I was unlikely to get.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my voice rising. ‘Of course, it happens all the time.’

  IX

  Despite the exclusiveness of its location, Civil Lines market often felt like a microcosm of India’s chaotic and aggressively inclusive democracy.

  The first stop for most was the street food restaurant, where customers were fed food with unswerving efficiency, strangers rammed onto tables together, and in a most un-Delhilike exercise, drivers and menial staff being sat next to tongue-tied young lovers being sat next to society matrons. The shop played the volume game, but the food was exquisite, the tangy chaat as moreish as the Punjabi spiced chickpeas, and though the society matrons huffed when the bearer asked them to budge up to make room for new customers, they promptly did.

  Normal order was restored past the restaurant, as the eateries grew more elite and more uninspiring. The shops the market was famous for—high end jewellers and art galleries and tea rooms and antique stores—were then laid out in all their glory, and it was here the matrons usually repaired to after getting their fix of street food. The hoi polloi generally weren’t visible now, but as I was to learn, they had a little section—an annexe to the market, so to speak—all their own.

  Now that Shanti understood that our plans didn’t obstruct her way of life, she grew cheerful. Every day brought a new idea; sometimes a proposal to change the whole edifice into a grand hotel, and on others, plans to rent out wings of the property. She grew in energy, taking trips to the market she had previously been wary of, and one morning, as I started on my daily walk, I saw her set off too.