by Manil Suri
Although you accepted the new brood, you remained wistful for the ones lost. Surely a week in Delhi would make a good apology, I thought, especially since it meant an unexpected week away from school. We left the aquarium with Zaida, who invented an excuse why you couldn’t take it along. “Snails don’t like being in a train because the rocking makes their caca get stuck,” she said.
I packed only white for the trip—not to appease my in-laws, but for Paji’s benefit. At the station, I noted with satisfaction his shock at seeing me dressed in the tradition of a widow. To his credit, he kept his dismay to himself. I had not seen him after Dev had passed, and he hugged me with a warmth I had not realized he could muster. “It’s at times like this that I envy the believers among us,” he said. “They can blame it all on God’s will.”
Biji had been checking the windows of the train on the other end of the platform. Arms outstretched, tears streaming, she walked, then ran towards me. “My Meera, my darling, how could life be so cruel?” she said, wrapping me in her embrace. “Already in white for your thirty-fifth birthday—it breaks my heart to see you in these clothes. Every morning I awake and think, what has life left you with?” She burst into full-fledged weeping, refusing to be consoled when I tried to convince her my fate wasn’t quite that tragic.
I took you that very afternoon to Nizamuddin. A flock of maudlin feelings arose in my heart when I spotted the top of Salim Fazl’s tomb from the taxi. The station itself was in the throes of renovation, new buildings being built and a sleek new bridge rising over the tracks. In the midst of the construction, the familiar garbage pile, with its obligatory attendant cow, had migrated to despoil a fresh wall.
Mataji had deteriorated as much as Hema had warned. Her left eyelid drooped, her mouth curled in on itself, her frame bent into a startling S shape with a pronounced central hump. She was surprisingly composed. “There’s only so much sorrow one can show—I learnt that when Sandhya died. After a while, the tears simply take care of themselves—they learn to drop quietly inside. Still, I should have gone before Dev—it was a shock no mother should have to bear.” A visible twitch ran through her body as she spoke her son’s name.
She took us in to say hello to Babuji, who lay in a charpoy with his mouth open, his hands twisted at the wrists against his chest. “It’s Meera,” she called, as if shouting down a well. “Dev’s wife. She’s come from Bombay with your grandson.” He did not respond. You pulled at my sari to get away from the smell of feces and urine. After all the care Babuji used to take to tighten the knots every week, the ropes of his charpoy were now depressingly slack. “Arya offered to hire a ganga to take care of him, but I refused. I’d lose the one focus of my life. All the time I have—what would I do with it?”
Mataji shuffled outside to the kitchen to make some tea. “Remember this?” she asked, pointing to the center of a row of blackened pots above the gas. I saw it was the pressure cooker from my dowry. “Hema wanted to take it when she married, she had been coveting it for years. But I told her it was to this house that it had come, and refused to give it up. Arya likes his mutton, so I still use it from time to time. He’s been looking forward to seeing you both—he should be here very soon. It’ll be good if you can get his mind off his aging parents for a while.” She looked up at me, and I noticed her left lid no longer drooped as much, that the cloudiness in her eyes had cleared.
Fortunately, Arya showed up not alone, but with Hema. He had bought a car, a secondhand Fiat, and Rahul and Tony sat in the back. Everyone clustered around you—Hema kissing you repeatedly all over your face, Tony shaking your hand with grave formality, and Arya lifting you up into the air. Rahul darted around with his pea-shooting gun, taking aim without firing, at each person in turn.
Your cousins whisked you away to show you a pack of wolves they’d found living down the street. “Don’t worry, they’re only dogs—puppies, really,” Hema said. She looked at me, then Arya. “I’ll go help Mataji, let the two of you catch up.”
The frown on Arya’s face stopped her. “Why don’t you show Bhabhiji where she can rest instead?” he said. “I’m sure she must be tired after her train.”
Arya kept up his careful politeness towards me all that evening—in fact, through all the times I came over to Nizamuddin on my visit. Hema and Mataji made increasingly blatant comments about how he and I had each lost a spouse, but Arya ignored them, thwarting all their attempts to leave the two of us together alone. I was never sure if he was simply trying to make a good impression, or getting my guard down for some future ploy. He did convince me of one thing—the affection he showed you was genuine—you were his favorite of the nephews. I felt some concern about the times he took the three of you wrestling at the HRM pits. But Hema assured me the military exercises for the cadets were held in the morning, that this was strictly for play.
If Arya put a smile on your face, Tony transformed you. I took you to Nizamuddin every evening at your urging, and as soon as Tony came home from school, he walked over the half mile from where they lived. The two of you were very furtive about your games—with secret codes involved, and a mysterious hidden fortress somewhere. You didn’t even take poor Rahul into your confidence—he spent the time hunting pigeons with his pea gun or sulking by himself. Tony started you on the hobby of collecting stamps, and you reciprocated, much to Hema’s dismay, by teaching him about snails.
I succumbed one evening to my memories. Mataji sent me to buy coriander and I found my feet treading the well-remembered path to the tomb. I did not know what self-destructive urge led me there, what irresistible temptation the place held for me. Hadn’t I come to grief on every occasion I had blundered onto its inauspicious grounds—the time I saw Roopa stretched out on the grass eight years ago, the time even earlier when I first sealed my fate with Dev? The bougainvillea grew thicker than I remembered it, obscuring most of the structure that lay beyond. My breath quickened as I pushed through—Turn back, I thought to myself, don’t venture in. Why did I feel so certain there would be some malignant new discovery lying in wait within?
The walls inside were less adorned than I remembered them—even the last remaining tile fragments having been gouged out in the intervening years. The ground had been colonized by a shadow-loving plant of some sort—I kept brushing against its luxuriant fronds. I waded in as far as I could into the interior, as if immersing myself ritually in a river. Memories of Dev came swirling up from the darkness to greet me—would I stumble into the grave in which we had lain?
I heard a tinkling sound, like a coin being dropped, and came to a stop. Was there someone else besides me—could Dev have somehow returned in ghostly form? Suddenly the tomb was filled with his presence, his breath traversing audibly through the air, his eyes gazing at me unseen from somewhere. I took another step in—tendrils of vegetation rubbed insinuatingly against my legs.
And then they came charging at me, two shapeless apparitions bursting across the floor. I screamed, then turned and ran, but was felled before I could reach the door. A glint of silver rose above me, a mask came off each head. Tony waved his toy sword triumphantly in the air, “Nobody enters the fort without the secret password,” you said.
THE EVENING BEFORE Independence Day, I came back from Nizamuddin to find my parents in the midst of a tremendous row. “Next time, I’m going to let them leave you in for a few nights with your hoodlums,” Paji was saying. “To teach you that jail doesn’t mean having tea and biscuits with the officers while you wait to be driven home in a limousine.”
“They’re not hoodlums,” Biji shouted back. “They’re college students from good families, with a conscience. They care about jobs and prices, they care about how your Indira Gandhi is ruining the nation.”
“And you? Have you started caring about prices as well? Answer me this, Rohini, have you shopped for vegetables even once in your life?”
“I’m a zamindar’s daughter—it’s my duty not to be selfish, to not think only of myself.”
&n
bsp; Biji had gone that morning with a group of students from the college at which Sharmila taught to gherao the minister for home affairs. I was stupefied by this news—that Biji would participate in such a protest, with college students, no less. I imagined them surrounding their target, bringing all business to a standstill, shouting slogans and singing songs of resistance like Gandhiji had. There had been some puzzling references to student rallies in the letters Sharmila still wrote occasionally for Biji—could this have been what she meant?
“Last month it was to rail against foreign policy, and before that some crazy protest against nationalizing the insurance industry,” Paji said, turning to me. “This hobby of politics she’s suddenly developed at sixty—ask your mother if she even has an inkling what nationalization means. Always some knee-jerk reaction against Indiraji, always something to embarrass me. Doesn’t she realize these people are taking advantage of her just because she’s illiterate?”
Apparently the police had been waiting for the protestors, and drove them all in a van to the Kailash lockup. (“We sang ‘Vande Mataram’ the whole way,” Biji proudly declared.) The Congress Party secretary for Delhi city personally phoned Paji. “He said there’d be no problem, nothing would enter the records or the press. The press, can you imagine, the press? They dropped her back here in a black Ambassador—I hope she realizes how much that ride is going to cost me.”
“Yes, yes—he can give lakhs of rupees to put that woman back in office, but ask him to spend a few rupees on his wife and see how he screams.”
Later, after Paji shut himself in his office and slammed the door, Biji explained how she had entered the realm of student politics. “For years, Sharmila’s been observing how your father treats me—taunting me with names like ‘Professor Rohini,’ or ‘Mother India,’ or ‘Darya Ganj Prime Minister,’ beating down my every opinion just because I can’t read. So your sister took upon herself the task to educate me—she labored for months to teach me to read.” Biji shook her head. “Unfortunately, it’s true what they say—once a dog’s tail begins to curl, it can never be straightened. All the years I had resisted your father’s attempts to educate me had left their mark—now even my own daughter was unable to succeed.”
Paji’s mocking grew worse once he learned about this failed attempt. “Wear it as a badge of honor,” he told her. “Six months and you still can’t spell your own name? That’s wonderful!—surely it will prove to everyone you’re still a zamindar’s daughter.”
Whereas before Biji could just shrug off his taunts, now they made her feel old and useless. “I knew I had to find a way to bite back at him to regain my confidence. Your father had just started sniffing around Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party, dreaming of a seat in Parliament. What easier course of action, I thought, than to come out in support of the opposition?”
Biji took to peppering her comments with praise for the Swatantra Party and the Jan Sangh, two groups she’d heard Sharmila mention. She vigorously criticized Indira’s policies like the devaluation of the rupee, without the slightest understanding of what they meant. “Your Paji’s reaction was infuriating—amusement and nothing else. He even offered to go over the opposition politicians with me so I would stop mixing up their names.”
Biji’s growing frustration prompted Sharmila to propose her curious scheme. She had seen the student group, armed with anti-Indira placards, waiting outside to use her classroom every Friday after her lecture. Being a professor herself by now, it wouldn’t have looked right for Sharmila to sit in on one of their meetings. But she told them that her mother was very interested in learning more about the opposition and asked if they would mind having Biji come one day to attend.
“The first time your sister dragged me to the classroom, I was petrified. A sixty-year-old woman, unable to read or write, meeting with college students, no less! I wanted to climb the rows of the lecture room until I rose so high I was out of sight, perhaps into the arms of Krishna himself. But there were too many eyes watching my every move, so I tried to shrink into a corner of the first empty bench I could find.
“Don’t ask me what they talked about—the Communists, most probably, were arguing as usual with those from the HRM. At the end, a girl remembered me and brought over some tea, saying, ‘Here you go, Auntieji.’ I’m not sure what gave me the courage to open my mouth, but I replied, Not Auntie, I’m old enough to be your nani. My words fell into a lull in the arguments, and the students all looked up and laughed.
“So I became their Naniji, their grandmother, their tea-drinking mascot, who began sitting faithfully through all their meetings. What more can I tell you about them? They’re all quite muddled, even I can see—they spend half the time fighting with each other, and the rest plotting their protests. I’m not sure if they really want to change the world or simply rebel. At first I used to nod at everything, but now I’ve found that I can have some useful ideas as well. The Communists, especially, keep congratulating me—for rising on the behalf of the workers, they say, after the disgrace of being born to a zamindar family.
“And your father? He sulks a lot and blames me for killing his chances with the Congress Party, even though they were already quite dead. He’s careful, though, not to challenge me so recklessly now. If I say that the price of onions has gone up or it’s more difficult to get a job, he doesn’t demand to know in which newspaper I’ve read that. He might even be a little scared of these grandchildren I’ve found—if he tries to press on me in any way, he knows I can retaliate.”
PAJI WAS NOT HAPPY when he found that his seats for the Independence Day celebration were located at the furthest edge of the reserved section. To make things worse, he had been assigned hard wooden benches, not the cushioned chairs designated for VIPs, and even these were being occupied by people from the adjoining unreserved enclosure. Although the trespassers quickly fled in the face of Paji’s red-faced rage, he sat there fuming afterwards. I wasn’t sure which woman he blamed more for his diminished seating status—Indira Gandhi or Biji.
My mother had been quite clear she wouldn’t be joining us this morning. “Isn’t it bad enough that they bring in people by the truckful for all Indira’s rallies? Why should I be one of her cheering masses just for some news documentary?” Instead, she planned to attend a party organized by her “grandchildren.” “It’s not only Indira who loves her country—the rest of us celebrate Independence Day too, you know. Tell your father it’s nothing political—I’m not going to get arrested, so he won’t have to pay this time.”
When Indira took the podium, Paji simply sat there, refusing to clap. Instead, he muttered on about how he had been hoodwinked out of his seat. I thought he was being overly sensitive about our seating arrangement, but Sharmila whispered that he now meant the electoral district from which he was supposed to stand—the Parliament seat he maintained the Congress Party stole from him.
All around us the crowds stood and cheered, like extras on the set of some epic like Mughal-e-Azam. Indira waved back as the air force band started up, as helicopters dropped rose petals, as battalions of schoolchildren marched past. Thousands of color-coordinated balloons rose into the air, to form a giant aerial Indian flag. Finally, even Paji got up to applaud. After all, this was the leader who had united the country and carried it to such an overwhelming victory, something no one could deny. The papers had been full of how Hindus and Muslims had together restored the nation to its rightful glory, how secularism had triumphed, finally, decisively. “Let nobody ever say again that the Nehrus were wrong in their vision,” one editorial proclaimed. The costs of the Bangladesh war were forgotten, the droughts all over the country somewhere far away. The mother of the nation, people had called Indira in the last election, and nothing could be truer, I thought, as I added my applause for the documentary films.
Afterwards, Paji tried to salvage what remained of his pride by taking us to the VIP enclosure, where they were serving tea and pakodas. He flashed his special Congress Party donor card
, but the policeman standing at the entrance was unmoved. “Only a green VIP pass,” he said. “Otherwise who knows what kind of people from the street we’d have to let in?”
Had Sharmila not been there, Paji would have surely gotten himself arrested (paying for his own release this time, instead of Biji’s). He took a swipe at the policeman, and only her quick reflexes managed to deflect his hand and make him miss. As the calculations ground along on the policeman’s face, she hustled our sputtering father away. A whistle blew behind us, but by then, the swarms of people had closed around us and we had blended in.
We returned home to a party in progress. Two college-age men chatted in the verandah with a woman holding a glass of orange squash. More youths stood around in the drawing room, boys on one side, girls in a row on the other, a platter of samosas on the table between them. “Have you met my grandchildren?” Biji asked, bustling in. “The college was closed for the holiday, so I invited them here instead.” The servant handed Paji a samosa, and he looked at it, stupefied.
“How was the parade?” Biji asked. “Did your Paji get you in close enough to the goddess to touch her sari?”
For a moment, Paji kept staring at the samosa clutched between his fingers. Then he hurled it across the room at the server. To the accompaniment of Biji’s screams, Paji started chasing people out—snatching the samosas from their mouths, knocking their glasses of squash to the ground. One of the boys called Paji a dirty capitalist—Paji pushed him so hard he went tumbling across the floor and rolled into the verandah. “This idiocy of yours has gone far enough,” Paji shouted at Biji, once the room had cleared. “I never want to see these hooligans of yours again in my house.”
“It’s my house as well,” Biji yelled back, and Paji strode up so close to her that for an instant I thought he meant to slap her.
Instead, he stared hard into her eyes, his face red and inches away. “Don’t bring them here again, Rohini. I’m warning you.” He turned on his heel and walked up the stairs to his office.