A Life Misspent

by Suryakant Tripathi Nirala

  ‘You are not a she-goat either to be smelly all the time.’

  My wife bounded from the bed. ‘I am happy to go if that’s what you wish.’

  She paused waiting for my response.

  ‘It’s not by my wish alone,’ I said laying the tenderness on, ‘it’s by your wish too that you share a bed with me. Decide for yourself what it is you want.’

  My wife said nothing. Her face flushed from the insult. She left the bedroom door open as she walked out.

  I said to myself, ‘New day!’

  Seven

  There was a lot going on when I woke up the next morning. My four-year-old brother-in-law was screaming from the beating Mother-in-law gave him. Father-in-law had slipped in the latrine; the servant was engaged in washing the muck off him. Three bullocks had strayed into the courtyard. My wife went to drive them out. She struck one of them so hard that a horn broke. Someone ran to the astrologer to find out what the penance for the sacrilege would be. The maidservant’s rope snapped and the brass bucket dropped into the well. The supply for the household was almost finished; there was no fresh rope to draw out more water. The neighbours promised to help but only after they had replenished their own supplies. Meanwhile Chandrika was nowhere to be seen.

  As I opened my eyes, I heard Mother-in-law saying, ‘Misfortunes never come singly.’ The proverb was familiar to me. I imagined Mother-in-law had been told about my conduct the previous night and quoted the proverb so I would overhear. I took my time getting up. Everyone was still running about. One by one I learned about all the disasters that had befallen the family. Chandrika had still not appeared. The servant who had finished helping Father-in-law clean up came up to inform me that Chandrika had left. He had no money, but he was going to walk along the railway track till it reached our village. ‘Tell the Babu not to worry,’ he had said. ‘If I had spoken to him first he would not have let me go.’ The servant added that Chandrika expected to lose his job but was counting on his skills as a farmhand to find work again.

  The aftershocks of the previous night must have affected Chandrika too. Was it my wife who spoke to him? ‘Was Chandrika around,’ I asked the servant, ‘when the bullock’s horn was broken?’ The servant nodded yes.

  We were still talking about the commotion when I saw it was eight o’clock. Time to set out for Kulli’s. I dressed and went out. I saw a young woman near the well with a pot full of water, an auspicious sign. Further up the road, I saw a calf feeding from its mother, another auspicious sign. Some people greeted me as I walked, complimenting me on my health and good looks. I toned down my expression to one of modesty and continued on my way to Kulli’s house. I found that he was already out on the road. On seeing me, he advanced towards me the way Nadir Shah’s army advanced towards Mathura certain of victory. After all the auspicious signs I had received, it was easy for me to radiate gladness in response. This warmed Kulli’s heart. ‘Come,’ he said and led me inside.

  There was a large mirror on the wall hung with small garlands at each corner. He put his arm around my waist, and when we looked in the mirror we seemed to be garlanded even though we wore no flowers. I was pleased with the effect. Kulli looked at my reflection in the mirror and smiled. I smiled back. ‘This is good,’ Kulli said.

  He hurried into an inner room and came back with a tray of sweets. He set the tray on a high wooden platform, brought a jug of water and poured some in a glass. He stood watching me eat. When I finished eating, he poured me some more water to wash my hands with and a hand towel. He also offered me paan.

  I sat down on his well-made bed covered with a small galeecha. Kulli took out a bottle of cologne. ‘I had this sent to me; it isn’t perfumed oil because we aren’t masseurs.’ I looked at him in innocent bewilderment. Whatever could he mean? Kulli for his part went pale. His features lost their composure. He wiggled towards me on the bed, then wiggled back. I wondered if he had taken ill. He cast a look of longing perhaps in my direction. ‘I had better lock the door.’

  But his voice died even as he uttered these words. I grew afraid, not of him but for him. I didn’t think that Kulli could injure me in any way, but I feared that his illness—for that is what it must be—would bring him harm.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call a doctor?’

  ‘You are cruel,’ he said.

  I tried to understand the connection between his wiggling and my cruelty. It made no sense.

  ‘I can use force if…’ and he wiggled towards me again.

  I burst out laughing. Kulli remained where he was, but he said indistinctly, like a person drowning in a well, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too,’ I replied.

  ‘Come. Let’s go then,’ he said and drew himself to his full height.

  I didn’t know where I was to go.

  ‘Have you never ever…?’

  The less I understood the angrier I got. ‘Tell me in plain words where you want me to go.’

  Kulli had nothing more to say. He suddenly became spineless, like a limp rag.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said as I left.

  Thus ended my first encounter with Kulli. I came home. I was greeted with utter silence. I might as well not have been present. The civil disobedience directed towards me made me think of Father. One small move of his had turned this entire household upside down. But I had neither wit nor wisdom to make any move in response to the turn the situation was taking.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Mother-in-law asked as if it were a simple, casual question.

  It would be wrong to tell a lie. ‘I was at Kulli’s.’ I didn’t think it appropriate to volunteer any more information.

  Mother-in-law stared at me. Her doubts about me had all been confirmed the previous evening. No additional supporting evidence was necessary.

  I decided to seize the initiative. ‘It wasn’t just the bullock’s horn which was broken, I too suffered an injury. I have been crippled. (I was thinking of how I had been crippled by Chandrika’s departure.) You have found out about a remedy for injury to the bullock. What about a remedy for injury to my foot?’

  ‘Where? Let me see.’ Mother-in-law bent down and felt along my foot.

  ‘Ask your daughter to help you.’

  ‘Beti,’ Mother-in-law said to her softly, ‘You seem to have sprained his foot while you were trying to massage it last night. Take a look. Why didn’t you tell me about it earlier?’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ My wife seemed perplexed.

  I had a permanent swelling on the big toe of my right foot from playing football. Mother-in-law saw that this big toe was fatter and reached down to feel it. ‘This must be where,’ she said to my wife. ‘Doesn’t this look swollen, Beti?’

  Her daughter said with worry in her voice, ‘Yes, that’s where,’ and she followed her mother in taking hold of this toe.

  ‘Son, don’t you think we should make lime and turmeric paste for the swelling?’

  ‘They have bowed at my feet,’ I reflected. ‘They want forgiveness. I will let the Chandrika matter go.’ To them I said with a yogi’s equanimity. ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘Sweet is peace after conflict,’ I thought to myself. ‘The other matter can wait.’ My wife began preparing a poultice of lime and turmeric.

  Eight

  Father-in-law objected when I asked for perfumed oil the following day. ‘Perfumed oil can’t be used daily. We are ordinary people. We barely manage ghee for food at a rupee a pound; perfumed oil runs at eighty rupees. Mustard oil will have to do.’

  ‘There goes the plan to take my wife home,’ I thought. The pull towards her was strong. I may have mumbled verses about the ephemerality of pleasures in her hearing, but she never found me holding back as far as she was concerned. Nor was I accomplished in arts and letters as she had imagined. She felt deceived.

  My money was gone. Father-in-law guessed rightly that I had no more than travel expenses left and that I couldn’t send for perfumed oil on my own. He knew that even the children of the rich don’t r
eceive daily massages of perfumed oil.

  I was trapped. I wanted to be like Father and say I was ready to remarry. But like Kulli, I would lose heart. I might recite ‘Who is wife to you? Who son?’ by day, but the truth was I couldn’t bear to be away from my wife a single night. I was a modern lover. I had declared my love to her in countless words. She knew my remarrying was out of the question.

  During the day I pretended to be coolly indifferent; at night I turned into an ardent spouse. My wife endured the tumult of her own feelings in silence.

  I decided to bring matters to a head. For her own reasons, or so it seemed to me, my wife refused to act as an inferior. In particular, she was proud of her knowledge of Hindi. She conceded the possibility that I might be well informed on other subjects, but as far as Hindi literature was concerned, she counted me an idiot. I, having no clue to the range of her understanding, found her superior attitude annoying. ‘You keep talking up Hindi,’ I said, ‘but what’s there of any worth in Hindi letters?’

  ‘You barely speak the language. What would you know of letters?’

  ‘Are you saying I don’t know Hindi?’

  ‘Your Baisvari dialect reveals how provincial you are. Do you know the Khari Boli speech of Delhi?’

  I had never heard of Khari Boli. Nor did the names of supreme writers such as Pandit Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, Pandit Ayodhya Singh Upadhyay and Babu Maithili Sharan Gupta mean anything to me at that time. In a single breath, my wife reeled off the names of twenty Khari Boli poets and scholars. I was awed the way a reader is awed by an essay filled with quotations. I could not doubt the scope of her learning or the loftiness of thought to which she had access. I began to understand why merely addressing the deity with a thousand names exerts a powerful effect.

  Things were quiet for a while. Obviously there were no more massages with perfumed oil. Mother-in-law was keeping count of the days to my departure. My wife, meanwhile, continued to dazzle me with her wide knowledge of literature. I needed to leave but could not bear to think of heading off to the railway station away from her.

  A musical evening was organized about this time. On an earlier occasion, Mother-in-law had praised her daughter’s voice. No woman, young or old, Mother-in-law had said, could match the quality of her daughter’s singing. I was happy to be able to take in her performance before returning home.

  People began to gather. The sounds of drumming could be heard—deep sounds, not shrill beats such as women often like. Some of the men who arrived seemed less interested in the music than in the beautiful women to be admired. Trays of paan were passed around. The men ate paan and began to compare the qualities of the available and unavailable women.

  The singing began with ghazals. The audience was hard on singers who did not know courtly ghazals but sang devotional songs instead. The singers of devotional songs were mostly older women. They were drawn to what the fashionable younger women sang, but did not know the new style. It is no different today in the field of literature.

  I wonder why we have been quick to accept English ways, but are far slower with the ghazal. Why is it that English food and clothing and sitting arrangements have became our own, but the Persian language and the poetry of Hafiz remain unfamiliar? Why didn’t these older women adopt Urdu ghazals the way the younger women fresh from college have adopted European ways of courting, of playing the piano and of working for the uplift of ‘backward’ women? What we should have passed on to our daughters was the splendour of our own culture. What had been passed on instead led to stifled thought and cultural indigestion. Raja Rammohan Roy was the first to discover this. Well, let the English look after the half-educated among us. I turned my mind to the ghazal singing.

  There was a steady stream of commentary from the audience. Who was the lead singer? Who were the accompanists? Whose were the well-trained voices? The men in the audience were stirred by the beauty of the ghazals and the charm of the professional singers. Some of the singers may have been ladies of easy virtue, but their allure was irresistible.

  My wife sat quietly to one side, the way major poets sit at literary gatherings. I wasn’t aware that it was her the crowd was waiting to hear.

  When she began to sing, she chose the crown jewel of devotional songs, the adoration of Lord Ram which begins: ‘Shri Ram Chandra Kripalu bhaju man haran bhavbhay darunam’ (‘Sing praise of Ram, who banishes terror of being’). The listeners held their breath. She sang the line about Lord Ram’s incomparable beauty, his body a denser blue than the azure sky. My jaw dropped. Could my Bengali condescension have kept me from noticing the depth of her accomplishment?

  She followed with the ghazal: ‘Agar hai chaah milne ki to hardam lau lagaataa jaa’ (‘If you desire to meet let your mind dwell on me’). The audience was ready to renounce the world for the love this stirred in them. People cast questioning glances at one another. Whom was this song dedicated to? Didn’t they know? Obviously, it was dedicated to me, but many in the audience seemed secretly pleased for reasons I did not understand.

  The next song was a fast-paced dadra:

  Sasuji ka chhokda, meri thadi pe rakh diya haath

  (‘My mother-in-law’s son laid his hand on my chin

  I could have slapped him straight, but I held my pain in’).

  One of the listeners didn’t like the lyrics. ‘Why should she object to her own husband? He must be that sort,’ the fellow said aloud. Little did the listener know that the husband sat next to him. Another member of the audience turned to me and said the lyrics didn’t have to be about the husband. They could be about the brother-in-law. A third listener confirmed that the lyrics were indeed about a naughty brother-in-law. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  The singing ended in a little while. The men stretched themselves and got ready to depart. The women, too, left one by one. Only members of our household were left. My wife sang beautifully; her knowledge of Hindi was profound. My talents in these fields were undeveloped. There was no shame in acknowledging my shortcomings. I penned a note to my father. ‘I am going on to Calcutta to catch up with my studies. Please visit here whenever you wish. I am well.’ I dropped the letter off at the post office and began to pack my things.

  ‘Why are you packing all of a sudden?’

  ‘I am going to Calcutta.’

  Mother-in-law’s face went pale. She had intended to talk to me about her daughter’s skills as a singer, but she grew confused. ‘Packing is work for the servants to do and it’s too soon for you to leave. What will your father think? What will the neighbours think? We will be disgraced because we couldn’t offer hospitality to our son-in-law for longer than a week.’

  ‘Let the disgrace be my lot then.’

  ‘How? How would you be disgraced?’

  ‘That’s for you to understand.’

  Mother-in-law paused. A look of comprehension dawned on her face. She realized I was aware that news of my time with Kulli had reached her. ‘I had warned you,’ she said, ‘that Kulli was not the right sort of person for you.’

  ‘Let’s drop this topic of whether it is Kulli who is not the right person for me or whether it is your daughter.’

  I spoke in a measured tone, but Mother-in-law began to sob. Her daughter joined in, sobbing along more softly. ‘You are God to her. I wouldn’t lie,’ Mother-in-law said. ‘See the fire burning under the stove? Let me burn, too, if I speak untruth. If you told my daughter to swallow live coals, she would. You can think of her as you wish, but the women who just left were full of praise for her.’

  ‘That is why I am setting out.’

  Packing one’s own bags at the in-laws is a sign of displeasure. Mother-in-law thought I was sore over perfumed oil for massages. ‘We had no cash to pay with, but we can arrange to get the perfumed oil for you tomorrow.’

  ‘It isn’t essence of perfume I seek but essence of being,’ I answered.

  Mother-in-law looked puzzled.

  ‘I have my studies to finish,’ I said. ‘I need time to prepar
e.’

  She said with relief, ‘So you really are going to Calcutta. I thought it was a ruse to get back to your village. I was worried about the plague, too. Finishing your studies is a good thing. One does have to think of the future.’ She asked the servant to finish my packing.

  My bags were ready. The horse cart arrived. I took leave of my in-laws in time to make the Rae Bareli train.

  Nine

  Five years passed. I made frequent trips to the town of my in-laws, but never came across Kulli. Meanwhile I was burning to master Hindi. Nobody knew Hindi in the Bengal countryside in which I lived. The soldiers in the Raja’s army spoke the Western Braj3 which I knew already, but there were no users of the Hindi of Delhi. I entered subscriptions for the two Hindi monthlies published at the time, Saraswati and Maryada. The very look of Saraswati communicated dignity, of Maryada it was the opposite.4 I would read the magazines and could catch the feeling behind a piece of writing, but I couldn’t write anything of my own. The grammar of Hindi was quite different from the grammar of Braj or Avadhi. I discovered that there is nothing diligence cannot accomplish. I would stay up till two or three in the morning construing sentences of Delhi Hindi on the basis of what I knew of Sanskrit, English and Bengali. I was especially happy when I could figure out a rule of Hindi grammar that did not derive from any of the languages I knew. It was akin to the joy of knowing God.

  I overcame many hurdles in this way. I took Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi to be my guru and received instruction as Eklavya did rather than as Arjun did.5 I wrote ‘A Bud of Jasmine’6 before I had completed my education in Hindi grammar, but I found out afterwards that I had divined the rules correctly. It is said about world-famous poets that they began to write poetry from the age of seven or eight. This was true of me, too, except that in my case I was writing poetry in Bengali. The words I penned then have entered the Great Unknown; no trace of the juvenile compositions remains. When I was sixteen or seventeen I began to feel that Fortune was ranged against me. My response was not to seek safety in money or big houses or the patronage of politicians, in superstition or in magic. Those who run after such things lose their life, those who pursue livingness itself are not denied acquaintance with life’s mystery. Enough said.