by Akhilesh
When she sat inside the mosquito net tonight, she was trying to remember what had made Awadh Narayan so furious that he had turned Suryakant out of the house. She lay down, hunted for her fan and fanning herself, was lost in thought. She ultimately remembered that it was because of a gorgeous girl. She was right, to the extent that the beautiful girl was Gauri, but when she tried to reconstruct the other facts, her memory duped her and she began to recreate reality through her imagination. She imagined that Suryakant had eloped with the girl without telling anyone and had already married her. In reality, Gauri had come home in jeans and a top, but Dadi believed she was in a sparkling sari, adorned with gold jewellery. Dadi had superimposed how Chachi had appeared when she arrived home after her wedding on Gauri. However, she was able to reconstruct the fury of her son, Awadh Narayan, accurately.
The woman touched everyone’s feet and Awadh Narayan’s too.
Suryakant introduced her.
Awadh Narayan asked, ‘Where does she come from?’
‘She is a student at Lucknow University.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Gauri.’
‘Who is her father?’
‘He’s a government servant.’
‘Where does he hail from?’
‘Odisha.’
‘Where is her maternal grandmother’s home?’
The woman spoke, ‘I want to tell you one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Nobody knows who my maternal grandmother’s parents were.’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t know. She was sold off when she was a mere child,’ she answered a brisk clip.
‘Where was she raised?’
‘She was bought by a circus owner.’
‘Circus! That’s wonderful!’
‘My maternal grandmother was an acrobat, and she married a clown in the same circus.’
‘A clown?’ Awadh Narayan tittered. ‘Your maternal grandfather was a clown?’
‘Yes, they taught my mother how to read and write. My mother was a singer on the radio, my father worked at AIR Lucknow. The two fell in love and got married.’
‘And you were born.’ Awadh Narayan’s voice trembled and he started shivering. His eyes reddened and bulged out as he said, ‘You bloody slut, could you find only my son to trap?’
Dadi’s eyes closed and opened again after a moment or two. The pace of the movement of the fan in her hand weakened, and then it stopped and tumbled on her bosom. She would have slept longer but the chatter on the rooftop disrupted her slumber. At first, she strained to listen to the talk, but failing, she slipped back into the past again and tried to recall why Awadh Narayan was livid enough to drive Suryakant out of the house. It was the eighth cycle of her memories related to Suryakant’s homecoming.
When she was in the tenth cycle, Shibbu laid his daughter next to Dadi and she clasped her to her bosom. The little girl moaned a little but once she was patted a little, she fell asleep. The girl was really naughty, and she flailed her limbs all night. But Dadi doted on these tricks of hers. She would fondly touch her tiny, slender fingers and tender palms, and soles and manna would cascade in her heart. But her own skin had grown rough and dull and hung loose now. Before his marriage, Shibbu used to nip clips in her skin folds mischievously. Now her palms had also turned coarse. There were deep cracks in her heels. Often, the child’s soft skin chafed against Dadi’s palms and heels, and she would scream in pain. She had cried out just now. Dadi knew that Kamana would run to her daughter, so she shut her eyes and pretended to sleep.
‘She must be hungry,’ Kamana said softly as she arrived with a milk bottle which she shoved into the girl’s mouth. But since the child’s belly was full, she pushed out the nipple with her tongue and kept crying. However, the effect of Dadi’s rough palms must have lessened because the intensity of her whimpering reduced. Still, Kamana took her out of the net and hugged her to her bosom, rocking her as she walked back into the gathering.
‘Your tea has gone cold,’ Nupoor said, pointing at the serene-looking cup.
‘I don’t take it hot,’ Kamana said and sipped the cold tea. ‘Bhai Sahib, you have come after such a long time but you have come alone. This is not good.’
It was an intimate grievance, a complaint that Shibbu and Nupoor wanted to make as well, but since they were familiar with the events of that fog-filled night, they had not dared to.
‘Next time perhaps,’ Suryakant said and set aside the difficult moment. To prevent it coming up again, he changed the topic. He focused on his relatives and Sultanpur town. He asked the questions while Shibbu and Nupoor furnished their replies. The replies insinuated that many people had passed away since he had been away and several others had been born. There had been a lot of illnesses, troubles and problems between the births and the deaths. There was some good news also, stories of large salaries and love marriages.
When Suryakant compared Lucknow and Sultanpur, he found that the elders had not been abandoned in this place. Their children had not gone away and forsaken them here. But this was not done out of choice, rather because of a lack of alternatives. They had not got better jobs; bigger towns and other countries had not accepted them. Thus, they were forced to stay in their small towns, growing increasingly frustrated. It was not their attachment, but their failures that had prevented their exodus. They blamed their parents and assailed them in turn, spoiling their own lives and those of their parents as well. After telling him all that was happening in Sultanpur, Shibbu suggested, ‘Bhaiya, walk about the town tomorrow and see the transformations that have taken place!’
‘In the morning, I’ll go see Chacha.’
‘Oh!’ Shibbu looked at Nupoor.
Suryakant felt they had shared something silently and asked, ‘Why did you react like that?’
‘Nothing,’ Shibbu said and tried to change the topic.
‘There is something!’
‘No, Bhaiya.’
Suryakant realized Shibbu would not say anything and addressed Nupoor, ‘When did Chacha leave the house?’
‘Around five or six years ago.’
‘Why?’
Nupoor looked uneasy, ‘Just like that.’
‘Do people leave their homes just like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nupoor said curtly, trying to snap the thread of the conversation. But it did not really break.
‘Do you visit him? Do they come here?’
‘We do meet,’ Nupoor replied. ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ There was something dormant in her question.
Suryakant felt restless. ‘Is everything well at Chacha’s?’
In reply, he heard Dadi’s groan from the mosquito net nearby.
Dadi had really fallen asleep while she feigned sleep, and she started dreaming. She would dream whenever she slept. Her dreams too were like her age. She mostly saw dreams of dead people. Sometimes, a dead person would sit by her cot and eat jaggery. Sometimes, another dead man would lead her with her holdall. One of the dead used to shout something in her ears and then laugh low.
Dadi often saw Yamraj and Yamdoot in her dreams. These creatures, with dreadful faces, would tie people on a buffalo’s back and haul them away. Once, Dadi dreamed that she was being carried off, fastened to the buffalo’s tail, and she shook herself awake. Dadi’s good deeds outweighed her bad deeds, yet she never dreamt of heaven; she saw dreams only of hell and would get up feeling shocked. She would go on shivering even after she opened her eyes. Pleasant scenes were few and far between in her dreams, and they began to occupy her thoughts. She would start brooding whenever she was alone and then she would think about any one of her old friends. In the process, she relived her memories of playing gutti with her childhood friends, of solemnizing the weddings of their dolls and swinging high during the month of Saawan. She would revive a bustling world filled with numerous persons such as her nanad, devrani, jethani, devar, mausi, phupha, bua, sasur, saas, baba, babuji, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncl
es. Finally, she would lapse into sleep again, where her dreams lay waiting for her.
In her dream that night, she saw that Awadh Narayan had clambered atop a tamarind tree in his underwear. He shook the tree with all his might. When the tamarinds fell off the branches, a cow came and sniffed them, and moved ahead without tasting them. Then she went to gather the tamarind and she realized they were blackberries. She collected the blackberries in her sari, intending to eat them with salt. Just then, her dead mother arrived on a mare. Dadi concealed the blackberries and squatted behind a bole, fearing her mother would ask for a share. Suddenly, she peed. Her sleep vanished and she realized she really had peed. Her bed was wet and stinking slightly. She was also feeling quite weak. She groaned lightly once, and then continued as if she was counting a prayer bead of groans.
Kamana removed the mosquito net poles and the net. Dadi saw Suryakant, Shibbu, Kamana and Nupoor standing around her.
Suryakant was worried and asked, ‘What’s Dadi’s problem?’
Shibbu replied, ‘Don’t bother. This is a routine occurrence now.’
Kamana added, ‘She’ll be fine soon.’
However, the atmosphere had shattered although the night was not over. Suryakant went to bed.
Dadi fell ill. She usually fell ill once a month these days. She behaved dreadfully the moment she fell ill. It began with her hollering for her elder son, ‘Hey, Awadh Narayan! I’m dying and you are blind to my misery. Call everyone here! Call Chotke, call all my daughters and sons-in-law, I’m going to die right now. I want to see everyone in my last moments.’ She never asked for Suryakant – perhaps his long absence had erased him from her memory. Everyone thought her call was at last the sundown of her life and ran pell-mell to her but the moment a crowd collected, she started improving.
Consequently, when she had called everyone a few months ago in February, nobody turned up. Chacha and Nupoor’s families appeared within half an hour since they were in Sultanpur, but all the others furnished excuses. And their decision to not come was proved right because, by Holi, she had recovered enough to eat not only two dal-filled pooris but also five gujhias. Her meals were time-consuming affairs. Be it rotis or the pooris, she did not have strength enough in her fingers to tear them into small bites. All the fingers of her right hand started shaking. To save her the trouble, the rotis and the pooris – whatever was in the plate – were torn into tiny pieces. Dadi would immerse the piece into the dal or the gravy of the vegetables to make it soft enough to chew. She took a very long time to finish her food because even her jaws were weak. On festivals, especially, her Herculean struggle between the temptations of taste and the inability to eat properly could be witnessed for protracted periods.
The loss from this bout of illness was that the regard and sincerity that others had for her diminished substantially. Everyone made fun of her and asked, ‘When is God going to summon you to Him?’ The young generation said, ‘You have seen both the twentieth and the twenty-first century, will you greet the twenty-second, too?’ Her daughters-in-law would taunt, ‘Ammaji arrived on the earth with the blessing of immortality.’ Nupoor quoted from the newspaper, ‘There is a Baba in Baharaich of our UP, two hundred and five years old, Dadiji is going to outlive him. But this Baba has been eating only fruit for a hundred years, not food grains; however, Dadi’s favourite food is kachori, samosa, dahi vada and jalebi.’
She heard everything, but did not react at all. She was like a sage, indifferent, staring around, as if all this was addressed to somebody else. However, she was also in a state of disorientation. The fact was that she was not stoic. The harsh words assaulted her soul brutally, so viciously that her entire existence shuddered. But she pretended she was unaffected. Sometimes, when she wanted to present a robust alibi of her acting abilities, she would laugh at the death jokes. She was aloof to both attachment with life and the charm of death. Waking up each morning was the blossoming of life for her and the moment sleep overtook her, she merged in the indefiniteness of death. This account sounds philosophical, and a tad poetic too, but Dadi was unable to perceive her own truth through this concept. Her philosophy of truth was a pure reality, beyond poeticism. Had she articulated it herself, she would have exclaimed, ‘What can I do at this age in life or in death?’ She let herself drift with the current. She was floating in the ocean of life without knowing how to swim, carried on by the current.
She had become cynical but the world had not forsaken her. The living universe presented so many startling spectacles that her stoicism would crumble and she would blurt out a remark like ‘bare-buttocks’. The world did not bother her simply because she had started failing to comprehend the world itself. Be it men or material – sometimes she found them charming and sometimes repulsive. The saving grace was that kids and young people did not involve her in their world, and neither did she feel like joining them.
Her personal troubles were so important that she did not have spare time for such things. Her biggest worry was her stomach. Often, she did not have clear bowels for five days in a row. She would squat in the toilet for an hour or more in vain. If she sat too long, the family thought she had passed away and began calling out to her. She would then turn on the tap and let the water gurgle to announce she was still alive. Tired of the constipation, she would take a folk remedy with lukewarm water, and then she would be afflicted with loose motions and make innumerable trips to the toilet. If she took a pill to control it, constipation gripped her once more. Every time she went to the toilet, she would take a bath.
Blessed be Awadh Narayan for he had installed a geyser in the house! Dadi often wondered about the fate that might have befallen her during the winter had this machine not been in the house! Her habit of bathing after each visit to the toilet was sixty-two years old. She never ate or drank anything before bathing in the morning. No matter how freezing cold it was, she had to get up at before dawn at 4 a.m. All the men would be sleeping, and even the labourers of the village did not turn up so early, and she had to enter the kitchen after washing with the icy water of the previous night. It did not matter whether she had a fever, or an ache in the bones or a cough, she had to bathe in freezing water. Later, unable to tolerate it any longer, she made it a habit to bathe after finishing the kitchen chores in the afternoon. But that was more taxing. It was forbidden to go to the toilet before entering the kitchen, and she had to postpone her visit to the toilet till then somehow. It had taken a toll on her bowels over the years, and she was paying the price now. Polyuria was no less bothersome. When it grew worse, she had to visit the toilet every ten minutes. Despite all her efforts, she would wet the bed. It spelled further trouble for her poor daughter-in-law.
Life offers everyone a gift but very few would have been as enthralled as she had been in her youth. Smitten with her own body, she would wonder, ‘This was my own figure, but it had not blossomed until now. These lips of mine, these cheeks and my neck!’ She went into raptures and if there was a mirror, she would go crazy over her teeth and her own tinkling laugh. Once her own lips in the mirror drove her wild and she kissed their reflection passionately. She was ecstatic when she looked at her own laden breasts.
When her clothes stuck to her nipples, hips and thighs during a bath, she fondly gazed at them as long as she could afford to. She fell so deeply in love with her body that she began to take the utmost care of it. The problem was that it was not considered proper for a woman to indulge in too much make-up. It was acceptable and tolerable only for prostitutes and women of royalty. And so, she took care of her body secretly. She would pretend that she was not bothered about her feet and to prove this she would often walk barefoot, but when she bathed, she would clean her heels, soles and toes meticulously. She stood before the mirror on one pretext or the other and combed her hair or straightened her dress. However secretive she was, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law caught her out. Consequently, when she started performing her toilette in the afternoon, her mother-in-law and the sister-in-law said, �
�She’s in the toilet in the afternoon so that all her dolling up can be sustained till the night!’
Whenever she visited a fair, she would never miss the swings. When the swing ascended, her hair flew and her clothes ballooned in the wind. Every time the swing descended, she would compose her hair and clothes. She gave the slip to her companions in the fair and when she was assured nobody was watching, she would quickly purchase some soap and sesame-seed oil.
Her jethani alleged that she bought atar too at a fair. Her silky skin had a golden glow and the jethani had revealed that she used some ointment she had procured from a gypsy woman. In spite of all her jealousy, the jethani, whenever she was around her, inhaled deeply. Not satisfied with this, she was always in search of an opportunity to be by her, sit by her or hover by her. This had turned into such a strong legend that it echoed even in the next generation. After his marriage to Nupoor, Tendulkar implored her to give him the formula. He wanted to get it patented in his name to net in millions and billions. Who can withstand the temptation of acquiring fair and fragrant skin?
Tendulkar had also resolved that in spite of becoming a multi-billionaire he would not forsake his photostat machine and the clinic. They would remind him of his days of struggle and penury. He can show it proudly to his children and grand-children to prove that if a person is focused, he can begin from scratch and turn into a billionaire. But all his desires had remained unfulfilled because he never received the gypsy woman’s recipe. On the other hand, Dadi had barely checked herself from inquiring from Tendulkar whether there was a medicine that could erase wrinkles and make the skin, that now hung loose from her bones, taut and bright again. The desire for such a remedy had seized her first when her earlobes had turned slack and limp. The tiny piercing in them had expanded into yawning holes. She would put in earrings but they kept falling out. Finally, she lost them for good. She believed that they were swept away during her bath but the jethani was sure the maid had stolen them.