In recent years when we collected under the garden umbrella to enjoy the winter sunshine, we had taken to locking the house behind us. If one of us wanted to re-enter the building, we requested the house key from our mother and two of us went in together.
It became a bargaining chip. I’ll come with you if you lend me your Three Men in a Boat3.
Our negotiating skills were honed to a high level and so was our sense of honour. We never went back on an agreement.
My mother always knew where each of us was. If I took it into my head to take a sole sojourn into the compound I never went out of earshot, even in broad daylight. None of us were ever on the streets alone. We walked as a group to school or church or to visit the aunts.
Our occasional visitors made sure they returned home before nightfall. After dark, no one was admitted to the house until their identity was guaranteed. Soon after dinner each night the front gate was padlocked with a heavy brass lock. Our father remained awake until three each morning to ensure no potential intruder was inspired with a bright idea.
He had a reputation as an honest, fair and generous man, as had his father before him, and this status went a long way to protect us. Potential thieves knew there’d be no “black” money hidden in the house – money that had been sourced from bribes and corruption and therefore couldn’t be banked. In spite of it, previous years had seen two potential breakins. On both occasions, the cement render was scraped off the same part of the pantry wall and three layers of bricks chiselled away to make a hole that could become big enough for a person to enter. Further progress had been stalled by our canine protector, who had brought the house down with furious intent, frightening off the would be intruders.
Gradually, we made more changes to reduce what might have been seen as provocation. The English number plates on our cars were rewritten in the vernacular and the two marble plaques that were embedded in our gate posts, one with our family name and the other with the house name, were painted over to obliterate the English script. The gate posts (along with the embedded tablets) were older than anyone could remember, but at a time like that, heritage mattered little.
There were other matters that impacted heavily on our lives. The infrastructure around us was slowly breaking down and further diminishing our already simple lifestyles. That September morning, looking up at the drawing room ceiling that was festooned with cobwebs, I sighed dramatically. The previous evening a lump of koora had languidly floated down and entangled itself in my already tangled hair.
“Mother! This is intolerable. I simply cannot live like this.”
“I know, dear, but we have no option. And, please refrain from shouting. You know none of us is deaf.”
“I’m embarrassed to bring my friends home.”
The exquisite curl of her lip was not directed at me. Or at the cobwebs. Her focus was my bourgeois attitude. “Don’t be silly! We’re not middle class enough to be concerned.” She walked out of the conversation, leaving her meaning clear. There were bigger things at stake.
The men who usually came to clean the ceilings had retired to their villages. Their sons were employed in the mills, which paid much more than domestic service, so they could afford a better life and future for their families. No one begrudged the young men this opportunity even though it left us in the lurch.
My mother discussed the matter with us. “Some of them will come to help us on their days off. They’ll do it out of respect for your father who was so good to their fathers. But I’m not going to ask them. That would be exploiting loyalty.” She considered for a moment before adding, “We’ll have to pretend we have year-round Christmas decorations and use our imaginations to add sparkle.” Beyond the shadow of a doubt, she was enjoying her joke.
The drawing-room ceiling was sixteen feet away so the cobwebs weren’t a particular problem. I looked up at them and wondered how long it would take for the whole room to fill up. I dreamily envisioned myself in the romantic role of a modern-day Miss Havisham, living in my ruined mansion overhung with cobwebs and trapped in time as I mourned a faithless lover.
The delusion didn’t last long. The possibility of grieving over a worthless man was beyond my imagination. For far too long I had gleefully sung along with Betty Hutton, intoning that a man may be hot but he’s not when he’s shot with the obvious interpretation that it wouldn’t take much to reduce a supposed hero to a spineless twit. From my parents I had learnt a healthy attitude about respectful behaviour that I would accept.
There were other problems about the house due to the lack of an available workforce. The paint on the external walls was peeling and mould squatted in the swirls and curls of the lattice above the porch. Black patches appeared haphazardly in other spots too. Again, there was nothing we could do. Our regular workmen who had colour washed the house every second year had, with love, returned to their roots forever.
“We’ll have a spotty house instead of a self-coloured one.” My mother’s focus was clearly above mundane appearances.
Both my parents exhibited a pragmatic approach to the growing dilapidation around us. When the fountain tap came off in my hands they shrugged it away with the remark it was so old this was bound to happen. The fountain sat in the middle of the rose garden and was never used for its traditional purpose. Water was a scarce commodity so, in the garden, was mainly used for growing food. The fountain was merely another remnant from a bygone era.
Some simple annoyances were simply annoying. The spring broke in the airgun and another wasn’t available for purchase, reducing the firearm to a plaything. It seemed a bit excessive to use a shotgun or a rifle for the sole reason of warning a monkey away from the maeva, but nevertheless, that’s what we had to do.
Music was particularly exasperating. Like all Goan girls, Lorraine, Lucy and I were taught to play the piano. Manuscript music had to be brought in from London via the agent in Bombay. Since it took forever and was excruciatingly expensive we all ended up playing the same pieces. The trouble was, being the youngest, by the time it was my turn, everything had been played a few trillion times before. By everyone. All my sisters, my cousins and my aunts.
From so much usage the sheets of music were often torn so I became a dab hand at repairs with transparent sticky tape. Sometimes the notes were completely obliterated, necessitating creativity on my part. For piano recitals I was always the first scheduled to perform and never – ever – understood why the concert hall filled up only for the second act.
Through utter necessity we learnt to accommodate, with varying degrees of humour, both major and minor irritants. The hardest to cope with were the random power outages that were increasingly commonplace throughout the year. In summer it was agonising. We were left to swelter helplessly as ceiling and induction fans came to a standstill. From a tolerably warm day we were plunged into the pits of hell.
“We are worse off than servants,” fumed our father. “Worse off than our ancestors who lived before the days of Edison. We’ve got used to these luxuries so feel the difference.”
There wasn’t much we could do except keep hydrated. In that respect we were lucky. Having our own well technically meant we had an endless supply of water. The problem was, the lack of power rendered the electric pump useless and our urban lives became primitive.
Our drinking water was stored in suris, unglazed earthenware jars similar to the vessels used in ancient Rome. The technique of evaporation produces crisp, mountain-stream-like water, far superior to artificially cooled refrigerated water. Six suris were filled each day in high summer, for it wasn’t unknown for a pitcher to be carried into the bedrooms for everyone to be given a drink during the night.
Regular electricity failures were simply evidence of an infrastructure that had been built to serve the elite few and now couldn’t cope with the demands from many more. Most of the shortages that plagued our lives were generated from the same source. It wasn’t unknown for petrol to “go underground’ which was a local term that meant p
etrol was only available on the black market. Cooking fuel and batteries were often in short supply.
The time came when the telephone was switched off. It was an ugly, heavy contraption housed in my father’s library and was either out of order or menaced us at the terrible hour of two in the morning, calling out in strident tones that demanded immediate obsequence.
At first my father rushed to answer, believing, like anyone would, that a telephone call at an ungodly hour would convey urgent news. But it was either a wrong number or a person seeking information about a night train. Our telephone number must have been similar to that of the railway station.
Answering the telephone in our home in the middle of the night was never easy. Multiple dark rooms had to be negotiated because the general idiosyncrasies of the house meant light switches were never in convenient places. Furniture that was familiar during daylight hours acquired a Mr Hyde personality by night, and moved around to effect vicious attacks on unsuspecting shinbones.
After the seventh time in one night of outmanoeuvring this treacherous path, my father put all his frustrations into the single action of snatching up the receiver. Expecting to hear the usual koun hi or “who’s there”, followed by questions about train arrivals, he was floored instead by King’s English with Received Pronunciation.
“My dear fellow,” it said, “If you insist on taking quite so long to answer the telephone, it’s reasonable to suppose my train will come and go while I await your pleasure. I really must ask you to smarten up your act.” Whether my father maintained his cool or his manners, we never discovered.
The following day there was another telephone incident.
“A man telephoned for you today,” Lily informed my father.
The atmosphere said, Elucidate. What else? Obviously a little prompting was required.
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t catch it.” Said earnestly to ensure my father got an accurate picture.
“So what did you say?”
“I said nothing.”
“You didn’t ask him to repeat it?”
“No, I said nothing.”
“I see. Did he say anything else?”
“Yes. He asked if he could speak to you.”
“A-a-and?…?”
“I said nothing.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Yes. He asked if he could leave a message for you.”
“And…?”
“I said nothing.”
“Did he leave the message?’
“Yes.”
“And…? What was the message?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
The vagaries of the Indian telephone system combined with the taciturnity of my sister meant that the phone was either out of order, not in use or unknown callers left forgettable messages.
“You know,” my father was in one of his occasional lofty moods, “I can probably afford to hire a spacecraft and join the Apollo missions to the moon but I cannot get the Indian telephone exchange to give me an instrument that consistently works. I cannot persuade them. I cannot cajole them. I can’t even bribe them.” The last part was said with mock, deep distress and sorrowful shakes of his head. Civilisation as we knew it was breaking down around us and there wasn’t a dashed thing we could do to halt or slow the destruction.
These were facts of life for us and we adjusted with ingenuity bordering on the fatalistic.
But in spite of all our efforts, a frightening situation had occurred the previous May when a little before seven in the morning my father was driving us along Canal Road to drop Lily at her city college. Without warning, a rickshaw turned in front of our car, causing my father to come to a screaming halt.
Without the dramatic entertainment of injury to life or limb, or damage to either vehicle, a crowd collected. As anyone who has been in a foreign country knows, the lack of appropriate language skills is a distinct disadvantage, especially in times of trouble. That it was the land of his birth was of no help to my father. He was outnumbered by a babbling, hassling horde.
In an attempt to help I turned to a young man standing near my car window. “Tell him –” I got no further.
“Understand me, I am not your friend,” was spat back at me in a harsh, unyielding tone accompanied by hatred in obsidian black eyes.
My heart thumped with shock and fear.
I’ve never seen you before, done you no harm so why would you hate me?
It was my first inkling that the situation was turning sour, the crowd aggressive. I looked at Lily who had lost all colour, her eyebrows a startling contrast to her face. My father remained outwardly calm but I knew he was frightened for us.
Having first-hand experience of the massacres of the India–Pakistan partition, his first act was to remove Lily and me, two young girls, from a potentially dangerous zone. Reluctant though we were to leave him to face the throng alone, we both realised the inadvisability of arguing at such an inopportune moment. Hailing rickshaws, the only mode of public transport, Lily and I deserted our father. She left for her college and I for home.
As good luck would have it, there was a tame end to the matter. Once Lily and I were out of the picture, a Mr George who lived nearby recognised my father in the midst of the angry mob and came along to help. He paid off the rickshaw man with Rs30, more money than the poor man had ever seen in his life, and with that the crowd was satisfied.
I hadn’t been so fortunate. Trembling internally and sweating like a pig, I sat rigid as I was pedalled towards home in the cool morning air. Suddenly I felt a strong tug on the back seat and a voice I had heard before, saying in broken English, “I love you, darling. Marry me,” and making insulting, kissing sounds towards me – pwoch pwoch. A second voice joined him in a high-pitched mocking laugh.
I knew who it was but before I could react two bicycles sped past the rickshaw, turned and swooped back, all the time hollering loudly about my face, my breasts and more that I didn’t hear, as the fear-based thudding of my heart obliterated all sound.
Their performance continued with calls to the driver to stop “Rickshaw wallah rokho,” while singing love songs from a Hindi movie.
My belief in Guardian Angels was vindicated that morning as the puny old man, who was no match for two youngsters, ignored them and kept his pace steady. Though I could feel my armpits were soaking wet and my palms were clammy I made sure I looked straight ahead and pointedly ignored the capers around me.
Even a pea-sized brain has a threshold for monotony. Fed up with getting no reaction, my tormentors turned off at an intersection close to home, calling out, Chinta muth karo – don’t worry, no more tuklief, trouble for you.
My hands were shaking as I paid off the rickshaw man.
I had never tasted brandy before but as its reviving properties burnt my throat I resorted to pointless, incoherent fury.
“How dare they!” I spluttered. “How dare they!”
But my parents were uninterested. Instead they wanted to ascertain that I hadn’t been followed home, asking repeatedly, worriedly, “Are you sure they turned off before you reached the house?” They were afraid a gang of thugs would return at a later stage intent on causing mayhem.
A few days later, when feelings had subsided, I asked my parents, “Why do they hate us so much? What have we ever done to them?”
“They don’t hate you personally,” was the tart reply. “Don’t flatter yourself that they even notice you. Their lives are so hard and their prospects so poor that they hate, and rightly so, the oppressive regime that kept them subjugated for so long. They see you as a representative of that regime.”
My father looked me straight in the eye and without rancour, without mirth, in fact with a deadpan expression, he made his profound statement:
“That’s what happens when you are left over from an Empire gone to pot.”
CHAPTER 17
CABIN TRUNKS
My final school e
xams were done so come January there would be nothing to hold us in Kanpur. It was a foregone conclusion that I’d leave for a college education.
“Try and coax you sister to go with you,” my father asked of me, adding persuasively, “then you won’t be alone.” But I held no sway over Lily so I didn’t bother to try.
“You’ll have to go at some stage,” he told her. “There’s no future for you here. What will you do if you stay?” Lily was dabbling in a few college subjects and spent most of her time at home helping our mother around the house. She was enjoying a lifestyle that suited her but our father kept muttering to himself, “She can’t continue on this glorious loaf.”
“Things will only get worse.” Fear made him unusually sharp. “There’ll be more power cuts, water shortages will become more acute and your home will crumble around you.”
Though Lorraine wrote rapturous letters about her new and exciting life, Lily had seen the devastation her absence had wrought on our mother and didn’t want to be responsible for added loss.
“You plan to stay and cope so why can’t I?” Lily’s reply had ultimate logic, but my father had his answer ready. “I’m too old to start again but you have your whole life ahead of you. I’d be failing in my duty as your father if I didn’t persuade you to leave.”
He considered for a moment longer, then added thoughtfully, “If you don’t go, I’ll have to marry you off. Agarwal in the office tells me there are two Goan boys in Saharanpur who are looking for wives. They are our jaath so that’s ok. They own department shops and have quite good prospects.”
We looked at our father in disbelief. Arranged marriages are an age-old institution around the world and generally work well in India. The few that don’t are highlighted to give the practice a bad name. We knew our Indian school friends expected to have arranged marriages, some even welcomed them, but we had been reared to be strong-minded people. Besides, any prospect of marriage at that time was abhorrent. We had seas to sail, mountains to scale, a life to be lived!
Since I wasn’t in the firing line I could afford to laugh. I hugged myself with silent glee and turned to Lily with a bland voice that I knew irritated her. “Who’s going to be Mrs Agarwal? Or will it be Mrs Ba-a-ajpie?” exaggerating the syllable to imitate the sound of a sheep. “Or,” and I added the most ridiculous name I could think of, “You could be Mrs Buumamanalum,” knowing she could neither pronounce nor spell the name.
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