The men and women sat apart. The younger Hindu women covered their faces with their head scarves; some of the Muslim women wore burkhas. After talking to the men about things in general, I asked one, a Meo named Barkat from a small village, whether he knew who had been elected prime minister of India.
‘It’s Nehruji’s daughter,’ he replied. ‘I don’t recall her name.’
‘Indira Gandhi,’ volunteered a chorus of voices.
‘Oh, yes, Indira Gandhi,’ agreed Barkat. ‘I knew it was Panditji’s chhokri (lass).’
‘How do you feel about having a woman as prime minister?’ I asked the question loud enough to be heard by everyone.
For some time no one answered. I repeated the question, this time turning my face towards the women. ‘Bhainji (sister),’ I asked, facing the eldest, ‘what is your opinion?’
‘O Ruldu ki Ma (mother of Ruldu), why don’t you say something? At home you never stop jabbering.’ This was a Jat from Faridabad. His wife was quick to retort, ‘Ruldu ka Bap (father of Ruldu), you who are so clever, why don’t you reply?’
The peasants laughed. Their women giggled.
‘It’s good propaganda,’ said a Sikh. ‘People will think we are advanced. No other country in the world has a woman prime minister. I am all for it.’
‘What is your opinion?’ I asked, turning again to Barkat. I encouraged him: ‘Women often rule in the home.’
‘That’s different,’ exclaimed Barkat. Other villagers agreed with him. ‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s like this,’ continued Barkat haltingly, ‘If my wife makes a mistake, I slap her across the face. Who can slap the face of a prime minister?’
They sat pondering over the problem like philosophers. They drew patterns in the sand with their fingers. They looked for the boat that was to take them across the Jamuna. Finally, the eldest spoke: ‘The big question is, can a woman rule this country?’ Then they drew more lines in the sand and again looked for the ferry.
This essay was written shortly after Indira Gandhi was elected prime minister.
Mother Teresa
It must have been more than twenty years ago that I was asked by the New York Times to do a profile of Mother Teresa for its magazine section. I wrote to Mother Teresa seeking her permission to call on her. And having got it, spent three days with her from the early hours of the morning to late at night. Nothing in my long journalistic career has remained as sharply etched in my memory as those three days with her in Calcutta. In my little study in my villa at Kasauli, I have only two pictures of the people I admire most—Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa.
Before I met her face to face, I read Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God. Malcolm was a recent convert to Catholicism and prone to believe in miracles. He had gone to make a film on her for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). They first went to the Nirmal Hriday (Sacred Heart) Home for dying destitutes close to the Kalighat temple. The team took some shots of the building from outside and of its sunlit courtyard. The camera crew was of the opinion that the interior was too dark and they had no artificial lights. However, since some footage was left, they decided to use it for interior shots. When the film was developed, the shots of the dormitories were found to be clearer than those taken in sunlight. The first thing I asked Mother Teresa was if this was true. She replied, ‘But of course. Such things happen all the time.’ And she added with increasing intensity of voice, ‘Every day, every hour, every single minute, God manifests Himself in some miracle.’
She narrated other miracles of the days when her organization was little known and chronically short of cash. ‘Money has never been much of a problem,’ she told me. ‘God gives through His people.’ She told me that when she started her first school in the slums, she had no more than five rupees with her. But as soon as people came to know what she was doing, they brought money and other things. ‘It was all divine providence.’ One winter they ran out of quilts. Her nuns found sheets but there was no money to buy cotton. Just as Mother Teresa was about to rip open her own pillow, the bell rang. Some official who was about to leave Calcutta for a posting abroad had brought his quilts and mattresses to give them away. On another occasion when they had run out of rations, a lady they had never seen before left them a bag of rice. ‘We measured the rice with our little tin cup; it was exactly what we required for the day. When I told the lady that, she broke down and cried as she realized that God had used her as an instrument of His will.’
The first institution she took me to was Nirmal Hriday. It was in 1952 that the Calcutta Corporation had handed the building to her. Orthodox Hindus were outraged. Four hundred Brahmin priests attached to the Kali temple demonstrated outside the building. ‘One day I went out and spoke to them. “If you want to kill me, kill me. But do not disturb the inmates. Let them die in peace.”’ That silenced them. Then one of the priests staggered in. He was in an advanced stage of galloping phthisis. The nuns looked after him till he died. That changed the priests’ attitude towards Mother Teresa. Later one day, another priest entered the Home, prostrated himself at Mother Teresa’s feet and said, ‘For thirty years I have served the Goddess Kali in her temple. Now the Goddess stands before me.’
I went around Nirmal Hriday with Mother Teresa. In the hour we were there, of the 170 men and women lying in rows, two died. Their beds were quickly taken by two lying on the floor of the veranda outside. Mother Teresa went round to every one of the inmates and asked them how they were. Her only message of cheer to people who knew they had not much longer to live was ‘Bhogoban acchen’—there is God.
Mother Teresa did not make an impressive figure—barely five feet tall and very slim, high cheek bones and thin lips. And a face full of wrinkles. It was a homely face without any charisma. Muggeridge was right in describing her as a unique person, ‘but not in the vulgar celebrity sense of having neon lighting about her head. Rather in the opposite sense—of someone who has merged herself in the common face of mankind.’ The nun’s dress she had designed for herself would make the plainest-looking woman look plainer.
She spoke with an Indian lilt in her voice. And like most convent-bred Indians, ended her sentences with an interrogatory ‘No?’, meaning ‘isn’t that so?’ She told me how at the age of twelve she had dared to become a nun and left her parental home in Skopje (Yugoslavia); how she had learnt English in a Dublin convent and had come to Calcutta in 1929 as a geography teacher in St Mary’s High School. She was for many years, principal of the school. Then suddenly a strange restlessness came over her. It was, as she describes it, ‘a special call from Jesus Christ.’ 10 September 1946 was her ‘day of decision’ as well as ‘inspiration day’. This is how she put it: ‘I was going to Darjeeling to make my retreat. It was in that train that I heard the call to give up all and follow Him to the slums and serve Him among the poorest of the poor.’ She prepared herself for her mission, receiving an intensive course in nursing at Patna. In 1948 she opened her first school in the slums of Calcutta in a private house donated to her. Her only helper was Subhasini Das (Sister Agnes). A new order, the Missionaries of Charity, was instituted. A male branch, Brothers of Charity, came up some years later, and initiates had to take four vows—poverty, chastity, obedience and wholehearted service to the poor.
Mother Teresa taught herself Bengali which she was soon able to speak fluently. When India became independent, she took Indian nationality. Her strength came from simple convictions. (‘She is blessed with certainties,’ writes Muggeridge.) When I asked her, ‘Who has been the dominant figure in your life—Gandhi, Nehru, Albert Schweitzer?’, without a pause she replied, ‘Jesus Christ’. When I followed it up with a question about books that might have impressed her, her answer was equally categorical and in the singular: ‘The Bible’.
The day I accompanied Mother Teresa on a ‘begging’ expedition, we boarded a crowded tram car. A man immediately stood up to offer he
r his seat. Another untied a knot in his dhoti and took out change to buy her ticket. The ticket conductor refused to take money from her and punched a ticket for which he paid himself. We arrived at the office of a large biscuit factory. Mr Mukherjee, the manager, had his excuses ready. His business was not doing well, he was having union problems, and so on. Mother Teresa expressed sympathy with him. ‘We only want the broken biscuits you discard. Thank God, we have no union problems. We work for God; there are no unions.’ I could see Mr Mukherjee’s defences crumble. He picked up his phone and ordered forty large tins of broken biscuits to be delivered to Mother Teresa.
Recognition came to Mother Teresa when in 1962, she was awarded the Padma Shri. Both Pandit Nehru and his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit who were present at the investiture, admitted that they almost broke down with emotion. A few months later came the Magsaysay Award. Pope Paul VI presented her with a car; she auctioned it and raised four-and-a-half lakh rupees. In 1971 she was awarded the Pope John XXIII prize of 21,500 US dollars. Then came the Good Samaritans and the Joseph Kennedy awards and the Templeton Foundation Prize. While making the presentation, Prince Philip referred to the ‘sheer goodness which shines through Mother Teresa’s life and work, and inspires humility, wonder and admiration.’
Since then, till she got the Nobel Prize for peace, there was not a month when she was not showered with money and awards of some kind or another. Every paise went in the upkeep of hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria that she opened in different parts of India as well as in foreign countries.
One evening, returning from Sealdah to her home, we had to get out of our car as there was a mammoth funeral procession coming from the opposite direction. It was the cortege of Muzaffar Ahmed, one of the founding fathers of communism in India. As we proceeded on our way, men waving little red flags stepped out of their ranks to touch Mother Teresa’s feet, receive her blessings, and then rejoin the procession.
Mother Teresa dropped me at Dum Dum airport. As I was about to take leave of her she said, ‘So?’, meaning whether I had anything else to ask. ‘Tell me how you can touch people with loathsome diseases like leprosy and gangrene. Aren’t you revolted by people filthy with dysentry and cholera vomit?’
She replied, ‘I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself: this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has gangrene, dysentry and cholera. I must wash him and tend to him. I serve them because I love Jesus.’
The last time I saw Mother Teresa was two years ago when she came to Delhi to receive two Maruti vans presented to her by my friend H.N. Sikand. There was an enormous crowd at his home. Mother Teresa passed by me without recognizing me. How could she, after all those years and the millions of people she must have met.
Sex in Indian Life
Many winters ago I happened to be travelling by a night train from Delhi to Bhopal. It was an express that made a few halts at major stations. I found myself in a compartment of five berths: three below and two on the sides above. I had a lower berth as did the other two passengers who were there before me. The upper berths were reserved in the names of Professor and Mrs Saxena. Fifteen minutes before the train was due to leave, a party of men and women escorting a bride decked in an ornate sari drawn discreetly across her face and her arm loaded with ivory bangles stopped by our compartment, read the names on the panel and came in. They were dismayed to see the two berths reserved for them separated by a fifteen-foot chasm of space. One of the party approached me and asked if I could take one of the upper berths to accommodate the newly-weds. I readily agreed and moved my bedding roll. Another passenger who had the middle berth also moved up on the other upper berth so that the bridal couple could be alongside each other. I heard one of the party stop the conductor and tell him to wake up the couple at a particular junction where the train was to make a brief three-minute halt at 3 a.m.
As the conductor blew his whistle and waved his green flag, the party took leave of the bridal couple with much embracing and sobbing. No sooner had the train cleared the lighted platform than the bride blew her nose and uncovered her face. She was in her mid-twenties: pale-skinned, round-faced and wearing thick glasses. I couldn’t see much of her figure but my guess was that she would be forever fighting a losing battle against fat. Her groom looked a couple of years older than her (the ‘professor’ being honorific for a junior lecturer) and like his bride, was sallow-faced, corpulent and bespectacled. From the snatches of conversation that I could hear (I was only four feet above them), I gathered that they were total strangers and their marriage had been arranged by relatives and through the matrimonial columns of The Hindustan Times. They talked of their papajis and mummyjis. Then of their time in college (the halcyon days for most educated Indians) and of their friends: ‘like a brother to me’ or ‘better than my own real sister’. After a while the conversation began to flag; I saw the man’s hand resting on his woman’s, on the window sill.
The lights were switched off leaving only a nightlight which bathed the compartment in a moonlight blue. I could not see very much except when the train ran past brightly-lit platforms of wayside railway stations.
The couple did not bother to use the middle berth vacated for them and decided to make themselves as comfortable as they could on a four-foot wide wooden plank. They ignored the presence of the other passengers in the small compartment and were totally absorbed in getting to know each other. Such was their impatience that they did not find the time to change into more comfortable clothes. They drew a quilt over themselves and were lost to the world.
The sari is a costume that is both very ornamental as well as functional. Properly draped, it can accentuate the contours of the female form giving a special roundness to the buttocks. A well-cut blouse worn with the sari elevates the bosom and exposes the belly to below the navel. There is no other form of female attire which can both conceal physical shortcomings of the wearer as well as expose what deserves exposure. A fat woman looks less fat in a sari than she would in a dress, and a thin woman looks more filled in. At the same time, a sari is very functional. All a woman has to do when she wants to urinate or defecate is to lift it to her waist. When required to engage in a quick sexual intercourse, she needs to do no more than draw it up a little and open up her thighs. Apparently this was what Mrs Saxena was called upon to do. I heard a muffled cry of ‘Hai Ram’ escape her lips and realized that the marriage had been consummated.
The Saxenas did not get up to go to the bathroom to wash themselves but began a repeat performance. This time they were less impatient and seemed to be getting more out of their efforts. More than once the quilt slipped off them and I caught a glimpse of the professor’s heaving buttocks and his bride’s bosoms which he had extricated out of her choli. Above the rattle and whish of the speeding train I heard the girl’s whimper and the man’s exulting grunts. They had a third go at each other before peace descended on our compartment. It was then well past midnight. Thereafter it was only the wail of the engine tearing through the dark night and the snores of my elderly companions that occasionally disturbed my slumber.
We were rudely woken by someone thumping on the door, slapping the window panes and yelling, ‘Get up! get up! It is Sehore. The train will leave in another minute.’ It was the conductor.
I turned the switch on and the compartment was flooded with light. A memorable sight it was! Professor Saxena fast asleep with his buttocks exposed; Mrs Saxena also fast asleep, her mouth wide open, breasts bare, lying supine like a butterfly pinned on a board. Her hair was scattered on her pillow. Their glasses lay on the floor.
Whatever embarrassment they felt was drowned in the hustle and bustle of getting off the train. We heaved out their beds and suitcases. The professor stumbled out onto the cold platform adjusting his flies. His wife followed him covering her bare bosom with a flap of her sari. As the train began to move, she screamed—One of her earrings was missing. The friendly guard brought the train to a halt. All of us went down on our kne
es scouring the floor. The errant earring was found wedged in a crevice of the seat. We resumed our journey.
‘It is love,’ remarked one of my travelling companions, with great understanding. ‘They are newly married and this was their first night together. All should be forgiven for people in love.’
‘What kind of love?’ I asked in a sarcastic tone.
‘A few hours ago they were complete strangers. They haven’t the patience to wait till they get home; they start having sex without as much as exchanging a word of affection. You call that love?’
‘Well,’ he replied pondering over the episode. ‘They may not get another chance for some days. There will be his relatives, his mother, sisters, brothers. And lots of religious ceremonies. Youth is impatient and the body has its own compulsions. Let us say it is the beginning of love.’
‘It may be the beginning of another family, but I don’t see where love comes in,’ I remarked. ‘I can understand illiterate peasants coupling like the cattle they rear, but I cannot understand two educated people—a lecturer in a college and a school teacher—lacking so totally in sophistication or sense of privacy as to begin copulating in the presence of three strangers.’
‘You have foreign ideas,’ said the third man dismissing me. ‘Anyway, it is 3.30 in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.’ He switched off the light and the argument.
The episode stayed in my mind because it vividly illustrated the pattern of the man-woman relationship that obtains among the vast majority of Indians. Love as the word is understood in the west is known only to a tiny minority of the very westernized living in the half-a-dozen big cities of India, who prefer to speak English rather than Indian languages, read only English books, watch only Western movies and even dream in English. For the rest, it is something they read about in poems or see on the screen but very rarely experience personally. Arranged marriages are the accepted norm; ‘love’ marriages, a rarity. In arranged marriages, the parties first make each other’s acquaintance physically through the naked exploration of each other’s bodies, and it is only after some of the lust has been drained out of their systems that they get the chance to discover each other’s minds and personalities. It is only after lust begins to lose its potency and there is no clash of temperaments that the alliance may, in later years, develop bonds of companionship. But the chances of this happening are bleak. In most cases, they suffer each other till the end of their days.
Khushwant Singh's Book of Unforgettable Women Page 3