Of Marriageable Age

by Sharon Maas

  Savitri was a blessing, and Mrs Lindsay vowed to 'do something' for the child. The Iyers had only one daughter, and as such were in a much better position than Kannan, who had three, but daughters were always a headache for the poor Hindu fathers. They had to be married off and if there were too many of them they could cause the ruin of a family. Although Mrs Lindsay frowned upon the dowry system, money was obviously always the key to a better life. Didn't she herself know that? No, definitely she would do something for Savitri.

  Mrs Lindsay had been thinking along these lines for some time, and had decided that the 'something' would be a cash gift. Mrs Lindsay's family had been connected with India from the very beginning, in the days when John Company ruled the British Empire. Things had changed since then, of course, but still there were investments. Mrs Lindsay wasn't too sure herself exactly what these investments were. She tried to keep her mind pure, free from thoughts of money and other material matters. A lawyer in London took care of business matters, and all she knew was that there was an ever-ready flow of cash, most of which she was leaving untouched so that David could one day be master of a fortune.

  David would surely approve of this idea, to 'do something' for Savitri. But later; the child was only six, and there was lots of time. But when that time came, the cash would buy a first-class husband for the girl. Because you could abolish dowries as much as you wanted to — a wealthy wife still had a better choice of husband. Why, it was that way among the English too. So she herself would ensure that Savitri was not married off to the first suitor her parents could find. Give her some money, and let the girl — or her parents, or whoever decided these things — choose.

  She was thinking all these pleasant, generous thoughts when David came to her with his idea, and this idea was so much in keeping with her own plans for Savitri, that she hugged him tightly — a very rare occurrence which quite took his breath away — and knew that this was a case of telepathy. Which only went to show that her idea was really ordained from Above, and that she herself was but an instrument of the Divine on Earth.

  7

  Chapter Seven

  Saroj

  Georgetown, 1964

  Like Indrani's wedding sari, Baba had imported Ma from India. That was all her children knew of her. Ma didn't count; what counted was Roy history.

  Balwant Uncle had appointed himself custodian of family history. After all, he was history master at Queen's College, and well qualified to keep the family archives, drawers full of yellowing, curl-edged photos, boxes of letters falling apart at the folds, and a thick black-bound ledger recording every single birth, marriage and death of every single Roy several times removed.

  The book was almost full now; yet it had all began so simply.

  In 1859 three Brahmin brothers, Devadas, Ramdas and Shridas Roy, were walking through the bazaar to the Kali temple in Calcutta when they were approached by a recruiter.

  'Come to Damra Tapu,' the recruiter said. 'It is a country far across the seas, a bright and sparkling country, money is growing on the trees; many Indians are already amassing a vast fortune there. When you have made your fortune in five years you can come back to India. No problem.'

  The three brothers took the recruiter's words as a sign from God. Just the day before this their father, a school teacher, had been bitten by a black scorpion under the neem tree and died, and the boys were on their way to the temple to pray to God for help and guidance. Jobs were scarce, especially for young boys with no skills, and their eldest married brother Baladas could not support his own family, their mother, their two sisters and themselves. So the recruiter, they decided, was God in human form showing them their destiny. They agreed to go to Damra Tapu, wherever that might be, and accompanying the recruiter to a sub-agency. There they signed themselves to work on a sugar plantation in the colony of Damra Tapu: Demerara, British Guiana, South America, to take the place of recently liberated African slaves. Then they went to the temple to thank God for showing them the way so explicitly. Shortly thereafter they sailed from India on the ship Victor Emmanuel, leaving their mother and sisters in the care of Baladas.

  The three brothers were allotted to the sugar plantation Post Mourant as indentured servants, but due to their fiery spirits and quick minds already sharpened by a basic English medium education in India they soon made swift strides forward. Ramdas, the eldest, discovered that certain Hindu ceremonies were not difficult to perform, and thus became a priest, the small fee he received being more remunerative than what he received as a cane field labourer. He went on to become sirdar (foreman) on the estate, saved every cent, and bought Full Cup, an abandoned sugar plantation on the East Bank of Demerara.

  Shridas acquired a horse and carriage with which he ran a highly successful taxi service in the settlement of Hague, later going to Georgetown and starting a motorised hire-car business and moving into a white mansion in Kingston. Devadas became a Hindi-English interpreter, going on to teach in a private school and finally founding a school of his own, attended by Indian children; it was his nephew, Ramsaroop, who opened the first Hindi-language cinema in Georgetown, the Bombay Talkies. Thus all three brothers remained in the colony after their five-year contract ran out.

  Their only problem was that they had no wives. Indian women were reluctant to leave home and family and make the long sea journey to another continent, and parents were reluctant to send their daughters far away to a country that, so rumour had it, swarmed with wild black savages, released African slaves. Which meant that women accounted for less than thirty per cent of the Indian population, which explained, Balwant claimed, the high suicide rates among Indian indentured servants.

  The brothers wrote home to their mother to send three wives for them. All she could find was an old widow of twenty-seven years, a low-caste orphan girl of sixteen, and a twenty-five-year-old woman with a harelip, the latter being the only one among them who could pay a dowry. She got Baladas to bribe the same officer who recruited her other sons, and with the dowry paid by the harelipped bride got the three women on to the ship Ganges, which sailed for Georgetown in 1865. The bride-problem was thus solved.

  The Roy family grew in size and prominence in the prospering colony. By the turn of the century the third generation of Roys was well established in Georgetown.

  In 1964, the year Saroj turned thirteen, there were well over a hundred descendants of Ramdas, Shridas and Devadas — now long dead and cremated, their ashes sent back to India to be scattered in the river Ganges. The Roys continued to prosper and seek prosperity. Indians were industrious, and certain professions tended to run in families. The Luckhoo family specialised in law; the Jaikaran family in medicine; and the Roys in business. They owned four dry-goods stores, two pharmacies, a cinema, two provisions stores, an electrical appliances company, a furniture store, three hardware stores, a construction company and the Jus-ee cool drinks company. Roys were emigrating to England, Canada, the USA. Some had settled in Trinidad, some in Surinam. But nobody, as far as Saroj knew, had ever returned to India. You didn't return to India. You left India.

  Back in Calcutta, Deodat Roy, Baladas's first grandson, grew up and won a scholarship to study law in England where he graduated with honours and practised as a barrister-at-law for a few years in London. But Deodat was an Indian through and through, and life in racist England, a member of the despised immigrant Indian society, did not appeal to him. England was too secular, too materialistic, too cold. Even with his education he was not treated with due respect. News of his dissatisfaction and plans to return home circulated through the family grapevine and reached Georgetown. In 1929 he received a joint letter from his three great-uncles, now old men and heads of the Georgetown Roy clan.

  It was one of the most important items in the family archives, heralding as it did the New Age of Roy tradition. Balwant Uncle liked to read it aloud at family functions: ‘This is a bright and shining colony, much better than India,’ the great-uncles had written, ‘and there's a crying need f
or well-trained Indian lawyers. Do not return to Calcutta, come here and settle in British Guiana. In India, even if you are successful, you will be at best a small fish in a big pond; here you can be a big fish in a small pond.’ (This was Balwant Uncle's favourite saying.) ‘You would not believe the leaps and bounds with which we Indians are progressing! We came to this colony as poor coolies owning nothing and less than nothing, yet through God's grace and our own diligence and thrift we Roys are all well-to-do and highly respected pillars of society, and we are by no means the exception! Now there are over 300,000 Indians here; we make up over forty per cent of the population! Diwali and Holi are national holidays, as well as Eid-al Mubarak for the Muslims. This is indeed Little India and opportunity is knocking on our doors! Kindly come and put your shoulder to the grindstone to help build the colony! We, your loving great-uncles, will accord you a hearty welcome. Only one thing: before you come, get married, for ladies are in short supply here. It would be preferable if you find a wife with several young sisters or female cousins to accompany her, for we know of many highly eligible Indian boys in dire need of a wife, and we can make excellent connections through marriage. Dowry and caste not relevant.’

  This last sentence alarmed Deodat exceedingly. He promptly married his first wife Sundari, daughter of Brahmin immigrants, in London, and brought her with two younger sisters to British Guiana. The sisters were immediately married into prominent Georgetown families so that the BG branch of the Roy clan grew further in consequence and connections.

  Sundari gave birth to three boys in quick succession, Natarajeshwar, Nathuram, and Narendra, but Narendra was barely eleven years of age when Sundari tumbled down the tower staircase in Deodat's Waterloo Street mansion and broke her neck. The three boys were immediately boarded out into various other Roy families, so all quickly recovered from the tragedy, and Deodat set about finding a new wife. But there were problems.

  Deodat, an orthodox Brahmin, refused to take a wife born and bred in BG. In such a woman traditions were diluted, culture was dying, he claimed. He was appalled at the gradual disintegration of Hindu traditions, and the spineless capitulation of Indians to the secular spirit which ruled the colony.

  In fact, Hindus were split down the middle. On the one side were the Traditionalists, trying to uphold their culture as much as possible but nowhere reaching Baba's strict standards. After all, these were second, third, fourth and even fifth generation Indians, not one of them had ever been to India, hardly any of them spoke Hindi, and compromise had been necessary. Of this clan Baba was the undisputed leader and authority, for he had actually grown up in India, he spoke Hindi as well as Bengali and a smattering of Urdu.

  The Modernists were non-practising Hindus, sunk in a mire of debauchery, growing worse from generation to generation. Nowadays Hindu men and women even went to parties and danced; the women wore trousers, or dresses showing their knees; and they chose their own marriage partners. They were all eating meat, even beef. They were converting to Christianity, giving their children English, Christian names. A man's name meant nothing. You could not tell a man's caste from his name, for caste was non-existent. Brahmins no longer wore the sacred thread, and as for the ritual purity called for in this caste, only a few pundits knew the theories that no-one practised. In fact, except for a few carefully-bred Roys, there were no Brahmins left. Hindus were mongrels, a boiled-down stew where no man knew his roots.

  Balwant Uncle said this was due to historical circumstances. The first Indians had lived cramped together in the abandoned slave logies on the sugar estates, without regard for caste and clan, forced to compromise on their thousand-year rules and regulations.

  But Deodat refused to compromise. He would not take a mongrel wife. His wife had to be of pure blood and orthodox upbringing. Her role was to ground a family pure in tradition, raise children as Brahmins. A devoted Hindu wife, steeped in the spirit of her religion, one to revive the dying faith. Most important, his three eldest sons should return home before they, too, succumbed to the spirit of secularism. A woman is the backbone of the family. The family is the backbone of society. Therefore, the woman was the backbone of society. But she had to be an aware woman. A woman of faith, a woman whose own backbone was held upright by God. When Woman falls, society falls, Deodat never tired of saying. There had to be a woman in the home. A good, strong woman. And he would have to import her from India.

  The Bengali branch of the Roy family placed an advertisement for Deodat in the Times of India. But finding a good Brahmin wife for Deodat proved to be near impossible. Fathers stubbornly refused to send their daughters into the Antipodes, quite literally into the Underworld. Deodat considered returning to England to choose a wife: but that was defeating the purpose. He wanted a wife born and bred on India's soil. His Bengali relatives advised him to take a widow. Reluctantly, Deodat saw the necessity for compromise, and permitted the words ‘widow acceptable’ to be included in the ad.

  Several months later Ma stepped off a ship at the Georgetown harbour. It was as easy as that.

  Ma moved into Waterloo Street, and three children were born at two-year intervals: Indrani, Ganesh and Sarojini. Deodat could not have been more pleased, because Ma was exactly what he'd wanted, a still, silent, good spirit of the house, devoted to the children, a good cook, and, above all, an ardent devotee of Shiva.

  The first thing Ma did when she came to Waterloo Street was install the puja room, and she was quite happy to hang up pictures of Krishna and Rama and Vishnu's consort Lakshmi next to those of Siva, Saraswati, and Ganesh, as well as pictures of Jesus, Mary and Buddha. So Baba was satisfied — almost. There were only two bitter drops in his life. The first was that Natarajeshwar, Nathuram and Narendra all refused to move back into Baba's household. Narendra was only thirteen at the time, so Baba forced him to come home, but he ran away nine times and was in danger of falling into extremely bad company, so Baba deemed it better for him to live on with less-than-holy Roys rather than risk complete vagabondage on his own. The three years these boys had spent in foster care had, just as Baba had feared, secularised them beyond redemption. They had enjoyed freedoms they'd never known before; never, ever would they return to orthodoxy; and they had all taken Christian names. Now they were Richard, Walter and James, and they had all settled in London. But Baba called them by their Indian names for the rest of his life.

  The second bitter drop was that caste purity ended with his marriage to Ma. There was no question of importing husbands and wives from India for his children. He would have to marry them to mongrels.

  Ma walked behind Baba. Ma's assimilation into the Roy clan was documented by two items in Balwant Uncle's archives: a creased, limp photo, passport size, of Ma, young, smiling, beautiful, wistful, confident, all these things at once, and more. And a clipping from the Times of India: ‘England-educated Brahmin barrister-at-law, widower, well-settled in Georgetown, British Guiana, South America, excellent income and social standing, seeks remarriage with Brahmin lady of childbearing age, willing to resettle in large pleasant home in Georgetown and raise a family. Widow acceptable. Dowry not required. Condition: must be literate and speak excellent English. Please send photo.’

  Whatever steps had brought Ma to Baba were unknown to all and swept over, unmentioned, by Ma herself. She was a woman without a past; without a name. Baba addressed her as 'Mrs Roy', referred to her as 'my wife', or simply as 'she' and 'her'. Relatives and family friends called her 'Mrs Roy' or 'Mrs Deodat' and even 'Mrs D', or 'Ma D', depending on the degree of familiarity with her. Balwant Uncle and his wife called her Dee, short for Deodat's wife, her nephews and nieces called her Dee Auntie. Her own children called her Ma. Ma, in her turn, never spoke her husband's name in public. She called him Mr Roy, or, capitalised, 'Him', or 'He', or 'my Husband'.

  Ma spoke little. Though her English was excellent (no-one asked, and no-one cared, why she had a perfect British accent) it was always Baba who did the talking. Ma's stories, of course, could go on for hour
s, but then only children were the listeners.

  Ma did the singing. Ma performed the pujas. Ma worshipped Shiva. Ma healed. Ma cooked. Ma nourished. Ma was a cherished figure at all family festivities, especially weddings and wakes. It was said that when Ma worked in the kitchen the food never ran out, and even if fifty unexpected guests turned up, which was often the case because Ma's reputation spread and people were eager to find out if the rumour was true, there were always leftovers.

  Ma cooked not only South Indian rice and sambar; she cooked Bengali, Punjabi and Gujerati. Badaam kheer, sooji halwa and kajoo barfi melted like nectar on greedy Roy tongues. On one occasion they discovered Ma could even bake a Yorkshire pudding, but no-one ever asked how she learned all this, and no-one cared. The Roy men stuffed themselves full of Ma's creations, and with swelling tummies washed their hands and mouths at the sink, burping and farting in deepest satisfaction. The Roy wives watched Ma cook with envious eyes, but Ma was too quick for them to learn her secrets. Chapattis flew out from under her rolling pin on to a growing heap like little flying saucers, her slender little hands flicking busily, expertly between the little balls of dough, the heap of flour, the rolling pin. Ma didn't give explanations; 'Cook with love,' is all she said, so the Roy women gathered in spiteful three- and foursomes and discussed Ma's failings.

  Ma's hands were magic. Her children came to her with scratches and bruises and Ma would pass those little brown hands over the wound and all would be well. They came to her with tummyaches and earaches and growing-pains, and Ma would count out five or eight of the tiny round balls no bigger than a pinhead she kept in little tubes in the old wooden chest, or she'd sprinkle some strange powder in a cup of hot water and hold it to their lips, and their aches and pains would vanish.