Prakash bore Lala Babu a son in the first year of marriage. This did nothing to help her. Her mother-in-law, in her irrational anger, began to starve the girl; she stopped producing milk and Prakash’s son almost died. Disaster was only averted when Lalji ordered Prakash back to the family home to be fattened up again, before sending her back when the milk began to flow.
Prakash gave birth to three more children – my aunt, my mother and another son, who died of cancer aged two. My aunt was born in 1944 – fair and beautiful. My mother, the last to be born – in Haridwar in 1950, in the middle of the Kumbh Mela – was deemed dark-skinned and unattractive.
Between my aunt’s birth and my mother’s birth, the British Empire left India, the nightmare of Partition took place and the country celebrated its independence. On 15 August 1947, the modern nation was born. Prakash recalled the torments of those years, the torture she suffered under her mother-in-law. She told my mother once, ‘I thought in those days, either she has to die, or I do.’
But Lala Babu was the one to die, in 1952, chasing a robber in his jeep. The brakes failed, he crashed into a tree, and smashed his head into the steering wheel. His family blamed Prakash – she was bad luck, a witch. They threw her out, though not before claiming her son. It was only through the intervention of the courts that he was returned.
Suddenly, terribly free. A widow in India. The end of a life.
But Lalji was having none of it. After the traditional thirteen days of mourning he said to his daughter, ‘Now it’s time to get up; if you don’t, you’ll die hungry.’
He gave her two options. The easy one: to become a teacher. The hard: to become a doctor like him. She had already decided she wanted her children to have the same status they would have had if their father were alive. So she decided to become a doctor.
Her father’s friends and colleagues called it absurd. ‘She’s a music student with no grounding in the sciences, how can she become a doctor?’
Lalji said, ‘My daughter has chosen, she will do it.’
But the schools didn’t want to take her; Lalji had to convince them. He said, ‘Just let her sit the exams. If she does well, take her, if not, let it be.’
He coached her intensively, and she took to it with an equal ferocity. Like father, like daughter. She was fascinated by the sciences. As soon as she began studying she said, ‘So this is how the world works! What have I been doing all this time?’
Art and music were cast aside. Physics was her new love. The most dreadful circumstances had allowed her to be free. She went through the junior science syllabus in three months, and when she sat the exams that enabled her to join the final two years of high school, she came top.
But as Lalji coached her, her children were handed over to servants, kept out of sight. When my infant mother cried, the servants removed her, so as not to disturb the student. Later, Prakash said it was a sacrifice worth making in order to improve her children’s lives.
Two years of high school, eight years of medical school: study, sleep, repeat. A life sacrificed with no conception of pleasure or joy. The carefree young girl had vanished. In medical school, the student body respected this tough, widowed woman unconditionally. Those in classes far advanced referred to her, in deference, as ‘didi’ – sister.
She passed through medical school with flying colours and, after another few years of internship, officially became a doctor, graduating into government service, electing to become a gynaecologist.
She had been inspired by the doctor who delivered her first son; she remembered at the time thinking, what a lovely lady, what a great profession, bringing life into the world. So much more respected than a teacher-ji.
From the sixties to the eighties, Prakash worked in government hospitals, establishing a reputation as a tireless, resolute doctor with a steely constitution and an unbreakable will. The young, determined ‘didi’ – sister – vanished, replaced by ‘Mataji’ – mother.
Mataji reigned supreme. She would brook no dissent, commanding unwavering devotion from the men and women beneath her. She rose up the ranks, eventually becoming superintendent of the hospital in Moradabad, a dusty, unforgiving Uttar Pradesh town known for brass and gangsters.
It was the pinnacle of her service.
But it was a hard service. U.P. was, and remains, a very tough, often lawless place. Many rape cases were sent to her. Often young girls. She was unflinching: examining the vaginal discharge, checking for semen or for signs of force and violence. When, in her opinion, rape was confirmed, she would go to court with the evidence, talking coldly and openly about the circumstances of the case. Lawyers would try to intimidate her with their questions; they would use crude language, expect the embarrassed female doctor to break down. But she could be cruder and colder and more intimidating than them all. She pursued justice relentlessly; she never let a case go. The accused and their families often came to her with big money, trying to make her change her testimony, but she refused every time.
For the educated in India, it was a time of expanding horizons. America beckoned the country’s bright young things. Those who could escape for a better life did, and families sent their children away with hope and blessings. But Prakash wanted to keep her children close. My uncle took after his mother in perseverance and dedication. Seeing the sacrifices she had made, he was always at the top of his class, and wanted to succeed for her. But he also wanted to go abroad. A friend offered him a job in the U.S., which had the potential to make him rich – in fact, some of these friends went on to become millionaires and even billionaires. But Prakash forbade him to go; she wanted to keep him close.
My aunt too. When her husband, who worked in the railways, found a lucrative job in the U.S., Prakash told him: ‘I would never have got my daughter married to you if I’d known you were going to take her away from me.’ They went anyway.
My mother, though, she knew she could never leave. To this day she laments the fact that, unlike Lalji to Prakash, no one ever said to her ‘Get up, or you’ll go hungry and die.’ Instead she was encouraged to marry in India.
My father was an intelligent man, with a God-given flair for maths and physics. But his family came from a different place from my mother’s. They were freedom fighters, risen out of poverty at a confluence of religion and mental illness: his father was a Godman – at various times in his life he gave away all their possessions, abandoned his family and took to wandering barefoot across the plains, giving religious discourses to the gathering crowds. The match almost fell apart when Prakash learned of this, but she had taken a liking to my father by then, and so, in her capricious way, she let it be.
My parents ended up being deeply in love. My father passed the entrance exams for the government civil service, but failed the interview because of poor English. Next he passed the entrance exam to the police force but, on the understanding he would be posted to Nagaland in the middle of a bloody insurgency, his application was withdrawn. He began to work for the State Bank of India instead. A safe and steady job, later to give material success when the economy opened up in the 1990s.
They were living in Kanpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1980, when I was born. My mother travelled to Moradabad for my birth, and Prakash, the superintendent of the hospital, delivered me herself. Already having a son, my father wanted a girl. My grandmother was disappointed when this turned out to be the case. She held me in the air with unconcealed contempt and said: ‘Here’s your kali bhavani.’ Here’s your black storm-raiser.
My father was posted many places for his work – we had a nomadic life. Kanpur, Bombay, Bhopal. Some of my earliest memories were of Juhu Beach. We lived in an apartment block there, when the beaches of Bombay were as quiet as Goa’s. I was a shy, secretive girl, inheriting my mother’s meekness and my father’s fire, internalising the latter so that it only raged inside. Before the outbreak of the First Gulf War, my father was posted to Bahrain with the State Bank of India. My lasting memory there is of a huge billboard
outside my window, an image of the Sheikh that covered the entire building opposite, staring at me. We lived in an apartment in the business district, in Manama, one of the smallest cities in the world. The streetlights were always on. I became obsessed with closing the curtains so tightly that not a single chink of light came through, and I would not be seen by the Sheikh.
My father adored and spoilt me, my mother kept me close. But while we were there, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Fearing for my safety, my parents decided to send me back to India, to a boarding school in Dehradun called Welham Girls’. Prakash, with her growing wealth, helped pay for this.
Taken from the tender home, thrown in with other girls who would bully and mock, you developed a thick skin, learned how to scrap and take care of yourself, fight for friends, food, small freedoms. You played politics to survive.
Immensely privileged in the scheme of things, I received a first-class education. But boarding school was a place without love. The lasting consequence of this, one my parents could not foresee, was a detachment, and a wilful independence. Before I left, I had clung to my family, a scared and obedient little girl. By the end of school I didn’t need anyone. I had lost my shyness, but I was unmoored. Family, tradition, obedience … I had no care for them at all.
In 1985, before we moved to Bahrain, Prakash retired from government service. She was sixty years old – by then a terrifying and formidable woman, in no mood to lay down her stethoscope. So she went to Firozabad, another dusty U.P. gangster town, famous for bangles, glasswork, fireworks and child labour, where she had once been posted. There she claimed some of her family’s old ancestral land, with the intention of building a private hospital.
It was a huge plot, prime land on the main road from Agra, right at the start of town before the houses bunched in and the lanes narrowed. It was no surprise that a crooked businessman, one you’d call ‘transport mafia’, was already squatting on the land. First she filed a case in the courts to take it back, and then approached the chief of police, invoking her dead husband’s good name. The chief, upon hearing she was the widow of the famous Lala Babu, told her, ‘Mataji, we will protect you.’ Just to be sure, she went to the Transport Minister and persuaded him to threaten the squatter. This did the trick. She built her hospital, and the message went out: don’t mess with this woman.
Soon the local tough guys were bringing their wives to her and she was delivering their babies. In no time she was famous. Hardened men would fall at her feet. One night a wanted man came into the hospital to see his newborn son. At the side of the crib, he removed his gun and placed it in the boy’s hand. The boy gripped it, as babies do, and the gangster declared proudly, ‘This is my son.’
We came to visit on summer holidays. She was not a grandmother who would tell stories and give you hugs. She’d be working while you slept and, when you woke, she’d be working some more. She had an assistant named Ram Pyari, a fierce local woman who started out as a cleaner, then became a cook, and then was trained as a midwife. By the end she could assist her in operations, administer stitches and deliver babies. But she would always cook chicken curry for us.
I watched during those holidays, looking down into the maternity ward through the grille from the apartment above. The desperate sounds of wailing mothers and howling babies, day and night – this is how I remember my grandmother’s home. A place without laughter and joy, and with a sense of impending doom hanging over it.
It was her kingdom, her domain. She controlled everything and everyone here. Ram Pyari was her enforcer. If anyone tried anything with her, Ram Pyari would say, ‘You speak to me.’ And she’d use her crude village dialect with them.
But it wasn’t as if Prakash shied away. She treated her staff with contempt, and used all kinds of abusive language if they didn’t work properly.
Always, though, she fought for women and their right to live. She refused to perform sex determination tests on expectant mothers. Lots of doctors in town did, and when a baby was discovered to be a girl, the foetus was quietly aborted. But she was adamant. No girl would die because of her. One time a rich family in the jewellery trade came to her with an ultrasound from elsewhere; it showed their daughter was going to have a girl. They wanted her to abort it. She refused, and she begged them not to go elsewhere. Begged them to wait and see. And behold! The woman gave birth to a son. They treated her like a saint for that one.
At the hospital, she also ran an off-the-books adoption service. Unwed mothers, mostly young girls, would leave their babies with her, and she’d find families to take them in. Once a very young girl came in with her family, complaining of a stomachache. It was confirmed that she was eight months pregnant. The pregnancy was kept a secret. When it was delivered, Prakash told the girl and her family that the baby had died, and then gave it to a childless couple.
How strange, then, in all of this, that Prakash maintained that being born a woman was the greatest curse of all. It would be better, she often said, if a woman was not born at all.
She always had to be vigilant. Over the course of the years, other gangsters and goons would try to take her hospital away from her. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Samajwadi Party boss and ex-chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, famous for fielding criminal politicians and saying of gang rapists ‘boys will be boys’, had land next to hers. He wanted to expand, so he used to send men with guns to threaten her. Four of Mulayam’s men came with guns, to try to get rid of her. They pointed their weapons at her head, said they would shoot. She held their gaze and refused to move, and her workers, led by Ram Pyari, formed a circle around her, until the men left.
The Agra Medical Association called her the Iron Lady, in recognition of the challenges she faced, and defeated, in her work.
I finished school and moved back to Delhi in 1998. I lived with my parents begrudgingly, studying journalism at a prestigious all-girls college in Delhi. My parents, delighted to have me back, still thought of me as their little girl. But inside their home, I only felt suffocation.
But in India it was an exciting time. The India I knew was going through a great upheaval. The economy was flourishing, people were no longer fleeing abroad for a life, jobs were abundant, the arts were vibrant. Social relations were changing too; life was loosening in the cities. I worked with a Human Rights N.G.O.; I worked for newspapers and news magazines. I was the first generation of my family not looking to the government for work.
While my grandmother was ruling her hospital in the badlands of U.P., I had many potential futures – TV newsreader, human rights advocate, wife to a wealthy banker, post-grad student at an Ivy League college. It was my decision to make. It was a time of optimism and opportunity and hope. I couldn’t wait to get on in the world.
Then, as I completed my first-year exams, as my parents were about to leave for a holiday in Korea, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumour. They called him to a hospital in Mumbai for exploratory surgery. When he came out he was paralysed and his speech was irreversibly impaired. Over the next year we nursed him, my brother and mother and I, until the tumour killed him. Two deaths, all told.
By the end of it, after a year of holding on, his passing was a release. But it sent me on a different path. What you might call going off the rails.
This coincided with Prakash coming to live with us. In 2000, when she was seventy-five, her hands had begun to shake. Realising she was too old to carry on, and seeing my father’s death as a sign, she sold the hospital and moved to Delhi to live with her widowed daughter and wayward granddaughter.
The three of us together in an apartment. A painful thing. Grief consumed. My mother, who had invested everything in my father, who had never been made to work in her life, now left alone. And Prakash, with her powers lost overnight. In Firozabad she was all-powerful. But here in Delhi, with no empire, no loyal subjects and no adversaries, she fell apart. My mother suggested she help out at a local medical charity, volunteer in some capacity to keep busy, but she stubbornly refused; if she could
not have power, she wanted nothing.
For all her money, all her success, all that she had done in her life, she took pleasure from nothing, and brought nothing of it with her.
She was stranded in a new India. One opened up to the West. And then there was me. My behaviour, the hours I kept, the language I used, my clothes, my ideas about personal freedom, happiness, desire, ambition, choice, duty and sacrifice: all of this made no sense to her.
She tried to interfere, to tell me what I should do. But her sudden presence only irritated me. I resented her living with us, judging, misunderstanding, trying to assert an authority she didn’t have, telling me I couldn’t go out to meet people, forcing me to change my clothes, lecturing me on my life. My father had just died, and now the freedoms I had learned were being curtailed. I looked back at all their lives and saw only the damage that she had caused by insisting she knew what was best, by insisting on taking the most pragmatic approach to all situations. Get married, work. There had never been any joy in her life. Now there was sadness in mine, but I was determined never to go the same way.
Soon after, my boyfriend also died. When this happened, I decided I must live as hard as I could, be reckless and experience all that life had before it was snatched away. I rebelled; I lived a secret life, and ignored all they had to say about marriage, stability, respectability, responsibility.
All the while, Prakash slowly but clearly fell apart. Not knowing what to do with herself, she took to wandering the apartment with her stethoscope, cutting a forlorn figure, a doctor without a patient.
Only occasionally she found one.
Once, a girl in our building came to see her about her missed periods. Prakash took this to mean only one thing: the girl was pregnant and needed a discreet way out. She handed out abortion pills from her private stash. The girl, not being pregnant, having a good relationship with her family, and having nothing to hide, showed the pills to her mother.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 21