And so, even after the army left, the family stayed on. Madhavrao Peshwa died, Maratha power was splintered, threatened by the British and later, the territory went back to Haider Ali following an agreement with Raghunath Rao, the then Peshwa. But all this made no difference to the family; they were too deeply entrenched by then as powerful landlords and collectors of revenue for the region.
The hero of the family document is undoubtedly Vishwasrao. His role in Peshwa Madhavrao’s entourage is not very clear, but whatever he was, Vishwasrao was obviously a very clever man and an ambitious one, who missed no opportunity to retain and enlarge his power. Praise, however, is not reserved for him alone; it is indiscriminately distributed by the writer of the document among many others. If Vishwasrao is the hero of the story, there are other claimants to minor stellar roles. Such and such a one, the document states, was a great soldier, a hero who died in the service of the Peshwa, this man was a learned scholar honoured by one and all, this one was charitable and generous, while another was a saintly man who, giving up all material possessions, ended his days in the Ganapati temple.
(Of the women, there is nothing. They are only an absence, still waiting to be discovered, something that only Aru will notice later. But that is altogether another story, it has no place here.)
Kalyani believes implicitly in the document. To her, the men are what the document says they are—heroic, generous, learned, saintly. Gopal, not blinded by family loyalty and pride, could see the holes and inconsistencies in the story told by this Vyasa. Without mentioning exactly what Vishwasrao’s position in Madhavrao’s entourage was, the impression is created that he was close to the Peshwa, that he was part of his inner circle. (A great deal is made of the fact that Madhavrao, on a later expedition, worshipped at the temple and gave money for its extension and maintainence.) Which, Gopal knows, is not true; he has not been able to find Vishwasrao’s name in any of the records of the expeditions.
He was, this much can be conjectured, one of a large family of children, with a streak of adventure (or desperation?) that made him forsake his meagre family lands and follow the Peshwa on his expeditions. There was enough family spirit in him though, for him to get two of his brothers to join him later and share his prosperity. Though he was not a soldier, the record makes frequent mention of his bravery. (Gopal finds it intriguing that a Brahmin family should take pride in claiming martial qualities. Proof of Toynbee’s theory of mimesis of the creative minority?). One of his sons, however, died fighting in a battle—most probably, the battle of Chinkurali. But their glory really rested on their prosperity, and that prosperity on the initial bit of luck in finding a stone idol, in the grant of lands that followed and in becoming revenue collectors for the region. And, of course, keeping on the right side of the rulers—whoever they were.
Though the document speaks with fervour of Madhavrao, after his death the family did not stay loyal to the Peshwas. The truth was that if they were to survive in this foreign land which they were preparing to make their own, they had to make their peace with the local rulers and become their loyal subjects. It took all their diplomacy, all their guile, to stay afloat, until they reached a stage of prosperity when it was they who were courted by successive rulers. And then they belonged.
Traitors? Kalyani would scorn the word. And Gopal is inclined to agree with her. In that era of flux, when the Marathas, Haider and his son, Tipu, the Nizam, the local Mysore rajas and the two foreign powers were all fighting for control, when rulers changed in quick succession, what did loyalty mean? When bits of kingdoms were bought and sold, when rulers bartered away land in exchange for peace, to whom was loyalty owed? And in any case, the family stayed loyal to the things that they considered mattered—to their caste, their status and their ideas of themselves. They clung tenaciously to their language, Marathi, and each generation imported brides from the ‘homeland’ so that the original language should not be lost or corrupted. (Though eventually, inevitably, it was.) The generation after Vishwasrao’s sons gave up the pretence of soldiering and settled down to being landlords, using the soldiers who had decided to stay back, as labourers. Knowing that being guardians of the temple gave them privileges and a position no ruler dared deprive them of, they held on to that, though the work of actual worship had long since been handed over to another family. The family name Bhat, which they had adopted after finding the idol, was dropped, later generations calling themselves just Rao.
And so the family took root, settled, prospered. How could they not, Gopal thought, when he visited the village Ganeshkhed. (This was before he married Sumi.) Sitting on the narrow embankment of a culvert, Gopal could hear the canal singing sweetly as it flowed along the roadside. In the distant fields, where they had set fire to the sugarcane roots, he could see the flames, creating a beautiful pattern as they moved forward on their devouring crusade, a pattern that spoke not of destruction, but of preparation for the next crop. How, indeed, could they have failed to prosper, with such fertile lands within their grasp?
By the time of Gopal’s visit, the fields were no longer family property; the temple too, though it still stood, was just bare stone walls, no longer a place of worship, defiled, it was said, by a suicide within its precincts. The family house was long since in ruins and none of the family lived in the village. They had moved to Bangalore before this century began, in the train of a Narayanrao, who had been taken into government service by the then Diwan. Narayanrao had built another family home in Bangalore. A temple, too, wholly unlike the simple stone setting for the stone god on the banks of the river in Ganeshkhed. A garishly decorated god and temple that Kalyani and Goda speak of with pride and nostalgia. Yes, truly the family prospered.
Thinking of this while he waited by the roadside for the bus to take him back to Bangalore, Gopal became aware of the voices of a group of boys wading in knee-deep water. He could not see what they were doing, only that it was not play but work; their voices told him that. The words came clearly to him through the evening hush and he realized that they were speaking Marathi. Almost unrecognisable, wholly changed from the language as it once was perhaps, nevertheless it was Marathi. And Gopal was startled into the thought: why, they are part of it, too. The history that Kalyani is so proud of belonging to, the history which she reads with such pleasure on her family document—it is their history as well. The ancestors of these boys were as much part of a conquering army as Vishwasrao had been. Yet they remain here, still scratching out a meagre living from the land, while Kalyani’s family, having got all they could from it, moved on to richer pastures. And this, not merely because of a stone idol that lay in the river waiting to be picked up. It is the knowledge of what they had been that made the family privileged, it is the writing down of it that gave them the consciousness and set them apart. To be ignorant of your history is to be deprived of it.
‘Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.’
Kierkegaard’s words have often made Gopal wonder: but what kind of an understanding does knowledge yield?
When Gopal became a student of history, it had seemed to him that there was a truth that lay at the end of the road, waiting to be revealed to him. It did not take him long to realize the futility of this hope. Historians, even the most brilliant of them, especially the most brilliant of them, are like magicians. With flamboyance they draw your attention to what they want you to see, take it away from what they want to conceal. ‘Look!’ they will say, ‘the Queen of Spades.’ And you see the Queen of Spades. All else is concealed in the darkness of a deliberate deceit.
‘History exists in the final analysis for God.’ Camus is right. Yes, that is how it is. Only God, or whoever it is standing outside this game, can see the whole of it. For the rest of us, a story in which we play a role ourselves, can never be clear to us. Only a Vyasa could write a story in which he played a role, and at times a not very noble role, with such detachment and clarity. It is not surprising then, that in Kalyani’s cons
truct of the family story there is no room for any minute details. She sees it like a mural on a large scale, the figures larger than life-size, the flaws and inaccuracies too minute to be noticed.
Yet, for Kalyani, her picture is the true one. And why not? After all, we can lay claim only to our own truths. The ‘higher truth’, as the Rig Veda calls it, is always beyond our grasp, that reality continues to evade us. Even the ‘inferior truth’ of facts is treacherous. And therefore it is, perhaps, that we prepare carefully edited versions of our lives to present to the world. For ourselves too. Except that we know they are there, the alterations, the deletions; but we ignore them, these squiggles, these jottings in the margin, we pretend they are not there, we tell ourselves we have changed nothing.
People have a right to their own history; they need their myths as much as the facts, perhaps even more. That Meerabai drank poison and lived, that Purandaradasa was converted by God in the guise of a mendicant, that Tukaram’s poems emerged intact from the river after thirteen days—these beliefs are part of people’s lives; to do away with them is to make a rent in the fabric of their lives.
Thus had Gopal argued with himself when he decided to retract the theory he had worked out in his article, after his accidental discovery of some erotic poems. To connect these to the devotional poems of a saint-poet, to reveal that it was the same man who had written both, to replace the myth of the pure untarnished saint with the truth of a passionate human being who stumbled his way to sainthood—suddenly it seemed wrong. I have no right to do it, he had thought. People have a right to their own history. To deprive them of it is to take away their own idea of themselves.
And yet, even when he had articulated this to himself, Gopal had known something that he could no longer ignore: that he was indulging in sophistry. ‘Their own history’—yes, that is where the problem lies. Gopal knows, he has long realized, that we have a very complex relationship with the past. Whether we are resisting it, reliving it, ignoring it, or trying to recreate it—all these things often at the same time—we are always, in some way, trying to reshape it to our desires. Therefore, this idea of ‘oneself is, actually, what we want ourselves to be.
Kalyani, plunging into the past with her granddaughter Aru, will try to refashion her family history out of carefully chosen material, leaving out everything that is dark and discomforting. Nevertheless, Aru will get a glimpse of the part that Kalyani has written out; like a cloud looming in the distance, she will know it is there, even if its shape is not very clear.
The truth, perhaps, is that whatever we do, we are always giving the past a place in our lives.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN KALYANI and Goda during Goda’s weekly visits follows a regular pattern. It begins with Goda’s recital of complaints about her husband, Satyanarayan, to which Kalyani responds with sympathetic, energetic clucks and a constant repetition of ‘you poor thing’. To anyone who knows what the lives of the two women are, it would seem odd for Kalyani to pity Goda. (And even odder, perhaps, for Goda never to reciprocate.) But Kalyani’s habit of sympathizing, of protecting ‘poor Goda’ began in their childhood, for Goda’s life, so comfortable now, had a very unpromising start. Losing her mother at birth, she became in effect an orphan when her father married soon after and relinquished his baby daughter to the care of his wife’s brother and his wife. Soon, he seemed to forget the very existence of this motherless child.
In her uncle’s house, where there already was an only child, Kalyani, Goda could have been neglected, she might have been unfairly treated, made conscious of the difference between her and the daughter of the house. But that never happened. Goda was much loved by her uncle and aunt and in turn wholly devoted to them. Between her and Kalyani there was the strong bond of sisters, a bond that stood even the stress of Kalyani’s mother, Manorama, making much of Goda, often showing her greater affection than she did her own daughter, so that outsiders were sometimes misled into thinking that it was Goda who was the daughter of the house.
It was a happy childhood for Goda. Her luck held in marriage too, for Satyanarayan was, still is, an easy-tempered man, a good provider and cheerful companion, laying his jokes at Goda’s feet like a homage, and even today, after forty years of marriage, devoted to his wife.
And yet each week there is this recital of Satya’s peccadilloes, from his cheating on his diabetic diet, to his insistence on driving their old Fiat (named, by their grandson Hrishi, ‘More Hit Than Miss’) and his extravagance in buying, according to Goda, all the magazines on the stands, both English and Kannada.
Since Sumi’s return, however, things have changed. Satya has taken a back seat and it is Sumi’s and Gopal’s marriage that is most often spoken of. In whispers. Listening to them, Sumi sometimes has a picture of her marriage moving slowly through this dark tunnel of whispers to the yawning silent darkness into which Kalyani’s own marriage has disappeared. Today, interrupting the two women, Sumi catches the quick flashing look they exchange, the sudden silence that follows.
‘Don’t stop,’ she says crossly. ‘Go on, you can speak of Gopal and me, I don’t mind.’
‘Sumi, why do you think ....’
‘Actually, we were speaking of Devi. Has she rung you up? She told me she would.’
‘No, she hasn’t.’
Sumi doesn’t believe Goda, but that night Devaki does ring up.
‘Sumi, I’m having a party this Saturday, I want you to come.’
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘None. We’ve become too dull. That’s what Vasu says. And he’s been grumbling that it’s all my fault, that I don’t think of anything but my work these days. Isn’t that just like a man? It was he who pushed me into starting this business. But you will come, won’t you, Sumi?’
‘Yes.’
Sumi hears the little sigh Devi gives at her assent, as if she’s been holding her breath, a sigh that belies her casual tone.
‘Lovely. Hrishi will pick you up.’
‘What, sit behind that maniac in a good sari? No, thank you, I’ll come on my own.’
‘And let me confess,’ it comes out in a rush, ‘I’ve invited Gopal, too.’ Sumi is silent. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Mind? Why should I? But let me tell you that if it’s for us to meet, we’ve already done that.’
‘Oh!’ A pause. ‘You have?’ Another pause. ‘Well, all right.’
Devaki is back to her usual brisk tone. ‘I want both of you to be here.’
‘Has Gopal agreed to come?’
‘Well—he didn’t say he wouldn’t, he said he’d try....’
He won’t come, Sumi thinks, and she is sure that Devaki, for all her professed confidence, is not so sure, either. Her eyes, even as she greets Sumi, are darting around anxiously.
‘My God, Sumi, that’s a beautiful sari. You look gorgeous.’
‘Good enough to seduce Gopal?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s Kalyani-mavshi’s sari, isn’t it? These old saris make me drool.’
‘You’re looking very smart yourself.’
The blossoming of Devaki after marriage into a chic young woman is like a modern-day Cinderella story. Seeing an old picture of the three of them, Sumi, Premi and Devaki, Charu had exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe this is you, Devi-mavshi.’
And Devaki had laughed at herself in the picture—a skinny, awkward girl in glasses, wearing a short, straight dress that showed her knobby knees, scowling, as if conscious of the unpleasing image she was presenting to the camera.
‘I look a sight, don’t I? I always wonder where Amma used to get me my frocks from. They were uniformly hideous. And what about your mother, Charu? Look at her in her parachute!’
But even the ‘parachute’ (their word for the long shapeless skirts yoked to a bodice that girls had worn then) could not hide Sumi’s grace.
‘Oh, put those picture away someone, I can’t bear to see myself,’ Devaki had exclaimed.
But her easy laugh had made it clear that, unlike Premi, w
ho could never look at her younger self without feeling a knot of pain inside her, Devaki felt comfortably distanced from the awkward girl she had been.
It has been a long journey. Devaki had been the dark one in a family of fair people, the ‘Madrassi’ in the North where she grew up, the odd Hindi-speaking girl who did not know her own language well enough when they came home. Conscious of her shortcomings (my mother never let me forget them, she says wryly), Devaki had deliberately remade herself, successfully lopped all the awkward corners off herself. And with marriage to Vasudev Murthy, a successful architect from a distinguished family, she had gained confidence, fitted herself easily into the kind of life Vasu wanted. And now, with her becoming a ‘woman entrepreneur’, she has moved into an independent role of her own.
But Devaki’s feelings for Sumi haven’t changed from what they were in their childhood. Sumi was the daughter of Kalyani-mavshi who lived in the Big House. A fact that made them, in some way, superior. It was Goda who had implanted this consciousness in them; though, as she grew up, Devaki began to wonder about it—why were they superior? Certainly Devaki and her brothers were better dressed, they went to better schools and they had, when they settled down in Bangalore, a nicer home. But Devaki granted Sumi superiority ungrudgingly, without any reservation. Sumi was her childhood idol, the way she would like to have been herself. Beautiful, graceful, effortlessly, almost without wanting to, gathering friends around herself.
The breakdown of Sumi’s marriage has hit Devaki hard. Her efforts to talk to Gopal, to make him see reason have failed. And so this attempt at reconciliation. She is anxiously waiting for Gopal, afraid he won’t come. She has almost given up on him when, finally, he does.
He enters when the party has reached a stage in which the guests have spread themselves in groups over all the three rooms Devaki has opened for the evening. Nobody notices Gopal at first and he stands listening to Murthy speaking about the conversion of his old family home into its present form.
A Matter of Time Page 10