by Jerry Pinto
The tahsildar came out, looking sheepish.
The sight of a government official dispersed them and we trundled along again until we came across a decapitated body across the tracks. The tahsildar clucked a bit. He wanted the body moved so that we could continue our odd journey and get it over with. But I was having none of it.
‘Find his head,’ I said. ‘And find out who he is.’ The men looked a bit put out.
I got out of our wheelbarrow. ‘I am not going anywhere unless you find his head, reunite it with his body and go and find out who he was and make sure his parents or his family know.’
It took some doing but finally, some dignity had been accorded to the dead. Then the tahsildar showed me a piece of land, crawling with mosquitoes, filled with rocks and pebbles. I did write another letter but I don’t think it worked. I believe the settlement was relocated and the matter ended there.
I tried but when you have thousands of years of prejudice on one side and an economically backward community on the other, it is not difficult to guess which side wins all the time.
Finally there was my run-in with those who practise a religion in its outward form but ignore its basic principles. And whatever theologists may say or priests may opine, the basic principle of every religion enjoins upon us an admission of our common humanity, and a respect that should grow out of it.
It was a hot day in April 1983 and a Friday. Across the Street from where I live is a building called Allana House, which has a mosque in its garage. Every Friday, namaaz was offered at this mosque and the road was blocked to traffic as the faithful gathered to pray on the road.
But this was no ordinary Friday. I was going to bring my father home from Bombay Hospital where he had been recovering from a stroke. Dom offered to come with me, and to this day, I have never been able to decide whether this was one of those incidental kindnesses or it was an intuition. Before we set out, I went down to talk to the young men in charge of setting up the barricades and blocking the traffic. I explained that I was bringing an old man, a sick old man home and that I would need to be able to bring the taxi up to the gate of the building. I explained that he would not have the strength to climb even a few stairs. They assured me that it would be all right, that the barricades would not stretch the entire length of the road.
But when we returned home, Dom in the front seat of the taxi and my father in the back seat with me, we found that the road had been three-quarters blocked, leaving no room for a car to pass. I got down from the cab and approached the barricades. It was around noon and the sun was beating down on our heads. I waited for the prayer to finish and then I asked the men at the barricades whether I could get the taxi in. I explained that it was an old man, a sick man … but the whole lot ignored me. I might have been a cockroach for all anyone cared.
The Koran speaks beautifully of the milk of human kindness. It speaks of respect for all life. It does not suggest that one should ignore the old and the infirm. I felt an anger rise in me. These men could not be praying. They could not be reaching out towards something larger than themselves if what they were doing allowed them to ignore the needs of an old man.
Finally, my patience ran out. ‘Are you praying or performing gymnastics?’ I asked.
This was enough to set them off. Two hefty butchers, clad in the lungis of their trade, leapt at me. One of them spat in my eyes, blurring my vision with a gobbet of thick phlegm. Then both of them grabbed me by the arms, lifting me off the ground, while one of them hit me on the head and the other punched me in the kidneys. Others went for the taxi, climbing on to it and thumping at the roof. There was rage in their voices as they threatened to burn the taxi, and kill whoever was inside it. The taxi driver fled, leaving his keys in the car.
I do not know whether we would have survived this onslaught but help was at hand. Mrs Lucia Gurung, whose home on Mereweather Street allowed her a view of our proceedings, came to her balcony to see what was going on. She sent her nephew off to get the police. He happened on a traffic police officer in his open black jeep and brought him to the scene. As soon as they saw a uniform, the brave young men who were beating a woman and trying to terrorise an old man, began to run.
The traffic policeman got the taxi towed up to the building. He got us all up two floors, taking my father first, carrying him in a football tackle. The air was still full of violence and threats. ‘The old man doesn’t go anywhere, but the woman should watch her step,’ an anonymous male voice shouted. ‘We’ll burn the building down,’ shouted another. ‘The husband. The husband, he has to come out. A quick slash with a knife …’
I got my father settled and Dom into bed. Dom had been roughed up; they had taken off their footwear and hit him in the face, an offence that offered more psychological hurt than physical harm, but they had broken his spectacles too. Then Mrs Gurung and Dr Navin Kumar, both of whom were active in the South Mumbai community of Colaba, came to see us. I was in growing pain but I had not had time for tears.
‘You must make a police complaint,’ said Mrs Gurung.
I went with them to the police station. There sat a constable with a stub of pencil behind his ear and the air of a man who was not likely to be surprised by anything in the world.
I explained that a Mob had attacked me.
‘Mr Mob or Mrs mob?’ He asked in Bambaiya Hindi. I had the distinct impression that I had stepped through the looking glass.
Then a young man was brought into the police station. Not a yard from where I was sitting, a policeman began to beat him brutally, slapping his face, dragging him up when he slumped, slapping him again and again.
I could not take it any more. I walked away but I was in tears.
Later when K.A. Abbas heard of what had happened, he wrote a very public apology. He knew that I had read the Koran in Devnagari and that I was a Sufi. I would not have offered disrespect to any religion. His legendary column that took the back page of the Blitz had the headline ‘Leela, Forgive Us’.
But I want also to say that humanity is not always like that. I met my dearest friend in Geneva, the same city in which I was attacked. She was Catherine Lombard then, she is Catherine Kuhn-Lombard now. I was Leela Naidu then, and I am Leela Naidu-Moraes now. Our friendship has lasted fifty-seven years, since the time we met as girls, and it has survived a trip we made together to South India when we were both in our fifties. I have been told that travelling together may be fatal to a friendship, but I remember Catherine leaning out of a window and turning into a schoolgirl again with excitement.
‘Leela, Leela,’ she shouted, ‘the cows are yellow!’
It was, of course, a turmeric bath for the family cow, a white one, on an auspicious day in Kerala. But we laughed together as we leaned out of the windows of our Hotel, laughed as if we were schoolgirls again, munching Toblerone and bread as we walked through another landscape, which we absorbed with younger eyes.
FOUR
ANOTHER HOME
We returned to India in 1955, when Daddy had been transferred to Delhi as the Science Director for UNESCO, South-East Asia. He had known Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, the Gandhian freedom fighter and patron of the arts, for years and when she heard that we had returned, she invited all of us to her home in Electric Lane for a performance by Balasaraswati, one of the greatest bharatanatyam dancers of any age.
I was wearing a Kanjeevaram sari and sitting with my parents, when I was politely summoned ‘backstage’ by Balu, who was both her brother and her nattuvanar, the one who keeps time and calls out the jathis.
I was now in the presence of the legendary Balasaraswati in her makeshift green room, where she was waiting for me.
‘I want your petticoat tape,’ she said when I had made my namaskaaram.
I goggled a bit at that. How would my sari stay up?
‘I will tie up your petticoat with a knot,’ she said.
And so I gave up my petticoat tape and she tied a knot in my petticoat. Then I draped my sari back around myself. Next,
I was ordered to get a hibiscus for her hair. Holding on to my sari, I tottered off to pluck a flower. (I need not have worried. The knot was so secure that it took both my mother and me to work it loose at the end of the evening.)
But when she began to dance, I forgot all about this. She was dancing on a veranda, lit only by a stand of many diyas, perfectly positioned so that it would throw her shadow on to the wall of the house. She was by then a mature woman, full of figure, her arms like hams. But in front of our eyes, she became a beautiful young Radha, pining for her Krishna. Her body was her instrument.
The next day we went to the Vigyan Bhavan for a seminar on dance. There was Rukminidevi arundale who gave a talk in which she described how bharatanatyam had not been considered a respectable form until she came along. Then Mrinalini Sarabhai spoke and she said that bharatanatyam had not been a respectable form until she came along.
I wondered whether Mesdames Arundale and Sarabhai had thought about what they were saying, about the effect it would have on a woman who had actually started out her life expecting to be a devadasi or temple dancer. But Balasaraswati’s expressive face—her abhinaya was legendary—was impassive.
Then it was her turn to address the audience. She said that she would not speak. She would dance. And in a corner of that stage, without proper lighting, without proper accompaniment, she danced spontaneously, beautifully, singing as she danced and once again she became Krishna, before our eyes, Krishna who was saving the world from the net of Maya.
When she had finished, we were leaving. I was wrapped up in what I had seen, eager to go home and replay it all, to process it and understand it or at least get a sense of it, when a loud carrying voice stopped all of us in our tracks.
‘Naidu gaaru,’ called Balasaraswati.
We stopped and turned.
‘My mother was a devadasi in your temple,’ she said. ‘Now your daughter Leela—she will be a dancer. Balu will come to your home tomorrow and I will come with him.’
My mother was delighted and wanted to know if there was anything special she would like to eat.
‘Lots of sweets,’ said the dancer. Of course, she was diabetic and of course, she ignored the advice that her doctors gave her.
The next day she came around teatime. She tucked into the sweets and told me the story of her life.
‘My mother was my first guru. Then she sent me to Kittappa Pillai. He would hit me with a plank with nails embedded in it wherever my posture was not correct. I took that for a while and then I ran away and went back to my mother. I told her that I wouldn’t dance and I didn’t. I didn’t dance for five years.’
I could completely sympathise with a little girl who …
‘But I missed it and one day I told her I would dance again but only if he would not hit me.’
And so began my first lessons in bharatanatyam with a woman who straddled two eras: the one in which it was seen as a debased temple form danced by devadasis and the other in which it had become a classical art form meant for middle-class girls and performed in front of admiring audiences across the world.
In the next three weeks that Balu was in Delhi, he came every day and gave me a basic grounding in bharatanatyam. Then he got his marching orders and had to leave for Chennai. Those three magical weeks had only whetted my appetite. I had not learnt either ballet or modern dance in order to perform. I was not intent on learning bharatanatyam in order to present my skills at an arangetram. But if I was finally to live in India, I felt I would be able to understand my country just that much more if I knew the rhythms of its dances.
Daddy had known sitarist Ravi Shankar in Paris when he would come there as a child, accompanying his brother Uday Shankar on the latter’s tours. He would come to meet my parents whenever he was in Delhi. When he heard that I was interested in dance, he sent Debuda, the third brother, to teach me dancing. That was an entirely different experience. Where Balasaraswati had concentrated on tradition and found freedom to express herself within that tradition, Debu was a syncretist at heart. When he was sure that my body was obeying the ancient geometry of bharatanatyam—the straight line between the shoulder blade and the elbow, the square formed by the thighs in a squatting position with the knees in a vertical line with the feet—we began to incorporate elements of Odissi and Bengali folk dance forms. We would even improvise a little from time to time.
I wondered, of course, whether I should try and get into an Indian college before going to Oxford. To that end, my batch-mate at L’Ecole Internationale, Kay Myrdal, the daughter of Gunnar Myrdal, the economist, and I went to meet the principal at Miranda House. I tried to prime Kay before we went in.
‘They will ask us some fairly loopy questions.’
‘Loopy? Let them try,’ laughed Kay.
My heart sank. She thought they were going to test us. I rather thought that the only test would be our patience. And so it was.
We were ushered into the room of the man who was supposed to interview us and decide whether we were suitable for Miranda House. He may have been some kind of vice-principal. I cannot remember. I have always been bad with bureaucracies. I don’t even remember his name. I have always been bad with the names of people whom I do not like.
‘Do you know how to use a dictionary?’ He asked.
Kay began to splutter. Applying a firm but gentle pressure to her ankle, I assured him we did.
‘Do you know how to read a map?’ He asked.
‘Calmes toi,’ I said to Kay, hoping that she would heed my advice and stay calm. Then I said to the man, ‘Yes, we can.’
‘Do you read the papers?’ He asked.
I did not dare look at Kay but I knew she would be red in the face.
‘We do,’ I said.
‘You know why I am asking you?’ He asked.
‘We don’t,’ I said.
‘Because when you read a word in the papers that you do not understand, you can look up the dictionary. And if you see a news article about a place you do not know, you can find it on the map.’
Kay got up suddenly. There was a moment when I feared that she would explode. But she didn’t.
‘Come, Leela,’ she said.
We left together and that put paid to the notion of my joining a college in India. I would wait and go to Oxford, I thought. At that point, I had no idea that a few years later, I would be playing a dancer in my first film. But then I also had no idea that I was to be married to Tilak Raj Oberoi, bear twins, go through a divorce, lose my daughters thanks to the regressive stance of the Hindu Marriage Act, which granted the male parent custody as a matter of course, and start acting before I was twenty years old.
But oddly, my preparation for a career in cinema started when I went to Paris to see a doctor.
FIVE
PARIS BY RENOIR
‘Meet my daughter Leela,’ my father began to say when I was pregnant. ‘It takes you a few minutes to walk around her.’
But then that was my father’s way. Dilip Kumar (his real name was Yusuf) was a friend and we went to see Ganga Jumna with him. In the course of the film, my father heard a phrase, ‘ullu ka patta’.
‘What does that mean?’ He asked Yusuf saahab.
‘It means, “son of an owl”.’
‘Can I call my daughter “ullu ki patti”?’ he asked.
Yusuf saahab looked a little surprised but he considered it in his logical fashion. Then he delivered his verdict. ‘I suppose so,’ he said and I got a new nickname.
I had always been slim and I was carrying the twins in the front. After I delivered them, I began to have some problems with the muscles of my lower abdomen. They had been distended so far that they weren’t recovering normally. At that time Roberto Rossellini was in India. He enjoyed my mother’s cooking and my father’s conversation and would often drop in at Sujan Singh Park in Delhi where they lived.
‘Ingrid had the same problems after she had the twins,’ he told my parents. ‘She went to Dr Samoil. Send Leela to him.’
The only problem was that Dr Samoil was in Paris. I wonder if anyone would believe what we had to go through to go abroad in those days. I was going on ‘medical grounds’ but the government wanted a government Hospital to certify you as sick. So Daddy and I went off to a hospital where a woman with a moustache put me on a gurney.
‘Lift your legs,’ she said.
Dr Thomas, the British surgeon who delivered my twins, said that he should have put me in a steel corset but what saved me was the ballet training. It was not that I did not want to raise my legs, but my muscles were so weak that I could not. I hated the idea of being helpless. I hated the idea of inhabiting a body that would not obey me. So when she asked me to lift my legs, I tried. The moustachio-ed doctor may have thought I was malingering but when she saw the strain on my face, she was moved to help. Together we got my legs up, but then I found I couldn’t even lower them again.
She came out of the examination room and looked at my father. ‘I think she has a medical problem,’ she said to him.
‘We think so too,’ said my father dryly and my passport was duly stamped.
But I went to Paris and called Ingrid Bergman, not without a butterfly or two fluttering weakly in my weakened stomach. ‘Ingrid est un peu cabotin,’ said her husband. That was a nasty word, an almost untranslatable word. It meant that she was a grandstander, someone who acted from the surface but not from within. I didn’t think so but I kept my opinion to myself. I did not think I knew enough to argue with Rossellini but I also felt a little as though I had let my own opinions down.
The voice on the other end of the telephone line was warm, welcoming and I presented myself and my letter of introduction to Ingrid Bergman who was at the Hotel Rafael. With her were a round little man with a pug nose and the pink cheeks of a Provencal farmer and a petite woman with a tight-lipped expression.