A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Looking back, I wonder if my memory of my father walking proudly in a beige gabardine suit and a brown tie next to the carriage of the deputy commissioner of Sargodha, drawn by four sleek black horses, while a police band playing (I now imagine) ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ leads the parade celebrating the victory of the British empire at the end of the Second World War, has his unacknowledged political differences with his own father as its latent agenda. I wonder if it was the whispering of my grandfather’s long-stilled voice, which, unlike most of my contemporaries for whom going to a British university after college was almost a rite of passage, stopped me from going to the UK for my higher university studies. Indeed, for many years of my young adulthood I was even reluctant to visit Britain, a country that had loomed large but contradictorily in the imaginations of my father and my grandfather. The disavowed part of my father’s psyche, his Indianness, would push itself forward as an aspect of my own identity as I aged, connecting me to the part of my father’s self that he had severed from his consciousness as unworthy when he entered the colonial civil service in 1935. The complex emotional stance of many Indians towards the West, from regarding it as worthy of admiration and imitation to incensed denigration, is not free of their less than conscious relationships with their own fathers and grandfathers.

  In the three months of 1943 of which I am writing, I remember my grandfather being mostly at home. The memory that particularly stands out is of my tickling his impressive paunch while he is trying to take his afternoon siesta. What I am doing is coaxing him to play jhoote maian with me. This is our private game in which I sit astride his feet while he is lying on his back. My chest leans against his knees that are drawn up to his chest. Holding both my hands in his and crying out ‘Jhoote!’ my grandfather extends his knees upwards and I am swung high in the air on his legs. He then cries ‘Maian!’ as he draws his knees back against his chest and brings down his feet on the bed, giving me the brief sensation of a fall that is delicious because it is destined to end safely, combining pleasure and fear in just the right proportions.

  The physical surroundings of my father’s family home and its lack of furnishings are just the background to my memories of that period. The images stamped enduringly on my psyche have an impress of swirling movement and excitement contained within secure boundaries of loyalty and protection with which the family surrounded each individual member, no matter how small. Moving from one part of the house to another, I could, within a few minutes, be witness to loud quarrels, heart-rending sobs, tender consolations, flirtatious exchanges, uproarious laughter and sober business conversations. The kitchen on the second floor, as much the heart of the house as its stomach, was always full of women—daughters of the house, female relatives and visitors. Presided over by my strong-willed grandmother, it was busy from early in the morning, and except for a couple of hours’ break in the afternoon, closed late in the night. One ate whatever one liked and whenever one liked and there was always a steaming hot snack that had just come out of a deep-bottomed, cast-iron frying pan. At all times, there were more than a dozen cousins and visiting children from the neighbourhood and we played everywhere: on the roof terrace, in all the rooms of the house, outside in the alley. There were no private spaces and all these sites were without boundaries, blending seamlessly into one another. Whenever I was tired, I’d find an empty bed, generally a mattress on the floor, and some woman would eventually drift over and put me to sleep. As the eldest son of the eldest son, I had the privilege of demanding that my favorite aunt, Darshana, my father’s youngest sister, put aside her kitchen or other household duties and tell me stories while I tried to fight the encroachment of sleep. Many of the stories were from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata but what I loved most was when she read out of Chandrakanta, a six-volume romance that was her favourite and soon became my obsession.

  Chandrakanta by Devaki Nandan Khatri, considered to be the first work of prose in the modern Hindi language, is said to have significantly contributed to the language’s popularity, with hundreds of thousands of people in north India learning Hindi at the turn of the twentieth century so that they could read the novel and its sequels. The story is about two lovers who belong to rival kingdoms. The father of the princess, Chandrakanta, has sworn revenge against his daughter’s lover who he holds responsible for the death of his only brother. The actual assassin is the evil Krur Singh in the king’s own court who dreams of marrying Chandrakanta and taking over the throne. The story is full of the most fantastic adventures, of tilisms and aiyars. A tilism is a kind of maze containing many secret locations, passages and prisons. The person who successfully breaks the tilism not only releases all who were imprisoned in it but comes into possession of its vast treasures. I became an inveterate breaker of tilisms, that is, when I was not being an aiyar who is a spy in the service of a king, a formidable fighter who can also disguise himself to impersonate any person or an animal. There are a few greater satisfactions for a child than to rescue beloved adults from impregnable prisons to which in your anger, in your ‘bad’ version, you might have confined them in the first place. The only other act that affords similar pleasure is to slip out of the skin of a five-year-old at will and don that of whichever person or animal you wish to be at the moment.

  I was hooked to this enchanted, fictional world where nothing was impossible. A part of me remained caught up in the happenings in this imaginary world even when my aunt was absent, busy with her other tasks during the day, the adventures of Chandrakanta dominating my reveries before I fell asleep.

  An old-fashioned psychoanalyst, part of a vanishing breed that liked to make one-to-one connections between psychic cause and effect, will connect the dawn of my imagination to the birth of my sister. ‘Ah, yes,’ he will observe, ‘the boy’s fantasies of omnipotence were a natural consequence of his entry into the adult world at the age of five and his consequent discovery of his own smallness in relation to the paternal phallus.’ I remain eternally grateful to my then sixteen-year-old aunt, Darshana, who I coloured with the hue of some of my boyish passion for my mother, that she offered me the beauty of literary imagination.

  Chandrakanta, and its sequels, such as the adventures of my favourite aiyar Bhootnath in seven volumes, set me on a furious course to learn Hindi so that I could read the books myself and not depend on the devoted but still capricious availability of my young aunt. Darshana not only encouraged me, but also took my Hindi lessons in her most capable hands.

  At the age of five, six months after my sister’s birth in October 1943, when we returned to Lahore for a family wedding, I wrote my first letter in Hindi to my father, informing him that red spots had appeared on the body of my baby sister, Sudha. Sudha was the first name my father had thought of giving my sister. Like matching clothes for siblings, Sudhir and Sudha seemed to go well together as names till my grandmother objected. ‘What is this sudda, sudda?’ she said, pronouncing my sister’s brand-new name with a hard ‘d’ in a Punjabi accent rather than the soft ‘dh’ of the original Sanskrit. ‘She will hate that name when she is teased by other children.’

  Acknowledging the strength of her argument—‘sudda’ is the word for hard turd in Punjabi—my father changed it to Suleena, an unusual and vaguely Sanskrit sounding name that he insisted meant ‘someone who becomes absorbed in the Divine’. My own name means ‘he who is steadfast’, although whenever asked I always bent its meaning to ‘he with courage’. My interpretation, courage instead of patience and steadfastness, I would like to believe, is more in tune with my image of myself.

  I now wonder how much of the warmth and excitement of the memories of my recurrent immersion in the life of my father’s extended family can be attributed to the majesty of Eros. The promiscuous sharing of beds and the contact with many different bodies in sleep are highly eroticizing for a child. Even otherwise, the extended family, given the constraints of space in which most Indians live, creates an erotic field that is inconceivable for those who ha
ve grown up in modern, nuclear families. Living in close quarters with many couples and with at least a pre-conscious awareness of their sexual lives by registering in half sleep at night those special whispers, giggles and stifled cries of pleasure against a background score of snores in many different pitches, and witnessing the signs of passion on the faces and bodies in the morning as mattresses are rolled up, is a constant source of sexual excitement. The large Indian family is not only a system of duties and obligations but also a highly charged field of eroticism. Occasions such as a marriage, where an imminent sexual union is the raison d’être of the whole family coming together, crackle with erotic excitement. Dozens of cousins, male and female, are thrown together in close proximity for a succession of celebratory evenings of music and dance, without the prohibitions and injunctions that normally govern the contact between the sexes. The abiding popularity of long scenes of marriage festivities in Bollywood movies can then also be attributed to the reconnection with those moments of a child’s life that were made radiant by the colours of Eros.

  Of Fathers and Men

  1944–45 Sargodha

  1947–48 Rohtak

  I have no recollection of my mother’s return to Sargodha with the baby. This must have been at the end of 1943. I have some vivid memories of the two to three months that I spent alone with my father in Sargodha while my mother and my newborn sister were away in Lahore. Among these, there are two scenes that stand out with exceptional clarity.

  My father and I are out for an evening stroll. We are walking between the railway tracks on the bridge over the river. The bridge is so narrow that there is no room between its edges and the tracks. Suddenly, looming against the setting sun, I see the massive black engine of a train bearing down on us. There is no time to turn back. One of the pillars supporting the bridge has a narrow ledge jutting out some five feet under the bridge.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ my father says and slides down the pillar on to the ledge.

  He spreads his arms. ‘Jump!’ he cries. The train is almost upon me. I see his outstretched arms and the swiftly moving expanse of water below. I close my eyes and jump. He catches me in his arms and lowers me on to the ledge as the wheels of the carriages thunder above our heads.

  Was it really a fearsome river or just a canal of the calm Jhelum? How did we climb up to the bridge again? These are details that my memory considers unimportant as it proceeded to transform the central features of the scene, the plunge into unknown and terrifying waters and the rescue by my father, into a recurring dream at certain moments of crisis in my life.

  The second scene is of my father sitting on an easy chair in the veranda of our house on a lazy Sunday afternoon. He is reading a book. I am sitting on the floor next to his feet, perhaps playing. Suddenly, we are attacked by a swarm of yellow-jacket wasps. Even as he picks me up in his arms and runs inside, we are badly stung all over the face. Our faces are bloated to the size of large melons. We are unable to open our eyes, so swollen are the lids. For two days, my father is confined to the bed. I spend almost a week supine till first the pain and then the swelling disappear. All we could eat during the first two days were mashed bananas, I proudly write to my mother. I feel that we, my father and I, have shared and survived a perilous ordeal. A special bond has been forged. Whenever I happen to touch the ‘scar below the right eye’ that my passport lists as my identification mark, a tiny crater gouged by the wasps, a part of me buried deep under the surface of awareness rejoices in the memory of that intimate connection with my father.

  To me, these memories are visual metaphors for a momentous inner process: the sharpening of my father’s image and his enhanced role in the scripting of my psyche. They are not memories of his dramatic entry on the scene of my young life; he had always been there. What they signify is the resplendence that his image now acquires. I believe I had earlier registered my father as a Shiva-like presence in the background, a still but powerful container of my mother’s ebullience, the dance of her female energy. Now, he becomes more palpable. No longer a distant god though still godlike, he assumes an importance at least equal to hers, if not more. His is a presence that will become larger as I begin to experience myself more and more as my father’s son.

  I have described elsewhere the outer setting of this inner process, our life in Sargodha where we lived between the years 1943 and 1946.1 With its crowded bazaars and their cheerful grubbiness, Sargodha was a provincial town much like others in the Punjab. There are memories of my standing next to our cook, Chet Ram, in the bazaar, watching ox carts loaded with gunny bags full of wheat streaming into the town after the harvest. Their arrival was announced by the chiming of small bells that hung around the necks of the oxen drawing the carts, placidly ignoring the attempts by mangy, yelping dogs to provoke them. On market days, the farmers were accompanied by their gaily dressed women and excited children, giving the drab town a touch of shy festivity. After the wheat bags had been unloaded at the mandi and the sale completed, these large family groups moved deliberately from one shop to another, unhurriedly bargaining for small luxuries—coloured glass bangles for the women, a piece of cloth for a child’s shirt, a burnished copper pot and brass tumblers for the family kitchen.

  As a child, I was as much an outsider to the bazaars of Sargodha as any child from the village. We lived a couple of miles away from the heart of the town in what was called Civil Lines. The Civil Lines and its military counterpart, the Cantonment, a creation of our colonial masters, were found in many towns of British India. The houses in Civil Lines, built at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, were sprawling bungalows with acres of ground and a number of servants’ quarters. Lawns and flower beds, a vegetable garden, a pond or a well, groves of fruit-bearing trees—in Sargodha, groves of ‘malta’—were often a part of the estate. They were home to the sahibs of the Raj and a few elite non-officials such as the principal of the local college and a couple of the town’s leading lawyers and doctors.

  By 1943, not many British were left in these towns. In Sargodha, even the deputy commissioner, the chief representative of the Raj and my father’s boss, a virtual lord over the half a million or so Indians who lived in the district, was no longer an Englishman but an Indian ICS officer, Nasir Ahmad, who later became the principal secretary to one of Pakistan’s military dictators, General Ayub Khan. The superintendent of police and the chief medical officer, the other key functionaries of the colonial administration, too, were Indian.

  The social life of the Civil Lines families in these towns was focused on what was simply called ‘The Club’. In winter, it was carried out in high-ceilinged rooms with padded chairs covered in chintz, a long dining room with a wooden dance floor, a library room lined with teak bookcases that had books on big-game hunting, the mores of obscure Indian tribes, the detective fiction of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, and the romances of Ethel Dell, Linda Howard and other mistresses of purple prose. In summer, the social life moved out to the lawns of the club.

  I have a memory of one summer evening, from either Sargodha or Rohtak, of watching my father and his friends sitting outside on the club lawn. In their white drill trousers and cotton bush shirts, they look fresh and cool, radiating an aura of calm authority that makes me feel safe and protected. A part of this effect is achieved through the sensory background of the setting—the settling dusk, the smell of freshly watered grass, the low murmur of waiters in white uniforms gliding between the clubhouse and the widely spaced bridge tables bearing iced lemon and orange squashes. And as they sit there, the upright garden lamps transforming the lawn into a dull yellow island surrounded by the brilliant Indian darkness from which only moths and fireflies venture in as intruders, the silence disturbed by the occasional dream cry of a peacock, they look remote from the dust, the colour and the noise of the town they administer.

  Generally, I was content to play within the grounds of our house with my friends, mostly the servants’ childr
en. Whenever I did go to the bazaar, accompanying a servant, most often Fateh Khan, my father’s orderly and all-purpose man, I quite enjoyed being pampered by the shopkeepers who all knew me as the magistrate sahib’s son. I took the pampering—the offer of hard caramel toffees, a piece of fruit, tumblers of sweet sherbet or freshly pressed sugarcane juice spiced with ginger and lime juice—for granted and confused it with the love I felt was my due.

  Sometimes, my father allowed Fateh Khan to bring me to his court. With his tall and powerful frame, and in his uniform of a long scarlet tunic worn over loose white shalwar trousers and the starched white turban tied Punjabi Muslim style around a high embroidered cap, with one end of the turban spread like a fan along the side of the cap, the other hanging down his broad back, Fateh Khan had an imposing presence as he walked into the court behind my father, carrying his lunchbox in one hand and court files tied with red string under his other arm. Sitting at the back of the court with Fateh Khan, I was aware of the curious looks of the lawyers and litigants even as I pretended to ignore them. I would stare straight ahead at the raised dais and observe the transformation that took place in my father when he took the judge’s chair. An affable man at home, who I do not remember raising his voice, not to speak of ever raising his hand against any of us children, his rare anger shown only by the knitting of brows in a frown, my father was impatient with lawyers who he thought were ill prepared or plain incompetent. He would brusquely cut them off in mid-sentence, tell them to hurry up with the argument which he found both stupid and bad in law, and expressed his wish that they had not bunked their classes in law college.