by Anuradha Roy
Dada said, “What’s the hurry? Don’t you know what the sage said?”
Beryl and Dada spent hours together in the wood-bound verandah that skirted the cottage. Here they read day-old newspapers and wrote letters and at some hour that was mysteriously settled by unspoken mutual consent, they began sipping gin with drops of juice from the yellow and green lemons that hung like paper lanterns from a tree in a corner of the garden.
Beryl looked up from her paper. “What did your sage say?”
“Oh, I don’t really remember. I’m quite sure it was something on the lines of ‘Why go when you have just arrived, O weary traveler!’ We are to harvest our apricots today. Wouldn’t you like to stir the jam?”
On the eighth evening, after apricot tart had been eaten and Mr. Spies had played “Ode to Joy” on his harmonica, and Beryl had objected yet again to everyone smoking indoors, she said, “Well, tomorrow we must really ask for the horses and be off. The mountains will not come to us, we must go to them, Walter. Almora is next. Mightn’t it be possible to persuade Gay to come with us?”
On the tenth afternoon, they were still there when there was a telegram from my father: Mukti Devi arrested. Cannot come as planned.
“What could have happened?” Dada said. “Should we pack up and return? I hope Nek does not end up in jail with her.”
“The politicians who go to prison do rather well! They write books, make friends. They don’t become any thinner.”
“Gayatri!” Dada said. “Do be serious. Mukti Devi may be too frail for prison.”
“Why would they put that harmless old lady in jail?” Beryl said. “My countrymen. Oh, such idiocy! What is the world doing to itself? Look at Walter’s country.”
“Germany is not my country,” Mr. Spies said. “My country is the world.” He went back to his harmonica.
“Darling, don’t be frivolous and don’t interrupt, please. What if there is a war? How many people can one rescue from fiends?”
Mr. Spies put his harmonica down and said, “If the world is in danger, we must still sing and dance and live. I am free in Asia. We are oceans away from all that.”
“Nobody is oceans away from anything, Walter. The world is round and oceans meet,” my grandfather said. “When you have lived to be as old as I am, you will understand that no place is safe from evil. Did anyone take Hitler seriously when he first said he would wipe out Jews? Fifteen years ago! I remember how in the twenties everyone was sure he would go back to Austria and tend his vegetable patch.”
“I don’t think of all that. What we have to think of is how to live a life, love a life, play a life, be there at the heart of life. And not go on about the earnest things, worrying ourselves to death. I think I’ll learn how to play the bamboo flute. I can’t get the sound of it out from my head.”
“Oh, do be sensible, Walter Spies,” Beryl said. “If they have Mukti in jail, they might arrest Nek next. Is it not widely known that he is her chief confidant?”
“Anxiety, anxiety! We’re in danger of dying from it. We live in despair. We work in despair when we must work from delight! You wear yourself out, time sweeps by, you are tired, and then you want to get away from it all, where life can be forgotten. Even music and art become a reward for putting up with life—which is full of imagined fears and worries. How can I help it if life will not take me seriously?”
Mr. Spies picked me up and gave me a whirl. “Life is one long birthday. Or if it’s not, we have to make it so. Let others fight. For me, I believe that people may kill each other and countries may explode but there is music in everything, beauty everywhere. We just have to find it. Mr. Tagore found it, Gayatri has found it. Don’t let them ever tell you otherwise, Myshkin Rozario.”
Mr. Spies lived his philosophy, he did find music in everything. One night, there was a sharp spell of rain. The next morning, breathing in the washed air, he asked me to tell him how many sounds I had heard during the night. I came up with the sound of rain on the roof. I offered thunder. Mr. Spies listed at least half a dozen more. The sound of water gurgling in the drains. The sound of rain on tile roofs, which is different from rain on tin roofs or brick roofs. The sound of water trickling onto mud. The croaking of frogs and toads, the chirring of crickets and cicadas. The whoosh of wind in the trees. The creak of branches when the trees swayed in the wind.
Another day or two, and a letter came from my father summoning us home. Mukti Devi was in the lockup in Muntazir and things were in a state of crisis. We ought to be home to show solidarity. We could not carry on with our holidays as if nothing had happened.
And so we began our journey downhill while Beryl and Walter carried on to Almora. They would come back to Muntazir after a few days in the hills, they said, and then, by and by, it would be time for them to pack their trunks and go back home.
On our way up, every step had been an adventure; the way down was nothing but drudgery. The horses smelled of dung, Rikki got lost twice on the road to the railhead. Dada had to lie down in a wayside verandah because the heat made him feel faint. Golak had a stomach upset and kept dashing off behind bushes. Each time we had to wait for Golak or shout for Rikki, Dada sat on any rock or parapet that offered itself, drooping, as if he might never get up again. When we reached the dak bungalow where we were to break our journey the beds were infested with bugs and we woke covered with red, itchy weals.
From the moment we were in the train and it began moving, my mother leaned her head against the window bars and was lost to us. Her eyes were on the countryside rushing past, and twice I saw them shining with tears. She did not stir, she had forgotten we were there. I was hungry, Rikki was sniffing the bags for food, and Dada lay on a bunk, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed, his breathing shallow, his legs seizing up with cramps. He whispered, “Mix some salt and sugar into a cup of water, bring it here. Don’t worry, it’s a simple heatstroke.” Golak and I took turns at tipping sugared water into Dada’s mouth. He gasped and opened his mouth like a chick in a nest. He would drift off to sleep and so would I. I would wake to see my mother still by the window, staring sightlessly out, her hair blown back by the wind. The hours passed. She ate nothing, drank nothing, spoke not a word.
Mukti Devi was meditating on the roof of the ashram when just after three in the morning, the hour she usually woke for her prayers, the police arrived. They had barely even given her time to put her prayer beads away. The few followers who lived in the Society building with her were given no answers to their agitated questions: Where was she being taken? Was she under arrest? They could see the shadowy bulk of a police van on the still-dark street. One of the officers put a hand on Mukti Devi’s shoulders to propel her towards the door and it was this gesture, more than the van or the unearthly hour, that appalled her followers. That a bully in a uniform had the power to touch their revered leader this way. What else might they not do? She was old, her health was shaky, how could she survive the impending brutality?
When she was arrested, my father said, her courage became more apparent than ever. A woman alone, being marched off to prison by a squad of burly men, yet she showed no signs of fear. She gave her followers a set of instructions in a steady voice. She told them not to make any trouble. They were to do exactly the same as they did when she was with them: spin the loom, meditate, pray, demonstrate against British rule, but only as peacefully as the Mahatma had instructed. They were to put food out for the birds, dogs, cows, and cats who were fed daily at the Society.
The truth was that the British feared her influence. They were finding it difficult to dismiss her as a crank now that her morning sermons drew two hundred people. A few days before her arrest, she had held a meeting in the dusty patch by the river, to which more than a thousand people had come, many trudging from distant villages. She had urged her followers to make sure there were no Union Jacks flying on any Indian building by the year’s end. She had meant it metaphorically, my father said, but some overcharged protesters had stormed off to the courthouse a
nd the post office and torn down several flags and burnt them on the riverside promenade—where Indians were not allowed to walk, far less set fires. They had also placed an upturned bucket on the head of the statue of Curzon that stood at the entrance to the college where my father taught. Tear-gas shells and beatings had followed.
Given the unrest it was thought prudent to send Mukti Devi to a jail in another town where fewer people knew of her. The police took care to transport her at an out-of-the-way hour, early in the morning, yet the road from police station to railway station was jammed with people. My father was among them. Overnight, he had discarded the circumspection that had made him shelter in the shadows. He no longer appeared to care about holding on to his government job. He was at the front of the barriers that held the crowds back from the driveway down which the police van would come. He had taken me along because this was history in the making and I needed to be part of it. He held my hand in the surging crowds, only letting go for an instant when the police van appeared and we saw Mukti Devi’s face behind the barred windows of the van. I half-expected her to call me to her and whisper a rhyme in my ear, but her white sari was wrapped around her head, her face was barely visible, and all she did when she saw the gathered people was bow her head and join her hands in a namaste. The van swept out of the police station and we followed on foot. Nobody shouted or shoved now. It was as subdued as a funeral. We were not allowed to enter the railway station. We saw the police van going into the station through a gate that we did not know existed.
It was just a day or two ago that we had got off our train from Kathgodam, but the bustling station we had seen then had been turned into a prison yard guarded by lines of men in khaki. I tugged at my father’s hand to make him go home. But he stayed until word went around that the train had left.
“Where to? Where to?” everyone shouted.
“Lucknow,” someone yelled back.
The crowd scattered as if a show had ended at the cinema.
In a few days, schools and colleges opened, my father had to return to work. He did go back, but there was a new sense of reserve in him about his college. He would work not an iota more than he had to, he said. He no longer bothered with whether my mother was reading Brijen Chacha’s detective novels or wasting time painting or gallivanting with her foreign friends. If he came home and found Mr. Spies or Beryl de Zoete there, he paused for a minute only to be civil and then kept himself out of sight until they had gone. Twice he went to Lucknow to visit Mukti Devi in jail. He came back vibrating with reverence.
“She is an inspiration to all women—this is what the liberation of women is about,” he said. Emotion made his voice shake. My mother got up and left the room.
My father began to do much more at the Society. He went with groups of people to villages to teach them about irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizers. Or the others with him did, while he gave lessons to village children. After his college hours he went to teach at an evening school for the unlettered poor. A tide of nationalistic fervor was sweeping the country, he told us, because of inspirational figures like Mukti Devi. He began to lead the early morning walks—she had asked him to. The walks did not end with a daily sermon from him, but a thought for the day from anyone who had one serious enough. The everyday thought was not unpremeditated, it had to be proposed earlier and approved in advance by my father. This was his brain wave, and it came from the time he had started noting his own ponderings down during the summer holidays. At breakfast, he reported what the thought had been at that day’s meeting. His favorite was from the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47, which he translated from Sanskrit as: “Work for work’s sake, not for yourself. Act but do not be attached to your actions. Be in the world, but not of it.”
Seeing the blank look on my face, he explained that I must always do whatever I had to, such as arithmetic homework or keeping my room clean, but I must not expect any rewards for this. I ought to feel fulfilled by the doing of the task and not seek more.
“More? What more?”
“If you clean your room you must not do it thinking now my father will be happy with me and bring me sweets. In the same way, you must not do your sums thinking that you’ll come first in class.”
“But I never come first in class. And you never bring sweets.”
“Exactly,” he said, and turned back to his book.
9
TOWARDS THE END of summer, as every year, Dinu’s uncle Brijen set off for the station in their Dodge, which was washed and polished with wax by Dinu’s driver the day before so that its blue-black body became as shiny as beetle wings. Dinu and I stroked the long line of the bonnet and the two round headlights that turned the car into a frowning man in glasses. We caressed the case of the spare tire mounted by one of the doors, spat on the winged Dodge logo and rubbed it with our sleeves. We put our noses in through the window to smell the leather of the seats. Opening the doors was forbidden.
The next morning we woke early and sat on the wall waiting for Brijen Chacha to come back from the station. He had gone to receive a troupe of musicians.
Dada used to say Old Monk and Old Musicians were the only two things in Brijen’s life. Barely out of his nappies, he had sung his first flawless song one fine day to his wonderstruck audience of cook, coachman, and ayah, after which, at the age of nine, he had sung an entire thumri, following that at the age of eleven with a quart of rum before he fell down in a stupor. He had stopped neither singing nor drinking ever since. As if to prove my grandfather right, Brijen Chacha sat in the front row at concerts with his bottle of Old Monk beside him, drinking it down from full to empty through the evening.
We spotted the car on its way back from the station when it rounded the corner and reached the wilderness around the pir’s grave. We stood on the wall for a glimpse of the chief singer, but the back seat appeared to have only a bundle of cloth in it, the end of which flew like a banner from the open window. After the car had swept into Dinu’s drive and out of sight under their portico, there was a period of quiet. Then, with the clopping of horses’ hooves, a tonga appeared, piled with a confusion of boxes, trunks, harmoniums, and hookahs, and the long stems of tanpuras sticking out between luggage and people. The singer’s party would stay for a few days.
Every year we hung around the performers throughout the day but this time we were not allowed anywhere near the singer’s quarters. We could not fathom why until we heard Arjun Chacha take Brijen Chacha aside and hiss, “A woman! A singing, dancing girl? Take her to the mango orchards! Invite your other drunk friends for the show. Not here. Not in front of our women. Even our mother! God! Has the liquor addled you completely?”
The quarrels between Brijen and Arjun were legendary. They were as opposed to each other as water and oil, people said. Brijen was the drop of cold water that made smoking-hot oil explode.
Almost every wealthy family of our acquaintance had a brother or uncle, usually single, more often than not the younger sibling, who laid waste any inheritance and then fell back on his family, a lifelong burden. Here the situation was different in one detail. Brijen was younger than Arjun by a decade; yet, unusually for that time, their father (who doted on his younger child) had divided his wealth in half between both sons. Knowing he was no good at managing industries and farms, Brijen had made over almost all of his money to his older brother in one grand—doubtless inebriated—gesture saying he owned nothing but music and nothing and nobody would own him but music. This was not strictly true, because he made a sort of living by writing. Somewhere between his drinking and music, he managed to concoct novels in Hindi featuring an alcoholic detective with perfect pitch and a flawless memory for melodies. These novels, with titles like Silenced Anklets and Killer at the Concert, were published serially in a magazine devoted to detective fiction, and to my high-minded father’s endless annoyance his students waited agog for each installment, as did my mother.
Brijen’s female relatives adored him. He listened when they needed to
talk, he laid down no rules, his eyes danced, his voice melted every bone in a woman’s body. He only had to sit down in the inner quarters, narrate the next chapter of his book, make up a funny poem, or call for a harmonium and a bottle, and the room lit up with laughter and singing. There was a boyish carelessness about his good looks and all over Muntazir, it was said, were smitten women who waited on their verandahs praying that Brijen would walk past, that their eyes would meet. Arjun could only gnash his teeth and suffer Brijen’s effortless popularity. This was how it had always been. What set him apart from other layabouts was not only his writing, it was that his gift for music was undeniable. He was widely accepted as an authority, famous singers counted him as a friend.
Every woman who sang or danced was not a whore, it was time to understand that, Brijen said to his brother in as patient a voice as he could muster. Akhtari Bai was a renowned and dazzling singer and you had to be a special kind of philistine not to be on your knees thanking your luck she had agreed to come. So what if she had been a courtesan, so what if she had acted in movies, there was nobody who sang with such purity. It was only because she had found a kindred soul in Brijen many years ago that she had agreed to come and it was their duty to make her feel as luxuriously sheltered as a pearl in a cushion of silk.
When his reasoning failed, Brijen Chacha stalked off to our house, to my mother. We were used to him turning up at odd hours to give her magazines, examine her new paintings, read out from his stories, but this time his visit was charged with purpose. Could my mother come and tend to the singer? Arjun would let no woman from their family take care of her, but she needed someone. She had a tempestuous personality, she could go from calm to distraught in minutes, and Brijen was afraid she would be offended at being put into a guest room and left alone there with nobody to make a fuss of her. “You will understand her,” he begged my mother, “you too are an artist. You paint, you sing.”