All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  After I had written my letters, I put them in an envelope that I sealed firmly with glue and then marked with a melted red blob from Dada’s stick of sealing wax. Nobody else saw what I wrote to my mother—my grandfather posted them from the shop and as soon as a letter had gone the wait began for her reply. Sometimes she wrote to me twice in a month, sometimes nothing came for two months at a stretch. At times our letters crossed and I imagined answers and questions dangling, sentences colliding with each other somewhere in the Indian Ocean. If the postman called out to me while I was playing with Dinu, he had a way of flinging his bat down and sitting with his hand cradling his chin and rolling his eyes while I ran inside and put the unopened letter in the hiding place I had for them.

  In the evenings after school, I lay by the river, dreaming on the grass, wishing my father had never come back. His very presence inside that locked outbuilding was oppressive, every rat-tat of his typewriter a stone he was throwing at the world. If only Mr. Spies would by some miracle become my father. Everything I wanted to be, Mr. Spies was. He explored the world, he made music, he painted, he was friends with animals, he slept in a boat on a lake. I did not care anymore that he had taken my mother away, I wished he had taken me too.

  As my father rapidly turned into a censorious headmaster at home, driving Dada to stay at the clinic for ever longer hours, my misery became more acute, my anger about my mother’s disappearance a monotonous, throbbing, directionless rage. In the time that had passed, my sense of her physical existence had dwindled. From being a real person, she was turning into the concentration of all that I longed for in my life and did not have. I wanted to be where she was. I wanted to do what she was doing. My life was going on elsewhere without me.

  I ask Ila for her memories of this period and she has almost none, or will not share them with me. We talk easily enough about many things, but when it comes to my father, her mother, her childhood, her steadfast response is to say she was too young to remember. What of the things her mother told her about her infancy? Ila changes the subject.

  I know that in her later years Lipi spoke less and less, watchful, timid, retreating into her own inner world as if she were afraid that words, once out of her mouth, would come back sharpened, to stab her. She and Ila were close right till her last illness and at times the two of them gave the impression of being a pair of brown sparrows stranded among hungry kites. They would huddle together talking in whispers, stopping abruptly if anyone else, especially my father, entered the room.

  I ask Ila if she remembers a particular day in 1939 when it was she who triggered a crisis that turned out to be decisive. She claims she has not the faintest idea what I am talking about, her mother never discussed any such incident with her, she has no memory of it. I start to tell her about it and she pretends to be occupied by her reading, neither commenting nor adding anything—although she does not leave the room.

  Was it summer or winter, were pigeons burbling and gulmohur blooming? The season is of no consequence. I do recall it was daytime when the door of the outbuilding burst open and my father emerged dragging Ila by one arm, her legs half off the ground. Lipi ran towards them with a cry of alarm and I heard my grandfather, his voice louder than I had ever known. “What are you doing, Nek? You’ll hurt the child. Let her go.”

  My father let her go by simply loosening his hand. Ila fell to the ground. She gave two choked whimpers at first, followed by silence during which she gathered breath, and then let out a long series of wails. Lipi ran to her, scooped her up, and held her close, rocking and stroking her as she sobbed. My father went back into the outbuilding, came out holding his typewriter. It had his latest article trapped in the roller. The paper was sodden with milk and the typewriter too dripped milk. He slammed it down on the parapet bordering the verandah. He stalked off into the outbuilding again and began to fling things out. Books, checkbooks, papers: all soaked in milk.

  “I had only left her there for a minute,” Lipi said with a gasp.

  Before Dada could say anything, my father had banged the door shut. Lipi looked at my grandfather as if she were scared and yet furious, her eyes ablaze. “What shall I do?” she repeated. “I had only left her there for a minute.”

  My father’s rage could be heard all over the house for the next hour, punctuated by howls from Ila. He went back to his work only after he had moved Ila and Lipi from the outbuilding to the last unoccupied room that remained in the main house, the bedroom he once shared with my mother. That was where they would be from now on, he decreed, while he and his desk and his books would stay in the outbuilding, restored to solitude.

  The day after the move, when I came home from school, I found Lipi sitting before an opened cupboard. My parents’ cupboard. She had begun to empty it and there was a trunk next to her into which she had already put some of my mother’s clothes. I plunged my hands into the trunk. I dragged out the saris and tried to put them back on their hangers. The cloth slipped out of my grasp. The endless length of a sari—when you release one from its folds, is there any way of taming it again? Within a few minutes I was standing in a soft nest of jade and emerald, peacock blue and burnt orange, my mother’s most loved colors.

  “You don’t want me to take those out of the cupboard?” Lipi said with a worried frown. She put a hand on my arm. “What is it you want?”

  When I made no answer, she gave a resigned sigh and picked up one fallen sari after another to return to the cupboard. In the evening, from my usual place in the shadows of the corridor, I heard my father say, “Let her part of the cupboard remain as it is. I’ll empty out my old shelves so you have space.”

  “I have to share a cupboard filled with her things?”

  “Come, come, Lipi, don’t be difficult. We both have such few clothes. You only need a couple of shelves.”

  I did not hear Lipi reply. My father spoke again. “Things have no meaning. You and I know that it’s our inner being that is everlasting.”

  I recognized the tone. He had settled the matter, he was the repository of a superior wisdom, there could be no further argument, and minutes later his typewriter began to fire away at great speed. The next week, he strode up and down the front verandah declaiming whole paragraphs from his column titled “The Immateriality of the Material,” interrupting himself to say, “Strange how mundane events in one’s life can lead to moments of such illumination.”

  A few days later, a bullock cart came to our gate and then through the gate into the driveway. The wheels squeaked, bells tinkled, and the driver yelled, “Anyone there?” as he hit the sides of the cart with a switch to make more noise. Golak and Ram Saran appeared, and the three of them carried a new, carved cupboard into the house. It was Himalayan tun wood, the finest mahogany, my grandfather explained to Lipi, the most beautiful piece he had been able to find. It had slim rounded sides carved with leaves and flowers and mother-of-pearl door handles. It was newly polished, breathing out the clean smell of resin. Dada opened it and showed Lipi: there were drawers she could store things in, as well as shelves and a rod to hang clothes from. The cupboard had a small safe in which he had placed five thick gold coins. “Yours,” he said. “You don’t have to tell my son about them.”

  Once she had arranged her things, Lipi locked her cupboard and tied the keys to the end of her sari. They jangled as she walked. “Thinks she’s a memsahib now,” Banno Didi said scornfully, imitating Lipi’s somewhat waddling walk. The cupboard fitted into the passageway outside the bedroom and many times I saw Lipi standing in front of it as if nonplussed. Her few saris and oddments and Ila’s tiny frocks filled two of the many shelves. The only other thing hidden away in the cupboard was a glass jar of face cream she had bought with the personal spending money my father gave her every month. However dark or dull may be your skin, it will be whiter and fairer with Valetta Radio Active beauty crème, promised its label.

  The rest of the cupboard was empty, as if proving my father’s point that Lipi could have managed perfe
ctly well with less space.

  19

  IF LIPI AND ILA contracted by degrees into a shell that contained only the two of them, I was no different. My shell was smaller, it had nobody in it but myself, and once I had found it, that was where I remained for all my years.

  It has become my lifelong habit to live unnoticed, and even at work, though I briefly entertained notions of name and fame, as soon as I realized what these things entailed, I retreated. Were I a plant, I would be the shade-loving one that grows below a tree in the far corner of the garden where nobody spots it or plucks its flower for a vase.

  I learned early that I preferred to live in hiding but I also realized that only the deluded place their faith in seclusion. Sooner or later, the rock you have chosen to shelter under is found and you are forked out. This was the process that began for us, even though we did not know it, in the summer of 1939, when it became obvious there would be a war in Europe.

  At the time, the events in Germany were still too far away for us to fully comprehend. The Hitler whom Beryl de Zoete and Mr. Spies used to talk about—he was in the newspaper every day now, a sinister news item but still reassuringly distant. Britain ruled us, and if there was a war we knew we would be forced into it, but at this remove it was an abstraction. We had no relatives in the Western world, we knew no Jewish people, it was not happening to us.

  The first changes were inconsequential. It was settled that Dinu would go to boarding school, a new one modeled on Eton and Harrow that had just opened in Dehradun to give Indian boys the kind of education that had been the preserve of affluent Englishmen. After a year or two in the school he was to start training as an officer in the British army at the Indian Military Academy that had opened in the same town. Until now, only white British men could become officers, but with the war almost upon them the government had realized it needed thousands more soldiers and had come to accept that it would need to recruit Indian officers to command the larger number of sepoys. Even so, only the sons of the rich or princelings were allowed to become officers. This pleased Arjun Chacha greatly and he came to our house to crow about the elevated company Dinu would henceforth keep. The days of running wild with the cook’s children and neighborhood boys were over. It was time for him to assume his natural place in the world—at its pinnacle.

  My father was instantly gifted a subject for his next article. If Britain goes to war with Germany, he asked, why should Indians be pushed into it? “What is it to us if the Germans rule Britain? Do the British not rule us?” he headlined the piece. “A million Indian soldiers fought for the British in the Great War. More than 60,000 died. Even today, an old sepoy from that war marches on the pavement outside my house in his ancient military cap, firing an imaginary rifle or groaning in remembered terror. People complain Kharak Singh disturbs the neighborhood’s sleep. I declare he ought to disturb our sleep. When men are transported off as cattle, it ought to disturb our sleep for evermore. We must vow not to let that happen unless we are promised our freedom in return. This is 1939, not 1914.”

  The day the article was published, Arjun Chacha stormed into our house brandishing the newspaper. “Why name Kharak Singh?” he demanded to know. His plump cheeks wobbled with rage. “He is my watchman. People are asking me why I haven’t done anything for him. Do they have any idea how much I have done?”

  “I was not accusing you—he has been used as an example. That is how we writers work,” my father said patiently, adopting a supercilious tone which said that the common or garden species of readers need not worry their heads over the complex arguments of great scholars. He was sitting in the drawing room, still studying the paper, rereading his article with a satisfied smile on his face. “Do you know how many people have congratulated me for this today? Professor Shukla, Mukti Devi, Dr. Dwivedi—everyone. Shakeel said all his friends had read it. A brave, forthright piece, they said. It might get me arrested, but one has to tell the truth.”

  “Shakeel! What do you see in that wall-eyed imbecile, Nek? Ever since we were in school—Shakeel said this and Shakeel said that. I suppose it was he who told you boys will be grabbed off the streets and sent to fight the Germans.”

  “So they will, Arjun. Wait and see.”

  “War is good for economies, Nek. You wait and see: we’ll be the country supplying all the goods they need. Boots, cloth, planes, guns. They will need them. We will make them.”

  “Is that all you’re worried about, Arjun? Money may come, but at what cost?”

  “I don’t know about costs, Nek, but this I know, no son of mine will sit it out at home hiding behind books if there’s a war the British are fighting.”

  Arjun Chacha heaved himself up from his chair and walked a few steps down the verandah, then came back to the drawing room and dropped his copy of the paper on the table. He turned on his heels, unsmiling. “I don’t need that,” he said.

  War against Germany was declared by Britain and then India in September 1939 but Dinu was to leave for boarding school and his father planned a send-off nothing would stop, not even war. It was to be a concert.

  They had not had a concert since my mother left because Brijen Chacha was no longer there to organize them. He had disappeared from home the winter of my mother’s departure, after an especially violent quarrel with his brother. Some said the quarrel was about Brijen Chacha’s liaison with a woman, others said it was because he had stolen money from the family safe. Everyone agreed he had killed himself in shame. Whatever the truth of the matter, he had no connection with his family now and it was left to Arjun to make the concert successful on his own. He went about it with grim determination, dividing the work into departments he noted down in separate registers titled Travel, Accommodation, Food. The work was distributed between Munshiji and his two older sons, as well as Lambu Chikara’s father, who had been called back from the Kanpur mill now that Dinu was going away.

  Arrangements were made for an evening as elaborate as a wedding. A red-and-white canopy was put up on their front lawns, the fabric of it thin and delicate. Immaculate cotton sheets and bolsters were spread over dhurries and scattered with scarlet rose petals. The singing, the practicing, the cooking, the lamps and decorations—all of that followed a well-worn course. If there was a sense of urgency and the threat of deprivations because of the war, my father said, Arjun had no sense of them.

  Neither did we, my grandfather pointed out. Among the first things that had happened because of the war was that we got a refrigerator, bought secondhand by Dada from a British officer who had been called back to England. For a few days we would open its door for no reason at all and stand there feeling the cold air drift into our faces like a mountain breeze. My grandfather took to storing his kurtas in it so he could wear a chilled one each morning. When we opened it there was nothing inside but neat stacks of white clothing and two metal ice trays that delivered geometrically perfect cubes of ice.

  Our refrigerator rattled, hummed, and vibrated in a corner of the dining room. I can picture myself today, standing with my ear pressed to its side. Nobody is in the room. Nobody can see me as I gently thump the sides of the refrigerator to a rhythm. If I close my eyes, the thumping sound blends with the hum of the machine, making me feel as if I am on a train. Where am I going? A different place each time. I set off to find Dinu in his new school in Dehradun and the hills I see from the train are like the ones on the way to the summer cottage Dada used to rent, and the same pine-scented wind is against my face. On a second day I am on a long, sweaty journey to Madras to reach a port and board a ship and then onward to Java and Bali, where I will swim with the boy called Sampih of whom my mother writes in her letters, and when I sleep I will have at least one monkey and two dogs in my bed with me.

  I tell nobody that the refrigerator has this power to turn into a train, I don’t want anyone else to know. My world has to live in silence within me or else its power vanishes.

  Smarting from the unprecedented challenge of Dada having bought something
as significant as a refrigator before him, Arjun Chacha acquired in quick succession: a gleaming Frigidaire, the latest model, not secondhand; a radio; a factory for making ammunition, and another for making army boots; a Model T Ford for Dinu; twenty cans of sardines. The brightly colored labels glued onto the tins of fish showed metallic sardines lying in tight, staring lines. Their flesh was salty, soft butter, we were told. To a small number of guests at the concert, Arjun Chacha planned to serve sardines on toast inside the drawing room, away from the crowds. Now that his brother was not there to complicate matters, the concert would be as he had always envisioned it: an urbane blend of useful conversation and entertainment that would at once showcase the family’s wealth and create opportunities for adding to it.

  Arjun Chacha’s new radio had a big round dial which lit up by degrees, slowly going from dark to dim to bright, and voices came on a little later, as if people had to travel into it to speak. It was shrouded all through the day with a crocheted cover Dinu’s mother had made for it and was unveiled in the evening by Arjun Chacha, who came home and sat by it with the glass of sherry he had taken to sipping before dinner. He listened with a solemn, preoccupied frown to the news from London. Sometimes visiting relatives would be allowed in, and while their comparative status could be assessed by the distance of their seats from the radio, they were all equal in being served lemon soda, not sherry. There was no question that women or children would be let into the room while the news was on—they were bound to chatter or giggle. We peered in through chinks in the curtains and saw Arjun Chacha shaking his head or wagging his finger at the radio as if it were alive and would come to understand how right he was about the events it was broadcasting.