Pir Barkat Ali listened to Dulari’s story with rapt attention. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes for a long while in contemplation. Then he opened the larger tome in front of him and turned its leaves till he stopped at a page and studied it in some detail, moving his head gently. He raised his eyes and looked intensely at Dulari and her mother as he explained the recipe specially designed for her. They were to buy a parrot, keep it captive in a cage and look after it with great care for as long as the groom was in their house, and beyond, till they received further instructions from him. Under no circumstances had the parrot to be freed or allowed to die in captivity. He also tied a charm around Dulari’s biceps, which she was not to remove at any cost.
While Barkat Ali’s instructions were followed in letter and spirit, Dhanvati, the ever worrying and vigilant mother, would not be satisfied with a single prescription. There was a multitude of specialist pirs in the field. For the sake of her beloved daughter, she craved extra insurance. A family friend came up with yet another pir who had performed miracles and gained huge reputation for his amazing results. To him she took her beloved daughter.
Pir Jalal-u-din gave a patient hearing to their predicament and went into a long trance before he came up with a rather bizarre formula: The groom was to be served special homemade bread, the flour for which had to be kneaded in water mixed with Dulari’s urine!
For every day of his stay with his in-laws, the unsuspecting groom breakfasted on freshly baked parathas, laced with his bride’s urine. Within days of these ministrations, Danvati came to believe that Pran Nath was now under total control. She was happy with herself that her schemes were working and that she had persuaded Gwash Lal to drop the case, much against his considered opinion.
It was time for Pran Nath Dhar to return to his job at Bombay. He had stayed with his in-laws for four weeks and planted his seed securely inside Dulari. When she missed her period, her mother cried with joy. It was a testimony of her skilful handling of the situation and her deft planning and strategy. She was going to be a grandmother, something she had dreamed so ardently. It was now in everyone’s interest that Pran Nath return to Bombay, go back to his job and find proper accommodation for his wife and the baby that was sure to arrive.
Everyone agreed that Dulari should stay back. It was not advisable for her to set up a new home when she had just conceived. She need not take any chances until she progressed to the third or fourth month of pregnancy when she could safely join her husband. She would travel back to Srinagar in the last month to deliver the baby in the love and safety of her mother’s home.
Pran Nath readily endorsed the plan. He repeated his promise of calling her, reiterated his resolve to separate from Malini and make a new beginning with Dulari once she joined him at Bombay.
When he boarded the bus, Dulari and her five siblings were there to see him off. He remained rather stiff and emotionless during the farewell even as they sobbed and cried, wiping their tearful eyes with the backs of their hands and handkerchiefs. Seated in the front seat, he did not look out from the window nor look back at them waving their hearts out to him, but kept his gaze straight ahead through the windshield, beyond the lofty mountains and the blue sky. They kept waving till the bus disappeared at the bend.
Days went by and then weeks, but there was no communication from Pran Nath. It was the third month of her pregnancy now and time for him to call Dulari to Bombay as had been agreed, but there was no word, not a line from him. Dhanvati became nervous. Setting aside any fear of reprimand, she once again sought Gwash Lal’s advice, but the lawyer expressed his helplessness. ‘Having withdrawn the case against Pran Nath, you have lost the moral and even the legal ground to get him rearrested. In any case, that will serve no purpose, certainly not of winning him over. The bird has flown. There is no way we can capture and cage it again.’
Dhanvati became hysterical. She tossed her taranga at his feet. ‘It is a question of my honour as much as my daughter’s future. You have to save us both from disaster,’ she urged him.
Gwash Lal got in touch with Dwarika Nath and asked him to find out. The news was bad. Pran Nath had lost his job and was still looking for another. He continued to live with his first wife. She had threatened to kill herself and her two kids if he got Dulari to live with them. He promised Dwarika Nath that he would call Dulari as soon as he found a job and a suitable place where she could stay with the kid that would arrive. Meanwhile, he requested that her family understand his predicament and bear with him until his circumstances improved.
There was nothing they could do. Their hopes now hinged on the soon-to-arrive child. Surely the infant would lure the father to his mother.
Nine months is a long time in waiting; in Dulari’s case it felt like an eternity. But destiny played yet another cruel trick on her. She carried to term, only to deliver a stillborn child—a cursed offspring of a cursed marriage. With that, the last vestige of hope was dashed and her only possible link with her husband was interred with the dead child. How long can one hold water in cupped hands?
What went wrong and why was it that her daughter’s life had come to such a sorry state so early in her life, Dhanvati agonised. Had she not reared her in the best family tradition with her sweat, tears and blood? Had not the family priest perused Dulari’s zatuk and found favourable astrological placements? Had he not predicted a life of happiness and fulfilment? Had the priest not matched the teknis of Pran Nath and Dulari and found full convergence? Had she not followed in letter and spirit the prescriptions of two of the best pirs of the land? Why was Dulari damned right from her childhood?
Alas, there were no answers to these questions except that the parrot had escaped from the cage and flown away when an inquisitive kid opened the trap door. Pir Barkat Ali had warned her not to let the bird escape under any circumstances. Had something also gone amiss with the parathas, a misstep somewhere in carrying out Pir Jalal-u-din’s directions in letter and spirit? There was no doubt Pran Nath had lapped them up with relish and more than once acknowledged that the parathas never tasted as good all his life. Why then had he flown away like the parrot, like a bird of passage, never to turn back?
After the tragic events, Dulari’s life remained in a state of limbo, unchanged and uneventful from one day to another, from one year to another. She was the object at once of sympathy and ridicule by her siblings. She became morose and withdrawn, and sank into depression each time her friends or siblings got married, even as she grew prettier and bloomed into full womanhood. Her motherly instincts surfaced when she saw kids being born to her friends and she secretly suckled them on her dry breasts. She dreamed of Pran Nath returning to her someday, even as she had horrible nightmares of his first wife attacking her and her children coming after her. The yearning to regain the favour of her husband was reinforced in no small measure by the undying belief of her mother that Pran Nath would come back to her. She had the astrologer and family priest look at Dulari’s horoscope again. Both of them declared that she was going through a bad patch, a seven-and-a-half year period of hardship that demanded observance of austerities and fasts.
Even as her mother had exhausted all traditional means— the charms, the recipes of the pirs, the fasting and the praying— and failed to retrieve Dulari’s errant husband and lure him back from Bombay, a family friend came up with another prescription: supplication at the feet of Lord Nandkeshwara, the resident deity at Sumbal.
The Nandkeshwara Bhiarava Temple is a sprawling complex on the river bank in Sumbal, a quaint hamlet about 24 kilometers from Srinagar. You go there in a doonga or by road on a tanga. It is a serene place with ancient chinars and an air of mystery. The idol of Nandkeshawara resides in the temple—a four-armed, three-eyed, handsome youth of striking red colour, granted immortality by Lord Shiva. He is the saviour of his devotees, the remover of all obstacles when you approach him clean in body, mind and spirit.
The Rainas set sail in a doonga. It was an adventure-filled excursion thro
ugh the backwaters of Srinagar, the Dal Lake and the Vitasta, and an idyllic retreat from the humdrum city life to a hermitage ideal for prayer and solitude. They paid obeisance. A havan was performed. The lungs and heart of a lamb purchased from the local butcher were offered according to tradition and fed to the kites that circled above and swooped down to catch the chunks hurled up in the air.
Dulari was initiated into a protocol that required early rising, sweeping the temple premises and bathing, followed by a regimen of worship, including the recitation of hymns and mantras. Her diet was limited to vegetables, fruit and yoghurt. She was forbidden spicy foods, silly thoughts and foul language.
Daily prayer, circumambulation, fasting and worship for a full week provided a mystical experience that lifted the spirits of the family. The temple priest was happy with their devotion. No one had returned empty-handed from Sumbal, he claimed, and hoped that their problems would resolve themselves soon. They should visit every year and adopt Lord Nandkeshawra as their family deity, he advised.
On their return, every member of the family beamed with confidence. People came to felicitate them for a successful pilgrimage and for their new affiliation to Nandkeshwara who would cure all ills and bring Dulari’s husband back to her.
Alas, that did not happen. There was depressing news from Bombay. Pran Nath’s life had followed a different trajectory; he had sired a third child with Malini.
On hearing this news, Dulari behaved like someone possessed. She stood up and moved around as if in a dream and started singing songs that no one had heard before, in a voice that was not her own. She danced, made wild gestures, flung her arms and legs, and clapped her hands. Her brothers managed to restrain her a while despite the unnatural strength she seemed to possess.
‘Dulari, calm down. This must be a mistake; the news from Bombay is not true. Calm down, sister,’ Jawahar, her brother, tried to comfort her.
‘I am not Dulari,’ she replied imperiously.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I am Nandkeshawara,’ she growled.
‘Pray, what is your bidding, sir?’ he asked politely.
‘She has desecrated my temple.’ The voice became hoarser.
‘What has she done?’
‘She spat near the sacred chinar, behind the temple.’
All the while, Dulari was trying hard to wriggle out. Soon, she managed to free herself and started the strange dance, as if it were Shiva’s tandava.
This was getting difficult. Word went round that Dulari was possessed. Neighbours gathered, some waiting in the courtyard, others coming near, eager to watch the spectacle.
While they were debating how to address this turn of events, someone suggested the name of Pandit Nand Lal who had been the high priest at Sumbal before he migrated to Srinagar during the 1947 tribal invasion. He was well versed with the Nandkeshwara lore, and was held in high esteem as a specialist who could communicate with supernatural beings, ghosts and spirits. He lived nearby at Budger and readily agreed to come. A tall, middle-aged person, dreamy eyes, and an erect stance, he wore a shirt and trousers, a finely done rose turban and a close-buttoned grey jacket coming down to the knees. He listened to the story with full attention like a doctor.
Dulari’s tandava was on when he was led inside the room. He watched her for a while and then moved slowly towards her. With a calm, reassuring, resonant voice, he addressed her: ‘I am the servant of Lord Nandkeshwara. I am here to make amends for the wrong done. Please leave her alone. Please go back to your place.’
She looked at him, flinched for a while and resumed her dance.
He repeated his plea and started reciting mantras in a mesmerising voice, slowly moving closer to her, touching her arm gently. It had a sudden sobering effect. The dance stopped and Dulari sat down exhausted, repeating her warning, ‘I will never forgive her.’
‘Please leave her alone; she will do the necessary propitiations, whatever you bid her to do,’ he said in a placatory tone.
‘She has defiled my place. She will have to suffer for it.’
‘You do not punish people for being ignorant. Please go away, I beseech you,’ he spoke in a commanding voice now.
‘She is cursed, cursed from her childhood. Her husband will never return to her.’
‘She has suffered enough; she could do without more pain,’ Pandit Nand Lal pleaded.
‘She is condemned; she will die suffering,’ Dulari shouted.
‘Please leave her alone, I warn you,’ he said sternly.
Dulari responded with a growl and made an attempt to stand up again but he restrained her, produced a tiny penknife from his pocketbook and placed it on her sternum near the base of the neck.
‘Will you leave her alone, or should I...?’ he raised his baritone for the first time since he arrived at the scene.
That seemed to do the trick. She answered in a conciliatory tone, ‘She will sweep the whole temple clean. She will offer sacrifices.’
‘Of course, she will do as you say,’ he continued in his resolute tone.
She tried to push his arm aside, but Pandit Nand Lal was unrelenting. He pressed the knife nearer the neck and raised his voice louder, ‘I command you; go away before I push this deep inside.’
‘I am going now, but I will return again,’ the voice drawled to a stop.
Dulari opened her eyes suddenly, sat up and looked around at the expressions of disbelief on everyone. Omkar came forward with a glass of water. She drank it avidly. Her limbs loosened up. Puzzled at seeing a big crowd, she asked, ‘Why are you all here?’
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
Dulari was possessed again several times in the succeeding weeks but Pandit Nand Lal negotiated her out of the spells with his patient, perseverant and professional approach. The spells finally faded away and Dulari was exorcised of the spirit of Nandkeshhwara and rid of the baggage of her failed marriage. She never talked about it again.
Gwash Lal refused pleas from Dhanvati to get the case against Pran Nath reopened. How long can you keep an unwilling husband in a cage like a bird, he asked her. The case had already been withdrawn; it would be a torturous exercise to resume the legal proceedings. He suggested divorce as an option that might earn her alimony, but Dhanvati would not hear that word. It was taboo. So was remarriage, because of her ambiguous state of being neither divorced nor widowed.
Dulari was condemned to live in her parents’ house, like a widow whose husband was alive. Though father Shiv Nath had lost all interest in her and mother Dhanvati still hankered after pirs, fakirs and priests, Dulari, at the instance of Gwash Lal, took up private tutoring over the next few years till she passed her high school examination. That enabled her to get employment as a minor functionary in a government department. She continued to live in the joint family, and carried on as if she were never married. In a final act of motherly devotion, Dhanvati encouraged her to adopt Sagar. He was the youngest sibling, 15 years junior to Dulari. She grabbed the offer; in fact, she had always treated Sagar more as a son than a brother.
But ruthless destiny strikes again just when you think it has spent all its poison darts.
Dhanvati died a sudden death, as unforeseen as a thunderbolt in a clear sky. It was evening time in autumn. The family was having a dinner discussion over finding a match for Doora, the younger daughter. Dulari’s matrimonial fiasco hovered like a dark shadow over her marriage prospects. Suddenly there was commotion across the street in the Guer house, who supplied milk to the neighbourhood. Dhanvati got up and looked out the window to find out.
‘What happened?’ Dhanvati asked Jana, the Guer matriarch, and a mother of six like her.
‘A thief found his way into our store. Rahima gave him a chase but he managed to get away. Thank God, he could not lay his hands on anything valuable; there was silver and copperware in the store for daughter Kaji’s dowry.’
On hearing this, Dhanvati uttered just one sentence, ‘The thief, the thief; he must have run away w
ith Doora’s jewellery,’ and fell down unconscious. The family thought she had thrown a fit, but she never woke up again. By dropping dead so suddenly, she had played the last act of her tragic-comic life.
Dulari was now anchorless; she had lost her beloved mother and her guardian angel.
With their mother dead and father left with no interest in the family affairs and little in his own self, the siblings lost the cementing force that held them together. The ancestral house did not have enough room to hold them under one roof, and they moved uptown to Rajbagh into a bigger house with four family sets, which they built to accommodate the whole family. Jawahar, Omkar and Tej moved into their respective sets in the new house. Doora finally found a suitable match and got married off along with the dowry her mother gave life for. That left Dulari and her adopted son, Sagar, who was still a college student, to share the fourth set.
Shivnath, having turned a recluse after the demise of his wife, was in the unenviable position of not knowing which of his sons would host and look after him in his last days. According to the scriptures, one has to have done great acts of piety in past lives to be blessed with the opportunity of serving an ageing parent. But the curse of having many heirs is to be owned by none but claimed by all. Shivnath’s case was no different. His sons vied with each other to deny themselves the divine privilege of looking after him. He ended up in the attic, away from the tumult of an expanding family and away from attention, to fade away unknown and unheard. One day, he quietly breathed his last.
Dulari, lonely and sidelined, made it her life’s ambition to provide the best she could for Sagar. She sold her jewellery, sent him to a good school, paid for his private tuition and motivated him to take a course in medicine. Sagar graduated in five years. Dulari was now the proud mother of a doctor, weaving dreams of a bride for her son, and the grandchildren that would follow.
Room in our Hearts and Other Stories Page 22