Dreamt Lives
Anirudh Deshpande
V
Family Memories
A bitter life had made the Doctor’s memories rancid.
Ravi’s childhood had comforted her but his growth into an unsuccessful romanticmade her anxious. She never expressed this anxiety in words but her eyes said everything. The Doctordisapproved of Ravi’s love for his attractive young wife. The fact that hedid not dominate his wife did not go down well with the bitter old woman. Sometimes Ravi thought his mother wanted to see herself in his wife to vindicate her opinion of matrimony. His choice of a girl from a Punjabi family was also disliked by the Doctor who had a poor opinion of “upper India”.
“The boy I nurtured with my blood. The only person made me laugh has turned into a fool” she thought at least once a day.
A remnant of propriety prevented his mother's subdued dislikes from spilling into her everyday language.Her harsh words and gestures were devoid of grace. She tried hard but could not hide her regrets and resentment. In the company of her only daughter the dam burst and she released her pent up anger in words we usually do not use for our children.
These words were similar to the ones shouted in the family when the Doctor’sonly brother married a Christian nurse secretly decades ago.
Love was unknown to the family.
“He has married aMang bitch” Ravi’s grandfather announced when the news of the elopement was conveyed by his son’s class mate.
“He went to Osmania to become a doctor but the sulemagne fell in love with a nurse! Such Mangrandis are available in the market for the price of a kilo of shareefa. AChristani and a Dhed to beat it all. I am sure there were Brahmin girls in his class, but why would he look at them? The Dhednihad cast a spell on him. What an idiot my son has turned out to be.”
“He is like your brother who slept with a chandal Muslim woman in the village. Bastard children have resulted from that union of lust. No one wants them in the biradari” the man’s wife, proud of her fair skin, chimed in.
While Ravi’s chain smoker grandfatherscreamed these words, spitting them out with cigarette smoke, his daughters’ faces darkened with rage. Revenge drifted into their unkind hearts. They decided to teach the untouchable Christian the lesson of her life. For them the marriage was a double crime. The bride was a Mang Christian and she was dark. The future Doctor and her younger sister left no stone unturned to humiliate their sister in law. Great violence was visited upon the lady in the hospital in front of patients, doctors and her colleagues. She was called a whore by the wiry short dark sisters in a fit of uncontrollable fury.
They dragged the Christian by her long hair and almost beat her unconscious.
“Bitch, whore, dhedni…how dare you trap our innocent brother. You are nothing but a witch,” they screamed as theyrained blows on the unresisting nurse. While the future Doctor held the nurse’s hair immobilizing her, the younger showered kicks on their victim mercilessly.
Taken aback by the sudden assault the staff reacted in time to save the helpless woman from greater harm. The sisters left the hospital in a fit,abusing and threatening their eyes blazing and cheap cotton sarees in disarray. They narrated this heroic exploit to their approving parents at home. That evening the son of the Brahman couple did not return home. He was informed of the attempted murder in a ward and had rushed to his wifewhose mouth and nose were bleeding.
Her colleagues administered first aid and helped her change into a fresh saree which she changed in Bombay two days later.Her husband took her to his friend’s house. The friend welcomed them and held a small party to celebrate their marriage the next day. The two rooms in a run-downchawl remained their home for a month after which Ravi’s uncle rented a small apartment in central Bombay.
Soon after this Ravi’s uncle got a job in Bombay. He never returned to visit the family. He never wrote to them. No one in the family paid him a visit even by accident. Relatives would go to Bombay and pretend he did not exist.He vanished from their life for decades. Almost thirty years after these unfortunate events when Ravi met his uncle and aunt after his JaneyuSanskar they showered him with a love he had never experienced in the company of his relatives.
They fussed over him. And his cousins joined in.
His uncle, a scholar, was impressed by the nephew’s curiosity, education and erudition. There was much he discussed with the boy.He showed him a diary containing his private thoughts.He wrote several diaries over a life spread over seventy five years which his ungrateful sons threw away much to Ravi’s regret. His Christianaunt never spoke to him of what his mother had done to her in Hyderabad.
Once he asked her about her past in Hyderabad but she deflected the question with a smile.
“Always leave bad memories alone my boy. They always harm you” she had said frying his favorite fish. “We were all young and immature but see now things are different. What matters is the present. Focus on it.”
Ravi was impressed with the wisdom the simple nurse exuded.He compared her with his mother and thought of his fortunate cousins.
A happy marriage had erased the bitterness from her life.
She appeared content with the only man she had loved.She was happy to lose carom games to Ravi and give him a rupee for the deliciousbatatawadas in a corner restaurant in Bandra where the family lived in a wind-swept sixth floor government flat. His surgeon uncle was a calligraphistfond of philosophy. His marital passionsproduced four children.The youngest was a girl on whom the family doted. This girl grew up into a tall copper colored beauty and married a rich Marwari besotted with her. She was the one in the family who moved up. The rest moved down. She kept in touch with the parents till they died but exiled her brothers from her husband’s sprawling bungalow on Malabar Hill.
The three sons were given to low ambition. One of them wasa schizophrenic and alcoholic infamous for vomiting in his plate in an inebriated state on several occasions.
“Sorry” became his favorite word said a thousand times a day.
The sons did not inherit the qualities of their father. One of them married a low caste Christian second cousinfrom his mother’s side before retiring to an obscure colony in a slum suburb of Mumbai. Another became a medical representative and migrated to a small town in Vidarbha. His Uncle spent his last years with his devoted wife as the resident doctor at a de-addiction centre in scenic Ganeshpuritwo hours away from the nearest railway station in north Mumbai.
This place is located in a valley in the lower reaches of the Western Ghats. It is green, salubrious and ideal for farming and a brief holiday.
“You see these rich kids?” he had asked Ravi and Smita when they once visited Ganeshpuri briefly on a field trip to Bombay, pointing at a group of grown up boys playing basketball in the open. Ravi saw the well dressed boys and heard their shouts in English as they passed the ball.
Their accent betrayed their public school background and upper middle class origins.
Ravi’s uncle finished his cynical sentence.
“First their parents spent lakhs on them in fancy schools and colleges to make them drug addicts. Then they spend a few more lakhs to de-addict them. I tell you Ravi, once an addict always an addict. The guards say that some try to procure drugs even here. How ungrateful the young can be! ”
It seemed the surgeon had spoken of his own sons.The surgeon’s two sons were tobacco and alcohol addicts. Both wastrels had disappointed the old man. He had stopped speaking with them many years ago.
Ravi nodded in understanding. Years later Ravi met and interviewed HIV positive heroin addicts in Manipur on a UN sponsored survey. Most of these addicts died. His uncle’s words echoed his ears in Manipur where the climate was different from the Western Ghats but the problems of addiction the same.
The surgeon-philosopher had been swindled by a builder and relieved of his life’s earnings in pursuit of a two-room, hall and kitchen flat – the dream of Bombay.His ingrate sons secretly thought low of their father. During their working years the couple brought up four children and supported a widowed sister-in-law who had a meager pension. A second sister-in-law spent her life waiting for a man who had made passionate love to her before vanishing into the lucrative Persian Gulf labor market.
As time passed Ravi’s cousins began making fun of her.
The jilted woman,sporting silks and her scanty jewelry, sat at a window for fifty years waiting for her hero to return. She had a sharp nose, fair complexion and light eyes.She stood out in the extended family and had attracted scores of suitors in her youth. She rejected them and waited for her lover was waiting for the unfaithful man when Ravi and Smita met her almost two decades after Ravi’s first visit to Bombay in the mid 1970s.
She embraced Smita, felt her features with gentle fingers and called her aside.
“Nobody believes me, but I have a hundred letters from him promising me that he will come back next week. He is handsome, fair and tall, not dark like your husband. There was no one like him in Bandra where we lived. All the girls wanted to marry him but he chose me”
Smita thought she had entered a Dickens novel.
She showed Smita an old black and white photograph kept carefully in a small trunk which contained her few possessions. Smita held her hand and nodded in sympathy even as a young beaming Gregory Peck looked at them from the photograph.
When this apparition died some years later one of Ravi’s cousins found a wad of letters she had written to herself from her lover in her trunk. Some of them were too explicit to be made public.The confessions of the lonely woman were destroyed by the intrusive relatives but not before they had disrespected the departed.
“What a dirty mind Akka had” they said to each other in between relishing the dead woman’s Marathi prose.
No one found the jewelry.While the family, excluding the surgeon and the nurse who were in Ganeshpuri when the lady died, were busy reading her letterssomeone walked away with the gold.
No one knew whether her ornaments were real or fake. No one cared and no one found out.
Sometimes Ravi reminded his mother of her surgeon brother. She said as much to her daughter Nanda in words hidden from Ravi.Her vulgarity would have shattered him in that gloomy period of his life. He had guessed nonetheless. On the rare days when Nanda gave her bed ridden mother some company Ravi turned away from his wife in bed and shed lonely tears long after she fell asleep. After his tears dried up he tossed and turned in insomnia. Sleep in the early morning hours brought nightmares which left him sweating.
When he walk in un-announced mother and daughter would fall silent but their looks gave the secret conversations away. Nanda told him what transpired between the two women in that lugubrious room months after their mother's death. His heart broke, though he said nothing in deference to his mother’s memory. The tears which had fallen from her eyes on his cheeks in a wooden house made him forgive his mother. He remembered running into his mother’s arms when she came home walking from the Irwin hospital with his favorite burger in her purse. His children never heard him speak ill of his parents. He made sure that their grandparents' black and white photographs, reframed with care, adorned the walls of their rooms. When pieces of old newspapers, going back to the days when his family history began in Hyderabad, used as packing in the discolored frames fell out in the photographer’s shop when the frames were dismantled he started sobbing. The shopkeeper’s mother had died recently leaving behind a hefty bill at a private hospital and an alcoholic abusive husband. The man understood and threw an arm around Ravi’s shaking shoulders.
After this the two bereaved men discussed old parents over a cup of sweet tea for an hour.
His parentshad a strange match. The groom was a debauch unlikely to bag an attractive affluent girl and the bride was unattractive enough to drive away handsome eligible bachelors. After the ceremony the husband, a police inspector in the Nizam police and scion of a jaagirdari family, left with his friends for a stag party in a forest dak bungalow.
A goat had been slaughtered for the party and liquor provided by an obliging liquor merchant flowed without restraint. Three famous harlots, brought in a jeep from Nizamabad by constables in mufti, danced in the party.Later his maddened friends almost ripped off their clothesbefore raping them. His favorite Telugu whore was among the harlots but he left her alone. His friends knew he was saving his strength for the waiting virgin.His bride was a medical student andknew what lay in store for her. She had never experienced a moment of intimacy with the opposite sex in adolescence. Such moments prepared the girls for marriage and made them women at an early age.
Her wedding night made her hate sex for the rest of her life. The husband returned after midnight and went straight to the nuptial chamber. Others in the house had fallen asleep after a long day. She saw him enter the room through the wooden door which slowly swung back on its freshly oiled hinges. The orgy had fired his imagination and he approached her full of lust. She felt scared at curled up in defense but he slapped her hard. As she lay stunned shedding tears and shame he deflowered her with a painful thrust.Once done, he fell asleep without noticing the dark stain which spread slowly on the new white sheet.
The next day he left on an official tour to the border where the Indian Army was massing in anticipation of an invasion of Hyderabad. Rape became regular in her life, destroyed her self-esteem and finally she stopped resisting it. This infuriated her husband and periodically increased the fury of his beatings. Many times he beat her before sex and relented she became pregnant with their first child. People knew what had happened but no one interfered in their personal affairs. She never confided in anyone. She was always afraid of being left alone. After marriage she had nowhere to go and divorce was beyond her imagination.
Occasionally she was beaten in public.
Ravi was told by his aunt of an event which occurred in the Osmania Hospital a year after his parents’ marriage.
The young medical student was hospitalized because of typhoid for two weeks in the hospital. One day her husband came with a basket of custard apples in a show of rare concern. It was known that one of his relatives owned a farm in Ranjangiri, a locality near Hyderabad, renowned for its custard apples. It was also well known that the tall, fair, slim and beautiful wife of the relative was an old lover of Ravi’s would be father. The cuckold had accepted the relationship without protest. It was rumored that he was impotent and therefore childless.
The patient on the bed was not beautiful and the illness made her look worse. It did not take her long to guess the origin of the fruit. The various romantic possibilities connected with their being picked at the farm infuriated her.
“I shall not eat these custard apples” she said looking away from her husband.
“Why not,” he asked, pretending to feel hurt by her refusal.
Drama was his forte.
“The doctor has ordered me not to eat fruits. I have typhoid. This illness weakens the intestines. You probably don’t know this, after all you only studied till matric” she replied barely hiding the hurt and contempt in her voice.
He felt insulted by the remark but swallowed his rising anger for a while.
“I know why you don’t want them. Because they come from Rajangiri where my relatives live and where I am respected and looked after. You feel jealous of my relatives who do their best for me. They are grateful to me unlike you and your family. Your family does not know the taste of good things” he rejoined.
“I do not care where they came from. You are free to take them back to the lady who has sent them for all I care. I cannot accept gifts from your mistress” she replied in a voice which had become louder.
The other patients became interested in the argument which promised them a delightful distraction.
Her replydrove the man into a fit of uncontrollable fury. His face darkened, eyes twitched and lips became curled in rage.
The vulgar policeman, shouting profanities, hurled a dozen custard apples, one after another, at his wife's face. The patients in the ward, taken by surprise, stared in shock and medical student’s younger sister pleaded with her brother in law to stop.
After exhausting the supply of fruit, the man stomped out of the ward but not before firing a parting shot.
“This is nothing compared with what I shall do to you once you are back home.”
The entire ward stared at him in shock.
In the evening the impeccably dressed senior physician Dr. Barqat Ali Khan, F.R.C.S., saw his student’s swollen face during his round of the ward. He examined the patient carefully and quietly. During his search for a possible facial fracture she kept her eyes lowered but could not stop the tears from flowing down her cheeks. By then word of the assault had spread through the hospital and gossip was rife.
The physician was a renowned professor who taught her class in the medical college.
After she recovered and joined class Dr. Khan called her to his room one day.
“Why don’t you leave him? Get a divorce. I have heard bad things about him and your marriage is still new. You’re educated. Soon you will become a doctor in the service of our young nation”
She said nothing, her eyes downcast.
She imagined the well dressed professor conversing with his wife, a cup of tea in his elegant hands, legs crossed sitting in a well appointed drawing room. Begum Sahib, as his wife was known, was an accomplished poet and ghazal singer. It was said that the great poet Makhdoom Mohiuddin was a regular visitor at Dr. Barqat Ali’s ancestral mansion near the King’s Kothi.
After a moment’s Anglicized professor finished the conversation in a clipped Oxbridge accent “That is the problem with Hindu women. They put with too much in their marriages till it is too late. Anyway, if you require my assistance in anything please let me know.”
Ravi’s mother continued to suffer an unhappy marriage throughout her life but her younger sister decided to live a different life.
Ravi’s aunt maintained a healthy interest in young men well into her old age. She knew everything about the family and had a sharp memory. She liked Ravi and her stories enriched his imagination. She was married to a mild mannered alcoholic bus driver, a former dispatch rider of the Burma Front, who became impotent early in life. Whether the alcohol and tobacco made him impotent or driving buses over Maharashtra’s pot holed roads ended his erections at an age when his friends spent money on the whores between Nagpur and Sholapur is difficult to say. His conditiondrove his over-sexed wife into the arms of his fair skinned younger cousin.This in house stud cooked for the family during the day and fucked this woman at night.He alsofornicated with her elder daughter when she turnedsixteen.
The daughter was initiated into sex after she frequently saw her mother take pleasure with this Don Juan since the age of fourteen. She feigned sleep and plotted her mother’s downfall. Mother and daughter vied openly for the affection of this man. At sixteen the daughter knew, from the looks he gave her, that he would take her virginity soon. He deflowered her in a cheap hotel room with the smell of urine in her nostrils. At eighteen she rode this stallion to the point of mutual exhaustion on the days when official duties took her mother away from the hot dusty town in which they lived.
These stories were narrated to Ravi by the younger daughter of his aunt’s sister in law over several days the girl spent in Delhi during a summer vacation in 1978. Ravi had developed a short lived intimacy with the fifteen year old girl.
“My aunt can never find samaadhaan in sex. She always wants more” the girl had confided in Ravi as he fondled her breasts his erect member in her hands.
It seems the truth that the infantryman turned police officer was a young whoring alcoholic was known to everyone in the province excepthis parents in law. If they knew, for reasons easy to guess, they had kept their unbecoming daughter ignorant of the facts. Due to her appearance, and their straitenedcircumstances, they grabbed the first marital opportunity the market offered.
“Your father”, his grandmother said to him in regret when she was in her seventies, “is a Rakshas who only thinks of alcohol money...and women. How I curse God for giving me an ugly daughter!”
“Did you not know that my father was a violent alcoholic? Mausisays the whole city knew. Even her friends in college were aware of his habits,” he had said to Naani. His grandmother doted on him and he would sing the Rafi hits Ehsaan Mere Dil Pe Tumhara Hai Doston and Yeh Ansoo Mere Dil Ki Zubaan Haifor her.
A tear of regret had rolled down Naani’s fair chubby cheek from her blue-grey eyes.
“Nothing can be done about what happens. We are all born with our destiny” she said in resignation.
“Blaming destiny for everything is only a justification for one’s inaction” he had retorted in anger. Then, realizing what he had said, he hugged Naani.
“I know you are angry with me. But you are young and life will teach you a lot” Naani had said thinking of what she could have done to give her doctor daughter a different life. If they had waited for her MBBS to get over maybe things would have turned out different. Her husband had been adamant and she, who went to the cinema alone in those days and secretly read Kannada classics, had caved in.
Two of the many disappointments of this woman’s life were the survival of her two daughters.Both had inherited her husband’s complexion which resembled the color of the stones of Golconda. This was a comparison made by her relatives in privateFrom the thirteen children she bore, the fair ones died early. Gangadhar, the light eyed fair genius, perished in a cholera epidemic clinging to her at seven.
One sonsurvived only to fall in love with an antyajaChristian.Hewas drivenaway to Bombay and returnedonlyonce when her husband died of his first heart attack in 1968. He camealone a week after the neighbors and a loafer grandson cremated the martinet. He stayed a couple of days in a cheap hotel, did not speak with his sisters and left remorseless. His wife, taking no chances, stayed back in Bombay..
Ravi once asked his mother about his future father’s alcoholism being unknown to her parents.If he wanted her to discuss the lost opportunities of her life with him he was being naïve. The Doctor looked at him through eyes in which he saw both anger and pain.
“I don’t want to hear you speak ill of your father” she tersely admonished him.
Ravi never broached the subject with her and chose to rely on his relatives learn more about his intriguing family.
Many family memories were painful.His mother only told him the good things. She became a successful professional and that mattered to her in the end. She loved her children, especially Ravi, and found in them a happiness marriage had denied her. With age her husband’s health declined fast. Obesity and high blood pressure set in early sapping his sexual energy. His clerical life made his anecdotes, real and imaginary, repetitive and boring. Ravi’s sister Nanda often questioned his fables and rebelled against him. She had disliked the man since her unhappy childhood.
She never forgave his violence which scarred her for life. Her memories of a childhood in Dibrugarh were mixed.
A distant poor widowed aunt of the Patriarch had been the housekeeper in Dibrugarh. In addition she was his mistress.
She died decadeslater in Sholapur incoherently muttering the name of her daughter in delirium. The Patriarch’s had not spared the unfortunate girl died in a fit of dyptheria at fifteen. The illness attacked her at night making her breathless. Rasping sounds emanated from her delicate throat as she fought for oxygen. Her limbs, Ravi remembered, thrashed so badly that it became difficult for his father to control her. Everyone in the small rented Dibrugarh quarter woke up and Ravi’s mother ordered his father to quickly take the girl to the hospital. The Patriarch picked up the girl and took her to a rickshaw which raced to the hospital where unfortunate patient was declared dead.
The corpse was brought home early in the morning. Some neighbors gathered and bought the funerary necessities from the Paltan Bazaar. The last rites of the child were performed on the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra. Through the ritualsthe aunt sat next to the corpse shedding tears silently.This was Ravi’s first view of a Hindu funeral and he watched the scene with fascination. He accompanied the men to the ghat on the banks of the sea like river where arrangements had been made for the cremation.
A crowd not far from the shamshanghatwas examining a dead gharial on the shore. While the men gathered wood for the pyreRavi slipped away and saw the dead alligator. The beast lay dead with his mouth open and scales shining in the sun but the men were still afraid of touching it. Some said he was an old alligator. Others claimed death by poison.
Soon the police came and dispersed the crowd.
Ravi ran back and saw the flames licking the shroud in which the corpse of his father’s young dead cousin was wrapped. The heat of the pyre drove him back and an elder took him home. On the way out he counted the number of corpses being prepared for cremation and thought about them when he passed through the bustling bazaar on his way home.
No one seemed affected by the number of dead awaiting cremation at the ghat.
Some of the Patriarch’s sexual victims, like the low caste maids from south-central India, fled to freedom. Kusum found a lover within a month of her arrival in Delhi. She kept food hidden in the kitchen for this lover.Both Ravi and Nanda knew of this but turned a blind eye to her affair. Sometimes Ravi saw a strangerrun out of the house from the backdoor as he arrived from school. When confronted the culprit laughed sheepishly. Other women found boyfriends and husbands to mock his father’s middle age. One had a broad face with a sharp nose and a little tattoo on her chin.This one, called Lakshmi, married a waiter who worked in theRanjeet hotel near Gandhi Market. She shifted in with the Nepali into the hotel staff quarters which overlooked the narrow passage which led to the Market from the Mir Dard Road. Ravi often visited this tenement to eat spicy mutton curry and rice on family errands. Decades later Ravi and his childhood friend Dheeraj visited the market out of curiosity and nostalgia. They found the place entirely different from the one in which they had relished samosas and jalebis as greedy adolescents.
The hotel and its staff quarters had vanished.
These events happened in the 1970s when the affairs between maids and the sahibs or the quotidian rape of maids and female sweepers were rarely reported to the police.None of the maids fucked by Ravi’s father lodged a case against him. Most of the fornication happened when Ravi’s mother was away on her night duties in the hospital. The doctor knew everything and suffered in silence. In those days lower middle class women cooked food on kerosene stoves, wore and slept in nylon sarees. For the lower middle or working class men and women a few pegs on the wall took care of the clothes to be worn outside. The bed sheets were not changed for weeks in some houses. In the small towns water was a luxury only for the fortunate. The nylonsarees, Ravi imagined, were raised above their waists by the women for their husbands and lovers at night to make things easier for love making.
Daytime screwing was difficult and rare.
Sometimes the sarees caught fire and burnt the women to death. This happened to a cousin of Ravi in the mid 1970s. Occasionally, when some women did not bring sufficient dowry, the nylon saree was set on fire. In Ravi’s imagination the nylon saree became associated with hurried sex and dowry deaths. This belief was fortified by experience. One day Ravi and Dheeraj, on the way to buy firecrackers from the Sadar Bazar, found themselves walkingon G. B. Road. On their left was the railway yard and sidings and on the right were the infamous Delhi whorehouses called randikhanas.The whores leant against their balconies and called out to the customers. On the ground shady pimps approached all potential customers from the paan shops where they sat eyes glued to the street.Stairs ascended to the houses of pleasure from narrow by lanes. Nylon sarees hung on the balconies water dripping from them on the street below. Ravi imagined and confided to his friend, who was busy ogling at the younger randis, the dripping water carried the smell of sweat, sex and stale semen. Ravi, following his friend’s gaze, looked up and saw a young whore who whistled at him while another giggled.
The one next to them in a tight short transparent blouse and navy blue petticoat shouted after them “come up boys, I am sure you can mount a woman. Don't worry we will charge you junior rates. Less money for smaller cocks”
The women burst into wild laughter.
“Come upstairs and enjoy the chudai. Come. Come. Come” they shouted trying to outdo each other. More laughter followed as they quickened their pace. The pimps gestured and grinned at them. Later the friends recounted this experience to their friends some of whom acquired their first bout of clap in those brothels later as sex crazy boys.
These boys were nicknamed randichodor randibaazamong the friends.
And now Ravi watched his father die. He had lived in the company of his desires and would die lonely.On certain days he walked in circles in the room maddened by his own incomprehension of the world. Faces of childhood friends swam before his lifeless eyes. He shouted their names to the unresponsive walls. The end was imminent and Ravi tried his best to see as much of the dying man as he could.
“Why doesn’t death come quickly? Why doesn’t this misery end in a moment?” the nude restless Patriarch asked his son one day. Ravi looked at the excrement on the floor and said nothing.
The attendant hovered incessantly thinking of the monetary loss she would soon suffer. Ravi’s father turned on her. He abused the woman in words which had once stiffened his sex in the company of maids and prostitutes. He attempted hopeless lunges at the middle aged attendant uttering profanities. She did not mind, because she had experienced such sterile lust many times in her career. Her experience in bed with her sex addict violent husband, while her children pretended sleep, had hardened her to the madness of patients.
This man was about to die and therefore she did not slap him.
The lugubrious room and the attendant’s fake smile affected Ravi. He knew he would miss the man despite everything. Ravi had inherited big feet, broad chest and heavy voice from his father. These and the shape of his nails would bring remind him of his father long after the man was gone. Ravi's memories of his father, to speak the truth, were not unpleasant. His indifference to the Patriarch resulted from his memories of incidents he had witnessed and the credible stories about the man he heard from others.
Sometimes the absence of hatred for the Patriarchtroubled him. He was torn between disloyalty to the truths experienced by others and his own pleasant experiences.
Tired of thinking he dozed off next to his wife. A loud knock woke him with a start.
“Babuji is about to go” Khem Bahadur said with a face which displayed no emotion.
Ravi flew downstairs. His wife left the daughter asleep on the bed and followed him. She had never seen death at close quarters and her curiosity was aroused. She was indifferent to her father in law.She had heard numerous stories about him from Ravi who enjoyed narrating stories. Yet she never judged the Patriarch who was fond of her and his granddaughter. The Patriarch did not die propped up on pillows in the comfort of old age as people did in illustrated novels. He suffered a long bout of breathlessness before his heart gave up. The last realhuman hesaw before the light went out of his eyes was the Nepali attendant who peered at him from a great distance.
Ravisaw his father's opaque eyes fixed on the ceiling fan. He looked up at the fan and wondered what the dying see for the last time.
He was about to reach out and close the dead man’s eyes when the Nepalispoke.
“He wanted to see you before departing. He told me that he loved his family. His benediction will be good for all of you.”
Ravi began to regret some things.
Not having spent more time with his father and recording his memories was one of them.If only he had sat for a few more hours with his father in his last few months? Surely his father took away more of his experience in the World War, the Hyderabad State and Assam in dyingalmost a month before his seventy-fifth birthday. Ravi’s jagirdar grandfather had lived all his life in a world between two towns a hundred kilometers apart in Marathwada. Except his prowess at bridge, a game of cards in which he excelled and defeated English visitors, the progenitor of the family had nothing to report from a provincial boring life. Once he traveled to Assam to visit his eldest son and his Doctor daughter in law. There it rained for a month and the mighty Brahmaputrabecame an ocean.At home father and son fought over the end of the family jagir for which Ravi’s father never forgave his father.Bothalmost came to blows.One the day the railway tracks surfaced from the flood and a meter gauge train pulled by an old steam locomotive left for Barauni.
The former jagirdar returned to Marathwada determined never to visit his son.
In old age the cranky jagirdar lived with his youngest son whose educated vain chess champion wife took care of him till he died one day after a game of bridge and a long walk at an age which no one knew. The son, Ravi’s youngest uncle, informed the relatives afterthe cremation. Even in Aurangabad, a sleepy small town, people came to know of the jagirdar’s death several days after the cremation.
Ravi’s uncle wrote his eldest brother a letter in 1992 informing him of their father’s demise a month after the funeral.
Dear Dada,
Sadar Pranam !
Our father passed awaya month ago without suffering too much. He left behind no possessions except two sets of dhoti kurta, two pairs of leather sandals, three packs of well used cards, one black coat, one black cap and two walking sticks with false ivory handles. A few weeks before he died he informed me that he had sold all his remaining land in Kaij and his share of the family wada to Malhar Kaka’s eldest son some years ago. So, practically, nothing now remains of the great jagirdari which never helped us when we needed it the most. I hope our Doctor sister in law is in good health and your family is doing well. My wife sends her regards.
Yours,
Vilas Rao.
The fact that a ten acre plot near Beed, the last piece of land the jagirdar had saved from the vagaries of time with tenacity, had been willed to the writer of this letter was not mentioned in the letter.
A cousin who hated Vilas Kaka revealed this to Ravi some years later.
Ravi’s father had read the letter with a smile spreading on his heavy face.He folded it and decided to have an extra drink that evening. Ravi saw him sitting on a sofa quietly for a couple of hours before the clock struck eight. That night his father did not abuse the jagirdarover his drinks and dinner.
After Ravi fixed his third drink, he showed him the letter his brother had written in Marathi.
Ravi read the letter slowly and looked at his father in anticipation of some action. He expected something dramatic as usual.
“Thewalking stickhandles Vilas mentions are made of genuine ivory. The sticks were won by your grandfather in a game of bridge he played with a relative of the Nizam in Hyderabad in 1948 soon after your mother and I got married. This noble relative was the head of the local police in which I served after leaving the Indian Army in late 1944. I arranged the game to show off my father’s skill at Bridge. Anyway, I shall let your uncle keep them. He was always sly and greedy as a child and that is how he has remained. He was quite young in those days to remember the incident.”
Ravi gaped and the story ended.
A thousand stories were now lost forever.
Ravi, following custom, closed his father’s eyes. A fly hovered over the cadaver’s open mouth undecided whether to sit on the parched lips or not. Ravi brushed it aside from the lips on which drops of blood had clotted. Despite Khem Bahadur’s efforts, the room stank of urine.A red patch began to spread on the white sheet on which the patient had urinated for the last time.
The tired bed sore had released the blood and pus.
Ravi entered his mother’s cramped room and the shriveled doctor raised her eyes. She said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“He's gone”Ravi said hoping to elicit a response from his mother.
“You must examine him and certify the death.After that Bahadur and I will prepare him for the cremation” Ravi continued in a voice full of resignation. He had gone to the cremation ground a week ago to inquire about the formalities and the number of the hearse van office was with him.
Ravi thought of all that had to be done. It was half past three in the morning and the process of getting rid of his father’s corpse would take another six hours at least if not more.
Ravi looked at this mother. The Doctor was staring at the wall in front of her immersed in hidden thoughts. Her son came forward, sat next to her and hugged her tight. He felt her tired head on his shoulder and her warm painful tears. Smita brought her a glass of water and turned away her moist eyes when Ravi looked at her.
What had the life of a Sati Savitri given to the Doctor in the end? She would have got the arthritis, high blood pressure and stroke anyway. Ravi drove the idea from his mind and returned to the present.
“Ma, pull yourself together. You must certify the death” Ravi feigned firmness and helped his mother get out of bed.He realized that her feet were very small when she wore her slippers.
The doctor shuffled into the dank room on a walker.She stood next to the corpse for a long moment lost in thought. Ravi’s attempt at closing his father’s eyes had failed. The eyes were open like a signal from a man who had never thought ofmortality. The moment passed and the doctor bent forward and checked the cadaver’s pulse with her experienced hand.
“Your father is dead. You are now the head of this family” she spoke straightening herself and looking up at her son to make sure that her remark sank in.
The room stank of memories she hated. In the instant the Doctor turned into her room Smita appeared in the doorway. She saw Ravi close the dead man’s eyes with a tenderness which surprised her.
“Better get some sleep” Ravi said to his wife.
“We will prepare him for cremationaround six. Till then you also sleep a little” Ravi said to the attendant before leaving the room.
After weeks Ravi felt he was in control.Although he had been fired by the ungrateful chief of an NGO eight weeks ago, his confidence surged. Ravi went upstairs, washed his hands and face and lay down next to his wife. Within seconds he started dreaming of his wife as a young nude girl in his arms. It was a strange dream punctuated with familiar and strange faces of people from his life. He saw Smita riding him with her hair open, waving in a breeze. The dream lasted an hour.His straining desire woke him. He left the bed, bolted the door softly and returned to his wife who sensed his urgency.
The couple descended to the ground floor after making passionate early morning love and Ravi picked up the telephone receiver to make the necessary funeral calls. Bahadur spread a cane mat on the floor and with the help of Ravi lowered the corpse on it. Ravi was surprised by the lightness of the corpse. His dead father, Ravi reckoned, did not weigh more than forty kilos. Old age and illness had shrunk him to half his original size. The experienced Nepali straightened the dead man’s legs and tied them together with a drawstring beforerigor mortis set in. The Nepali’s actions were deference inspiring and Ravi wondered how much this man knew and what his hard life had made him. He imagined Bahadur leading funeral processions on the bridle paths of Nepal a mashaal in hand chanting Ram Naam Satya Hai.
The incense in the room made him imagine the pine resin burning on hundreds of funeral pyres in the Himalayas.
Soon thefuneral guests arrivedand the cremation arrangements were made amidst small talk. The corpse was wrapped in a new white sheet, tied to a ladder and placed in the small garden outside the house with its face exposed to the morning sun. Before it could be lifted into the waiting hearse by the men standing to, a family friend, a Mathematics teacher in a Gurgaon school, removed the sindoor from the forehead of the new widow with a flourish. The Doctor had appeared at the threshold with her marital mark intact to see the ex fornicator’s body for the last time. Ravi did not fail to notice the drama involved in the public declaration ofhis mother’s widowhood. His mother’s batoo had been removed, and his thoughts wandered to a time when the batoo had raised a controversy between the Patriarch and Nanda.
*****
