Dreamt Lives
Anirudh Deshpande
VI
Nanda
In the late 1970s Nanda returned from a medical college in Sonipat with a dislocated knee andgave up the medical course despite the open disapproval of her parents. Nanda was erudite, imaginative, disorganized and, as it happens with such people, bad at prescribed studies. From Assam she had been sent to Hyderabad to finish school. When she refused to distinguish herself in that city and Ravi’s grandfather died she was called to Delhi. She failed the entrance tests in two schools before a third admitted her. She passed out from this school situated in a by lane of Kashmiri Gate and was packed offto the obscure private medical college.
Ravi remembered a visit to the ugly town where he had got down from a state transport bus with Nanda at a bus station smelling of vomit and infested with flies. A rickshaw took them to the college. The Spartan institution was located on the outskirts of the townfrom where the green fields stretched endlessly on the flat Haryana grassland. Ravi played with the brother of his sister’s classmate, a good looking Jat girl called Suneeta Thakran, in the sugarcane crop for two days. He loved the lassi and thick rotis smeared in homemade ghee fed him by Suneeta’s hospitable family. In the morning he and his friend Narender drank fresh buffalo milk which came from the animals treated like family members by the farmers. Ravi had returned to Delhi full of stories for his parents and friends.
After aborting her career as a medical student Nanda pursued humanities in a Delhi University college. This decision proved momentous. In college, she was the only girl who read, wrote and spoke good English and naturally attracted the attention of everyone.Soon she was affected by a group of senior students dedicated to the idea of a making a Marxist revolution in India. Their great inspiration, theNaxalbariinsurrectionof Bengal, had ended by then leaving these romantics bobbing in its wake. But the Cold War raged across the globe and anti-imperialism was the flavor of educated youth in those days. The college faculty had a sprinkling of brilliant Marxist teachers and a large group of students committed to Marxism-Leninism. Most of these students belonged to Delhi’s sprawling Hindi medium lower middle class.
Sunil was one of them. He was a stocky balding man of medium height with artistic pretensions. Sleeping with men like himbecame a revolutionarycause for women of the middle or rich classes stricken with class guilt. Soon after joining college Nanda fell in love with this dreamy eyed bespectacled revolutionary. Her boyfriend was ill read compared with Nanda and Ravi and it did not take him very long to openly express his resentment against this fact. Those were the days when brother revolutionariesdirtied your new shoes to make them look old and proletarian. Indian classical music was condemned as elitist, feudal and reactionary. It was supposed to have been invented by the ruling class as anopiate-lullaby for the masses! The problem with this argument was easy to perceive. If this music was elitist how was it supposed to put the masses to sleep?Ravi once asked this of a corpulent Sikh revolutionary. This man had tried to light the fire of revolution in the Delhi IIT in vain before settling down to a bourgeois life with his Iranian wife some years later. The Sikh looked perplexed and gave Ravi no answer. After this meeting Nanda complimented him in private.
The revolutionarieswere defeated by history. One of them, who relished stamping on clean shoes with his dirty feet, became a respected member of a known Muslim communal organization aspiring for a Rajya Sabha ticket. Two prominent ones became Namazi Muslims. Some joined Dalit and Backward Class politics in the pursuit of personal careers. Some cleared government exams and joined various services, even the police! Only a handful remained steadfast in progressive causes and with these people Ravi and Nanda developed a lifelong friendship.
By the time Sunil met Nanda in college she had stopped speaking to her father and her heart was bittertowards the Patriarch. In those days the realization that an unhappy childhood rarely produces a happy person had dawned on Ravi. One of his close friends had developed a hang dog expression in childhood because of his parents’ kill joy attitude towards life.His father, a clerk in an Embassy, was a pretentious martinet and his mother had the habit of emotionally blackmailing her two sons. This friend kept sporting this expression till the day when the friendship between him and Ravi’s family ended in Muscat. This friendtruly became more miserable after he married a psychologically unhinged girl from Gorakhpur under his parents’ pressure. Anyway, this unfortunate union between low self worth and madnessmerits a different narrative.
Nanda was averse to the Patriarch for too many reasons to be recounted here. She openly criticized and opposed his raping the maids and questioned some of the self glorifying myths he told the family.
In one storyGeneral Montgomery recognized him in London after the War!
The Patriarch claimed presence at the victory parade in London. The family was told that before this celebration, the general inspected the contingent of Indian troops selected for the event. During this inspection the General had stopped in front of the Patriarch and shaken his hand in a gesture of battlefield recognition. In this narrative the former infantryman went too far in mixing fact with fiction.
Ravi looked at his father in disbelief and Nanda remained unimpressed. The Doctor raised her eyebrows in disapproval. Nanda countered with a question which stunned Ravi.
“Since your papersrecord that you were discharged from the Indian Army in December 1944 in Italy, how did you participate in the London victory parade held in the summer of 1945?”
Nanda was bad at history but not an idiot and her favorite subjects were English and Philosophy. Her erudition had sharpened her wit. Ravi gaped at her in admiration.
The question elicited a stunning silence in the room.The Doctor’s frown turned into a rare smile. Ravistared at his father in anticipation. Taken ThePatriarch’s face was flushed with liquor and indignation.He responded by saying that some men were chosen specially for the parade.
“So you have some proof of this selection?” asked Ravi, his voice fortified by Nanda’s wit. “In December 1944 you were repatriated to India. If they wrote to you regarding the selection for the parade, I am sure you saved the letter. We found no such letter in your service file which you showed to us the other day” Ravi added fuel to fire.
Confronted with a formidable alliance the Patriarch uttered a garbled sentence which left Ravi and Nada exchanging glances and smiling. They had nailed him. But there was no doubt that the man was an excellent raconteur.
As a teenagerNanda evolved into a rebel allergic to academic curricula.Her teachers were exasperated with her reading habit which made her question the status quo. Nanda questioned everything. Faith, superstition, tradition and mythology were interrogated relentlessly. She turned reason against her peers irritating them no end. She abhorred discipline, housekeeping otherqualities considered necessary for a female by patriarchy. She became anarchistic at the time Ravi became disciplined. He woke her up early to clock his running time and she obliged with scowl. As a person she was neat and tidy but she cared little for the surroundings which encased her.
Her habits made her a bad student and enraged her conventional parents. FromDibrugarh Nanda was sent to Hyderabad to complete high school. In that conservative city where girls were not allowed to display themselves on the balconies she immersed herself in fiction and failed high school exams for two years. In Delhi her academic nonchalance caused chronic stress at home and bouts of violence which scarred her.
In fits of anger, reeking of whiskey, the Patriarch beat his daughter who stood her ground.
Ravi never forgot the nights when arguments started between his parents and Nanda. Those violentwouldcontinue to disturb him in old age.
“Your mother says you failed again. The school has complained” his father began the conversation as a prelude to the beating.
“What am I supposed to do if I do not like studying what they teach in school?” Nanda replied in defiance.
“You are supposed to study hard and become successful. So far you have achieved nothing. You never pay attention to studies and I only see novels in your room” the father would say his voice rising.
“You could not clear the matriculation exam yourself and you talk to me about studies! Ma can speak to me about these things and she overdoes it in any case. At least I am more educated than you! I shall not study. Especially those silly textbooks which are not worth the paper they are written on” her defiance would rise in response to his increased anger.
Then the father beat his refractory daughter in the presence of the Doctor and Ravi. The former policeman believed that a beating was the best way to reform a non-conformist. Clad in a shirt and pyjama he cornered and beat her. In another corner the TV remained ondisplaying the delicate beauty of Salma Sultan. The slaps resounded in the room. The shouting drowned out the TV. If Ravi tried intervening he was sent crashing to the floor. Ravi, after his tears dried up, took ice to his sister and she hugged him tight.The siblings cried together inloneliness. Sometimes theDoctorstruck her own forehead with her palms in helplessness while the beatings and abuses raged.
Domestic violence drove Nanda into long term depression. She was tall, dark and considered unattractive in conventional terms. She found fairness obsessed north India particularly cruel. From childhood she developed low self-worth. At nineteen, when suicide crossed her mind five times a day every week, she concluded that she was depressed and needed help.
She made a mistake she regretted soon.
On a pleasant March morning she fed the sparrows their quota of grain in the back yard and walked a kilometer to the hospital where her mother worked, with a spring in her step. She was determined to take charge of her life. In the OPD she got a card made in her real name and met a young male psychiatrist to whom she poured out the stored bitterness in her heart. She shed copious tears in his company and left the hospital feeling light and hopeful. She enjoyed the warmth of the sun that day and walked home snacking on fifty grams of roasted peanuts. It was decided that she would meet the doctor once a month till the depression left her.
Unknown to her, she was seen entering the hospital by a senior nurse who passed by the OPD gate on her way to the department where the Doctor worked. The nurse ran into Nanda’s mother an hour and half later as the Doctor took off her white coat after a hard night duty. The nurse blurted out what she had seen at the OPD gate in the morning. Soon the psychiatrist found himself treating the middle aged doctor to a cup of tea in the canteen.
“The head nurse told me that my daughter came to see you this morning. May I know what she said to you?” the Doctor confronted the handsome young man.
Torn between ethics and the facts which this grumpy senior demanded the psychiatrist betrayed his patient.
“Why did you see that psychiatrist this morning? Are you trying to tell the world that my daughter is mad?” the Doctor shouted at Nanda that evening after first giving her a tight slap. Later the fact was revealed to the Patriarch who beat Nanda at night in a fit of drunken anger.
“Control her!” he shouted at the Doctor “or she will roam the streets like a randi one day.”
Nanda narrated this incident to Ravi years after it occurred.After the beating she became discreet, changed the hospital made a partial recovery from depression. A psychiatrist at the Willingdon Hospital proved helpful and Nanda lived to become a known feminist, journalist and a writer of novels and stories well received by thousands of readers. When these events happened brother and sister mutually concluded that their parents neededcounseling.In time the beatings stopped and the parents aged. Ravi grew tall and strong and the Patriarch could not subdue him when defended his sister. When Nanda joined college the parents gave up on her and slowly the relations between the parents and the siblings improved. The Patriarch was losing his strength fast because of his addictions and the Doctor gradually grew out of his shadow.
Nanda wrote fiction to fight the bouts of depressions which descended upon her without warning. Many years after these incidents Raviwas reminded of Nanda when he read an interview of the famous Spanish-American writer Vargas Llosa. In the delightful autobiographical interview Llosaadmitted to suffering from lifelong depression and anxiety. When nothing cured him he sought refuge in writing. Ravi was guided to this interview after his addiction to Llosa’s work was begun by the gift of The Dream of the Celt made to him by Nanda some years after his mother died. Fascinated by the life of Roger Casement narrated by Llosa, Ravi downloaded all the novels of Llosa on his tablet and spent hours between teaching and chores savoring every word in them. He researched the subjects chosen by Llosa and was fascinated by the historical insight of the Latin American author. After Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende the realism of Llosa appealed to him in a different way.Ravi felt happy to observe the realism in his sister’s literary works, drafts of which she always gave him to read and comment on.As time passed history and literature became fused Ravi’s imagination. Finally in advanced age he returned to his childhood through this medium. His friends respected his ability to remain curious and young.
In the Delhi College some of Nanda’sMarxist teachers found her inquisitive, receptive and philosophical. Under the influence of her professors and some seniors Nanda became committed to revolution.The flame of revolution still flickered in the universities. Sunil entered Nanda’s life dressed in Bata sandals and khadikurtapyjamas. He carried a cloth bag slung across his chest in which were a few books, pamphlets and a diary. He came from a family of stamp makers and engravers which had migrated to Delhi from Lahore in 1947. His father had initiated him in the business as a school boy.The fine needle work spoilt his eyes early and he wore thick glasses. He sang revolutionary and romantic songs in a voice which Ravi found jarring and unsuited to the art of vocal music. Sunil smoked Regent cigarettes and exhaled the smoke from his flared nostrils. In those days the revolutionaries smoked cigarettes or bidis and drank Old Monk rum which was cheap. Things more expensive were neither affordable nor considered proletarian. Sunil had studied in a government boy’s school and had not spoken to a girl for more than five minutes before joining college. Flattered by Sunil’s attentions and full of idealism Nanda fell in love. After a while both decided to get married in the cause of revolutionary theatre and the Marxist Leninist movement in Bihar.
The Doctor and Patriarch agreed to the inter caste match after some hesitation.Happy that their errant daughter would finally settle down and they would see their grandchildren soon, the parents went out of their way to get the couple married in style. No expense was spared. A large number of relatives were invited from Maharashtra for the wedding and sent back laden with gifts. The Patriarch went overboard, paid for the train tickets of many relatives including Vaini whose arrival caused the Doctor much heart burn. But she decided to honor the lady on the auspicious occasion.
An elegant lady in a green nine yard silksareewas pointed out to Ravi by his mother’s excited younger sister.
“She is the one your father loved. Because of her he threw the fruits at her in the hospital when she was suffering from Typhoid”
Ravi moved forward and touched Vaini’sdelicate feet on which the veins stood out. When he straightened she embraced him showering compliments on him.
“You have grown tall and strong like your father” she said to him.
“Thank you very much Vaini” he barely managed, mesmerized by the warmth of her embrace. As she held him close, he felt her firm breasts at the time when she was barely fifty. She released him slowly having relished every moment of his touch.
This enigma had come into the Patriarch’s life by an accident narrated to Ravi by his aunt who excelled in gossip.
The virgin Vaini was married at eighteen to a man who suffered a psychological illnessof incurable premature ejaculation.
“After trying to consummate the marriage for a month her husband gave up. He left her free to love someone else.”
He was probably reconciled to her not eloping with someone and thereby disgracing the family name in public. Worse could have happened. She could have found satisfaction with a domestic or a local shopkeeper.
Vaini shifted toRanjangiriafter her marriage a few months before the Hyderabad Police Action was ordered by Nehru in 1948. The times were bad for the landed Brahmin families living in isolated pockets vulnerable to communal mob violence. In the meantime Qasim Razvi, the rogue from north India had raised a band of hooligans in the name of Islam called the Razakars. It was said that he persuaded the Nizam to opt for Pakistan, a demand which looked ridiculous to all Indians. The entire Ranjangiriarea was swarming with the communal Razakars who targeted some large Hindu households. Their eyes were on the wealth and women in the large Brahmin wadas. While the Hindu males feared for their lives, the women were petrified of rape and worse.Rumors and news of such incidents in other parts of the Nizam state had been aired for quite some time. People had left their houses and moved to other cities in the Deccan
Finally the Razakars arrived, intent on loot and rapine.
One day a mob of sword wielding Razakarsvigilantes surrounded Vaini’shouse.They were about to break down its massive main doorwith a tree trunk carried by twenty men when a police party, alerted by the villagers, arrived on the spot. The police party was led by a dashing officer. From a small hidden window on the first floor the young beautiful virgin bride saw a handsome man in khaki dismount from a jeep, lighted cigarette in mouth and a cocked revolver in his right hand. The officer took the cigarette from his mouth flung it to the ground and barked a command in a stentorian voice to the personnel in the two jeeps.
The twelve constables, six to jeep, sitting in the rear of the vehicles jumped out, formed a line and pointed their 303 rifles with bayonets fixed at the screaming criminals. The arrival of the jeeps distracted the mob leaders and they lost the desire to plunder the jagirdar’s house.The young officer shouted a warning to the mob and fired a shot in the air. On cue, the armed constables fired a volley over the heads of the hooligans. After this the police party began to advance slowly, in military fashion, towards the mob aiming their rifles at the chest of the Razakars. By then the leaders of the mob knew that the young officer meant business.A second volley in the air decided the issue and the Razakars took to their heels.
The young bride fell in love with the officerwhen she saw him jump out of the jeep. She had heard stories of his military exploits in North Africa and Italy. She knew he was the eldest scion of the largest jagirdar family in Marathwada and distant relative of her husband who knew him quite well. She also knew his reputation with women and this excited her more.
After the Razakars were put to flight, the doors of the wada were opened to the victors of the day and the young officer entered the house like a war hero. By marriage the lovely tall virgin was his distant relative and the future lovers were acquainted with each other. He had one look at her and was filled with a desire only a true lover can feel for a woman. He saw her blush and did not fail to notice that she personally supervised the hospitality organized for him. After lunch, he was shown to a guest room specially prepared for him. She kept a plate of paan and supari on a table next to the bed and turned to leave the room.
“You know me, don’t you?” he asked her, standing close to her.
She nodded without saying anything but felt his presence fill the room.
He put one hand on her slim shoulder and gently caressed her waist and from behind with the other. She ran out of the room her heart pounding.
A week later he returned when Vaini’s husband had left for Vijayawada for a weekon some urgent business. The family had not recovered completely from the shock of the mob attack and requested him to stay for a couple of days and enjoy a little more hospitality. He graciously accepted the offer, posted two constables outside the house and late at night, when everyone was fast asleep waited for her in the guest room. She came to him, anxious and breathless, late at night to lose her virginity and reputation in a fit of passion. He extended his stay by two more days and every night the lovers fornicated several times on a mattress spread on the floor to avoid detection. After this eventful time, everyone came to know of these lovers but no one interfered in their affair. It was rumored that, on some pretext or another, Vaini sometimes accompanied the officer on his tours to the countryside and on several nights the two young lovers slept together under the stars while the police constables guarded the posts.
In her company he forgot his homely wife and the nimble dusky prostitutes of Telengana.
In the swirl of the marriage Ravi did not spend more time with Vaini, a fact he regretted later when the memories of his father’s past tormented him with unanswered questions. Some years later Ravi was sent by his parents to the town near Hyderabad where this lady lived in a joint family to look for a future bride for himself among the daughters of his distant relatives. Much of this visit was wasted by Ravi in delightful activities like swimming for hours in a large community baoli, eating delicious local mangoes and delicacies under the benign gaze of Vaini, as she was called by everyone. No one knew why this honorific was reserved for her and Ravi did not know whose sister in law she was.He knew that her husband, the cuckold, was a distant cousin of his father. When he took his leave of the place with its green mango trees and the oasis with which he had fallen in love, she asked him to come back soon and stay for a few weeks at least.
In Maharashtra it is the custom to say“I shall return” upon leaving someone’s house.To say “I am going” is considered inauspicious because “going” is a metaphor for death. This beautiful woman had no children but she treated the son of her former lover as her own. Ravi had promised himself a longer trip in the near future before boarding the bus to Udgir but that trip never materialized. Fate willed otherwise and he never met Vaini again. In Delhi he fell in love with a Punjabi girl and forgot Vaini until one day news arrived from the Deccan that his father’s former beloved had died of cancer at an age when people are deluded by notions of immortality.
The news arrived in a light blue inland letter and was relayed to the family at the dinner table with a solemnity the Patriarch rarely displayed. As he spoke he looked at his wife with expressionless eyes. The Doctor’s face had remained motionless as she reached for a chapati while Ravi’s father spoke.
“She was a good woman and how nice she looked at Nanda’s wedding. Green always suited her” was the only comment which ensued from the Doctor’s mouth as she continued to chew food.
The moment, like the fleeting presence of Vaini in their north Indian lives thousands of miles away from the Deccan, passed without changing the surviving lover’s routine. The evening drinks and numerous replays of a record which played the Ragas MaruBihag and Kalavati in PrabhaAtre’s melodious voice continued unabated. The evenings blended into the mornings and for Ravi and his friends history stood still for a long time.
A special letter of invitation was sent to Ravi’s maternal uncle in Bombay in the hope of getting the married couple blessed in person by the Mama. The Patriarch swallowed his pride in discussing this invitation with his wife and finally both decided to dispatch the letter well before the wedding. Some developments formed the context of this marriage invitation. Some years before this wedding Ravi had been taken by train in the company of his family to the temple town of ParliVaidyanath where, with his three cousins, sons of his father’s younger brothers, he had undergone the Upanayan ceremony. After theMaunj he became a dwija [twice born] the evidence of which was provided by the multitudes who rushed forward to touch his feet unmindful of the scorching summer sun. Summer is cruel in India but in the central Deccan it is particularly merciless.
Later, after the community meal, as child Brahmins sat in the bus which would take them to their ancestral village men, women and children of all ages entered and left the bus in a single file with the purpose of touching the young Brahmins’ feet. All this happened under the benign gaze of the proud elders. The experience horrified Ravi but his cousins enjoyed their newly acquired power.A fortnight after returning to Delhi Ravitook a pair of scissors and, without remorse, cut the holy thread janeyu and nobody minded at home. After the ceremony the Doctor’s family travelled in Maharashtra for ten days during which Ravi met many of his senior relatives and cousins for the first time. The trip ended in Bombay where the Doctor met her brother and his wife. The customary gifts were exchanged and Ravi enjoyed the sea breeze for the first time in his life in his uncle's Bandra flat on the seventh floor. Much was forgotten and forgiven during this visit which encouraged Ravi’s parents to invite Mama and Mami to Nanda’s marriage.
The auspicious occasion finally did not arise because the Mama, who had become a true recluse by then, wrote back a polite letter which highlighted an excuse for his absence from the wedding and sent His long distance best wishes to his niece and her husband. These wishes were contained in a letter which Ravi found among the papers left behind by his mother some years after she died. The English in which the letter was written demonstrated the fluency of intellect his late uncle obviously possessed. The hand writing was neat, almost calligraphic. The letter spoke of forgetting the past and allowing the younger generation to start a new future afresh.
25/11/78
Dear Lata,
Read your letter and the wedding card. Convey my best wishes to the newly married couple. A few days ago, on 5 November, 1978 your brother in law Srinivas came and met me in the Aarey Hospital. I am sure you have received the message from him. I will be unable to come to Nanda’s marriage on the 27th as I am not well. The atmosphere in Aarey Hospital has been bad for my health. I believe mother wants me to sign some papers. I have requested our younger sister to send me those papers by registered post because it is difficult for me to travel beyond Bombay these days. Let good sense prevail over the elders (mother and others) as the younger generation has grown up to take up the new responsibilities of the family. I hope that you will keep on writing to me as usual. Rest is ok.
Convey my pranam to your husband who, Srinivas told me, has started suffering from hypertension and incontinence these days. Give my love to Ravi who must be a big boy now. My wife remembers him with great affection.
Yours Lovingly,
M.B. Kalloorkar.
Aarey Hospital,
Goregaon (East)
Bombay 400065.
The Doctor showed the letter to Ravi and he felt proud and responsible reading it. He loved the words the younger generation has grown up to take up the new responsibilities of the family.
It was a great misfortune that none of Mama’s children inherited his talent. They remained uneducated and uncaring of his talents. The males among them vanished into the social and architectural labyrinths of a great city of slums and whores. One sonhad started drinking early and turned into an alcoholic.His alcoholism and jealous nature destroyed his marriage with a good lookingGujarati girl whose father supplied dresses to Bollywood actors. Ravi always wondered why and how this girl ended up marrying the fellow in the first place.The secondson left Bombay for a small town called Bhusavalin Khandesh.He never returned to Bombay which had nurtured his empty dreams. He hated the city. On the way to Khandesh he lived for two years in a small town in Marathwada where he did not lose the opportunity of impregnating a cousin who foolishly fell in lust with him. Ravi heard the story from the woman herself several years after she married a lackluster clerk in Aurangabad.This pedestrian clerk was cuckolded by a local politician who died in a car accident some years after the marriage. The cousin, dressed in white, and the widow of the Maratha politician grieved together next to the cadaver in front of a large crowd including the cuckold. The third son wasted his nondescript life as a failed small scale fabricator of electricity parts in a slum in Bombay among the lower class Christian relatives of his wife who had a hole in her golden heart. He lived among people who brushed their teeth with tobacco dust every morning and intermarried in an extended family producing malformed children with a regularity which surprised strangers.
Scores of friends from Delhi were present at Nanda’s wedding reception and Ravi’s friends had a ball. Many of them drank alcohol mixed with cold drinks for the first time in their lives and some of them did not fall asleep before vomiting copious amounts of semi digested beverages and the oily food served at the reception. The event was declared complete by the relatives in the morning when it was discovered that a theft of Dunlop mattress had taken place during the night. What is a wedding without a theft, they said over gossip and several cups of sweet tea. The theft was considered auspicious by an old uncle of the Patriarch who announced that the marriage would last at least fifty years!
The needle of suspicion pointed towards a maternal cousin infamous for his habits of drinking, gambling, whoring and stealing. This thin bearded fellow had vanished mysteriously at night while the party was on. He appeared in the afternoon to deny the charges with vehemence to an audience full of groggyhappy men and grumpy tired women. For the first time in its history, which stretched back to 1936, the government quarter on Barron Road was full of Maharashtrians much to the wonder and amusement of the North Indians and Bengalis who were invited in great numbers to the wedding.
Among the Bengalis was a young dusky well endowedgirl, barely fifteen, madly in love with Ravi without his knowing it. She spied on each and every movement of his during the wedding. She recounted these memories of the marriage two years after the event in bed with Ravi after a session of mutual deflowering in Ravi’s room one day when no one was home. She told him that she had fasted and prayed for his recovery from an attack of severe hepatitis which had hospitalized Ravi for a fortnight some weeks before Nanda’s marriage.
Unlike her fair mother, the girl did not have sharp features but had a flat stomach, full shapely breasts and a hairless body.She also made love with a passion and expertise which surprised Ravi whose expectations of a virgin were different.
“Where did you learn to make love like this, in your mother’s womb?” he had teased her one day after they were done.
She had burst out in a peal of laughter “What an innocent boy you are. You have no idea what all girls discuss and read. Most of my friends know all this very well. There is also something called reading”
Before Nanda’s marriage,her parents arranged some futile meetings between her and some eligible suitors. Ravi, by then his sister’s collaborator in all matters, would be present as a sideshow at these organized dates which took place in the restaurantsof Connaught Place. Ravi enjoyed the meetings.He loved the snacks bought by the suitors and spoke sentences in between chicken sandwiches to support of his sister. Once, an Indian Administrative Service Officer, the most respectable category of Indian suitors in those days, took them out to dinner. The man was a perfect gentleman. He exuded progressive values, disliked the idea of dowry and was against the caste system. He seemed not put off at all by Nanda’s ordinary appearance.It was not as if Nanda was not capable of better but this was a trait she purposely displayed on such occasions to put off the suitors. To her surprise, the stratagem often backfired. After that particular meeting, as brother and sister walked home from Connaught Place, the Ravi had passed a remark in favor of the IAS officer.
That was the only time he regretted his sister’s turning down a suitor. He thought of Kashmir, the Bay of Bengal Islands and the North-East as the young man spoke of his postings over food. It was clear that the fellow had opted for geography as his UPSC main subject. “It would be nice if you married him. I would get to see the whole country in some style” he had said later greedily sucking on chocolate ice cream after the meal. He remembered his geography lessons while uttering those words. Nanda hated geography and more than that dislikedRavi’s obsession with the subject. He was rebuked immediately and asked to mind his own business or else be prepared not to be brought to such meetings in future. Ravi was lucky to have got away without a tight slap!
For a long time after that he pondered overNanda’s vehemence demonstrated that day. Did she regret her decision to turn down a man any middle class girl would have gladly married? Decades later, in private, he found the answer but then it was too late to turn back the wheels of history and start again in that restaurant which vanished like others in passing time.
Nanda, the communist, refused to wear the sindoorafter her marriage to Sunil. The ageing Patriarch never failed to reprimand her for violating this tradition.
“Your forehead has no sindoor! You are a married woman now. You must wear the battu”. Somewhere in a life of interaction with obese farting traders he had picked up the word battu which irritated Nanda and she was resolute in not wearing it.
“Look, all this is not good. Our daughter is not using the battu” the Patriach, breaking wind loudly, would remark to his wife while Ravi looked on enjoying every bit of the discomfort his sister’s irreverence had caused his father. He relished the argument which broke out between Nanda and the Patriarch on this issue.
By this time the Doctor had started sides in this conflict. Her sympathies were with her daughter.
“What battuare you speaking of?Hobnobbing with the Marwaris has spoilt your language and expectations both. Why do you complain to me? What good has mybattudone to me all these years?So many women do not put on such things these days. Have you seen Dr. Gauri Sen? She has never usedsindoor. Even my friend Dr. Naina Sehgal gave up the practice years ago. Please keep quiet and learn to change with the times. Nanda is a mature woman now. She has settled down.She is not a girl anymore and knows what is best for her. Do you want to interfere in her marriage and spoil it? When her husband has no objections to her not putting on the sindoor what is your problem?”
Thus was set the context for a re-enactment of these dialogues between Ravi and Nanda later. Both would die of laughter as Ravi imitated his father and spoke the same battu dialogues while Nanda played her own role with more vehemence. The friends enjoyed the theatre immensely.
After marriage Nanda shifted to small rented accommodation in East Delhi beyond the dirty Yamuna in a lower middle class colony called Pandav Nagar which had open drains and established colonies of mosquitoes and flies. There, in a single room which gave access to a small toilet and kitchen, the revolutionary couple settled down to a life dedicated to street theatre and Marxism. Sunil played the role of a husband who earned no living and Nanda wasidealist enough to support him on a small salary she drew as an unknown journalist and editor in a press agency.This press agency had been set up by former communists in a government flat in central Delhi. Both her home and office were hospitable places where friends and political comrades were made to feel comfortable at any hour. Whenever Ravi visited Sunil and Nanda, he found the room full of visitors discussing politics and literature.Sometimes he found them rehearsing theatre in loud voices. From their glances it was clear that the neighbors found this couple strange although no one objected to their living in the locality in any way. Within weeks Nanda had developed cordial relations with some women in the area most of whom were semi literate housewives.
Unlike Sunil, Nanda was not used to living in a single room home but she said nothing to anyone. Ravi sensed her discomfort but remained silent on the topic for fear of being rebuked.
Two years later the limits of this existence were reached and the Doctor and Patriarch could no longer endure Nanda’sdiscomfort. A small house was bought for Nanda and Sunil in a back lane of Patel Nagar from the hard earned savings of the Doctor. The house, registered in Ravi’s name for reasons unknown to him, became a site of rum soaked soirees which had earlier scandalized the neighborhood of Pandav Nagar. This revelry of life and causes remained partially known to Nanda’s parents who often spoke of seeing their grandchildren soon. The happiness in the new marriage was short lived and the marriage endedafter six eventful amidst much acrimony between Nanda and Sunil.
These were painful years for Ravi. As Nanda’s marriage came apart, the fondness initially felt for Ravi by Sunil was gradually replaced by envy and resentment. The years passed and Nanda’s ideal of falling in love with an attractive ‘other’evaporated with each passing summer between the two. Her imagination had been nourished by Chaucer and Byron.She had spent her childhood in the company of Italian nuns in a convent school in the salubrious North East. Her character was informed by a cosmopolitanism which was spread between Assam and the Deccan. The English language came to her naturally and she wroteexcellent prose in English and Hindi bothas a high school girl.She knew Kannada which she picked up in the company of Naani in Hyderabad and understood Marathi.
Her marriage with Sunil was destined to fail.
In the fifth year of the marriage the verbal exchanges between Sunil and Nanda occasionally turned physical until one day she requested him to leave the house her parents had bought. By then she was attracted to another man. Sunil left the house without a word and repaired to room in East Delhi, jobless, depressed and hopeless. He survived, living with a number of women,for ten years after the divorce in penury.Then he died of cancer like his mother had died in the early 1970s. He expressed his desire to meet Ravi and his former parents-in-law a couple of years before this sad event but, for unknown reasons, the meeting did not happen to the regret of Ravi.
It was Nanda who told Ravi that Sunil had been diagnosed with cancer in a voice of resignation. Ravi looked at her wet eyes and understood everything.He knew she was torn between expressing her feelings for a man she had stopped loving and an indifference to the suffering of the same man. Seized of the complexity of human emotions, Ravi had wanted to meet Sunil. He wanted to tell him that he had forgiven and forgotten a lot which had happened between the two men. When Sunil’s cancer was discovered, Ravi’s life was fracturing. The regret for not meeting Sunil at least once before his death remained.
A few weeks after Ravi’s daughter turned one Nanda called Ravi.
“He is in the intensive care at the AIIMS and may not live long. I think you better go and see him.”
Ravi decided to see Sunil alone because Smita had disliked him. Her memory of the dying man was of a night years ago in the house on Barron Road where he tried to touch her inappropriately after a party which had left the guests drunk and uninhibited. She was a young girl at the time and was visiting her cousin. She stayed on for the party and left early the following morning. She confessed to Ravi about this many years later.This confession brought into focus another scene in Ravi’s memory. Ravi’s classmate and theatre comrade in JNU had accused Sunil of being sexist and lecherous. The charges were discussed in a special session of the theatre group and Sunil proved unequal to the task of refuting them. When confronted, he had lost his poise and called the accuser names in Hindi.This weakened his defense and left everyone, including Ravi, with the impression that the girl was correct. In fact she was. The girl left the group after this showdown and spoke about Sunil’s sexual advances on her in the activist circles openly bringing down the revolutionary’s reputation several notches. This event, in turn,had reminded Ravi of the accusations of molestation brought against Sunil by the parents of a minor school going girl within a year of his marriage to Nanda. This simple Jain family of three had rented out the house number 47.
The parents had approached Nanda hesitantly not knowing what to say. The child was fond of Ravi’s dog and visited the Doctor’s house often.
The nine year old, who stopped stepping out of her home after a few weeks of meeting Sunil, told her parents that the bearded man had touched and fondled her on several occasions when he found her alone playing with the dog in Ravi’s house. Nanda was livid and confronted Sunil in front of Ravi who watched husband and wife discuss the issue carefully. The parents of the girl were present. Sunil had vehemently denied the allegations and called them a figment of the child’s imagination. Soon thereafter the traumatized family left the locality but the matter registered in Nanda’s disturbed mind. Ravi started observing Sunil’s behavior towards girls and women indiscreetly. He heard the risqué jokes Sunil cracked and the saw the expression in his eyes when attractive feminists visited Ravi’s house to meet Nanda.
History wiped out Barron Road and now Sunil was dying in a hospital where once one of Ravi’s uncles had been treated for a case of severe retinal detachment.
Ravi took a shared cab to the hospital and walked through the crowd of patients and their relatives to the ICU of the Cancer Ward with a heavy heart. The hospital stank of vomit and urine reminding Ravi of his father’s sick room at home. The ward was full of patients awaitingdeath with the smell of formaldehyde and phenyl in their nostrils. Memories of Sunil, Nanda and their lives in the 1970s and 1980sclouded Ravi’s mind as he walked up to the ICU on the third floor. Much of what he remembered had turned rancid. Ravi stopped to gather his breath in the anteroom of the ICUand staunch the flow of memories which distracted him from the present. Many old comrades were present in the room silent and morose. There was nothing to say and nods were exchanged. To most of them Ravi was an outsider. These men and women in the lugubrious room transported Ravi to a different painful time. Most of the guests had met Sunil and soon Ravi entered the death chamber to meet the dying man. Ravi saw Sunil sitting upright with an oxygen mask on his clean shaven face which appeared pock marked. His breath was short because his lungs had been destroyed by the cancer which had spread to his entire body from the testicles. He wore a khadikurtapyjama over a frame which, surprisingly, looked well preserved. The stocky forty-three year old Sunil, who never sang in tune and acted with difficulty, was about to die and Ravi suddenly felt sorry for the patient.
It seemed the dying man had stopped recognizing the people who came to visit him. A haze covered Sunil’s vision. Sunil peered at Ravi trying to recognize the visitor through the cloud of medication and impending death. After a few seconds Ravi’s presence dawned on him.
“How are you?” Ravi asked pointlessly. But what was there to say? He should have met Sunil years ago before the onset of cancer.
Sunil managed a weak smile and nodded. It seemed he had liked seeing Ravi before dying.
He swayed in exhaustion and slowly waved the younger man out. Ravi left Sunil almost feeling guilty of being the younger man destined to live much longer than the lost revolutionary.
The men had met after eight years. For a moment, Ravi thought later, memories must have flooded Sunil’s befuddled brain. Memories of an incomplete life, of Nanda and of a career never made. He must have regretted dying at forty-three, and age when people are poised to soar in life. Ravi cast a last glance at Sunil from the door and left the ICU.Heleft the hospital without meeting anyone, took a bus back home and returned to a young woman and a child. The image of Sunil desperate to win a game of carromboardin the living room of 53 D Barron Road flashed before him when the phone rang early next morning.
“He died at four this morning. The cremation will take place at the Nigambodh Ghat around ten” an unknown terse voice said to Ravi. On the thirteenth day after Sunil’s death a public meeting was organized by his comrades to remember him in glowing half true terms. Ravi was informed but declined to go because he was loath to speak of Sunil in front of people many of whom did not know the man’s past.
Ravi had nothing to say in public. He wondered what people would say if he were to go and speak of the minor on Barron Road or his classmate who had accused Sunil of sexual misconduct.
Sunil had lived a life without accumulating money or property. He had renounced all claims on his father’s house and shop and his family had reciprocated by renouncing him. He left behind a scooter with a small loan on it, some books, two pairs of Bata leather sandals and a suitcase half full of clothes mostly handloomkurtapyjamas. His two younger brothers and old blind father refused to attend the public meeting although one of them came later to take the scooter.The event happened and in a few years people forgot Sunil.Some months after Sunil’s demise his lady friend recounted his struggle with testicular cancer to Ravi. Sitting in the Teen Murti canteenshe spoke of the courage with which Sunil had confronted the scourge. She spoke of the tests which had once given him false hope. Her throat became choked as she narrated how he rode to the AIIMS on a scooter for several sessions of chemotherapy before giving up on life. Ravi heard her with misgivings and barely touched the teapot kept on the table. He wondered whether the slim middle aged woman had become Sunil’s last lover.Ravi accompanied the lady to the main gate talking to her about Sunil. Later he went home, reported the conversation to Smita and fell asleep cradling his loneliness. He dreamt of young Sunil, Nanda and their marriage in black and white.
“He was a good man. Your sister’s feminism did not make the marriage work” the Doctor had said to Ravi upon hearing of Sunil’s death on a hot summer morning. Ravi thought better than dispel her illusions.
“Will you attend the cremation?” she had asked looking at him with eyes swimming in tears.
“Yes” he had lied, thinking of the minor who had loved playing with his dog years ago.
*****
