Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 10
hike, bicycle, ride, and walk. No cars were allowed beyond a base point on most hill stations, including Simla, so we all had to move our own bodies around. It was considered healthy and, along with the fresh air, the main reason for our going there.
We, my boy cousins and I, might decide to go to the Wood Bazaar (Lakkar Bazaar) and order new yo-yos. Here we would marvel as the carpenter, using just a lathe, transformed a block of wood, right in front of our eyes, into any size yo-yo we requested. He would then lacquer it in the colors that suited us that day. I could never twirl and unfurl the yo-yos like my boy cousins, or make them “walk” or “talk” or whatever else the boys did, but I could hold them in my hands and admire them, shining, smooth oranges and pinks and blues. We could take a walk past Scandal Point and the Ridge, past the Gaiety Theatre (where many years later I was to film the theater scene in the Merchant Ivory movie Shakespeare Wallah), go to the tallest peak in the region, Jakko Top, and stare at the hundreds of monkeys that gathered there around the Temple of Hanuman to stare right back at us.
The only organized activity in the “hills” was the mountain picnic, which was quite different from the city picnic.
The picnic site was carefully chosen weeks in advance, usually by Shibbudada, who was well versed in the terrain and remained our majordomo in the hills. Sometimes it was a distant mountain peak, several ranges away; at other times it was a thunderous waterfall in a deep valley; once it was a mountain stream rushing through a remote gorge. Ordinary picnic spots, where most mortals went, were never considered good enough. No, not in the hills. Our spots were picked not only for their natural grandeur but for their inaccessibility in terms of distance or the climbing required.
Preparations for the picnic would begin weeks in advance. Rickshaws and hill palanquins (daandees) were arranged for the old and the infirm, and horses for the riders. The ladies of the house, plus numerous servants, spent many days preparing the food. Baskets of mangoes were ordered from various North Indian cities: langras from Benares for those who liked their mangoes tart; dussehris from Lucknow for those who liked them sweet and smooth; and chusnis, small sucking mangoes, for those who preferred not to eat the fruit at all but, rather, to suck the juice straight from the skin. Litchis were ordered from the city that grew the juiciest, smallest-stoned varieties, Dehradun.
Boys wear pullovers and girls solar topees on a mountain picnic. Typical picnic fare would be curry patties and pooris, the latter also used as plates.
At sunrise, when the mountains were still shrouded in an icy mist, porters (qoolis), rickshaws, palanquins, and horses were all assembled. First the porters were loaded with baskets of food and sent off with a party of servants. The walkers—led by Shibbu-dada, who had a passion for hiking—would leave next. I chose to go with him but nearly always lagged behind, which made him very cross. Third were those who rode in the rickshaws and palanquins, and the last group consisted of those on horseback.
Clad in heavy sweaters, mufflers, and shawls, our large party moved slowly, making numerous stops along the way. If we passed an orchard, a stop would be called and the farmer asked if, for a certain sum, we might pick plums or apricots. My favorite
Family picnics in the Himalayas often involved long hikes. Here the walkers among us pose with Shibbudada (in the hat). I am in the front row, far left, resting on a very handy stick.
groves were those of almond trees. I loved green almonds, slit open and robbed of their tender white flesh.
We would generally arrive at our picnic spot around midday. If it was beside a waterfall or stream, the children were allowed to swim while lunch was unpacked. The mangoes were placed in nooks of the stream to cool, fires were lighted to heat certain dishes (and also to warm the children when they emerged from the freezing water). Then the meal, often including ground goat meat cooked with peas (keema mattar) and cauliflower cooked with fresh ginger, would be served, accompanied by tales of adventure and hilarious stories about our ancestors.
The best part of the meal was still to come. It was those mangoes, biding their time in the frigid waters. At the start of the season we had the choicest dussehris and langras, standard-bearers of the northern mango world, peeled and cut into slices by the women. By the season's end, all that was left on the market were the small, visually unprepossessing chusn s, the sucking mangoes. After lunch we would rush to the stream to peer at our final course, dozens of mottled yellow-green egg-shaped wonders, nestling on the pebbles just beneath the surface of the rippling, gurgling waters. We would each pick one out and roll it between our palms to soften the flesh and reduce it to juice. Then we would pluck off the very top, where the mango was once attached to a tree, put that top to our mouths, and squeeze. Cool and sweet, this nectar had the taste of ecstasy, the ecstasy of our summers in the hills.
Paddling in a stream on a picnic with Rajesh. I have embroidered my shirt with a very stylish anchor.
FIFTEEN
A New School• Classmates in Burqas •
Hindi or Urdu: A Dreadful Choice •
A Lethally Sharp Pencil
Leaving Kanpur in 1944 had been hard, as we knew it was for keeps. None of us ever went back there except in our dreams. For months afterwards, I would wake up in our new, much smaller home at Number 5, crying. My mother would move from her bed to mine and say, “Were you dreaming of being in Kanpur again?” I would sob even louder. I felt I would never recover from the loss.
My life in our gardens, my shimmering Diwali oil lamps, my salmon-colored dining room, my intimate world—it had all come to an end. Verging on my teens, I had to face a bustling cosmopolitan city without my older sisters, who had been such calming companions. I did have my brothers now, but they were already in college, dealing with their own lives and loves. My baby sister, Veena, was too young for almost-teen conversation.
School, yet again, was a problem. My father first put me in what he thought might be a continuation of the tried-and-true convent school. He had me admitted into the Convent of Jesus and Mary in New Delhi.
I lasted a month. The school was cruelly segregated then. Education was carried on in two unequal “sections,” the English and the Indian. My father must have got a guarantee that I would be put in the English section, which had better teachers and students, though the thought of my father wanting me to be there was demeaning enough for me. After just a few days in this English section, which had mostly English girls but a few Indian daughters of high government officials as well, the school decided on its own to transfer me to the Indian section. There were only Indians here, under an Anglo-Indian teacher named Mrs. Clock. I was even more confused and angry. No one in this section could read or write or add. Where was I?
I complained daily to my father. In the end, he pulled me out and put me into Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School. Even though not a convent, it was still a missionary school, run by lay Episcopalians for the rather unique purpose of educating “purdah girls,” inner-city Muslim girls who wore the veil.
How such girls were educated at all was a wonder. Although our family was Hindu, we had, out of necessity, adopted many Muslim codes. Purdah, in its mildest version, had played its part. According to stories told by my two youngest aunts, my father's sisters Saran Bhua and Kiran Bhua, their father, my grandfather, had decided to send them to college, the same one he himself had attended, St. Stephen's College. Not so easy. First the girls had to get out of their house in the Old City, with its very Muslim sensibilities. My grandfather's grand phaeton was summoned to the nearest road that could accommodate it, and servants held up sheets on both sides of my aunts as they maneuvered the narrower lanes. Once they got to the college, where they were the only two female students, two chairs were placed for them as near the professor as possible. They could play tennis if they wished, but only with each other and after the courts were cleared of male students for the duration of their match.
By the time I went to Queen Mary's, Hindu girls certainly had much more freedom, but for Muslim inner-city girls, even getting to a good school was full of hazards. Queen Mary's solved the problem by sending a small, curtained horse-driven van to collect them. I remember that rickety van as it clattered back into the school grounds. A door at the rear would be impatiently shoved open from the inside, and a dozen or more girls—shadowy, unrecognizable forms swathed in white, dark green, or black burqas (body-covering chadors)—would burst out, hopping down one after another. Once inside the school doors, they would race down the hall, tearing off the constricting burqas as they ran. There was a special corridor leading to the back netball court where hooks had been strategically placed on both sides. This is where the burqas were hung—long, haphazard rows of shrouds.
Queen Mary's meant that in my schooling I was moving from a more Westernized Christian world to a more Indianized Christian one. The school was Christian in name and intent for sure. But because only the heads of the school were Christian, and Indian independence was already in the cards, Indians were more and more allowed to be themselves—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, whatever.
When I walked into the school, my first, seemingly insurmountable, hurdle was something else entirely. In the middle school, where I was to enter in the sixth class, all subjects— history, geography, mathematics, everything except English— were taught in either Hindi or Urdu, Indian languages that I had spoken at home since I uttered my first words but that I had never learned to write or read.
First I had to choose between Hindi and Urdu. Hindi was part of my Hindu inheritance, the language that had evolved from classical Sanskrit. Urdu was part of our Muslim culture, a hybrid that had actually developed in the bazaars of Moghul Delhi, my very own city. It used the grammar of Hindi but borrowed much of its vocabulary from Persian and Arabic. One was the language of my mother and the women of our house; the other, because of Delhi's peculiar history, the language of my father and most of the men I was related to. Partly inspired by Shibbudada's passion for Urdu poetry, I had actually studied the Urdu alphabet once with a maulvi (Muslim teacher) who would come to Number 7, make me whitewash a wooden board, and then, with a freshly sharpened qalam (quill) dipped in an ink that I made myself by dissolving ink tablets in water, teach me to write my alphabet — alif, bay, pay, they, toy. I had got as far as being able to read and write simple words.
It was a dreadful choice for me. I loved the elegant sounds of Urdu, but, employing perhaps the only gene for farsightedness I possessed, I opted for Hindi. Until then, to be among the brightest in my class had seemed almost a birthright. Yet here I was at barely twelve years of age, at the bottom of the class, struggling with a new alphabet. I was in the uniquely embarrassing position of not being able to read or write in school.
My father hired a Hindi master who came every other day on a bicycle. As our lives at Number 5 and Number 7 were hopelessly intertwined, it was decided that the best place for me to study quietly would be in one of the unused rooms in Number 7's south annex. Shibbudada's suite was at the river end; the room where I studied was at the opposite end. A table and chair had been set up there for the purpose.
The corner room of the south annex at Number 7, where I studied Hindi. The annex also housed extra bedrooms, the library (with the family history), and Shibbudada's suite. The garden is decorated with lights for a wedding.
I started with the Hindi alphabet —a, aa, e, ee, o, oo. I struggled. My masterji struggled. I was learning, but very slowly. Every now and then my youngest sister, Veena, who was about seven by now and in the same school as I was would get on her bicycle at Number 5, ride through the Number 5 gate, cross the road, ride through the Number 7 gate, come down the long driveway lined with henna hedges, and wave at me through the door as I studied with Masterji. Masterji took to inviting her in, playing with her and teasing her.
One day she came in and idly picked up my pencil as she and Masterji bantered. Masterji lifted her up and was teasing her when somehow, no one knew quite how it happened, the next thing I saw was the point of my pencil in his eyeball. I have always liked to keep my pencils lethally sharpened. He screamed in pain, Veena began to cry, and I felt miserable, because it was my pencil and my sister. He pulled the pencil out and dabbed his eye. I offered to call a doctor, but he insisted on going home right away. He did not return for several weeks. When he did, his eye seemed healed, but he remained so cross about the incident that he could barely teach. Soon he stopped coming altogether. That was the end of my Hindi lessons.
I was left too agitated to start again with another teacher. I told my father that I would manage. After all, anyone who knows the Hindi alphabet can read it. It is a completely phonetic, logical language. Of course my writing was pitiable, I read v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, and my knowledge of the more Sanskritized vocabulary that pure Hindi demanded was still nil. But I soldiered on. Within a year, I could just about keep up with my classmates.
SIXTEEN
Shibbudada's Favorites • Teatime Tension •
A Dream House in Daurala • The Sugarcane
Fields • Sweets Galore in the Sugar Factory
Shibbudada continued to haunt my life with a presence I wanted and did not want. The seeds of the slow-developing rift between our families were also being sown.
It was not enough for Shibbudada just to ignore his wife and children. Every now and then he needed the warmth of a family, and he picked ours. We were all on the whole good-looking, well mannered, neat, and clean. He liked that. I remember him saying once to a roomful of listeners, hanging on his words, “He has such a thick, coarse neck, how could he possibly appreciate the finer things of life—poetry, music?” He made statements like that. Most people just laughed and went along.
All members of my father's family had thin, delicate necks. That must have been a plus. In my father he had an adoring younger brother who never learned to deny him anything he asked for. My mother was sweet, pretty, and pliant. We were his ready-made family when he needed us.
Shibbudada went further. Out of my parents' six children, he picked two to bless with his special glow, thereby driving small wedges into our family that would grow into bigger wedges.
Of the two brothers that my parents had left in his care, Shib-budada's favor was bestowed on the younger, Bhaiyyadada. My eldest brother, Brijdada, always a bit of an introvert, was quiet and thoughtful. He liked to paint and draw, not Shibbudada's interests. Bhaiyyadada was a total extrovert, full of jokes and fun, easygoing, and utterly charming. He was picked.
Among the girls, his eye fell on Kamal. Lalit was startingly beautiful, too, with wavy hair and dark eyes that glowed with intelligence. He liked her. But it was Kamal who had an unearthly, angelic innocence, and a face to match. I remember that, even at the age of seventeen, she thought babies came directly out of the stomach. Perhaps the convent's nuns could be credited with this bit of fantasy. She had shy, undemanding eyes, a fine aquiline nose, thin, well-shaped lips, and a firm chin. As her body began to fill out, it, too, followed a master plan of divine devising. Rather like the goddesses that cling to temple brackets, she managed a large bust, tiny waist, and rounded hips. She had it all. And, in our joint-family setup, she was Shibbudada's favorite.
Bhaiyyadada and Kamal could walk into Shibbudada's suite freely. He could be seen laughing with them, with his arms on their shoulders. They had an ease between them that few others shared. What his children and wife were thinking all this time can only be imagined.
Shibbudada had, some time back, given up his law practice. As he himself explained, his delicate constitution rendered him incapable of pleading the causes of thick-necked crooks forever. He had, instead, started a financing-and-leasing company of his own. The business was first quartered near Kashmiri Gate, and then, as it grew wildly successful, the family bought a building in
Kamal (left) and Lalit, leaning on the falsa tree in the garden of Number 5.
Lutyens-designed Connaught Place in New Delhi, and the business moved there.
On his way back from the office in the early evening, Shibbu-dada had taken to stopping off at Number 5, where my mother would ask him politely if he'd like some tea, even though we might have had our tea earlier. Our smaller meals were in Number 5 now, but for lunch and dinner we still went to Number 7. After his tea with us, Shibbudada would drive on to his suite in Number 7 to rest, change, and then go out for the evening. At this rate, his wife, Taiji, hardly ever saw him.
My brother Bhaiyyadada.
Once Taiji discovered that Shibbudada was making a habit of stopping off in Number 5 for tea, she started keeping a lookout for him from Number 7's front veranda. If she managed to spot his familiar two-toned cream-and-blue Chevy turning into our much smaller bricked driveway, she would begin walking slowly towards our house, a casual look on her face, as if she had just thought of coming over to greet our family. The weight of her large body would shift in heaves from one side to the other as she moved.
As Shibbudada settled down in our drawing room, I would look nervously through a window and see what I knew I would see, Taiji advancing along Number 7's red gravel driveway. My stomach would knot up in a state of the highest anxiety. I could barely get the tea down my throat.
When Taiji arrived, all bathed and freshened up for the evening, Shibbudada, as expected, would not greet her or look at her. He proceeded as if she were not there. My mother would sweetly pour some tea for her as well, while trying to ignore the prevailing tension. After tea, Shibbudada joked with us, asked us about school, told funny stories, and offered all manner of wonderful fruit—mangoes or cherries or litchees or loquats or whatever he had brought especially for us from the most expensive fruit shop in Delhi, Oriental Stores. I would be at a loss to know what emotion to project, the I-am-so-happy-to-receive-the-gifts look to Shibbudada, or the I-don't-want-them-take-them-for-your-children look to Taiji. My palms would begin to sweat. What I felt was acute misery.
