Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 14
When I was asked to play the lead in Robin Hood and His Merry Men at school, I was ready for that, too. Already half a boy since early childhood, I donned my tights and tunic with glee, picked up my bow and arrow, and entered the fray in Sherwood Forest as if I had been born in Nottingham.
There were other infusions to the blood. Out of the haze that separates juniors from those in more senior classes, one face kept asserting its presence. It was that of a girl, about three or four years older than I, called Amina Ahmed. For someone like me, who came from a staid family of fully documented ancestors, a family in which kind married kind, Amina's history alone was enviable, and she repeated it with a certain pride. She was a Muslim girl from the inner city whose father was the illegitimate son of a prostitute. It could not get much better than that!
But it did. This father, Nuruddin Ahmed, had managed to educate himself enough to become a lawyer and, when in England, met and married a half-Jewish woman named Bertha Boam, commonly known as Billy. Amina was the offspring of this unusual couple, who still lived in the inner city, near a disreputable movie house that we had been warned to avoid, Novelty Cinema. She was as blond and light-skinned as her mother and sported her father's long, prominent nose. She wore her silky blond hair in a fashionable pageboy. Quite fearless, she could outswear any local ruffian in street lingo but also spoke the most chaste, elegant Urdu when it was required. (Later, as the wife of an Indian ambassador, she was to master Russian and Persian as well.) None of the Anglican supervisors in our school could control or suppress her.
Miss Devi Ditta, our principal, tried. Each morning started with an assembly of all the students for prayers. Here we stood in rows according to the class we were in, with the younger children standing in front. We began with hymns, accompanied by the nurse on the piano. These were Christian hymns, but because most of us were Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, certain concessions were made. Instead of singing, “Onward, Christian soldiers,” we sang, “Onward, onward soldiers.” I did not realize until I heard my father-in-law singing in a Brooklyn church some decades later that our words in India had been altered. After hymns and prayers, announcements were made about trips to interschool games, or “chaat parties” to raise money for a charity, or about new teachers. This was followed by a cursory inspection to check if our clothing was neat, our hair was tidy and free of lice, and our nails were clean and unpolished.
It was absolutely forbidden to use nail polish. Amina's nails, squat and bitten, were nonetheless always polished. Varnished a bright red or bright pink. Her name would be called out, a common occurrence.
“Amina Ahmed!” Miss Devi Ditta would say in an exasperated voice. “You have been asked again and again not to wear nail polish. Kindly go with Nurse and remove it.”
Amina: “I can't.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “What do you mean, you can't?”
Amina: “I can't. I am not allowed.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “Who is not allowing you?”
Amina: “Doctor's orders. I have to keep the nail polish on to protect my nails.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “I have never heard of such nonsense.”
Amina: “I have shimiitis [or some other invented name]. If I remove the nail polish, my nails will fall off.”
And so Amina would get away with it again. I would stare back at her and invoke my Hindu gods in awe. My admiration for her knew no bounds.
Amina behaved with equal gumption in the drawing class. Not that she and I went to the same class, but I knew the drill. Miss Aloo MacAdam, the art teacher, taught only two things, object drawing and painting, and in the same way, year after year.
For the object drawing, she placed wooden blocks, one or two of them, perhaps a bottle as well, or a vase with flowers, at the front of the class on a table. We sat in semicircular rows at a little distance with our drawing books open on our desks, well-sharpened pencils beside them, and drew the objects.
In order to get the proportions right, we had to keep measuring. “Hold your pencil out in front of you. Keep it straight. Close one eye. Now measure the length of the box on your pencil. Mark that point. Now measure the height of the box. Mark that. On your pencil, how many times does the height go into the length? Follow those proportions. Then use your watercolors and paint the objects in. Use the colors you actually see, making them paler where light hits the objects.”
I had no trouble with any of this, because I could draw and paint anyway. Miss MacAdam's directions only helped me double-check what my natural instincts already knew. She always rewarded me with the highest marks and showed my work around as an example.
Somehow, it was not enough. I needed Amina's approval. I had heard that she was an “artist.” So, one day, I waited for her outside the art room, drawing book in hand.
It took her a while to come out. Most of her class had already left when she and Miss MacAdam emerged. Miss MacAdam looked cross. Amina looked nonchalant. Miss MacAdam went back into the art room and banged the door shut behind her.
“Amina,” I said, “I want to show you my drawing.”
She looked at it.
“What do you think?” I persisted.
“Do you like it?” she asked me. “The most important thing is that you should like it.”
I was suddenly insecure. Unsure. “May I see what you did in class?” I managed.
She held out her drawing book. She had broken up her blocks, bowl, and vase into bits and pieces, scattering them about her page, and then colored them in nail-polish colors, magentas, reds, fuchsias, and oranges. The objects and colors were unrecognizable—that is, if you tried to match them to anything real in the art room—but the painting was beautiful.
Here was another dawn, another awakening. West European painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had already left their mark on us. On one of my birthdays, my family had given me a book of the paintings of European masters. I would sit with this heavy tome in my lap, drinking in the images on its thick, glossy pages day after day. Rembrandt, Holbein, and Leonardo da Vinci were there, but so were the more fragmented, angular worlds of Cézanne and Picasso. Just below this book, on the same shelf, I kept a thinner volume containing the turn-of-the-century paintings of Jamini Roy. A Bengali, he painted stylized folk-arty figures in few strokes and bright colors. This, too, was well thumbed. My favorite painter, though, whose work I loved with a passion then, was Amrita Sher-Gil, a half-Indian, half-Hungarian woman who had studied in France in the early 1930s, returned to India, and died at twenty-nine, but not before leaving the most graceful images of fluid Indian figures, often draped in striped clothing.
Until then, I had never been to an exhibition of paintings and did not apply the lessons I might have learned from my art books to myself. I admired the freedom of painters but did not realize that the freedom could apply to me, even at the age of thirteen, even while I was a mere student. In the end, I was not as bold as Amina. I painted as Miss MacAdam wanted me to in the art room, but bought myself some oils and painted in furious blobs at home.
TWENTY-ONE
The Sisters Return • A Taste of the Future •
Mother's Shawls • Kamal's Illness
My sisters Lalit and Kamal spent nine months of the year in their unheated boarding school, the Himalayan convent in Nainital. They came home only for the months of January, February, and March, when the mountains turned uncompromisingly frigid. By this time their slender fingers were already red and raw from chilblains. My mother had spent months furiously knitting woolen mittens with openings for the fingers so they could hold their pens and pencils. These, as well as hand-knitted cardigans, socks, and mufflers that had made their way up to the mountaintop school in package after package, hardly helped. My sisters suffered dreadfully from the cold. Of course they did not complain. Delhi must have seemed downright balmy to them. I was ecstatic to have my older sisters back for the winter holidays. We celebrated in big ways and small.
On those winter weekends, the men were free by lunchtime on Saturday. We all congregated under the beri, our beloved umbrella-shaped jujube tree, which each of us had climbed as a child. Weekend lunches were always preceded by beer—for the men. But many of the girls were in their teens now and permitted shandy, a mixture of beer and our carbonated “lemonade.” Those who wanted to sit in the full sun pulled their chairs away from the beri's shade, but most chose to have their heads in the shade and much of their bodies in the sun, and so kept adjusting their chairs. It was here that Bhaiyyadada, my very courtly brother, carefully poured me three-quarters of a glass of lemonade and added just enough beer to allow me to feel grown-up. The very first sip tasted of a future that lay in waiting.
During this period, I cannot quite pinpoint the exact time or the reasons for it, we sisters began addressing each other by our initials. We probably thought it was “cool”—some sort of Indian “cool” of the period. I became M, Kamal became K, Lalit was L, and Veena was V. When writing, we all spelled the initials differently. I addressed all letters to Lalit “Dear L” and signed them with an “M.” Her letters to me began with “Dear Emm,” and were signed, “Ell.” My parents never fell into the game, nor did my eldest brother. But Bhaiyyadada went along, and so did our closest cousins and friends. It soon stopped being a game. Our initials became our names for each other, names we still use. Today, the group of people who call me M is a limited club, and I, for one, guard membership to it jealously. Besides my sisters, my children call me M and so do many of my cousins, nieces, nephews, and dear, close friends. Recently, in Los Angeles, on the way to a film location, when a young actress I hardly knew, quite out of the blue, addressed me as M in a casual sentence, I was at first too startled to say anything. But the very next day I had to let her know, as gently as possible, that only those who had known me for at least forty years or were members of my family could address me that way.
(I was reminded then of a story told to me by a young director working for the first time with the legendary and formidable English actress Dame Edith Evans. Not knowing how to address her, he took the easy way out for the first few days by not addressing her directly at all. Then, one day, screwing up his courage, he ventured, “Edith, would you …” Dame Edith rose to her full height. “Edith?” she barked. “Edith? It will be Edie next.”)
Winter was when my mother bought her Kashmiri shawls. Delicate pashminas (the real ones, not the imitations available cheaply in the West), fine shahtooshes made from the softest mountain-goat hair, and jamevaars, handwoven antique paisleys, were all the stuff of dreams, sold only by itinerant shawl-wallahs, who traveled, generally on recommendation, from house to house. Kashmiri shawls were to Delhi women what furs are, or were, to women in the West. Pashminas, shahtooshes, and jamevaars were the rarer sables and ermines of the trade. They established a woman's credentials as soon as she walked into a room. Unlike some furs, a good Kashmiri shawl could never look cheap or tarty. It always enhanced the wearer, encasing her in solid dignity.
My stylish mother bought a few such shawls each year, adding to her already large collection. Now that her two older daughters were blossoming, she was keeping them in mind, too. The itinerant shawl-wallah, most often a Kashmiri, traveled with an assistant. He himself walked in front, carrying a small bundle. The assistant walked behind him. Both were directed to Number 5's back veranda. There my mother and older sisters would sit down on chairs. They were serious. Veena and I hung about. We, too, would turn into serious shawl-buyers one day. The shawl-wallah spread a bedcover on the floor and began opening his bundles.
The reason my mother chose the back veranda was that it was possible to be discreet there. After all, our relatives were everywhere. How many shawls we bought and what we paid for them was our business. Besides, she wanted to take full advantage of the southern light. Good light was essential, as these shawl-wallahs, according to my mother, could not be trusted. Sometimes, she said, they took several old, fr aying jamevaars, cut off the damaged bits, and pieced the good bits together, dyeing sections to make them match. Sometimes a beautiful shawl was riddled with the tiniest moth holes. Only if the shawl was held up to the light would they be visible. Light was needed to check on the fineness of the embroidery, the exact colors, and whether there had been any fading.
The shawl-wallah would unfold a shawl and hold it up to my mother. My mother might shake her head and say a firm “No,” in which case the shawl would be thrown in the direction of the assistant, who would refold it and put it away. Or my mother would say, “Put it aside, I will think about it,” in which case the shawl would be put to one side. My canny mother knew that almost as important as the light needed to examine the shawls was the poker face needed to fool the shawl-wallah. On no account was he to get the slightest hint of which shawl she was really interested in, as that would jack up its price.
The shawls were never ticketed with prices. A shawl-wallah could ask for whatever the market would bear, and that, of course, varied. If, at the end of a day, no shawls had been sold and the shawl-wallah needed money, prices could come way down. If the shawl-wallah had got a hint of the one shawl that was most desired, he could hold off until he got the price he wanted.
Soon there was a heap of “possible” shawls that my mother might want. Then she would start all over with this heap, winnowing them down by making a second selection from the first selection, again saying “No” and “Put it aside.” The heap of possibles got smaller and smaller until there were only a few left. She asked for their prices and began haggling. She was very good at it. Sometimes she presented the shawl-wallah with so many options that he got confused and forgot the ridiculously high prices he had originally quoted. “If I take this one and this one and this one, how much would it cost?” “What if I removed this one and added that one?”
Once, a shawl-wallah came to us with the most stunning green nineteenth-century jamevaar. It was a rare color, and the hand-loomed paisley workmanship was incomparable. It was the only shawl we wanted. Yet my mother went through her usual “No” and “Put it aside” for hours, until the poor shawl-wallah sold it to her for a price she was willing to pay.
March came to an end before I wanted it to, and my sisters went back to their convent school in Nainital. I began to feel lost the second they headed north.
The twin, seemingly contradictory, elements of dependence and resilient independence were being etched into my character. My brothers were absent for much of the first decade of my life; my older sisters were missing for most of my crucial early teens. I used to write to my oldest brother, Brijdada, from Kanpur, and he would reply, reassuring me sometimes with letters and sometimes with drawings. Lalit had assumed a semi-maternal role. She was certainly my mentor for all intellectual matters and was the only one who seemed to understand my insecurities enough to try to draw me out of them. Once she and Kamal left for school, I felt bereft.
My father, me (standing to his left), aged about thirteen, and Veena on holiday in Poona. These were difficult years.
Since private traumas were never discussed in my family, only smoothed over whenever necessary, these feelings of loss just stayed within me and festered.
At the end of 1946, Lalit graduated from her mountain convent school and returned to Delhi for good. In the following year, she was admitted to Indraprastha College, an easy bicycling distance from our house.
Around this very time, I began to notice my father and mother whispering to each other with a worried look. Somehow Kamal, who was still in Nainital and still everybody's favorite, was involved in this worry. At first I could not understand any of it, and my parents would not explain. What I did know was that something had happened during sports. Had she fallen down and hurt herself? There were calls to the school, talk about X-rays, calls to doctors. It seems that Kamal had noticed swelling and pain in her ankle and had found herself unable to compete in their summer sports meet. The nuns had called in doctors who had pronounced it serious. There was talk of a malignant bone tumor in her leg.
Kamal was brought back to Delhi in June 1947. Doctors poked around doing biopsies and then deep radiation. It was felt that the problem had been brought under control. She would do her final school exams, her Senior Cambridge, from Delhi.
TWENTY-TWO
The Muslim Twins • Sudha's Vegetarian
Delights • Punjabi Promila • Our Shared
Lunchtime Feasts • Contacting the Spirit World •
The Icy Hands of Partition • Mahatma
Gandhi • Spinning for India • Independence
Day and the Bloody Aftermath
There were other changes in the air. World War II was finally over. Whereas Europe and East Asia looked forward to peace, India could look forward only to a wrenching partition. Partition, as it was called, with a fearsome capital “P.” This Solomon-testing breakup of its being into two entities had already caused mayhem. The British, with Lord Mountbatten as their viceroy in India, were granting India its freedom, but not before splitting the country, taking two chunky ribs out of India to form Muslim Pakistan to its east and its west. All the secular dreams of nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi that saw Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians coexisting in a newly independent nation were being crushed into the ground.
The Partition drama was being played out at all levels. The Muslim League, under the guidance of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had already endorsed the idea of a separate nation for India's Muslims. Nehru and Gandhi were using all means possible not to give in to that idea, to keep the country whole. The British were leaving anyway. How much did they really care? They were being accused of a history of divide-and-rule tactics that were culminating in Partition. Hindus and Muslims, encouraged by their own fanatics to be ever more mistrustful, were now pitted against one another. Riots were breaking out throughout the country, and Gandhi was rushing around trying to quell them with his policy of nonviolent resistance.
There were other infusions to the blood. Out of the haze that separates juniors from those in more senior classes, one face kept asserting its presence. It was that of a girl, about three or four years older than I, called Amina Ahmed. For someone like me, who came from a staid family of fully documented ancestors, a family in which kind married kind, Amina's history alone was enviable, and she repeated it with a certain pride. She was a Muslim girl from the inner city whose father was the illegitimate son of a prostitute. It could not get much better than that!
But it did. This father, Nuruddin Ahmed, had managed to educate himself enough to become a lawyer and, when in England, met and married a half-Jewish woman named Bertha Boam, commonly known as Billy. Amina was the offspring of this unusual couple, who still lived in the inner city, near a disreputable movie house that we had been warned to avoid, Novelty Cinema. She was as blond and light-skinned as her mother and sported her father's long, prominent nose. She wore her silky blond hair in a fashionable pageboy. Quite fearless, she could outswear any local ruffian in street lingo but also spoke the most chaste, elegant Urdu when it was required. (Later, as the wife of an Indian ambassador, she was to master Russian and Persian as well.) None of the Anglican supervisors in our school could control or suppress her.
Miss Devi Ditta, our principal, tried. Each morning started with an assembly of all the students for prayers. Here we stood in rows according to the class we were in, with the younger children standing in front. We began with hymns, accompanied by the nurse on the piano. These were Christian hymns, but because most of us were Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, certain concessions were made. Instead of singing, “Onward, Christian soldiers,” we sang, “Onward, onward soldiers.” I did not realize until I heard my father-in-law singing in a Brooklyn church some decades later that our words in India had been altered. After hymns and prayers, announcements were made about trips to interschool games, or “chaat parties” to raise money for a charity, or about new teachers. This was followed by a cursory inspection to check if our clothing was neat, our hair was tidy and free of lice, and our nails were clean and unpolished.
It was absolutely forbidden to use nail polish. Amina's nails, squat and bitten, were nonetheless always polished. Varnished a bright red or bright pink. Her name would be called out, a common occurrence.
“Amina Ahmed!” Miss Devi Ditta would say in an exasperated voice. “You have been asked again and again not to wear nail polish. Kindly go with Nurse and remove it.”
Amina: “I can't.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “What do you mean, you can't?”
Amina: “I can't. I am not allowed.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “Who is not allowing you?”
Amina: “Doctor's orders. I have to keep the nail polish on to protect my nails.”
Miss Devi Ditta: “I have never heard of such nonsense.”
Amina: “I have shimiitis [or some other invented name]. If I remove the nail polish, my nails will fall off.”
And so Amina would get away with it again. I would stare back at her and invoke my Hindu gods in awe. My admiration for her knew no bounds.
Amina behaved with equal gumption in the drawing class. Not that she and I went to the same class, but I knew the drill. Miss Aloo MacAdam, the art teacher, taught only two things, object drawing and painting, and in the same way, year after year.
For the object drawing, she placed wooden blocks, one or two of them, perhaps a bottle as well, or a vase with flowers, at the front of the class on a table. We sat in semicircular rows at a little distance with our drawing books open on our desks, well-sharpened pencils beside them, and drew the objects.
In order to get the proportions right, we had to keep measuring. “Hold your pencil out in front of you. Keep it straight. Close one eye. Now measure the length of the box on your pencil. Mark that point. Now measure the height of the box. Mark that. On your pencil, how many times does the height go into the length? Follow those proportions. Then use your watercolors and paint the objects in. Use the colors you actually see, making them paler where light hits the objects.”
I had no trouble with any of this, because I could draw and paint anyway. Miss MacAdam's directions only helped me double-check what my natural instincts already knew. She always rewarded me with the highest marks and showed my work around as an example.
Somehow, it was not enough. I needed Amina's approval. I had heard that she was an “artist.” So, one day, I waited for her outside the art room, drawing book in hand.
It took her a while to come out. Most of her class had already left when she and Miss MacAdam emerged. Miss MacAdam looked cross. Amina looked nonchalant. Miss MacAdam went back into the art room and banged the door shut behind her.
“Amina,” I said, “I want to show you my drawing.”
She looked at it.
“What do you think?” I persisted.
“Do you like it?” she asked me. “The most important thing is that you should like it.”
I was suddenly insecure. Unsure. “May I see what you did in class?” I managed.
She held out her drawing book. She had broken up her blocks, bowl, and vase into bits and pieces, scattering them about her page, and then colored them in nail-polish colors, magentas, reds, fuchsias, and oranges. The objects and colors were unrecognizable—that is, if you tried to match them to anything real in the art room—but the painting was beautiful.
Here was another dawn, another awakening. West European painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had already left their mark on us. On one of my birthdays, my family had given me a book of the paintings of European masters. I would sit with this heavy tome in my lap, drinking in the images on its thick, glossy pages day after day. Rembrandt, Holbein, and Leonardo da Vinci were there, but so were the more fragmented, angular worlds of Cézanne and Picasso. Just below this book, on the same shelf, I kept a thinner volume containing the turn-of-the-century paintings of Jamini Roy. A Bengali, he painted stylized folk-arty figures in few strokes and bright colors. This, too, was well thumbed. My favorite painter, though, whose work I loved with a passion then, was Amrita Sher-Gil, a half-Indian, half-Hungarian woman who had studied in France in the early 1930s, returned to India, and died at twenty-nine, but not before leaving the most graceful images of fluid Indian figures, often draped in striped clothing.
Until then, I had never been to an exhibition of paintings and did not apply the lessons I might have learned from my art books to myself. I admired the freedom of painters but did not realize that the freedom could apply to me, even at the age of thirteen, even while I was a mere student. In the end, I was not as bold as Amina. I painted as Miss MacAdam wanted me to in the art room, but bought myself some oils and painted in furious blobs at home.
TWENTY-ONE
The Sisters Return • A Taste of the Future •
Mother's Shawls • Kamal's Illness
My sisters Lalit and Kamal spent nine months of the year in their unheated boarding school, the Himalayan convent in Nainital. They came home only for the months of January, February, and March, when the mountains turned uncompromisingly frigid. By this time their slender fingers were already red and raw from chilblains. My mother had spent months furiously knitting woolen mittens with openings for the fingers so they could hold their pens and pencils. These, as well as hand-knitted cardigans, socks, and mufflers that had made their way up to the mountaintop school in package after package, hardly helped. My sisters suffered dreadfully from the cold. Of course they did not complain. Delhi must have seemed downright balmy to them. I was ecstatic to have my older sisters back for the winter holidays. We celebrated in big ways and small.
On those winter weekends, the men were free by lunchtime on Saturday. We all congregated under the beri, our beloved umbrella-shaped jujube tree, which each of us had climbed as a child. Weekend lunches were always preceded by beer—for the men. But many of the girls were in their teens now and permitted shandy, a mixture of beer and our carbonated “lemonade.” Those who wanted to sit in the full sun pulled their chairs away from the beri's shade, but most chose to have their heads in the shade and much of their bodies in the sun, and so kept adjusting their chairs. It was here that Bhaiyyadada, my very courtly brother, carefully poured me three-quarters of a glass of lemonade and added just enough beer to allow me to feel grown-up. The very first sip tasted of a future that lay in waiting.
During this period, I cannot quite pinpoint the exact time or the reasons for it, we sisters began addressing each other by our initials. We probably thought it was “cool”—some sort of Indian “cool” of the period. I became M, Kamal became K, Lalit was L, and Veena was V. When writing, we all spelled the initials differently. I addressed all letters to Lalit “Dear L” and signed them with an “M.” Her letters to me began with “Dear Emm,” and were signed, “Ell.” My parents never fell into the game, nor did my eldest brother. But Bhaiyyadada went along, and so did our closest cousins and friends. It soon stopped being a game. Our initials became our names for each other, names we still use. Today, the group of people who call me M is a limited club, and I, for one, guard membership to it jealously. Besides my sisters, my children call me M and so do many of my cousins, nieces, nephews, and dear, close friends. Recently, in Los Angeles, on the way to a film location, when a young actress I hardly knew, quite out of the blue, addressed me as M in a casual sentence, I was at first too startled to say anything. But the very next day I had to let her know, as gently as possible, that only those who had known me for at least forty years or were members of my family could address me that way.
(I was reminded then of a story told to me by a young director working for the first time with the legendary and formidable English actress Dame Edith Evans. Not knowing how to address her, he took the easy way out for the first few days by not addressing her directly at all. Then, one day, screwing up his courage, he ventured, “Edith, would you …” Dame Edith rose to her full height. “Edith?” she barked. “Edith? It will be Edie next.”)
Winter was when my mother bought her Kashmiri shawls. Delicate pashminas (the real ones, not the imitations available cheaply in the West), fine shahtooshes made from the softest mountain-goat hair, and jamevaars, handwoven antique paisleys, were all the stuff of dreams, sold only by itinerant shawl-wallahs, who traveled, generally on recommendation, from house to house. Kashmiri shawls were to Delhi women what furs are, or were, to women in the West. Pashminas, shahtooshes, and jamevaars were the rarer sables and ermines of the trade. They established a woman's credentials as soon as she walked into a room. Unlike some furs, a good Kashmiri shawl could never look cheap or tarty. It always enhanced the wearer, encasing her in solid dignity.
My stylish mother bought a few such shawls each year, adding to her already large collection. Now that her two older daughters were blossoming, she was keeping them in mind, too. The itinerant shawl-wallah, most often a Kashmiri, traveled with an assistant. He himself walked in front, carrying a small bundle. The assistant walked behind him. Both were directed to Number 5's back veranda. There my mother and older sisters would sit down on chairs. They were serious. Veena and I hung about. We, too, would turn into serious shawl-buyers one day. The shawl-wallah spread a bedcover on the floor and began opening his bundles.
The reason my mother chose the back veranda was that it was possible to be discreet there. After all, our relatives were everywhere. How many shawls we bought and what we paid for them was our business. Besides, she wanted to take full advantage of the southern light. Good light was essential, as these shawl-wallahs, according to my mother, could not be trusted. Sometimes, she said, they took several old, fr aying jamevaars, cut off the damaged bits, and pieced the good bits together, dyeing sections to make them match. Sometimes a beautiful shawl was riddled with the tiniest moth holes. Only if the shawl was held up to the light would they be visible. Light was needed to check on the fineness of the embroidery, the exact colors, and whether there had been any fading.
The shawl-wallah would unfold a shawl and hold it up to my mother. My mother might shake her head and say a firm “No,” in which case the shawl would be thrown in the direction of the assistant, who would refold it and put it away. Or my mother would say, “Put it aside, I will think about it,” in which case the shawl would be put to one side. My canny mother knew that almost as important as the light needed to examine the shawls was the poker face needed to fool the shawl-wallah. On no account was he to get the slightest hint of which shawl she was really interested in, as that would jack up its price.
The shawls were never ticketed with prices. A shawl-wallah could ask for whatever the market would bear, and that, of course, varied. If, at the end of a day, no shawls had been sold and the shawl-wallah needed money, prices could come way down. If the shawl-wallah had got a hint of the one shawl that was most desired, he could hold off until he got the price he wanted.
Soon there was a heap of “possible” shawls that my mother might want. Then she would start all over with this heap, winnowing them down by making a second selection from the first selection, again saying “No” and “Put it aside.” The heap of possibles got smaller and smaller until there were only a few left. She asked for their prices and began haggling. She was very good at it. Sometimes she presented the shawl-wallah with so many options that he got confused and forgot the ridiculously high prices he had originally quoted. “If I take this one and this one and this one, how much would it cost?” “What if I removed this one and added that one?”
Once, a shawl-wallah came to us with the most stunning green nineteenth-century jamevaar. It was a rare color, and the hand-loomed paisley workmanship was incomparable. It was the only shawl we wanted. Yet my mother went through her usual “No” and “Put it aside” for hours, until the poor shawl-wallah sold it to her for a price she was willing to pay.
March came to an end before I wanted it to, and my sisters went back to their convent school in Nainital. I began to feel lost the second they headed north.
The twin, seemingly contradictory, elements of dependence and resilient independence were being etched into my character. My brothers were absent for much of the first decade of my life; my older sisters were missing for most of my crucial early teens. I used to write to my oldest brother, Brijdada, from Kanpur, and he would reply, reassuring me sometimes with letters and sometimes with drawings. Lalit had assumed a semi-maternal role. She was certainly my mentor for all intellectual matters and was the only one who seemed to understand my insecurities enough to try to draw me out of them. Once she and Kamal left for school, I felt bereft.
My father, me (standing to his left), aged about thirteen, and Veena on holiday in Poona. These were difficult years.
Since private traumas were never discussed in my family, only smoothed over whenever necessary, these feelings of loss just stayed within me and festered.
At the end of 1946, Lalit graduated from her mountain convent school and returned to Delhi for good. In the following year, she was admitted to Indraprastha College, an easy bicycling distance from our house.
Around this very time, I began to notice my father and mother whispering to each other with a worried look. Somehow Kamal, who was still in Nainital and still everybody's favorite, was involved in this worry. At first I could not understand any of it, and my parents would not explain. What I did know was that something had happened during sports. Had she fallen down and hurt herself? There were calls to the school, talk about X-rays, calls to doctors. It seems that Kamal had noticed swelling and pain in her ankle and had found herself unable to compete in their summer sports meet. The nuns had called in doctors who had pronounced it serious. There was talk of a malignant bone tumor in her leg.
Kamal was brought back to Delhi in June 1947. Doctors poked around doing biopsies and then deep radiation. It was felt that the problem had been brought under control. She would do her final school exams, her Senior Cambridge, from Delhi.
TWENTY-TWO
The Muslim Twins • Sudha's Vegetarian
Delights • Punjabi Promila • Our Shared
Lunchtime Feasts • Contacting the Spirit World •
The Icy Hands of Partition • Mahatma
Gandhi • Spinning for India • Independence
Day and the Bloody Aftermath
There were other changes in the air. World War II was finally over. Whereas Europe and East Asia looked forward to peace, India could look forward only to a wrenching partition. Partition, as it was called, with a fearsome capital “P.” This Solomon-testing breakup of its being into two entities had already caused mayhem. The British, with Lord Mountbatten as their viceroy in India, were granting India its freedom, but not before splitting the country, taking two chunky ribs out of India to form Muslim Pakistan to its east and its west. All the secular dreams of nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi that saw Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians coexisting in a newly independent nation were being crushed into the ground.
The Partition drama was being played out at all levels. The Muslim League, under the guidance of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had already endorsed the idea of a separate nation for India's Muslims. Nehru and Gandhi were using all means possible not to give in to that idea, to keep the country whole. The British were leaving anyway. How much did they really care? They were being accused of a history of divide-and-rule tactics that were culminating in Partition. Hindus and Muslims, encouraged by their own fanatics to be ever more mistrustful, were now pitted against one another. Riots were breaking out throughout the country, and Gandhi was rushing around trying to quell them with his policy of nonviolent resistance.
