Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, page 18
Each examination was three hours long, starting and ending promptly at the designated times. On most days there were two exams, with a break for lunch. Before I left in the early morning, armed with sharpened pencils, pens freshly filled with ink, ink bottles, rulers, and erasers, my mother would appear with a plate containing two almond balls (badaam ki golian). She made these by soaking the nuts overnight, peeling them, then grinding them with sugar and cardamom, forming soft balls, and finally covering the balls with the silver tissue. They were the most elegant two balls you could ever hope to see. My mother firmly believed that almonds were brain food, and that any child sent off to write two examination papers for six hours unfortified with almond balls was surely suffering from the grossest form of neglect. I would take a bite of the badaam ki goli and savor it on my tongue. Meanwhile, my mind would be thinking: There are 1,760 yards to a mile, that is 5,280 feet to a mile. …
Blank sheets were handed out, and we began. Teachers patrolled the rooms to catch cheaters. I wrote as fast as I could, barely stopping to think. I would lift up a hand—“More paper, please”—and keep writing. Most questions, except, of course, for arithmetic, had to be answered in an essay form. For example, the question “What were the causes, main events, and results of the battle of Panipat?” would require regurgitating a couple of chapters I had crammed about the founding of the Moghul Empire, with all relevant dates duly stated. There was no sliding into fiction here.
I would return home, ink-stained and exhausted, and immediately begin to start studying for the next day's exams. My mother never asked me how I had fared. She always assumed that I would do well.
Often she would try to distract me from my studies if she thought I was working too hard. One afternoon when the servants were off duty, she called me, saying, “Come, come, there is a man here selling honey.” By the time I came out of my room, the man was well into his sales pitch: “Purer honey than this, you can never hope to find. Look at its fine golden color. See, see, it still has pieces of honeycomb suspended in the middle. Smell it. The odor of nature's flowers …” My mother cut right through to the chase: “But how do I know it is pure? What proof do you have?” She was hoping that she had stumped him right there.
He turned out to be wilier than that. “What proof, you want to know? The oldest proof in the world. It has worked since the beginning of time. First you catch a fly, and then you throw it into the honey. It will sink. If the honey is impure, it will keep sinking and die. If the honey is pure, it will rise to the surface and fly away.” At that he swung his hand in the air and caught a fly, flinging it immediately into the honey. It sank. Then it started to rise, higher and higher, until it reached the surface and flew away. My mother was so impressed she bought several jars, and I went back to my studies.
That evening, when our cook returned from his afternoon break and my mother recounted the honey story, he said, “Arey memsa'ab [Oh, lady], you have been completely duped. I can do exactly the same thing with sugar syrup.” Our cook seemed as adept at catching flies with his hand as the honey man. He caught one and threw it into a jar of sugar syrup that my mother kept for sweetening our fresh lime juice. The fly sank, then rose to the top and flew away. We teased our mother mercilessly.
Soon after the exams, the results were announced. If they were good, it necessitated an immediate mango-and-ice-cream party, sometimes with rasgullas (cheese balls in syrup) as well. As it was the height of summer, it also meant that it was the height of the mango season. Our grandparents, as well as our neighboring aunts, uncles, and cousins, were immediately summoned for a celebratory sweetening-of-the-mouth. My mother never called this simply a party. People were being invited to sweeten their mouths. Sweetening the mouth was auspicious and had the hallowed ring of tradition to it; a party was just a party. “Come around five, five-thirty?” my mother would say.
Boxes of mangoes were hurriedly sent for from a Kashmiri Gate fruit stall. Rasgullas came in terra-cotta crocks from Bengali Market—Bengalis made this sweet better than anyone else—and three-flavored, three-colored blocks of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla ice cream from Kwality in New Delhi. Before Partition, our thick, creamy homemade ice cream had come from a small Muslim family-run restaurant in Kashmiri Gate named Idris, after its owner. We could actually taste its main ingredient, clotted cream (malai). But that was all in the past. We could not linger on what used to be.
We would all bathe and change. The women wore flowing white voile sarees, embroidered for them especially in Lucknow with white thread. Jasmine from the garden, also white—and fragrant with summer's promises—was the only ornamentation in the hair. The men wore similarly embroidered white kurtas. As the party started, a mother whose child had scored particularly spectacular marks would try to dull her eyes with feigned clouds of humility. “Have more mango,” she would say to her guests.
As good ripe mangoes were full of juice, there was a simple trick, now well mastered, of eating them without spraying your crisp white clothing with squirts of orange. You just had to lean over your plate and have napkins handy.
TWENTY-SIX
First Jobs and First Loves • Ballroom
Dancing • Dressing for the Dinner Dance
Our social life was evolving, too. Not mine, really, as I was still in school and destined to remain a mere voyeur for a while, but that of my older brothers, sisters, and cousins. The first year that followed Independence had been full of elation and sorrows, but Delhi had settled down and was in a celebratory mood. My brothers were now out of college and starting their first jobs. My eldest brother, Brijdada, was working at the same cloth mill as my father. Bhaiyyadada, devastatingly handsome, at least in my eyes, and puckish in his humor, had tried to join the Indian Army after his master's degree and had gone through several of their tests. I understood why he might want to join. National feelings were running high. India had been forcibly truncated and felt embattled and threatened. China loomed to the northeast; Pakistan gnawed at the northwest. I did not want him to go into the army. With belligerence between India and Pakistan soaring, I wanted him at home. In the end, he joined my middle uncle Shibbudada's very successful firm as second-in-command.
Me with Lalit, some friends, and Lalit's future husband, Madan (far right), on the wall of the beer garden at the Cecil Hotel, Simla, three years after Partition.
It seemed a natural extension of their relationship, which had remained very close and trusting through the years.
My older siblings and older cousins were of an age to fall in love, or to at least have deep emotional leanings. They were living up to expectations. Since we, the younger generation, and our friends did everything together as a large, friendly gang, it was hard at first for me to comprehend that stronger, more intimate relationships might be forming among those in our midst. Such things would never be discussed, so I had to keep my antennae up and focused.
My grandfather still insisted that we all come over to Number 7 for a dinner or a breakfast or a lunch. If we had friends visiting, it was expected that we would just bring them along. We never knew who might be filling up the benches in the dining room when we arrived. Besides the assorted first, second, third, and fourth cousins, there were all their college friends, who came and went, too. Sometimes there were so many people we had to eat in relays. Our picnics now consisted of just the younger set and were thought up frequently on the spur of the moment. No demands were made on any household kitchen, as there was no long-term planning. All of us, brothers, sisters, friends, and cousins of assorted ages, would pack into cars, pick up food from Moti Mahal, and drive off to the same historic sites or dammed rivers that we were already familiar with. Only this time all participants were young and included those for whom Delhi was new—refugee college-mates.
Even visits to the hills—to Simla, for example—might be undertaken by a similar collection of siblings, cousins, and friends. Instead of renting houses, we just stayed at a hotel.
Who was developing feelings for whom? Love, or something like it, seemed to be blooming right before my eyes. It was quite clear that Lalit and a student at St. Stephen's College, a tall Hindu called Madan from northwestern Pakistan, were getting close. They went for walks together. Among the refugee friends he had introduced to us was a young girl from Karachi whom Bhaiyyadada seemed to like. Lalit's best friend at college, a young Kashmiri girl, had a brother who seemed to dote on my cousin Santoshjiji, whom we called Tosh. Tosh and her family had been living in Lahore at the time of Partition and had been forced to flee. All around me there was an entanglement of relationships, bubbling and heaving with varying degrees of intensity.
One Holi, I discovered that my dear sister Kamal was perhaps developing a crush as well. There was a young, handsome youth who visited frequently. I did notice, however, that whenever this young man walked by our house he whistled a jaunty tune, which ended after he had passed our second gate. He was a good whistler.
That Holi had been like any other, a free-for-all with cousins, friends, aunts, and uncles all participating in assorted hijinks, most ending up in the tank of tesu water. I watched this youth circle Kamal and then grab her and rub red powder all over her face. She laughed and covered his face in return with the golden paste she was carrying in a jar. She seemed to be anointing him. Their play was innocent, and yet I could sense their attraction. Of course Kamal did not say one word to me about it.
Shibbudada's own eldest son was studying statistics in America and had met an American girl. There was talk of marriage. Sheila, Shibbudada's daughter, was thought to be in love with an economics professor at Delhi University. Was it true? It was all hush-hush, as the gentleman in question, it was said, already had a wife in Kashmir.
I watched and listened as I felt attractions and tensions straining the air, but I stayed at arm's length. Sometimes my brothers, sisters, and their friends would go dancing at the clubs. They had already started dance lessons with a Madame Varda, who was reputed to have Russian blood. What Madame Varda taught them was nothing particularly Russian. It was ballroom dancing that was highly popular then, the rumba, tango, quickstep, and waltz—both the slow one and the fast-twirling Viennese. When they came home from their lesson, my brothers and sisters danced with each other, winding up their gramophone and dancing to 78s of Victor Sylvester and His Band.
They had become very good by now. Bhaiyyadada and Lalit were particularly smooth at the tango, holding each other tightly and going pum-pum, pum-pum, pumpumpumpum, pum-pum, with their swaying and sliding feet.
I would hear them make reservations for a Saturday dinner dance. Dinner jackets would be sent out for pressing to the dhobi (laundryman). My sisters would look through their collection of sarees again and again. Would something they already owned suffice, or did they need to go shopping? By now they had starting wearing sarees frequently, both for everyday and formal wear. We had been convinced—mostly by Lalit, who guided our tastes—that ordinary silks were common and bourgeois. We were to wear rare handloomed cottons, some from far-off villages, others distinguished by fine work in real gold thread. In the summer, only the sheerest cream Chanderis, see-through cotton-and-silk mixtures from Central India, would do. If silk was to be worn at all, then it would need to be some exquisite antique, perhaps once worn in South Indian temples by nineteenth-century dancing girls. When a new saree was purchased, it did not come with a matching blouse. The blouse would need to be sewn, and Ram Narain, our tailor, hurriedly sent for.
It was equally gauche to wear any of my mother's heavy jewelry. Only small, rare pieces were stylish. We went to the jewelers again and again with our mother, searching through their storage boxes for old Moghul tidbits. There was the tiger's claw that we found, set in the most delicate gold filigree. It could be strung and worn around the neck. Then there was the hauldali! Years later, when we were grown up enough to have our own children, my mother, smart woman that she was, decided to distribute all her sarees and shawls and jewelry among her daughters while she was still alive. The two things we all wanted were the green jamevaar shawl and this hauldali.
The hauldali was a white jadeite tablet set with precious stones that had been arranged in a delicate floral pattern, each flower and leaf outlined with gold. Its workmanship was not unlike that of Emperor Shah Jahan's wine cup, now in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. My mother had it strung with a simple black thread so it could be worn modestly around the neck. (Veena got the jamevaar, I have the hauldali.)
The great hullabaloo in the days preceding a dinner dance had me all worked up, too. I could not go, but at least I would watch my sisters dress. They sat in their petticoats (long half-slips) and blouses before my mother's three-mirrored dressing table and put on their makeup—nothing much, just some rouge and lipstick, a little kohl for the eyes, that was it. They coiffed their hair in buns. If any hair ornaments were to be worn, they would consist of jasmines from the garden, made into a thick rope that was wound around the bun. Heels were out. Gauche, gauche. It was only proper to wear flat chappa s (slippers), perhaps the natural leather ones from Kohlapur in Maharashtra. Finally, the saree, all ironed by the ayah, was wound around and my sisters were ready. How very beautiful they were.
My brothers, smelling of Old Spice, and my sisters, of fresh jasmine, drove off into the night. They would meet their friends and eat and dance. I wanted so much to grow up fast but was afraid that I would never end up with their grace or looks.
When they returned late at night, I was up and waiting. They would talk among themselves and I would listen. My eldest sister, Lalit, would say merrily, the joy of the evening still singing inside her, “You want to dance? I'll teach you.” She would take hold of me as if she were the man. “Here we go. This is the waltz …. One two three, one two three … Dip and take a long slide on the one, ” or “Here is the quickstep. Forward quick-quick slow, backwards quick-quick slow.” We would practice, she leading me around the bedroom furniture, twirling and sliding, until we fell down on the bed in a heap of giggles.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Future Planning • The Radio Station •
The Last Large Picnic • Wildflower Hall
and an Encounter with the Police
In my last years at school, I was happy enough. But something deep inside me knew that the life I was living was not my real life. I was convinced that I belonged in another world. I had no idea what that world might be, I just knew that I had not found it yet. One day it would happen. I would step out of one life and into another one—the one I was meant to be in. I was oddly calm and optimistic about it.
I had begun thinking about college and what I might want to do with my life. I thought that I wanted to be a painter and that I would apply to the J.J. School of Art in Bombay.
Naturally, I discussed this with Lalit. “You could do that,” she said, in her thoughtful, practical way, “but why not go to J.J. later? Go to a regular college now and get a proper B.A. degree, and once you have that as a backup, you can do anything else you want.”
It seemed far too practical. I just wanted to fly away somewhere. Quickly. And paint with blobs of oil paint.
“Get a degree in what? What else am I interested in?” I wanted to know.
“You could do an Honors [major] in English,” Lalit suggested. “That is my subject. It is Sheila's, too. Or you could do an Honors in history, like K.”
Kamal was in a new all-girl college that had just opened, Miranda House. Even its brick buildings were not yet fully in place. But, partly because it was just behind the hallowed St. Stephen's College (now going through a males-only phase), and partly because it had begun to attract the hottest young ladies in town, it had become a highly desirable destination for Delhi's graduating schoolgirls.
Unfortunately, Miranda House, just like all of Delhi's colleges, was bound by Delhi University rules and offered a most limited range of subjects. In the arts category (mathematics and the sciences were obviously quite out of the question for me), we could do an Honors in English, Hindi, history, philosophy, or economics with a minor in one other of the same subjects. Or we could get a general bachelor-of-arts degree in some of the above subjects without specializing in any of them. The general degree carried much less cachet. I postponed thinking about it: I did not have to apply to any college until after I had graduated from school. The J.J. School of Art seemed to be drifting further and further away.
I had started taking on odd jobs at All India Radio. Even as a young child, I was quite familiar with the soft thump of recording-studio doors and the musty, enclosed smell of radio-station corridors.
Lalit (right) and I on the gate of Number 5.
Delhi's first radio station was barely five minutes away from Number 7. Whenever children were required for radio plays or children's programs, our gang of cousins was summoned. Where else could just one phone call produce such a variety of children, all of whom could be counted on to read fluently and, as was said in general praise of our abilities, “with expression”? The call always came to Number 7—to the one phone there, located in a corner of the gallery. Whoever answered it then buttonholed a servant and asked him to make a round of all the surrounding houses to convey the relevant information.
I had been taking part in radio plays almost all the years since I could read. Now that independent India's new All India Radio had been established in New Delhi, I was asked to come in several times a year. As I was paid a small fee for each session, this could be considered my first professional work. It felt more like play than work. A car was sent to pick me up, I met other schoolchildren I had never met before, we were offered tea and samosas, then we stood around a microphone and read our lines while invisible goblins in the recording booth made sounds of doors closing, cars starting, thunder, and rain. We knew how to dip our knees slightly and drop the page we had just finished onto the floor without a rustle, and to refrain from fidgeting noisily while someone else was reading. Radio was fun—and easy. Already, the allure of work that felt like play had begun to infiltrate my being.
