Difficult Daughters (29 page)

*

Swarna Lata: How many really understood what was happening? It took us all by surprise – we never expected it – it would pass after they got what they wanted – what was the point of murdering, looting, raping, after the goal had been achieved? When the refugees came, they told stories about the killings, the abductions – those screaming girls – they spared no one, not even ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-olds – the forced conversions – people dying of hunger – boiling leaves – scraping the bark off trees – one roti in a day if they were lucky – this city felt its heart about to break – and there was nobody who could come and who was not welcome. Such moments happen but occasionally in history – when our hearts move out in love and tenderness for those who suffer, and whose suffering we ourselves have so narrowly escaped. Occasionally in history – and it is just as well it is only occasionally – the price one pays for a mass synthesis of generous spirits is too great.

*

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru: The appointed day has come – the day appointed by destiny – and India stands forth again after long slumber and struggle, awake vital, free and independent.

The past clings onto us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about.

We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrow-stricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens, and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.

 

When Virmati came home to Moti Cottage, the first thing she did was shift everything belonging to Ganga to the dressing-room. Doing this, she felt light-headed, as though she had conquered and won. Now the dressing-room was Ganga’s and the main bedroom hers. All summer long, she lay under the fan while the city burned. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t go out of the house, there was curfew almost every day, and for women nothing was considered safe. The college was shut. Harish spent much time anxiously listening to the news bulletins, twiddling the knobs on the radio, depressed at the death of civilization. Otherwise he helped with the refugees, coming back from the camps with ghastly reports. Amritsar was a city washed over with the scourge of death, which reddened the skies at night and filled the air with lamentations. Like so many others, he was waiting for all this to be over.

In the evening, Virmati would sometimes fill the tank with a little water, climb down the steps, and lie down. Her mind was drained of all emotion. Her limbs were heavy with torpor. Harish would sometimes join her. Submerged in the depths of the tank, all they could see was the far-away sky and the grey walls. Often they made love. There was no one to see them, no one to mind anything they did. Virmati had never had so much space around her. Maybe this was really what she had fought for all along, space to be. She conceived.

This time, she knew nothing could happen to her. With the certainty of the nascent life within, she felt strong, and her heart moved out in pity to mankind in general. Later, when it was considered safe, she wanted to help in the camps. But Harish would not allow it. She must think of the baby, especially in the light of what had happened before. Shocks, exertion, witnessing of horrors, all this was not good for a pregnant woman. Let the country, till yesterday a colony, go to rack and ruin. Let those thousands march footsore, weary, raped, mutilated, bewildered, and lost, let them march into Amritsar in all their hordes and be herded towards various shelters. She must stay at home.

*

Then, one night, they heard that their neighbourhood, quiet, secluded and remote, was going to be attacked. All the residents of the street, and that included Virmati and Harish, Kasturi and her sons, daughters and daughter-in-law, gathered in Sardar Hukum Singh’s house, the only one high enough to allow a watch to be kept from the roof.

The attack proved to have been a rumour, but it did serve one purpose. Virmati’s mother sent for her. The times demanded from Kasturi that she carry resentment no further. Virmati shifted to her mother’s, where she helped with the cooking along with the other women, because the need of the hour was to feed the scores of people who passed through their house fleeing from the mobs in Pakistan. No one mentioned the past. The present was too drastic for such luxury.

*

The house had to be made goonda-proof. The boundary walls were raised to eight feet and topped with jagged edges of broken glass. On the inside of the walls, coils of barbed wire were spread.

Kailash spent his time organizing the langar at home, and arranging transport for relatives who wanted to move on. As they left, more people kept streaming in. At night, there was no room to place a foot anywhere. The men slept in the verandas and on the roofs, the women and children in the angan and rooms.

The prices of everything shot up – there was hardly any vegetable to be bought. In the house the main meals were dal roti, roti dal, with some variation in the kind of dal. Two big tandoors were put just behind the kitchens. The huge gardens to the side of the house were scoured for vegetables – sarson, mooli and shalgam. When the floods came in October, the electricity was cut for days. All the grain had to be ground by hand, adding to the work.

*

That October, Virmati was six months pregnant. She could not be properly looked after by a doctor – they were all at the camps having their hearts wrung and senses wrought upon. Many refugees had nothing – only the clothes upon their backs. They had left everything behind, to walk in kaflas for days and days, in processions that were sometimes fifty miles long. Master Tara Singh had given away half his clothing and begged the inhabitants of the city to do the same.

Such a spirit possessed Virmati, as she moved slowly and heavily to the cupboards in Moti Cottage. Absent people had no moral right to their clothing, when there were so many needy ones crying out for cloth to cover them. First, she looked at Giri’s clothes lying stacked in the children’s cupboard. Kurtas, pyjamas, sweaters that were too small for him – had Ganga nurtured hopes of another? Then Chhotti’s clothes – mostly school uniforms neatly folded, blue kameezes and white salwars and dupattas. Virmati took them all.

Her mother-in-law’s cupboard had Guddiya’s uniforms, along with the old woman’s saris, petticoats, blouses, all in white. God knew there were plenty of widows in the camps who needed white clothes.

Her own things she went through the fastest. She kept five sets for herself and gave the rest away. Harish’s she left alone.

Finally, there was one big steel almirah she couldn’t open. Ganga had locked it and left. Left eight months ago, in riot and bloodshed, left putting a lock on her cupboard, a lock that asserted her claims, and promised she would return. How many people had escaped from Pakistan and done the same?

She would have to come back tomorrow with someone to break open the door.

*

The next day, back at Moti Cottage with a locksmith, Virmati stood before Ganga’s open cupboard. Just seeing those saris made her sick. Each one of them reminded her of the woman, with her round face, round bindi and black kaajal-lined eyes staring fixedly at her with loathing.

The child within her womb trembled, as revulsion coursed her body.

She stretched out her hand to pluck the first sari from the pile, a red thing. Ganga liked wearing red. It was hard for her to touch it, it was like touching Ganga’s skin. Finally she swept everything out from the cupboard, without going through the individual items, and tied them into large bundles with old bedsheets. The huge piles of clothes she made over to Kailashnath to donate to the camps.

Kailashnath was delighted.

‘You are a generous woman, sister,’ he said.

‘For those in distress‚’ murmured Virmati.

*

I was born.

‘Bharati‚’ suggested Virmati as a name.

‘No‚’ said Harish.

‘No? But why? I thought with the birth of our country …’

‘I don’t wish our daughter to be tainted with the birth of our country. What birth is this? With so much hatred? We haven’t been born. We have moved back into the dark ages. Fighting, killing over religion. Religion of all things. Even the educated. This is madness, not freedom. And I never ever wish to be reminded of it.’

Harish’s voice rose hysterically, and the girl was named Ida.

‘But what does it mean?’ asked Virmati doubtfully. ‘People might think it is a Persian name.’

‘This is the very attitude that has led to Partition‚’ said Harish irritably. ‘Let anybody think what they like. For us it means a new slate, and a blank beginning.’

*

Virmati was left alone with the baby, while Harish worked for a while with the newly formed Kashmir Sahayak Sabha, to help combat the fires burning there.

For a while he went to Kashmir and then came back, dispirited and sick at heart.

‘Is there no end to this needless violence and stabbing?’ he asked. Was this price necessary for freedom?

But there was no time to ask these questions, or think out the answers. The deed was done, they would just have to go on living.

Ganga’s leaving home, in the pressures and tensions of the moment, was meant to be a temporary affair. However, she could never return. She wept, begged, and stormed indirectly through her mother-in-law, but circumstances did not favour her. After Independence, Harish was offered a principalship in one of the new colleges of Delhi University. Amritsar had become a place to leave, rather than stay in, and the couple moved to Delhi and a much smaller house.

Virmati had just one child, Ida. Harish told her that three was a large enough family, his resources were already strained beyond his means. Giridhar and Chhotti came to live with them when their schooling demanded it. Harish carried on with his love of learning and made education an issue with each of his children. They didn’t care for the whole process as much as he did, and each found a way to rebel.

Giridhar decided to go into business. He opened a small chemist’s shop in Karol Bagh and married one of his customers. Both the families objected.

Chhotti, who craved her father’s attention, did excel in studies, but she refused to do anything with the humanities, books or music. She joined the IAS, mainly for the cheap government accommodation that would enable her mother and grandmother to live with her. While Harish was alive, the relationship between the two houses was perpetually uneasy.

Chhotti never married. Her father thought no man good enough, and her mother dared not cross him in this respect.

Her husband continued to be Ganga’s public statement of selfhood. Her bindi and her bangles, her toe rings and her man-galsutra, all managed to suggest that he was still her god.

Ida refused to show any signs of intellectual brightness.

‘There are other things in life‚’ she told her mother.

‘Like what?’ asked Virmati.

‘Like living.’

‘You mean living only for yourself. You are disappointing your father.’

‘Why is it so important to please him?’ Ida protested to her mother. She wanted to please herself sometimes, though by the time she grew up she was not sure what self she had to please.

Later, she tried to bridge the contradictions in her life by marrying a man who was also an academic. Virmati could only guess at the basis of their relationship, but she did not think it comprised the higher things in life.

 

I grew up struggling to be the model daughter. Pressure, pressure to perform day and night. My father liked me looking pretty, neat, and well-dressed, with kaajal and a little touch of oil in my sleeked-back hair. But the right appearance was not enough. I had to do well in school, learn classical music, take dance lessons so that I could convert my clumsiness into grace, read all the classics of literature, discuss them intelligently with him, and then exhibit my accomplishments graciously before his assembled guests at parties.

My mother tightened her reins on me as I grew older, she said it was for my own good. As a result, I am constantly looking for escape routes.

*

Of course I made a disastrous marriage. My mother spent the period after my divorce coating the air I breathed with sadness and disapproval. ‘What will happen to you after I am gone?’ was her favourite lament. I was nothing, husbandless, childless. I felt myself hovering like a pencil notation on the margins of society.

For long periods I was engulfed by melancholy, depression, and despair. I would lie in bed for hours, unable to sleep, pitying myself for all I didn’t have, blaming my mother, myself. Now her shadow no longer threatens me. Without the hindrance of her presence, I can sink into her past and make it mine. In searching for a woman I could know, I have pieced together material from memories that were muddled, partial and contradictory. The places I visited, the stuff I read tantalized me with fragments that I knew I would not be able fully to reconstruct. Instead, I imagined histories, rejecting the material that didn’t fit, moulding ruthlessly the material that did. All through, I felt the excitement of discovery, the pleasure of fitting narratives into a discernible inheritance. This book weaves a connection between my mother and me, each word a brick in a mansion I made with my head and my heart. Now live in it, Mama, and leave me be. Do not haunt me any more.