Difficult Daughters (5 page)

‘Oh, poor thing‚’ said Virmati caressing her half-heartedly. Her finger started moving again and Paro pulled at her dupatta.

‘Red medicine‚’ she started wailing. For while the other children had scraped and banged themselves with no after-luxury of medicine, Virmati had always tenderly looked after Paro’s hurts, cooking up haldi and ghee to smear on them. Of late she had taken to being more modern and buying red medicine, which was quicker to apply.

‘It’s not really so bad, Paro. Now don’t disturb me, I’m reading. Go and play with Vidya.’

Paro snatched the book from her hands, and threw it on the floor. Virmati leapt off the bed and slapped her.

Paro burst into tears, and fled. She wandered around the house crying, and when her sister still did not come, crept outside her room, and snivelled loudly next to the window. She wouldn’t stop until Virmati came and held her as she used to, until she put medicine on her knee as she used to.

Oh God, thought Virmati, what will the Professor Sahib think? I’ve kept his book for two weeks already, and he was asking me what I thought of it yesterday, and why did I say I’ve almost finished it, when I’m only beginning. It’s impossible to read in this house. She’s not even that badly hurt. No one looked at my hurts when I was her age. I’ve spoilt her. Anger rose inside Virmati, and Paro felt her hands hard and rough, instead of caring and tender, but looking at her sister’s face, she was too scared to complain further.

*

Virmati passed her FA with marks that were respectable enough for a girl, her parents thought. She now wanted to study further. Her parents thought that she had gone far enough. Her fiancé’s parents thought she was already well qualified to be the wife of their son, the canal engineer. They didn’t want too much education in their daughter-in-law, even though times were changing. Virmati wept and sulked.

‘What is the matter with her?’ said her mother. ‘She was never so keen before.’

‘The girl is serious. It is natural,’ said her grandfather to her mother.

‘For how long can she go on like this? There is Indumati to think of. We can afford to wait for the boys after Indu, but what about her?’

There was no argument against this, but then the canal engineer’s father died. There was to be a mourning period, the marriage was again postponed.

Virmati entered AS College, the bastion of male learning. It had four hundred boys to six girls. Virmati was the seventh.

*

Kasturi spoke to the Professor’s wife: ‘What are these college-going boys like? Virmati will be among so many of them! So few girls to so many boys! I do not feel easy.’

Kasturi and the woman had become quite friendly, and Kasturi turned to her for advice about her daughter’s education.

‘Don’t worry, Behenji,’ said the woman. ‘They are all from good families. And they have no time for anything else besides studies. Even learning in the classroom is not enough, they come to him at home. Books, records, pictures, photos, all he shares with them.’ Here the woman put her palla across her mouth and uttered a tiny laugh into it. Her husband’s popularity was a source of vicarious pleasure for her, but she was modest and did not want Kasturi to think she was boasting about him.

‘Well, you know, so if you think it is all right‚’ hesitated Kasturi.

‘Yes, I do‚’ said the woman. ‘Some of them are married, some of them are engaged. They come to him with problems in their personal lives as well.’

‘Such as?’

The woman became vague. She wasn’t sure, but it had something to do with the books her husband taught, and the way in which he taught them. She herself distrusted books, they had caused her so much misery, but as the Professor’s wife she was hardly in a position to say so. It was just that the whole business involved so many other things as well. Students at all hours, students beginning to be dissatisfied with life the way it was, with the brides their parents had chosen. Thank God, Virmati’s fiancé was an engineer, an educated, working man. No, no, she assured Kasturi, Virmati’s future was safe in AS college.

*

Virmati always sat in the front row with the four other girls who were in the Professor’s class, and that was the only place he saw her in college, flower-like, against a backdrop of male students. The Professor knew the seven girls spent their time between classes in a small room meant for them, next to the principal’s office, on the inner side of the courtyard. Through the thin bamboo curtain that covered the door, they could see what was going on in the morning assembly, could see when all the boys had reached their class, and when it was safe to venture forth, heads muffled in dupattas dashing to their reserved seats in the front.

Once, the class had been more than usually full. Virmati, a little late, found no room left in the first row. She hesitated at the door. The Professor, sensing it was she, did not look up as he might ordinarily have done. Ignoring the half-dozen young men who rose to give her their place, Virmati sat on the floor in front of his desk, looking up at him with her large eyes. The Professor drank in the symbolism of her posture greedily. It moved him so deeply that he remembered it in all its detail even when his children had grown up. The murmur and rustle of students with scratching pens, their heads receding in rows, the whirr and click-click of the fans overhead, and the stillness at the heart of it, enclosing him and Virmati, Virmati with her offering eyes in her open face.

Later, when the deed was done, and he was in love with her, insisting on death if she were so cruel as to deny him, he discovered she was myopic. She still stared at him, with that thoughtful, dreamy, not quite seeing gaze. He took her to the eye doctor. Yes, she needed glasses. Not strong ones, just a mild prescription. With them, she looked more studious, less flower-like and appealing. But by then, the Professor’s desire to possess had extended to her heart and mind.

‘Kailashnath Mama?’

‘Yes, Ida?’

‘You know the college where my father taught?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘I wonder, could you take me there? If it is not too far?’

‘Too far? What is too far in Amritsar? This is not a big city like your Delhi. Instead we have a small city, big with bombings and killings. No, I can’t take you there. There is a curfew on. Don’t you read the papers, or listen to the news?’

I am guilty. I don’t. The rawness I feel after my mother’s death doesn’t allow me to do anything that is not, in some way, connected with her. Ever since coming to Amritsar I have been restlessly pacing the old house. I wish bricks could speak. This must have been where Virmati slept, this must have been where she studied, this must have been the window Paro snivelled at. Those rooms have now been partitioned and divided into subunits with separate kitchens for each uncle and aunt.

The lichi and the mango orchards are all gone. The Urban Land Ceiling Act has transformed the huge gardens into little suburban plots. The fields where gaajjar-mooli grew have been replaced by ugly concrete houses. They have little gardens and tall hedges to fence out prying eyes. The hand-pump situated at a corner of the old, yellowing house now hangs dry and useless, with rust gathering around the handle. Everything has changed, become smaller and uglier, more developed.

*

The curfew did partially lift in two days. How terribly Kailash Mama drives, I thought, as we horned and lurched our way through the Amritsar bazaar. The car was an old Morris Minor and the seats had practically worn into the floor over the years.

‘They knew how to build cars, the British did. See how solid it still is, not like these shiny tinny Marutis you see everywhere today. Touch them and you have a dent‚’ shouted Kailash Mama, swerving to avoid a truck that roared past him on the narrow road.

‘This is a sturdy car‚’ I agreed, poking my finger absent-mindedly through a tear in the upholstery.

Mamiji gazed out of the window.

The way to AS College was very crowded, but ultimately not long. In twenty minutes we were there.

‘It is certainly centrally located‚’ I remarked.

‘Cycling distance‚’ said Kailashnath Mama, ‘though your mother came in a tonga.’

A high wall surrounds AS College. It has metal spikes at the top, and on top of that, barbed wire.

‘Why the barbed wire, Mamaji?’

‘One of the students was caught trying to blow up the place. A fanatic. He was planting a bomb in the lab when the lab attendant spotted him. They couldn’t dismiss him because of communal tension, so they quickly awarded him his degree, and sent him to his village. He wouldn’t settle for anything less than a second class, I believe. Meanwhile the governing body got very frightened about the security of the place, and put barbed wire all over the top. As though the spikes were not enough. Typical of the mindless idiots.’

*

The three of us are stopped at the spiked, barbed-wire gate and asked our business. To see the college, we said, which made the guard look even more suspicious. But we are well dressed, and used to a certain treatment. Reluctantly, he ushers us into the principal’s office.

It is a small room, cramped and poky. The damp, yellowing walls are randomly broken with mementoes of past significance, stern-looking principals, tarnished shields. Shiny brown and beige curtains hang limply over the barred windows. A huge desk takes up half the room, its Sunmica surface glittering with a design of wood whorls and lines. Bright blue rexine chairs surround it, while at the head sits the principal’s armchair, heavy, with dirty black cushions.

Kailashnath thought, how different the place was when the Professor Sahib was principal before Independence. Then the office was in the main portion of the college building. After he married Viru, I visited him once or twice in the college, so that Mati would not get to know. His room was a good one, big, windows overlooking the driveway on one side, and courtyard on the other. His desk was of a dark and lustrous wood, and he placed it where he could see his books and whatever else was going on. He took his English classes here, classes that he refused to give up despite his administrative duties, that man was so fond of teaching.

The principal came, murmuring apologies at the zealousness of his guards.

‘The times are such‚’ said Kailashnath.

‘Indeed,’ agreed the principal.

‘So unfortunate,’ I added, though no one was listening.

Did we really want to see the college? The principal looked politely disbelieving. Kailashnath enlightened him. I was introduced as the Delhi seeker after local and historical knowledge. The principal sent for the oldest two teachers. He himself had only joined recently, he explained.

We set off, the men striding ahead. Following slowly, at my aunt’s pace, I agonized over the valuable information I might be missing.

We walked into the main building. My parents must have walked down these hallways, across these stones, and I felt the past hovering, cliché-like, over that run-down building, beckoning me into its orbit.

The main college buildings were colonial, with classrooms built around a large, brick-paved courtyard, with a raised cement platform at one end.

‘This is where we still have assembly,’ said the principal.

‘How quiet the college is,’ I wondered aloud.

‘Exams are going on,’ explained a teacher to my aunt, courtesy dictating that he ignore the younger woman while addressing the older.

On the way down the corridors, I could see that exams were indeed going on. The desks were arranged in parallel rows, and after years of invigilation in my own college it was not hard to see that many of the students were cheating. Heads furtively bent forwards, backwards, or at acute angles, open exam scripts pushed over the edge of the desk, question papers being dropped on the floor and exchanged. The invigilators were chatting to each other in front of the classroom. In Delhi, students of some men’s colleges cheated with open knives on their desks, a threat that the invigilators did not dare confront, but here obviously the rules were better understood by those concerned.

‘We have a very high rate of pass,’ said the teacher turning to me at last.

I politely commented that that must bring pleasure to them all.

‘Yes, ours is considered a good college, though of course it no longer has the reputation it did in your father’s time.’

‘Oh no. That was the height of the college. Its days of prestige,’ said the other teacher.

‘I never knew the Professor Sahib,’ said the principal. ‘But people still tell stories about him.’

*

We first went to the library. It was housed in a large room running the entire length of the building on the first floor. There were old-fashioned wooden cupboards with glass doors arranged around the walls. In the middle were desks and benches dotted with a few students. The room was cool, even in the middle of summer. The ceilings were high, and the deep, recessed windows covered with wire netting. It looked old and graceful, peaceful and untouched.

‘The librarian sits here,’ said the principal, going towards a small room at the back. ‘Our oldest staff member.’

We approach the librarian. Yes, he remembers the Professor Sahib.

‘This library,’ he said, gesturing around the big room. ‘He made it. He used to buy the books when he was principal. Whenever he travelled anywhere, he would come back with a suitcase-full for the college. We had the latest and the best.’

The sight of the books drew me, and I wandered over to look at the names on the faded spines in the literature section. A casual glance, and then closer, my gaze held by those muted colours, those old names. From one cupboard to the next I looked. How many of these same titles, the same edition even, had I lived with in my own home? What did he do? Reproduce the home in the college and vice versa?

I took out a familiar-looking volume. Saintsbury on Dryden in the
English
Men
of
Letters
series, published 1915. The date on the library sticker in front was a current one. Did students still read what Saintsbury had to say on Dryden, on his – here I opened the book – on his ‘varied cadence and subtly disposed music’ and other such fulsome rubbish? Judging from all the underlinings in the book, yes, they did. AS College, the last colonial outpost, where Saintsbury and Gosse were king, where the Beauties of Literature still flourished.

‘All his selection,’ said the librarian, who had noticed what I was doing.

‘Who bought the books after him?’ I wanted to know.

The librarian looked apologetic. ‘After the Professor Sahib’s time we could afford less and less. And now of course, students depend on keys and guides.’

He sounded quite despondent. I told him it was the same in Delhi, but how did that help? Whether there was Saintsbury or Foucault in the library, in the end we teachers were redundant. The vast majority of students were just concerned with their marks, using any means necessary to achieve them, whether knives or cheating, cheap kunjis or mugging up the notes of last year’s topper.

*

Our group of seekers and guides moved on. We stopped at classroom number eight on the ground floor.

‘Where he taught.’

It was a large, empty room, resembling a theatre. A few pigeons fluttered around the rafters, the steep rows of benches  and desks were of a dark, sombre wood.

‘This used to be the most crowded classroom in the entire college.’

‘Students used to come from Lahore to hear him.’

‘They sat on the window sills.’

‘Stood in the corridors, the doorways, trying to hear what he said.’

‘But what was so special about what he said?’ I was curious. English was English. You could only carry it so far.

‘Oh,’ said Kailashnath, looking around the classroom where he too had once sat, ‘he brought the subject alive. Most of us had never stepped out of Amritsar. The things he talked about, his expression, his way of speaking, we felt we were in another world. Am I right, ji?’ he asked turning to the teachers.

They smiled assent.

I walked inside. The ceiling was high, with three faint domes marked into it. Two large windows looked directly upon the green, thick-creepered, college boundary wall. From the inner door and windows one could see the broad veranda, and the courtyard beyond. I climbed the steps and sat on the topmost row, looking down at the stage far beneath me. The coos of pigeons sounded nearer than the conversation of the little group below. They were standing on the podium, around the lectern, where at one time a teacher performed, working his way into the hearts and minds of captive students.

*

My history had started here, in this classroom. Here it was that my parents must have looked at each other significantly, doomed love in their eyes.

‘Imagine my plight,’ my father used to say, performer still, first making sure my mother was in earshot. ‘Imagine my plight.’ And he would roll his eyes, mock alarm and distress crossing his face. ‘Your mother engaged to someone else!’

He said nothing about his wife.

Virmati plus fiancé, the Professor plus wife. An invisible quadrangle in a classroom.