The Age of Shiva (33 page)

Apparently the police had been waiting for the protestors, and drove them all in a van to the Kailash lockup. (“We sang ‘Vande Mataram' the whole way,” Biji proudly declared.) The Congress Party secretary for Delhi city personally phoned Paji. “He said there'd be no problem, nothing would enter the records or the press. The press, can you imagine,
the press
? They dropped her back here in a black Ambassador—I hope she realizes how much that ride is going to cost me.”

“Yes, yes—he can give lakhs of rupees to put that woman back in office, but ask him to spend a few rupees on his wife and see how he screams.”

Later, after Paji shut himself in his office and slammed the door, Biji explained how she had entered the realm of student politics. “For years, Sharmila's been observing how your father treats me—taunting me with names like ‘Professor Rohini,' or ‘Mother India,' or ‘Darya Ganj Prime Minister,' beating down my every opinion just because I can't read. So your sister took upon herself the task to educate me—she labored for months to teach me to read.” Biji shook her head. “Unfortunately, it's true what they say—once a dog's tail begins to curl, it can never be straightened. All the years I had resisted your father's attempts to educate me had left their mark—now even my own daughter was unable to succeed.”

Paji's mocking grew worse once he learned about this failed attempt. “Wear it as a badge of honor,” he told her. “Six months and you still can't spell your own name? That's wonderful!—surely it will prove to everyone you're still a zamindar's daughter.”

Whereas before Biji could just shrug off his taunts, now they made her feel old and useless. “I knew I had to find a way to bite back at him to regain my confidence. Your father had just started sniffing around Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party, dreaming of a seat in Parliament. What easier course of action, I thought, than to come out in support of the opposition?”

Biji took to peppering her comments with praise for the Swatantra Party and the Jan Sangh, two groups she'd heard Sharmila mention. She vigorously criticized Indira's policies like the devaluation of the rupee, without the slightest understanding of what they meant. “Your Paji's reaction was infuriating—amusement and nothing else. He even offered to go over the opposition politicians with me so I would stop mixing up their names.”

Biji's growing frustration prompted Sharmila to propose her curious scheme. She had seen the student group, armed with anti-Indira placards, waiting outside to use her classroom every Friday after her lecture. Being a professor herself by now, it wouldn't have looked right for Sharmila to sit in on one of their meetings. But she told them that her mother was very interested in learning more about the opposition and asked if they would mind having Biji come one day to attend.

“The first time your sister dragged me to the classroom, I was petrified. A sixty-year-old woman, unable to read or write, meeting with college students, no less! I wanted to climb the rows of the lecture room until I rose so high I was out of sight, perhaps into the arms of Krishna himself. But there were too many eyes watching my every move, so I tried to shrink into a corner of the first empty bench I could find.

“Don't ask me what they talked about—the Communists, most probably, were arguing as usual with those from the HRM. At the end, a girl remembered me and brought over some tea, saying, ‘Here you go, Auntieji.' I'm not sure what gave me the courage to open my mouth, but I replied, Not
Auntie
, I'm old enough to be your
nani
. My words fell into a lull in the arguments, and the students all looked up and laughed.

“So I became their Naniji, their grandmother, their tea-drinking mascot, who began sitting faithfully through all their meetings. What more can I tell you about them? They're all quite muddled, even I can see—they spend half the time fighting with each other, and the rest plotting their protests. I'm not sure if they really want to change the world or simply rebel. At first I used to nod at everything, but now I've found that I can have some useful ideas as well. The Communists, especially, keep congratulating me—for rising on the behalf of the workers, they say, after the disgrace of being born to a zamindar family.

“And your father? He sulks a lot and blames me for killing his chances with the Congress Party, even though they were already quite dead. He's careful, though, not to challenge me so recklessly now. If I say that the price of onions has gone up or it's more difficult to get a job, he doesn't demand to know in which newspaper I've read that. He might even be a little scared of these grandchildren I've found—if he tries to press on me in any way, he knows I can retaliate.”

PAJI WAS NOT HAPPY
when he found that his seats for the Independence Day celebration were located at the furthest edge of the reserved section. To make things worse, he had been assigned hard wooden benches, not the cushioned chairs designated for VIPs, and even these were being occupied by people from the adjoining unreserved enclosure. Although the trespassers quickly fled in the face of Paji's red-faced rage, he sat there fuming afterwards. I wasn't sure which woman he blamed more for his diminished seating status—Indira Gandhi or Biji.

My mother had been quite clear she wouldn't be joining us this morning. “Isn't it bad enough that they bring in people by the truckful for all Indira's rallies? Why should I be one of her cheering masses just for some news documentary?” Instead, she planned to attend a party organized by her “grandchildren.” “It's not only Indira who loves her country—the rest of us celebrate Independence Day too, you know. Tell your father it's nothing political—I'm not going to get arrested, so he won't have to pay this time.”

When Indira took the podium, Paji simply sat there, refusing to clap. Instead, he muttered on about how he had been hoodwinked out of his seat. I thought he was being overly sensitive about our seating arrangement, but Sharmila whispered that he now meant the electoral district from which he was supposed to stand—the Parliament seat he maintained the Congress Party stole from him.

All around us the crowds stood and cheered, like extras on the set of some epic like
Mughal-e-Azam.
Indira waved back as the air force band started up, as helicopters dropped rose petals, as battalions of schoolchildren marched past. Thousands of color-coordinated balloons rose into the air, to form a giant aerial Indian flag. Finally, even Paji got up to applaud. After all, this was the leader who had united the country and carried it to such an overwhelming victory, something no one could deny. The papers had been full of how Hindus and Muslims had together restored the nation to its rightful glory, how secularism had triumphed, finally, decisively. “Let nobody ever say again that the Nehrus were wrong in their vision,” one editorial proclaimed. The costs of the Bangladesh war were forgotten, the droughts all over the country somewhere far away.
The mother of the nation
, people had called Indira in the last election, and nothing could be truer, I thought, as I added my applause for the documentary films.

Afterwards, Paji tried to salvage what remained of his pride by taking us to the VIP enclosure, where they were serving tea and pakodas. He flashed his special Congress Party donor card, but the policeman standing at the entrance was unmoved. “Only a green VIP pass,” he said. “Otherwise who knows what kind of people from the street we'd have to let in?”

Had Sharmila not been there, Paji would have surely gotten himself arrested (paying for his own release this time, instead of Biji's). He took a swipe at the policeman, and only her quick reflexes managed to deflect his hand and make him miss. As the calculations ground along on the policeman's face, she hustled our sputtering father away. A whistle blew behind us, but by then, the swarms of people had closed around us and we had blended in.

We returned home to a party in progress. Two college-age men chatted in the verandah with a woman holding a glass of orange squash. More youths stood around in the drawing room, boys on one side, girls in a row on the other, a platter of samosas on the table between them. “Have you met my grandchildren?” Biji asked, bustling in. “The college was closed for the holiday, so I invited them here instead.” The servant handed Paji a samosa, and he looked at it, stupefied.

“How was the parade?” Biji asked. “Did your Paji get you in close enough to the goddess to touch her sari?”

For a moment, Paji kept staring at the samosa clutched between his fingers. Then he hurled it across the room at the server. To the accompaniment of Biji's screams, Paji started chasing people out—snatching the samosas from their mouths, knocking their glasses of squash to the ground. One of the boys called Paji a dirty capitalist—Paji pushed him so hard he went tumbling across the floor and rolled into the verandah. “This idiocy of yours has gone far enough,” Paji shouted at Biji, once the room had cleared. “I never want to see these hooligans of yours again in my house.”

“It's my house as well,” Biji yelled back, and Paji strode up so close to her that for an instant I thought he meant to slap her.

Instead, he stared hard into her eyes, his face red and inches away. “Don't bring them here again, Rohini. I'm warning you.” He turned on his heel and walked up the stairs to his office.

Biji glared after him. “It's my house as well,” she shouted again, once he had slammed shut his office door.

PAJI MADE HIS PITCH
to me the next morning. He started with the guilt-based approach. “You've seen what's happening to your mother. Going on her crazy protests, adopting those rascals as her own. Day by day she becomes more unhinged. And who can really blame her? When she has nobody to talk to, when her real grandchildren live hundreds of miles away. She should be hearing the word ‘Nani' from Ace's mouth, not from those delinquents. I keep asking myself—what could we have done for Meera to insist on living alone so far away?

The carrot part of the campaign came next. “You've grown accustomed to the sea, that's fine, but we have the Jamuna here, and the Ganges isn't so far away. I'll get Ace into Model school—St. Xavier's in Bombay can't compare. I'm not going to push too much, because in the past you've punished me for speaking my mind. But a whole floor to yourself at home, a job whenever you ask—tell me, what else is there to say?”

When I didn't answer, Paji lunged into the final stage, to remind me he also carried a stick. “Sometimes I can't help but wonder what would happen to you if the checks from me stopped. If I fell ill, or suffered financially, or some other disaster occurred. I shudder to think how you would manage, how you would even find money for food.” He made an attempt to visibly shudder, but it came out looking like a shrug.

“To tell you the truth, with Bombay prices so high, it isn't a bad time to sell the flat. It's quite an extravagance for me, you do realize—to run this household in Darya Ganj and pay for yours as well. Besides, I have to be fair to Roopa and Sharmila—there's a limit to what one daughter should expect. Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying anything for right this minute, that I'm stopping the checks.”

“Actually, it's fine if you do, Paji. I found out about Dev's insurance policy—the company sent us a copy by mistake. One lakh and twenty thousand rupees, I think the notice said. If I invest the money, the interest should more than cover your check.”

I had meant to be cautious, to not fling the policy in his face. Now that I had given in to the temptation, I savored the surprise around his mouth, the series of astonished blinks. He opened his mouth as if to contest what I had said, then closed it.

He found his voice soon enough. “It's been so long, Meera, but I really did mean to inform you about it. Your Paji's getting old—to have forgotten something like this. Except you don't really need it, you know—that's what I'm trying to say. If you come live with us, you won't have expenses anyway.”

“I can think about it, Paji. Once the policy has been processed.”

He made one last attempt as I left his office. “Why don't you let me hold it in reserve until Ace turns eighteen? I can even invest it for him if you like, make sure the money doesn't get frittered away.”

BY THE TIME WE
drove to the station on the last day of our trip, Paji had fully recovered from my discovery of the insurance policy. “Believe me, Meera—I'm glad that you have your independence now. You're all set financially, so no one can tell you where to stay. But you know as well as I do that there's no argument left for you to continue living in Bombay.”

Biji, I could see, was trying hard not to cry—for once, she was in complete agreement with my father. “You've been away for far too long, Meera, and I don't know how many years remain for your parents. It's cruel of you to deprive us like this.”

There was more campaigning at Nizamuddin station, where Arya managed to have the train make an unscheduled stop through Babuji's railway contacts. Even Mataji made it to the platform—as I hugged her, I could feel the individual bones leading up to the hump in her spine. “Go home, pack a bag, and come right back,” she said. Arya raised you on his shoulders one last time, then swung you back onto the steps of the train. “Your Bombay adventure is over,” Hema called out as the doors were closing. “It's time to return to the people who care.”