Dulari Raina was incarcerated in the nursing home for more than a month. She spoke little and moved even less, alternating between states of delirium, drowsiness and coma, a catheter in her bladder, and a feeding tube in her stomach. Morbidly obese, her skin was surprisingly diaphanous and bruised with a hint of pressure. Sores were sprouting on her sacrum, buttocks and heels. Omkar, her brother, and Nancy, his wife—the only care givers—were worn out from looking after her and had deposited her in the home. There, she would wait for final deliverance.
Dulari had no visitors from amongst her five siblings and their families, except Omkar who visited her every Monday morning to pay the bills and say hello to the hospital staff. But a stranger had of late become a regular visitor. He spent time with her every evening, holding her hands, trying to communicate. No one knows what transpired between this greying man in his mid-50s and the dying woman. When the nurses asked how he was related to her, he said he was a kinsman.
A week later, 75 years after she was born, Dulari bid adieu to this world and to the long saga of pain and suffering. Her last birthday, like her birthdays over the past four decades, went unnoticed at the nursing home where she finally gave up her fight.
Dulari’s tragic tale needs to be told to remind us of destiny’s unseen hands twisting and turning our lives at its will, leaving us with little control over ourselves. This is not just about the bizarre ritual prescribed by a pir whose services were sought to pull Dulari out of the tragic predicament after she was deserted by her husband, Pran Nath. That was after he had been brought handcuffed all the way from Bombay through a court order and lodged in the Central Jail of Srinagar. After a few days in jail, Dulari’s mother, Dhanvati, had directed her sons to visit the groom to inquire about his welfare. This was without the knowledge of the lawyer, Gwash Lal, who had toiled hard for the arrest warrant. She believed that Pran Nath was just an errant husband, too naive to understand the responsibilities of marriage; it was unacceptable to imagine him in jail, supping and sleeping with thieves and thugs, when he should have been enjoying the hospitality that he deserved at his in-laws.
Soon Dhanvati started sending dishes, which she cooked specially for her son-in-law, to supplement what was provided at the jail. She ordered a pair of new shirts and stockings, and asked Dulari to knit a pullover for him. She had his clothes washed and ironed.
Soon, Pran Nath ingratiated himself with the family, apologised for his mistakes and made fervent appeals for pardon. He promised that he would make up for all his lapses and prove himself a model husband. Dulari met him twice in the jail and felt convinced that he was a changed man. That enthused Dhanvati to rush to Gwash Lal and request him to drop the case and get Pran Nath released. He warned her that this sudden transformation seemed a mere charade, but he could not prevail over an impassioned mother-in-law craving to indulge her daughter’s husband regardless of his faults and failings. It was head against heart, reason against faith.
Pran Nath was honourably discharged from jail and formally welcomed as an honoured son-in-law, soon to endear himself to the Raina clan. Dulari’s uncle vacated his spacious room for the couple to consummate the marriage two years after the wedding. Dulari had confessed to cousin Gouri that her wedding night had been a total disaster. She was too raw, too nervous and too unprepared for his urgency, and his consuming drive focused on the penetration that was hard to achieve with her thighs held tight together as the hot fluid pouring between her thighs gave her an uneasy feeling, and the strange odour caused her alarm. Her unresponsiveness had grown worse with each renewed attempt till he had given up in frustration. Later, she had cursed herself for her naiveté and believed it might have been the reason he abandoned her.
Being the first born, Dulari’s wedding was a cherished family event. Her doting mother had bid for a well-qualified and well-placed groom. Middlemen came up with several proposals. Horoscopes of eligible candidates were sifted and studied, but none impressed her until Pran Nath’s strong credentials came under review. Employed in far off Bombay, he had a postgraduate degree, his family seemed fine, his tekni matched with Dulari’s, and the wedding was on.
The wedding was performed in style. The tall and handsome groom made quite an impression, but his stay was short, just five days. He told Dulari that he was in the thick of an important assignment at his office. He would call her to Bombay as soon as he set up a decent apartment.
Dulari was still in the euphoria of her wedded state. She spent time with her in-laws, basking in the special treatment traditionally showered on new brides. But Pran Nath was not heard from much. He wrote to her, but sparingly. The letters were brief, drab and unemotional, not the romantic stuff that she was waiting for. She took the help of her cousin and wrote long, loving replies but the response was tepid. He was still looking for an apartment, he wrote.
Weeks went by. Dulari’s parents grew anxious. They met Pran Nath’s parents who set their mind at ease. What was the hurry, they asked. Were they not entitled to the privilege of having their daughter-in-law with them for some more time? Was she unhappy in the new household or in any sort of distress on their account? These were beguiling words that forced the Rainas into silence. But not for long. Why was Pran Nath incommunicado, they wondered. Omkar, Dulari’s brother, dashed an express letter to Pran Nath asking him when he would come and take his wife. In his reply, Pran Nath reflected on the difficult living conditions in the metropolis, adding that he was going through a crucial phase in his career, which demanded long working hours that left him little time to look for a decent accommodation. He would call her soon, he reassured him, and made a plea on behalf of his parents who had taken a great liking for their daughter-in-law and would like to have her in the house for some more time.
More letters were exchanged and new excuses offered every time until Pran Nath stopped answering. By then, nine months had passed and the family was in despair. They decided to send Dulari to Bombay to join her husband, without informing him about it.
Gwash Lal established contact with a distant relative, Dwarika Nath, who lived in Bombay. He received Dulari at the railway station and accompanied her to Pran Nath’s address. It was a small place, a single room and a kitchen. Pran Nath was away but there was a woman with two kids. When informed that Dulari was Pran Nath’s legal wife, the woman was enraged. Who is the real wife, she screamed; she, who had been living with Pran Nath for six years and bore him two kids, or Dulari who nobody had ever seen or heard about?
The intensity of the woman’s anger left Dulari stunned and her fulminations sent her cowering into a corner where she fainted with fear. Dwarika Nath was at a loss. He got hold of some water and sprayed it on Dulari’s face to revive her. When she came to, she started crying. The other woman just stood there, unmoved. She asked them to leave at once before she called for help. Dwarika Nath realised that there was no point in confronting this woman, and led Dulari out. As they left, she banged the door shut behind them and bawled, ‘Don’t ever make the mistake of coming here again; I won’t even let your shadow fall on my portals.’
Nevertheless, early next morning, Dwarika Nath went to the place alone and knocked. As soon as the woman opened the door he shoved his way in and saw the man face to face. The woman hollered, ‘How dare you come here again?’ but he addressed the man, ‘I believe you are Pran Nath? Your wife has arrived from Kashmir. She is staying with me. This woman here claims that you married her six years ago and that you have two children by her.’
Pran Nath was cornered. He had no argument except a wild excuse that his parents had forced him into marriage with Dulari much against his will.
‘And yet you agreed to marry a second woman and, throwing your conscience to the wind, deserted her only after a week. This is bigamy as well as desertion, and the consequences can be grave,’ Dwarika Nath warned him.
The woman went on muttering profanities, looking menacingly at Pran Nath as he barely managed to find speech, ‘I am ready to take full responsibility. Dulari will live with us. I will put her up temporarily in a hotel until I find a larger apartment for all of us.’
This provoked a wild altercation with his wife who poured more abuse on Pran Nath, pushed him out of the apartment, commanded Dwarika Nath to clear out and shut the door behind them, not before warning them that she was Pran Nath’s only lawful wife and that she would never share her husband with any other woman.
‘How do you propose to reconcile this impossible situation?’ Dwarika Nath asked as the two men stood face to face out on the street.
‘You will have to bear with me for a while till I sort it out with Malini. She is not as bad as she seems.’
Dwarika Nath did not like the idea of Dulari being put up in a hotel in a city alien to her. He left his address with Pran Nath and gave him two days to sort things out with Malini.
They waited a full week but Pran Nath never turned up. Dwarika Nath went to seek him again, but the apartment was locked. The horse had bolted.
Dulari was too naive and too shocked to think for herself. She was terribly disillusioned with this city called Bombay, which had assumed a mystique in her imagination during the past year. She had passed the past seven days crying her eyes out and the nights in extreme agitation and fright. Now she knew it was all over and begged to be sent back home, to her parents.
Legal proceedings started soon after her failed visit to Bombay. It took several months before Pran Nath was brought to Srinagar in handcuffs and jailed.
Now, nearly two years after her wedding, when a shy, diffident Dulari, dressed up as a bride again, was ushered a second time into the nuptial chamber where her husband waited, it was with clear instructions not to repeat her earlier follies. Dhanvati, the irrepressible mother, pressed her ears to the door for a long time until she thought she heard everything that she wanted to. There was not a more satisfied mother that went to bed that night.
Even as the daughter reported a successful consummation, Dhanvati would take no chances. She had already sought other means to ensure a firm hold on the groom. Caught in the web of tragic tangles, people in the Piriveir and Rishiveir, as the valley of Kashmir is proudly called, often seek access to spiritual, mystical and magical aids to solve their manifold problems. That is how the pir, referred to earlier, came into the picture.
The pirs of Kashmir have a reputation for getting truant and cheating husbands back into the fold of their spouses. Thus it was that mother Dhanvati sought the services of the celebrated Pir Barkat Ali. He lived behind the public burial ground at Zadibal, in a mysterious looking house from which chimney smoke rose in curls and took myriad forms. Inside, the pir sat in one corner, in a low-ceilinged, poorly-lit sombre room, on a raised cushion of mattresses with a big bolster behind his back, a low table in front and a cabinet by his right side against the wall. He wore a long white pheran with wide cuffs, a green turban over a white cotton skullcap, sported a long white beard, and had bushy eyebrows that met in the middle and flowed over the base of his angular nose. There were three ancient-looking books on the desk, two dog-eared ledgers, a pen and an inkpot, and small square slips of paper on which he scribbled some spells in Arabic, folded them twice and handed them over to the supplicants seated on the floor in front of him. For others, he wrote the spells on the inner surfaces of ceramic cups and instructed them variously, according to their problems, to go home and drink tea, milk or herbal potions from the cup. From the cabinet he fished out amulets of different designs for different clients.
Pir Barkat Ali listened to Dulari’s story with rapt attention. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes for a long while in contemplation. Then he opened the larger tome in front of him and turned its leaves till he stopped at a page and studied it in some detail, moving his head gently. He raised his eyes and looked intensely at Dulari and her mother as he explained the recipe specially designed for her. They were to buy a parrot, keep it captive in a cage and look after it with great care for as long as the groom was in their house, and beyond, till they received further instructions from him. Under no circumstances had the parrot to be freed or allowed to die in captivity. He also tied a charm around Dulari’s biceps, which she was not to remove at any cost.
While Barkat Ali’s instructions were followed in letter and spirit, Dhanvati, the ever worrying and vigilant mother, would not be satisfied with a single prescription. There was a multitude of specialist pirs in the field. For the sake of her beloved daughter, she craved extra insurance. A family friend came up with yet another pir who had performed miracles and gained huge reputation for his amazing results. To him she took her beloved daughter.
Pir Jalal-u-din gave a patient hearing to their predicament and went into a long trance before he came up with a rather bizarre formula: The groom was to be served special homemade bread, the flour for which had to be kneaded in water mixed with Dulari’s urine!
For every day of his stay with his in-laws, the unsuspecting groom breakfasted on freshly baked parathas, laced with his bride’s urine. Within days of these ministrations, Danvati came to believe that Pran Nath was now under total control. She was happy with herself that her schemes were working and that she had persuaded Gwash Lal to drop the case, much against his considered opinion.
It was time for Pran Nath Dhar to return to his job at Bombay. He had stayed with his in-laws for four weeks and planted his seed securely inside Dulari. When she missed her period, her mother cried with joy. It was a testimony of her skilful handling of the situation and her deft planning and strategy. She was going to be a grandmother, something she had dreamed so ardently. It was now in everyone’s interest that Pran Nath return to Bombay, go back to his job and find proper accommodation for his wife and the baby that was sure to arrive.
Everyone agreed that Dulari should stay back. It was not advisable for her to set up a new home when she had just conceived. She need not take any chances until she progressed to the third or fourth month of pregnancy when she could safely join her husband. She would travel back to Srinagar in the last month to deliver the baby in the love and safety of her mother’s home.
Pran Nath readily endorsed the plan. He repeated his promise of calling her, reiterated his resolve to separate from Malini and make a new beginning with Dulari once she joined him at Bombay.
When he boarded the bus, Dulari and her five siblings were there to see him off. He remained rather stiff and emotionless during the farewell even as they sobbed and cried, wiping their tearful eyes with the backs of their hands and handkerchiefs. Seated in the front seat, he did not look out from the window nor look back at them waving their hearts out to him, but kept his gaze straight ahead through the windshield, beyond the lofty mountains and the blue sky. They kept waving till the bus disappeared at the bend.
Days went by and then weeks, but there was no communication from Pran Nath. It was the third month of her pregnancy now and time for him to call Dulari to Bombay as had been agreed, but there was no word, not a line from him. Dhanvati became nervous. Setting aside any fear of reprimand, she once again sought Gwash Lal’s advice, but the lawyer expressed his helplessness. ‘Having withdrawn the case against Pran Nath, you have lost the moral and even the legal ground to get him rearrested. In any case, that will serve no purpose, certainly not of winning him over. The bird has flown. There is no way we can capture and cage it again.’
Dhanvati became hysterical. She tossed her taranga at his feet. ‘It is a question of my honour as much as my daughter’s future. You have to save us both from disaster,’ she urged him.
Gwash Lal got in touch with Dwarika Nath and asked him to find out. The news was bad. Pran Nath had lost his job and was still looking for another. He continued to live with his first wife. She had threatened to kill herself and her two kids if he got Dulari to live with them. He promised Dwarika Nath that he would call Dulari as soon as he found a job and a suitable place where she could stay with the kid that would arrive. Meanwhile, he requested that her family understand his predicament and bear with him until his circumstances improved.
There was nothing they could do. Their hopes now hinged on the soon-to-arrive child. Surely the infant would lure the father to his mother.
Nine months is a long time in waiting; in Dulari’s case it felt like an eternity. But destiny played yet another cruel trick on her. She carried to term, only to deliver a stillborn child—a cursed offspring of a cursed marriage. With that, the last vestige of hope was dashed and her only possible link with her husband was interred with the dead child. How long can one hold water in cupped hands?
What went wrong and why was it that her daughter’s life had come to such a sorry state so early in her life, Dhanvati agonised. Had she not reared her in the best family tradition with her sweat, tears and blood? Had not the family priest perused Dulari’s zatuk and found favourable astrological placements? Had he not predicted a life of happiness and fulfilment? Had the priest not matched the teknis of Pran Nath and Dulari and found full convergence? Had she not followed in letter and spirit the prescriptions of two of the best pirs of the land? Why was Dulari damned right from her childhood?
Alas, there were no answers to these questions except that the parrot had escaped from the cage and flown away when an inquisitive kid opened the trap door. Pir Barkat Ali had warned her not to let the bird escape under any circumstances. Had something also gone amiss with the parathas, a misstep somewhere in carrying out Pir Jalal-u-din’s directions in letter and spirit? There was no doubt Pran Nath had lapped them up with relish and more than once acknowledged that the parathas never tasted as good all his life. Why then had he flown away like the parrot, like a bird of passage, never to turn back?
After the tragic events, Dulari’s life remained in a state of limbo, unchanged and uneventful from one day to another, from one year to another. She was the object at once of sympathy and ridicule by her siblings. She became morose and withdrawn, and sank into depression each time her friends or siblings got married, even as she grew prettier and bloomed into full womanhood. Her motherly instincts surfaced when she saw kids being born to her friends and she secretly suckled them on her dry breasts. She dreamed of Pran Nath returning to her someday, even as she had horrible nightmares of his first wife attacking her and her children coming after her. The yearning to regain the favour of her husband was reinforced in no small measure by the undying belief of her mother that Pran Nath would come back to her. She had the astrologer and family priest look at Dulari’s horoscope again. Both of them declared that she was going through a bad patch, a seven-and-a-half year period of hardship that demanded observance of austerities and fasts.
Even as her mother had exhausted all traditional means— the charms, the recipes of the pirs, the fasting and the praying— and failed to retrieve Dulari’s errant husband and lure him back from Bombay, a family friend came up with another prescription: supplication at the feet of Lord Nandkeshwara, the resident deity at Sumbal.
The Nandkeshwara Bhiarava Temple is a sprawling complex on the river bank in Sumbal, a quaint hamlet about 24 kilometers from Srinagar. You go there in a doonga or by road on a tanga. It is a serene place with ancient chinars and an air of mystery. The idol of Nandkeshawara resides in the temple—a four-armed, three-eyed, handsome youth of striking red colour, granted immortality by Lord Shiva. He is the saviour of his devotees, the remover of all obstacles when you approach him clean in body, mind and spirit.
The Rainas set sail in a doonga. It was an adventure-filled excursion through the backwaters of Srinagar, the Dal Lake and the Vitasta, and an idyllic retreat from the humdrum city life to a hermitage ideal for prayer and solitude. They paid obeisance. A havan was performed. The lungs and heart of a lamb purchased from the local butcher were offered according to tradition and fed to the kites that circled above and swooped down to catch the chunks hurled up in the air.
Dulari was initiated into a protocol that required early rising, sweeping the temple premises and bathing, followed by a regimen of worship, including the recitation of hymns and mantras. Her diet was limited to vegetables, fruit and yoghurt. She was forbidden spicy foods, silly thoughts and foul language.
Daily prayer, circumambulation, fasting and worship for a full week provided a mystical experience that lifted the spirits of the family. The temple priest was happy with their devotion. No one had returned empty-handed from Sumbal, he claimed, and hoped that their problems would resolve themselves soon. They should visit every year and adopt Lord Nandkeshawra as their family deity, he advised.
On their return, every member of the family beamed with confidence. People came to felicitate them for a successful pilgrimage and for their new affiliation to Nandkeshwara who would cure all ills and bring Dulari’s husband back to her.
Alas, that did not happen. There was depressing news from Bombay. Pran Nath’s life had followed a different trajectory; he had sired a third child with Malini.
On hearing this news, Dulari behaved like someone possessed. She stood up and moved around as if in a dream and started singing songs that no one had heard before, in a voice that was not her own. She danced, made wild gestures, flung her arms and legs, and clapped her hands. Her brothers managed to restrain her a while despite the unnatural strength she seemed to possess.
‘Dulari, calm down. This must be a mistake; the news from Bombay is not true. Calm down, sister,’ Jawahar, her brother, tried to comfort her.
‘I am not Dulari,’ she replied imperiously.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I am Nandkeshawara,’ she growled.
‘Pray, what is your bidding, sir?’ he asked politely.
‘She has desecrated my temple.’ The voice became hoarser.
‘What has she done?’
‘She spat near the sacred chinar, behind the temple.’
All the while, Dulari was trying hard to wriggle out. Soon, she managed to free herself and started the strange dance, as if it were Shiva’s tandava.
This was getting difficult. Word went round that Dulari was possessed. Neighbours gathered, some waiting in the courtyard, others coming near, eager to watch the spectacle.
While they were debating how to address this turn of events, someone suggested the name of Pandit Nand Lal who had been the high priest at Sumbal before he migrated to Srinagar during the 1947 tribal invasion. He was well versed with the Nandkeshwara lore, and was held in high esteem as a specialist who could communicate with supernatural beings, ghosts and spirits. He lived nearby at Budger and readily agreed to come. A tall, middle-aged person, dreamy eyes, and an erect stance, he wore a shirt and trousers, a finely done rose turban and a close-buttoned grey jacket coming down to the knees. He listened to the story with full attention like a doctor.
Dulari’s tandava was on when he was led inside the room. He watched her for a while and then moved slowly towards her. With a calm, reassuring, resonant voice, he addressed her: ‘I am the servant of Lord Nandkeshwara. I am here to make amends for the wrong done. Please leave her alone. Please go back to your place.’
She looked at him, flinched for a while and resumed her dance.
He repeated his plea and started reciting mantras in a mesmerising voice, slowly moving closer to her, touching her arm gently. It had a sudden sobering effect. The dance stopped and Dulari sat down exhausted, repeating her warning, ‘I will never forgive her.’
‘Please leave her alone; she will do the necessary propitiations, whatever you bid her to do,’ he said in a placatory tone.
‘She has defiled my place. She will have to suffer for it.’
‘You do not punish people for being ignorant. Please go away, I beseech you,’ he spoke in a commanding voice now.
‘She is cursed, cursed from her childhood. Her husband will never return to her.’
‘She has suffered enough; she could do without more pain,’ Pandit Nand Lal pleaded.
‘She is condemned; she will die suffering,’ Dulari shouted.
‘Please leave her alone, I warn you,’ he said sternly.
Dulari responded with a growl and made an attempt to stand up again but he restrained her, produced a tiny penknife from his pocketbook and placed it on her sternum near the base of the neck.
‘Will you leave her alone, or should I...?’ he raised his baritone for the first time since he arrived at the scene.
That seemed to do the trick. She answered in a conciliatory tone, ‘She will sweep the whole temple clean. She will offer sacrifices.’
‘Of course, she will do as you say,’ he continued in his resolute tone.
She tried to push his arm aside, but Pandit Nand Lal was unrelenting. He pressed the knife nearer the neck and raised his voice louder, ‘I command you; go away before I push this deep inside.’
‘I am going now, but I will return again,’ the voice drawled to a stop.
Dulari opened her eyes suddenly, sat up and looked around at the expressions of disbelief on everyone. Omkar came forward with a glass of water. She drank it avidly. Her limbs loosened up. Puzzled at seeing a big crowd, she asked, ‘Why are you all here?’
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
Dulari was possessed again several times in the succeeding weeks but Pandit Nand Lal negotiated her out of the spells with his patient, perseverant and professional approach. The spells finally faded away and Dulari was exorcised of the spirit of Nandkeshhwara and rid of the baggage of her failed marriage. She never talked about it again.
Gwash Lal refused pleas from Dhanvati to get the case against Pran Nath reopened. How long can you keep an unwilling husband in a cage like a bird, he asked her. The case had already been withdrawn; it would be a torturous exercise to resume the legal proceedings. He suggested divorce as an option that might earn her alimony, but Dhanvati would not hear that word. It was taboo. So was remarriage, because of her ambiguous state of being neither divorced nor widowed.
Dulari was condemned to live in her parents’ house, like a widow whose husband was alive. Though father Shiv Nath had lost all interest in her and mother Dhanvati still hankered after pirs, fakirs and priests, Dulari, at the instance of Gwash Lal, took up private tutoring over the next few years till she passed her high school examination. That enabled her to get employment as a minor functionary in a government department. She continued to live in the joint family, and carried on as if she were never married. In a final act of motherly devotion, Dhanvati encouraged her to adopt Sagar. He was the youngest sibling, 15 years junior to Dulari. She grabbed the offer; in fact, she had always treated Sagar more as a son than a brother.
But ruthless destiny strikes again just when you think it has spent all its poison darts.
Dhanvati died a sudden death, as unforeseen as a thunderbolt in a clear sky. It was evening time in autumn. The family was having a dinner discussion over finding a match for Doora, the younger daughter. Dulari’s matrimonial fiasco hovered like a dark shadow over her marriage prospects. Suddenly there was commotion across the street in the Guer house, who supplied milk to the neighbourhood. Dhanvati got up and looked out the window to find out.
‘What happened?’ Dhanvati asked Jana, the Guer matriarch, and a mother of six like her.
‘A thief found his way into our store. Rahima gave him a chase but he managed to get away. Thank God, he could not lay his hands on anything valuable; there was silver and copperware in the store for daughter Kaji’s dowry.’
On hearing this, Dhanvati uttered just one sentence, ‘The thief, the thief; he must have run away with Doora’s jewellery,’ and fell down unconscious. The family thought she had thrown a fit, but she never woke up again. By dropping dead so suddenly, she had played the last act of her tragic-comic life.
Dulari was now anchorless; she had lost her beloved mother and her guardian angel.
With their mother dead and father left with no interest in the family affairs and little in his own self, the siblings lost the cementing force that held them together. The ancestral house did not have enough room to hold them under one roof, and they moved uptown to Rajbagh into a bigger house with four family sets, which they built to accommodate the whole family. Jawahar, Omkar and Tej moved into their respective sets in the new house. Doora finally found a suitable match and got married off along with the dowry her mother gave life for. That left Dulari and her adopted son, Sagar, who was still a college student, to share the fourth set.
Shivnath, having turned a recluse after the demise of his wife, was in the unenviable position of not knowing which of his sons would host and look after him in his last days. According to the scriptures, one has to have done great acts of piety in past lives to be blessed with the opportunity of serving an ageing parent. But the curse of having many heirs is to be owned by none but claimed by all. Shivnath’s case was no different. His sons vied with each other to deny themselves the divine privilege of looking after him. He ended up in the attic, away from the tumult of an expanding family and away from attention, to fade away unknown and unheard. One day, he quietly breathed his last.
Dulari, lonely and sidelined, made it her life’s ambition to provide the best she could for Sagar. She sold her jewellery, sent him to a good school, paid for his private tuition and motivated him to take a course in medicine. Sagar graduated in five years. Dulari was now the proud mother of a doctor, weaving dreams of a bride for her son, and the grandchildren that would follow.
There must be something terribly amiss in the double helix of some unfortunate people, something like a missing or mutant gene, that they have a predilection for disasters. Tragedy strikes them like a hungry beast, insatiate until it consumes the last shred of its victim.
After she exhausted nearly all her resources to build a career for her son, Dulari arranged his marriage with a girl, who came with the promise of bringing some light in her dark life. But it was not long before the light faded away and eclipsed her life altogether. The daughter-in-law soon took over the household, including the kitchen, and rendered Dulari redundant. Slowly, she encroached upon her living space as well. Sagar remained a silent bystander as relations between the two women were strained to the limit. He never took his role as her adopted son with any degree of seriousness and even forgot the duties of a younger brother. Dulari was forced to move into the attic vacated by her father. There, in that cold and dark corner of the house, she grieved over her fate and the futility of life.
Alas, the hungry beast took yet another lunge at her to snatch that corner too. It was at this time that Kashmir was engulfed in the flames of terrorism and Kashmiri Pandits became the worst victims of this monster. The Rainas found themselves in one of the numerous caravans fleeing for their lives to neighbouring Jammu and other towns in the Indian plains.
Exile transformed the social relationships among Pandits. Now it was everyone for oneself. It was impossible for the Rainas to retain any closeness in exile. They broke up and went wherever destiny guided them. Over the years—through repeated migrations from one town to another, in search of space, shelter, vocation, children’s education and of the ever-changing dynamics of social readjustments—the sub-units of the Raina clan finally settled in different places away from each other. Jawahar and Omkar settled in Gurgaon, three kilometres apart from each other; Tej in Dilshad Garden across the Jamuna, and Sagar in Jammu. Doora moved with her husband to Hyderabad. However, none of the siblings showed any enthusiasm for keeping Dulari with them. It was as if exile offered an opportunity to rid themselves of her unwelcome presence, a relief from the daily reminder of her wretched state and from the guilt of the neglect she had suffered in the joint household. So she tagged along with Omkar and Nancy. The couple still had some compassion for the eldest sibling whom misfortune had rendered prematurely old and fragile.
The Raina siblings hardly connected with each other except the occasional phone calls, and rarely ever met except, sometimes, on the weddings of their children. Meanwhile, Dulari sank further into depression and withdrew within herself. It was a purposeless existence for this abandoned woman who had lost her connections, her vocation and her nest even if it was the small attic back home in Kashmir. Over the years, she developed flab, her health declined and her knees degenerated from osteoarthritis, forcing her into inactivity. Her mind atrophied from an invasion by the deadly weeds of loneliness, idleness, and ennui. She roamed in the labyrinth of her past and yearned for her other siblings, for her adopted son, for her childhood friends, for her home. But no one was willing to have her even for a day. They had left their consciences behind in Kashmir. Even Jawahar, the eldest brother, who lived just three kilometres away, never bothered to see his sister. In fact, he gave her the rudest shock.
Omkar’s daughter, a student of engineering in Madras, was advised urgent surgery for an acute lumbar disc herniation. Her parents rushed to be with her. They arranged to put Dulari in a home for the aged. The manager of the home insisted that they leave behind a contact address just in case of an emergency. Omkar gave Jawahar’s phone number since he lived close by. The following week, Dulari ran high fever and cough. The manager informed Jawahar and asked him to take his sister to a hospital for treatment. He was upset and even enraged when he came to know that Omkar had left his contact number with the management. Reluctantly, he brought Dulari home, cursed her for falling ill and Omkar for having gone to Madras and leaving her at the home. He didn’t take kindly to this uncalled-for responsibility from which he had exonerated himself long back.
Omkar and Nancy cut short their visit and returned soon after their daughter was ambulant, only to find Dulari in total disarray, and Jawahar petulant. She was disoriented and failed to show any emotion on seeing them, even refusing to return their greetings. They took her home, but in spite of their best efforts she continued to deteriorate, ate little, spoke even less, became careless about her dress and lost control of her bladder. It was a transformation they could not understand. She never recovered from this final shock from Jawahar. His heartlessness had broken her heart. Over the next few weeks, her mind remained foggy and she became bedridden, developed pressure sores and had to be catheterised. It was difficult for Omkar and his wife to manage her huge frame and they were forced to put her up in a nursing home.
The end came in seven weeks. Omkar received the news from the nurse on evening duty. He was obliged to inform all his siblings, just in case any of them wished to participate in the funeral. He made the first phone call to Sagar who was bound by religious duty to perform the last rites, to pour the sacred Ganges water in her mouth, to carry her body to the crematorium and light the fire, and to perform the post-funeral 10-day ceremonies. But Sagar asked one of the weirdest questions ever by a son on the death of his mother: ‘Do I have to come?’
‘That is your wish,’ Omkar replied and waited for an answer.
There was a long silence followed by the clicking sound of the phone hanging up.
Omkar made phone calls to other siblings and rushed to the nursing home along with Nancy.
Dulari’s corpse was covered by a white sheet. Sitting by her side was a stranger, sobbing and holding her hand.
‘Who may you be, sir?’ Omkar inquired.
‘Consider for a moment that I am a part of the family,’ the stranger answered in all humility and broke down, words coming haltingly from his trembling lips.
‘I am sorry, but I do not understand this outpouring of grief.’ Omkar had no idea who this stranger could be.
‘If tears can wash my father’s sins, I will cry until there is not a drop left in my eyes.’
‘Pray, what are you talking about? I do not understand your parables.’ Omkar was getting impatient with the man, even annoyed. What had the father of a stranger to do with the death of his sister, he wondered.
‘Death is a leveller, sir. With it, all the sins are interred in the grave or burnt to ashes.’
‘So it is, yet I do not have the faintest idea what this situation has got to do with you.’
‘I will tell you, if you bear with me and don’t lose your temper.’
‘I hope I have no reason to.’ Omkar was mystified.
‘Sir, Pran Nath was my father.’ He uttered the name almost in a whisper.
Omkar was confused. Who was Pran Nath? How did he care who the stranger’s father was?
‘I am sorry, but I cannot recall anyone with that name. In any case, do I have reason to know him?’
‘It is more than five decades that your sister, this unfortunate woman here, was married to my father, Pran Nath. He was already married and had begotten me before your sister came into his life. My name is Mohan. I was three then; you must have been a young boy.’
The revelation revived terrible memories of a life of tragedies, of the cruel hands of destiny that tormented Dulari all her life. Omkar was shaken with disbelief as much as with grief. There was no point being angry, or shouting Mohan away, or cursing Pran Nath who had terribly wronged his sister. Truly, death is the final arbiter and there is mercy for everyone. But why was Mohan so penitent? How did he find them?
‘My father passed away three months back,’ Mohan continued. ‘On his deathbed, the only thing he asked of me was to atone on his behalf for the wrong he had done to Dulari which he could not right even when he wanted to. It was Dwarka Nath who helped me locate you. But when I arrived at your house, it was locked. I sought information from your neighbour who guided me to this nursing home. On finding her in a critical state, I decided to stay back. Now, if you allow me, I would like to join the funeral and perform the last rites as a son should.’
Omkar was befuddled. What was the meaning of this extraordinary coincidence? Had destiny too decided to atone for its wickedness to Dulari? Why should he come between a mother and son?
‘We will withhold the cremation until tomorrow when I expect my other siblings. You have my permission to join the funeral ceremony,’ he finally declared and shook hands with Mohan and hugged him as if he had found a long-lost nephew.
‘I have no words to thank you, sir. I might as well inform you that I poured the Ganga jal in her mouth when she breathed her last. I happened to be by her side.’
Omkar hugged him again. ‘You did what we all couldn’t. Thank you.’
Sagar did not turn up. It was good he didn’t; his lighting the pyre would have been an act of great hypocrisy. Jawahar and Tej did show up, wearing masks of grief. Omkar invited Mohan to lead the ritual of lighting the pyre. There was a strange sparkle in his eyes, a sense of fulfilment of having discharged a duty both to recompense for a father’s iniquity and to fulfil the religious obligation towards a mother.
Dulari’s fortune smiled only in her death; she was indulged as a mother for the first time. After all, her journey into the other world would not be as stormy as her earthly sojourn, because the two overriding wishes of any Hindu mother were granted to her—that her son pour the holy water in her mouth when she is dying, and that he light her pyre.
NOTES
Piriveir and Rishiveir – the abode of pirs and rishis
tekni – the alignment of astrological signs (zodiac)
taranga – an elaborate headgear used by Kashmir Pandit women
zatuk – horoscope
tanga – horse-driven carriage
doonga – small version of a houseboat
tandava – Shiva’s dance