OF FAMILY

There has to be more to a family than just your name Mama. I am putting things down so that the family history becomes clearer to me, romantic angles, tantrums, shenanigans and the coordinates of relationships. I remember as a child I was confused between the maternal granny and the paternal one. Mama you never wanted to marry, your brother told me, Balbir Uncle. Two names can give a chap schizophrenia Mama, he may start wondering who he is, isn’t it? I put this question to your brother and he said ‘Don’t be a fool.’ Late in my teens I had gone to his apple orchard in Kangra, that’s where he told me you never wanted to marry, until you got married, that is. He also hinted that you were into calf love with someone older than you and ‘above’ your station—his words Mama, for me no one is ‘above’ you. I asked him how he knew all this since he was full ten years younger than you, he said he had heard your Dad, that is Grandpa Thakur Brajbir Singh, telling you off. He was feigning sleep in an adjoining room, Balbir Uncle, and he heard your father say, ‘You fell in love and it is over. Now lift yourself and move on.’

Your mother had no idea that you had ‘fallen’ in love. (I don’t even know why people ‘fall’ in love, why can’t they long jump or pole vault into love?) When she heard this, the colour left her cheeks and she fainted. Balbir was told to rush and bring a glass of water as also some cologne from Dadi’s dressing table to revive her. The Thakur splashed half the cologne bottle on her forehead and she came to. You were so frightened that you said to her, ‘Mama, I have never been in love, I swear. These are just stories that Papa believes.’ Granma next day came out with a tirade against her husband. ‘See, this is what comes from coming to a foreign country. You can’t raise children as you want them to, not in a foreign country of half-naked mems.’

Balbir Uncle, since he was born in Canada, had no problems, settling down there a few years after you all left Mexico. He also told me that your father shifted to California a few years after the war ended and the American police was no longer interested in ‘Indian revolutionaries’. In California he bought a farm, his first love. Harnam Singh’s brother helped him in getting it. I was told you proclaimed from the rooftops you wouldn’t marry. You were the one person in the family to come back to India—and you joined the Communist Party. Was also told that you were arrested once and came out of jail only after the case was dropped. The British believed that Congress with its mass following was a bigger threat, though the commies were a vicious lot. Then one fine day you suddenly married father, ten years older than you and a mild, though committed, socialist.

Balbir Uncle found Canada too cold in the winters and came to his apple orchard. I went to him again. I trusted him to be more sympathetic than you, I don’t know why. I didn’t dare to tell you that I was going steady with Nishant, for your health was cracking, a case of spine TB, according to the doctors. Balbir uncle said what are you afraid of? Tell her, she won’t die of shock, let me tell you. She has withstood worse assaults. The boy is a Thakur from Bihar and is a member of the IAS. What more can she ask for? I could break the news to her but she will resent the fact that her daughter did not tell her, trust her with the news.

He also told me about your dad. He could never forget his forty acres of rice land which he had sold to his step brother at almost half the price—the brother had sensed that it was a distress sale for the big Thakur wanted out. The pull of ancestral land is something a farmer or land owner can never resist. It becomes a part of him. He wanted the same acres back and the brother refused even twice the going market rate. He told Kaushalya granny that the brother probably wanted to milk him—he must be wanting four times the price. Granny told him ‘Why can’t you believe that he is now as much in love with the land as you are. After all, you are the same blood. Just forget about the land.’Thakur Sahib was not convinced. ‘I took a round of the land, Kaushalya. None of the old farm workers were there but their children recognized me and did obeisance. Do you understand?’

She replied, ‘I understand but there will be no fighting in the family.’ Later she asked sarcastically, ‘Didn’t you hear any shehnais wailing from the Naubat Khana and the drums beating?’That silenced father or so we thought, Balbir Uncle continued. ‘The Thakur bought large tracts of land in Rudauli. He even got a red brick Naubat Khana built there, dome and all, and had actual naubat players beating their drums. Such is the pull of younger days. What was mine has to be mine again, or at worst, a replica of what was mine.’ Balbir Uncle had turned philosophic at the end of the narration.

Mama, of your days in Bombay and Calcutta I haven’t been able to glean much. Balbir couldn’t tell me, didn’t want to perhaps, apart from saying that it was your father who financed you. Balbir Uncle’s analysis was that Thakur Brajbir Singh was stricken with ‘philosophic schizophrenia’—his phrase Ma, I wouldn’t be caught dead saying things like that. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. He answered, ‘Look at his trajectory: landowner, burning-to-be fighter for freedom— it’s another thing that he never fought—a bit communist later, I think he absorbed communism through a process of osmosis, interacting with his daughter, your mother. But he was making some money all the time, sawmill in Vancouver, shop in Mexico and then a farm in California. And what happens to his hate for the British—they had hanged one of his ancestors after all, his grandfather if you please. And you’ve been able to do nothing, you haven’t shot, leave alone a Dyer, even a British sergeant or an oppressive indigo planter. Udham Singh and others may have shot the wrong Dyers, if not the General of Jalianwala Bagh, at least the collector with the same name, ki farak painda hai yaar?’

Father could do nothing, his circumstances were such. And all this while, which means for the better part of his life he kept up with the news—Easter rebellion in Dublin, Gandhi in Champaran and the Bolsheviks who turned out so bad and bloody that all idealism about revolutions got fucked up—sorry shouldn’t use such words in front of you, don’t tell your mom.

Doers break through the wall of circumstance, father couldn’t. He just kept burning within like an old Hamam in the hills where you keep throwing pine cones and wood shavings into the damned thing and the water keeps boiling and the steam goes up in the air eternally. He had to look after family and finance and an exceptionally talented and beautiful daughter, a linguist who could pick up languages like a magnet picks up iron filings. You’ve got your mother’s looks, her long hair and almond eyes, don’t know where the almond eyes came from—we don’t have a Mongol or Uzbek in our family tree. But you are a drifter, better to be blunt, have done nothing with languages, a bit of a waster you, that’s what I think of you, best to be blunt. (He repeated this damned ‘best to be blunt’ twice, Mama! Is that a way to disguise cruelty?) So, you understand the philosophic schizophrenia I was talking about? And whatever he may have said he needs must have regretted coming away from California—back to caste and mosquitoes and malaria, a corrupt patwari here or a tahsildar there and the Englishmen living in an empyrean all their own, with Indian servants eager to pull off the riding boots of sahibs as they return from the paddocks or pig-sticking. British India was Baksheesh India—the third division graduate awaiting clerky as we call it, a lower division clerk’s post; the LDC awaiting the baksheesh—how grateful the sod is—for the post of a UDC. And how fair the goras were—no biradari, village association, caste politics—Kayastha helping Kayastha, Brahmin helping Brahmin, especially if you are from the same gotra; a Sarju Parin Brahmin ain’t going to help you even if you are a Brahmin with a plume of hair sprouting from your cranium, in case you are born on the other side of the Sarju river. Now the Hindiwalahs have started calling it Saryu. Sorry pal, wish your mom had delivered you here—placenta and blood—mark registered on our sands, not cis-sarju, if you get me. Gotra-ghetto-thinking must be quite incestuous. But I have drifted, Mama.

I now fear that I may be going the way Dad did. Living on two shores brings its problems. I love it more there, I was born abroad, but now I am worried that the alluvial tug of the Gangetic plain is getting to me. Home and homeland are like a mother, you can’t have homelands in pairs. But I will live with it. Father did not. God saw to it that he died in Lucknow and there were more than three hundred mourners at the Gomati bank and at least half the pyre consisted of sandalwood logs. It was a calm winter evening, cloudless sky. He had asked me in his last days what I wanted of his property. I said I have enough. Leave what you can to Shail.

And talking of family one day Nishant told me as he returned from office that his sister would be coming to Delhi the next day. ‘You should have told me this earlier,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the guest room ready.’‘No,’ he said, ‘they are not staying with us. They already have a flat on Asaf Ali Road, her father-in-law’s.’ Jijaji, that is, her husband Vikramsheel, was planning to open a clinic here in Daryaganj, right place to make money. They are shifting to Delhi. ‘Lovely’ I said, though I didn’t feel too good. She had come to Lucknow once after we had got married and were staying in Dilkusha Colony in a government flat—Nishant’s male ego would not permit him to stay in my kothi, for he would have looked a ghar jamai. She was at least five years older than Nishant which would mean a decade older than me. I thought I had taken good care of her, taking her around to the Imambaras and the Rumi Gate and showing her the Residency (she wasn’t a bit interested in history). Nishant drove her to Kakori, for what good reason I don’t know, except that she thought she would recall the Kakori conspiracy, when all we saw was a slightly seedy casbah. It was winter and the only visit she enjoyed was to the Coleus-and-Chrysanthemum show at the Botanical Gardens. She hardly smiled, and a serious face sat rather ill on her stocky body. When she left she hadn’t bothered to say a word of thanks to me.