BALBIR UNCLE TAKES ILL

It was a telegram. Balbir Uncle had fallen ill and he was in Kangra, his cottage next to his vast apple orchard. He was down with pneumonia and a severe one at that. My only uncle! I bolted to Kangra. It was good to be back, even the birds had a clearer note. His estate, if I could call it such, was much better than our little cottage with the scabbed lawn which my father had left me. This estate of his was his baby, he had nursed it for over twenty years. Next to the cottage were mandarin trees, I loved looking at those little golden orbs lighting up every branch. He loved making a jam out of them, a hybrid preservative, half marmalade and half jam. He had, against advice, also put up a bed of lavender flowers. He had grown the purple haze lavender, but the deep blue of the flowers had faded a bit under the Indian sun. They had a mauve touch about them now.

I thought to myself that the shadows of the purple flower and the withered leaf were alike black. Remembered a poetic fragment from the past—

‘Naked to earth was I brought.

Naked to earth I’ll descend.

Why should I labour for naught

seeing how naked the end?’

Memory, in tune with my bleak mood, had ejected these lines from where, I wouldn’t know. I noticed his apricot trees, the branches weighed down by the fruit. When I was a kid we used to break the kernel on the grindstone and eat the almond within, often bitter. It had rained earlier and I walked up to the glazed veranda, the black humus giving way beneath my flat shoes.

He was well looked after, had a night nurse and a male day nurse. Within three days he was better, the phlegm had lessened, and he was breathing freely. We could talk at last which was a relief. ‘We seldom talk about the family,’ he said. ‘We should. Your mother for instance, how much do you know about her?’ I kept quiet. He thought you were exceptionally intelligent Mama, not just the way you picked up languages like skewering fish fingers with a tooth pick and swallowing them, his words. He was impressed by the manner in which you majored in philosophy. He added you put in very hard work as well but the really remarkable thing was the way you got to the core of Marx or any other philosopher you tackled. ‘Philosophers sometimes don’t know themselves what they want to say, and even if they do, they find it tough to exit from the morass of knowledge they have gathered and the flood of things that come to their mind which they want to express. They get caught in the swamp of their own making and their outpourings are seldom pithy and never very clear. A philosophic tract is a cloud and often at the end of it there is no rain. But you could have come out with a series of books—Marx Made Easy, Immanuel Kant Made Easy.

‘She was also clever. The way she played that Markham along was a lesson, reminded me of a woman carrying on with two lovers, communism on the one hand and the foreign office or the secret service on the other. And she did it in such a languid manner, spinning the Americans round her fingers. Her loyalty towards the communist cause was fierce, steady, unrelenting. Or was it?’

He seemed to relapse into silent contemplation, almost appeared to be in need of it, a respite from his own definitive opinions. ‘I mentioned that she could get to the heart of things…’

‘Core,’ I interjected. ‘Yes core,’ he continued. ‘She got there dealing with others. I am not sure if she ever got to the core of her own feelings.’

‘What are you trying to say, Uncle?’

‘I am hesitating, Seema. Who am I to talk about the core of another person’s feelings, especially if I am saying that she herself couldn’t get a grip of the deepest currents of her inner turmoil, something that swirls inside you and you can’t give it a name? I am also conscious that I am talking to her daughter.’ I persisted however, you can’t say that much and then clam up, can you. Now I have a right to know. Spill it out, Uncle.

‘I think Seema, it is just a guess, for a good part of a decade she was nursing romantic notions towards MN.’ Then he clammed up, leaned back on the sofa, and I heard him wheezing, like air slowly hissing out of a punctured tyre. I couldn’t control myself, seldom can. ‘What the hell do you mean by “nursing romantic notions” Uncle (I was insolent enough to mimic him!)? Are you saying that she was in love with him? Then why the hell don’t you say so!’ He laughed and so did I, his only niece saying all this. We sat there in silence for a while watching a pair of jet black birds pecking away at insects in the lawn. After about fifteen minutes of watching birds and a horse chestnut falling on the lawn and a troupe of monkeys invade the grounds only to be shooed off by the gardener, I finally asked, ‘What makes you say that Uncle?’

‘Russian. After she majored in political philosophy, she went for Russian. Why on earth? She wasn’t making a career as an expert on Bolshevism. She wasn’t a journalist writing for papers. What was Bukharin to her or she to Bukharin, or Trotsky for that matter, that she should wade into this Slavic language? It was MN. She wanted to be useful to him, near him. Isn’t that another word for love?’

‘What about loyalty? Uncle, can’t you think of passionate loyalty, devotion which big leaders command through their charisma. Can’t that be an explanation?’

‘Seema, how old were you when your father died?’

‘Fifteen years.’

‘He was ten years older than your mother. He was as tall as MN and as dignified. He was a substitute for her first love…I am sorry don’t cry.’ Of course I was crying, any daughter would cry to hear this and see the unremitting logic behind it.

‘Seema I am sorry, but have you read the journal which I gave you when you came to write your book which you never wrote, some Pahari painting wasn’t it?’ I told him I didn’t have the courage. How would I know what she had written? ‘Your mother has written about her childhood and more. Go back and read it.’

I wished at that moment I had a sister, or, second choice, even a brother. You can discuss your parents with your sister or brother, who else? There’s none other. He was wheezing a bit and I helped him to get back to his bed. As a parting shot he said, ‘You haven’t read the journal I gave you. A bit of what I said is evident from the journal.’

I sat down in the lawn. Memory turned up an old scene, I must have been seven or so, a photograph placed before me and a forefinger (father’s?) pointing out ancestors, saw the family framed, and I: why is the photograph brown? Father: child this is sepia, afflicts old photographs; I don’t know the word sepia, but keep quiet, old stratagem of mine, never exhibit your ignorance; I just ask why, why what he asks, why does it turn brown, and find he is at a loss for words; the window behind the old family is open, the landscape against which they are framed looks haggard; was distance brown in those days I ask; laughter; father’s explanation goes over my head, it is a signature of the times, they are captive in a six by four frame, they are captives to an age gone by. Were cameras similar to ours, I ask and I remember his answer, the shutter dropped as it does now, and the lens had a good eye, till filmed by a cataract. Why can’t the old speak in phrases children can understand?

I went back to my cottage in the evening, the one Dad had left me, couldn’t stand Balbir Uncle for a while. I made my excuses—had to see things were ok and clean and if the caretaker was looking after the place. But the weather had changed; a cloud as solid as old age bronze was making straight for us. Thunder was still distant, a growl from the other side of infinity. Uncle tried to dissuade me but I insisted. We wasted a half hour bickering. Rain started pelting away as I stepped into Balbir’s car and I saw the driver shrugging shoulders—what can you do if the woman is mad? I noticed the hiss of tyres in the night rain. Rain slanted in, the cold seemed to have hardened the drops. I noticed the mist around the street lamps, till the interior of the car became thick with moisture and even the wipers were of no help. I lowered the side window, never mind getting wet, and that seemed to be of some help. When the driver objected, I told him visibility was more important than getting wet. We were moving so slowly that I noticed two wet dogs following a wet bitch, as they got lit up by the headlights. I tipped the driver as I got off. He hollered for the caretaker-cum-maali and all was well, even though the rain was roaring against the tiles. Late at night, the rain relented and instead of the roar, I thought I heard the sibilance of water drizzling from the skies.