Difficult Daughters (11 page)
Thursday, 4 January, 1940
Vir, darling,
So long, and no word from you! It is with an uneasy heart that I contemplate this silence. Kanhiya said you had no letter for him. He said nothing else, and I did not like to probe further.
Today is the last day of the Scout Mela. It has been almost a two-week affair, with seven thousand scouts and guides congregating from all over India. I would have thought a more natural venue would have been Lahore, but I suppose the powers that be thought that Amritsar should get its fair share of (what?) attention, I suppose. One can hardly call it culture.
Thanks to the Scout Mela, Amritsar was graced with the presence of Jawaharlal. We Indians have an innate need to worship, I think. The day he came, the market shut. At Malviya Nagar, where he was to give his address, two lakh people congregated. Two lakh! Imagine! By the time J.L. came, they were so excited they broke the cordon and swarmed all around him. Such was the press and swell of the crowd that he even fell off his horse. His pleas for order, as well as repeated injunctions over the loudspeakers, had no effect. In the end he left in disgust. The crowd disbanded and collected at Jallianwala Bagh where rumour had it he would appear. At five, J.L. finally came back and gave his speech!
I give you these snippets of news, but my heart is not in it. Please Viru, write to me. That I should have to plead with you! I will send K.L. again to your house, and again and again, until I hear from you. This misgiving that I feel within me is hard to bear.
H.
Can it really be a mystery to you why I have not written?
They have told me that your wife is pregnant. Apparently Ganga had come to announce the happy news. At first I did not believe it. How could it be true?
They have let me out of the little room on the terrace. I cried when I left. That was my house of dreams, when I still believed in you. Thank God their problems are over, Mati said, and my daughter is safe. Now she has to come to her senses
On her next visit she asked to see me. They forced me to go.
When I saw her I could see that it was true. Mati told her it will be a boy, and this is what every man wants, even if he is educated. She blushed, and smiled, and I knew that the place next to you was rightfully hers.
Tell K. there is no need for him to visit.
I understand. She is your wife after all.
Goodbye, goodbye forever,
V.
No, Viru no. Will you brusquely cut me off, will you really condemn me without a word from my side? Day and night I move with your invisible presence next to me, my love for you quickening my heartbeat with life and vitality. What you imagine happened seems so insignificant, hardly worth talking about in comparison to what I feel.
I find it hard to unravel the tissue of domestic strife and obligations that I find I am the centre of, but I must try.
You will say, why did I not walk away, why did I succumb? You think I am no longer faithful – that I am incapable of it – that I want a son, and believe the things the whole world tells you to believe.
It was not for a son that this happened. It was not because I wished to reaffirm the physical bond between my wife and me.
My love, what can you understand of these things? You who are so innocent and inexperienced.
Picture to yourself a man so in love, he cannot call his soul his own. Out of consideration to his family, he tries to hide his deep involvement with the girl. They are used to his preoccupied demeanour, no one is close enough to know the state of his emotions.
Then one day the girl tries to commit suicide. The man breaks down completely, the inmates of his house become privy to his secret. His wife cries, threatens, demands reassurance. She does all this softly, bit by bit, with half-sentences, and tear-filled eyes. She burns the food. His mother takes her part.
The man needs to be left in peace. What has happened to his loved one has so shattered him he finds it difficult to think coherently, finds it difficult to resist the relentless appeal to what was made out to be his moral responsibilities.
He does what he can to bring back domestic harmony. He feels guilty about ignoring the suffering of one who is also in a way blameless. An act is performed mechanically, with what result you have already seen.
Sweetest, it does no one any credit, the story that I have had to reveal to you. Yet I was vulnerable, and in this moment of weakness it seemed I could not in all conscience ignore the claims of those around me.
Vir, revile me as you wish, curse me, berate me. Only do not punish me so harshly as to deny me yourself. If I have sinned against you, it has never been in spirit, my darling, never that. My love and devotion has remained ever yours, it is that which gives my life its meaning.
This time I have called Kanhiya Lal, and begged him to take this letter to you, as soon as was feasible. I had to tell him that there was a misunderstanding between us, and he must insist you read it. I know your feeling for me will not allow you to refuse this plea.
I enclose a small poem. Not as part of my letter, but rather as a supplement to it. You are too perceptive a reader not to sense its application to my poor situation.
I live only when I hear from you again.
Still, and forever, your
H.
LOVE’S UNITYHow can I tell thee when I love thee best?
In rapture or repose? How shall I say?
I only know I love thee every way,
Plumed for love’s flight, or folded in love’s nest.
See, what is day but night bedewed with rest?
And what the night except the tired-out day?
And ’tis love’s difference, not love’s decay,
If now I dawn, now fade, upon thy breast.
Self-torturing sweet! Is’t not the self-same sun
Wanes in the west that flameth in the east,
His fervour nowise altered nor decreased?
So rounds my love, returning where begun,
And still beginning, never most nor least,
But fixedly various, all love’s parts in one.
Thursday, 1 February, 1940
Please do not go on sending K.L. with demands for a reply. It is kind of you to show such interest in me, and to try and educate me by sending me poems, but I am still not advanced enough to understand them. It seems to me the poem is saying that you can do what you like so long as you go on saying you love. I know this cannot be true. In my family marriages are not made like this.
Now I know there is still some life in your feelings for your wife – as it is proper there should be – it would be very wrong of me to come between you, especially when there is going to be another baby. But for the pregnancy, I would never have known.
What has happened has happened for the good. In which world was I living, to be so caught up in the illusion of your love? Just as you must do your duty to your family, and your wife, so too I must do my duty to mine. My people have always been straightforward people, Pitaji and Bade Baoji have always been known for their honesty and high standards. People blindly trust my father in business, our community respects us. I am proud that I belong to such a family, and I must keep up its traditions.
I am going to Lahore to do my BT. I want to be a teacher like you and Shakuntala Pehnji. Perhaps my family will also benefit by what I do, as yours has done. As for me, I never stopped learning from you, whether it was in the classroom or outside.
Mati says at least I wouldn’t be at home to remind her of the eternal disgrace I am to everybody. I, too, want a fresh start. It will be a great relief for me to leave this house. Maybe Bade Baoji will consent to come here after I have gone.
I hear them say to each other, ‘Poor thing, it is not her fault she has been taken in. She is so simple. Once she is out of here, the situation will improve.’ They haven’t talked so nicely about me in a long time.
I have learnt from my experience, but this much I also know. You did not mean to deceive me. What has happened is God’s will. I was unreasonable ever to mind.
I thought you would appreciate the fact that I was not going to stop my studies – you were always so pleased when I learned anything.
V.
Wednesday, 7 February, 1940
Sweetheart,
For that you will always be, no matter what you say – how can I stop writing to you? How cease begging, pleading, imploring you to have a little mercy upon me? You are the air I breathe – you may as well ask me to avoid eating or reading.
And the tone of your last letter, how cold, how indifferent, how determined. You thank me for my interest in you. Good God! Can I be merely interested in someone whom I have banded round my heart with hoops of steel! That is doing me a gross injustice, darling! I had rather you abused, damned, anything but this deadly polite tone.
At another time I would have rejoiced that you are going to Lahore. I have a friend there – you remember I used to talk about him sometimes – the one who teaches in Government College, we were at Oxford together. He was responsible for bringing me to Amritsar. His father was asked by someone on the AS College board to recommend an English teacher.
Can this be of interest to you now, when your calmness strikes terror in my heart, when it seems immaterial to you whether we meet or don’t? I, who love you so truly and so ardently have become an enemy in your eyes. I cannot bear this. I realize I am repeating myself, but the pain I feel is not subject to variety.
Sweetheart, I do not send K.L. with the intention of extracting a reply. I am too miserable, too deeply troubled. Any distance from you, not physical distance, for that we have experienced and survived, but any alienation of the spirit, leaves me but half a man.
I must hear from you soon, I must. Every minute of the day will be passed in waiting.
Yours, ever and always,
H.
27 February, 1940
Dear Sir,
It is not as though I do not value your friendship. Nor do I purposely sound cold and cruel, as you put it. I just described what seemed obvious.
When I first heard, how I suffered, how I cried. I thought, this is the real punishment for what I have done. I had to be strong to bear the pain, silently, without anyone knowing. I did not want them to believe I was so stupid that no matter what you did, I would go on fighting with them over you. I had already caused enough grief by trying to be different from what was expected of me. No, it is better to do as they tell you. It is safer. Then the family protects you if things go wrong. At least I would not be as lonely as now.
So it hurts when you talk of my not caring for your misery. Do you really think I could so quickly forget all you were to me? It’s only that you were not mine to care for.
Shakuntala Pehnji has suggested Rai Bahadur Sohan Lal Training College for Women. It is small, attached to a school in the same compound, and away from the fashionable part of the city. They have approved the place. All I want is a change from my old life and the chance to do something useful. I do not mean ever to marry.
I have heard that a hostel has opened for girls in the medical college. There
are
families who want a career for their daughters. Nobody wanted anything for me except a husband.How is your wife? She looks very nice these days. The way she walks, I too think you will have a son. I see her talking to Mati sometimes, but thankfully she has not sent for me again.
I do not think we need to write to each other after this.
V.
XV
Who would go with Virmati to Lahore? Kasturi rejected all the possibilities that offered themselves to her. Suraj Prakash could not leave the shop, Kailashnath was too young, Somnath too irresponsible. Shakuntala Pehnji had offered, but how could Kasturi expect a young, unmarried niece, already corrupted by Lahore, to recognize any lurking invitation to sin?
No, Kasturi had to go herself. If fate saw fit to rub chillies in her wound, she must resign herself to that. She made one last attempt to make her daughter see reason before they departed.
‘If you cannot consider your duty to us, at least consider yourself. There is a time in the cycle of life for everything. If you wilfully ignore it like this, what will happen to you? A woman without her own home and family is a woman without moorings.’
Virmati had nothing to say. That tone, those reproaches had but to start for her to go deaf.
‘When I was your age,’ continued Kasturi, ‘girls only left their house when they married. And beyond a certain age …’ Her voice quavered and she stopped, looking at her daughter helplessly.
Virmati noticed the tears in her mother’s voice, but she kept her head turned away. She had made a decision, and there were certain things she would not see.
‘God has put you on earth to punish me,’ concluded Kasturi harshly, disappointment pinching lines around her tense mouth.
The train ride was a silent one. The Inter class in which they sat was almost empty. No strangers’ voices dropped into their midst, no questions were asked as to where they were going and why. From time to time Virmati glanced furtively at her mother, and the wall she encountered forbade her from making the attentive gestures that might have made the journey bearable for both.
An hour later, Lahore.
*
Kasturi leaned out of the window, anxiously scanning the platform for Shakuntala. Virmati hugged the bag in her lap and thought, I’ve come, I’m going to be on my own, this is a new beginning. She was filled with a lightness that made her useless in collecting the luggage, irritating her mother further.
By now, Shakuntala Pehnji had spotted them. Embraces, exclamations followed, with the usual remarks of how thin the younger one was looking, tossed from Kasturi to Shakuntala to Virmati. A coolie piled their luggage on his head, and the trio made their way to a precious tonga waiting.
‘Why precious, Pehnji?’ enquired Virmati.
The luggage was stored under the wooden bench, and the women squeezed onto the back seat, as Shakuntala gave details of the tonga strike, the insistence of the authorities on three passengers instead of four, the new demand that all tonga-wallahs be licensed, the indignation of the tonga-wallahs – were the horses of more importance than the men driving them? – the subsequent agitation, and the difficulty of finding transport. This explanation over, Shakuntala started commenting on the places they passed. From time to time, Kasturi grunted to show that she was listening.
At the sight of the passing scenery, the weight of her mother’s displeasure lifted a little from Virmati. She was seeing the fabled city at last. They passed the Mall, Chief’s College, Nedou’s Hotel, the Botanical Gardens, Lawrence Gardens, the Gymkhana Club, Queen Victoria’s massive statue with its delicate canopy of carved marble, the Assembly, the GPO, the majestic-looking courts which looked like palaces, while Shakuntala murmured and pointed to all of the above.
From time to time Shakuntala looked Virmati over. She thought the girl looked older, the shy, open look she had seen in Dalhousie was gone. She was glad that her family was at last waking up to the fact that women had to take their place in the world, but must it always be when marriage hadn’t worked out? Work was not second best, though she didn’t expect anybody from Amritsar to understand that.
‘Chachi,’ she said, turning towards her aunt. ‘You will not regret sending Viru to Lahore.’
‘Beti,’ said Kasturi, ‘what is there to hide from you? What else is left this wretched girl but study?’
Shakuntala smiled bitterly to herself. ‘She will become a teacher and help others. Chachi, you know how important education is to Bade Baoji. In time, maybe he will even be pleased with her.’ Virmati devoured this sympathetic crumb, and yearned for more.
Kasturi said tartly that where Virmati was concerned no course of action was right, the girl was so stubborn and independent, no matter what they did for her, she wasn’t grateful. When she had been young, eighth-class pass had satisfied her, but her daughter thought she was too special to follow family ways.
Virmati stared fixedly at King Edward Medical College coming up, with a statue, she presumed, of the king in front. Her eyes were hot and burning. She was trying to live within a moral code, but her mother would never understand that. Scenes from last evening stabbed her mind. She had carried all the letters the Professor had ever sent her to the kotha. At the furthest point where the topmost branches of the neem tree could touch her face, she watched them burn undisturbed. When the fire had finished its job, she collected the ashes and flung them towards her aunt’s house, where he had once lived, watching the tiny black specks of her lost love float about. She would leave him to his pregnant wife and get on with the rest of her life. Nevertheless, despite her resolution and her pain, she was still considered the black sheep of the family.
Past Government College, past DAV College, on and on the tonga went. The grand buildings receded, and to Virmati’s dismay they entered a more congested part. Finally they reached a high brick wall, with a small, painted sign proclaiming that these were the premises of the RBSL School and College. To one side was a black gate, with the usual pedestrian opening let into it. The tonga-wallah stopped just inside, and demanded one rupee as fare. Infuriated, Kasturi paid the unreasonable sum to avoid the greater humiliation of her niece paying first.
Mother and daughter looked around speculatively. Kasturi was relieved. A plain no-nonsense place. None of those poems in stone and brick they had been passing. A good Arya Samaj institution.
Virmati thought she should have known that the poems in stone and brick would not be for her. Still, any place was welcome, any place that promised to bring sense and purpose to her life.
*
The compound housed several buildings. A brick-paved walk led to the administrative unit, low, white, and wide-verandaed. On the right was a dusty playing field, with two basketball nets hanging desultorily on either side. Beyond that was a large, double-storeyed, red-brick school. Far to the left was the smaller teacher-training college, and behind both of these was the teachers’ hostel.
They met the principal in white khadi with a greying bun. She spun her charkha daily, was a staunch supporter of the struggle for swarajya, Gandhi, female education, and everything being bettered. She assured Kasturi that all the girls staying there were like her daughters, and consequently she had her eye firmly fixed on each one. This was a respectable institution, with a reputation to maintain.
Kasturi allowed herself to relax. Perhaps her worries had been unfounded. Her daughter would be all right here.
The formalities over, the group walked through the narrow entranceway of the teachers’ hostel. A door was unlocked to a small room containing two string beds, a cupboard, two desks, two chairs, and a small window from where one could see the mud of the playing field. Though the room was dark and gloomy, it was bordered by a pleasant corridor-veranda towards the inside. The angan beyond was spacious, with a badminton court painted on its grey, cemented surface. In a corner was a large mulberry tree.
‘These used to be single rooms, but now the new girls have to share. Your room-mate will come tomorrow.’
Virmati looked around and saw autonomy and freedom. The ache in her heart lessened a bit.
Kasturi looked around, a tightness in her throat. My poor girl, for this she wouldn’t marry. For living in a solitary, poky little room in a strange city, for eating hostel food, for the loneliness of single life.
Shakuntala looked around with satisfaction. The room was dismal, and she knew enough of her family to be sure it met her aunt’s requirements.
Just to be sure her daughter would be able to pursue her studies undisturbed, Kasturi departed to have a small private talk with the principal. Virmati knew what her mother was going to say, and she was angry. She was to be supervised like a jailbird on parole. Marriage was acceptable to her family, but not independence.
There was silence in the room. Virmati started fiddling with her things, while her cousin looked at her thoughtfully before putting her arms around her. Virmati was startled. Shakuntala had never been demonstrative.
‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Chachi, but I know that whatever happened could not have been your fault. You are not the kind of girl to give up an engagement casually,’ said Shakuntala lightly.
Virmati did not know what to say. That part of her life was closed. Discussing it might bring back the pain.
‘You will find, Viru, that in Lahore people are not so narrow-minded. It is a pity the man was married, but you have done the right thing. Together we will face the family. After all, I have experience in resisting pressures. Don’t worry, I am on your side.’ Shakuntala squeezed Virmati closer and added, ‘Now tell me all about it. What actually happened?’
Virmati squirmed.
‘Nothing happened‚’ she mumbled.
Shakuntala looked incredulous. Virmati felt hunted.
Shakuntala had been a source of inspiration, she wanted to be like her. Now she noticed the hunger in her eyes, the avidness on her face. She waited uncomfortably for her mother to come, and as a way of putting Shakuntala off, cried instead. It wasn’t difficult once she started.
When the goodbyes took place, Kasturi, moved by the tears in her daughter’s eyes, unbent enough to give her an affectionate farewell.