Pravas said, ‘Sometimes even I despair. And it is perhaps only something in my make-up that stops me going to the mafia.’ To straighten people out, to get things done. ‘There are no rules in the Indian streets.’ That wasn’t a simple or frivolous matter. Pravas rode a motor-scooter; he arrived always, when he came to see me, like a kind of spaceman, with his big helmet. ‘You feel a little bit like being in a jungle, and this can transfer to a larger view of things. It can, and does. It actually translates into a loss of productivity. I am a far less productive person than I ought to be. A lot of energy goes into these things, those traffic jams, that chaos. Friction in society is like friction in the machine.’
I thought of his grandfather, one of the five or 10 priests of the king of a small state in the east. He lived on very little; he had only his subsistence piece of land to keep him from absolute want, if the king withdrew his favour. He had no other skill – the little state at that time didn’t require many skills. That was an arbitrary world, where change could come suddenly and overwhelmingly to a man. It was like the India which had been overrun again and again by this army and that; it was the India of unfinished monuments, of energy going to waste, creating an impression of randomness. That was a jungle, too. Did Pravas’s grandfather live with something like that idea?
‘I never knew my grandfather. He died when my father was twelve or thirteen. I have no memory of his world, but I can reconstruct it. He was part of a static society. He was not different from his father or grandfather. So, even if there was friction, he wouldn’t discover it, because he didn’t have the bike.’
The bike – Pravas had been talking of the Bangalore traffic and his own motor-scooter. I liked the metaphor: it made the static past understandable.
I began to wonder whether many of the frustrations Pravas spoke about were not rooted in the past, whether they hadn’t been created by the smallness of Indian expectations, the almost pious idea – like the idea behind Gandhian homespun – that a country so poor needed very little. I wondered whether there wasn’t deep in India even now a psychology of shoddiness, an extension of the idea of holy poverty, the old religious-political feeling that it was wrong, wasteful, and provoking to the gods (and the ruler) to get above oneself. And I asked Pravas, as I had asked Subramaniam, about the psychological effects on him, as he was growing up, of the shoddiness of Indian manufactured goods.
He said, ‘I didn’t have much to compare with when I was growing up. I might have seen my grandfather’s watch, but I never saw an Indian watch and had nothing to compare. So I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t grow up with too many imported goods. The things we used were made locally, or we simply didn’t have them. We used a lot of the products of Indian artisanship – metal plates, not china, and metal plates have been made for thousands of years. Textiles had been made long before I was born. So the basic needs were met by local goods. When you are small, besides, your needs are very small.’
About the shoddiness of Indian goods he saw now he was philosophical. ‘Compared with contemporary goods elsewhere, they are bad. Compared with the nothing we had 50 years ago, it is something. It only means we have started late. Japanese goods 50 years ago were shoddy.’
The new world was so new: it had begun for some people with their grandfathers, and for most with their fathers. And people had travelled so far so fast that many active people had a success story to tell, their own sometimes, or that of someone in their family.
I had got to know Kala. She was of Tamil brahmin origins. She did the publicity for a big organization. She was in her twenties, and unmarried. She was diligent and methodical; she had a reputation as a worker. She was grave, self-possessed, educated. But I didn’t know enough of India, and especially of that brahmin South from which she came, to guess at her background.
And then, at lunch one day, speaking of it as of a fairy story, she said that her grandfather had started from nothing, had been so poor as a child that he had studied by the light of street lamps.
(Hadn’t that been said of many other people? Hadn’t there been another very poor boy somewhere – without paper or pencil or slate – who had had to work out sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal? I thought of Kala’s story as a piece of romance. And then, some weeks later, in a small brahmin ‘colony’ in Madras, I saw a small boy one evening actually sitting with a book below a street lamp. The lamp was too dim to read by, but the brahmin boy was there cross-legged with his book, acting out ambition and struggle and self-denial, doing the virtuous thing he and his parents had heard about.)
I asked Kala the name of this ancestor. It was the name of a princely-state administrator; it was a name famous in pre-independence India. The boy who had studied by the street lamps had risen to power and wealth.
From Kala’s manner, I might have expected someone like that grandfather in her background. What was unexpected – and yet a little thought would have shown that it was in keeping with that brahminical background – was that, on Kala’s mother’s side, there was a sanyasi ancestor, an ascetic, someone who had renounced the world to go and meditate on the river-steps or ghats of Banaras, among the pyres and temples beside the Ganges.
Such strands of old India did Kala carry in her make-up. She knew she was part of the movement out of old India that Pravas had spoken about; but she didn’t know it in the same analytical way. When Kala meditated on her family past, as she did with something like obsession, her thoughts were of her mother, who had been caught by that movement forward, had been trapped between the generations, and had had her life distorted.
Kala took the story about her grandfather reading under the street lights seriously. She had heard the story when she was nine or ten from her mother, and then later on in more detail from her grandfather himself. She said, in her grave way, ‘When there is a power failure, and the lights go off, and one becomes irritated, then I think of this man, this boy, who didn’t have lights at all in his house.’ It was probably so. This was in Madras in the early 1900s. His parents had sent him to his grandmother’s house in Madras to live.’ And though Kala didn’t say, I thought that this would have been part of the brahmin migration to the cities that occurred in so many people’s stories. In Madras, Kala’s grandfather lived in a brahmin area near an important temple.
‘My grandfather has told me about having to wait at the temple every evening to collect parsad, the consecrated food offerings. That food was his evening meal, and his grandmother’s meal as well. We visited that temple recently, the temple of Kapaleshwar, one of the two famous old temples of Madras. My grandfather showed me a stone lion on which he used to lean or sit while he waited for the evening puja to be over, to collect his food and go home. The pundits used to scold him: “Can’t you even stand and wait respectfully while the puja is going on?” This time, when he went back as a very old man, the priests were standing outside to receive him.
‘When he finished the school in Madras, he came to Bangalore, to go to the college here. He stayed with a relative, and he went on his own and got himself admitted to the college.’ It was interesting, how that recurred in stories of the past: the child going on his own, without a parent or adult, to get enrolled in a school. ‘While he was in college, he married my grandmother. He was a teenager, and she was eleven, if I remember right. In those days, when children were married, they stayed in their parents’ house until they grew up. I should tell you that, as I knew them, my grandmother and grandfather were a romantic and devoted couple. I asked him about those early days of his marriage, and he told me that sometimes after his classes at the college he would go down to the market and pick up things for the home, including sometimes beads and coloured threads for my grandmother, his wife.
‘The father of that eleven-year-old bride was the sanyasi I told you about. He was a boy sanyasi, and he was in Banaras. The man who became his father-in-law is supposed to have heard in some way of this sanyasi far away in Banaras – Banaras is many hundreds of miles from he
re – and he had heard that this sanyasi was destined to marry his daughter.’ Sanyasis are renouncers of the world; they have no households; they don’t marry. So this idea of the destiny of the sanyasi was a strange one.
Kala said, ‘They, the people who became the in-laws of the sanyasi, would have been religious people. They must have been in touch with astrologers; they must have had their daughter’s horoscope read. So the man of the family went to Banaras, or he sent someone, to look for this boy sanyasi who had appeared in his daughter’s horoscope. They went to Banaras, and they looked among all the holy men there, and they found the boy sanyasi. They put this proposal of marriage to him. But he was firm; he didn’t want to re-enter the world. So they came back. But then various things happened, and then they went again to Banaras, and somehow they said certain things, and they persuaded the sanyasi to give up his ascetic life and to leave Banaras and to come here and get married. Not long after this marriage, the sanyasi’s wife had an accident, and she began to lose her sight. She was sixteen when she got married.’
‘Didn’t the astrologer see that?’
Kala said, ‘I don’t know.’ The story that had been handed down to her was like myth: it was full of wonders, but it had its gaps.
‘Do you have any story of what the sanyasi said after his wife lost her sight?’
‘There are no reports of the sanyasi’s reaction.’
‘How did he make a living?’
‘The sanyasi became a priest at Palani, and in time a high official there. Palani is a famous temple town. The deity of Palani is a manifestation of Shiva. I go there almost every year with my mother. She believes in the temple.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘She believes in the power of that temple.’
‘Do you believe in it?’
‘I love my mother, and I believe in her. My mother was very close to her grandmother, the wife of the former sanyasi, and I believe there would have been some family feeling for the Palani temple. Though I go every year with my mother, it doesn’t mean much to me. I’m not a particularly religious person myself.
‘Palani is a rich temple. There are temples that are richer, but Palani is pretty rich, and many pilgrims go there. Temples are rich from the lands they have, and from the offerings the devotees make. One of the richest temples in the South is the temple at Tirupati. There is a story about it. The deity of that temple, Srinivasa, took a large debt from Kubera, the Lord of Wealth. The goddess Lakshmi gives wealth; Kubera owns it or hoards it, or lends it out. And the story at Tirupati is that the money that people give to the temple is being saved by Srinivasa, the temple deity, to repay the debt to Kubera. Many people believe in that story and that deity. There is a huge hundi, a huge cloth bin, and you throw the money in that. You throw anything – gold, silver, diamonds. I believe there have been people who have thrown in revolvers and bloodstained knives, hoping to be forgiven for the crimes they have committed with those weapons. And it is said that the very big offerings of money come from people who have made it illegally. Palani doesn’t get anything like the offerings at Tirupati, but it gets.’
‘So the sanyasi became a man of power?’
‘The impression I get is that he was a very saintly man, and that he wasn’t interested in things like power. He died when his daughter, my grandmother, was quite young. She was about fourteen. She had already been married, but she was living in her own parents’ house – that was the custom. Before his death, the sanyasi had said to his wife, “If ever you have to depend on anybody, go and stay in the house of the husband of our eldest daughter.” So my grandmother went to live in her husband’s house, the house of my grandfather, and the whole family went with her.’
‘How had that marriage been arranged – between your grandfather and grandmother?’
‘We are a fairly small sub-sect of Tamil brahmins, and I guess that people were more sub-sect-minded in those days. Possibly everybody was distantly related. People kept records, or remembered, or kept track of everybody else – somebody’s cousin’s mother-in-law or something. This clannishness exists today in vestiges. People still keep track of distant kinspeople – which doesn’t make sense to me.’
But Kala was in a position to make her own life. She had been educated; she had her job; she was free to come and go. Fifty years before, there would have been no job for her; the publicity job she did wouldn’t have existed; even the kind of company she worked for mightn’t have existed. People 50 years before would have thought and felt differently; the idea of the clan would have been comforting.
Kala said, ‘Perhaps two generations ago the world didn’t seem so small a place as it seems now.
‘After his time in the college, my grandfather passed an examination, and he joined the government service. He rose. He was very dynamic. He had the reputation of being bold and honest. He went abroad many times.’
This was how Kala told the story, lingering over the boyhood and the street-lamp studying, and then racing away to the great success. It was almost like a proof of what Pravas had said, that with the development of the Indian economy, people had been sucked in and taken upwards.
‘In the course of his life he had nine children. He also had his mother living with him, and his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. My grandfather was the only earning person in that house. There wasn’t much money going around, but all his children were taught horse-riding, swimming and music, and they went in for trekking. I am sure this was a consequence of his career in administration.
‘It’s all like a story to me. As I knew my grandfather’s place, there were no horses, no stables, no swimming. I’ve also heard of a palace the family lived in, when he served a princely state. There were peacocks in the garden. The stories are true. But those were different times. I feel no nostalgia; I just think it would have been a nice place to visit.
‘By the time my grandfather was having this palace life, my mother had been married. So she didn’t live in the palace. She just visited it. She had a baby daughter whom she took for a speedboat ride, when the baby was a month old or something. She said she knew the baby wouldn’t remember the ride, but she wanted to share everything she knew with her daughter.’
And though Kala didn’t say, I thought that the month-old baby girl might have been Kala herself.
‘This part of the story, the story of my mother’s marriage, is the most painful part. It is not pleasant and not easy for me to talk about it. My mother went to British schools, convents. She was very good in everything she did – music, sports, academic work. She was very bold and confident.’ It was noticeable, Kala’s approving emphasis on boldness. ‘She wanted to do a lot of things. She thought she would like to be a doctor. She enjoyed going to school and wanted to study further. She was still very much a child at heart. She used to read a lot, English novels. Marriage was not on her mind at all. She was a child, a schoolgirl, almost like a British schoolgirl.’ Kala, always grave, was now close to tears. ‘She says she wasn’t a very beautiful child, but I know that she was a very beautiful woman.
‘She got married when she was fourteen, and there was nothing she could do about it. She said she would have just liked to be left alone. She was very distressed, and her elder brother and her boy cousins were also distressed. They, the boys, told her that she could run away – and they would take care of her.’
‘Whose idea was this marriage?’
‘It was her father’s idea. My grandfather’s idea.’
‘Have you talked to him about it?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? You know him.’
‘I know him pretty well. But he is no longer the man he was then, and I am sure that if he had been the man he is now, he would not have done what he did.
‘My mother was in the 10th standard. I don’t ask her too many questions about that. I find it too painful, and there is nothing I can do about it, sitting here now. Maybe it’s a cowardly attitude on my part, not wanting to know more. She c
ompleted school – after her marriage she stayed on for a few more months. It was all quite embarrassing for her, the last few months. People kept asking her whether she was married – many of her friends were British girls or Anglo-Indians. All of them were a good deal older than her. Many of them had boy friends. There were a lot of Tommies around in Bangalore. This was in 1946.’
It was unsettling, this glimpse of 1946 and the real world, in what had up to then been like a far-off story: 1946, the British still in India, still in that cantonment area of Bangalore, but with independence coming, and with the deadly Hindu-Muslim riots about to happen in Calcutta.
I said, ‘That year sounds very recent to me. It was just a year or so after Somerset Maugham had published The Razor’s Edge – about sanyasis and people looking for self-realization.’
Kala said, ‘That was a book she liked. She continued to read a lot. It was all wrong, that marriage,’ Kala said, carefully using restrained language. ‘They should have let her be. She would have become a far greater woman if they had left her alone.’
‘Didn’t your mother tell her father that the whole thing had become very embarrassing for her at school, after the marriage?’
‘I don’t think my mother would have told her father that.
The next bit I don’t find easy to talk about. She couldn’t study any further. For a few years after her marriage she was virtually a chattel, working for the large joint family of her husband. Hard physical work – washing clothes and scrubbing vessels. She had no time to herself, no freedom. She wasn’t allowed to go and visit her people when she wanted to. She could make no decisions as to what she would like to do with her own life. Somebody always decided for her.’
‘What did your father think about all this?’