‘Certain processions may need to be controlled as well,’ said the Home Minister.
‘Let us see, let us see,’ said the Chief Minister.
14.10
The uncertainties of the great world were complemented in Brahmpur by the smaller certainties of the calendar. Two days after the flag-hoistings and orations of Independence Day—the most unsettling of the five that India had so far celebrated—came the full moon of the month of Shravan, and the tenderest of all family festivals—when brothers and sisters affirm their bonds to each other.
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, however, who was normally keen on festivals, did not approve of Rakhi or believe in it. For her it was a typically Punjabi festival. She traced her ancestry back to a part of U.P. where, according to her, at least among khatris, the festival on which brothers and sisters more truly affirmed their bonds was Bhai Duj—located two and a half months from now among the little glut of smaller festivals clustering around the almost moonless skies of Divali. But she was alone in this; neither of her samdhins agreed with her, certainly not old Mrs Tandon, who, having lived in Lahore in the heart of the undivided Punjab, had celebrated Rakhi all her life like all her neighbours, nor Mrs Rupa Mehra, who believed in sentiment at all costs and on every possible occasion. Mrs Rupa Mehra believed in Bhai Duj as well, and sent greetings on that day too to all her brothers—the term included her male cousins—as a sort of confirmatory affirmation.
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had clear but undogmatic views on various subjects relating to fasts and festivals: she had her own views of the legends underlying the Pul Mela as well. For her daughter, however, living in Lahore with the Tandons had made no difference. Veena had celebrated Rakhi ever since Pran was born. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, whatever she thought of this festival, did not try to dampen her daughter’s enthusiasm for coloured thread and shiny florets when she was a little girl. And when Pran and Maan used to come to their mother as children to show her what their sister had given them, her pleasure was never entirely feigned.
Veena went in the morning to Prem Nivas to tie a rakhi around Pran’s wrist. She chose a simple rakhi, a small silver flower of tinsel on a red thread. She fed him a laddu and blessed him, and received in exchange his promise of protection, five rupees and a hug. Although, as Imtiaz had told him, his heart condition was a chronic one, she noticed that he was looking quite a bit better than before; the birth of his daughter, rather than adding to the strain of his life, appeared to have relieved it. Uma was a happy child; and Savita had not got overly or prolongedly depressed in the month following her birth, as her mother had warned her she might. The crisis of Pran’s health had given her too much concern, and reading the law too much stimulation, for a lapse into the luxury of depression. Sometimes she felt passionately maternal and tearfully happy.
Veena had brought Bhaskar along.
‘Where’s my rakhi?’ demanded Bhaskar of Savita.
‘Your rakhi?’
‘Yes. From the baby.’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Savita, smiling and shaking her head at her own thoughtlessness. ‘You’re quite right. I’ll go out and get one at once. Or better still, I’ll make one. Ma must have enough material in her bag for a hundred rakhis. And you—I hope you’ve brought a present for her.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Bhaskar, who had cut Uma a bright and multicoloured dodecahedron out of a single sheet of paper. It was to hang above her cot and she could follow it with her eyes as it twirled around. ‘I coloured it myself. But I didn’t try to use the minimum number of colours,’ he added apologetically.
‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Savita. ‘The more colours the better.’ And she gave Bhaskar a kiss. When the rakhi was made, she tied it over his right wrist while holding Uma’s hand inside her own.
Veena also went to Baitar House, as she went every year, to tie a rakhi around Firoz’s wrist, and Imtiaz’s. Both were in, since they were expecting her.
‘Where is your friend Maan?’ she demanded of Firoz.
As he opened his mouth to speak, she popped a sweet in.
‘You should know!’ said Firoz, his eyes lighting up in a smile. ‘He’s your brother.’
‘You needn’t remind me,’ said Veena, vexed. ‘It’s Rakhi, but he’s not at home. He has no family feeling. If I’d known he would still be at the farm, I would have sent him the rakhi. He really is very inconsiderate. And now it’s too late.’
Meanwhile the Mehra family had duly dispatched their rakhis to Calcutta, and they had arrived well in time. Arun had warned his sisters that anything more elaborate than a single silver thread would be impossible for him to conceal under the sleeve of his suit, and therefore entirely out of the question for him to wear to work at Bentsen Pryce. Varun, almost as if to flaunt a garish taste that could be guaranteed to exasperate his elder brother, always insisted on elaborate rakhis that reached halfway up his bare arm. Savita had not had the chance to meet her brothers this year, and wrote them long and loving letters, rebuking them for being absentee uncles. Lata, busy as she was with Twelfth Night, wrote them brief but tender notes. She had a rehearsal on the actual day of Rakhi. Several of the actors were wearing rakhis, and Lata could not help smiling in the course of a conversation between Olivia and Viola when it struck her that if the festival of Rakhi had existed in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare would certainly have made much of it, with Viola perhaps bewailing her shipwrecked brother, imagining his lifeless, threadless, untinselled arm lying outstretched beside his body on some Illyrian beach lit by the full August moon.
14.11
She also thought of Kabir, and of his remark at the concert—so long ago, it seemed—about having had a sister till last year. Lata still did not know for certain what he had meant by the remark, but every interpretation that came to her mind made her feel deeply sorry for him.
As it happened, Kabir was thinking of her that night as well, and talking about her with his younger brother. He had come back home exhausted after the rehearsal, and had hardly eaten any dinner, and Hashim was unhappy to see him look so spent.
Kabir was trying to describe the strangeness of the situation with Lata. They acted together, they spent hours in the same room during rehearsals, but they did not talk to each other. Lata seemed to have turned, thought Kabir, from passionate to ice-cold—he could not believe that this was the same girl who had been with him that morning in the boat—in the grey mist in a grey sweater, and with the light of love in her eyes.
No doubt the boat had been rowing against the current of society, upstream towards the Barsaat Mahal; but surely there was a solution. Should they row harder, or agree to drift downstream? Should they row in a different river or try to change the direction of the river they were in? Should they jump out of the boat and try to swim? Or get a motor or a sail? Or hire a boatman?
‘Why don’t you simply throw her overboard?’ suggested Hashim.
‘To the crocodiles?’ said Kabir, laughing.
‘Yes,’ said Hashim. ‘She must be a very stupid or unfeeling girl—why does she delight in making you miserable, Bhai-jaan? I don’t think you should waste any time on her. It doesn’t stand to reason.’
‘I know it doesn’t. But, as they say, you can’t reason someone out of what they’ve never been reasoned into in the first place.’
‘But why her?’ said Hashim. ‘There are plenty of girls who are crazy about you—Cubs the Cad.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kabir. ‘It mystifies me. Perhaps it was just that first smile in the bookshop—and I’m still feeding on the meaningless memory of it. I don’t even think it was me she was smiling at. I don’t know. Why was it you whom Saeeda Bai latched on to on Holi evening? I heard all about that.’
Hashim blushed to the roots of his hair. He didn’t suggest a solution.
‘Or look at Abba and Ammi—was there ever a better-matched couple? And now—’
Hashim nodded. ‘I’ll come with you this Thursday. I, well, I couldn’t come yesterday.’
‘We
ll, good. But, you know, don’t force yourself Hashim. . . . I don’t know if she notices your absence.’
‘But you said she had a sense about—well, about Samia.’
‘I think she senses it.’
‘Abba pushed her over the edge. He gave her no time, no sympathy, no real companionship.’
‘Well Abba is Abba, and it’s pointless complaining about who he is.’ He yawned. ‘I suppose I am tired, after all.’
‘Well, goodnight, Bhai-jaan.’
‘Goodnight, Hashim.’
14.12
A week after Rakhi came Janamashtami, the day of Krishna’s birth. Mrs Rupa Mehra did not celebrate it (she had mixed feelings about Krishna), but Mrs Mahesh Kapoor did. In the garden at Prem Nivas stood the undistinguished, rough-leafed harsingar tree, the tree that Krishna was reputed to have stolen from Indra’s heaven for the sake of his wife Rukmini. It was not in bloom yet, and would not be for another two months, but Mrs Mahesh Kapoor stood before the tree for a minute just after dawn, imagining it covered with the fragrant, star-shaped, small white-and-orange flowers that lasted only a single night before falling to the lawn beneath. Then she went inside, and summoned Veena and Bhaskar. They were staying at Prem Nivas for a few days, as was old Mrs Tandon. Kedarnath was away in the south, soliciting the next season’s orders at a time when, owing to the moisture in the air, the production of shoes in Brahmpur was slower than usual. Always away, always away, Veena complained to her mother.
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had chosen a time of day when her husband would not be at home to mock her devotions. She now entered the small room, a mere alcove in the verandah separated by a curtain, that she had set aside for her puja. She placed two small wooden platforms on the floor, on one of which she sat, on one of which she placed a clay lamp, a candle in a low brass stand, a tray, a small bronze bell, a silver bowl half full of water, and a flatter bowl with a small heap of uncooked grains of white rice and some dark-red powder. She sat facing a small ledge above a low cupboard. On this ledge stood a number of bronze statuettes of Shiva and other gods and a beautiful portrait of the infant Krishna playing the flute.
She moistened the red powder, then leaned forward intently and touched it with her finger to the foreheads of the gods, and then, leaning forward once again and closing her eyes, applied some to her own forehead. In a quiet voice she said:
‘Veena, matches.’
‘I’ll get them, Nani,’ said Bhaskar.
‘You stay here,’ said his grandmother, who planned to say a special prayer for him.
Veena came back from the kitchen with a huge box of matches. Her mother lit the lamp and the candle. Noisy people, the endless guests who stayed at Prem Nivas, were walking around talking on the verandah outside, but they did not distract her. She lit the lamp and candle, and placed these two lights on the tray. Ringing the bell with her left hand, she picked up the tray with her right, and described a motion in the air around the portrait of Krishna—not in the form of a circle but something much more irregular, as if she were circumscribing a presence that she saw before her eyes. Then she got up slowly and quite painfully from her confined posture, and did the same for the other gods in the statuettes and calendars scattered around the little room: the statue of Shiva; a picture of Lakshmi and Ganesh together, which included a small mouse nibbling at a laddu; a calendar from ‘Paramhans and Co., Chemists and Druggists’ of Rama, Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman with the sage Valmiki seated on the ground in front of them writing their story on a scroll; and several others.
She prayed to them, and she asked for comfort from them: nothing for herself, but health for her family, a long life for her husband, blessings on her two grandchildren, and ease to the souls of those no longer here. Her mouth worked silently as she prayed, unselfconscious of the presence of her daughter and her grandson. Throughout she kept the bell lightly ringing.
Finally, the puja was over, and she sat down after putting the things away in the cupboard.
She turned to Veena, and addressed her with the affectionate word for ‘son’:
‘Bété, get Pran on the line, and tell him I want to go with him to the Radhakrishna Temple on the other side of the Ganga.’
This was shrewd. If she had phoned Pran directly, he would have tried to wriggle out of it. Veena, however, who knew he was well enough to go, told him quite firmly that he couldn’t upset their mother on Janamashtami. So in a short while all of them—Pran, Veena, Bhaskar, old Mrs Tandon, and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor—were sitting in a boat that was making its way across the water.
‘Really, Ammaji,’ said Pran, who was not pleased to be dragged from his work, ‘if you think of Krishna’s character—flirt, adulterer, thief—’
His mother held up her hand. She was not annoyed so much as disturbed by her son’s remarks.
‘You should not be so proud, son,’ she said, looking at him with concern. ‘You should humble yourself before God.’
‘I may as well humble myself before a stone,’ suggested Pran. ‘Or . . . or a potato.’
His mother considered his words. After a few more splashes of the boatman’s oars, she said in gentle rebuke: ‘Don’t you even believe in God?’
‘No,’ said Pran.
His mother was silent.
‘But when we die—’ she said, and was silent once more.
‘Even if everyone I loved were to die,’ said Pran, irked for no obvious reason, ‘I would not believe.’
‘I believe in God,’ volunteered Bhaskar suddenly. ‘Especially in Rama and Sita and Lakshman and Bharat and Shatrughan.’ In his mind there was no clear distinction yet between gods and heroes, and he was hoping to get the part of one of the five swaroops in the Ramlila later this year. If not, he would at least be enrolled in the monkey army and get to fight and have a good time. ‘What’s that?’ he said suddenly, pointing at the water.
The broad, grey-black back of something much larger than a fish had appeared momentarily from beneath the surface of the Ganga, and had sliced back in again.
‘What’s what?’ asked Pran.
‘There—that—’ said Bhaskar, pointing again. But it had disappeared again.
‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Pran.
‘But it was there, it was there, I saw it,’ said Bhaskar. ‘It was black and shiny, and it had a long face.’
Upon the word, and as if by magic, three large river dolphins with pointed snouts suddenly appeared to the right of the boat and started playing in the water. Bhaskar laughed with delight.
The boatman said, in his Brahmpuri accent: ‘There are dolphins here, in this stretch of the water. They don’t come out often, but they are here all right. That’s what they are, dolphins. No one fishes them, the fishermen protect them and kill the crocodiles in this stretch. That is why there are no crocodiles until that far bend, there beyond the Barsaat Mahal. You are lucky to see them. Remember that at the end of the journey.’
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor smiled and passed him a coin. She remembered the time when the Minister Sahib had lived for a year in Delhi and she had gone on a pilgrimage to the region hallowed by Krishna. There, in the deep water of the Yamuna just below the temple at Gokul, she and the other pilgrims had watched transfixed as the large black river turtles swam lazily to and fro. She thought of them, and of these dolphins, as good creatures, innocent and blessed. It was to protect the innocent, whether man or beast, to cure the recurring ills of the world, and to establish righteousness that Krishna had come down to earth. He had revealed his glory in the Bhagavad Gita on the battlefield of the Mahabharata. Pran’s dismissive manner of speaking of him—as if God should be judged by human standards rather than trusted and adored—disturbed and hurt her. What, she asked herself, had happened in one generation that of her three children, only one continued to believe in what their forefathers had believed for hundreds, indeed thousands, of years?
14.13
One morning, a few weeks before Janamashtami, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, his mind ostensibly on hi
s files, was thinking back to the time when he was very young, and was unable to keep awake, despite all his mother’s blandishments and reproaches, until the midnight hour when Krishna was born in the prison cell. Now, of course, he rarely got to sleep before midnight.
Sleep! It was one of his best-loved words. In Almora Jail he had often been worried by the news he received of his wife Kamala’s condition, and his helplessness upset him for a while, but somehow he still managed to sleep soundly in the hill air. On the verge of sleep he often thought what a wonderful and mysterious thing it was. Why should he awake from it? Suppose he did not wake up at all. When he had watched by his father’s sickbed, he had mistaken his death for a deep sleep.
He sat at his desk now, his chin resting on his hand, and glanced for a second or two at the photograph of his wife before continuing with his dictation. Thousands of letters every day, a relay of stenographers, endless work in Parliament and in his offices in the South Block and in his office here at home, endless, endless, endless. It was a principle with him never to leave any paper undealt with, any letter unanswered when he went to sleep. And yet he could not help feeling that a sort of vacillation lay hidden in this dispatch. For though he kept up scrupulously with his paperwork, he was too self-analytical not to realize that he avoided coming to terms with less tractable matters—more muddled, more human, more full of bitterness and conflict—like the one that faced him in his own party. It was easier to be indecisive when busy.
He had always been busy except when he was in jail. No, even that was not true: it was in the many jails he had known that he had done most of his reading and almost all of his writing. All three of his books had been written there. Yet it was there too that he had for once had the time to notice what he now had no time to: the bare treetops day by day becoming greener above the high walls of Alipore Jail, the sparrows nesting in the huge barred barn that had housed him in Almora, the glimpse of fresh fields when the warders opened for a second or two the gate of his cell yard in Dehradun.