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  In the beginning when I was miserable, I had with the help of a day-scholar posted an appeal to my father begging him to rescue me from what I considered to be hell. I hated the meaty smell of the vegetable-curry and the viscid soups. I hated the cold water baths which gave me frequent cramps and a persistent ache in my calves. My father did not reply to that weepy letter. By the time the year was out I had begun to like my room-mates, and the boarding ceased to resemble hell.

  Then my father took me back to Calcutta to live with the family. Our family had increased to six by then. I had a younger brother and a baby-sister. We lived in an old yellow house at Lansdowne Road which had large bedrooms with high ceilings and a verandah shaded by curtains made of khus. There was a narrow garden separating the house from the pavement where we grew cactus and crotons. At the back was the kitchen-house, consisting of a large dark kitchen, a coal-shed and an attic-room where the cook and his wife, our ayah, slept at night. The servant’s privy was some yards away in the north-west corner. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a pregnant girl who had committed suicide hanging herself from its ceiling. At night the servants were afraid to go there.

  The old chaprassi who slept in the coal-shed urinated in the corner of his den and we could smell it from the kitchen. He drank arrack every evening and smoked beedis sitting on his charpoy in the dark. There was a naked bulb hanging on a wire in his room but he hated to switch it on. I don’t like to waste your father’s money, he told me one day. When I was starving in far-away Kunnamkulam, your father saved me from penury and brought me here. Now I send home enough money to educate my boy and to keep my girls well-clothed. Your father is a king. Next to God, I revere him most in this world. Do you understand? And sitting near him on his charpoy, I nodded.

  He was well over sixty and looked worn-out. But he worked during the day at my father’s office, preparing frothy tea for the clerks. In the evenings he was our chaprassi and opened the door to our visitors with a greeting in English and a cultured grin. He had worked for our relatives, Mr. and Mrs. K.N. Menon, the parents of Aubrey Menon, for a year and had learned how to please the westernised Indians.

  One day he got from his son a letter stating that his old wife was dying. The old man wrung out his large nose and told my mother that he wanted to send a hundred rupees immediately to meet the expenses of the funeral. Money was despatched by telegraphic money order in an hour’s time. The would-be-widower sat on his charpoy talking about his wife in the past tense, recounting her vanished beauty and her kindliness.

  After a week the wife recovered from the ailment and wrote a letter to thank him for the money. He was in a rage. That good-for-nothing hag, he shouted, when he had the letter read out to him, she cheated me of a neat hundred! If she decides to die after a few months how will I be able to raise another hundred for the funeral? He went out and drank a lot of arrack that evening to calm himself down. Why didn’t she die at the proper time, he asked me, and when I smiled at him he nodded his head and muttered, it is God’s will...

  14

  The Bengal Aristocracy

  From the rectangular balcony of our house we could see across the road and into the garden of the wealthy lady who had once figured in the famous Bhowal Sanyasi case. Her playboy of a husband had died at a hill station when he was very young.

  But one day after several years a sanyasi went up to the family and declared that he was none other than the one who was supposed to have died.

  The pall-bearers had left him on the lit pyre and run away to escape from a sudden downpour that ultimately put out the fire and brought him back to consciousness. He was taken away by a sanyasi to an ashram and nursed back to health. He too became one of the sect but later, much later, he decided to come back to Calcutta to claim his share of the family’s property. His wife refused to acknowledge him as her lost husband. She did not see any similarity in the features of the corpulent sanyasi and called him a mere impostor. The sanyasi filed a suit and waited patiently for the court’s verdict but before he could benefit from its favourable judgment he fell ill and died.

  The widow, wearing plain white, flitted about like an aging Snow White in the garden where roses of several colours grew. There was a rockery, a pond with a wide ledge where she sat in the evenings watching the water and a little gnarled tree bearing yellow flowers. The birds were always very noisy in her garden but she seldom spoke to anyone or ever went out of the house. Her brother stayed with her. He used to walk with long strides in the garden, and he too seemed silent, thoughtful. It was as if the two of them knew that their minds were bruised with doubts which could never be swept away.

  To the left of our house lived a family that entertained lavishly and hobnobbed with the international bigwigs. They believed strongly in Moral Rearmament. Members of the movement visiting India invariably came to Calcutta and stayed for a while with them. The lady of the house sat in the mornings near the dining table, fat and contented, checking the kitchen accounts with her cook and cutting up the vegetables for the salads. Her youngest son came to our house in the evenings to play shutlecock with us in the space between our dining hall and the kitchen-house.

  He was obese and left-handed. He used to bore us with details of the many matches he had won at his school. He showed us as evidence a letter he was going to post to the Tollygunge Club inviting the players over for a tournament. He became a member of the Casma Players Badminton Club which my brother and I had started along with four of our friends. He pestered us to make him our captain, but we decided to wait until the Tollygunge players replied to his letter before honouring him. They did not reply to his letter.

  He was always in need of money. Have you got four annas to lend me, he would ask, nosediving down from the corrugated roof of our kitchen adjoining theirs. I need it urgently... My mother had an old tin where she stored buttons for my father’s shirts and buckles. I would rummage among the buttons and find for my friend a few coins. The urgent need was nearly always an ice-cream. The ice-cream vendors used to cycle along the roads carrying their yellow boxes and shouting musically, Ice-cream Magnolia, Ice-cream Magnolia.

  To the right of our house in an old ramshackle mansion, showing only its profile to the street, lived the Zamindars of Madhupore who had a daughter of my age named Shantu. She had a mole on her cheek of which she spoke with great pride. It is a beauty spot, she said. Only one in million will get born with a beauty spot on the cheek... I was sick with envy. I had by then begun to wear glasses to correct myopia. I would rather die than wear glasses, said Shantu. She used to come every evening to my house to take lessons in Manipuri dance from my teacher, Sjt. Brajabashi.

  One day, while my parents were out, she took me to her house where in the dim lit halls and corridors I saw with fascinated eyes statuettes of jade and amber, rustbrown carpets woven in Persia and gossamer drapes of yellowing lace. We went up the staircase and entered a darker domain, a bedroom, where on a fourposter an old man lay huddled beneath silk quilts. His face was narrow like a mountain goat’s. Dadoo, this is my friend, Kamala, said Shantu. The old man who was her grandfather lifted his head and chortled. His vacant eyes and the laughing mouth frightened me. I was soaked in perspiration when I finally got away from his presence.

  But afterwards, standing on my terrace, reaching out to touch the ripe jamun sprinkling the treetop with ivory, I prayed to God to make me rich enough to live in an old mansion full of statuettes and silver and old lace.

  I wanted to marry a rich man, a zamindar, and live on in the city of Calcutta. Above all I wished to be a snob.

  15

  Liza Beck

  My father had admitted me to a school near our house which had at one time a college attached to it. A revolutionary student had made an unsuccessful attempt to shoot dead the British Governor, and this closed down the college.

  Its vast rooms were converted into bedrooms for the teachers and into libraries. Those of the Calcutta elite who had been unwittingly drawn into the gri
p of Gandhism sent their children to that school instead of admitting them into the anglicized Loretto House.

  Our principal was an old spinster who formed strong likes and dislikes on the basis of physical allure and the lack of it. She used to whisper often to a classmate of mine that she ought not to read late into the night and ruin her health and beauty. Nearly all the teachers were old maids, turned sour with rejection, and so we were subjected to subtle sadism of several kinds.

  I had at that time only one reliable friend, a stout girl named Romola, who was prepared to like even the most snobbish and the most malevolent. Clowning came easy to her and the naivete of her reactions to any situation was moving. Not one girl hated her, although all made fun of her.

  The most snobbish were the West Bengali rich who spoke a faster dialect and kept themselves aloof. They talked endlessly of Sarat Babu’s novels and hummed tunes from Rabindra Sangeet. They had their lunches brought to the school by their servants in tiffin carriers of gleaming brass, which when spread out on the class desks, revealed fish in a red gluey gravy, rice, fried prawns and sweets made from cream.

  If any of us who belonged to the group of drylunchers walked past the rooms while their lunch was going on, they stopped their munching and tried to hide their plates. They believed genuinely that we were envious of them and that we were capable of making them fall ill, merely by glancing at their food with our greedy eyes. Their discomfiture amused us a great deal because their food always looked to us sticky and unclean. Our cheese sandwiches, in comparison, seemed clean and wholesome.

  Then there were the orthodox Tamils who preferred to hide behind the staircases and the bathrooms to eat the curds and rice which they had brought from their homes, a sticky mixture sprinkled with green chillies and lime, lovingly prepared by their mothers or widowed grandmothers. This was always brought in round containers dented and tarnished with age. The Tamils had an inferiority complex which rose basically from this meagre diet. They kept themselves away from the others, and whispered to one another of M.L. Vasanta Kumari and M.S. Subbalakshmi. The Bengalis made faces at them and muttered “antra puntra antra puntra.”

  Our Maths teacher was a young woman with a perpetual scowl who wore a circular brooch at her waist to accentuate its slenderness. My benchmate Mamata fell in love with her and gazed at her with adoration while she took our class. Isn’t she the prettiest person you have seen, Mamata used to ask me repeatedly. Mamata was weak in Maths and was often punished for not trying to learn its rudiments. At such moments she wore on her face a beatific expression as though she had become a saint or at least a Joan of Arc. When the teacher left Calcutta in search of a better job, Mamata grew listless and stopped coming to school.

  Our English teacher, Liza Beck was an Austrian refugee who had escaped from Nazi Germany. She was stout and redfaced. She had the typical kinky hair of the Jews. She spoke English with a thick German accent, pronouncing stop as sthop. The girls used to giggle in her class and try to spatter ink on the four good dresses that she possessed. One day she caught a girl shaking her pen at her and was very upset. I am not rich like some of you, she said. I don’t have many sets of clothes or the money to buy such things. Her eyes filled with tears while she said this. The guilty girl bowed her head in shame.

  I had joined the school in the second term and so my father decided to let me have enough tutors to help me at home. One of them was a Syrian Christian spinster who was short and aggressive. A female Napoleon. I was terrified of her. One evening she stood at the window watching from behind the curtain a ball that was going on in our neighbour’s house. Bejewelled women and men in black waltzed to slow music. There were potted palms near the pillars that had been borrowed from our garden in the afternoon. The scent of the cut flowers and the perfumes used by the ladies travelled to us, borne by the wind. I was quite fascinated.

  Then I saw a dark man walking in, wearing not a suit but a bush shirt and he looked around with self-assurance and a smile. My teacher’s hand on the curtain went tense all of a sudden. Don’t look at him, the one in the bush shirt, she whispered, he is the most wicked man alive, I knew him well once upon a time... Her face had grown pale and she was panting with hate. How I hate him, she said.

  I stared at the man who had caused such a storm in the mind of my teacher. He had an animal grace. He danced with light steps as though his shoes had in its soles coiled springs. I like his looks, I told my teacher. She pulled me away in a hurry. You are not to look at that man. He has ruined the lives of several good girls. He has disgraced some of the best families in India, she said. How did he ruin the lives of the girls, I asked her. She was too distressed to reply.

  After that incident, I thought often about the man. He was dark and of small build. Except for a leonine grace, he had nothing to attract the passing eye. The adjective “wicked” compensated for his deficiencies. It was the first time that I had seen somebody who was notorious. I felt that I ought to meet him when I grew up, and perhaps become his mistress. All the wisdom of early adolescence told me that it would not do to marry a wicked man. Being a mistress to him meant pain in a bearably moderate dose and plenty of chances to forgive the sweet sinner.

  16

  Mahabharata

  After my maidservant married the cook and started to share his room above the kitchen, I used to sleep alone in the large bedroom facing the verandah. The house was old, with high ceilings, and fans hanging on long iron rods that squeaked while they moved.

  I used to fear the dark and all the creatures nesting in it, like ghosts and malevolent spirits. Each night I went to bed with the light burning on, pretending to have read myself to sleep. But at about two or three in the morning I would wake to find the light switched off. My parents probably got up at night to switch off my light.

  I used to lie awake hearing thin swishing sounds which sounded like the sighs of spooks. Next to my room was a hall where the previous tenant, who had only sublet the house to us, had stored all his things, a divan with heavy mattresses, cupboards locked and unlocked, hat stands, dressers and huge wooden chests which his father, a captain in the navy, had once brought from China.

  I used to think that the old captain’s ghost was peeping from the low wall that separated my room from his hall. I thought of him as an old bearded man, wearing a pirate’s hat. In the day his room was not very frightening. My father had asked us never to go into the room or look into his almirahs, but when he was out I’d open the shelves and take stock of the dead one’s belongings.

  We had at the back of the house a spiral staircase which was used only by the servants and the boys belonging to our badminton club who liked to spiral upwards fast to churn up their insides. Once I tried it but stopped midway feeling that I was about to faint. I was rescued in time by my maidservant, who carried me up to the prayer room where my mother was lighting the brass lamps in front of Krishna.

  My frock had large spots of blood on it. I felt the hot blood flowing on to my thighs and dripping down to the floor. I am ill, I am dying, I cried to my mother. Something has broken inside me and I am bleeding. My mother lifted my dress and said with a laugh, it is nothing to be worried about, it is what all girls get at twelve or thirteen... She asked me to change my dress and taught me to wear sanitary pads. She told me that the blood only showed that I was ready to be a mother.

  The maidservant kept laughing as she watched me change my dress. What a simpleton this child is, she said. After three days of dampness, I was as good as new again. I felt happy to think that I too could be a mother. I wanted to get a child for myself as fast as I could. I had heard from my grandmother the story of Kunthi, the mother of Pandavas and had been impressed with her methods of getting good sons.

  Kunthi had prayed to the Sun God to grant her a son and thus Karna, the beauteous one, was born, wearing on his earlobes kundals that shone like the sun. After bath, alone in my room, I bared my body to the sun and told the Sun God that he ought to give me a son too. Take all of the,
I cried, take my swelling limbs, take my wavy tresses, take my round breasts with their diminutive nipples, take all of me and give me a son. No God came forward to claim me as his woman. But gradually I grew. One or two places sprouted hair. The smell of my perspiration changed. My father sent away the dancing master, saying that I was too old to dance.

  At Chowringhee, there was a well-known dentist who had returned from Vienna with the latest knowledge in Orthodontia. He straightened my teeth with braces and told me at the last sitting, now you are a very pretty little girl. Nobody in our family ever liked to pay one another such compliments. So when I heard the words, I blushed purple with happiness. From that day I began to pay more attention to my toilet. I brushed my hair regularly before going to bed and washed my face three times a day. If ever I discovered a pimple on my cheek, I tinted it pink with lipstick to make it a pretty pimple. I removed my glasses at the slightest provocation to expose my eyes which I thought were rather lovely.

  All the heroines of Bengali novels were supposed to bear in their eyes a sadness which made them irresistible to their heroes. I too tried to look sad but it was a difficult task, for there were so many things that made me burst into laughter, and the world seemed so young, so happy, so full of promise!

  At thirteen when I went home to Malabar for my summer vacation, I fell in love with a student leader who had been jailed for his revolutionary activities. He did not reciprocate, for his only interest was politics. He had read the writing of all the famous political philosophers and could quote effortlessly from their books. He had eyes that rolled upwards showing only their whites whenever he grew excited. My grand-aunt told me that he had serpent eyes and that people with such eyes were never to be trusted. She must have deduced from my behaviour that I had become infatuated with his charm. I tried to spend as much time as I could get in his company, but he did not once touch my hand or show any particular fondness for me.