India (18 page)

[there are 100 paise in a rupee]

Even in that rough translation, improvised by Charu in a busy hotel lobby, the poem was moving. It was much more moving to Charu. He said that the voice was absolutely new in Marathi; and he told me that Vijay Tendulkar, the contemporary Marathi playwright, had compared Namdeo to Tukaram, the 16th-century Maharashtrian poet-saint, whom I had heard about for the first time from Mr Raote.

In the poem Charu had translated, the mingled suggestions of sex and degradation were harsh and undermining, and the ideas of untouchability and brothel-area sex, childbirth and rags, all coming together, were like an assault. This was the passion that Namdeo had put into his politics and the Dalit Panthers.

But that name, which he had borrowed from the Black Panthers, was like a foreshadowing of what was to come. Like the Black Panthers, the Dalit movement, with its success, began to fragment. That pitch of passion couldn’t be sustained; there was the temptation to many to make their peace with the wider society. And though Namdeo became famous and courted, he began to lose his followers. Soon even his literary reputation began to recede. He had done a fair amount of work; he had written two novels, in addition to his poetry; but his most recent book had been published in 1981, seven years before. He wasn’t writing so much now; and he had contracted a debilitating illness.

He had no telephone. But Charu knew where his house was, and we went there one afternoon to leave a message for him. The house was not far from the Golpitha area he had written about. It was a house, though, not an apartment; and it was in a reasonably wide and clean lane. Just across the lane from the front door of the house an old open jeep had been parked or abandoned and was
now, mysteriously, bleaching away, its tires squashed and perished, its metal body almost bare, yet still looking whole.

Charu called from the lane. After a little while a dark young woman, bright-eyed, fine-featured, opened a leaf of the front door. She and Charu spoke in Marathi, and we went up the concrete steps that were set against the front wall of the house and led directly from the lane to the front door.

The room we entered ran the width of the house. It was the main room of the house. The walls were a lilac colour, and recently painted, in an eggshell finish. There were white-painted rattan chairs with dark-green cushions; and from one of the sturdy beams of the ceiling a basket chair hung by a chain. A feature, this hanging chair, a touch of luxury; and a plump young woman in a blue georgette sari, a visitor, was sitting in it, with her feet on the floor and moving with deliberation back and forth.

The dark woman who had welcomed us was Mallika, Namdeo’s wife. She was stylishly dressed, in a kind of long peasant skirt in lightweight material. The skirt swung as she walked about the terrazzo floor on her small bare feet, and her tinkling Marathi voice filled the room as she welcomed Charu and me.

There was a very large colour photograph of a white baby on one wall. On another wall were small colour snapshots of Namdeo: full-cheeked, paunchy, but with a face that was still strong. On the opposite wall was a photograph of Mallika’s own father. He had been famous, a folk singer, a member of the Communist Party, and a Muslim. A small red flag hung on the wall behind the television set at the far end of the room, not far from a framed copy of the famous grey-toned photograph of Dr Ambedkar in a jacket and tie.

The woman in the blue sari in the basket chair had not been introduced to us. We had addressed no word to her; and she, as private as always, and seemingly quite content, had continued with small movements of her feet to move the basket chair back and forth. Now, without social disturbance, she got up and went inside.

Mallika herself then went inside, skirt swinging, and after some time brought out tea for us on a kind of woven tray, very pretty. I was beginning to understand that very little Mallika did was casual, that in everything she did, or had some control over, she aimed at prettiness or elegance: in her dress, her walk, the colours of the room, the big colour photograph of the white baby, and even in
her dogs, a pair of white, fluffy, combed Pomeranians, slightly listless in the Bombay heat, that she had bought four years before, for their beauty.

We left our telephone numbers with her. She said she would ask Namdeo to get in touch with us. Abruptly, then, with no intermediate atmosphere, we were out of the front room or hall into the lane where the abandoned jeep squashed its rotted tires. And at the end of that short lane we were back in a more familiar Bombay.

Charu told me later that the story of that marriage – Mallika’s and Namdeo’s – was famous. Mallika had written an autobiography in Marathi,
I Want to Destroy Myself
, and the book had been a bestseller. In Marathi that meant a sale of 10,000 copies.

Mallika’s book was a story not only of love, but also of disillusion and pain. Almost as soon as she and Namdeo had married, things had begun to go badly for the Dalit Panthers, and Namdeo’s behaviour had changed. She had suffered. She had been introduced to shocking things. Namdeo had a venereal disease; he continued to go with women from the brothel area. But she was tied to Namdeo, by the child they had had, and by her love for him. She was passionate about the freedom of women; but in her own life, because of her love for Namdeo, she found that she had lost some of her autonomy. After 10 years of love and torment she had written her book.

The book was sexually frank; and though that kind of writing was not unknown in Marathi women writers, Mallika’s created a sensation, because it offended many people’s caste sensibilities. Though Mallika’s father had been a Muslim, her mother was a Hindu, of a caste just below the brahmin caste; and people had been upset and wounded by Mallika’s story of her love for Namdeo and her later turbulent life with him.

No message came from Namdeo, and late one morning Charu and I went back to the house. Mallika wasn’t there, but someone let us in. Before we could leave a note, Mallika came. She had been out shopping, and was wearing a light chiffon sari that billowed about her, a small, rust-red motif on white; and she was carrying in her hands, almost as part of her dress, just a few turnips or carrots with their green: the vegetables looking in her hands like emblems in a kind of Italian renaissance painting.

And then Namdeo himself appeared, with a friend. Namdeo was sturdy, paunchy, dark, unexpectedly avuncular. He would not have stood out in a crowd. I saw suggestions of forcefulness only in his eyes and forehead; but that might have been because I knew who he was. It was hard to see in him the poet or the Panther. There was a curious placid quality to him; it was as though his inner fire had burned out. And then I remembered what Charu had said about his illness. It was his illness, that other external enemy, that had finally weakened him, and given him the easy, affable, and yet somehow distant manner he now showed us.

He spoke no English. Yes, he said to Charu in Marathi, he would like to meet us. Tomorrow. Yes, come for lunch. No? Well, come after lunch. From two to five. Come then.

He went inside then with the man who had come with him, and Charu and I said goodbye to Mallika and left. It seemed easy enough, arranging that meeting, now that we had met Namdeo. But Charu thought it had been too easy. He had his doubts about the appointment. And I learned later – from other people – that in the matter of time-keeping and appointments Dalits had a poor reputation.

And it was as Charu feared. When we went to the house the next day, Namdeo wasn’t there. This was Mallika’s news when we went up the concrete steps from the lane to the front room or hall. And just as, the first time we had gone to the house, there had been a young woman in the basket chair, to whom we had not been introduced, so now there was someone in the front room who was not mentioned: a thin dark woman sleeping on a mat on the floor, just like that.

We followed Mallika to the kitchen at the back, and then through a side door to a small room at the side of the house, with a high, deep-embrasured, iron-barred window. This was the room Mallika had prepared for our meeting with Namdeo. It had two of the painted rattan chairs, a table with a table-cloth, and, in one corner, an old-fashioned, pretty electric table lamp with a draped woman in bronze-coloured metal, holding a torch.

Waiting there for Namdeo, I talked to Mallika. I asked her about the house. I could see that it was unusual, but I felt I wasn’t in a position to see it correctly. I brought too many outside ideas to it. I asked her to describe the house for me, so that I could begin to see it as people in the area might have seen it.

Something of what I intended got lost in the interpreting, and Mallika said, This is my parents’ house.’ The house, therefore, of one of the most famous folk singers of Maharashtra, the house of a successful man. ‘It is the house where I grew up. It’s nice to stay in a house where you’ve been since your childhood.’

She and Namdeo had done a certain amount of renovation. They painted the house every two years. As for the area, it was an area of working people; but middle-class people also lived on the street. She knew everyone there. When her father was alive their family had been looked up to.

But her parents had had a mixed marriage. Her father was a Muslim, her mother a Hindu. Had that made for problems?

‘I didn’t know my father was a Muslim. My mother was a Pathari Prabhu. A little lower than brahmins. These Patharis eat fish. Pathari Prabhus are the original Bombay people, and that is how they have been eating fish.’ Eating fish, that is, though they were very nearly brahmins, because they were a coastal people.

She had learned about the Pathari Prabhus from her mother’s mother, when she used to go and stay there. She hadn’t been particularly interested in her mother’s relatives; she hadn’t gone out of her way to make inquiries about them because they were the kind of people they were. What she knew about that side of her origins was more a kind of ‘idle knowledge’ that had come to her as she had grown up.

I asked her about her book. Had she intended it to be as daring as it had turned out?

‘I didn’t think like that. It was necessary for me to write that book. I had no choice. It wasn’t open to me to separate one side of my life from the other side.’

She was wearing a lightweight sari, a simple pattern on a pink ground. She was sitting on one of the white-painted rattan chairs. In the room was a steel wardrobe, olive-green, with a long mirror on one door – it was a kind of wardrobe I had been seeing in Bombay. On top of the wardrobe was a tarnished little globe. The masonry or plaster of the window-sill was nicely bevelled; the eggshell finish of the paint, added to that bevelling, made me want to run my hand over it.

In her book – sections of which Charu had translated for me at great speed, before we had come out – she had said, talking of her
love for Namdeo, that she felt ‘a blank’ at the thought of leaving him. I told her I had been taken by that.

She said, ‘Even now I love Namdeo, and am willing to give him everything. Even though he has some negative points. There is a kind of thread running through our relationship. Even when I don’t want him, I want him. Even now, whatever is good in me, whatever is creative in me, I would suppress for his sake. I know that if I do certain things he will go out of my life. I don’t want that. Then there is my child. We are in a kind of vicious triangle. I love Namdeo. The child loves me. Namdeo loves the child.’ The child was thirteen.

The book hadn’t been flattering of Namdeo. Some people thought it had even damaged him politically. Had Namdeo read the book while she was writing it?

‘If I hadn’t written the book, I would have gone mad. Namdeo didn’t read it. He used to read my poems. But he wouldn’t read my prose. I showed him the manuscript of the book, but he didn’t read it. It was only when the book was published that he read it. But then for a year before he had been suffering from his nervous illness.’

She was smaller than her erect posture and her hips suggested. Her dark arms were slender, even thin. She had a big red spot between her pencilled eyebrows. She had a watch and bangle on her right wrist, and eight or nine thin silver bracelets on her left arm.

‘He didn’t say anything about the book, but there was a change in his behaviour. He has never mentioned the book to me to this day. But I know that when other people have said to him that he should write a rejoinder, he has defended my book. His argument then is that this woman who has lived with him all these years, and has seen it all with her middle-class eyes’ – there it was, the social comment, the comment on her family house perhaps, the comment on the way Mallika saw herself in relation to Namdeo, and the way he saw her – ‘his argument is that this woman has every right to express what she feels about the marriage.’

Now, Mallika said, a little of the earlier relationship, when she had first loved him, had revived. He was still under treatment for his illness, and he had stopped drinking. His drinking had caused many clashes between them, and he used to beat her. But she felt
that much of that had been due to his political frustration, witnessing the quick decay of the Dalit movement he had started.

Her understanding didn’t make it less hard for her. ‘I would get angry. I would cry. I would shout. I would find it extremely humiliating. I loved the man, but I never thought my life would be so degraded – after I had gone against everybody and married him. Because I had gone against everyone, I felt I couldn’t give up on the marriage just then and tell people what a failure the marriage had been. I also felt that if I kept quiet I would have to bear it forever, and that was not my nature. Everybody reacts to a situation in a way which comes most naturally to them, and I turned to writing.

‘I wrote the book straight off, within a month. I wrote it sometimes in the front room, and sometimes here, at this table. Sometimes I wrote in the kitchen also.’ The kitchen, seen through the doorway, with a door to the right leading to the front room or hall. There was no fixed time for writing. I wrote whenever I could.’