India (19 page)

‘Was Namdeo in the house when you were writing?’

‘He was very much in the house.’

‘Did he have any idea what you were writing? You weren’t nervous?’

‘I didn’t know what he would do. I thought he would beat me up or throw me out, and go to the court.’ To get custody of their child. ‘I think a mother should have a right to her child. But according to Indian law the father can have custody of the child after the child’s seventh birthday. So, even if I left, I had no guarantee that one day Namdeo wouldn’t come and take away the child.’

A good half of the book she wrote in those tormenting circumstances was a reliving of her early love for Namdeo.

It had begun 14 years before. She was sixteen, and she had gone to the resort town of Lonavala, between Bombay and Poona, to do some studying. She had gone with her brother-in-law Anil, who had leftist leanings, and with a famous Marathi film-actor and director. Anil was writing a film-script.

On the fourth or fifth day of this Lonavala interlude Namdeo appeared. He came late one night with another man from the Dalit movement. Mallika had already met Namdeo. She had met him in her family house – the house where we now were. Namdeo used to
come to the house to hide. This was in 1974, when the Dalit movement was at its peak, and there were riots in the Bombay district of Worli.

‘He had never paid much attention to me. This surprised me, because the boys here found me attractive. But he never paid me much attention. I read his poems, and I realized he had leftist leanings. I gave him my poems to read.

‘He came now to Lonavala. At that time Lonavala had a very poetic atmosphere, a pre-monsoon atmosphere. It looked as though it was about to rain, but it never rained. There were quite a few similarities between us. He liked rain and I liked rain. He liked poetry and I liked poetry. Our literary opinions more or less matched, and even now, in literature, we have very many things in common. I was at the age when you really fall in love with somebody.’

She laughed. And when I said I thought that that time in Lonavala was still romantic to her, she laughed again and lifted her thin arms with the thin bracelets, and clapped her hands.

‘Then he would talk about politics, and how the police were harassing him and beating him, and I would find it very thrilling. I felt I wanted to be close to him. This wasn’t a sexual feeling. I felt compassion. I felt I wanted to put my hand on his head.’

‘You had no caste feeling about the man?’

‘I had no caste prejudices. I didn’t know about his caste, and I didn’t think it was essential to know that.’

Perhaps her communist father, the folk singer, had trained her that way. Yet caste would have been in everything Namdeo did. He was a caste leader, and caste still attached to him. In the house that afternoon, in the front room or hall, which Mallika had decorated with such care, there was a thin dark woman in dark clothes sleeping on a mat. That woman, I now learned from Mallika, was Namdeo’s mother.

‘She is seventy. Because of Namdeo’s politics and the ups and downs of his career, she’s had a nervous breakdown. Namdeo was her only son. She always had the fear in those days, in the 70s, at the height of the movement, that somebody would beat him up and kill him. Whenever she put on the TV she felt that somebody was going to read out that news. That pressure was always on her, and led to her breakdown.’

But – going back to the earlier point – the fact was that, at sixteen, Mallika had no caste feeling about Namdeo.

‘Practically everybody at Lonavala knew we were getting close to one another. We had been together for about 15 days. Anil, my brother-in-law, would joke about it. It was he who asked one day whether I liked Namdeo, and he said we were quite suited to each other. So that same night, after we had had dinner, all of us who were staying in the bungalow – it hadn’t begun to rain, but it was cool: Lonavala is cool – I called him into an inner room, away from the people sitting outside, and I said to him, “What do you think of me?” And he said, “Do you want me to put it in words?” ’

She raised her hands and the eight or nine thin silver bracelets slipped down her thin arm.

‘After this my brother-in-law talked to him. He asked him some questions about his background and his feelings. Namdeo didn’t like this. My brother-in law said to him that I had come to Lonavala to do some studying. “Since you’ve come she hasn’t read a single word. She is still at page 153.” ’

‘What book was that?’

‘A history book. So my brother-in-law said to Namdeo, “You better leave.” The next day Namdeo left.’

But hadn’t her brother-in-law encouraged Namdeo? Yes, Mallika said; but when her brother-in-law had spoken to Namdeo about his intentions, he wasn’t speaking in anger or in rebuke; he was only speaking formally. Namdeo, though, hadn’t like being questioned at all; so he had been asked to leave.

‘Just before Namdeo left Lonavala, he took my hand. He called me “comrade” and he gave the “red salaam”, the communist salute. This excited me. Before he went he taped something by me – it was a song I used to sing night and day. I heard later that he would play that tape to his friends in Bombay.’

They were married four months later. After the schoolgirl romance, the sexual side of marriage had been disagreeable for her. That was one of the things she had written about openly in her book. ‘The pleasure came when the routine started. It was then that I started getting the pleasure. The psychological pressure lessened with the experience.’ She hadn’t had any idea of the sexual give-and-take in a relationship. And it amazed her, it enchanted her, to be able to give her body and herself to someone she loved. She wrote of this in her book, and people reacted in different ways
to her frankness. Some people ‘threw themselves at her feet’ in admiration; some people abused her.

The marriage itself came under another strain almost at once. ‘Within two months of our marriage the Panther movement started breaking up. Dalits stay in small settlements and pockets, little groups. Each pocket and settlement began to have its own leader, and poisonous things began to be said about Namdeo in those settlements. His marriage to me added to his troubles. I was the daughter of a well-known communist, and the Dalits don’t like communists. The reason for that is simple. Dr Ambedkar, the hero of the Dalits, didn’t like communism. Every Dalit has Dr Ambedkar’s picture in his house. So the Dalits hate communists.

‘The next year, 1975, there was the Emergency. There were something like 350 court cases against the Dalit Panthers – speeches, fighting, etc. The government withdrew all those cases when the Panthers supported the Emergency. That wasn’t really what Namdeo wanted to do. And though he never said anything about it, I feel that was when he began to feel compromised. But that was when I, too, needed him most – in July of that year I had had my child. I needed Namdeo, and I felt he was neglecting me.’

‘Because of political pressure?’

‘His setbacks and frustration. That helped to send him away from me. So his political life had an effect on his personal life.’

‘Do you still find him an attractive man?’

‘Much water has flowed down the Ganges, but if he were to come in this room now, I would feel like a young girl. I would feel I had just fallen in love with him. Nothing has really changed in that. There are many other men who may be physically more attractive or intellectually superior. But I don’t want them.’

I asked her about the ‘five-star life’ that – according to his critics – had come to Namdeo as a Dalit Panther, a man in the news.

Mallika said, ‘This downward journey began right at the Emergency.’

Namdeo’s mother had got up from her mat in the front room. Through the doorway I saw her in the kitchen, a thin dark figure in dark clothes, moving silently, like a shadow.

Mallika said, ‘Namdeo is a born politician. If he decides tomorrow to write his autobiography, there would be just a page for me. That is why his political ups and downs had its repercussions on his private life. This is one of the questions I asked in my
book. Why should this affect me? Why isn’t he helping me with my life?

‘After the Emergency he became unpredictable. His friends in the underworld began giving him money. One day he would have 10,000 rupees. The next day he wouldn’t have a rupee. And we both had a common trait – money never stuck to us. Namdeo used to say it was middle class to keep money in the bank. So whatever money he had he spent – and on high living.’

Ever since 1975, just a year or so after its time of glory (and a year or so after Mallika’s Lonavala romance), the Dalit movement had been in decay. She used an English word:
numb
. The movement fragmented and fragmented again, and there were allegations and counter-allegations about money being taken by various people from various sources. The Dalits, as a result, had lost faith in the people who had been their leaders.

It was now five o’clock. We had been with Mallika for three hours. And at this moment – when our meeting would have been ending, if he had been there for it – Namdeo appeared. His mother was still in the kitchen.

And it was as Mallika had said: Namdeo was in the house; she was aware of his presence; her thoughts were of him. She began to speak to us with only half a mind – speaking simple pieties about the Dalit movement – but then she calmed down again.

I asked about the violent sexual imagery in some of Namdeo’s poems, the conflation of sex and excrement and degradation. When she had married Namdeo, her thoughts had been all of romance; even the sexual side of marriage had shocked her. Had she, after that first shock, become wholly accepting? Wasn’t she still unsettled, just a little, by certain things in Namdeo’s poetry?

No; she wasn’t unsettled in any way. What she felt, more than shock at some of the words and images, was Namdeo’s great power as a poet. ‘It’s quite true and pure poetry. It’s not just an imitation. I look upon him as one of the greatest poets in Marathi. We’ve had people who’ve changed the course of poetry. He’s one of them.
He’s a milestone.
’ She spoke the last words in English.

Namdeo came in from the kitchen to the little room where we were. His glasses were on his forehead. He smiled and was polite. He made no reference to the meeting he hadn’t come for. He said only that there were people waiting for him, and he couldn’t stay to talk.

He was busy that day with his political work. He was organizing a demonstration by prostitutes in the Golpitha district, he said. He showed the black-and-white posters he had just picked up from the printers. He asked whether I would like to come to that demonstration. I said yes. He gave me a copy of the poster, and we arranged to meet at the house the day after the demonstration, when he would have more time. And then he was out of the room.

I asked Mallika, ‘Does he show you his poems?’

‘If he writes something here, he will show it to me. If he writes it somewhere else, he will show it to the person nearest him, whether that person understands poetry or not.’

All the shocks of her relationship with Namdeo appeared now to lie in the past – the discovery, for instance, in the first year of their marriage, that he had a venereal disease. She had written about that, and about other discoveries she had made. She lived more easily now with the things she had written about; and she thought her life with Namdeo could go on forever as it was going on now: ‘a middle-class family state’. She was not, besides, in a position to do anything extreme: she always had to think of her child.

‘I want the child to become my friend. I don’t want the child to grow up like his father – the negative aspects.’

‘What negative aspects?’

‘Raging, cursing. The movement is the first thing Namdeo thinks about. So, whatever our relationship, he will never break his ties to the movement.’

The movement was now stalled. People might come together on certain issues; they might shout slogans and march. But people no longer had a direction or a purpose.

I told her about the long line of people I had seen on the way in from the airport. What would their mood have been, waiting to pay tribute to the long-dead Ambedkar?

‘Emotional. Dalits will sacrifice anything and everything for Ambedkar. He is not an extra god for them. He is God. They would slaughter their wife. Anything for Ambedkar.’

Charu added on his own, ‘Like Christ to the Christians.’

Mallika agreed.

I asked whether she had been supported by any religious faith during these years.

‘Whenever things were bad I turned to myself.’

‘No faith?’

‘I have faith in myself. I have faith only in my own existence.’

The first part of Mallika’s book had ended (in Charu’s spoken translation): ‘Male ego is the most hideous thing in our present society. Women find quite a pleasure in boosting it. It reminds me of a story in which the tree itself gave its branch to a woodcutter who had only an axe-blade and no handle … I do not believe that for anybody called Namdeo I should surrender my entire life.’ But the book was also an account of her obsession with the man and his poetry and his cause, and her consequent loss of freedom. The second part of the book ended: This has been the journey of a defeated mind.’ And though what she had done had been done for the sake of a man, she had always been alone. There was nobody with me.’

Charu and I got ready to leave. And now many of the details of the house had a fuller meaning: the photographs of Mallika’s father and mother, the colour snaps of Namdeo, the red flag (made by Mallika’s son) in the front room, the dark, shadow-like, silent figure of Namdeo’s mother who had had a breakdown many years before (and was about to die now), the framed certificate to Namdeo from the Bombay Russian House of Culture, the icon-picture of Dr Ambedkar, the poster for the prostitutes’ meeting Namdeo was planning. On one wall, above the very big colour photograph of a white baby (Mallika said she simply liked the picture) there was a framed drawing by her son: brown rocks, black boulder, red sun, black birds. In the up-and-down scratching of the brown crayon, which had given volume and solidity to the rocks, I had seen a great subtlety, and had thought that the picture was a contemporary Chinese print.