India (30 page)

‘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 here – 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 completed 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?’

‘My father was a quiet, easygoing, peaceable sort of person. His family was ruled by the older women in it.’

‘Your grandfather was a distinguished man. How could he have married his daughter into that kind of family?’

They were well thought of. They were an aristocratic family. They were considered to be philanthropists. They probably didn’t practise what they preached. Many of the women of the family were in social welfare organizations. They were far better formally educated than they permitted my mother to be. It all comes down to double standards, a lack of sensitivity, a touch of cruelty.’

Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood: an early introduction to the ways of the world, and to the nature of cruelty. It had given me, as I suspected it had given Kala, a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less crowded life, where one had space around oneself.

But I didn’t think that what Kala said about double standards was appropriate. Hindu family life was ritualized. Just as there were rituals for every new stage in a person’s life, so there were roles that people were required to fill as they progressed through their allotted years. Mothers-in-law were required to discipline the child brides of their sons, to train the unbroken and childish girls in their new duties as child-bearers and household workers, to teach them new habits of respect, to introduce them to the almost philosophical idea of the toil and tears of the real world: to introduce them, in this chain of tradition, to the kind of life and ideas they had been introduced to by their own mothers-in-law.
Such a disciplining of a child bride would have been considered virtuous; the cruelty, however willed, however voluptuous, would have been seen as no more than the cruelty of life itself. The social work the women of the family did would have been directed to people several layers below, many times more abject. The very wish to do social work would have issued out of an idea of virtue and correctness at home. The concept of double standards came from another world, came from Kala’s world today.

Kala said, ‘It was a total shock for my mother. She was the only daughter-in-law. She would be the last person considered for any kind of treat or outing. There wouldn’t be room in the car for her. And she was still so much a child herself. Everyone was so much older. She was hit sometimes.’ This was too painful for Kala to talk about. ‘Both her mother-in-law and her husband hit her. Somehow, suddenly, as soon as she was married she was expected to turn into an adult.’