India (43 page)

‘All this made me very sad. I started feeling entirely different from my father, and begged him to spare me these agonies. But he was firm. He said that family respect and tradition were more important than these passing experiences. I was not convinced. I dropped out of college. I felt I had to be independent.’

Independent – it was a strange word.

Kakusthan said, ‘Independent of these practices. I was sixteen. I felt I must be as modern as anybody else.’

‘Weren’t you frightened when you left the college?’

‘I wasn’t frightened. I was full of hope that I would be able to do what I wanted once I was away from home. I told my mother these things in confidence. She partly agreed with me, and partly didn’t. She understood my feelings.’

I tried to set that family drama of 30 years before in the colony I had seen. In the yard around the well the people would have been more obviously brahminical in their dress and restrictions: people once of authority, now safe only in this little area of theirs. I tried to think of the passions of father and son exploding in the small private space the family had in the colony: the dark small room at the back of the kitchen on the lower level, the sleeping room off the common terrace above, with a view – as you climbed the narrow stone-and-concrete steps at the side of the house-row to that terrace – of the overgrown temple garden, memorial of a calmer time.

‘For a few days I stayed at home. My father was very angry. He
didn’t talk to me. He didn’t want me in the house. I had betrayed the family and let down his prestige. He wanted me to be a graduate and a bank employee or a central government employee, even while adhering to my religious pursuits at the temple in our village – where we had much honour as brahmins. He would cite several examples of people who did the two things – wear the long tuft, the churki, and at the same time did good, secure, modern jobs.

Through friends in the colony, friends of my own age or a little older, I got a job with an electric-bulb dealer as an office boy on a salary of one rupee a day. This was in 1959. But since the father-and-son relationship was extremely strained, there was no peace at home. There was also a mother-father tussle, with mother and father quarrelling, and with occasional beatings for me from both father and mother. So I left home.

‘I decided to go to my married sister. She lived in the town of Vellore, 100 kilometres west of Madras. Her husband had become a schoolteacher after retiring from the army. I went to Vellore by bus. I got the fare out of the old college books. My father had bought them new. I sold them to a hawker for a throw-away price.

‘It was a Saturday when I left home. Every Saturday and Wednesday I had my traditional oil bath, and my mother used to soap my long hair. She did so that Saturday. I had my morning meal around 10.30, and immediately afterwards I slipped away to the bus stop, not telling any soul I was leaving for Vellore. I had very little money, just enough for the bus fare to Vellore, and I walked from Triplicane to Parry’s Corner. Five miles, in the scorching heat. It took about an hour.

There was a lurking fear in me. Was I doing the right thing? What would be my mother’s reaction? This agitated me all through my travel to Vellore. Mid-way I even thought of returning home. But then the other half of my mind compelled me to go on – and I told myself I was only going to my sister’s place, after all.

‘For a few days I was a welcome guest there in Vellore, at my sister’s. But then their sympathies were more with our parents than with me, after I had explained why I had come to them. My sister wrote to my parents that I was with her. My father had been quietly looking for me, but he had been pretending not to be concerned about my disappearance.

‘My brother-in-law tried to get me a job in Vellore. But Vellore
is a predominantly Muslim town, and I was handicapped by my Hindu-brahmin appearance. Whenever I went with my brother-in-law to get a job, the first question would be: “Why don’t you wear pants and become more modern, if you want a job?” But even though I’d left home, I wasn’t courageous enough to remove the churki or put on trousers. I was in a dilemma. I had no job, and I couldn’t go home. I spent some sleepless nights, even while putting a brave face on things.

‘I must have stayed a month at my sister’s. And then, reluctantly, I went back to Madras. I didn’t go back to my own home. I went to the house of a friend of my mother’s. This house was outside our brahmin colony.

‘The son of this friend of my mother’s also wore the churki and the caste-marks and was obedient to what his parents told him. He was an extraordinarily brilliant boy, in mathematics and statistics. He is today a professor in a big American university. And even then, when I went to his house – he was two years older than me – he was an admirer of the genius Ramanujan, whose mathematical work he and his equally brilliant colleagues would discuss and debate for hours together. They especially discussed the unsolved mathematical problems of Ramanujan’s. These boys were college students. I couldn’t follow the discussions, but I could admire the deep commitment to the studies they were pursuing – commitment which I didn’t have.

‘What impressed me most was the way in which the father of the boy took interest in these discussions, and encouraged them by supplying coffee. You must imagine these discussions going on in a house as poor as my father’s in the agraharam, the colony. There was an irony. My mother’s friend’s husband was a Sanskrit teacher, and yet his son was a mathematical genius. My father was a mathematics teacher, and I was a mathematical zero.

‘The mathematical debate went on past midnight. I felt sorry I couldn’t participate, and I literally wept that night that I had had to disappoint my father.’

Tears came to Kakusthan’s eyes. He tried to ignore the tears, to go on talking. But then he began to cry at those memories of 30 years before. He stood up and said, ‘Let me take five minutes off.’

He walked to the rear of the hotel lobby and began to walk up and down, a small figure in his brahmin clothes, noticeable, five feet one or two, walking up and down, wrestling with his grief,
looking down, in his abstraction like a monk or holy man in his cloister, indifferent to the hotel setting.

Were the tears for himself, for what he might have made of himself if he hadn’t been pushed into rebellion? Or were the tears for the unhappiness he had caused his father 30 years before? The tears were for both things: he said when he came back and sat down and collected himself that it was the difference between the two families that had upset him all over again.

‘I spent 10 to 15 days in that atmosphere, and was full of guilt that I had left home and studies. This boy I have mentioned would teach me mathematics, and console me that nothing was lost, that even now I could pick up the threads. That gave me encouragement to go back to being a student.

‘I went home to the agraharam. I settled there. But I couldn’t get back into college. It was the middle of the year. I took a job. I needed the money, to satisfy my social cravings – taking friends to hotels, going to movies, etc. None of these things would have been available to me, if I had to depend on my father. In fact, they were forbidden. At home we never even drank coffee – it was a foreign item, an item invented by the British. And even today in strict brahmin homes coffee is not drunk, because of its intoxicating effects – the caffeine.

‘I went back to my job with the bulb-dealer. I got 26 rupees a month. I gave my family 20 rupees, and I kept six – to fulfil all my cravings, without the knowledge of my father. I stayed in that job for a year. And having tasted money power, I was reluctant again to take up studies. So I went back to my old ways again.

The work was hard. I literally had to hawk the bulbs around the city, sometimes on a bicycle, sometimes walking, when the cycle was punctured. It used to be so hot that sometimes the tires used to burst. Even my father was moved by the arduous nature of my job, which was telling upon my health. I became very lean, with the irregular food. So he got me a job with an engineering consulting firm, making blueprint copies, at 65 rupees a month – a big jump.’ Sixty-five rupees, £5 a month, in 1960.

‘One day I burnt a blueprint. The engineer slapped me, and went away without saying a word. I was at fault. I didn’t blame him. I told my father when I went home. He advised me to take it in my stride as part of life. I was surprised – I thought my father might also want to beat me for the mistake with the blueprint.

‘I did the blueprints for the company for nine months. Then I was posted to one of the company’s construction sites. Work was going on at that site on behalf of one of the big industrial concerns of the South. It was here again, for the second time in my life, my traditional brahmin appearance and approach came to my aid or advantage.

The managing director of the company we were working for was very pleased with my strict adherence to the brahmin way of life. He was so pleased to see a brahmin boy in churki in charge of a building site, being a
maistry –
especially at this time, when anti-brahmin feeling was at its height. This was in 1961.

‘I did not know how important this managing director was, how many businesses he controlled. He asked me about my father, and he sent a message through me asking my father to meet him. I was a little nervous. So also was my father. We didn’t know what the managing director wanted or who he was. They met, and the managing director got on well with my father immediately. After hearing about my father’s background, and especially his versatility in the 4000 hymns of the Tamil Vedas, he asked my father to be his teacher in the Tamil Vedas. Which my father did. This happy meeting with one of the very great industrialists of the South made my father so happy he wondered how I could have pleased an outsider, when I couldn’t please people at home.

‘On completion of the job which our construction firm was doing for him, the great man offered me a job in his own organization. He wanted me to begin as an “attender”, on a salary of 97 rupees, 52 rupees basic and 45 rupees allowance. “Attender” is another word for office boy. But to get into that organization in any capacity would be today like getting into IBM. I did more typing than office-boy work. So at last I began to rise, and I never stopped – with God’s grace. I was seventeen.

‘The company opened a branch in Vellore. I got transferred there – to be with my married sister, and to be independent. When the Chinese war came in 1962, I became politically active – which I’d never been before. I gave my rings and ear-rings – things given me by my uncle on the occasion of my thread ceremony – to the war effort. This outraged my parents, and it also outraged my sister, because the things I had given had belonged for some generations to the family.

‘A visitor came one day from Delhi. He was a first cousin. He
worked in the Delhi office of an American concern. He was shocked to see me in my traditional appearance – and also shocked by the paltry salary I was getting. He asked me to leave the job I was doing and to come to Delhi. He said that, for the same effort I was putting into the firm in Vellore, he would get me twice the salary in Delhi. It was a fascinating offer for me. I immediately decided to accept his offer. But I wasn’t sure how my father would react.

‘As I expected, my father was reluctant to let me go to Delhi, lest I should deviate further. For four months there was a lot of debate, and many heated exchanges, between me and my father. But in the end it was my father who bought the ticket for me. It cost about 42 rupees, and he gave me some pocket money as well. For the journey itself my family gave me
idli
and
dosas
and fried eatables. They gave me too much. I had to throw away the surplus. Their thinking was that the train might get stranded, and they didn’t want me to suffer if that happened. It is even today the normal South Indian family way with travellers.

‘Finally, on the third of May, 1963, I charted an entirely new course in my life. I left by Grand Trunk Express from Madras Central railway station at 7.30 p.m. I arrived 40 hours later in Delhi, at 11.30 in the morning on the fifth of May – according to the Gregorian calendar, my birthday.

‘The very first thing I did in Delhi – as instructed by my cousin – was to drive straight from the railway station to the barber saloon and remove the churki. That was a moment of great anguish and pain. For 18 full years both my mother and my sister used to rear it – as they would do their own child. They were proud of it. They were jealous of it. I had unusually long hair, longer than my sister’s. It used to hit my calf when I undid it. They would wash it and oil it and comb it and knit it together.

‘My agony was deeper as the barber, a young man, a real thin-looking man with a moustache, started making probing questions – whether I was sure I wanted what I said. He gave me three chances. He said in Hindi, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” I repeatedly said, “Yes,” though in my heart of hearts I was trembling and worried about what my father would say. The barber was so kind and considerate he started cutting it slowly, from below, instead of killing it at one blow – to give me another
chance to think again. That was the day I lost all my religious fervour – as Samson lost his physical power.’

That was where the story should have ended, with the flight to Delhi, the cutting off of the tresses at the back of the head, and the start of a new life. But Kakusthan had returned for good to the colony from which he had fled. His story was of a double transformation; and it was of the second transformation that he told me on another day.

Kakusthan said, ‘In New Delhi I found myself, and for the next 16 years I lived there. I did a small job for the American firm for which my cousin worked. I also worked as a stenographer for a trade union journal.’

Stenography: the old South Indian brahmin vocation, the vocation that followed on from the doing of rituals, and was the other side of the talent for mathematics and physics.

‘I got 50 rupees a month from my cousin’s American firm. I got 200 rupees from the trade union paper. And it was during my time on the trade union paper that the second transformation began to take place.