Someone Else’s Garden
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‘Hai, Didi, how lucky. With such a handsome husband you can really tell that Ramu off when he teases you.’
‘Mamta! Sneha!’ warns Lata Bai. ‘You leave those boys from across the river alone, you never know what they might do.’
‘Amma, that Ramu comes over each day to my dung patch to take the sweet out of my sugar. He says my husband won’t be like Guru Dutt at all.’ Mamta squeezes her eyes closed, she’s not a child but Ramu’s words have the power to hurt her – ‘Look at you, black as dirty oil. Do you think your mother could have got you married to a Guru Dutt?’ – Damn that motherfucker. Each day she runs to the river, makes a pool with her hands, fills it with water and searches it for her reflection. Ramu is right, she is black as dirty oil, but not dirty enough to hide her wretched birthmark.
‘You mustn’t listen, Mamta,’ says Lata Bai feebly, unwilling to waste time on simple lessons which she thinks her daughter should have learned a long time ago.
But Mamta can’t let go. Just yesterday Ramu’s friends tried to teach her a thing or two. Prem wanted to defend her, but she’d said, ‘They want me, let them talk to me.’ No one talked to Mamta. She could pitch a stone from a catapult better than any of them, and when she hitched up the skirt of her ghaghra and ran, there was no catching up. ‘Motherfuckers,’ she laughed, and tossed curses over her shoulders, ‘Catch me if you can.’ When they couldn’t, they’d started taunting her:
Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll come on an old horse to get her, He’ll give her an old sari to wear, They’ll jiggery all night together, They’ll jiggery all night together.
Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll beat her black and blue, Her belly will be swollen in no time, They’ll jiggery that night too, They’ll jiggery that night too.
She catches herself humming the ditty, feeling betrayed. ‘He tried to tease me again today, but I chucked a stone at his head. Oh, what fun that was! How he ran!’ says Mamta, putting her arms around her mother’s neck.
Lata Bai undoes her daughter’s arms saying, ‘Careful he doesn’t catch you one day, Mamta.’
‘Huh, what if he does? He can do nothing to me now. I will belong to someone else soon. My husband will protect me.’
‘Don’t start with the dreams. Marriage can be anything. Pray you have a good husband.’
‘You mean a good husband, just like Bapu?’ Mamta says sarcastically. ‘Amma, I don’t know why . . . why you bother with him.’ Her boldness takes her by surprise.
‘You watch out. That kind of talk will get you a beating from your husband.’
‘A beating from my husband . . . I don’t think so. We will be in love as much as . . . as our own zamindar Singh Sahib and Bibiji.’
‘Mamta!’ Lata Bai cups her daughter’s mouth violently with her hand. It is such a bad omen to say something so lofty about your future husband so close to your wedding date.
‘What a love that was,’ says Mamta with a sparkle in her eyes. Singh Sahib’s great love for his wife Bibiji is legendary. He is Gopalpur’s own home-grown Romeo. Gopalpur loves all of them – Romeo–Juliet, Laila–Majnu, Hir–Ranja . . . and of course Singh Sahib–Bibiji . . . all star-crossed, desperate couples dying for love. Love stories form the substratum of Gopalpur’s daydreams. A man like Singh Sahib who is willing to love in the glorious tradition of daydreams is naturally a legend. Secretly all Gopalpur’s men aspire to Singh Sahib’s love-standard, and some even think they love their women with the same honourable hopelessness, but they don’t. Their passion is nothing but a tremor in their collective imagination, a swindle by their egos.
‘Love stories will get you nowhere,’ says her mother.
‘Yes, hai, what if he is old and beats you?’ Sneha verbalises her sister’s worst fears. Sneha’s unquestioning gullibility isn’t the only thing Mamta can count on.
Once again the ditty takes hold of her . . .
Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll come on an old horse to get her, He’ll give her an old sari to wear, They’ll jiggery all night together, They’ll jiggery all night together.
Marked Mamta’s getting married, Marked Mamta’s getting married, To an old, old man, He’ll beat her black and blue, Her belly will be swollen in no time, They’ll jiggery that night too, They’ll jiggery that night too.
‘Amma, that Ramu said Bapu would sell me to the bandits if no one turns up to marry me,’ says Sneha. The taunting has left her nervous too.
‘Well, you can just tell him that there won’t be any bandits left by next planting season. Singh Sahib’s youngest son is bringing them all in and locking them in jail,’ says Mamta. ‘Amma, tell us again about the bandits,’ she says, moving away from the sordid world of taunting boys.
‘Yes, Amma, tell us, what did the bandits do?’
‘Where do these questions come from? All the time stories, stories, as if you girls have no work to do . . . as if I have no work to do. We can’t fritter our lives away on stories,’ says Lata Bai.
‘C’mon, Amma, tell us about Daku Manmohan,’ says Mamta. She knows she has to plead but a little for her mother to capitulate. It was Lata Bai who gave her a taste for stories in the first place. Bending the boundaries of time and place, she would weave together threads as separate as Kashmiri silk and Bengali cotton into one gargantuan tale of bravery, epic love and histrionic honour, leaping into the arena of myth with alacrity from a very lofty height.
‘Yes, come on, Amma, Mamta Didi will be leaving soon. There will be no one to beg you for stories after she goes,’ says Sneha, pulling a face.
Lata Bai smiles. Her children are still children. She suckles Shanti. ‘Stories, stories, that’s all you care for,’ she says mock-angry. ‘What about the cooking? What about the washing? What about the weeding and tying the vines back against the walls? What about the spices? The well water? Kneading the clay for a new pot; collecting the resin and the wild mangoes. So who will do all that then? Your father?’ The children look at her, their cheeks chubby with smiles. Of course she isn’t serious, they know that.
‘Come on, Amma . . .’
‘Okay, okay. But only for five minutes. What a time that was . . .’ Lata Bai’s eyes glass over. The children come closer to her, not to miss a word. They’ve heard this story many times before, but it is always slightly different, always exciting. ‘The surprise of the bandit raid was more traumatic than the bloodiness of it.
‘I remember it was evening. Earthy clouds heralded their arrival minutes before the rhythmic hoofbeats. They looked magnificent with their turban tails flowing behind them and their oiled moustaches gleaming in the sun . . .’ The romanticism of the gang’s appearance was shattered all too soon. Not one bandit had to dismount from his horse. Gopalpur simply capitulated, offered herself up spread-eagled, naked, defenceless, to the plunderer for his taking. All night the moans of the dead and dying glided through the fields. It wasn’t a night for heroism. People hid in the hay, in ditches and in sugarcane fields. In the morning they walked out to greet a pitiless sun that showed up the destruction in its unaccountable manifestations.
‘Of course they spared the landlords, the Singh family ensconced in the Big House. Some said the Big House paid the bandits to stay away . . .’
‘But Prem says that isn’t true. He says Singh Sahib is a man of honour, and his honour wouldn’t have allowed it. He says Singh Sahib hates his son because of this surrender and if he wasn’t so sick, Singh Sahib would gladly hunt down Daku Manmohan . . . right this minute,’ interjects Mamta, filling in for her absent favourite brother.
‘Maybe, maybe. But what do we know of Singh Sahib, the zamindar of Gopalpur living in his Big House, out of our sight? We only know how much he charges for his loans and that damned son of his, Ram Singh, is like a vulture, usurping lands left, right and centre, just like Daku Manmohan. One son adds to the bandit numbers, while the other tries to cull them . . .
‘Those damned gangs. They came sweeping in from the direction of the dusty Gopalpur wind where the famines were so awful that it was said that people had begun to eat cow meat and sometimes even human flesh. At first, they took whatever their horses could carry, mostly sacks of wheat and washing left to dry unguarded on clothes lines. But we weren’t under any illusions. We knew that once the bandits attacked, they returned.
‘Each night, we had to find a different place to sleep. Under the ridge, by the riverbank, or hidden in the roots of the banyan trees . . .’ (never at the Red Ruins or the dry well, that’s where the bandits raped the girls) ‘. . . in the mornings we dragged ourselves back to our huts. As the gangs became stronger, they became bolder, and started looting everything . . . including children. That’s when my brother went missing. Others lost family too. Shyam Lal lost a son and Moti a son and a daughter. Nutan Bai thought the bandits had taken her daughter Kanno, but she found her hiding in a haystack, her leg poked through with the point of one of their knives.’
‘Even now, after all this time, Kanno doesn’t speak. We used to think her tongue was cut off, but she stuck it out at me just last week. I wonder why she doesn’t speak.’ Sneha is most concerned for the fate of dumb Kanno.
Lata Bai continues: ‘Gope’s teashop also vanished with the bandits. Gope’s tea was famous. He could pour the liquid from a great height, pulling it into brown rainbows a metre long. Each time the bandits came, they stopped at Gope’s for a cup of tea, tossing him not one rupee coins, but five rupee notes for his frothy drinks.
‘Of course, it couldn’t last. Gope was making money off the bandits, while Gopalpur was paying in sacks of grain. So the farmers managed to convince Gope to lace his tea with rat poison.
‘The bandits burned down his teashop, killed his son, and, and . . . they had their way with Gope’s daughter-in-law.’
‘Amma means raped,’ says Mamta.
‘. . . and left her to die.’
‘But you know what I heard from Sunita only yesterday? She said that Daku Manmohan is a hero to the girls in the village. She said he saved her sister from rape by that, that, that . . . Babulal. And Prem says he’s only surrendering because Lokend Bhai asked him to.’
‘I don’t know about the rape, all I know is that he never shied from killing. I remember them systematically burning everything in the village and cutting off the hands of those who dared to fight back. They left the handless and Gope alive as a lesson to others who might think of defying them. These creatures hang around by the Lakshmi temple begging for scraps . . .’
The last raid took place almost two years ago. Since then Gopalpur has managed to pull itself together. People are prosperous enough to get in debt again. And now the bandits, offered government amnesty, are surrendering all over India, and with Lokend’s persuasion in Gopalpur as well. All those years of looting didn’t earn Gopalpur a mention in the city papers, but news of the surrender has. From now on, Gopalpur’s fate will be to teeter on the edge of infamy, written up far too often in the daily papers.
Evening has come to Gopalpur and with it some lone cowherd’s flute cries out to them. Its lilting voice melts into their pores, stirring up a sympathetic pathos. Such is the nature of this trained wind, to bring equal parts sorrow and joy to the listener.
Chapter 2
RAM SINGH ENJOYS THE CRISP FEEL of the razor blade against his cheek. He needn’t bother shaving for the wedding, but he does. He shoos off the flies dancing around his face with his free hand.
‘Looks respectful,’ he says to Babulal his overseer who comes over with steaming tea. ‘When they see me all shaved and dressed up, they will know I care about them. You can’t let slaves know they are slaves, they might become discontent. All you need to do is throw these people a bone or two and like starving dogs they will stop barking and lick your hand.’ His words are carefully chosen for maximum effect. ‘You’ve put Seeta Ram down in the book, haven’t you?’ Babulal nods, taking a warming sip of tea. ‘My father always made the time to attend both weddings and funerals in the lands, and I will be damned if I’m the one to break with tradition.’
‘Ram Bhaia, Ram Bhaia!’ Lokend comes running to his elder brother, grinning from ear to ear. His teeth, big like shelled peanuts, burst out of his face. ‘Ram Bhaia, I believe Seeta Ram’s daughter is getting married. Take this box of sweets to her, will you. I would take it myself, but those damn policewalas have made a hash of Daku Manmohan’s case and now he says he won’t surrender unless I am there to guarantee the safety of his family. As if I could guarantee anyone’s safety. They only listen to me because I am Singh Sahib’s son. Anyway, if Bapu’s position can be used to help someone, then why not.’
Ram Singh arranges his stance for a fight. ‘What should I tell you? What could I tell you that you don’t already know? The evidence is before you. You know what the villagers say? They say they will find peace only in their graves. They say that once again the bandits will rule this land, and do you know why? Because of your ridiculous surrender scheme. Every four years a politician passes through this place with a stack of promises, a bunch of gundas and a pack of chaiwalas. All standard issue from Delhi, but they have done nothing for our village. We shouldn’t let those bandits surrender; we should hunt them down like rabbits.’
‘Bhaia, guns will bring more guns. You hit a man with a rock, he’ll come back at you with a stick. You hit a man with a stick, he’ll come back at you with a sword. You attack him with a sword, he’ll retaliate with a gun. Surrender is the only answer. Non-violence is the only lasting weapon. To that there can be no retaliation.’ It’s easy to mistake the younger for the elder.
‘This may be the land of Gandhi, non-violence may have worked against the British, but against these motherfuckers we need guns.’
‘Guns can never be the answer; violence is a primitive tool, the antithesis of civilisation.’
‘You are a dreamer,’ says Ram Singh. ‘All your effort won’t move one grain of the future.’
‘Yes, in a way you are right, but even so, you only make your enemies stronger by fighting them. It’s a misguided man who’ll fight without the backing of his people. It’s a foolish man who’ll fight without the backing of his god . . .’ He laughs. ‘We must all be foolish men then.’
Ram Singh feels himself pulled into his younger brother’s eyes. He shivers with irritation and says, ‘I have to go, I will be late.’
‘Don’t forget the sweets, and give Prem a ride too. I don’t think he’s ever sat in a jeep before,’ Lokend shouts before running off, his white dhoti flapping in the breeze.
At first glance he is a hunchback, with none of the awkwardness of the deformed, but at a second it is easy to see the deformity for what it is – a pet mongoose.
‘I wish he’d get rid of that damn thing. It gives me the creeps. He says he keeps it to remind him that sometimes kindness can defeat cruelty, just like a mongoose can tear the head off a snake. Why is the mongoose “kind” and the snake “cruel”, I ask you? I think he says that to make an impression on me. As if I care. Our great-great-great-grandfather was a zamindar. Should we stop now just because my younger brother doesn’t have the taste for it?’
The overseer knows better than to reply to Ram Singh’s rhetorical questions. His brother’s presence induces self-doubt. Nothing a little rum won’t cure. Babulal takes a bottle out of his kurta pocket.
‘No, not before the wedding,’ says Ram Singh. This time Lokend’s presence has an unusually long-lasting effect on him. ‘I am going to see Bapu,’ he says, without moving his reluctant feet. ‘I better go see Bapu . . .’ He looks back at the Big House. Anxious beads of perspiration have sprouted on his face. ‘I must go see Bapu now or I’ll be late.’ Managing to convince himself in stages, he moves swiftly towards the house.
The Big House shimmers in the distance with an inner light that shrieks at the onlooker. Its gleaming whitewash puts a glare in the eye. It has been that way since it was built more than one hundred years ago. It has stood gleaming through every summer, every monsoon and every addition. Its glow comes not just from the trueness of the whitewash, but also from the belief in its power. It stands apart and above the brown plane, a jewel of prosperity and control.
Many families living in Gopalpur owe their existence to the Big House. Most of their forefathers worked on it during the great drought. Singh Sahib’s great-great-great-grandfather, the then king, kept extending the building as a means of paying the villagers in grain. The construction stopped only when the rains arrived, and it was at its completion that Gopalpur got its name.
In the old days this land of ravines was a malingering nomadic expanse, visited mostly by cattle. They would arrive from nowhere and everywhere to leave great heaps of dung pats for the wandering tribes to collect. The tribes’ people named the place Gobarpur: gobar – cow dung, pur – site. Cow dung site. But Gobarpur didn’t sound elegant enough to support the shining Big House, so Singh Sahib’s great-great-great-grandfather changed the name to Gopalpur – the abode of Gopal, the flute-playing, blue-skinned god of love. And to firmly establish Gopalpur as the true eponymous land of the love god, the great-great-grandfather planted a virtual forest of mango trees brought all the way from Vrindavan, from the very same legendary orchards in which the young Gopal was believed to have seduced throngs of milkmaids with a lot more than just his flute-wielding prowess. Few trees survive today, but their fruits are blessed with extraordinary sweetness. Come dusk, there is at least one flute to be heard in Gopalpur, perpetuating its name.
The Singhs didn’t remain kings much longer after Gobarpur became Gopalpur. They were forced to give up the throne and their privy purses when the country achieved independence from British rule.
Gobarpur or Gopalpur, king or zamindar, the people still look to the Big House for sustenance.
Ram Singh strides to his father’s room, a man with a purpose. The slaps of his sandals echo so loudly in the corridor that he has to turn and look to make sure he is alone. Asmara Didi is standing outside Singh Sahib’s room, waiting as it were for Ram Singh’s appearance. He is annoyed.
They enter the room together.
Singh Sahib, the widowed father of the two boys, is in bed. An untidy chess game is spread before him like an unfinished meal. From his vantage point Ram Singh can see that the black king is in a snare he can’t get out of. He feels in much the same snare himself.
‘You are white, I hope?’ He mocks his father. ‘Which one of his pet dogs did he get to play with him today?’ Ram Singh asks Asmara Didi. She has no intention of replying. In days long past father and son might have played a game of chess together, but that is no longer the case.
Singh Sahib looks at Asmara Didi and lifts his left hand slightly. That one tiny movement serves as a swath of communication between them. Her knees are stiff and both crack mutinously at different times as she kneels to touch his purple gout-infected toes with her forehead.
‘Oh sht . . . op.’ Singh Sahib absolved Asmara Didi from touching his feet months after she cured his wife Bibiji of her mysterious illness and made her strong enough in the ‘female department’ to bear him a child. But Asmara Didi has neither acknowledged her status in the Big House nor her employer’s wishes.
Still kneeling, she removes Singh Sahib’s quilt with one flick, a little like a magician revealing the finale to a most complicated trick, and places his turban on his head in an unpunctuated movement. Singh Sahib, standing six feet five inches, the biggest man in the region, at his heaviest one hundred and ten kilos, was never a fat man. Now, uncovered and turbaned, his immense frame takes over the room.
Singh Sahib’s right arm dangles like a curtain pull by his side. Asmara Didi places the limp limb in his lap, palm facing upwards. It falls to the ground. Once again she places it with great care in his lap. Again, it slips. She has to discipline the unruly curled hand a few times before it will stay still.
Ram Singh moves closer to his paralysed father, allowing the dead limb no dignity in his scrutiny. Asmara Didi wrinkles her brows and throws her head quickly forward and back a few times like an old mare. Move back, she says silently. Move back or else.
Even now, five years since his father’s illness, Ram Singh feels uncomfortable standing taller than him. He bends his knees and straightens. Sitting, head higher than Singh Sahib’s, is unthinkable. Technically, standing is disrespectful too, but standing is more deferential than sitting.
The son looks from the shining buckles on his sandals to his father’s feet. He stopped touching them long ago. He still remembers the day that his father spitefully kept pulling them out of reach till Ram Singh was almost chasing those elusive toes on his hands and knees like a dog.
Singh Sahib makes an initial attempt to speak from the mobile side of his mouth. He only manages to leak spit like a dripping tap. Asmara Didi wipes his spit with a towel. It is clear the old man puts up with the woman’s fussing with a degree of annoyance. But he has grown used to her. He installed her in the Big House years ago to keep his fading wife company. He has a lot to thank her for, including his own two boys. She was clever with her potions even then.
‘How’sh . . . brother? Come . . . closher.’ Singh Sahib’s words are like river stones bounced by young boys across rushing water, leaping along, with great gaps in between.
Asmara Didi and Ram Singh move forward together in the single movement of a cast net. Again the turbaned man signals to the woman with a look; this time she leaves the room. Her eyes linger long and hard on Ram Singh’s back where the whitewash from the wall has left powder marks on his indigo Nehru jacket.
Ram Singh feels an old welt open up again, and he says, ‘Fine, I imagine,’ with practised nonchalance.
‘Whe . . . ll . . . you sheen him?’ Wheeze in. Wheeze out.
‘Yes.’ Monosyllabic answers convey more than full sentences. ‘. . . jealoushy . . . no . . . n,’ the old man says out of the working side of his mouth.
The son looks into his father’s face without a trace of emotion. His father is forbidden to him. Singh Sahib’s long morning in bed has not dulled the glow of his pristine crackly starched embroidered white muslin kurta with precisely thirty-seven deliberate creases in each sleeve. Asmara Didi takes great care of Singh Sahib’s clothes and puts the creases in herself each morning with a heavy brass iron studded with little arched windows along both sides through which she blows at the hot coals.
The sun is high outside. The light perfectly illuminates the picture of the elephant-headed Ganesha flanked by peacocks painted by Bibiji on the back wall of the room. There are bars on the window. Rectangles of sunlight dance just above Singh Sahib’s head, falling in and out of his eyes.
The old man lies prone, mentally shading his eyes. As it is, he can’t use his good hand for fear of falling over. The thought of falling over makes Singh Sahib’s mouth flicker with the hint of a smile. He can clearly recall how Bibiji had fallen over in the backseat of their jeep when he’d brought her back as his new bride. How embarrassed it had made her and how prettily she’d blushed. How that blush had reached out to him and grabbed his heart from inside his chest, never to let go.