Travails with Chachi

by Louise Fernandes Khurshid

  ‘Bring out the mithai,’ Bablu ki Ma called out. ‘Bring out my hookah,’ said Dadu. Fauji Chacha and his two sons brought out their double-barreled shotguns and fired shots in the air. And even Mehnath stopped chewing and offered the beetle leaf to his son.

  But Pushpa continued to look worried. ‘Are you sure the telegram is not wrongly addressed?’ she whispered. ‘A Yadav in a Rajput Regiment? Are you sure this is not some devious plan of those Thakurs who are against us?’

  Three years later a telegram arrived that Bachu was to return on leave. We happened to be visiting so were happy to join in the excitement. Pushpa started rolling out the kachoris. Bablu ki Ma had the little rascal up the bel pathar tree. Fauji Chacha started cleaning out his double barrel gun. Even Dadu had a new spring in his step.

  As he got off the Kalindi Express at Fatehgarh Station Chacha, resplendent with all medals, smartly saluted him. As he stepped out of my freshly washed Chachi, Dadu brought out his father’s hookah and presented it to Bachu with a flourish, telling him that this was a sign that his Dadu accepted him today as a man rather than yet another young boy in the khandaan.

  The first day passed so quickly even Bachu asked for permission to sleep early. On the second day he and some old friends took out Chacha’s old army disposal Jonga and went on shikar along the Ganga terrai. On the third day he even consented to look at some photographs of prospective brides.

  On the face of it Bachu looked glowing with happiness, confident that he was now a full earning member of our biradari. But something was eating him up inside. Bablu ki Ma was the first to notice and she urged me to get to the bottom of it. I had meant to speak to Bachu on his last evening home but the prospective bride’s chacha chose just that time to bring across the fellow who matches the janam patris. Later that night Bachu was scheduled to catch the Kalindi Express to New Delhi.

  The events that overtook us are now history. To my embarrassment Chachi, my normally trustworthy DLY taxi, refused to start. Even Kallua Khan, the best mechanic we have in the village, couldn’t figure out the problem. And since we had left so little leeway before setting out for the station at Fatehgarh in the neighbouring district of Farrukhabad − over 90 kms away − Bachu missed his train. He cursed something terrible. Dadu was shocked. Mehnath, however, was most impressed. ‘Ladke mein kuch dum hai!’ he said very smugly. I tried to reason with Bachu but, for the first time he turned his face away from me, his favourite uncle, and went to sleep without eating.

  I spent a troubled night.

  Imagine then my surprise at the sight the next morning. There was Pushpa, for once smiling, burning chillies over Chachi’s bonnet. Mehnath was patting her sides lovingly and Bablu was actually pressed into hosing down her muddy tyres! ‘Arre bhai,’ Bablu ki Ma said, ‘since when has Jawai Babu started showering praise on Chachi? He’s always only compared her unfavourably to his Armada jeep and Tau Nakli Singh’s Mahendra Bolero. Ab kya baat hai? Must be wanting to siphon out the diesel.’

  In the end it was a visibly shaken Bachu who brought in the news. Two of his batchmates − one from neighbouring Kannauj and the other further down the G.T. Road at Bhongaon − had died a terrible death the previous night when the speeding Purshottom Express had crashed into the back of the stationary Kalindi Express just outside Tundla station. The very same Kalindi that my stubborn Chachi had made Bachu miss ….

  ‘Is this how it all ends? Crushed under ten tons of twisted metal, snuffed out in one’s sleep? We talk of spit and polish and discipline and duty. Day in and day out. Day in and day out. To what avail? To what avail when, in a flash of indiscipline, some irresponsible signalman hurtles more than 500 people to a tragic end? We toil and trouble day in and day out, drilled into our heads that we face the enemy with fearlessness. And time and time again our honour is compromised into aiming the gun at our own countrymen.’

  I let him ramble on. His guilt at being alive, while body parts of his friends were vulture food in the fierce UP sun, was eating him up.

  Worse still the face of the little Kashmiri girl, who fell to crossfire between his regiment and militants, haunted him even more. Was this how it all ended? With a half eaten apple in one hand and a bullet in the heart?

  31

  WHAT A TAMASHA!

  I DIDN’T NEED ANY MORE TENSION IN MY LIFE. BACHU’S predicament set me thinking. But you’ll be surprised how few people you meet along the byways of UP are even remotely concerned with what happens on the streets of Kashmir. Bablu ki Ma has her own way of coping. She just increases her time at this women’s organization, Saheli, and cooks up a storm at home. What I don’t see or hear doesn’t bother me and, so long as she keeps her male bashing away from home, I indulge her moments of what Bablu terms ‘women’s liberation’.

  Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I returned home one day after a hard day’s work, expecting to be greeted with a cup of piping hot chai and a plate of mirch ka pakoras, and what did I get? One dozen hysterical females, of all shapes and sizes, screaming at the top of their voices. ‘Arre bhai’, I thought that day. ‘Kya hua? Kya maine kissi chhori ke samne galthi se aankh tho nahi mara?’

  I was naturally nervous. The last time I witnessed such a tamasha was when Gurcharan’s hand accidentally brushed against the front of this lady lawyer’s black gown. First she started screaming. Then she insisted he drive her to the nearest police station − to file a complaint of sexual harassment against himself! Then, when the police fellows laughed at the flimsiness of the evidence, she rushed to the Defence Colony office of that very same women’s organisation, Saheli, and got the women there all steamed up. Arre bhai! What a tamasha!

  Bablu ki Ma reminds me of that incident periodically. Especially when our man talk gets a bit boisterous. Remember our revenge, she hints darkly. Remember our revenge.

  Don’t I remember! Unlike mine, the financial situation of Gurcharan, the chief at our taxi stand, is quite posh. Not only does he own Bhabhi and Guddi, DLY taxis like my own Chachi, but he also owns two interstate licensed trucks. At the rear of the older truck he has inscribed the legend: ‘Buri nazar wale, tere muh kala’. Taking inspiration from this, the infuriated ladies had marched in an unruly, noisy procession to our stand and covered Gurcharan’s face with the choicest of black paint.

  How did they know where to find us? Ask my recently ‘liberated’ wife. Escaping, with a vengeance, from the enforced purdah on all women (Muslim and Hindu) in our home village in district Etawah, she has started experimenting a little too liberally with freedom. She spends two hours of one day each week in making alu ka parathas and chai for hapless females who run to this place for shelter against abusive husbands and harassing mothers-in-law.

  No amount of persuasion can make her stop this routine. ‘What will your mother-in-law say?’ I often ask. ‘Are you suggesting that her son beats you?’ I stopped questioning her the day she looked me straight in the eye and, in a chi-chi accent, said, ‘There are different ways of harassment, not all of them physical.’ The face-blackening incident, I later learned, was part of her ‘initiation’. Of course she passed with flying colours!

  But to return to my hysterical reception. As I entered the front room I noticed Bablu lurking round. I called him aside and asked what the problem was. Was there some grievance against anyone in particular or generally against all us mard log?

  I quietly slunk into a corner after − for the first time in 10 years − getting my own cup of chai. ‘The mirch ka pakoras are all gone,’ said the fat lady on my right. ‘They were delicious,’ she added, delicately burping into her missionary-handcrafted lace handkerchief. ‘It’s so great to sink my teeth into a true blue samosa,’ her companion on the left said. ‘I thought I would never get that smell of fried pork and Peking duck out of my nasal passages after that Women’s Conference in Beijing,’ the badey chashma wali with the Khadi Gram Udyog thaila said loudly, ‘And three cheers for some good old fashioned daal roti,’ said Bablu ki Ma.

  I couldn’t he
lp smiling. The little lady hadn’t even gone in smelling distance of Chinese Hut, the small Kaka dhaba down the road run by those two chinky-eyed boys from Tehri Garhwal. And here she was pretending that she too had just returned from the NGO Conference on Women held the previous month in China.

  ‘What’s Ma showing off about,’ the smart aleck Bablu sniggered. ‘She can’t even pronounce Beijing, let alone that tongue-twisting place 60 kms away where the NGO bash was held.’ I wanted to join in the snigger. But I hesitated. With my own limited knowledge of English, surely I was not one to talk?

  I felt almost indulgent watching Bablu ki Ma add her two bits. The conversation had turned towards some strong statement made at the conference by some lady called Hillary Clinton about bride burning and dowry deaths in India. Opinion was divided about whether she should have singled out India like that, especially when that chhori Benazir had done her usual India bashing once more. The razor thin khadi thailey wali said Clinton was quite justified in exposing us. ‘These b*****y men have got away with murder for too long. I welcome the criticism. How long will we pretend that we are a nation of non-violent satyagrahis? How long will Mahatma Gandhi continue to roll around in his grave? We are such firangi chamchas. Maybe this criticism from a firangi will have more impact than our own protests. I salute you, Hillary.’

  The fat lady, who by this time was on to her fourth ginger flavoured chai (to neutralize the indigestion caused by the mirch ka pakoras), seemed to feel otherwise. ‘We don’t need some pale skin telling us what to do with our problems,’ she said. ‘What right do these firangis have to point a finger at us? Why doesn’t someone remind them that when you point a finger at your neighbour, there are always three fingers pointing back at you? If they had no problem of discrimination would Michael Jackson have to sing the song: “It don’t matter if you’re black or white”?’

  The final word came from the most unexpected quarter. The fat lady got up to relieve some of the pressure on her bladder and who should I see, so far hidden from view? My friend Gurcharan Singh! What in the world was he doing here? I asked. I would have thought he’d have run a mile from such a collection of militant brassiere burners.

  Turns out Gurcharan had stumbled into the chaos. He had come over for a glass of desi sharab (which I indulge in on the rare occasion) and stayed to listen when he heard the topic move towards dowry deaths.

  Gurcharan and I looked at each other. We were obviously both thinking of the same thing. It was over ten years ago when we got this anonymous call from a hysterical woman who seemed convinced her neighbour was being burnt to death. She kept screaming: ‘Call the police. Call the police. Sudha is dying. Sudha is dying.’ Gurcharan kept saying she had the wrong number, that we were a taxi stand and not a police station. He tried saying that we were willing to come across and also call the police if she stopped screaming long enough to give us the address. But to no avail.

  What a frustrating and disturbing night it was for us − knowing that someone needed help and not knowing where to go to render that help. Then, imagine the bitter taste in our mouths the next morning when we read in the paper that someone called Sudha Goel, a young woman in the last stages of pregnancy, had died the previous night of 70 per cent burns .…

  I had scanned all the newspapers for details. The police apparently accepted the theory − put forward by her husband and in-laws − that the death was an accident. But, to my mind, things did not add up. For instance, why would she, at her advanced stage of pregnancy, have squatted on the ground to heat up the milk? Or why, when there was a gas stove in the kitchen should she have used a kerosene stove in the first place? Or why, when she was screaming for help, would her brother-in-law have refused to open the door? Could anyone accept his explanation that he locked the door, trapping Sudha within the fire zone, because he was worried the fire would spread throughout the house?!

  But what surprised us even more were the different eyes with which various courts of our land looked at these same facts. Gurcharan and I rejoiced the day the sessions judge (S. M. Aggarwal, I think his name was) gave Sudha’s husband, brother-in-law and mother-in-law the death penalty. But imagine our horror when a division bench of the Delhi High Court completely reversed the order, finding, on the very same set of facts, reason to let the three go completely scot free!!

  By the time the case came up for the judgment of the Supreme Court we were not expecting miracles. And miracles we did not get. Ironically, the apex court did reject the High Court opinion and went along with the findings of the Sessions Court. But when it came to punishment, what Sudha Goel’s parents got was cold comfort. The in-laws still got away and even the one who didn’t − the husband − only got life imprisonment. The SC’s reasoning for this lesser sentence? That too much time had lapsed since the incident first took place. Time enough for the husband to get married again and have another child .…

  It took a particularly loud belch from the fat lady to jolt me out of that awful memory. Gurcharan and I exchanged looks again and silently raised our mugs of adrak ki chai to cheer this lady, Hillary Clinton.

  True, perhaps she would have made a better point if she had raised the issue here itself during her visit to India, rather than in China where Pakistan was looking for yet another opportunity to attack our nation. But even I, the so-called offending mard realised that it was time we stopped brushing this issue under the carpet and let the truth hang out to dry.

  32

  LAND OF THE BUDDHA?

  THE LITTLE LADY’S BELAN BASHING MOOD CONTINUED through the week. Too bad another telegram should come from the village at this time. Up went the belan once again as Bablu entered waving it. Fortunately before his mother could say anything uncomplimentary Bablu revealed that it came from his beloved Dadu.

  Now my father has never called for me before. Even Bablu ki Ma had to bow down to that. In fact it was she who was worried. Go immediately, she insisted. I lost no time, called into the taxi stand, cancelled all out station trips for the next week and got down to packing. Bablu ki Ma, of course, started rolling out the alu ka parathas.

  ‘Can I come too?’ Bablu asked. I thought, why not. He had four days off for Gandhi Jayanti, Janmashtami and Dussehra. Might as well take him. These city kids are so much in danger of losing touch with their roots. What better thing to do than make him feel I had done him a favour by taking him home.

  We arrived by noon the next day − right in the middle of a stormy gathering of the clan. Tau Nakli Singh, as usual, was holding forth. Dadu had his hands up to speak but − till I called this to Tau’s attention − nobody seemed to notice.

  The sum total of the problem was this: Thakur Lambemoochwala’s nephew, that senior UP government officer, had heard from a colleague in the Tourism Department that our venerable chief minister planned to go to Japan to get help to develop tourism in the state. The inside track was that special emphasis was to be on Buddhist tourism − to attract the devoted (and rich) Japanese to the many things UP has to offer in the footsteps of the Buddha.

  Our immediate concern, on hearing this news, was about the fate of the family’s land holdings in Basantpur village in the neighbouring district of Farrukhabad. On a considerable portion of our land lies the Buddhist pilgrim centre of ‘Sankisa.’

  The very word got Bablu all excited. He had only recently completed a history lesson on the life of Gautam Buddha and, having secured 80 per cent marks in the exam, considered himself a walking encyclopedia on Buddhism in India. ‘Do you know that Hieun Tsang and other Chinese travellers have mentioned Sankisa in their travelogues?’ he asked me. I’m afraid my own Mission School, Etawah, history lessons hadn’t stretched that far. It was Dadu who rescued me from being embarrassed in front of the beta.

  Yes, he said, he had heard. His friend, Shaitan Singh Shakya (the Shakya community being Buddhists) had confirmed that, indeed, Sankisa is located in the present Basantpur village, which is situated in the ruins of an ancient fort. About 500 yards from the villa
ge, in a sacred spot, is a temple dedicated to Bisari Devi, which stands on a stupa. An Ashoka elephant pillar has been excavated from close to the stupa. Near the pillar, on a platform, stands a temple with a statue of the Buddha. It is believed that Lord Buddha, along with Brahma and Devraj Indra, descended on this spot after giving sermons to his mother in Heaven.

  I had heard that the government had its eyes on our land to develop the tourism potential further. In fact the process started when our own biradari brother, Mulayam (‘Softy’) Singh was in power. At that time we had rejoiced because we were told that this development meant enhancing of the Farrukhabad airstrip. My childhood friends from the Sadhwara − the famous printing centre in the heart of Farrukhabad town − had been thrilled. This would mean they could fly their foreign contacts right into the district. We had even talked about a fifty/fifty partnership in a short taxi service between the airport and the town.

  As a result, I could not understand what the alarm was all about. Certainly for me any talk of development of tourism meant more travel and hence, more tourist taxis and buses.

  But I did understand the worry of the rest. So long as our own man was the chief minister we had been, more or less, confident that no action would be taken against our interests. After all, his soft spot towards his own Yadav biradari was well known. But the current CM had clawed her way to the top, swearing vengeance on us Yadavs. She would, in this mood, surely ensure that government took over our lands with the minimum of compensation.

  That was what the meeting was about. What to do to prevent this situation?

  Pandit Bimari, called in by my Tau as a ‘friendly observer’, was the first to raise his hand. He, too, was very unhappy with our CM because, being a Brahmin, his community featured high on her ‘hit list’. Remember her very first slogan was ‘Tilak (Brahmin), Tarazu (Bania) aur Talwar (Thakur), sab ko maro joota char’. He went back to the worship of Brahma and Devraj Indra and offered a simple solution: send a group of people to the spot in the night and − at least at the four ends of our property − place little murtis of these gods there. ‘In the morning a priest − someone I can trust fully − will, coincidentally, be walking past the area,’ he said. ‘And so another miracle will be born. Then let’s see which administration will interfere.’