Passage Across the Mersey

by Robert Bhatia

  Helen and Avadh travelled to Ahmedabad to drop off her luggage and then on to Ajmer in Rajasthan, closer to Delhi, where Avadh, with his family’s help, had arranged the wedding. There, at the Arya Samaj temple, Helen and Avadh were married on 24 May 1950.

  The Arya Samaj wedding ceremony is less elaborate than most Hindu weddings, lasting only an hour or so, and Helen and Avadh’s was very small. The ceremony was presided over by a Brahmin friend of Avadh’s father. Both Helen and Avadh were dressed in off-white silk salwar kameez – a long shirt or tunic combined with pyjama-like pants that taper from the waist to ankles – and garlanded with flowers.

  Three times Helen made a ritual offering of water to Avadh: first to pour on his feet, then his body and finally to drink. She offered him yoghurt, ghee and honey, which he sprinkled in all directions and then ate. After that, taking Helen’s hand in his, Avadh chanted mantras promising to look after her and provide for her always.

  Fire, the purest of all elements, is central to the wedding ceremony as it is said to strengthen the vows of the couple. In the 49° C (120° F) heat, they circled the fire four times, then were bound together ceremonially with a sash tied with three knots. They took seven steps together around the fire, binding themselves in spirit, and then made a final circling. After blessings by the Brahmin, they placed their hands on their hearts and chanted mantras pledging their love and asking for the Almighty’s blessing.

  This was the moment Helen had been awaiting for such a long time. She hadn’t made it to the altar with either Harry or Eddie but, at last, she was marrying a man she loved deeply and passionately, to whom she was happy to devote her life. In Thursday’s Child, she writes: ‘With a flow of tender understanding between us we were married in front of the Creator.’ Perhaps she was speaking for herself.

  I’m sure there was a tinge of regret that none of her family could be there. Sadly, none of Avadh’s family could attend either. Back at the family home in Delhi, his father had been taken ill and the doctors said he was dying. According to Hindu tradition, if Avadh’s father died, there could be no wedding for a year so there was no time to lose. Avadh must have been worried about his father, but nothing could mar the perfect day when Helen at last became his wife.

  Without taking a honeymoon, they headed back to their new home in Ahmedabad. Helen described what happened next in a letter to a friend, written in the 1990s:

  After a few days, my eldest brother-in-law called us to Delhi, and I stayed in the old Imperial hotel, so that Avadh could be present at his father’s death. Since the communal family included aged and crosspatch uncles who did not approve of Avadh’s marriage, I did not attend either the death or the cremation.

  I never saw my father-in-law, but he was tremendously good to me in organizing our wedding from his deathbed and changing his will, so that I inherited the appropriate small gifts he left to all his daughters-in-law. I still have the four bracelets I had made out of the lump of gold he left me, and a number of gold British sovereigns which I hope to pass on to my grandchildren in his memory. It was not a very happy start to a marriage but we sustained each other.

  There is no surviving description of my grandfather but in Thursday’s Child there is a passage about the family patriarch, Ram Singh, that is broadly consistent with references in Avadh’s letters to his own father.

  [He] was noted for his toleration of the unorthodox behaviour of others, and, in fact, his own household was by no means orthodox. Many Western innovations had crept in. He had, however, insisted upon the observance of certain customs. No meat or eggs ever entered his house, although he had been discreetly deaf when busybodies told him that his sons ate both of these in restaurants. Prayers were said, fasts and festivals were kept, food was prepared in accordance with caste rules, and his charity was unfailing. He accepted his sons’ Western mode of dress, since it had long been adopted by civil servants, and he himself wore it on official occasions; but when he was at home he wore the village-woven shirts and dhotis of his own people. When his father, Ajit’s grandfather, died, Ram Singh abolished purdah throughout the family, much to his mother’s disgust. He expected, however, that his womenfolk would not go out alone and would behave with modesty.

  Ram Singh ruled with justice what was still really a communal family, banded together for safety in troubled times, and for the protection of their weak and helpless ones. He considered every action and every question raised from the viewpoint of what was best for the family as a whole, and this frequently meant the sublimation of the desires of one member for the good of the many.

  The sovereigns Avadh’s father left to Helen in his will sit in a frame on the corner of my desk as I write this, a lasting connection to my tolerant grandfather and to that hot wedding day in Ajmer. They will indeed pass to Helen’s grandchildren.

  While Avadh was in Delhi attending to his father, Helen wrote to him from the Imperial Hotel with all the ardour of a newlywed: ‘Ten days seems like eternity without you. How on earth did I ever wait five months before!! A month of marriage has taught me that I cannot do without you. Your flesh is my flesh, your mind my mind, and your spirit my spirit. We are each other.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  I had a new name, a new religion, a new language, a new diet and a totally new way of doing everything, domestic or social. I wore Indian clothes and learned Indian manners, to the best of my ability.

  When Helen arrived in Ahmedabad in 1950 it had a population of about three-quarters of a million. This was roughly the same size as Liverpool or Manchester at the time, but while these English cities were declining in population, Ahmedabad had almost trebled in size since 1920. Its diverse mixture of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Jains contributed to a complex society, one that greatly fascinated my mother. She wrote in The Moneylenders of Shahpur about the intricacies of inter-caste marriage, and about a university teacher who was vilified by the local Jains for killing a fish for his biological research. Jains do not permit killing of any animals. In fact, Jain monks sweep the floor in front of them with a long feather to brush aside any insects so they do not accidentally step on them.

  Ahmedabad is located in the western state of Gujarat, about eighty kilometres inland from the Arabian Sea. Historically, it had been a strong commercial, financial and industrial centre, specializing in the trade of gold, silk and cotton. In 1950 it had a significant and progressive business establishment.

  The first major cotton mill was established in 1861 and the industry grew rapidly. Because the mills produced a coarse product that was well suited to the domestic market, Ahmedabad’s industry withstood the onslaught of cotton imports from Great Britain relatively well. By the 1940s, the textile industry was booming and the city was nicknamed the ‘Manchester of India’. The 1940s also brought the establishment of the Physical Research Laboratory, several other educational institutions and finally, in 1949, Gujarat University.

  Ahmedabad was particularly active in the Indian independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi had established two ashrams (a type of monastery) in the area in 1915 and 1917, and these later became centres of independence activism. Significant protests and strikes by textile workers against various aspects of English rule occurred from 1919 on. Ahmedabad was also the scene of much violence in the Hindu/Muslim riots that followed Partition in 1947, so the vibrant city in which Helen arrived in 1950 had had a turbulent recent past.

  If someone were looking for the ‘real’ India in 1950, Ahmedabad must have been a good place to start because the influence of the British colonizers had been less there than elsewhere on the subcontinent. The English as a race were generally viewed with suspicion outside the upper echelons of big business. However, despite its good rail and road links, Ahmedabad was sufficiently isolated that Helen was seen more as a curiosity than as a representative of the former oppressor.

  In Thursday’s Child, Peggie describes her arrival in the fictional city of Shahpur, which is based on Ahmedabad:

  Shahpur station is big,
but when our train drew into the platform at the end of a hot May day it was crammed to capacity with a shouting, milling crowd and with immense piles of luggage, amongst which strode the railway police with their rifles slung over their shoulders. A thin, red-shirted, red-turbaned porter piled onto his head our tin trunk, two pigskin trunks and a bedding roll, took a suitcase in each hand, and then motioned us to lead the way to the ticket barrier.

  Peggie then embarks on a long, harrowing ride in a horse-drawn tonga [a light carriage]. While she mentions car horns in the centre of the city, motor vehicles would have been few and far between. Thirty years later, I looked out of a hotel window in the centre of Kanpur, another big industrial city, watching the endless oxen, bullocks, goats, pedestrians and cycle rickshaws passing by, and counted several minutes between each motorized vehicle, so I am sure there were even fewer in 1950. Helen and Avadh’s eight- to nine-kilometre trip to their flat on the outskirts of the city could easily have taken a couple of hours by tonga because of the narrow, rutted streets crowded with people, camels and all manner of commerce.

  In May, the temperature was probably over 43°C (110°F) and unlikely to drop below 27°C (80°F) at night-time. How did my mother cope with the heat? She describes English characters in her Indian novels whose pale skin is flushed scarlet with the effects of the climate. She said that the local women ‘always made a joke of me because I used to go tomato red in the heat, which was a phenomenon they could not understand’.

  Helen and Avadh had been promised a bungalow by the Physical Research Laboratory but it had not yet been built so they lived in a flat on the edge of the desert outside the city. Helen wrote:

  Our district was called ‘The Garden of Gujarat’ but it often reminds me of those beautiful abstract gardens that the Japanese sometimes construct – out of sand and stones!

  Hidden in the nothingness of it, however, were many villages including a Criminal Tribe Village [one in which a caste of criminals resided] (which very obligingly never robbed our little community; they preferred to raid the city suburbs.)

  Now it is all built over. But when I lived there, the land around the house was grazed by buffalo, racing camels, and goats. There were also lots of semi-wild dogs, the same colour as the sand, and it was strange to see them, if scared, suddenly rise out of the hollows they dug to sleep in and hurry away. In a tree at the back, a huge collection of baboons lived, and they used to put their long arms through the bars of the kitchen window, to try to steal anything edible.

  I had to learn never to open the door to strangers, because the times, just after the partition of India into India and Pakistan, were very troubled. Sometimes I would see a local police constable on his bike struggling through the sand to a nearby village, to sort out some kind of problem. Bullock carts strained through the sand, carrying goods to market – sometimes, they were pulled by black buffalo, with the most beautiful eyes and eyelashes I have ever seen.

  The bungalow that Helen and Avadh had been promised was never built. She explained:

  The material for the bungalow had already been delivered and was piled nearby. However, an argument broke out between two different factions of the education world as to who should be responsible for building it. As the fight went on, the local villagers found the pile of building material irresistible and it slowly shrank to almost nothing. The battle was still being waged when we left, still bungalowless. I do not know who won or what they did about the missing building materials!

  Language – or, more precisely, languages – was a major challenge. Avadh spoke Hindi and those in the university community conversed in both English and Hindi, the national languages. In Helen and Avadh’s block, there were sixteen flats and almost as many different languages from every corner of the country. And the local language was Gujarati, which was considerably different from Hindi. Avadh struggled to learn the minimal phrases he needed to communicate with the servant he employed, although the written language was sufficiently similar to Hindi that he could read it. But Helen was torn between Hindi, which she was still trying to teach herself, and Gujarati, which looked to her like a hopeless mess of squiggles. ‘I was in a strange country with no language, except a few words of Hindi, no knowledge of the customs, not able to read, and yet expected to be a good Indian wife,’ she wrote in a speech in later life. It was a struggle, but she managed to adapt remarkably well.

  Avadh’s friend Venket also brought a new wife, Bharati, to Ahmedabad. She was a scientist and came from Pondicherry, the French part of old India. Like Helen, she spoke no Gujarati and since neither of the men spoke much, they struggled to shop in the bazaars.

  Just to walk the three miles to the nearest bus stop, get to town each day to buy food in 110 degrees of heat [43°C] was an appalling effort. Then which bus? How to ask for what I wanted? How to manage a strange currency, a strange set of weights and measures in a country where everything is bargained for?

  Many of the men in our little settlement spoke English but none of their wives did. Only a single lady professor [in a neighbouring flat, whom Avadh had mentioned in his letters], who also spoke a little English could help me out. She had no time to teach me, but she did have a little English-Hindi grammar book and I got an English-Gujarati one from London, and I started in, from scratch, to teach myself to read again.

  I taught myself the numbers and the currency first. Then I would stand behind a Gujarati housewife as she bought things and watch what she paid. And I would pay no more. After a couple of months, I could read prices and the housekeeping began to balance!

  Helen learned to shop in the bazaar but she was aware that as an Englishwoman she would always struggle not to be overcharged. In Thursday’s Child she recounts an anecdote about a fruit seller who complained bitterly that Ajit had driven too hard a bargain for someone with an English wife – implying that he must be well-off to afford one.

  It was such a long, hot trip to the bazaar that it made sense for their servant to do the shopping most of the time. Helen had grown up with servants until the age of ten, so she knew to treat them with a balance of fairness and firmness.

  Shopping [took] a long time because there was no fixed price for anything, and a good servant charged only a small percentage on each shopping list. For example, if I gave my servant two rupees, about six percent would go into his own pocket, unless he managed to drive a very hard bargain and make it more in that way.

  Avadh was surprised that the two of us could live on the same amount of money that he had lived on, when he was alone with a servant. Of course, his servant cheated him.

  My servant was paid about £2 per month, plus three or four sets of shorts, shirts and undervests per year. He had a half day a week off – an innovation which was too much for my neighbours altogether, and occasionally he would get a week off to go to a marriage or back to his village. We also took a paternal interest in his health and family – these are all usual things with good employers. Heaven help a servant with a bad employer!

  Helen and Avadh’s servant was named (or nicknamed) Buchoo. As a youngster, that name was more familiar to me than the names of most of my cousins. He made my parents’, and especially my mother’s, lives in India much more manageable. Despite both Helen and Avadh’s misgivings about servants, he proved trustworthy, hard-working and happy to have an English mistress. My mother said that when they were leaving India, Buchoo pleaded with them to take him along. I sometimes wonder what happened to him. I don’t think my parents knew.

  All Helen’s practice cooking Indian food back in Liverpool was of little use to her when faced with the real ingredients and cooking methods of Ahmedabad.

  We received our inadequate rations as raw grain, rice and barley, sometimes wheat or millet. These had to be spread on a tray and stones and insects removed. Then they were washed and dried in the sun, after which we took them to the miller to be ground.

  Bread [rotis, which are a whole-wheat flatbread] was made fresh for every meal – as was every othe
r dish. We had no refrigeration and food went bad in a very few hours. Anything left from a meal was taken outside, where beggars and holy men would wait, with their little brass bowls to receive it.

  While the servant made some of the food, Helen learned to cook North Indian vegetarian staples such as pulao rice and vegetable curries, as well as party items such as puris (deep-fried bread, made for special occasions), snacks such as samosas (filled pastries), and sweets such as burfi (which is milk-based) and halwa (fried semolina with raisins and cashew nuts). She was not shy about asking Indian women for their recipes and worked hard at her cooking while in India. Her efforts were considerably more successful than her early attempts back in England and, when we lived in Canada later, she was quite capable of producing a full-fledged Indian meal for a visiting professor. Once a month or so she would cook an Indian meal just for my father and me. But it was the samosas, and sweets like burfi and halwa that I really looked forward to.

  Our children were introduced to Indian food early and enjoy it too. I try my hand at Indian cooking from time to time but, despite a lesson from Vijay’s wife and her daughter-in-law on my last trip there, rotis are beyond me.

  Conditions in Helen’s kitchen in Ahmedabad were fairly primitive, but nothing she could not handle after cooking over an open fire in Liverpool during the Depression.

  I cooked on a tiny stove, about 12 inches wide and 12 inches deep, filled with charcoal. It was set on the floor and I sat in front of it cross-legged. I felt I had hit the height of modern technology when we could afford to buy a tiny Primus stove which ran on paraffin; it boiled a pan of water in almost no time!

  The well gave water for one hour in the morning and one in the evening, so the first job was to fill big pots with water to last the day. I had a nice serving boy [Buchoo], who cleaned the house for me and did any other job I wanted done. He wore a loincloth and that was all.