by Dipika Rai
‘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.
What does he have to smile about? Ram Singh has learned to read the nuances of his father’s face but not his thoughts. The old man closes both eyes as the sunlight catches him mid-thought. He thinks of his wife a lot. That’s one thing he can still do with his crippled body.
‘Ask Asmara Didi to put in curtains,’ says Ram Singh, his voice packed with irritation, starting to pace the room, placing one diffident foot slowly in front of the other, thinking each step carefully through. He knows his father doesn’t like pacing. He has to calculate exactly when to stop, just before Singh Sahib’s irritation burbles over into a spurt of reprimand. He wants to bring up the issue of the property again, but doesn’t. He already knows the answer, from years of having this conversation, way before his father’s face got twisted. ‘Want me to die, do you? I am not dying yet, my brain is still as sharp as a new lemon. Forget about things that don’t concern you. You will get what you deserve when you deserve it.’ His father always spoke as if he was talking about Fate, but of course he was talking about his own plans for his son. Today he would want to say the same things through his paralysed mouth. Why bother? The son already knows the words.
Ram Singh has to grind his teeth together to stop himself from speaking. His father’s unsaid words make him prickly. Forget about things that don’t concern me, indeed. The property does concern me, all seven hundred hectares of it. And if Babulal is to be believed, the additional four hundred and sixty-seven hectares virtually owned by them in everything but name.
‘Lokend . . . Daku?’ Always talk of Lokend, his younger brother. What has Lokend got that he hasn’t? The sun drops. The rectangles slip with finality into the old man’s eyes. A trail of ants marches through the scene of pastoral delight and frolicking gods behind Singh Sahib’s head. Silent rebellion will get you nowhere, my friend. As long as you divide the land fairly, half and half. After all, there are no smaller halves. Or are there? In your realm anything is possible.
‘Can we talk about the lands? There are two problems.’
The father keeps his eyes closed, forbidding him the consideration of sight.
‘Well, you have left me in charge, haven’t you? Do you want me to quit? Would you like to handle the lands yourself?’ It is the continuation of the same argument they have been having since before the stroke. Ram Singh’s words have become progressively more cruel. His father doesn’t attempt to reply.
‘Then if you can’t handle the lands, let me do the work. I am the only one who has kept this place together. Why can’t you see that?’ The son speaks for both of them, aloud for himself and silently for his father. He knows his father’s mind, and there is no approval in it. You wish I was more like Lokend. But he is the least like you. Look at me. Can you not see yourself in me? There is more than a vestige of the old man in his son’s finely carved features, the straight nose and the strong moustache.
Singh Sahib has that twitch in his lip that tells his son the interview is over.
But the son won’t be brushed away this easily. Physically he has the upper hand. Trapped in his inactive body, his father can do nothing. Ram Singh squats close to the old man’s ear. ‘We have to act soon. More and more people are talking about taking loans from that Lala Ram. We have to stop that. I have a plan,’ he whispers harshly.
Lala Ram tried to hide the tin signs collecting in a growing heap in one corner of his shop, even so, they have popped up all over Gopalpur: Hypothecated to the Bank of India, written in curly-wurly yellow paint on black.
‘We are losing ground. There is talk of opening a branch here soon, right in that Saraswati Stores. Then we can forget about getting any interest payments at all.’
‘Huh,’ says the father, who isn’t at all worried about the Bank of India grabbing his share of t
he loan business. After all, who in Gopalpur is going to fill out a litany of papers asking impossible questions requiring complicated answers? Date of birth? Repayment terms? Security? And on and on. With him, they just have to plant their thumbprints in the lower right corner, place the paper bonding them – sometimes for life, sometimes for generations – in their rafters away from mice and, if they are lucky, termites, and forget about it for eternity.
‘You just give me the word, and I make sure Lala forgets about the banking business.’
Singh Sahib finally opens his eyes. He still has one weapon left: The Look. Ram Singh hasn’t seen that look in his father’s eyes for years now. The last time he had seen it was when he and Lokend fought and he had broken his younger brother’s jaw. His father had lashed him in full view of the servants, continuing the thrashing till the belt broke. Ram Singh still has the scars on his back. After a particularly bad day, he likes to look at them.
‘Lea . . . ve!’
‘Times are changing. You will have to do it sooner or later if you are to survive as Gopalpur’s zamindar. After all, it is my future too. I will not be the one to break with family tradition because of you. You yourself say that tradition and honour are everything . . .’
‘. . . do . . . hnt! Honour! It ish . . . n’t . . . you!’
The ruthlessness of the insult shoves Ram Singh to the wall. Defeated but not crushed he bounces back: ‘I know what you think. You think I have no honour. Do you really think you would do things differently? Say what you like, I am more like you than you know. Honour before Life.’ He shouts out his father’s motto before leaving the room.
Singh Sahib does nothing to curb the hatred that lodges in his throat making it difficult for him to breathe.
‘You leave him alone!’ Asmara Didi accosts Ram Singh outside the door. ‘Remember, I brought you into this world.’
‘Yes, you keep telling me so . . . So damned what, do you think you can take me out of it too?’
‘It would have been better if she’d never had you!’ says Asmara Didi, surprised at her brutality. ‘Your father loves you, I wish you could see that.’
‘Yes, he loves me so much that he never wants to see my face.’
‘That’s not true! Don’t you remember how the two of you used to eat dinner together every night? It was always Lokend who didn’t have his attention.’
‘Lokend may not have had his attention then, but he certainly has his love now.’
‘Give him a chance, won’t you . . .’ she says, visibly softening. ‘He is in a bad way. When your amma died, he stopped living too . . .’
‘He better have, it was he who killed her. She was too good for him.’
‘Ram Singh! Your father loved Bibiji more than life itself,’ she says. ‘A love like that is fraught with danger, it can be very fragile . . . but you wouldn’t understand . . .’
‘He went with other women till she died of a broken heart.’
‘No . . . she was weakened by her breathing sickness,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘She was very weak, she couldn’t handle the strain of bearing a second child,’ she reiterates, trying to convince herself as much as Ram Singh. In her opinion it was misguided jealousy that killed Bibiji, not childbirth.
It was a cruel trick of providence that had placed Bibiji at the window the day Singh Sahib put his hands on the shoulders of a village woman waiting under the spreading mango tree. The woman, one of his numerous bachelor dalliances, had come to ask for money to go to the city. Singh Sahib had grabbed her shoulders to impress upon her never to come to his home again. The woman may have been no one to him, but for Bibiji she was her nemesis, sent by the gods to quell her laughter and teach her the one universal truth: Nothing is Permanent.
That day an alien loneliness, thus far held at bay by her husband’s love, rushed up and grabbed Bibiji by the throat. All her loneliness and desolation attacked her, and for the first time since she had arrived at the Big House she regretted her superior marriage that made her unfit to return home. After that, she lived in constant fear, her stomach balled up so tight that she was unable to eat. Day after day, the situation received sustenance from the placenta of her imagination. Her love became desperate. In his absence she found herself cleaning all her husband’s things in a frenzy, just to be close to him. She lay alert and unsleeping night after night thinking her self-cruelty would give her resilience, but it only intensified the pain. More and more, she spent long hours at her open window gazing into the fields, closing it only on the days when the maddened dust came to visit Gopalpur, accepting her situation, having nowhere to go and nothing to change. That’s when she’d started having the midnight attacks which left her breathless and half-conscious.
‘What do you know? You were only four when she died,’ says Asmara Didi. ‘Did you know your mother was a commoner, a mere village girl, but still he married her. He went against his whole family, this village, tradition, to bring her into this house. She didn’t have children for many years, and he could have taken another wife, but he didn’t.’
‘Maybe he should have taken another wife, then she might be alive today . . .’ Ram Singh misses his mother in that gruff way of tough men who can never acknowledge their feelings.
‘Your mother was – no, is, your father’s entire world. She was simply too suspicious of her good fortune, she couldn’t accept her destiny. She was so lovely, so delicate, so lonely, so weak . . . Everyone has a story, Ram Singh, mark my words; each of us has our own burden.’
‘Huh, each one of us, indeed, except my perfect brother, damn him, and that godawful mongoose of his.’
‘You used to keep mongoose pups too, you know. After your mother died you spent all your time beside a wooden crate hidden behind the cowshed which held four abandoned mongoose pups. Their eyes just barely open, you kept them alive on a rag dipped in milk.’
‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’ he says, his voice wavering. Of course he remembers. He remembers vividly. It was on one of those dank days when the clouds were distended over the fields, stretched big and fat with rain, that he thought he would make the world right for his grieving widowed father. He’d brought one of his pet mongoose pups into his father’s despondent room, walking heel to toe like a thief in a vaudeville act, and quickly placed the pup in his father’s hands before thought could change his mind. Then he’d run to the safety of the darkest corner in the room to hide behind the curtains, believing his father would be fooled into thinking the present came from the heavens if he hid well enough. He’d watched secretly as the pup arranged itself into a confident ball, so tiny that it was no more than a bony warm feeling in those massive palms. He had wanted to leap out from behind the curtain straight on to his father’s lap, but before he could make a sound his father dropped the pup on the floor. The spell was broken and Ram Singh knew not to declare himself.
‘You are free to believe what you want.’
‘Amma died, but not me, I was alive, I am still alive – when will he see me? Honour before Life. My God, what does that man in there know about honour then?’
The chill has returned to the air. It enters Singh Sahib’s good leg and spreads through his body like ink on blotting paper. Asmara Didi is back to light the fire. ‘Leave h . . . it,’ he says. He can’t get his temperature just right with the fire going. It’s comfortable for a while, then too hot to bear. Of course Singh Sahib could keep a retinue of constant servants by his side to move him around the room, if he so wished, but he doesn’t. He wants to be alone, as do all the guilty. He can just about stand to be in the company of Asmara Didi, and that too for very short periods.
‘Lokend has gone back to the bandits. Hai, when will he learn? After they have lopped off his obstinate head in one swift stroke? As if those scoundrels need our help now, after they’ve ravished our fields and raped our women . . .’ Asmara Didi’s chastisement contains more pride than anything else. It is a description of Lokend’s foolish courage, with the emphasis on
courage. ‘Through and through he’s your son . . .’ Far from the truth, her words die on her lips. In fact, every cell in Lokend’s body proclaims him as his mother’s son, even though Bibiji never had a chance to hold him. She never recovered from childbirth, and when Lokend was only four weeks old, she died with a soft sigh. All joy died with her and the Big House’s fate as a place of sadness and guilt was sealed.
The memory of that time still brings a shudder to Asmara Didi’s frame. Overnight Singh Sahib’s skin began to hang on him like baggy wet clothes two sizes too large, and prayers and incense ruled the Big House, lodging deep inside cupboards, up trees, under quilts and in each and every vessel in the kitchen. Ram Singh and his father had their heads shaved so all the world would know of their grief.
After that, Singh Sahib never left his room and refused to see his younger son, whom he blamed for his mother’s death. The little Lokend, talking in a language oiled with m’s, had only Asmara Didi. When he said Am-m-ma for the first time, Asmara Didi was tempted to let the word fly free on shimmering wings right into her waiting ear to fill the child-lonely spot in her heart. But she couldn’t. ‘Not Amma,’ she’d said, ‘Didi.’ There is a reason why mothers are called Amma. It was much harder for the boy to say didi, elder sister, it was a word learnt, not like amma, which sprang from his soul unsolicited. But she was more than a mother to him.
The word out of his mouth, there was never any confusion in Asmara Didi’s mind as to her duty, and she aggressively grasped her role as surrogate mother and teacher. She instantly recognised a special stillness in Lokend, which she couldn’t shake in spite of her attempts to draw him into her world with childish games. Sometimes she thought she didn’t have to teach him anything, just jog his memory a little for ancient knowledge to pour out of his mouth in a fountain of pure speech.
She is glad she wasn’t picked to be his mother. There is something heart-rendingly tragic about a spiritual child because he belongs to everyone and to no one at the same time. It was her duty to formally impart the holy knowledge of scriptures to him. Luckily she knew the words of the Bhagvat Gita and the mantras of the Vedas. Her husband had been a bit of a dilettante with his learning, and though he never made it to the enlightened stage, he certainly knew the theory by heart. More than most, Asmara Didi and her husband had shared a closeness that rarely occurs in childless couples. It was to fulfil her role as companion that she had thrown herself equally into divine learning. But her knowledge wasn’t for herself, and it was only years later, in the employ of the Big House, that Asmara Didi realised it was fated for her tiny charge.
