Burial at Sea

by Khushwant Singh

  He broke the good news to his family. His father had meanwhile drawn up the articles of association of the new company. He would be chairman for life; Victor its general manager. His mother and sisters would be allotted shares. The rest was to be thrown open to the public. The company would be known as Jai Bhagwan Textiles.

  The next day Victor took an architect with him and got the tehsildar to join them. They put markers at different places. Victor told the architect that he was only to design workers’ quarters: three rooms with a small courtyard, latrine and washroom. The rest would be designed by an architect he was getting from England. He wrote to Nair inviting him to be the company’s agent in England, offering him a handsome salary, travelling expenses, perks and commission on sales. He was to finalize negotiations with the architect and mechanics in Manchester. Nair was thrilled. He had never seen so much money; he could live comfortably in London after he had finished with Oxford. The prospects of his making a living in legal practice were bleak. He accepted Victor’s offer with alacrity.

  Victor was like a man possessed. Even before the English architect, technicians and crates of spinning and weaving machinery were ploughing the seas on cargo boats, he was planning to replicate the model to be set up near different cities of the country and offering jobs at higher salaries to cotton mill workers employed in existing mills.

  A month later the architect arrived carrying designs of mills he had set up in Manchester. Two months later came the machines. Because he knew it would make her happy, Victor got his mother to perform bhoomi pooja and lay the foundation stone. Jai Bhagwan Textiles began to take concrete shape. Six months later the mill was ready to go. Mattoo invited the Viceroy to the inauguration function: he could not very well ask Mahatma Gandhi to come to the function. It was attended by the elite of the city including cloth merchants big and small. The Viceroy pressed the button to get the machines going. Guests were taken around the mill to see how different varieties of textiles were made. They were served tea, sandwiches and cakes. As they left, they were given parcels containing products of the mill as presents: bed sheets, table cloths, sarees, curtains, furnishing fabrics, towels and napkins. No other textile mill in India was producing as many different items at the same time. Victor had no belief in small beginnings; Jai Bhagwan Textiles would be the biggest mill in the country.

  Victor sent a parcel of his products to the Mahatma in Sabarmati Ashram with a letter asking for his blessings and telling him to dispose of the items as he thought fit. A few days later he received a postcard with a cryptic two-word acknowledgement:Jeetey raho—long may you live.

  Money started rolling in. After paying dividends to shareholders, Victor ploughed profits into setting up more textile mills: one in every state of India. Many old mills went into liquidation. He bought them and renovated them. ‘Modernize or perish’ was the motto he gave to Indian industrialists. Within two years there were not enough British textiles for the Mahatma and his followers to make bonfires of; Indian fabrics had taken over the Indian market and were being exported to some foreign countries too.

  Even as his first few textile mills were being set up, Victor decided on sugar mills as well. The English made sugar out of beetroot; he imported machinery from other countries which made it out of sugar cane. Another chain of mills, Jai Bhagwan Sugar Mills, came up in cane-producing states.

  Victor and his vision of progress were taking India by storm. In barely five years he had set up mills in a fourth of the country. Little townships were beginning to grow around his large factories. He paid his workers unheard of salaries, built housing colonies for them, and made sure all his products were priced low. Money was good, but that was not why he had set up his mills; his true ambition was to make prosperity possible for every Indian. One of his sisters said to him one day that he was working too hard and aiming too high—he was barely thirty, after all. He replied: ‘I am a volcano; there is so much energy in me because there is so much to be done in this country. I cannot take it easy.’

  Over the next couple of years Victor set up factories to produce chemicals, cement and bicycles, before finally investing significant capital in shipping. This last made it necessary for him to move much of his business operations to Bombay. He bought a few nondescript blocks of apartments on Marine Drive and built a thirty-storeyed building, Jai Bhagwan Towers. It was the first of its kind in India. He kept the penthouse and the floor below for his residence, the rest for different departments of the industrial empire he had created.

  Through all this, Victor kept aloof from the ferment of the freedom struggle. He was no supporter of the Raj, but he had no flair for politics. Men like Nair understood politics better, they could outshine and out-shout the ideologues of colonialism. Besides, there were Bapu Gandhi and his followers working to throw the British out. To Victor it was more important to industralize India, to make it economically strong. Because what freedom could there be without that? There was so much the country needed to modernize itself: produce more electricity to bring light in every home and drive machines; lay highways and rail lines to connect remote villages to cities and towns; manufacture chemical fertilizers and pesticides to boost agricultural production; and even manufacture its own automobiles, ships and aircraft. The scope was endless. It was for the government to take the initiative. Even if the British thought it worth their while to do so, they were now so engrossed in a life-and-death struggle against fascist powers that to think of anything besides winning the war was looked upon as treason. They had committed themselves to hand over power to the Indians as soon as the war was over. Few Indians, including Gandhi, trusted them to keep their word. Victor did. And he didn’t want a free india to start off as a backward, impoverished nation.

  All his many enterprises had made record profits during the war. Congress leaders contacted him once in a while through Gandhi for funds and he always obliged, but discreetly. He had been approached by the Viceroy to join his council but he had turned down the offer with a polite refusal. He could not be a member of a government which put Bapu Gandhi and other national leaders in jail. He preferred to bide his time, and if the rulers of independent India wanted his advice and counsel in any capacity, he would consider their invitation favourably.

  7

  * * *

  The hectic pace of work in which Victor involved all members of his family save his mother left little time for them to settle personal affairs. Mattoo was earning more as president of Victor’s many companies than he had as a lawyer. (He would still not let go of Valerie Bottomley as his personal secretary; she showed no inclination to return to England.) They had become India’s richest family; but to Victor’s mother this meant little. ‘You’ve all got caught in the web of Maya,’ she said to them one day when Valerie was not around. ‘Have you ever thought about the marriage of your three sisters, Jai Bhagwan? Or yours?’ Her husband replied, ‘I have been approached by many well-to-do families including those of rulers of states but I put them off. On one thing I am quite certain: I will not give any of my daughters to the son of a raja. I know many of them; they are drunkards and debauches, they have no family life. I told them we are Brahmins, you are Rajputs; there can’t be matrimonial alliances between us. It is forbidden by our dharma.’ They had a hearty laugh. All except his wife, who had her views on Mattoo’s own integrity as a family man. ‘What about others?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Haven’t you found anyone good enough for my daughters?’

  ‘They can have the pick of this country,’ replied Mattoo. ‘I’ll have the boys come over in turns and leave the choice to the girls.’

  So it came to be. Every one of the Mattoo girls, though well over the marriageable age by Indian standards, was worth a tidy fortune: besides chests full of jewellery and priceless saris there were agencies of Jai Bhagwan companies going with them. The eldest girl picked a boy in the Indian Civil Service who had done a year’s probation in Oxford. He was a Bengali. The second picked a boxwala recruited by Burma Shell soon a
fter he had taken his degree from Cambridge. He was a Punjabi. The third chose the son of a Gujarati textile manufacturer of Ahmedabad who had managed to keep afloat by modernizing his mill. None of them was a Brahmin. When it came to their marriages, Victor put his foot down. ‘We must set an example to our countrymen. There must be no lavish display of wealth, no big baraats or bands, exploding of fireworks and that kind of vulgarity. We will make it clear that only immediate members of the grooms’ families are welcome in our home—a simple Hindu wedding ceremony. One dinner party. And they depart.’

  There were no dissenting voices. So in one year the three Mattoo girls got married without many people getting to know. Only Victor was still to find a wife.

  ‘What about you, beta?’ his mother asked after her daughters had left. ‘Won’t I have a grandson of my own?’

  ‘Ma, I have told you many times. I will marry any girl who you think will make a good daughter-in-law for you.’ Love had given Victor the miss. He hadn’t the time or even the need any more for romance and passion. He had promised his mother he would marry the girl of her choice. There was no reason not to fulfil her wish.

  ‘I have one in mind,’ said his mother excitedly. ‘She is the daughter of a distant cousin, a Raina. A very humble ghareloo girl. I don’t know if she will fit into your English ways, all the kaanta-chhuri (fork and knife) style. She is only a matriculate and doesn’t speak much English. But like all Kashmiri girls she is fair. What I like most about her is her humility. If you approve of her I will be happy. If you do not, I will look for another Kashmiri girl.’

  ‘Ma, if she is the one you like best, I will be happy to make you happy. What is her name?’

  ‘Jaishree. Jaishree Raina. She’s been here with her mother a few times but you never bothered to look at them.’

  As a matter of fact Victor had seen this girl with her mother a couple of times when they were being escorted by his mother’s maidservant to her room. She looked like a callow little schoolgirl, somewhat overawed by the size of the house, like many visitors were. ‘Ma, you talk to Papa; if he is agreeable you can ask the girl’s mother on my behalf.’

  That evening Victor’s mother broached the subject with her husband, half expecting to be snubbed by him. She was pleasantly surprised by his reaction. ‘At least one of our children will be married to a Kashmiri Pandit and our line will not be dissolved into the rest of India,’ he said. ‘They are a very maamooli (ordinary) family; not our class. I think her father is a small-time commission agent living in a gali where many poor Kashmiri Pandit families live. But money is of no consequence; we can give him an outlet or two for our products to improve his financial status. If your beta agrees, I have no objection.’

  Mattoo had a guilty conscience about the way he had put aside his wife in a corner of the house and made Valerie Bottomley his concubine. So often, even as he ground into Valerie, like the savage that she begged him to be with her, he was aware of his wife sobbing in her room. Because he had wanted it so, all other members of the family had taken to speaking English which she did not understand. They ate western food which she did not. He had condemned her to a life of silence and loneliness. He wanted to make amends by giving her a companion of her choice.

  Victor’s thoughts were along the same lines. He was not anxious to take a wife. He had shied away from entering into emotional relationships with the few English girls he had met in college. No sooner had one got close to him than she wanted to invade his private space and assert exclusive proprietary rights over him. He was reluctant to have sex with any of them because he sensed that sexual relationship was a kind of temporary marriage which conferred emotional rights on both partners. He much preferred consorting with prostitutes whenever he could. He got the sex he wanted; she got the money she wanted. No hassles, no emotional baggage. It also occurred to him that he had never had sex with an Indian woman. Nor with a virgin. Would it be any different than with the whores he had picked up on the streets round Piccadilly Circus or Bayswater Road? There was every chance, in fact, that Jaishree Raina might turn out to be just the sort of wife he wanted. There was little likelihood of her claiming equality with him. She would be like his mother who bore her husband children and returned to the part of the house allotted to her.

  Victor’s marriage was as low-key as those of his sisters. No invitation cards were printed. Only his sisters and their husbands came to Delhi for the occasion. The wedding rites took place in Shanti Bhavan. Jaishree’s parents left after the ceremony was over, leaving their youngest child to the care of the Mattoo family.

  Victor took Jaishree on the night of their marriage. She was barely seventeen and a virgin. She bled profusely but bore the pain without complaining. No words of love were exchanged between them. In fact, few words were exchanged between them at all. Victor took her every night and sometimes during the afternoon siesta. It was the only bond they shared. And since neither one expected more from the marriage than this simple contract of duty and sex, they were content. Victor divided his time between Shanti Bhavan in Delhi and Jai Bhagwan Towers in Bombay. Jaishree never left Delhi and spent much of her time in her mother-in-law’s room, except when Victor was in town. Less than two months after their marriage, Jaishree missed her first period. And then the second. When the third period was due she began to throw up in the mornings. Victor’s mother was delighted. She wrote to her daughters giving them the good news. She would soon have a grandson in her lap and they a nephew to play with when they came to Delhi. Mattoo began planning his grandson’s education. Victor, though a little bemused, was happy enough at the prospect of having an heir.

  The joy was short-lived. Jaishree died giving birth to her child, a daughter. It was the first death in the large house which was now enveloped in gloom. Victor was numbed with anguish. He had not said a loving word to his wife of ten months. Whenever he was in Shanti Bhavan, he had expected to find her in their bedroom, waiting for him to come in, shut the door, undress and mount her. Some days the sight of her slender naked body startled him. She was a mere child! Where had she learned to handle the fevered needs of a man almost twice her age? He felt a tenderness towards his submissive girl-wife. He had wanted to tell her this one day and do better by her than his father had done by his mother. Now it was too late. His normally in-control father took the tragedy very badly and lost his zest for life. Even Valerie was unable to console him. Surprisingly enough, the one who took it in her stride as the will of an inscrutable God was Victor’s mother. Though the child was not the grandson that she wanted but a granddaughter, she ascribed that too to God’s will and was content to abide with it. Now she would be a grandmother as well as a mother to the newborn babe. She arranged for a wet nurse with a one-month old baby to move into Shanti Bhavan to suckle her granddaughter.

  Mattoo chose the name for the newborn—Bharati. Victor’s mother would not let Bharati out of her sight. She watched her being breastfed by the wet nurse, put her on her shoulder to let her burp, bathed her, changed her clothes and lay beside her in bed. Often Bharati’s podgy hands went searching for her bosom and she would sigh and say, ‘Beti, there is nothing left there for you; Ayah, she is hungry, give her another feed.’

  Mattoo was also taken up by his granddaughter and spent hours talking to the baby and begging her to give him a smile. Valerie would join the others in baby worship. ‘Pretty, isn’t she? Taken after her father: his features, her mother’s complexion. She’ll grow up into a stunning beauty, God willing.’

  The first three words Bharati learnt to babble were Dadima, Dadoo, and Gannyma, to refer to Victor’s mother, Mattoo and Valerie. Papi, for her father, was the fourth; he spent less time with her than the others.

  ~

  Victor shuttled between Delhi and Bombay more frequently now and worked almost sixteen hours a day. He had no choice. Mattoo, approaching seventy and badly affected by Jaishree’s death, was growing indifferent to office work, and Victor had to take on more on his shoulders. His shipping bu
siness was also not doing as well as he had hoped. He had appointed his good friend Nair general manager of Jai Bhagwan Shipping Company after the latter returned from London, fleeing an enraged British Parliamentarian he had insulted in public. With the cushy job, Victor also provided Nair a large flat in Jai Bhagwan Towers and other benefits like a chauffeur-driven car, the right to spend as much on entertainment as he thought proper, the right to hire and fire his staff as he pleased. But Nair was not pulling his weight. He had a prickly personality and did not get on well with any of his senior executives. It was said that he had given a senior position to his mistress who had once worked in the typing pool. He was also reported to be taking commissions on tramp ships he bought for the company. In the business circles of Bombay he had the reputation of being rude and arrogant. Some complaints Victor received were from senior staff who resigned their jobs; many more of Nair’s peccadilloes came in anonymous letters. Victor took no notice of them. He had implicit trust in Nair’s integrity and refused to hear anything said against him; he even ignored his father’s advice to send Nair back to England because he was giving the company a bad name in India.

  Whenever Victor was in Bombay, Nair fawned over him: his flattery was subtle and hence more acceptable to Victor than the blatant praises others showered on him. It did not occur to him to wonder at the change in Nair’s attitude towards him. When they were students in London, Nair had made no secret of the fact that he considered himself intellectually superior to Victor. He took obvious satisfaction in guiding Victor and lecturing him on communism. He was never rude or sharp with Victor but did tick him off once in a while for his ‘bourgeois’ ways; he himself was a communist who starved himself and wore a tattered coat, which again made him feel superior. This did not bother Victor who liked having as a friend the witty, normally acerbic younger man who was a star in the liberal circles of London. Now, it was Nair who referred to Victor as the star. He agreed with everything Victor said and rarely voiced his own opinion on any matter. Had Victor been observant, he would have noticed that Nair’s fists clenched whenever he spoke to Victor and he rarely looked him in the eye. The truth was that Victor’s great success had changed the equation between them and this had made Nair bitter. He resented the fact that Victor was his mentor now. He resented it more because he needed this patronage. Victor was oblivious to this. Whenever people said anything against Nair, he either snubbed them or replied with a stony silence. He worked harder to cover up for Nair’s inefficiency; he was not one to admit failure in any business he undertook. But this meant that he had to spend much more time in Bombay than in Delhi.