The college song was set to the tune of ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ and was sung with gusto by the students while the pianist, Mrs. ‘Music’ Jordan, sat ramrod straight on the stool and gravely pounded the keyboard. She also played the organ in the College chapel. She pinned her anchal neatly to her left shoulder with a brooch and wore her sari four inches above floor level. Both Mrs. ‘Music’ Jordan and her sister-inlaw, Mrs. ‘Economics’ Jordan, were Lucknowites. Then there were two Bengali Brahmo ladies, two olde-worlde, courteous gentlemen who taught Urdu and Persian, and a kindly Hindi-Sanskrit panditji. Mrs. Constance Das was the college’s first Indian Principal and had recently taken over from the American, Dr. Mary Shannon, who had retired.
Mrs. Das was gracious and handsome, a very high-caste, upper-class Indian Christian. She was the younger sister of Lady Maharaj Singh—Sir Maharaj belonged to the Christian branch of Kapurthala’s Sikh royal family. Vice Principal, Miss Sarah Chacko, was from Kerala. Indian society was a cocktail or potpourri, cheerful co-existence was the norm.
The rest of the college staff was white American, except for the ever-smiling Miss Downs who was a Black nurse, in charge of the King’s Daughter’s Infirmary. A Methodist missionary, Miss Isabella Thoburn had come from Ohio in 1862 and founded this college in Aminabad. It became a degree college in 1895 and was shifted to Chand Bagh across the Gomti in 1922.
Isabella Thoburn College was popularly known as Chand Bagh. Before 1857, Chand Bagh was part of Ramna, or royal parkland, where deer and bison were kept and where the rulers of Oudh came to watch elephant and ram fights. In Lucknow, various localities were known as Baghs or gardens, laid out by the Nawab Vazir and later kings. The residential areas were called Ganj or treasure-houses.
With its magnificent buildings, beautifully furnished drawing rooms, well-tended playing fields and gardens, Chand Bagh looked like a college campus, Anywhere, U.S.A. All the buildings were inter-connected through long, gleaming corridors. The eucalyptus grove was called the Forest of Arden. The three college hostels were named Nishat Mahal, Maunihal Manzil and Maitri Bhavan. Hindu and Muslim boarders jointly celebrated the festivals of Id and Diwali. Some Hindu girls wore ghararas and solemnly lighted joss sticks on the occasion of Milad Sharif, the Prophet’s birthday.
The American teachers of Chand Bagh were the finest emissaries the U.S.A. could have sent to India in its period of isolation. The Americans were aliens and steered clear of Indian politics. Still, instead of the British governor and his lady, they often invited personages such as Sarojini Naidu, leading Urdu poets and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to address the girls on non-political subjects. The college was affiliated to the University of Lucknow: the method of teaching was American. Sociologically, however, the term ‘Americanization’ was unknown. The continent of America had not really been discovered by Indians yet, except by those Punjabi farmers who had settled in California in the Twenties.
On the morning of July 14, 1941, Champa Ahmed of Banaras was taken by surprise when she counted 40 Muslim names on the list of 250 students displayed on the notice board. The tall and statuesque Meher Taj, daughter of the Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who looked like the Statue of Liberty was a student there, and so was Chandralekha Pandit, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru.
As an educated class, Indian women were slowly emerging from their seclusion. Lucknow had two middle-aged Muslim sisters, Miss Shah Jehan Begum and Miss Roshan Jehan Begum, who had graduated from Chand Bagh in the 1920s. Both were “England-returned”: Miss Roshan Jehan Begum was Principal of Karamat Hussain Muslim Girls’ College down the road, (a purdah college whose sprawling campus was hidden behind high walls). Both sisters were spinsters and were often seen bicycling back and forth on Fyzabad Road. Bicycles were the preferred mode of transport for modern college women in Lucknow, and had somehow become the symbol of female emancipation here, just as they had been in England and America in earlier times. Doe-eyed Miss Noor Jehan Yusuf must have been a beauty as a young woman. She was Inspectress of Schools and also lived on Fyzabad Road. When she went to England for higher studies her sister went with her as a chaperone and they, too, were spinsters.
By 1941, when Champa joined Chand Bagh, women had acquired greater self-confidence and society was also generally more liberal. Still, Chand Bagh remained a conservative college. Hostel rules were strict, junior girls could go to Hazrat Ganj only with seniors as chaperones. The city was out of bounds and ‘dating’ was unknown.
Chand Bagh was also a great social leveller. Daughters of ruling princes and commoners all wore simple saris, for the missionaries, being American, did not have the class snobbery of the British.
As the stranger Tehmina Reza had promised in her letter, on the morning of July 14, at 8 a.m. sharp, with American precision a slim Plain Jane met a slightly bewildered and nervous Champa Ahmed on the steps of Florence Nicholas Hall, the neo-classical porch of Isabella Thoburn College.
“Hello. Are you Champa?” she asked pleasantly.
Champa nodded, tongue-tied.
“I am Tehmina Reza, your advisor for one year. Come along.”
Champa was disappointed. She was expecting to meet some glamorous princess who had written to her from Oakland Hall, Mussoorie. This was a homely, good-natured student of B.A. final, who told her that the college office sent the addresses of newly admitted girls to some of the senior students to write letters of welcome. Along with one faculty member, the seniors acted as advisors to new girls during their first year in Chand Bagh. Tehmina’s younger sister, Talat, had joined as a freshman. She said to Champa, “Omigosh, Champa Baji, we saw you in Banaras in April, didn’t we, Nirmala?”
Champa was invited by her ‘advisor’ to Gulfishan.
It was a Saturday afternoon. She sat on the back lawn near the roses, talking to Tehmina, when she saw Kamal and Hari strolling down towards them. Their eyes met. All three were momentarily taken aback, then all of them broke into merry, youthful laughter.
“Have you met these rascals before, Champa?” Tehmina asked her.
“Well, not really. Saw them riding a Rolls Royce and wondered about them,” Champa answered smoothly. As one of the have-nots she had trained herself to hold her head high in all situations. Here she was amidst the Chosen Few and she was not going to reveal her deep sense of insecurity and inferiority. She was as good as any of them, and would take them in stride. Besides, she had an address in Lucknow: the rich relative’s bungalow on Sir Wazir Hasan Road. She needn’t worry, they would never go to the congested mohalla in Banaras to see where she actually lived.
Kamal and Hari gaped at her as she continued talking to them in a patronising manner. They also realised that she was a few years older than them so, of course, romance was out. And she was Elder Sister Tehmina’s friend and, as such, had to be respected.
Talat called her Champa Baji, so Kamal and Hari also began to address her as Baji. But they wondered why a girl of twenty-three was still doing her B.A. (previous). It was a personal question which nobody could ask—she couldn’t have told them that she had begun her education late because of her father’s financial difficulties.
“We, the zamindars of Poorab, are very orthodox—I couldn’t go to school till my grandfather died,” she volunteered the ‘information’ herself.
Unwittingly, Champa Ahmed had embarked upon a career of spinning yarns in order to keep up with the Joneses.
Tehmina had asked Champa to stay back for dinner. Amir spotted her in the crowd of guests on the lawn, and with his killer instinct walked over and introduced himself in a most charming manner. Gallantly he brought her food from the buffet tables and managed to remain by her side all evening. He was clearly smitten. Still, he was her mentor’s fiancé—the plot of the women’s serial romance had thickened much too fast. Inside, in the drawing-room, poor Tehmina was dreamily playing Strebbog’s Faery Waltz on her cottage Steinway. A full moon shone in a black velvet sky and the garden was flooded with the heady scent of raat-ki-rani.
Amir asked Champa quietly, “May I see you tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“For obvious reasons.”
“Damn the reasons. We are only born once, etc.,” he said masterfully. He was willing to take risks. Besides he seemed to be the kind who was in control of situations.
The next evening he drove down to Chand Bagh and sent in his name as Miss T. Reza’s cousin.
Now, ‘cousins’ was a special term for visitors to women’s hostels, but Lieut. Reza, everybody knew, was a genuine relative. Champa came to the Visitors’ Room—
“I am your chaperone for the evening,” he grinned, and signed the register.
He whisked her off in his scarlet sports car to Mohammed Bagh Club in the cantonment. Being a Services Club it was not frequented by civilians. They had coffee, and he brought her back much before the gates closed. Had she been late she would have been ‘gated’ and not allowed out again for a certain period of time.
Amir was on a month’s leave and he took Champa out every other evening. They went deep into the countryside, well beyond Chinhat or Bakhshi ka Talab, two favourite picnic spots near Lucknow. It was all strictly honourable. They did not even hold hands, just talked. He told her about his childhood, his terrible governess Nina, his ‘compulsory’ engagement to Tehmina. He was an unhappy young man. “How can you and I not hurt poor Tim? I’m really at sea . . . that reminds me . . . I may be sent to the war front soon. Promise you’ll wait for me— we’ll find some way out of this tricky situation, don’t worry.”
Both Amir and Champa thought they had been discreet about their secret meetings, but one day Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. He was at Chand Bagh to talk about his “discovery of India”. Standing on the stage in the Assembly Hall, he looked down benignly at the girls as though they were all members of his own extended family. He was affectionate and informal. During the course of his lecture in which he discussed pre-historic Indian geography, he said, “If you wished to go to Mussoorie you would have had to board a ship and cross a sea to reach the Himalayas.”
The following day Tehmina took Champa along to India Coffee House—Hari, Kamal, Laj, Nirmala and Talat had invaded Hazrat Ganj, as usual, on their bicycles. Tehmina and Laj began to discuss Panditji’s visit.
“He is cho chweet,” Nirmala exclaimed.
“Oh, he is tweeet . . .” Talat said even more emphatically. Kamal and Hari Shankar groaned.
“Yes, but he revealed his class affiliations when he talked about going to Mussoorie . . .ℍ Tehmina objected. She was extremely left-wing.
“Come on, Tim,” said Hari judiciously. “Panditji was talking to Chand Bagh girls, he wasn’t addressing farmers of the Kisan Sabha. Don’t you agree, Champa Baji?”
“Oh, I didn’t attend his lecture. I was in the library, studying for my test,” Champa replied nonchalantly.
Tehmina, Laj, Talat and Nirmala exchanged meaningful glances. Tehmina was obviously very upset. All of them kept quiet. On the way back as they were descending the slope of Monkey Bridge, Tehmina shot ahead of the rest and asked Champa to follow her. She went straight to Chand Bagh.
“Let’s go to the swimming pool for a chat,” she said grimly.
The pool was deserted. Autumn had arrived, auburn leaves lay in heaps under the trees. Champa sat down rather weakly on a diving-board, Tehmina kept standing. “Look, Champa, never tell lies,” she said, raising her voice. “There was no need for you to say you were in the library yesterday when Pandit Nehru came. The library is closed for the week, for renovation. You could have said you had gone out.
“See, we’re no small-town fuddy-duddies, but it is a closeknit society and everybody knows everybody else. You have often gone out in your parrot-green sari with Amir. Perhaps you know that his sports car is known as Prince Gulfam’s Flying Carpet? Now the University wags are saying that the Sabz Pari of Chand Bagh has abducted Gulfishan’s Shahzada Gulfam.
“A few girls get talked about every year in Chand Bagh and Badshah Bagh. We wouldn’t like you to be one of them.”
An ominous silence followed the outburst. Suddenly something happened to Champa. ‘She is yelling at me as though I am her ayah, Susan. Would she speak so harshly if I were the daughter of a high court judge or a taluqdar? Despite her leftist pretensions she is like the rest of them . . .’ Tehmina had sensed Champa’s financial status. She had only one ‘party’ sari, a parrot-green georgette, which she often wore when she went out and because of which she was called Sabz Pari, the heroine of the Urdu Opera Inder Sabha. Quite often Tehmina lent her her own super-fine clothes for special occasions, and now this indigent scholarship-holder had the cheek to steal her fiancé.
“I didn’t know you were such a cheapster, or could be so ungrateful,” she shouted.
Champa trembled with rage. Ungrateful! I’ve been eating her salt and wearing her clothes, like a hanger-on of her patrician family.
She stood up and said defiantly, “I am no Jezebel, but if you want me to make Miss Shah Jehan Begum and Miss Roshan Jehan Begum my models, you are sadly mistaken. I will not give you the satisfaction twenty years hence, of seeing me cycling up and down Fyzabad Road as a bespectacled old maid with a shingle bob.”
Tehmina stared at her in disbelief. After her conquest of Amir, Champa had discovered the power of her sexuality. Instead of being ill at ease in her new surroundings, she now made other women feel insecure and envious. In their frustration they could only call her “cheap”. And Amir, the uncrowned prince, was willing to alienate his almighty family for her sake. The assurance made her bolder.
“Chances are that you will turn into a battle-axe, leading processions down Monkey Bridge as a bogus revolutionary,” she added, before she started running across the green towards her hostel.
Amir continued to meet Champa whenever he came home on leave, Hari and Kamal remained ardent admirers. She was invited, as usual, though less frequently to Gulfishan and Water Chestnut House for parties. Tehmina learned to hold her peace. It would have been too undignified and commonplace to break off with her—like an Indian film with two women, the goody-goody heroine and the scheming vamp, fighting over the chocolate-cream hero. Ugh. Tehmina remained coolly cordial with Champa through the years that onward rolled . . .
37. Over the Waves
“I am convinced Champa Baba has fed him owl’s meat,” Hussain’s wife said gravely. She was doing petit-point embroidery with silver thread on Tehmina’s red chiffon dupatta. Like many working-class Muslim women of Lucknow, she was an expert needlewoman who did silver-thread kamdani as well as cotton-thread chikan embroidery in her spare time. She had learned the craft from her mother, now her ten-year-old was watching her carefully. The driver’s wife was busy crocheting petticoat lace for Tehmina Bitiya, and Ram Daiya was helping them as a kind of assistant. The women sat on rush mats spread under the mulberry tree outside the servants’ quarters. Tehmina’s trousseau was added to every year, all year round, ever since she had been a schoolgirl. And now, this disaster.
“Owl’s meat . . .” Hussain’s wife repeated.
Although a rare bird, you could find a good owl for black magic in the celebrated fowl market of Nakhas. Of course, it was expensive, but if you had special mantras recited over it and mixed its meat in a kebab and gave it to the man you wanted to enslave for life, he became as stupid as an ulloo. An ancient tried and tested recipe.
“. . .otherwise how could Bhaiya Saheb have given up our pearl-like Bitiya? Champa Bibi is a dark enchantress of men. A kali jadoogarni of Poorab Des.
“If they were not such Angrezi-fashion people, I would have asked Begum Saheb to get a tawiz from Dargah Shah Mina Saheb for Tehmina Bitiya as an antidote.”
“She must have got the jadoo done last Diwali,” Ram Daiya put in, “and again this Diwali.”
“Yes, of course,” Susan, the ayah, agreed. She was also very concerned about
Bitiya for she had often seen her crying quietly in her room . . .
Diwali had come and gone. Laj and Nirmala had made rangoli in their courtyard to welcome the goddess Lakshmi. Ram Autar and Gunga Din had gone out to gamble—if you don’t indulge in the game of dice on Diwali night you’ll be reborn as a doormouse in your next life. Even Qadeer gambled a little to attract good fortune.
On the moonless nights of the festival, Mrs. Raizada and the Begum of Gulfishan had always told their children not to stir out of the house for fear of the black magic done by the devotees of Loona Chamari, the sorceress of yore. All manner of weird, dangerous things happened on these dark nights. Mooth bans—flying cooking pots—were despatched to hit and kill the enemy, little clay bowls filled with ‘Black Magic’ sweets were kept at the crossroads to transfer the evil spirits to unsuspecting passers-by.
“Don’t sit on the grass, rain-serpents may still be lurking in it,” Aunt Zubeida used to say. “The snakes slide away to hibernate after they have licked the burnt-out Diwali lamps.”
The sacred month of Ramzan had also come and gone. This month had a presence of its own, a mystique and sense of holiness. People fasted and prayed, but it was also loads of fun. Everybody woke up in the early hours of the morning and had the sehri before first light. Cooking for iftar began in the afternoon for breaking the fast at sundown—a lavish repast was laid out on the table. Cannons went off in the city to announce the exact moment for breaking the fast.
In city streets bands of volunteers went about tunefully announcing, “Wake up and have your sehri.” Every evening Hussaini or Qadeer bicycled down piously to the nearest mosque, carrying tiffin boxes full of iftari. The snacks were sent from various households to the poor, to wayfarers and to the mosque’s mullah for them to break their fast with. Heaps of edibles from various households were piled up in the illuminated mosques during the month of Ramzan.
Iftar parties were the done thing and on the last evening of the fast, the excitement of sighting the crescent moon of Id was electric. Then the festival itself: new clothes, Id cards, presents, feasts, varieties of sweet vermicelli. Everybody, rich and poor alike, wore new clothes and new shoes. As children Kamal and Talat had been so excited about their new shoes that they kept them under their pillows!
River of Fire Page 24
