A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  My mother’s ideal male was her elder brother Krishan, a doctor in the armed forces whose interest in medicine was close to zero. Krishan mama was tall, over six feet, well built and handsome in a macho way that included a dapper moustache which adorned his upper lip. Twirling a highly polished teak baton and followed by a uniformed orderly when he went to work in the military hospital in the mornings, he cut a dashing figure in his starched khaki army uniform with the lieutenant’s star on the shoulders, the peaked cap and a gleaming Sam Browne belt around a trim waist. He looked equally smart and handsome in the white shirt and trousers when he went to the club to play tennis in the evenings; he was the club champion.

  Krishan mama had an easy, playful charm which both my mother and grandmother found irresistible. He drank hard and was reputed to ‘have an eye for the ladies’, many of whom reciprocated his interest with both their eyes. An impetuous man with a devil-may-care attitude, Krishan mama was someone who would rather regret something he had done than regret what he had not done.

  My puritan grandfather openly disapproved of the wild ways of his eldest son. It was my grandmother who consoled and took him under her wing after each tongue lashing from his father. Often smelling of a combination of whisky and an aftershave, Krishan mama always had a kind word and a pat on the shoulder for me whenever he passed me in the house. He called me ‘yaar’, which can be translated as ‘intimate friend’, but for an Indian has resonances of a lifelong bond of affection and commitment between men whose friendship goes back to their teens. For a five-year-old, there could be no greater flattery than to be addressed as ‘yaar’ by this heroic figure whom his mother held, in her shining eyes and expression on the face if not in so many words, as her ideal of a real man.

  Except for fleeting encounters at family occasions, I lost touch with him as I was growing up. Once in a while he would crop up in my parents’ conversations, generally in context of his drinking and difficulties in marriage. I had been his sarbala, the child-nephew who sits on the horse behind the bridegroom, when Krishan mama rode at the head of his wedding procession to marry Vimla, reputed to be the most beautiful girl in the town of Firozpur where his wedding took place. Given their physical allure, I can imagine that Krishan mama and Vimla mami created a powerful field of desire around them, attracting would-be lovers intent on breaching the boundary of their coupledom. As I gathered from my parents’ conversations, the temptations posed by these others were not always resisted. My mother, though, consistently maintained that the stories about her brother’s flirtations were vastly exaggerated and in any event it was the woman who was at fault in such affairs, referring both to Krishan mama’s wife and the gossip around his new conquest. My father would just smile.

  Krishan mama died young, in his early fifties, of a heart attack on the tennis court, the heavy smoking and drinking finally taking their toll. My childhood recollections of his laughter and charm, the sense of life that emanated from him and animated the space and people around him, have been darkened by a memory from the last time we met. This was on the occasion of my marriage. We were all returning from Bombay where the marriage had taken place to Delhi. When the train was passing through Rajasthan, he had asked me to get a bottle of alcohol at one of the stations where the train stopped.

  ’What would you like? Whisky, rum, gin?’ I asked. He had looked at me with tired eyes, the grey stubble on his unshaven cheeks not only making him look older but also as someone who was trying to come to grips with the downward course his once golden life had taken. Dissipation had taken its toll on his good looks. The days of his sporting triumphs were long over. He knew he would never go higher in the army than his present rank of lieutenant colonel. People spoke mockingly of his medical skills and none more so than his best friend and drinking companion, Ajji, the husband of his sister Prem, who affectionately called him ‘horse doctor’. ‘Kuch vi lya de, yaar. Mat hi te marni hai,’ he had said to me in Punjabi. ‘Bring anything, yaar. The sole purpose is to obliterate consciousness.’

  My mother may have looked down on my father’s social origins but she was proud of his intellectual credentials and career achievements. Over the years, leafing through the family photograph album, she would often point to his photograph as a young man with two gold medals pinned to the lapel of his convocation gown which he had been awarded for standing first in the university in the Master of Arts examinations in both Economics and Political Science. She did not need to voice her expectation that when the time came, I too would add to my father’s gold medals which she kept safe in a bank locker with the jewellery given to her as part of her dowry.

  As she became older, her admiration for my father grew and their bond became stronger. More and more, she came to value his integrity, calm good sense and his devotion to the family, especially to her. My father adored my mother. He thought that she was the most beautiful of the Kapur sisters. ‘Just look at her,’ he would say, pointing to a studio photograph of my mother when she was in her early twenties and which, elaborately framed, adorned the mantelpiece of the living room of all the houses we ever lived in during my father’s frequent transfers that went with the job. In this photograph, my mother is wearing a short, embroidered silk kurta that comes down to the knees and a shiny white garara, trousers that flare out at the bottom so that the garment looks like a long skirt. With one hand she is holding the end of an almost transparent chunni that covers a part of her head and hides her daring, shoulder-length ‘bobbed’ hair. She is quite beautiful.

  More improbably, my father claimed that my mother was also the more intelligent of the sisters. ‘If she had only had the opportunities that Kamla had,’ he’d say, referring to the second sister who went on to do her PhD in the US in the late 1940s and had a brilliant career as a pioneer of management education in India, ‘your mother would have done equally well if not better.’

  From the age of five, then, I grew up with two ideals of the man I should become: a composite of the images of my father and my uncle, as refracted through my mother’s psyche and my own experiences of the two men. These two images remained with me as my telos of manhood well into adulthood. The ideal was of a man who is both an intellectual and a sportsman, a scholar and a bon vivant, a man who strives for the life of the mind, even spirit, yet pays equal homage to the body’s élan. One of my mother’s unconscious messages to me, her designated conquistador, was to be someone who excites the admiration of women and the envy of men, a disastrous recipe if the man happens to be the husband of an admiring woman.

  It was also at the age of five, during our long stay in Lahore that I discovered the joy of cinema-going which added wings to an already overactive imagination. I have written about this elsewhere,6 about going to movies in the 1940s being regarded as somewhat dissolute, if not outright immoral, and especially dangerous to the growing sensibilities of young children. Not all films were equally burdened with moral disapproval. In the movie caste system, stunt films, the Indian version of Kung Fu movies, were the lowest caste while the Brahmin mythologicals and the Kshatriya historicals vied for supremacy at the top. I was in the fortunate situation that my grandmother’s brothers owned a cinema, Prabhat Talkies, and I was great friends with the doorman who doubled as an odd-job man in the adjoining house of my grand-uncles. While the family took their afternoon siesta, I would sometimes sneak into the cinema to indulge my secret passion.

  I use the word passion literally and not as a metaphor, since my craving for movies was insatiable and my consumption equally remarkable. I saw Ratan when it came out in 1943 sixteen times, Shikari fourteen times and even the eminently forgettable mythological Kadambri three times. My taste in movies was catholic, marked by indiscriminate adoration.

  As I sat there in the front stalls of the darkened foyer, in the company of students giving their studies a breather and domestic servants prolonging their shopping errands, I was no longer a small child from a provincial town but very much a man of the world, a part of the desired wor
ld of adulthood, even while I sensed its mysteries and rituals but dimly. I joined in the appreciative laughter that followed a risqué comment from someone in the audience, even when its meaning totally escaped me. I too would hold my breath in the hushed silence that followed a particularly well-enacted love scene, and surreptitiously try to whistle with the ‘O’ of the thumb and index finger under the tongue, in imitation of the wolf whistles that greeted the obligatory scene in which the heroine, mortal woman or goddess, was drenched in rain and revealed her charms through a wet and clinging sari.

  By the age of twelve or thirteen, when I was at school in Shimla, my taste in movies had graduated, or rather degenerated, into a special fondness for ‘stunt films’, the B-grade action movies of Bollywood that were shown at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings. Besides a smattering of schoolboys and college students, the audience for these movies was predominantly young, male and lower class: rickshaw pullers, manual labourers, shop assistants. The reigning queen of these movies was Nadia, the ‘Fearless Nadia’ of movie posters. Her films, Hunterwali (The Woman with the Whip) and Toofanmail (Storm Express—the name of an actual train from Bombay to Amritsar) were big hits even after years of their first showing and were regularly screened in Shimla’s three cinemas.

  Nadia was a most unlikely Indian film heroine, a chunky blond Australian woman who spoke bad Hindi, wore a mask and tight-fitting leather shorts that exposed her muscular thighs. At a time when Indian women’s legs were supposed to be always covered in a sari, salwar or ankle-length skirts, Nadia’s white legs were exempted from this proscription and were an acceptable font of sexual excitement. The logic here, though reversed, was the same that in the West allowed magazines like the National Geographic to show the bare breasts of brown or black women long before Playboy could show the breasts of white women.

  Nadia wielded revolvers, brandished a whip, ran along the roofs of rushing trains, swung from chandeliers, beat up villainous men and played with lions. Culturally, she was a fantasized reincarnation of Durga, the protective mother goddess who brandishes a spear instead of a whip, and is an intrepid slayer of demons, inner and outer. Psychologically, Nadia was the powerful phallic mother, affording young men and boys on the cusp of manhood to engage with the vagaries of sexuality and the fluidity of sexual identities before they hoped to step into a confident masculinity. In unconsciously identifying with this superwoman, as much man as woman, one was not limited to being a male but had access to femaleness; one could be both the sexes. An object of both desire and anxiety, Nadia helped in freeing the flow of fantasies relating to what psychoanalysts believe is the fundamental object of our unconscious imagination: the maternal body. In this, she was different from the other love of my cinematic life of the time, Ava Gardner of the emerald green eyes, high cheekbones and full lips, an object of simple lust . . . if lust is ever uncomplicated, especially in the teens.

  Movies have retained my affections although my taste has kept on changing—I would hesitate to claim it has steadily ‘improved’. In youth, a pretentious period of life at the best of times, my would-be-intellectual persona granted respect only to European ‘art films’—the cinematic works of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Francois Truffaut, Jean Goddard, Federico Fellini, Michael Antonioni, Akiro Kurosawa, Andre Wajda. With the sole exception of the movies of Satyajit Ray, these were the years where I joined in a modish denigration of all Indian cinema—and of the standard Hollywood fare. At a time when I myself entertained fantasies of becoming a film director (to which I will return later), I would have found it mortifying to admit, even to myself, that I actually found some of these black-and-white masterpieces which I discussed among friends with affected knowledge and much intensity, boring if not positively soporific.

  Movies continue to occupy a special place in quickening the life of my imagination, although they are now no more than a mild addiction; a fix of watching two to three movies a week from the offerings of world cinema now available on the small screen is sufficient for my reduced needs. If, as a child, cinema brought the vistas of a desirable adulthood tantalizingly close, it now helps to keep the road to childhood open.

  Returning to my childhood memories of Lahore, the most important of these are of the days I spent with my father’s family at their home in the old walled city. I can see from my mother’s letters to my father that my memory does not deceive me on how much I loved to be with my other set of grandparents and their large extended family, which on any particular day could vary from fifteen to twenty-five members, adults and children.

  ‘Our baby doesn’t stay at Lawrence Road,’ my mother writes. ‘He prefers staying at Machhi Hatta and enjoys [it] there. Sohan [my father’s youngest brother] came and took him and he is staying with Bhauji [my grandfather] for a few days.’ And again, ‘Sudhir is being spoilt staying there. I don’t understand what to do. I am exhausted.’

  The ‘spoiling’ refers to the attention I received from my grandparents and my father’s younger brothers, unmarried sisters and cousins who stayed with them or just happened to be visiting for the day, or even a few months. It helped that I was the eldest son of the eldest son who was the pride of the family and indeed of Hiranand gali, one of the many narrow lanes that branched off Shah Almi Bazaar. The shopkeepers in this bazaar were mostly Hindu and thus cows and oxen, squatting in the middle of the busy street or drinking from water troughs built especially for them by pious shopkeepers, were a common sight. The coachman of the tonga in which my uncle fetched me from Lawrence Road often had to crack his whip to get a cow, which was licking a slab of raw salt devout Hindus had placed for the animal, to make way for the horse carriage. The bazaar was completely gutted by fire during the partition riots in 1947 although our gali, I am told—since I have never been to Lahore after it became a part of Pakistan—escaped destruction.

  Like other lanes in the walled city, some with such evocative names as Laila Majnun di gali that kept the memory of the legendary Persian lovers alive, Hiranand gali was lined on both sides by three-storey houses. These were constructed with regard to convenience, that is, cramping as many rooms as possible into the available space, and not according to any dictate of aesthetics. The houses were stacked against each other like a row of books placed spine to spine on a shelf and one could cross from one terrace to another just by stepping over a low parapet. The life that took place on a terrace roof—women hanging the washing out to dry in the morning, elderly men and women warming themselves in the sun in the afternoon during Lahore’s cold winters, families gathered for a feast on festive occasions, flirtatious teenage cousins sneaking up for some privacy when the terrace roof was deserted and, in summer, the many conversations in different parts of the terrace before people went to sleep at night as also the hawking noises they made when waking up in the morning—was accessible to all the neighbours. Hiranand gali was dusk-dark even during daytime. It was also always slightly damp and smelly from the narrow, open gutters flowing in front of the houses that carried an inky, sluggish sludge of vegetable peelings, fruit rinds and children’s pee.

  In the family mythology, Bhauji had earned and spent, or rather given away, more than a million rupees during his working life as a building contractor with the state’s public works department. According to the legend I grew up with, there was no softer touch in the whole of Lahore. Anyone with a sob story, especially if the man worked for him, was sure of encountering a sympathetic heart and an open wallet. My practical grandmother was in the habit of rifling through the pockets of his coat (kurta in summer) when he returned from work and went into the bathroom for a wash and to change into more comfortable wear for the night. I cannot substantiate the whole myth but can personally attest that whenever I stayed with my grandparents in Machhi Hatta, any child who needed money to buy a sweet or a toy was led to Bhauji’s room by an unerring instinct.

  If there was any money left after relative strangers had claimed their share, Bhauji donated it to Punjab’s Congres
s Party. Bhauji was a nationalist who undertook large construction projects for the British government but was also an ardent supporter of the country’s freedom struggle. During Gandhi’s 1942 Quit India movement, he decided that he would no longer accept British building contracts, a decision that had an immediate and disastrous impact on the family’s finances. His political convictions did not stop him from being fiercely proud that his eldest son served as magistrate in the same colonial regime that he resolutely opposed. My father reciprocated Bhauji’s sentiments. In true Hindu fashion, both of them experienced their opposing political views and conflicting attitudes towards the Raj as part of their different svadharmas, their distinctive life tasks and separate ground plans of life, which could happily coexist and had no bearing on the affection and respect in which they held each other.