A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  The year 1947 was also the site of my first literary foray, a radio play written in Urdu that I sent off to All India Radio (AIR) in Delhi. I have no memory of the content of the play or its length, perhaps around ten pages to fit the 15-minute slot that was allotted to these plays. I have never felt as proud as I did on the day I received the printed formal letter from AIR regretting that they were unable to use the play while wishing me success in my future literary endeavours. That first acknowledgement, never mind that it was a rejection, was more exhilarating than any publisher’s acceptance of a manuscript in later life. For days, I went around school with the rejection letter in my pocket, reading and rereading it, showing it to incurious friends, till it fell apart after being left in the pocket of a shirt thrown in the wash before I could retrieve it.

  Some of the most vivid memories of the months I spent in the boarding school in Delhi relate to sex and violence. This is not surprising. Apart from any instinctual satisfaction they provide, sex and violence are also ways of feeling alive in the bleak and barren landscape of loneliness, such as the one in which I found myself at school. Whether pleasurable, or painful as in the case of violence, both were crucial in greening the desert of aloneness during the months I was away from home and family.

  The sex took place in the mornings in the washroom of the residence hall, my new home that I shared with twenty other boys of the same age. The washroom had one basin for brushing teeth and two shower stalls next to each other. The stalls were without doors. The sex consisted of a hurried exploration of another boy’s genitals while offering one’s own for a similar grope. It had to be rushed, since other nine- and ten-year-olds, shivering in their pyjamas in the cold Delhi winter while they held a toothbrush in one hand and a towel in the other, were lined up in front of the washroom door, impatiently awaiting their turn. After a couple of months of indiscriminate gropings, partners were selected for the rest of the year, each pair making sure that both boys stood next to each other in the morning queue to the washroom.

  I can still summon up the image of Inderjit, my partner in the sex play. The image is not of his person but of our hands on each other’s slender child-penises while we stand or sit on the floor under one shower, taking care that water is streaming out of both. Appearances had to be kept even when all the boys were not only aware of the goings-on in the washroom but were themselves enthusiastic participants. Inderjit had never seen a circumcised penis before—‘nangi lulli’ or ‘naked penis’, as he called it—while I found it fascinating to pull back his foreskin, the pink bald head emerging as if out of a beige turtle neck, and then draw the foreskin forward to make the moist head disappear. The tumescence and the mutual touching were both exciting and pleasurable. There were no feelings of embarrassment. These would come later, in puberty, with the supremacy of the purely sexual, when arousal would be unpredictable and promiscuous, where even touch was no longer necessary, merely the chafe of the underwear against the genitals capable of producing an erection. Yet, as I have said, I believe it was not only the promise of erotic pleasure but also the need to break out of the armour of loneliness that encased the boys who had left home for the first time, which prompted the sexual encounters. What I had experienced in boarding school was a tactile starvation diet for a child for whom the touch of other bodies had been almost as elemental as the air he breathed. If I felt my aloneness so keenly, it was also because my family life had been so dear to me.

  The memories of violence are from scenes of teachers punishing the boys in class. Our English teacher, Mrs Bose, a diminutive woman with thick glasses who always wore a white sari with a thin gold border, had the habit of pinching the ear lobe of an errant boy so hard between the nails of her thumb and index finger that it would leave red crescent-shaped marks on the skin. The arithmetic teacher preferred the murga or rooster. Here the boy was made to squat on his haunches and catch both the ears with his hands in an almost Yoga posture where his arms had to come out from under the knees. The buttocks had to be kept elevated for minutes on end. Any tired lowering of the haunches earned a painful smack on the behind with a thick wooden ruler. Our Urdu teacher, a young man with a pockmarked face and longish, oiled hair combed back in the fashion of the day, had developed his own novel method of inflicting pain. A boy who could not answer his question from a lesson had to be slapped on the face by the next one who could. Since I was good in Urdu, it was often my lot to slap a number of boys who had failed to give the right answer. I soon realized that this would not add to my popularity, but the first time that I tried to keep my slap gentle, the teacher slapped me so hard that I fell down on the floor. Caught in a bind, I discovered a way out of my dilemma by keeping a small hollow space between my palm and the other boy’s cheek; the slap was then loud enough to fool the teacher and yet hurt the boy much less than the genuine article.

  Teacher violence in schools was endemic in those days, as it is in most Indian schools even today. In my next school, St. Edwards in Shimla, run by Irish Christian Brothers, slapping and caning accompanied our education as a matter of course. Although their professed intent was pedagogic, the beatings also provided an outlet for the hidden sadism of some teachers. I remember that in St. Edwards, Brother Conway, a celibate monastic like other Irish teachers in the school, once started caning a plump, good-looking Kashmiri boy who had played some innocent prank. Brother Conway could not stop the beating even after the boy had dirtied his pants. In his flushed face and his inability to stop, as if he was possessed by an unseen demon, we boys could sense that what was happening was something more than punishment for an offence, that there were other, darker forces propelling Brother Conway’s cane and blocking his ears to the boy’s screams.

  In 1948, my father was transferred to Shimla to take up his new post as the administrator of the town’s municipal corporation. My mother was ecstatic. Beginning with Dera Ghazi Khan, my father’s first posting, she had had enough of Punjab’s dusty provincial towns. Shimla was romance. Shimla was sophistication. It also had some of the best schools in north India for the education of her children.

  The British had discovered Shimla, now capital of the state of Himachal Pradesh, in the early nineteenth century and made it their summer capital seven years after the first Indian war of independence in 1857. Surrounded by pine, deodar, oak and rhododendron forests, Shimla’s popularity as a summer resort really began in the early twentieth century when the viceroy, Lord Curzon, finished building one of the most spectacular railway tracks in the world, the winding track of 96 kilometres with 103 tunnels that climbed up from Kalka in the plains to Shimla at over 7000 feet.

  The British intended Shimla to be a home away from home where they could escape from what for most of them was an unpleasant Indian reality. The houses they constructed for themselves were replicas of Swiss chalets with sliding slate roofs, Tudor Gothic with roofs of corrugated iron, and other architectural styles that were in vogue in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. The Viceregal Lodge, the palace of the viceroy and the seat of imperial power till 1947 and now home to the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, was the acme of this Anglo-Indian architecture: a sprawling neo-Elizabethan fortress in grey stone, complete with turrets and terraced gardens spreading across 110 acres. In 1946, it was here that Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders of modern India met Lord Mountbatten to discuss the final arrangements for the handover of power, and where Gandhi passionately pleaded against the plan to partition the country.

  The houses in Shimla were named either after the owner or after their natural features: Henderson Cottage, Pine Lodge, Snow View. Green Gate was an obvious name for our bungalow in the northwestern part of the town, below Longwood, half a mile off Circular Road. Overlooking a spectacular valley, it was an isolated house at the end of a winding path that hugged one side of Elysium Hill, one of the seven hills on which Shimla was built.

  In the years we lived in Shimla, no motorized vehicles were allowed on the main roads. Except the elderly, th
e disabled and the self-important who were carried in litters on the shoulders of ‘coolies’, or sat in a rickshaw pulled by stringy but strong hill men clad in the owner’s livery, we all walked. I remember my father returning home quite out of breath one evening in the summer of 1948 when, as part of his official duties, he had had to almost jog for a mile in his suit and tie behind the rickshaw carrying Lady Mountbatten, the wife of the last viceroy, who had come to Shimla on a holiday with the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

  The British residents had already begun to leave Shimla by 1946 when it became clear that India was headed for independence from colonial rule. By 1948, there were not many left in the place they had called ‘Indian Mount Olympus’, ‘British Jewel of the Orient’, or, in a mocking reference to the hordes of officialdom that came up from Delhi for six months of summer, ‘Abode of the Tin Gods’. Some, who had run businesses, such as the managers of Shimla’s grand hotels, were waiting to be replaced by Indians. There were few, very few, who stayed on because they were without homes to go back to in the home country. The situation of the latter, their retreat into nostalgia while they struggled with the new realities created by the loss of British power, has been poignantly portrayed in Paul Scott’s novel, Staying On, an epilogue to his Raj Quartet that has the fictitious hill station of Pankot in the Himalayas as its setting.

  On the Mall, a meandering esplanade that runs along the Ridge and was the hub of Shimla’s social life, white faces were now rarely seen among the stately procession of brown ones taking the evening stroll. On Scandal Point at the end of the Mall where it meets the Ridge, it was only Indians who stopped to take in the unimpeded view of snow-covered Himalayan peaks in the distance and to exchange news and gossip. Gaiety Theatre, a neo-Gothic building on the Mall, with its clubroom and bar, that had been a major focus of British social life, was now peopled with the inheritors of the Raj, a whole class of Indians from an Indo-Anglian world of which my parents were a part. Its amateur theatricals, once staged by enthusiastic British army officers and their wives—a young Rudyard Kipling had appeared at the Gaiety as Brisemouche in Sardou’s popular farce, A Scrap of Paper—were now staged in both Hindi and English by a new amateur theatre group of which my mother was a keen member.

  Later, my mother remembered the five years we stayed in Shimla as some of the best of her life. She was in her late twenties at the time, a beautiful and now increasingly self-confident woman who was ready for and eager to enjoy the social life of the fabled summer capital of the Raj that attracted the Indian elite from as far away as Calcutta, three thousand miles away. Most Indian princes had their summer palaces here. Shimla had legendary hotels like Cecils and the Clarkes, and cafes like Davico, where on weekends and national holidays such as Independence and Republic days, there were dinner parties followed by ballroom dancing. Then there was Annandale, a famed Anglo-Indian playground and racecourse in a deep wide valley, an hour’s downhill walk from the centre of the town, a favourite place for picnic parties, fetes and fairs, flower and dog shows, Sunday afternoon horse races and occasional polo matches. My mother was ready to rock.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, even among the urbanized middle and upper classes, to ‘rock’ did not have the same hedonistic connotations as it does today. Cultural norms and taboos dictated that sexuality be channelled exclusively into marriage although, in the case of men, discreet visits to prostitutes were tolerated. The outlet for the large reservoir of unruly sexuality, present in every society at all times, especially in youth though by no means limited to this stage of life, was the extended family. The larger family was the only site which permitted the kind of contact and flirtatious exchanges that are a precursor to even casual sex. It had the further advantage that unintended consequences, such as a pregnancy, or depression that came in the wake of an abandonment by a lover could, well, remain in the family. Brief encounters or even longer affairs between cousins, uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews, were, and continue to be common. In fact, sexual banter, or even cases of physical intimacy between a woman and her brother-in-law, the bhabhi and her devar in north India (mother’s brother and niece in parts of south India), was accepted as almost inevitable. For a time in Indian social history, the erotic importance of the brother-in-law—in the sense that he would or could have sexual relations with his elder brother’s widow—was officially recognized in the custom of niyoga. Though the custom gradually fell into disuse, surviving only among remote communities such as the hill people of Uttarakhand, the psychological core of niyoga, the mutual awareness of a married woman and her younger brother-in-law as potential partners, is an actuality even today. The awareness is present in the most chaste of mythical wives, Sita, who, in the Ramayana, accuses Lakshmana of hesitating to help her husband and his brother, Rama, because of his erotic interest in her. Lakshmana later reports the conversation to Rama: ‘Sita said to me, “Evil one, an excess of feelings for me has entered you. But if my husband is destroyed, you will not obtain me.”’1

  In clinical practice among the middle and upper middle classes, I have found that women who are on terms of sexual intimacy with a brother-in-law rarely express feelings of guilt. Their anxiety is occasioned more by his leaving home or his impending marriage, which the woman perceives as an end to her sensual and emotional life. In some remote, rural communities, these affairs are even welcomed if they produce a much-desired male offspring. I remember that one morning, some twenty-five years ago, our cook who came from a village in the Kumaon hills, brought me sweets on a plate.

  ‘I have had a son,’ he said, looking most pleased.

  ‘How?’ I was surprised. ‘You haven’t been home for a year.’

  ‘How does that matter? My brother is there.’

  For my mother, as for other ‘modern’ women in the early 1950s, ‘to rock’ meant taking the daring step of going to a dance party with other couples who were close friends. It meant acceptance of flirtatious compliments from my father’s friends and dancing a chaste foxtrot with a man who was not her husband. Not that she did not attract men. I remember Mr Singh Roy, a sophisticated Bengali from Calcutta and manager of the Imperial Bank of India, the predecessor of the State Bank, the country’s largest bank, who was quite smitten by her. They became close and Mr Singh Roy could be found in our house on most afternoons while my father was at work. They would talk for hours in the bedroom, with the door left half open, till my father returned and they all had tea together. My father, in contrast to his son, was not a jealous man.

  One day, my mother announced that she had decided to tie a rakhi on Mr Singh Roy, thus effectively ruling him out of the sexual sweepstakes by turning him into a brother. Tying a rakhi on the man is an age-old custom practised by Indian women to transform a relationship which is threatening to become openly erotic into that of a brother and sister. Singh Roy uncle and his wife became my parents’ close friends and a part of our family, as we became a part of theirs. The relationship continued for decades after we had left Shimla for Jaipur and Mr Singh Roy, now Shiny uncle, had returned to Calcutta. Each year, my mother would send a rakhi to him as she did to her two natural brothers. Shiny uncle conscientiously fulfilled the role of a protective elder brother all his life: giving counsel when asked, taking a keen interest in our lives and offering help when needed. When I was staying in Calcutta after finishing my engineering studies, I would go to his house in Hungerford Street every weekend. Even though I was a Punjabi who did not speak any Bengali, his large extended family treated me as one of their own, the older women heaping my plate with sandesh at mealtimes because they thought I was too thin. It was Shiny uncle’s father, a director in the India Steamship Company, who arranged for an apprenticeship for me with Howaldtswerke, a shipyard in Hamburg that had built cargo ships for their company.

  I returned to Shimla for a visit in 2003, the second time in fifty years after we left in 1953. I had heard of its all-round degeneration but was appalled at the extent. Since the time we had liv
ed there, Shimla’s population had swelled from a mere 20,000 to almost 250,000. The summer tourists that numbered less than 10,000 in 1948 were now more than a million. The few remaining landmarks of the Raj era, such as Christ Church brooding over the Ridge, the timber-framed General Post Office in Spartan brick, the massive cast-iron and steel structure of the Railway Board building, the sprawling governor’s residence, Barnes Court, and others like the Municipal Corporation building on the Mall, my father’s old workplace, looked out of place in a riot of unplanned construction that had covered Shimla’s grassy slopes with cement and concrete. The spectacular architecture marked by stone and deodar wood and slanting slate roofs I remembered from my childhood had given way to high-rise buildings housing hotels and boarding houses, and commercial offices and residential apartments. Shimla was an urban nightmare.

  I had gone to Shimla with my wife Katha to introduce her to a principal site of my past. Shutting my eyes to its present disrepair, trying to conjure up through words sights that only existed in an archaeological layer of my memory, we started the tour at Green Gate. The gate of the house, that was suffused in my memory with a warm glow of childhood happiness, sagged at the hinges as did most of the wooden window shutters. They were no longer green but a discoloured off-white with which the public works department promiscuously liked to paint all wooden surfaces—chairs, tables, doors—in government buildings. The house had been divided into two apartments and a small office where an elderly man was clacking away on an ancient typewriter. The valley below was still deep and mysteriously remote but the hillside opposite our old home was scarred with concrete structures painted in a mélange of lurid colours. Walking up the unpaved path carpeted with pine needles, unchanged since the time I had used it on my daily walk to and back from school, the distance to the main Circular Road now seemed much shorter, a consequence, of course, of my legs having become longer. We passed Auckland House on top of Elysium Hill, my sister Suleena’s first school. From Circular Road we climbed up the steep local bazaar where, on my way back from school in the evenings, I had often stopped for a snack of stale onion pakoras with mint chutney, afterwards wiping my fingers clean on the newspaper in which they were wrapped. We then turned into Lakkar Bazaar, now crammed with shops of Tibetan refugees selling bronze prayer bells and statues of the Buddha, hand-knitted sweaters of coarse wool, fearsome deities carved from wood and chunky bead necklaces sprinkled with turquoise stones. Regal Cinema, one of the three movie theatres in Shimla, where I had continued my love affair with movies begun in Lahore, had been turned into a skating rink for summer tourists—a sanctioned site for the exchange of flirtatious looks and occasional daring comments as young men and women whizzed past each other to the music of Hindi film songs.