by Mark Tully
The troubles – the partition riots of 1947 – found Chandre and his mother in Lahore. His mother was working as a sweeper in a lunatic asylum. Chandre told me, ‘My father was not alive by then. He was a big strong man, like you, but he died about a year after I was born. He died in one minute, at night.’ Chandre did not know what had happened in that minute.
I asked Chandre what he remembered of the bloodshed in Lahore. He replied with his usual brevity, ‘Much rioting.’
Lahore, the magnificent capital of Punjab, became part of Pakistan after partition, and Hindus like Chandre's mother fled to Delhi. No one knows exactly how many fled or how many Muslims tried to make their way to Pakistan in what must surely have been one of the greatest upheavals of history. About half a million people were killed, many of them butchered in trains. Chandre and his mother were lucky. He remembers that the train journey from Lahore to Delhi, a distance of about 300 miles, took several days. He also remembers a mob stopping the train.
‘On the way, near the start of the journey, someone attacked the train. I don't know who. The carriage was crowded, great big men were weeping, we were all scared. We shut all the windows and doors, and I hid under a seat. Then the military came and we reached Delhi safely.’
After that adventurous beginning to his life, Chandre could well have just settled down to being one of millions of Harijans working on the land in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. His village is Molanpur, post office Gavvan – a villager always describes his home by his local post office – district Badayun. It is about four hours' drive from Delhi. Chandre's family was better off than most Harijans because they did own some land. According to Chandre, his grandfather had at least ninety bighas (fifteen acres) but he lost a lot of that to the Ganges, which meanders where it likes through the soft soil. His uncle was still farming about fifty bighas when Chandre was a boy, grazing the buffaloes and goats. His mother used to make ghi, or clarified butter, from the buffaloes' milk and sell it in the bazaar at Gavvan, only a mile away by foot. As soon as he was strong enough, Chandre was taught to plough with bullocks. Then he worked the year round in the fields – sometimes his family's and sometimes other people's which his family had taken as share-croppers, sharing the produce with the owners on a fifty–fifty basis.
Chandre was perfectly happy. ‘Farm work goes on twelve months of the year. We lived well and I was never hungry.’
‘What about school?’ ‘I asked Chandre when I was trying to piece together the story of his childhood.
‘There was no school in my village. I learnt to read from my own children.’
There was actually a school, I discovered later, but it didn't teach much which seemed relevant to working on the land, and Chandre had no other ambitions at that time.
‘If life was satisfactory for you, how did you come to Delhi?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that was because of the big row.’
I imagined there had been some massive dispute over land which had driven Chandre out of his village. But not at all – it was a sudden storm, although it must have been brewing for some time.
‘I left home because I argued with my mother. She told me to go, otherwise why should I go?’
‘But why did your mother tell you to go?’
‘Because she got angry with me.’
‘There must have been some reason for her getting angry with you.’
‘I suppose there was. I did have a bad temper.’
‘So you lost your temper.’
‘No, not me – my mother.’
Extracting information from Chandre was trying my patience, so I said rather irritably, ‘Chandre, I don't understand. What was the row about? Surely your mother didn't just get angry for no reason at all.’
That at last got Chandre going. ‘Well no. One evening I returned home to find the buffaloes and bullocks lowing because they hadn't been fed. I said that my cousin should give the buffaloes green fodder. I said that I spent the whole day working in the fields and what I brought home everyone ate, so why couldn't my cousin at least look after the animals and give the fodder. My mother said, “If you leave the house there'll be no fighting.” That night I was sleeping in the fields while the maize was growing, to keep away the wild animals. In the field I thought, “My mother has never spoken to me like this in the whole of my life and so I should go.” I left the next morning from the fields and no one knew that I had gone. No one knew where I had gone. I had eighty rupees with me and the clothes I was wearing.’
It is quite possible that Chandre would have cooled down and returned to his village to make peace with his mother had he not met a member of his biradari or subcaste on the road – described by Chandre as one of his relatives. Chandre has an army of so-called relatives, who are always demanding his attendance at weddings, funerals or other family occasions. He asked Chandre where he was going, and Chandre replied without thinking, ‘To find work.’
His relative said, ‘But you have work in your village and you have land, so why do you want to go outside.’
Then Chandre told him the story about his mother. His relative replied, ‘Your mother should not have spoken like that. You have done right. You can come with me – I have work in Delhi.’
So Chandre arrived in the capital of India with just the clothes he was standing up in and his eighty rupees. His relative was living in what is known as a jhuggi-jhonpri, that is a cluster of one-roomed shacks normally consisting of mud walls and rusty corrugated-iron roofs. Even someone as short as Chandre could not stand up inside the jhuggi. The jhuggi-jhonpri had sprung up on the edge of a construction site because, as usual, the contractors had made no attempt to house the migrant labourers building in this case a hospital. Chandre's relative was working as a labourer, carrying sand and bricks on his head.
The next day, Chandre's relative sent him off to buy atta or flour for making chapattis, but Chandre was never to return. It wasn't that he didn't want to return – he had nowhere else to go and was very grateful to his relative – but he just got lost. When I asked Chandre how he could have got lost when there must have been plenty of atta shops nearby and plenty of people to ask the way back to the construction site, Chandre replied, ‘I crossed the road to the shop, bought the atta and then forgot the way.’
‘But it must have been a big construction site. Some people must have known the way back to it,’ I said.
‘Yes, it was a big site, but I didn't know what to ask for. I had only arrived the night before, so I didn't know. I wandered around all day and in the evening I found myself in Akbar Road.’ Akbar Road is one of the tree-lined avenues of the original New Delhi. Its colonial bungalows set in large gardens are occupied by ministers, senior civil servants and service officers. Chandre must have walked a long way from north Delhi to get to this, the most sought-after part of the capital. The burra sahibs of independent India live like their colonial predecessors in an artificially sanitized zone, removed from all the discomforts suffered by the people they are governing or administering. Chandre was overcome by the alien orderliness of it all.
‘There were no people on the streets, no shops. So I finally realized that I was completely lost and there was no one to ask. It was getting dark, I had nowhere to go, so I just sat down by a rubbish heap and started to cry. I couldn't think of anything else to do.’
‘Did you spend the night on the streets?’ I asked.
‘No. You remember our dhobi [washerman], Sohan Lal? A friend of his came by and asked me why I was crying. He said, “Don't worry. Come with me,” and that night he gave me food and a place to sleep. He asked me my caste and I said I was a bhangi. But he didn't mind. He was a dhobi.’
‘Did you feel uneasy because you were a sweeper, not from their caste?’
‘No, there was nothing like that. I didn't feel like that. I spoke to Sohan Lal and his family and they didn't let me feel anything.’
I was a little surprised by this, so I said, ‘Sohan Lal's family had absolutely no rea
son for taking you in. You were not related. They didn't know your family. They didn't come from the same area.’
‘No, they just felt sorry for me when I told them that I had arrived in Delhi the night before, had been told to go and buy atta and had got lost. They said, “You stay here until you find your relative, otherwise you will die.”’
Chandre could well have died or got lost in the underworld of Delhi if Sohan Lal's family had not taken pity on him. To this day, Chandre remains a very nervous traveller. Recently he was sent by train to Allahabad to meet me. Before I left, I assured him that the Prayagraj Express terminated at Allahabad, but a tired Chandre told me he had sat up all night in case he missed the station.
Sohan Lal's family lived in the servants' quarters at the back of a large compound in Akbar Road. A senior naval officer called Nayar was living in the bungalow – he must have been an admiral to qualify for such spacious accommodation. Chandre was taken to see Nayar Sahib the next morning. Nayar telephoned a friend who was looking for a sweeper and suggested that he took on Chandre. But Chandre once again failed to reach his destination.
‘Nayar Sahib's sweeper told me to go behind the Ashoka Hotel where I would find a house and to ask there about the job. There was no house – just a big hotel – so I wandered round all day and then luckily found my way back to Nayar Sahib's house in the evening.’
‘What did Nayar Sahib say?’
‘He called the dhobi and asked him whether I got the job. The dhobi told him that there was no house where the sweeper had sent me. So the sahib called in the sweeper and asked him why he had told me to go to the wrong place. The sweeper said he had gone for the job himself – I suppose it was better paid. Anyhow, Nayar Sahib got very angry with the sweeper and said, “This man will work here now.”’
Chandre worked for Nayar Sahib for five years – or at least that is as he remembers it: I am a little doubtful whether a senior naval officer would have remained in one posting for so long. Anyhow, it was during Nayar Sahib's time that Chandre met and married his wife. Under normal circumstances Chandre's marriage would have been arranged for him by his family and the biradari or subcaste, but he had not had any contact with his village since he had arrived in Delhi. So it was that Nayar Sahib acted as the head of Chandre's biradari – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his marriage-broker. It all happened very suddenly, as Chandre explained in his laconic way.
‘A man was running off with a girl in Nayar Sahib's time. He came to the compound where I lived. We were all on duty, so the women asked him who he was, where he had come from, what caste he was. He got frightened and ran away. Perhaps the police were after him. He left the girl behind and didn't come back. Then, after some days, all the compound people – the dudh-wallah [milkman], the mali [gardener], the dhobi and all the rest of them – went to the sahib. He called the girl. She told him she had no relatives in Delhi and was not married. The compound-wallahs suggested the marriage. The sahib asked if she wanted to stay with me. So it was fixed.’
‘Did the sahib ask you whether you wanted to marry the girl?’
‘I can't remember. The sahib took us to a navy place in his car where we had an official marriage and put our thumbprints on the papers.’
Chandre did not bother to find out about the man who had brought his wife to the compound.
‘I never asked my wife. She didn't tell me either. Later her mother did say that a man used to come to their house, but they didn't know who he was. It appeared to be something about love. My wife was very beautiful.’
‘What about her caste?’
‘She told Nayar Sahib she was a sweeper, so I took her to belong to the same caste as I did.’
Neither Chandre nor his new wife made any attempt to contact her family. That, like most things in Chandre's life, happened by accident. One day the newly-weds were together in a market near Akbar Road when they were spotted by his wife's sister-in-law, who worked there. She ran up to Parvati, Chandre's wife, and asked her what she was doing with a man. Parvati explained that she was now married, and so the sister-in-law took the couple to the hospital where Parvati's parents were working. They were, according to Chandre, ‘happy at the marriage’. But Chandre still did not tell his own family and biradari.
Eventually the inevitable happened and Nayar Sahib was posted. A new Anglo-Indian naval officer took over the bungalow in Akbar Road. He was, according to Chandre, a little more inquisitive.
‘I never used to go back to my village like the other servants do. One day the new sahib asked me why I didn't. He then asked me about my village, its name, the name of the post office, the name of the tehsil [revenue area] and district. Then he sent a letter to my mother. She came to Delhi and we met again. For five years I had not seen anyone from my village.’
I asked Chandre what he had felt when he first saw his mother after so many years. He shook his head slowly and said, ‘Kuch nahin’ – ‘Nothing.’
‘After all those years, nothing?’
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ he said.
Nevertheless, Chandre was apparently glad to re-establish his connections with his village because he started going home again. There inevitably he came under pressure from his relatives to find jobs in the big city for them too. To demonstrate his status as a man of the world, he gave the job in Akbar Road to his sister's husband and moved on to a guest-house where he was the sweeper for three or four sahibs. When they left, all the staff lost their jobs and the cook and Chandre set off to find work as a team. They worked together for three years and then the cook introduced Chandre to one of his relatives – Garib Prasad, a long-serving BBC cook. It was through Garib Prasad that Chandre first came to work for me. Neither of us can remember the year exactly, but it must have been about 1972.
At that stage in my family's life the household was dominated by Garib and his wife, who somehow managed to look after my children as well as her own seven. The Garibs were part of our family, and Chandre did not, I am ashamed to say, impinge on our lives very much. Garib belonged to the old school of servants who believed that the cook was the boss. What is more, he did not really approve of Chandre's frequent absences in his village –absences which were always extended well beyond the day he had promised to return. Eventually Garib decided that we must have a sweeper who could be relied on, and Chandre returned to his village for good – or at least that was what he thought. He was quite happy about that, because there was no one to look after the land. There was another reason for Chandre's return to the village. It was in his words the ‘aurat ka chakkar’ or ‘trouble with the woman’.
Chandre was not shocked when I asked whether that meant that his wife was involved with another man or that he was involved with another woman. He smiled and said, ‘It does happen sometimes in the village – you can't do anything about it – but it wasn't that trouble. I told you that my wife was very fair. But she also suffered very badly from fits. She had them very often.’
‘So you went back to look after her.’
‘Yes. That was why I kept on taking a holiday from you, and in the end Garib said I would have to go, so I did.’
By this time Chandre had a daughter, Rani, and a son, Mahesh. After Chandre's return, his wife bore him another son. He died soon after birth, and Chandre's wife died two or three days later.
Chandre stayed in the village until his son, Mahesh, fell ill. He then returned to Delhi to stay with his sister and get treatment for Mahesh. He managed to get a job cleaning some offices and re-established his contacts with the domestic servants’ circle. That, he explained, was how he came back to my house.
‘Garib was ill in the Mool Chand Hospital near where you were living then. He called for me and said that I should join him again, because he had not found a sweeper he could work with. So I came back.’
Neither my wife – Margaret – nor I knew about all those machinations, but we were very happy to have Chandre back again. In so far as he ever showed any emotion at that stage
in our relationship, Chandre seemed to be reasonably pleased too.
Two years later Garib died. We were all heartbroken – especially my children. Garib had been with us since we first came to India, fifteen years earlier. None of us could imagine an outsider in Garib's kitchen, so we hit on the idea of Chandre – who was by now very much an insider. When Margaret put this to Chandre, he turned it down flat. He said, ‘I can't do it, because I am not a good enough cook.’
Margaret tried to persuade him. ‘You have been working with Garib and other cooks for so long you must have learnt something about cooking.’
‘No. I am a sweeper, and I am very happy. I would not like to let you down or to make you angry with me because the food was not good.’
Margaret refused to give up. ‘Come on, Chandre,’ she said. ‘I have seen you cooking sometimes. When Garib was tired he used to sit on the chair and tell you what to do.’
‘Yes, but Garib isn't here to tell me what to do now,’ said Chandre with flawless logic.
‘I will teach you,' offered Margaret.
But Chandre had an answer to that one: ‘It would not be proper for you to spend your time in the kitchen.’
Margaret knew how stubborn Chandre could be, so she decided to leave it for the moment, saying, ‘Well, Chandre, I don't know what we can do, because all the children say they won't have anyone else.’
The matter was left for a few days, during which Margaret and our daughters did the cooking – much to Chandre's horror: he had never seen a memsahib working in the kitchen except when there was something really special to be cooked.
Garib's death left us with the problem of his family too. His eldest son was now in a good job with an advertising agency, but the rest of the family still had to be looked after. What was worse, if we took on another cook he would have demanded Garib's quarters and there would have been nowhere for the family to go. We discussed this problem with Garib's eldest son, and he came up with an answer which has worked to everyone's total satisfaction ever since. He suggested that Mamaji, as we all knew Garib's wife, should work in the kitchen with Chandre. That would give her an income, and something to take her mind off the loss of her husband. Sham Lal, Garib's son, didn't see any problem in his mother working with a sweeper as cook, and promised to put the idea to her when he felt she was sufficiently recovered. He soon managed to persuade her, on condition that Chandre handled the cookbook – that accounting horror left over from the raj. Chandre had an apparently irrefutable answer to that one: ‘I can't read and write well enough to do the cookbook. I never went to school.’
