Difficult Daughters (14 page)

Virmati loved doing her BT. It took up her day from nine to three – theory classes in the morning, practical teaching in the attached SL girls’ school in the afternoon. She even thrived on the hostel mess, despite her mother’s predictions that, deprived of home cooking, she would grow thin and sick. When Swarna commented on how well she was looking, Virmati replied, ‘Maybe they really are using pure ghee as they say. Otherwise, how could I gain weight?’

‘Rubbish‚’ said Swarna Lata. ‘You can’t get pure ghee in Lahore any more. It’s all mixed with vegetable oils.’

‘Then vegetable oils must be good for the health,’ said Virmati complacently, refusing to get agitated even about pure ghee.

‘When there are more outlets for food at controlled prices, then at least one won’t be paying such high sums for adulterated stuff‚’ said Swarna.

There was a pause. Virmati felt uncomfortable as she always did when Swarna started talking about the many things she was involved in. Finally she asked, ‘Wasn’t your Diwali demonstration in Krishna Nagar a success?’

‘Oh‚’ said Swarna, ‘it was a success all right. That is, a lot of people participated. We drafted a petition, but government rationing and fair-price shops still show no signs of materializing. I wish you had joined us.’

‘I can’t be like you, knowing what to say. I do not know how to convince people. I’m not clever.’

‘You don’t have to be clever to fight‚’ snorted Swarna. ‘Besides, I think you are intelligent.’

Virmati didn’t believe her. ‘We are just
seedhe-saadhe
people‚’ she said righteously.

‘For heaven’s sake, what does that have to do with it?’

Virmati thought that the trouble with leaving home was that one had to explain perfectly obvious things. In her family the banner of simplicity, once unfurled, functioned as a deterrent to argument rather than a stimulant.

Swarna Lata scowled at her. ‘It is people like you who create trouble by letting others do your thinking.’

Virmati looked bewildered at this hostility. Swarna Lata sighed. ‘Sorry. I’m in a foul mood and I’m taking it out on you. It’s just that today I met, or rather didn’t meet, but saw, a friend who was once extremely dear to me. She cut me dead. I’m not surprised, but it hurts, hurts almost as much as it did a year ago. My friends would say I am still too bourgeois.’

‘How dare anybody cut you dead?’ cried Virmati, ignorant of bourgeois traits.

Despite her tension, Swarna Lata smiled to herself. It was true, Virmati was simple. She made no demands beyond the ones of basic amicability.

‘I’ll tell you. Come, let’s go for a walk.’ They moved outside into the moist and cool November night. From the angan they could see the brilliant stars in the piece of sky framed by the hostel buildings.

‘Ashrafi and I were like that,’ Swarna continued, lifting twisted fingers in front of Viru’s face. ‘We were doing English Honours together at Lahore College for Women. It was around April last year at the time of the student elections. My friends persuaded me to stand for senior studentship. It was the first time that a nationalist like me was nominated. The English principal, Miss Dean, usually saw to it that the elected leader was somebody who went along with their line of thinking, but it was done behind the scenes to give the whole process a façade of democracy.’

‘But you are hardly pro-British,’ laughed Viru, who was well acquainted with her friend’s politics.

‘Exactly. They didn’t want me. Too much khadi-wearing, too many speeches about our cause in the debating society. And our cause included the Muslims. Time and again I said that the Muslim League and the Congress should come together, that we were one, that it was the British we should fight, and not each other. I was not alone. Plenty in the college thought like I did.’

Virmati thought, this is what is going on around me. This is the life I should be involved in. Not useless love and a doubtful marriage. ‘What happened then?’ she asked in a subdued tone.

‘Shortly after I was nominated, I found that Ashrafi was standing against me! The principal had persuaded her – how, I never found out. Why she never told me, I never found that out either. And we used to share everything.’

Virmati understood betrayal. ‘She couldn’t have been much of a friend,’ she remarked vehemently.

‘No, she was, she really was. But obviously there was something deeper than friendship at work here.’

‘What? What could be deeper than friendship?’

‘What a baby you are, Viru! So many things are deeper than friendship. In this case it must have been religious identity, maybe Muslim fear and insecurity. They must have told her she would be disloyal to the Muslim cause. I didn’t want to stand against Ashrafi, but my group said we had to win this election if it was the last thing we did. So you see, ultimately I too put something before friendship.’

‘It’s not the same thing,’ muttered Virmati.

‘Maybe Ashrafi thought it was. Anyway, for the first time our college was divided along communal lines. For the first time.’

‘Did you win?’

‘I did. There were more Hindus, Sikhs, Christians in the College than Muslims and most of them voted for me. Much good that victory did me. The whole year it was like dust and ashes in my mouth. Ashrafi stopped talking to me. Initially I tried to discuss it with her, surely our feelings for each other were strong enough to survive an election! What rubbish I was talking. We were pawns to forces beyond us. I did learn a valuable lesson, though. I now know better than to presume on the permanence of any relationship.’

Virmati felt tears come to her eyes as she heard this. Despite all their differences, they shared common experiences.

‘Obviously she still hasn’t forgiven me. I hear she’s joined the youth wing of the Muslim League. Ashrafi! The most apolitical person that was! How does one stop thinking of someone one used to love, Viru? How does one stop remembering?’ Swarna shook herself, adding, ‘It’s something I have to get used to, I suppose. It happens all the time.’

Virmati stared at Swarna. What a girl! Her opinions seemed to come from inside herself, her thoughts, ideas and feelings blended without any horrible sense of dislocation. She was committed, articulate. Would the Professor want her to be like Swarna? She didn’t want to do anything that would alter the Professor’s undying love for her. Maybe she could be like Swarna from the inside, secretly.

 

Gopinath Mama helps me unearth a little old lady who used to know my mother while she was studying in Lahore.

Swarna Lata Sondhi lived in a small set of rooms on the second floor of an old house near Eden Gate. She was shrivelled with age, her eyes red-rimmed and watery. She walked with a stick, and was delighted to see me.

‘Yes, I remember your mother, though we didn’t keep up after she finished her BT and left Lahore. Maybe, I think, yes she did come back for an MA, but I’m not sure. There was so much happening at the time …’

‘But you also left Lahore, didn’t you, auntie?’

Her voice fluttered and trembled over the division that had ploughed furrows of blood through her generation.

‘We had to … had to … though we hadn’t believed – never believed – things would come to such a pass. Lahore was our city – our home. Whether it went to India or Pakistan was irrelevant, we didn’t care. Nothing was going to make us forsake it. Leaders of both sides claimed – again and again – minorities would be safe. They said to quit would feed communalism. We assumed that ourselves. We had always co-existed. Why not now?’

‘And …?’

When they received the worried, secret warning from a Muslim friend they too hastily departed. They had seen too much arson, looting, and people drunk with the lust of killing to feel exceptions. As it was, they were hanging on by a long emotional thread that needed but one direct threat to snap.

So she and her husband fled, planning their return once the absurd trouble was over. Like thousands of others, abandoning their land, houses, furniture, carpets, linen, dishes, jewellery, pets, cars, books, gardens. Those things were never forgotten and around them crystallized an aura that borrowed its lustre from tears that were too inadequate to shed. Too much had been lost, too many people had died.

*

Swarna Lata Sondhi stoops towards me. ‘If I only knew’, she said, ‘how little Ashrafi’s loss would mean to me later, when it was drowned in the sea of all those other losses, I never would have wasted so much time crying over her. As 1947 drew near, friends like her went – increasingly, as the divisions of Hindus and Muslims were exploited by both the Congress and the Muslim League. I threw myself into my work. Yes, and I also got to thinking that agonizing over personal sentiments was a time-consuming bourgeois luxury. There is a lot to be said for that attitude, dear.’

‘I am sure there is,’ I reply. ‘But what exactly did you do, auntie?’

‘After Rameshwari Nehru was arrested in 1942, she handed over charge to Perrin Barucha – shall I spell that out for you, dear?’ And the old eyes peer uncertainly over spectacles at my illegible handwriting.

‘No, that’s all right. I think I’ve got it.’

‘Perrin Barucha and her girls. I was one of them.’

‘You must have been pioneers.’ I am full of admiration for this frail, incredible female.

‘Oh, not really‚’ she said modestly. ‘That was the time when people were very aware of what was happening around them. I got involved with IPTA, we agitated against rising prices, we organized singing squads with songs based on folk songs to arouse awareness, we wanted rationing centres opened, we wanted profiteers punished, we wanted more equality between men and women, and we were against,
totally
against, segregation on religious lines.’

Swarna Lata’s nostalgia is so strong that I feel it too. We live in the long shadow of those times, I thought as I sit before her, my pen my votive offering to her age and history. Her death will further dwindle those who can still remember an undivided India. I lean towards her soft, quavering memories and the difference between her and my mother becomes increasingly marked. ‘No use thinking about the past,’ had been my mother’s axiom, blanketing everything in oblivion. So far as Lahore was concerned, the subject of other people’s eloquence, there was nothing but a void, though it had been a place she had studied much in.

*

I want to go to Lahore, I want to see the place where my mother was educated after so much trouble. I want to see the place that had been the Mecca for all Punjabis. Lahore, where students gathered on the river, around the mausoleums, through the mall, in the gardens, the shopping areas, the eating places, the theatres. Where anybody with brains in their head went to study. To learn, to meet people, hear leaders, be in contact with social, political, fashionable trends. The centre of Punjab, its heart and soul, and how much else besides.

*

Going to Lahore is not easy. It takes me two months. The queues in the visa section are long, the atmosphere between the two countries as usual hostile. When I finally arrive, I understand the look in people’s eyes whenever there is talk of the fabled city.

It is clean, leafy, cool and beautiful. The institutions I visit are massive, ornate, touched by Gothic, and I am in love with everything between the sky and the grass from my very first hour there. As for the people, I had never seen so many good-looking ones together. I look at them possessively, a Punjabi Hindu hunger in my eyes – a hunger about a region I’d hardly thought about – until I thumbed through the pages of people’s memories, and saw my questions as a bookmark in their leaves.

And the Oxford of the East. I saw Government College Lahore, first from the road. I walk up an incline towards it and look at the Gothic spire narrowing into the sky, a superb statement of its colonial heritage. This place must have been something in its heyday. Students dressed in maroon blazers and grey pants pass me as I wander around full of lust and longing, my eyes glassy with desire for the best shot to imprint on my film, certain I would fail to capture the ultimate vision.

I walk reverently through a narrow, arched corridor, leading into the inner courtyard, not quite a courtyard, because one side is bordered by a path, with wide, serried, stone steps sloping down to an open-air theatre. Beyond and below I can see the boys’ hostel, a double-storeyed red-brick building. Yellow leaves fall on the students who are pacing up and down the path in front, open books held before them. I climb the stairs flanking the library, into a gallery with classrooms on either side, enter one, slide into an aisled bench and put my arms on the wooden table in front. This is where my mother sat and waited out the periods of time that fate had employed to divide her from her married life.

Here she faced the black-robed Professor and tried to concentrate on what he was saying. Here her eyes fastened on the two fans whirring on their long poles suspended from the rafters. Here she gazed at the peaked ventilators, and the tops of the green trees beyond the veranda. I drink in all these details; I take photographs of every turn in the staircase, the corridors, the classrooms, outer and inner aspects, knowing I may never be able to come again.