Difficult Daughters (6 page)

At what stage did thoughts of the Professor replace the permitted thoughts of her fiancé in Virmati’s mind?

That he looked at her, she knew. That he paid attention to her, she was aware. But to think of him was impossible, given the gulf between them, until he bridged it by crying out his need. Eldest and a girl, she was finely tuned to neediness, it called to her blood and bones. He spread his anguish at her feet, and demanded that she do with him as she pleased.

Days passed, and Virmati’s confusion grew. She would sometimes wish that … but what could she wish? Early marriage, and no education? No Professor, and no love? Her soul revolted and her sufferings increased.

The question of the fiancé loomed large.

*

‘Tell him, tell him.’ The Professor became exigent. ‘The thought of him in your life is like poison to me.’ By now, Virmati had finished her BA and her wedding date was fixed.

‘How can I tell him? I hardly meet him. And never alone.’

‘Look at me,’ urged the Professor, stroking the hair of her bent head. ‘It won’t matter to him. As you say, he hardly knows you. How can convenience be allowed to come between us? Say you have changed your mind,’ he persisted.

Changed her mind? In what world was he living? ‘They will think I have gone mad. They have been patient enough with me as it is. And then there is Indu,’ she tried to explain.

At this, his face puckered with distress. The grip on her hand tightened, and his fingers, trembling with passion, travelled persuasively up and down her soft arm. Virmati’s whole body tightened with tension.

‘Don’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Someone will see. She may come in.’

‘No one will see. She’s gone out.’

‘Still, I don’t like it. There are others. They will tell her – them.’

The Professor gently placed his fingers around the thin column of Virmati’s neck. ‘Don’t worry about her‚’ he pleaded.

‘Why not? She is your wife, isn’t she?’

The Professor looked crushed and Virmati thought again how it was not his fault, how could he help it if he had been married off at the age of three? Her arms closed around him, and she cushioned his head against her young shoulder.

Later, on her stealthy way home, she felt as usual tainted by her moments with the Professor. The thought of her wedding was always at the back of her mind, splitting her into two socially unacceptable pieces.

As Virmati entered her house, she heard Indumati’s voice, ‘Pehnji! Here’s a letter for you.’ The coyness and interest left Virmati no doubt as to whom it was from. Irritated, she grabbed the letter from her sister’s hand. She would read it later, after her milk, in the privacy of the second terrace on top of the house.

Virmati read this brief letter several times. She searched the words, but could find no sense that she was important to him, no impatience to be united with her. But maybe, thought Virmati indecisively, these things came after marriage?

In her pocket was another letter, part of a correspondence the Professor had insisted on maintaining, although she hadn’t seen the need.

‘But why? You are right here. We see each other almost every day.’

‘Until I am with you every moment of the day I cannot be satisfied. Every thought and feeling I have, I want to share with you.’

Now, feeling wretched, Virmati unfolded the Professor’s latest offering.

Virmati put these letters on the parapet and stared at them as they lay indecently side by side; the Professor’s crushed from hiding in her pocket, the fiancé’s with legitimate public folds. Quickly she tore up the latter and scattered the pieces over the wall. Wasn’t her future partner decided by the first touch of a man on her body? Even though in this case it meant humiliating her grandfather, who was publicly associated with female education, betraying her father who had allowed her to study further, and spoiling the marriage chances of her siblings.

Virmati remembered, once upon a time, she had been quite happy to be engaged to someone her elders had chosen. Had she been able to follow the path they had so carefully planned for her, they would have seen to it that the transition into adulthood was as painless as possible. Now all that was over. Oh, why hadn’t she married sooner? But deaths in both families had made hers a two-year engagement. In those two years she had fallen against the grain, and whatever might be the consequences, she must continue her course.

*

‘Mati?’

‘Yes?’

Virmati found it difficult to broach her topic. Instead, she silently watched her mother work. Kasturi was sitting outside her room, in the veranda that ran along the side of the house. Before her, on the chattai, was a spinning-wheel, on which she was making thread from a pile of cotton. With long, careful movements, her left hand swung back and forth, pulling out the thread from the needle on the spindle. Her right hand slowly turned the wheel. Disturbed by her daughter’s unmoving eyes, Kasturi repeated, ‘Yes?’

Virmati sat down on the floor and started playing with the cotton. She felt her mother’s inaccessibility even more because her hands could not join hers in their work.

‘What are you making?’ she finally asked.

‘I am getting this last khes ready for the beddings you will take with you.’

‘I don’t think I want so much bedding.’

‘It is not your job to decide how much bedding you want and don’t want. This is a question of marriage.’

‘Maybe we had better wait,’ said Virmati desperately, after a pause.

Kasturi’s hand faltered in its steady movement, and lumps formed in the thread. Making an irritated tiching sound, she broke it off. ‘Are you out of your senses?’ she asked harshly. ‘Two years is not long enough for you?’

‘What is wrong with not wanting to marry?’ appealed Virmati, bringing the words out in the open where they wilted in the hostile atmosphere.

Her mother could only stare. Virmati fidgeted, pulled more cotton apart. ‘Shakuntala Pehnji never married. Look at her,’ she said.

‘Shakuntala Pehnji did not have five sisters waiting to get married either. And do you think it makes her mother happy to have her daughter unmarried? She may say what she likes about jobs and modern women, but I know how hard she still tries to find a husband for Shaku, and how bad she feels. You want to do the same to me? To your father and grandfather?’

‘No, no‚’ said Virmati feebly.

‘You are the eldest, Viru, your duty is greater. You know how much the younger ones look up to you. Your grandfather and father both have confidence in you, otherwise would they have given you so much freedom? They thought school and college would strengthen you, not change you. Now what will they feel when you want us to break our word and destroy our good name? How will they understand it?’

By now the cotton was almost completely pulled to pieces. Virmati knew being the eldest meant being responsible. It was unfair on the part of her mother to think that, after all those years of looking after them, she could even think of harming her siblings.

‘I’m not harming anybody by studying, Mati,’ she pleaded.

‘You harm by not marrying. What about Indu? How long will she have to wait? What is more, the boy is getting impatient. What about him?’

‘Tell him I don’t want to marry‚’ whispered Virmati, hanging her head still lower.

‘
Hai
re
. After making him wait so long? What were you doing all this time? Sleeping?’ Kasturi’s voice was rough with exasperation.

‘Let Indumati marry. Give her this khes you are making. I don’t want any bedding, pots and pans, nothing!’ Virmati was growing frantic.

‘What nonsense!’ exclaimed Kasturi. ‘And what about his family? What face are we going to show them? Do you think you find such good boys every day?’

‘Mati, please, I want to study …’ Virmati faltered.

‘But you have studied. What else is left?’

‘In Lahore … I want to go to Lahore …’

Kasturi could bear her daughter’s foolishness no further. She grabbed her by the hair and banged her head against the wall.

‘Maybe this will knock some sense into you!’ she cried. ‘What crimes did I commit in my last life that I should be cursed with a daughter like you in this one?’ She let go of the girl’s head, and started to wail, rocking to and fro. The reels of thread spilt from her lap. Virmati moved to pick them up.

Kasturi slapped her hand away. ‘Leave them there, you ungrateful girl!’ she hissed. ‘Otherwise you do just what you want! Why bother with the show of picking up thread! Get away from my sight‚’ Kasturi’s face was purple with fury. As Virmati got up, she said coldly, ‘Remember you are going to be married next month, if I have to swallow poison to make you do it!’

Slowly Virmati dragged herself away. As Kasturi watched her daughter’s retreating back, the arms swinging uselessly by their sides, the head buried between hunched shoulders, her own despair increased. What had come over the girl? She had always been so good and sensible. How could she not see that her happiness lay in marrying a decent boy, who had waited patiently all these years, to whom the family had given their word? What kind of learning was this, that deprived her of her reason? She too knew the value of education, it had got her her husband, and had filled her hours with the pleasure of reading. In her time, going to school had been a privilege, not to be abused by going against one’s parents. How had girls changed so much in just a generation?

Sultanpur, West Punjab, 1904. Kasturi was seven and had been going to the mission school for only a few months when her parents caught her praying to a picture of Christ, something the nice Bengali teacher said she herself did. Her mother had torn the picture, screamed and shouted, and threatened to marry her off, before she brought further disgrace to the family. It was her uncle who intervened.

There was no question of Kasturi becoming a bride, he said. Child marriage is evil. Suppose her husband dies – her life will be over before she knows anything. Their Swami Dayanandji had said that marriage was a union between rational, consenting adults. This was the only way its sanctity could be preserved, and the misery of multiple marriages and child widows avoided. He understood his sister-in-law was upset – praying to a picture of Christ was no small matter, he agreed, it was exactly in this way that the British sought dominion over their minds – but what kind of example would they set the community? All the things the family stood for would be suspect; Dayanandji’s convictions must go on living despite the great sage’s death twenty-one years ago, otherwise the Arya reform movement would have no life in it.

‘That’s all very well,’ said the irate mother. ‘But this witch sitting at home will have nothing better to do than think she is a Christian. Who will marry her then, I would like to know?’

‘Sixteen, and the best bridegroom in the Punjab,’ said Kasturi’s uncle, flapping the advertisements in the
Arya
Patrika
, advertisements of educated boys wanting educated girls. ‘Till then, she must go to school. I started one for our boys, I will do the same for the girls. Had I done so sooner, there would have been no question of exposing our daughter to Christian schools.’

And he began, transforming the fistfuls of flour housewives donated for the Samaj cause into bricks and letters for his niece, arranging for grants, teachers, students, space, and facilities.

Kasturi never forgot that evening. Over the sound of beds being dragged into the centre of the angan for the night, and the clatter of poles being inserted for mosquito nets, Praji, his eyes on the children’s kites that were darkening against the red evening sky, told her that soon she would soar like those very kites. Once she had gained a proper education, she would be on her way to becoming one of the finest flowers of Hindu womanhood.

So the school came about, and Kasturi became the first girl in her family to postpone the arrival of the wedding guests by a tentative assault on learning. Her father, uncle and teacher made sure that this step into modernity was prudent and innocuous. Her head remained modestly bent over her work. No questions, no assertion. She learned reading, writing, balancing household accounts and sewing. Above all, the school ground the rituals of Arya Samaj havan, sandhya and meditation so deeply within her that for the rest of her life she had to start and end the day with them. After five years of this education, it was considered that Kasturi had acquired all that it was ever going to be useful for her to know. She appeared for her first and last outside exam, performed creditably, and graduated at the age of twelve, to stay at home until she married.

*

During Kasturi’s formal schooling it was never forgotten that marriage was her destiny. After she graduated, her education continued in the home. Her mother tried to ensure her future happiness by the impeccable nature of her daughter’s qualifications. She was going to please her in-laws.

How?

Let me count the ways.

With all the breads she could make, puris with spicy gram inside, luchis big as plates, kulchas, white and long, tandoori rotis, layers of flaky flour, paranthas, crisp and stuffed. With morrabas, never soggy, and dripping juicy sweet. With seasonal pickles of lemon, mango, carrot, cauliflower, turnip, red chillies, dates, ginger, and raisins. With sherbets of khas, roses, and almonds, with hot and cold spiced milk, with sour black carrot kanji, with lassi, thin, cool and salty, or thick and sweet. With barfis made of nuts and grains soaked overnight, and ground fine between two heavy stones. With sweets made of thickened milk. With papad, the sweet ones made out of ripe mango, the sour ones with raw mango, the ones to be fried with dal and potato. With thread spun, with cloth woven, with durries, small stitched carpets, and phulkaris, with pyjama kurtas, shirts, and salwar kameezes.

With all these accomplishments under her belt, Kasturi spent her free time sewing. If she wasn’t doing the family stitching, she was working on the phulkaris for her trousseau. The phulkari stitch was a simple one, it allowed room for her to indulge in hopes (shy), fears (suppressed), speculations (of the unacknowledged), and the bright colours she used, magenta, orange, green, yellow and white, became linked with the desire she secretly felt for her unknown groom.

With her needlework, Kasturi held back worries about the behaviour of an unmarried, educated seventeen-year-old. Her father, in particular, loved watching her. Such gentleness and tranquillity, beauty and modesty were sure to be rewarded by a good husband, he felt, as with her threads and needle Kasturi joined the ranks of women who have stitched hours of waiting into intricate patterns. Her clandestine activity was reading, which she protected from comments about self-absorption by gratifying it at night.

*

The glimpse that decided the union of Kasturi and Suraj Prakash, the young and enterprising advertiser, came in August, when the weather was hot and humid. His advertisement answered, his background investigated, his presence called for, he arrived at the dry-fruit shop in the forenoon, looking crisp despite the heat, having washed and changed at the station.

Yes, he would do, Kasturi’s parents decided late that night. They had both talked to Suraj Prakash, they had talked to Praji. Should the couple meet? Kasturi’s mother was against this. It was highly unlikely that they could have anything to say to each other, and it just created space for whims and fancies to operate.

‘Well,’ reasoned Lala Jivan Das, ‘he has come all the way. He will want to see as well as be seen.’

‘See her? He can see her from the window if he is that keen,’ said the mother. ‘But there is no need for anything else.’

‘These are modern times,’ Lala Jivan Das tried again. ‘Swamiji has said that young people should not get married without knowing each other. The young man has come, and we have been able to judge him for ourselves. Let him also meet Kasturi, it is only natural.’

The mother thought this a strange idea. After all, their girl was not for display.

‘No, no,’ argued Lala Jivan Das. ‘Where is the display in this? Send her in with his glass of milk. She is always doing this for her brothers.’

‘Suppose he doesn’t like her? Then another will want to see her, and another, and another, and our daughter will get a bad name for nothing.’

Lala Jivan Das looked at his wife in amazement. He supposed it was the tension. ‘Not like her? Of course he will like her. What is there to dislike in her? He is an educated man, from a respectable Samaj family, where is the room for liking and disliking? Nonsense!’ he exclaimed.

Next morning, Kasturi’s mother handed her daughter a glass of milk, with a small plate of barfi, and told her to give it to her brother’s friend who had come from Amritsar. Throwing her red dupatta over her head, Kasturi walked towards the baithak, where Suraj Prakash was sitting, waiting, wondering.

There she was, young, thin, her dupatta setting off the colour of her skin. Tendrils of hair framed her face. As she offered him the glass of milk, their eyes met and held for a moment. They looked away, and were consumed by the desire to look again, but how could they? There were so many people around. The blush on their faces became a glow. With this one glance, the final link was forged in the chain of events set in motion years before.

*

The wedding was fixed for October. On a formal visit to Amritsar, Kasturi’s brother came to Suraj Prakash in his shop, with a silver bowl of mishri, a gold guinea and a hundred and one rupees. Suraj Prakash ate the mishri, kept the bowl, sold the guinea, gave the money to his father, and set about making clothes for his wedding.

The preparations in Sultanpur began. There would be fifty to sixty people in the barat to house and feed at regular and steady intervals. Some of the barat intended to stay at least a week because they meant to make a holiday of the whole expedition. Lala Jivan Das pored over the menus, consulting for hours with the halwais. He was a wholesale merchant who dealt in spices such as black pepper, cinnamon, and cumin; sherbets of kewra, rose and khas; dry fruit, especially almonds, pista, cashews, walnuts, raisins, figs, and apricots; pickles, mainly mango and lemon; sweet morabbas in huge jars containing carrots, amla, mangoes, apples, pears and peaches preserved in sticky sugar syrup. His godown was now ransacked for the best it had to offer. There were to be at least four varieties of barfi in different colours – green pista, white almond, brown walnut and pink coconut – for the guests to eat as a side dish with every meal. The freshest spices, rose leaves, and saffron were to flavour the daily glasses of milk they would drink. Special feasting things like dhingri and guchchi to put in the rice and paneer were ordered from the Kashmiri agent in Sultanpur. The expenses were going to be considerable, but Lalaji did not care. How else was he to display his love for Kasturi, his sorrow at her leaving, the worthiness of his son-in-law?

Praji was calm. He had done his duty, kept his word. He was aware that the cause for which he had done so much, education in Sultanpur, was talked over in many homes after Suraj Prakash had made his visit and won his bride. It was rumoured that he had a wonderful jewellery business in Amritsar, that he was a sanatak, having graduated from a gurukul in Kangri, that he had no mother, only an old widowed aunt, and of course everyone was aware of how he had come to Sultanpur himself, with no running-after by the girl’s side. If education had started the whole process, there was a lot to be said for it. Already Praji had more people showing an interest in the girl’s school, and more willing promises of donations than ever before.

Kasturi and her mother spent hours alternately crying and preparing the trousseau. Most of it was taken (along with the big metal trunks) from the trousseaus of Kasturi’s two elder brothers’ wives. Nobody thought of asking them whether they minded or not, such territorial attachments were frowned upon as being contrary to family spirit. Looking at the two sets of bed frames with delicately painted legs, Kasturi felt the twinge of dread in her grow stronger. The initiation into womanhood, intimacy, procreation, all this was going to be hers at last, on home-made sheets of fine Manchester cotton, embroidered pillowcases, brightly woven kheses that her mother had spun in red, yellow, brown and black. The base of the bedding was a strong thick durrie, especially made to order from the Jammu jail. For warmth in the winter months she had six mattresses, stuffed with cotton from her family’s fields. In another trunk, padded with old cloth, were a hundred and one vessels and utensils. There were small, delicately moulded tashtris for snacks; kansa thalis and katoris gleaming their mock silver shine; brass, cone-shaped glasses; huge karhais and patilas to cook in. A small suitcase contained her clothes – six sets of salwar kameezes. A wife was not for show, after all.