This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach (129 page)

‘I asked, “I won’t be able to escape what?”

‘The comrade made a fist and warned me, “Those who are not with us are against us! Whatever happens at the time of revolution, what happened in France, in Russia, in eastern Europe, will also happen here!”’

Mathur cut in, ‘He didn’t threaten to hang you from the electricity pole?’

‘He could have,’ Chaddha said smilingly. ‘Who doesn’t threaten when excited? What is your Congress government doing in Telengana?’

‘Your party is responsible for what’s happening in Telengana. You challenged government with arms, it replied with arms.’

Narottam raised his hand to ask everyone to listen, ‘I said worriedly, “Dear brother comrade, I have always supported you. I support Marxism also. I buy party literature, I have also contributed money to the party.”

‘The comrade sneered at me, “Lip sympathy means nothing. What does it matter if you give away a few rupees? You can throw away twenty without a thought when playing bridge or flash. The test of theory is in practice.”

‘I pleaded, “Comrade, how can I be against you? Won’t you have any consideration for an old friend?”

‘The comrade turned his back to me and said, “Can’t promise you!”’

Mathur and Tara burst into laughter.

‘Get lost, you big mouth! You are a true bourgeois!’ Mercy scolded Narottam. She did not appreciate joke about communists.

‘You find childish people everywhere,’ Chaddha again conceded with a smile.

‘It’s not only about being childish. Your party always gets instructions from outside India for all its decisions and activities. It’s a well-known fact that your party radically changed its policy at the Calcutta Congress on the basis of an editorial in the Cominform newspaper
For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy
. You can’t deny this.’

‘There’s no need to deny it,’ Chaddha replied. ‘What’s wrong if the party decided to form its policy to go with the international progressive outlook? If at any time the comrades in this country cannot apply Marxist principles to the situation, why can’t they take inspiration from the example of other more experienced people? Where’s the problem? The Congress government also invites experts and consultants from foreign countries.’ He knocked on the table with his finger, ‘Countries struggling to be free of imperialist oppression will naturally want to form a united front with countries against imperialist aggression.’

‘No, no. National interest has never been your party’s first concern,’ Mathur protested. He again began to analyse the events of 1942 to support his contention.

Tara had heard all this many times. She got up to go to her room.

‘Arrey, sit. Where’re you going?’ Mercy asked her to stay.

Lost in a feeling of deep contentment, Mercy at times suspected that Tara might be feeling ignored, and would become even more affectionate and caring towards her. She wanted Tara to joke with Chaddha and tease him as if she was her younger sister, so that there would be some joviality around the house. Tara also enjoyed light-hearted and amusing banter, but only to the extent that her background and upbringing allowed.

Previously Mercy would sometimes have a meal without waiting for Tara, but to give Tara a sense of belonging, she and Chaddha would now wait for her to join them. Mercy also wanted Tara to keep her company in the living room until Chaddha wanted to retire. Not wanting Tara to feel any distance from her, sometimes she would behave unabashedly in Tara’s presence. She would take Chaddha’s hand into hers or rest her head against his shoulder. If Tara turned her face away or got up to leave, Mercy would insist that she stay put.

Tara at times felt uncomfortable in the presence of the amorous couple. During her childhood and the part of her life spent in the gali, she had seen a different kind of behaviour between husbands and wives and members of a family. Love had been a totally personal and private affair in the world of the gali. Etiquette dictated that newly-married couples did not speak to each other intimately in the presence of others. Tara did not think such restrictions were necessary or acceptable. ‘Mercy is a modern woman. She has had a different upbringing, has a different notion of propriety. Why should she have to pretend to be shy? She and Chaddha are a couple, they can behave as they want, but why do they have to be so overly demonstrative!’ If she felt out of place and went to her bedroom, leaving them to be alone, the sounds of a man and woman talking and laughing together filled her with a strange feeling of restlessness.

Tara had been working assiduously to expand the scope of Women Welfare Centres, and to make them into a success. She came back home from office completely exhausted, and found no relief from the constant presence of
visitors and the babble of a crowded living room. She had spent the last two-and-a-half years in that flat in peace, and had become used to the solitude of her room. And when there were no sounds of heated discussion, she had to witness the spectacle of Mercy’s courtship. She would feel fed up and want to run away to some place else.

After the standard of living she had become used to and her new position, it was not possible for her, she felt, to live in a cheap rental somewhere. The wait for the government subsidized housing was as long as before. The thought of moving to the Working Women’s Hostel again came to her mind. There had been all kinds of unsavoury rumours about the hostel. Even if she did not care for the rumours, a room could not be made available just because she wanted to move in. Sometime ago there was a vacancy, but at that time Tara was quite content living where she was. She asked two clerks at her office to lend a hand in finding an accommodation. She knew that even a modest dwelling of two rooms with a bathroom would not cost less than Rs 60 a month. And she would need someone to do the cooking and the housekeeping. She found it preposterous that a person would be needed full-time to cook and look just after her needs, and that person would have to be paid a salary, fed meals and given a place to stay! Two years ago she would never have considered hiring help and would have preferred to do the chores herself on her return from office, but now it seemed necessary. Why was it so, she asked herself? The answer was that she needed peace of mind to do her job well. The thought of spending close to Rs 250 a month only on herself was anathema to her, but she found she could not escape the reality of her social status in the eyes of others and their high opinion of her. The burden of the monthly stipend to Sita was still on her. Faced with a dilemma, she decided not to let her heart rule her head, and to put up with the inconvenience at Mercy’s place.

It would not have been right to stop helping Sita, who had been lately behaving herself. She had trained hard to become a proficient typist. Mathur often found her typing work that earned her Rs 15 to 20 per job. Her mother brought home unfinished socks from a hosiery factory and by finishing toes and heels of the socks, both got an extra rupee per day. They were paying Rs 12 every month for their small dark one-room accommodation.

In the first week of October, Mr Batra, the deputy secretary, sent for Tara and asked her, ‘Do you have any connection with the Communist Party?’

‘Ji, no,’ Tara answered. The question took her by surprise. She had been investigated for her political views a second time at the time of her appointment as an undersecretary. Why the question again? She gave Mr Batra an inquiring look.

Mr Batra asked again, ‘Do communists visit your house? Do they hold meetings there?’

What she had heard about Special Establishment Police flashed through Tara’s mind. By now she had learned to speak with tact and diplomacy within government circles. It was well known that Sardar Patel and Rajaji had declared communists to be ‘Enemy Number One’. The government did not consider officials with partisan feelings for the Communist Party as trustworthy.

Tara said, ‘How can anybody visit my house? I don’t own a house. Since I was alone in Delhi and was afraid to live all by myself, I became a paying guest of nursing sister Mercy Sorrel. She had her own flat, but lived alone. She got married to one Mr Chaddha in August this year. They have many visitors. If there are any communists among them, I don’t know. As it is, it causes me much inconvenience.’

Mr Batra nodded his head to show that he understood, ‘A confidential inquiry about you has been ordered. I think you should not continue to live as a paying guest. Do you own a car? No? Well, you should, considering your position and need. I know this is your personal business, but take it as advice from a well-wisher. Well, I have noted down your answer, but it’d be better if you found another place soon. Any inquiry about you will not look good in your service roll. I’ll report that you’re searching for another place to stay. Do you know that your service record so far has been excellent? Did you try for government housing?’

‘I was told that there was no chance. How could I get a residential accommodation with so many waiting for one?’

‘That’s correct, but ladies can be given priority. I’ll make a recommendation. The government can also rent an accommodation for you. Well, all this will take time, maybe another six months. But you must move to another house soon. Even if you have to pay a high rent, it’ll be in your own interest.’

Despite her closeness with Mercy, Tara had been thinking of moving to another place to get away from the increasingly inconvenient circumstances, yet she did not like being pressurized into doing so. She knew that under
the regulations, government employees could not be a member of any political party. In principle there was nothing wrong in the rule that the people in administration should not have any bias towards or prejudices against any political party, but it was different in practice because sympathy for the Congress was considered as a show of loyalty rather than affiliation to a political party.

Tara could not bring herself to tell Mercy about the pressure to change her place of residence. For her to admit it was demeaning. She brooded over her dilemma, ‘The President, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet ministers, they all are members of the Congress party. Even if they are not in the executive, in matters of government policy they tilt the scales in the Congress party’s favour. Isn’t such partisanship an indication of the dictatorial tendencies in the Congress government? What else does this bullying others into buying
hundi
s mean?’ Hundi, literally a bill or invoice, was something like a bond or certificate that could be used to buy khadi cloth. Gandhi used to ask public to buy it so that the money could go to help khadi weavers. The Congress government tried it for a while as a proof of its faith in Gandhi’s philosophy.

From two weeks before Gandhiji’s birthday on 2 October, government employees were being encouraged to buy khadi hundis. They were told about senior officials who had bought hundis worth Rs 100 or Rs 200. Batra had got one for Rs 150. Word had quietly spread that each employee was expected to buy hundis worth 10 per cent of the salary. Tara also bought, rather reluctantly, a hundi for Rs 100.

A couple of clerks in Tara’s section, encouraged by her approachable attitude, said, ‘We don’t mind buying the hundis, but we don’t care for khadi. We don’t believe in khadi, and it costs more than other cloth. But if you say, we’d buy it nevertheless.’

Tara replied, ‘What belief has got to do with it? Buy it and use it for what you want. You are under no compulsion to wear khadi.’

All the staff bought hundis of small denominations, but not without grumbling under their breaths. Tara’s section assitant, Ram Swaroop Bhutt, was over ten years older than she was. He could not bring himself to call her madam, so he always addressed Tara as huzoor. One day when he brought a file to her office, he stood respectfully before her desk and began to gossip about various clerks, ‘Such and such was saying, “Gandhi Ashram and khadi
has always been political symbols. Why do we have to wear khadi?” Such and such said that the seven annas out of a rupee that the khadi weavers will get as a subsidy will be extracted by the government from the public. That means that they pay the tax so that those wanting to wear khadi can get it cheap. Why were they being compelled to buy the hundis? Such and such said, “We are told that government employees should not participate in the PWA (Progressive Writers’ Association) and the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) because those are communist organizations, but we are told to buy khadi. We are made to pay to keep the Gandhi Bhandaar out of the red. If Nehru is so fond of working at the spinning wheel, he can sit at the Rajghat all day and do so, but why force it on us?”’

The clerks’ grumbling reminded Tara of her own reaction to the official pressure to make her move to another dwelling, when she had thought in exasperation, ‘Should I resign over such a minor issue? But I’ll be making that sacrifice for what great ideal? I am working only so that I can survive. And so is everyone else.’

As a result of hectic efforts of Mathur, Ratan and two of her staff clerks, Tara found a residential accommodation. It was about the same size as Mercy’s flat, but the rent was Rs 80 per month. Tara realized that she would now need a woman to do the cooking and to look after the house when she would be at work. Had Tara not been a woman, she would have had no problem finding a servant. Tara could not ask her peon to stay at the flat, for he was alone as his family lived away from Delhi. Peons at government offices liked working for superiors who could provide them with living quarters. They would do cooking for the boss and clean his house in return for free accommodation and meals, and get baksheesh for buying tobacco in the bargain. On the first rung of the career ladder, women had become clerks and officers, but not peons.

Tara called Sita to her new flat and told her plainly, ‘I had to rent a new place and I am facing unexpected expenses. I don’t think I’d be able to help you with money as before. I’ll give you and your mother one room here. Your mother can keep the house. Whatever simple meals I will eat, you will also eat.’ Many stories of scandalous acts by displaced women and adventurer refugees were doing the rounds. Tara preferred this arrangement to taking the risk of trusting some stranger. What better deal could Sita and Purandei think of?