Diddi Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  DIDDI

  Ira Pande worked as a university teacher for fifteen years, and then as an editor at Seminar, Biblio, Dorling Kindersley and Roli Books. She has done some work for television and has also acted in the awardwinning film Monsoon Wedding. Currently, she works a freelance writer and editor.

  DIDDI

  My Mother’s Voice

  IRA PANDE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Jiya

  Contents

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1 Diddi’s Kasoon

  2 Ama

  3 Santiniketan

  4 Diddi and Babu

  5 Priory Lodge

  6 Binu

  7 Jayanti Jerja

  8 Hamid Bhai

  9 Ramrati

  10 The Last Chapter

  Epilogue: Pootonwali

  Acknowledgements

  In February 2004, my mother-in-law, Jiya, was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. Jiya, to whom I dedicate this book, was never a mother-in-law: she was my best friend. I wrote this book whenever I could snatch time in those painful months when we all suffered with her and finished the first draft in four months, so that she could read it while she had the energy to. She did, and then wrote on a slate (she could not speak clearly then), ‘I give you the Nobel Prize for this.’ For her faith in me and the love she gave me so generously, I dedicate this book to her, someone who was more a mother to me than my own.

  There are some special friends who helped me carry on writing even when it was difficult to find the will or time. Dipa Chaudhuri, Sanjeev Saith, Alok Rai, Pankaj Butalia, Shobha Dev, Abhinav Dhar, Meera Malik are among those few friends to whom I showed a draft of this book and who gave me wonderful feedback. Anuradha Roy, who first set me off by commissioning an article on Diddi for the Hindu, is someone I owe a lunch of gratitude. V.K. Karthika, Jaishree Ram Mohan and Bena Sarin of Penguin have been a dream team, and produced this book in record time. I thank them all.

  My sisters and brother allowed me to do whatever I wanted to with Diddi’s books and actually helped me locate some missing articles and stories. Without their support, I would have never dared to write.

  My children, Apurva-Chinmaya, Aditya and Aftab, have been enthusiastic readers and been a part of this whole venture. Aditya, who designed the cover, was with me throughout the writing of the book and even fibbed to make the right noises. But it is to Amitabha, my husband (long-suffering, patient and wise), that I owe more than a debt. It is he who helped me to think towards writing this book with Diddi as a character in her own world, and not as a memoir that I had originally planned. Many arguments and tantrums from me were borne with his characteristic fortitude. Without him there, I would never have completed this book or given it to a publisher.

  ~

  * * *

  Prologue

  Perhaps because we called our mother Diddi, elder sister, our relationship with her was always somewhat ambivalent. More than a mother she was for us a difficult sibling, an eccentric, much older sister who belonged to a different generation. After her death, it seemed to me as if she had lodged herself in my head because I could hear her voice constantly, more clearly than I ever heard her when she was alive. It occurred to me then that despite the fact that she was never a cloying presence, she had burrowed herself so deeply into my life that losing her was like losing a limb. Or perhaps it was something like the phenomenon that people with amputated limbs describe when they can feel sensations in an arm or leg that is no longer there.

  That she was also the most popular Hindi writer of her times was an aspect of her personality that we were both proud of and embarrassed by. She was too proud to mention how hurt she was by my casual acceptance of her literary reputation. It must have pained her deeply that the very children who had once never tired of hearing her fascinating stories had now outgrown her kind of writing. So she chose to deliberately downplay her literary reputation with us, treating it as a joke that she got hundreds of letters and awards from many sources. Making fun of one’s achievements was a game we had learnt to play from her and understood, so we played along.

  This was one of the reasons that after her death in March 2003, I vowed to read all her works again, many of which, I’m ashamed to admit, I had never read at all. While reading her prose writings it dawned on me that over the same half century that she wrote her most popular novels and short stories, she had also published a large body of autobiographical prose. And that it is primarily in her non-fiction—her portraits, essays, memoirs, chronicles, travelogues and newspaper columns—that she kept a kind of personal record of her life. As I read them, some remembered as stories she had told us as children, others I remembered reading when they were first written, it became clear to me that until I absorbed this part of her work, and the personality embedded there, she would never move out of my head.

  This book is not meant to be anything as literary as a biography. Indeed, while writing it I deliberately put aside all that I ever learnt as an editor. For the more I read her and tried to recreate her voice, the more I became involved in a psyche and a temperament that used the senses as well as the mind rather than the mere intellect. I do not know whether Diddi herself necessarily understood, or intended to understand, this aspect of her work, for like so many writers, she could embody truth, but did not always know it. Or if she did, she chose to hide it.

  In this sense, I suppose, every writer becomes a character in the fictional world he or she creates. I can’t say whether this is a universal truth, but I do know that Diddi bled into her plots often without knowing that she was doing so. I suspect this was her way of marking a place for herself in everything she created so that her voice would never be stilled or forgotten by anyone who had heard it. In the same way that she left a bit of herself in each of her children, she left bits of herself in every piece she wrote. Doubtless, there are several writers and artists who, like her, cannot bear to be excluded from the world that they create. Diddi created her fictional universe from the part of her life she loved best: her childhood and early years. Time and again, she used Kumaon and Bengal as the setting for her romantic novels and she clung to these territories as a child to a mother’s hand. They gave her the strength to face the encounters, people and places she feared to confront. A part of her, I am convinced, always stood at the top of her childhood home and looked down confidently at the passers-by on the road below, secure in the knowledge that she had something that none of them even knew.

  Her writings of her childhood are a marvellous mixture of memory and fiction, a fact that becomes evident as the reader discovers that she uses an event in a portrait of a real person and then again as a situation or character in a novel. She looked and treated all of us as characters she used and controlled. And to liberate herself from the frustration when she—like all romantic dreamers—encountered the complexities of real lives, real people. I also know now that despite her lofty proclamations of detachment, she could never bear to let go of us. So when we all moved away, she remembered us as characters so that she could always keep us near her in the only way she knew—through her writing.

  Yet she also knew—perhaps the word is trusted—that to be born sentient and watchful is a daily miracle; that the world around us is as wondrous an index of heaven as we shall ever know; that to abide here is the nearest you can get to heaven because it is a chance to watch and take part in so many lives. Entering other people’s homes and lives gave her the best chance to find a better and better image with which to secure it for her readers. For a person as restless and alive as she was, one life, one pair of eyes, one heart was not enough. Perhaps this is why after she lost us to our own lives and families, she created another family for herself in Lucknow
and ruled over them like a queen. My sister Mrinal—the child nearest to her own restless temperament—called her Queen Lear because she always travelled with her personal fool. Her maid, Ramrati, was Diddi’s alter ego, and her family and friends became Diddi’s Lucknow court. Among the regular visitors to this world were the local hijra, Mohabbat, the milkman, Suleiman, the vegetable vendor, the postman, and Qutb Ali, her faithful rickshawallah. An occasional visitor was a monkey (named Ramkali) who used to wear her glasses and ‘read’ the newspapers with her in the morning, or so she said. This was the court that she presided over and that supplied her with all the stories that came tumbling out of her.

  One of her greatest qualities was her capacity to befriend people of whatever class and creed and especially those who would be intellectually and socially unacceptable to most of us. It was this endearing lack of conceit that made her a bit of an embarrassment to her own children. Yet Diddi was also a fearful snob—an intellectual snob—and was instinctively drawn to the pure of spirit. It was this that won her the fierce loyalty of whoever she had around her. In her tribute to Ramrati, she writes:

  My Guru, Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, once said in a lecture, ‘The common people you have around you are a treasure. Remember that they represent a rich cultural tradition: make them the subject of your study. Look closely at the people you work with, observe their language, thoughts, their social units, their lifestyles and beliefs. You will learn more from them than from hours spent in a library or museum. Yet remember that you must interact with them in a responsible manner: do all you can to make them understand their past, see their present for what it is and prepare them to face their future. In short, learn from them and teach them.’

  I have no doubt at all that no lecture in the world can better the lessons given by life and the ordinary people around us. I have met some outstanding minds and learnt valuable lessons from them. My teachers came in many shapes and forms and what they taught me has helped me immeasurably in negotiating the difficulties I have faced.

  So let me begin with Almora, where it all starts.

  I remember my father’s house in the cantonment area where we lived until I was three years old. All I can remember is that it had a red tin roof, a little garden pavilion and a hen coop. Magnificent deodar trees shielded it from the gaze of the Circuit House on top of the hill and far below us lay Almora’s Lala Bazaar with its quaint cobbled lanes and sleepy shops. Yet more than the details of the house it is smells and sounds that I remember: the sound of the wind rustling through the deodars and the warm smell of crushed pine needles, the drone of fat bumblebees in the summer and the lonely cawing of the crows in winter.

  However, since we spent most of our time at the other end of town, in my grandmother’s house at Kasoon, that is the house that I remember with a Fellini-like vividness. It was perched on a ridge that offered a sweeping view of virtually the whole town. I remember its stone flagged courtyard, its long wooden veranda that overlooked the street below and a trapdoor that separated the top storey from the ground floor and led directly to the passage adjoining the library. Ama, my grandmother, was a plump, bespectacled and toothless presence who presided over an empire of pretty unmarried daughters, grandchildren and hangers-on from the past. She seldom moved from her rooms on the upper floor and loved my uncle Tribhi’s children more than the rest of us put together. Yet, in the innocent way that children store happy memories, I have no recollection of being jealous of the fact that my uncle Tribhi and his family were placed on a level that none of us would ever reach.

  According to the peculiar social dynamics of the Almora of those days your social position was determined neither by your wealth nor by your station in life. It was fundamentally attached to your birth and to the clan you belonged. If I were to draw a map of Almora from memory, it would be a sea of islands named after families and family homes: Champa Naula, Bishtakura, Jhijhar, Sela Khola, Tyunara, Dhunga Dhara, Pande Khola, Jivanpur, Galli, Malla Kasoon, Talla Kasoon. These were the fortresses of old Brahmin families who married eternally among themselves. Little wonder that madness mushroomed happily in the town and each clan had its share of lunatics.

  In fact, one entire branch of my mother’s family was cheerfully acknowledged as the mad people of Talla Kasoon. Ama said an ancestor of theirs had killed one of their farm hands. The father of the dead man cursed his landlord saying, ‘May not even a calf ever prosper in your house!’ And truly, no one in that house was normal or prosperous. Two of them, Bhagwat Da and Mohan Da, were amiable lunatics who often sauntered over to visit Kasoon. We touched Bhagwat Da’s feet as we would touch those of any elder uncle when he strode across the courtyard to visit Ama. Dressed in rags and feathers, he held a staff festooned with flags and came to play a solitary game of table tennis downstairs in the library. He would chuck the pingpong ball across the table and solemnly say, ‘One love,’ then cross over to the other side to toss the ball across to make it ‘One all’. When he had played enough, he went upstairs to chat with my grandmother and drink a glass of tea with her. His wife was a schoolteacher who worked hard to keep the family going and once came to my father, then in the Education Department, to plead for a transfer from Almora. Apparently, Bhagwat Da had taken to attending her classes to the delight of the students. He held up his hand to answer every question she asked the class and even participated in the annual sports day races.

  Across the terraced field lived the family of Mayaram Da, once my grandfather’s driver and now part of my uncle Tribhi’s staff. He called Tribhi Mama ‘Highness’ and smelt of cigarettes and sycophancy. In what was once the cowshed, lived Tara Didi, Ama’s faithful Sancho Panza. A contractor in Burma, Tara Didi’s husband died suddenly, leaving her alone and virtually destitute in a foreign land. How she found her way back to Almora is another story but she and her children were adopted by Ama and she remained Ama’s faithful companion to the end. Tara Didi’s kitchen smelt of warm chapattis and generosity.

  In contrast was our own house in the cantonment: my father disliked noise and loud laughter. And he disapproved of Diddi’s constant visits to Kasoon. I don’t think he understood or wanted to acknowledge Diddi’s deep attachment to her childhood home and its lively, noisy people. If I were Fellini and this was a film script, I would bathe Kasoon in bright sunshine and the cantonment house in a dark, brooding sadness. But to understand Diddi’s love of Kasoon and its loony inmates, one has to read her own version of it.

  1

  * * *

  Diddi’s Kasoon

  These reminiscences are taken from a selection Diddi’s writing in the sixties/seventies, mainly from an article she wrote on Lohaniji when he died.

  My earliest memories of Lohaniji are from the time we were in Gujarat, in Verawal. Lohaniji took us every morning to the Somnath temple and then let us play nearby as he lay under a tree to sing hymns to the Devi. His favourite was an invocation to the Devi who rides a tiger and his deep baritone would occasionally draw a passing shepherd as an audience. ‘I have a feeling the old man knows only one song,’ my brother once said deliberately within his hearing. ‘Otherwise why would he sing a hymn to the Devi in a temple for Shiva?’

  ‘Oh ho,’ roared Lohaniji. ‘You think I don’t know any hymns to Shiva? Then listen to this one, you fools!’ and he launched into a thrilling Shiva stotra. When he came to Dhagadh-dhagadh dhagjjval lalaat patt pavake, we stopped breathing as Lohaniji’s voice thundered like a train across the windswept field.

  His real name was Purushottam (literally, the best of men) Lohani and it was a name he lived up to. Tall, fair, with a bushy moustache bristling under a sharp, patrician nose, Lohaniji had large eyes and lips that rarely smiled. He was fond of reminding us that he had come into the family a year before my mother came to Kasoon as a bride. This is why even after she became a grandmother, he always referred to my mother as Dhulaini-jyu (bride).

  Lohaniji was originally appointed to take charge of our kitchen but gradually all the importan
t portfolios of the house came under his control. He handed over the task of cooking to his younger brother, Devidutt, and became instead the home, finance, information and broadcasting minister all rolled in one. In addition to this, he was the Chief of Protocol in my grandfather’s household. Distinguished visitors—Tagore, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, Swami Nityanand, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, Sir Sultan Ahmad, Dr Ansari, the wrestler Rammurthi, and various royal guests, such as the Nawab of Rampur, Murtaza Ali Khan, would regularly come to Almora and often stay in our house. The Crown Prince of Datia, nicknamed Bulbul, stayed for over a year as our house guest. My father told us that his stepmother had tried to poison the prince and he had been sent to Almora for safety with my father as his guardian. Traumatized by his childhood memories of Datia, Bulbul would jump at unexpected sounds and crept around the house like a shadow behind my father.

  Lohaniji was also our unofficial family priest: the long morning and evening puja, the rudri path at the annual Parthiv Puja in the rainy season, birthdays, deaths—Lohaniji oversaw the conduct of all these rituals. His own family—two sons, one daughter and a son-in-law, and his ‘Bamini’, a wife he loved deeply—were second to ours and he visited them once a year. For the rest of the year, he forgot he had any other family but us.

  The four oldest children of our large family of siblings were especially close to him. Lohaniji had declared my eldest sister Chanda, who died at a tragically young age, a divine soul. She was not destined to stay in this sinful world for long, he’d say, shaking his head sadly. She was his favourite, a dev kanya: he had cradled her when she was born and she died with her head in his lap. My handsome brother, Tribhuvan, was born after two sisters and was the eldest son of the family. Lohaniji, an unashamed sexist, loved him dearly. Tribhi was allowed liberties no one else could take and called him Parkhiya, an affectionate swear word.