Dreamt Lives
Anirudh Deshpande
VII
Two cremations.
After Bahadur and Ravi removed the Patriarch’s corpse from the bed the question what to do with it arose in Ravi’s mind. He had never prepared a cadaver for cremation and the vivid memories of preparations for a cremation went back to the summer of 1971 when his sister, the one younger than Nanda but older than him, died. Everything happened without much warning. The Doctor’sdreamy family had arrived in Delhi on a freezing January morning in 1968. Getting transferred to the capital from NEFA was never easy in India but the Doctor never gave up easily. There were good schools in Delhi, the capital’s hospitals were big and had reputed medical colleges attached to them. The transfer was obtained after Ravi’s father did a lot of footwork in 1967. It was said, with the help of an obliging MaharashtrianCongress MP, he had met Nehru’s daughter with his wife’s transfer file of his wife in his shaking hands. It seems Indira Gandhi, while writing a note on the margins of the transfer file addressed to the Health Minister, had exclaimed: “The heavens will not fall if this young doctor is not transferred to Delhi.” Whenever the Patriarch narrated this incident to the family the Doctor reminded him of a fact which embarrassed him.
“See how he sings the praises of Madam Gandhi now. Let me tell you how, in 1966, he was detained by the police in Dibrugarh for shouting slogans against her in a group of RSS type people led by a few Marwaris.” The statement of this truth led to an argument between husband and wife to the great amusement of the children and friends witnessing it. The Doctor adored Nehru and held India’s woman prime minister in high regard
Within days of their arrival in Delhi Ravi and Varsha were admitted to the Model National School where Varsha displayed great promise by topping her class in all subjects. Three pleasant summers in Delhi passed and the peers’ confidence in Varsha’s abilities grew. By then she had even led a successful students’ demonstration against a liquor vend on the Ridge Road next to the school.For long after she was gone Ravi remembered the event. He had joined in, shouting slogans against the shop and the drunks who leered at school girls, but his young mind had images of his alcoholic father.
One hot day in May 1971, when the school was preparing for the summer vacation, Ravi and Varsha returned home without the presentiment of a death in the family. The next morning Varsha developed a fever which did not respond to home treatment by evening despite the Doctor’s best efforts. The Doctor decided to admit Varsha to the Irwin Hospital the next day for investigation and treatment under the personal care of a specialist. Nanda packed the bag for Varsha, her expressive eyes full of worry which Ravi did not fail to notice. Ravi was sent to school and under a scorching sun the patient was taken to the hospital in a taxi.
Ravi remained restive in school and was dropped home by a classmate of Varsha who lived in Paharganj. Nanda was in the hospital giving Varsha moral support. A number of doctors examined Varsha and a large syringe of blood had been drawn by the nurse for the prescribed tests. Feeling lonely at home Ravi began to cry and insis on going to the hospital. The doctor, under whose care Varsha was admitted to a room isolated from the ward because of her severe infection, had forbidden visits from Ravi because of his age and vulnerability.
Ravi refused to meet his friends who shouted his name from the back lane at four pm. He neither touched the cricket bat nor the tea and snack he was served. He sobbed for two hours and finally, at seven, the alarmed Patriach gave in. On that evening as a summer storm gathered, Ravi was allowed a short visit to the hospital. He saw his sister sitting on a Fowler Bed reclining on two enormous pillows reading Pride and Prejudiceby Jane Austin. Her fever had subsided and a smile flickered on her lips. Nanda sat in a chair not far from the bed reading the latest copy of the Reader’s Digest. The Doctor lay on a couch close to the air conditioner trying to get some sleep. Ravi ran to his sister ignoring the entreaties of the elders.Varsha exclaimed and hugged him tight and he began to cry.
“Don’t cry, I promise to be home soon. It is only a fever, paagal” she said to him wiping his tears with a small white towel. He hugged the patient tight with a premonition and had to be pulled away by his mother and Nanda. Soon the meeting between Ravi and his chotididi ended and he was literally dragged away when a senior doctors and a nursecarrying syringes in a tray entered the room.
“I want to stay here with didi. I don’t want to leave her in the hospital” he shouted while being taken away.
Varsha’s words rang in his ears, and the sight of her reclined on the white pillows wasbrandedon Ravi’s memory. A dust storm broke over a desolate city when he left the hospital in an auto rickshaw with Nanda. He sat staring at the traffic, a half eaten hamburger in hand and tears rolling down his sunburnt cheeks. Nanda held him close and her own eyes became moist when she felt him shaking in grief. Both siblings went home with dark thoughts in their minds.
While Varsha was in hospital Ravi’s aunt, his mother’s younger sister the raconteur, arrived with his three cousins. Their arrival was a surprise and a relief, because the aunt took over the kitchen leaving the Doctor and Nanda free to take care of the hospitalized patient. The vacations began soon after the guests arrived and Ravi was distracted by the endless games of marbles and tops with his friends and the cousin who stole the Dunlop mattress seven years later. This cousin had taken to liquor, tobacco and whoring early in life. He was fond of narrating his escapades embellished with dirtyshayariand got along famously with Ravi’s friends who crowded around him after losing their marbles to him. The cousin’s poetry, picked up from bus conductors and mechanics in the Deccan,mentioned the attractions of a woman’s body in lurid language. He sang praises of pointed breasts, smooth thighs and lustrous pubic hair to Ravi’s friends regaling them evening after evening. Sometimes he vanishedin the morning to reappear in the evening with a mysterious smile on his face full of stories for his eager fans. They were sure he had visited the whores on G. B. Road not far from Kamala Market. Some years later he appeared on Barron Road with a credible story about dropping out from school and roaming the country as a helper on a truck. His bold younger sister, who once displayed a pair of large breasts to Ravi shocking him out of his wits, vouchsafed for this story. This wasted thief drank and gambled his life away, departing the world at forty-two leaving behind a battered wife and daughter who left him years before his death in a drunken stupor in room which did not have a ceiling fan.
Every day life continued at home but matters worsened in the hospital. In the hospital, Nanda told Ravi years after Varsha’s death, the doctors did not know what to do with the patient whose liver first swelled and then fatally contracted. Varsha was diagnosed with acute viral hepatitis.She was in great pain but could not be given painkillers. One night when she began to scream more than usual the young doctor in charge that day gave her a painkiller injection which finished her necrotic liver and sent her into a coma from which she never really recovered. After this the family could little except pray for her recovery. One day Varsha gained consciousness and, in the last moment of lucidity, asked for a sitar. She had started learning to play the sitar in school and enjoyed the music lessons.
“Get well soon and a sitar will be bought immediately. Your father has gone to look for one in Darya Ganj” was Doctor’s response from behind the tears which welled up in her eyes. The Doctor knew that only a miracle could save her daughter.
Varsha observed the tears and realized her end was near.
She knew she would never play the sitar. She felt no pain, asked for the air conditioner to be switched off and requested an extra blanket. Her body was cold and she felt life ebbing away. Her mother became a distant figure in the room which became a massive sunlit hall in which the faces of her school friends became illuminated. They smiled and waved at her. From a great distance she heard the bells the Hariharbaba Math tolling.
Varsha thought of missing Ravi and Nanda.She was about to call them when darkness enveloped the sunlit room. She felt her mother take her hand and press it gently. A tear trickled down her emaciated cheek. A soft hand wiped the tear and she felt nothing. Varsha stopped breathing two days later when the birds in the hospital garden heralded another morning in their lives.
Ravi did not understand why his father’s colleagues brought a ladder and leaned it against the majesticjungle jalebitree in front of their house. He saw, but did not notice the new white sheets kept inside the jaafri enclosed verandah. The small bundle of coconut fiber rope escaped his attention. Everyone woke up early.
“Varsha is coming home” his father said raising his spirits.
Ravi went about the house chanting “ChotiDidi is coming back. Soon I shall go to school with her.” He mistook Nanda’s tears for tears of happiness which he saw women shed in the movies. His mother had not returned from the hospital and he ascribed that to a night duty. The news of Varsha’s death was broken to him by the cruel debauch cousin.
“You fool! Can’t you see the preparations? Varsha is dead and they will bring the body home.” Hearing this Ravi was reminded of the preparations he had seen in the neighborhood when the Bengali boy Nimai had died. His face fell.
As the May sun climbed to its nine o'clock position a black Dodge van halted on Barron Raod behind the jungle jalebitree. Ravi waited behind the henna hedge outside the house expecting Varsha to walk out of the van.They brought her out on a stretcher with her face covered in a white sheet. The Doctor followed the stretcher and her husband, ashen faced, disembarked from the front. A white Ambassador car pulled up behind the van and his father’s friends got down from it. Ravi ran towards the corpse expecting it to get up and speak with him. Soon, after he was allowed to see his dead sister’s face once, the Punjabi neighbors took him away. They tried feeding him some paranthas and dahi but he pushed the plate away and ran back to his house to see his mother conduct a final examination of Varsha’s eyes in the hope of some life. The Doctor was pulled away by her sister and sought solace in an embrace in which Nanda and Ravi held her. Only when they used the ladder, white sheets and the rope did the reality of death dawn upon Ravi.
Thirteen days later Ravi accompanied his father and his colleagues in the white Ambassador to Haridwar and was surprised to hear the casual conversation in the car. From the moving car he saw the life teeming on both sides of the road. He saw people sleeping under immense shady trees and saw children playing near ponds. Life went on but Varsha was not there. No one, including his father, mentioned Varsha even once during the long noisy drive and Ravi’s demand for kalakand, samosas and coca colaon the way was met without resistance. The party stayed overnight in Haridwar in a hotel and he was left alone with a younger brother of a colleague of his father while the others vanished only to return late at night in an inebriated and boisterous state.
Ravi heard Bahadur’s voice from a great distance
“In Nepal we generally bathe the dead with yogurt, turmeric and water. If you don't mind, should we do the same with Babuji?”
The sentence transported Ravi to the present.
“Yes” replied Ravi and looked at his wife who stood in the doorway. She was young, straight and full of years. She was afraid to come near the corpse for fear of infection. Death was a stranger to her. She went to the fridge and brought a large bowl of yogurt. Then she brought the turmeric from the kitchen. She stood at the door looking at what the two men did to the corpse.
The Nepali, with some help from Ravi, washed his former patient with some difficulty. After this ritualbath, Bahadur cleaned the floor and wrapped the corpse in a white sheet Smita provided. Ravi and Bahadurthen stretched the dead man on the floor on a mat and Smita, who had gathered some courage, placed a lit candle near the head of the corpse.
After these preparations, the family waited for the guests.
Nanda and her live in partner, an old comrade from the college days, arrived at seven in the morning and soon thereafter the house became full of friends and neighbors who made the funeral arrangements. The ladder, sheets and ropes appeared and by ten in the morning the remains of his father vanished on a funeral pyre on the platform number fifteen at the Krishna Bagh cremation ground. A crop of white hair was the last of his father Ravi saw before the flames rose and consumed the diseased corpse. He stood close to the raging fire while his friends and sister chatted in the distance. A cold breeze spread the smell of burnt flesh mixed with ghee across the cremation ground. Next to other pyres people discusseddifferent or similarmemories and the snatches of their conversations reached Ravi. The impatient young could be seen in almost all the groups waiting to go home and get on with the task of living. After an hour nothing remained of his father on the bed of red hot charcoal and Ravi returned home with his sister in a car driven by a friend. In the back seat some friends discussed property which had recorded the first slump in Gurgaon since the early 1990s. No one mentioned the Patriarch. No tears were shed for him. The car ride reminded Ravi of his trip to Haridwar as a child with his father and his father’s friends. They had carried Varsha’s ashes to be submerged in the Ganga but no one spoke of Varsha in the non-stop conversation which went on throughout the trip.
Two days after the cremation Ravi brought home the ‘flowers’ from the cremation ground in a canvas bag which was left untouched in the boot of his mother’s Fiat car. The next daylater Ravi and his bosom friend Dheeraj took themoist canvas bag containing the Patriarch’s bones to the banks of the swollen Yamuna.The river was in spate and waves were rising and falling in the swift current because the floodgates had been opened up stream in Haryana. The friends chose an isolated spot close to the river bank, lit their cigarettes and waited for the designated moment to consign the bag to the river.
“What are you waiting for?” Dheeraj asked after they had smoked for a while.
“I don’t know. I think he is there in this bag, at least in some form. What’s the hurry? Let us remember him a little before throwing this into the river” Ravi said pointing at the car parked close by.
“You have so many memories of Uncle. So unlike me” Dheeraj replied staring at the river. His diabetic father had died young of a heart attack brought on by a failed business and mounting credit decades ago.
Ravi finished the cigarette, flicked the stub on the grass and took the canvas bag from the boot of the car and waked to the rolling and pitching river. The river reminded him of the Brahmaputra and a dead alligator on its bank.
“Stand back, you don’t know how to swim” he warned Dheeraj before tossing the canvas bag into the torrent.
The bag bobbed up and down for a few seconds and vanished into the rolling muddy water. On the long drive back the friends shared anecdotes of the Patriarch and Ravi laughed loudly after months.
“Will you ever write about him” asked hisfriend.
“Yes I will, but it will not only be about his life for no story can be about one man’s life. I will imagine other lives to tell the story and also imagine his life to narrate the story of other lives” replied Ravi, lost in thought, his eyes fixed on the road which he had taken every day on his way to college years ago when the Patriarch was alive.
“If it will be about other people, will you have the courage to speak the truth? You know Ravi, I never mind what you say. I don’t know, but I always like what you say. I have never judged you and I know you never judge me or other people, but society is not like that. It might not be prepared for your frankness” rejoined Dheeraj before pulling hard at a cigarette.
Ravi suddenly thought of the known local prostitute Dheeraj and his three flat mates had hired years ago for a night of pleasure in a sub-let government flat in central Delhi. They had struck the deal in Connaught Place where the prostitute solicited customers every evening outside the Blue Star Cabaret Bar and Restaurant. The four adventurers, armed with a box of condoms, had experienced embarrassing premature ejaculations one after the other and the prostitute, lying nude in bed with her tired breasts and dry pubic hair, had laughed at them.
“The rickshaw pullers are better at this. At least they keep it up” she said to the guilt ridden middle class boys enjoying the expressions on their faces.
They had paid her soon after the misadventure and she had walked away sneering at them. All four decided to keep this blunder a secret but Dheeraj, on whose conscience this entire episode hung heavy, had told Ravi about it. It was his habit not to hide anything from his friend. The narration, punctuated with the choicest abuses some of them self directed, had left Ravi amused.
“That is what happens when you take porn too seriously” he had said to Dheeraj who shook his head in agreement.
Would society be prepared to hear this story without feeling morally superior to its actors?Ravi said as much to Dheeraj.
“The lives in my prose will be dreamt lives. People will judge my creation not by the value or lack of value in it but its ability to describe the lives of others” replied Ravi to his friend who was looking outside the car for an answer to the question he had raised.
“Maybe I will add a few juicy bits of your life to my book to give my characters more flesh and blood” added Ravi to the conversation for the sake of effect.
Dheeraj noticed that Ravi had winked at him while saying this.
Dheeraj smiled and both friends sat in silence for a while as the Fiat made its way through the traffic near Delhi Gate. Instead of driving home straight, Ravi drove to Minto Road passing the former Irwin Hospital on the way reviving his childhood memories. The friends spent a few hours walking around the ruins of Barron Road where they had cycled together and developed their friendship.
Some hours after the cremation, Ravi realized that he would never see his wasted father drenched in his own urine shivering in fever on a cold winter night again. He would never be disconcerted by a pair of vacant eyes staring into nothing. His father would never plead for death in front of his son. Ravi had not loved his father like most sons but the loss of his father hurt him somewhere.
Fifteen days later some friends and Nanda came over to Ravi’s house where a party was held to remember and forget the patriarch over a few drinks. In honor of the departed, and especially in deference to his drinking habit, several bottles of liquor were brought by the guests and a copious quantity of chicken curry was prepared over an earthen stove fired with wood and coal on the terrace itself. Chicken curry was the only nonvegetarian dish relished by the departed.He had picked up a taste for it as a young infantryman in the Indian Army.
Laughter rang out loud and long as the friends shared the memories of the man who would never have a drink before eight in the evening. No one knew why this rule had been made. But Ravi guessed its origins lay in a sentence his father probably heard spoken by an English officer in the early 1940s or a police superior in Hyderabad.
“Not before eight” the friends said repeating what they had heard many times in a bygone era and Ravi and Nanda joined in the laughter. The rule was broken years ago. It had been broken by Ravi and his friends who had not only drunk in the afternoons but also stolen whiskey from his father’s bottle replacing the quantity drawn with tap water. In those days they were scared of the Patriarch known for his violent temper.
The precaution proved useless because the sharp man had sensed the trick but said nothing. His silence was an acceptance of his son becoming a man. The full throated laughter eased Ravi’s depression and he felt that the happier days of Barron Road would ultimately be reborn in Gurgaon
Ravi forgot his mother’s illness. He forgot the last days of his father filled with suffering and lack of care. The scene of his father, driven mad by illness, standing nude in the corner of his room, away from the wet sheets and the excrement on the floor a fortnight before he died did not haunt him that day. He forgot the past and future as the Whiskey went to his head. He forgot that a few weeks before his father’s death he had been fired from an NGO after six months of employment. Upon joining the NGO he had thought of a five year plan which was discussed with Smita during the evening walks! How naïve he had been. He forgot that his mother’s condition was worsening and the fear this caused him and his wife.
He took leave for a while of the depression which broke his heart every day.
On the terrace overlooking the glorious Aravalis, under the salubrious November sun, the friends ate and drank toasts to the late patriarch and remembered a time forever incomplete without the departed man’s memories. They remembered Minto Road on which the Patriarch had spent the high noon of his life incubating the illnesses which destroyed him.The days, months and years marked by the aazaan from the masjidof ShakurkiDandi, had stretched endlessly into immortality which had ruled the age which began a few years after Varsha’sdeath.
The family had stopped speaking of her soon. The memory of a fourteen yearsis brief. Creeping time had erased the locality from extant memory and only its remembrance lived forever and treasured in the conversations of this small group of people. The material and historical erosion of Minto Road, built in the 1930s by Indian contractors and workers under the guidance of British architects, began in the later 1970s when the plebeian Muslims displaced from Turkman Gate by the Emergency moved into the vacant houses with their goats and white metal utensils.
By then the families which had lived in the locality since the late 1960s had left for greener pastures. Several men and women had died. Numerous houses in the area had become vacant and the ruins were occupied by new men, women, children and their animals. The smell of horse shit and buffalo urine soon became the de facto smell of the locality.
Gradually overtaken by history and the ordinariness of their lives, the people assembled on the terrace in Gurgaon that day would meet less and the memories made possible by British rule in India would fade. But this happened over years after that celebration of life and death on that pleasant November day on a sun drenched terrace from which the verdant post monsoon Aravalis could be savoured. In the distance, as far as the eye could see, were spread the goats, sheep and the camels brought to the Aravalis pastures by the RajasthaniRabaris in their colourful clothes. The men sported beards and moustaches and gold ornaments glinted in the lobes of their ears. The women were tall, straight, slim and unafraid of flaunting their firm breasts encased in shape enhancing short blouses.
Occasionally a nomad woman walked on the rocks with a bleating kid in her arms bedecked inmetal and false ivory bangles.
Downstairs, in a room filled with the smell of medicines and old clothes, sat Ravi’s mother in a gown on a bed reclining on two thick cushions. She was knitting a sweater and bottom for her granddaughter with her old and gnarled fingers.She had long uncut nails.Her medical attendant sat on a low stool shelling peas on a newspaper near the bed. The granddaughter had run down to the sanctuary of the doctor’s room petrified by the loud laughter on the bright white washed terrace. When she had started crying on the terrace the laughter had grown louder in response and some elders had tried to hold her back. She first ran into her mother’s embrace only to elicit louder guffaws. Soon she found herself unsafe in her mother’s lap. Then, struck with terror by the strange faces and loud voices, she flew downstairs, climbed on her grandmother’s double bed, buried her small head in a soft pillow and immediately fell asleep. The laughter and loud conversation could be heard in the Doctor’s room. The room opened into a courtyard from which the rays of the afternoon sun had begun entering and lighting it up. On the off white wall the flickering images of the maid whose hands mechanically worked on the fresh peas dancedin the sun rays. Some of the images reminded the invalid of the moments of her life.
The Doctor stopped knitting, reached for the small tin box of snuff kept on a side table next to her bed alongside her medicines and treated herself to a double dose of super fine tobacco which she inhaled with gratification. The snuff was her guide to memory. Fine tobacco snuff was the only material pleasure she had discovered in her otherwise socially un-irrigated life. After she shifted to Gurgaon it became difficult for her to procure snuff in the neighborhood shops. So she told Nanda to get her the stuff. Her daughter, for whom her feelings had softened with age, kept her supplied with high quality snuff bought at a shop in the Yusuf Sarai market. This ritual continued till a few weeks before she died almost six years after that day in November when she became a widow.
Ravi’s mother inhaled the snuff deeply and sneezed long and hard a couple of times in a small towel. The sneezes cleared her head as they had during the last fifty years. Then she resumed knitting the sweater with a sharpened sight. In between knitting mechanically she looked at her granddaughter with a tenderness which the surprised maid did not fail to notice. The old invalid was consoled by the thought that the light blue woolen suit she was knitting for the child would suit her brown hair and fair complexion.
The Doctor thought of her son and daughter on the terrace. She imagined the bright sunlight and heard the laughter of the group. The thought took her back to the clear sky and gentle sunshine of Assam where she had begun a new life not long after India had become free of British rule. Everyone had taken the trouble to come to Gurgaon to remember her husband since the forenoon. They had greeted her before proceeding upstairs to sit on the plastic chairs, smoke, drink and chat. She had known all of them personally for years. Many were childhood friends of her son she had hosted in her home years ago. She thought all of them would outlive her and give company to the family she would leave behind.
Then the Doctor started thinking of Ravi’s wife who did not have an affluent background. Her late husband had often commented on this to her in private. Smita was an attractive woman she had disliked for the simple reason that her son loved her too much. Smita had given up her family for Ravi and in some ways was alone in life. Despite her unspoken lingering sadness the woman quietly managed the house, organized the finances and did her teaching job to the best of her ability. She had demonstrated that she was capable of inheriting the Doctor’s mantle and holding the family together. The Doctor grudginglyaccepted that her romantic son had not made a bad choice.
A smile, which the maid saw, graced her bitter lips and she resumed knitting at a briskpace. As she knitted she thought of the winters on her house on Barron Road where her son Ravi would sit next to her close to the heater and knit a small sweater, as he said, for his cat.
She felt happy and content and forgot the burning in her knees. The family would survive, she said to herself, and with good fortune might even prosper. Ravi and his level headed wife would carry the family name forward because Nanda had decided decades ago not to have children. The Doctor and her husband had nursed a hidden grievance against this for a while before accepting the inevitable.
The woolens had to be ready soon because the first nip of winter could be felt in the air. The cold winter nights were not far.
“One more winter to live” the Doctor sighed, with her eyes fixed on the pattern which was beginning to form on the growing blue sweater. She realized with some relief that she did not miss her husband. Her memory was beginning to fade and this had lessened her pain and she came to terms with life when not much of it was left in her. Finally, with thisacceptance, the heaviness in the atmosphere at home evaporated. The house smelt of pleasant booze and she did not mind Nanda enjoying her drinks on the terrace.She smelt the cigarette smoke. It was different from the pungent smell her husband’s Charminar unfiltered cigarettes had emitted in the house for fifty years.
She understood thatthis family homewas destined to be different. She knew she did not have long to live and would one day formally hand over charge of the family and the house to her capable daughter in law. Towards the end of an eventful life she was beginning to making peace with her memories.
She was happy to know that she would leave behind a home in which no stench and no fear would rule.
******
