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The Indian Quarterly – A Literary & Cultural Magazine https://indianquarterly.com Mon, 18 Oct 2021 11:25:05 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.28 Myth Of The Common Man https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6657 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6657#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 11:25:05 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6657 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.48.16 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.48.30 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.48.41 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.48.54 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.49.10 PM_600

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Haq https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6655 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6655#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:59:33 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6655 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.46.00 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.46.15 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.46.28 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.46.43 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.46.57 PM_600 Screenshot 2021-10-18 at 3.47.18 PM_600

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Postcard from Jabalpur https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6616 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6616#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:55:41 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6616 I grew up in a city called Jabalpur. If you don’t know about it, I don’t blame you. If you know it only because your train passed through it once and you stepped out to buy some water or maybe a samosa, it is perfectly acceptable that that is the only thing you have to say about it. You had better places to be. Writing about cities that don’t matter has always been a hard task. What do you say about the places where nothing happens? Where people are waiting for their turn to escape to a better life. Where there is absolutely nothing exceptional and when there is it is ignored. I ran away from Jabalpur the first opportunity I got. Ran to Delhi and built a new life for myself. Like most tier-two city kids, I knew Jabalpur could not contain my aspirations. I believed that the city itself was stale, had no interest in growth or in being exposed to the new and strange. And that the people who stayed in Jabalpur were content with this moribund state.

In the ten years that mark my absence from this city, things have ‘changed’, though the people have not. This realization dawned on me when on my last visit I noticed a slew of small eateries which I was informed had just opened. My eyes popped cartoonishly out of their sockets when I spotted a bakery unironically named ‘Sugar Daddy’. I was told by friends that it had gained quite a reputation over the past few months and was encouraged to try their pastries.

When I was growing up, the idea of eating out had not caught on. My parents’ generation seldom went to restaurants, however small or humble. Aside from those who had inherited wealth, most of India was poor and still decades away from the effects of economic liberalization and the benefits of pay commissions. The first time my mother ate at a restaurant was after her marriage, while my father’s experience of restaurants was limited to dhabas where he and his friends ate thalis that cost two rupees per person. Even these outings were infrequent. Mostly he made rotis and basic sabzis for himself when he lived alone because the idea of eating out felt exorbitant and hardly ever crossed his mind.

Leaving these habits behind was not easy for my parents, so we ate out only on select occasions like wedding anniversaries or birthdays. As the markets opened up and television became part of our staple diet, we were exposed to eating out as an accepted and desirable mode of celebration and what we now call lifestyle. If we could afford it, why would we not go out? Why should the woman of the house cook thrice a day every day? And the children deserved an outing.

The restaurants we went to served north Indian food and were named Swastik, Navneeta, Rupali, and Sonali. None of these places served alcohol, and all of them boasted about being “pure veg”. This set them apart from the places where the young people of the town gathered. In my late-teens and undergrad days the places I went to with friends, like a still popular Chinese joint called ‘Clock Tower’, were avoided by devout Hindus. Clock Tower wasn’t just not “pure veg”, the rumour was that it served pork. And then there was a restaurant called ‘Traffic Jam’ that had pizzas and burgers on the menu. Mostly though, eating out meant either going to one of the many outlets of the Indian Coffee House, or just going to the Chaupati, the seaside.

When I left this city, this is where the ‘restaurant scene’ was at. Whenever I used to visit my parents, my trips would not last more than a week long and most of the time would be spent visiting relatives and eating home-cooked meals. Imagine my surprise then when I returned to Jabalpur a couple of years ago to finish writing a book and discovered that the city, like me, had grown up. Jabalpur now had a Grandma’s Kitchen that served continental and Mexican food. It now offered Chicago, New York, and California pizzas. It now had specific restaurants for Belgian waffles and pancakes. It had a Baskin Robbins. You could find a Wok & More that served khow suey, even if it came with paneer marinated in some Indo-Chinese sauce. And you could find Thai curries and Tibetan soups and, at your own risk, momos.

The more I looked the more I became interested in the names of some of these new restaurants—places that aspired to be 21st century, that wanted to attract a younger crowd that spoke English and had grown up on American cinema and television. Places that wanted to share in the success of such restaurants in metropolitan cities. Even before OTT platforms became a thing, shows like Masterchef Australia were popular with younger people. My generation and the ones that followed were exposed to shows like Friends and Gilmore Girls. Growing up in Jabalpur, chai was what most of us drank, like in most of north India. Coffee was for special occasions. When a guest said they didn’t drink tea, Baba would press with “chai nahi toh Nescafe le lo?” He said it almost as if he were bragging. Friends, of course, made coffee unfathomably glamorous for my generation. The show single-handedly changed our choice of beverage.

But, as writer Shoiab Danyal pointed out in an essay, “changing our choice of caffeinated beverage amounts to no more than swapping a British import for an American one. Before the Raj, nobody in India drank tea. For a long time, it was an elite drink. Yet now chai is intrinsic to large parts of India. That Friends could dislodge chai, at least among the Anglophones, is another telling marker of its deep influence.” When the first CCD opened in the city, I and my Friends flocked to it regularly, hoping to replicate Central Perk Café. This is to say that the American lifestyle, its attitude, its fashions, its food and beverages were already part of our daily vocabulary. It was only a matter of time before Jabalpur itself made the mental migration its youth had already made and sought the amenities of Indian metropolises and Western cities.

Which is why we now have fast food joints with names like ‘Bun In A Million’. It isn’t that we didn’t have burgers in Jabalpur before, but our burgers were more ‘desi’ in their look and feel, were served with fries in your average north Indian restaurants as part of their ‘multi cuisine’ offerings for the younger demographic. While Jabalpur still does not have a Starbucks, it is aware enough to offer you a ‘Stardrinks’, with a simulacrum of the Starbucks lady stuck neatly on its logo. Stardrinks serves coffee but proudly calls itself a ‘tharra’, a reference to desi liquor, and is a regular haunt for young people looking for alcohol and pizza.

In a 2017 essay, Sohini Chattopadhyay wrote “Kaira, Shyra, Akira, Kia, Tia, Sia. Shanaya. These are Bollywood’s cool new names, broadly classified into the ‘ya’ or ‘ra’ nomenclature. The Poojas, Nishas, Anjalis and Nehas of the 1990s are déclassé. These new names carry an unmistakable aspiration to be global. They are unrooted to place, community or any kind of identity except class. They are almost never longer than three syllables and easy to pronounce. They float on coolness and lightness.”

If the emergence of these restaurants in Jabalpur in the past few years tells us anything, then it is that global capitalism always comes with class anxieties. What does it mean to name your pizzeria ‘Fuego’ when the people ordering the pizza don’t know what the word means? What does it mean to name your restaurant ‘Sugar Daddy’, when even you, the person who named it, aren’t necessarily aware of the implication? To borrow Sohini’s point, these restaurant names too float on coolness and lightness, and have an unmistakable aspiration to be global. It is why the quality of education, employment, and the city infrastructure might not have changed much but the branding of this smart city has.

When I first moved to Delhi, it was a huge cultural shift for me but I pretended like it wasn’t. The pizzas were better there and came with thin crusts and cheese burst options. There were big and famous-for-years Italian restaurants like The Big Chill that were so expensive that it took me a few years to gather the courage to visit them. I didn’t know what churros were. I didn’t know what a Bao was. I hadn’t tasted any Thai curries. I hadn’t even thought of Burma and Vietnam as places whose food I’d ever try, never mind love and crave. But that shift happened for me as my cultural class moved upwards.

This upward mobility has gripped my hometown—which is why Grandma’s Kitchen serves nothing that my grandma would have made or had even heard of. In Jabalpur you can now get everything you can get in Delhi, but it doesn’t taste the same. My first outing during the entire lockdown period was with a friend to a café called ‘The New Yorker’ with no reference to the magazine. A cardboard cutout of the Statue of Liberty greeted me. The cafe was mostly empty but that felt more like the doing of the pandemic. Otherwise, it seemed likely to be the sort of place where Jabalpur’s college kids would hang out with their friends and eat all the things my generation could never have dreamed would be available in this city. It didn’t matter if the food was not ‘authentic’ or even that good.

When I was little, every other Sunday, Baba used to bring home poha-jalebi, and/or samosa for breakfast. I loved the poha-jalebi so much that upon moving to Delhi one of the first things I did was to find a place that served MP-style poha and jalebi. I wanted to find familiarity in everything that was new. As I was browsing through the Sugar Daddy menu, I saw a dessert called ‘Taco Jalebi’ and I thought that it sounded exactly like the kind of thing one should find here. This dessert sounded like a good marriage of innovation and aspiration and so I ordered it. It was a flattened jalebi in the shape of a taco loaded with the kind of cream that sticks to insides of your mouth, and a sad, lonely cherry on top. Not unpleasantly, it tasted like the city—mild, sweet, familiar, and clinging to its past.

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The First Casualty https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6618 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6618#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:53:20 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6618 In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of the Baburnama, Salman Rushdie considers the apparent dichotomy between Babur’s penchant for violence and his love of poetry, which he wrote as well. He was both, says Rushdie, a bloodthirsty warlord as well as a poet of refined sophistication. He believes it expresses the dichotomy of Islam itself: aggressive and ruthless streak in conquest, especially in the medieval period, yet cultured, urbane and pleasure-seeking when off the battlefield. Babur, for instance, can write that to quell a restive population he “had four or five people shot and one or two dismembered” and a few pages later sing hosannas to Kabul’s wine—“Drink wine in Kabul citadel, send round the cup again and again, / for there is both mountain and water, both city and countryside.”

For millennia, these extremes appear to have been reached more quickly and more easily in Afghanistan than nearly anywhere else. Though, unlike Rushdie, I do not think the dichotomy between a violent streak and a poetic imagination is exclusive to Islamic world, but to all cultures, in both pre-modern times and contemporary times. “There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, as Walter Benjamin once wrote.

Babur described Kabul and Kandahar as commercial cities, where goods from all over Asia were sold, arriving via the legendary Silk Route that China has been trying to recreate as an expression of its superpower status. “From Hindustan, caravans of ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pack animals bring slaves, textiles, rock sugar, refined sugar and spices”, Babur wrote. He praised Kabul’s fruits, its “grapes, pomegranates, apricots, apples, quinces, pears, peaches, plums, jujubes, almonds and nuts.” He loved the honey grown in the mountain surrounding Kabul, and the meadows in the city’s outskirts.

On July 16, Danish Siddiqui, chief photographer of the Reuters, and one of the best journalists in the world, was killed in Spin Boldak, in Kandahar province on the border with Pakistan. Embedded with the Afghan government’s elite forces, he was covering the deadly aftermath of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The details of his death remain shrouded in mystery, although amid conflicting, sometimes lurid reports, a Reuters investigation suggests he and an Afghan officer and medic were left behind by the very forces with whom he was embedded. His body and face were mutilated before his body was handed over to the Red Cross. (The Taliban denies responsibility.)

In that introduction, Rushdie pointed out that Babur is famous for the mosque he built in India, making him a particular bugbear of Hindutva conservatives. A common and ugly slur used against Indian Muslims, as Rushdie noted, is that they are all Babur’s progeny.

Danish too encountered some of this hatred, as he took some of the most striking, internationally-known images of the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, of the 2020 Delhi riots, of desperate daily wage workers compelled to walk to their villages from cities hundreds of kilometres away in the wake of the first Covid lockdown and the death and misery that characterized the second wave. The anger expressed online by supporters of the government was all the more vituperative, even unhinged, because the evidence of Danish’s photographs, their indictment of power were so difficult to deny. As such, his work was in the best traditions of journalism.

War and photography have always been intimately connected in the modern world, as Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others. Photographs are the chief means of bringing information about wars into the living rooms of the educated classes living in cities across the world, which in itself, as she explained, is an entirely modern phenomenon. It is why journalists on the frontline so often become targets. A Human Rights Watch report “found that Taliban commanders and fighters have engaged in a pattern of threats, intimidation, and violence against members of the media in areas where the Taliban have significant influence, as well as in Kabul”.

The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan started soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Two months later, on 13 November, the day Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, the New York Times ran a triptych, wrote Sontag, which “depicted the fate of a wounded Taliban soldier in uniform who had been found in a ditch by Northern Alliance soldiers advancing toward Kabul. First panel: being dragged on his back by two of his captors—one has grabbed an arm, the other a leg—along a rocky road. Second panel (the camera is very near): surrounded, gazing up in terror as he is being pulled to his feet. Third panel: at the moment of death, supine with arms outstretched and knees bent, naked and bloodied from the waist down, being finished off by the military mob that has gathered to butcher him.”

No other medium could have rendered the defeat of the Taliban around the world in such a humiliating manner as this triptych of photographs. Perhaps it is no coincidence that two decades later they have chosen to signal their revenge by perpetrating an outrageous and brutal war crime such as the murder of a photographer.

But what is generally missed or misunderstood in this complex discourse—the urge on the part of journalists and activists, who do this with the noble intention, not to say the courage and dedication, to expose war atrocities, and on the part of those who make war, to commit worse atrocities to subdue those who dared to document them in the first place—is that war photographs serve a limited purpose. As Sontag wrote: “For a long time, some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.” Danish,

The simple fact is, we don’t—saturated by images of atrocities from all over the world, human beings have learnt to ration their empathy. And we have become partisan to the extent that we entirely dismiss photographs if they do not tally with our political convictions about a given situation. We see some of this happening already in the case of Danish’s death, where no agreement can be reached about the manner in which he died despite photographs being circulated online of his dead body and those seen by reporters and commentators who have written on the issue. The Taliban maintains it was a crossfire and refuses to acknowledge its fighters could have mutilated the body, blaming this desecration on the propaganda efforts of Afghan forces. Meanwhile, keyboard warriors who felt embarrassed and humiliated by Danish’s recent photographs of burning pyres symbolising the devastation wreaked by the second wave in Delhi, have not shied away from describing his death as karma on social media.

Nevertheless, even if they only reiterate a truth, which has a limited appeal, it does not take away from the harshness of that truth that photographs do convey and that Danish tried to emphasise through his last assignment in Kandahar. As Sontag writes, “Look, the photographs say…This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.” This is a truism that bears innumerable repetitions. It should be added that the effect of war or violence is almost always hardest on the those who are left behind. Men make war, is how Sontag starts the argument of her book, citing Virginia Woolf from her anti-war essay, ‘Three Guineas’. Women are often left behind to bear the brunt of violence committed by men. If it is cruel that Danish, a non-combatant, should have been killed as he tried to inform us in our armchairs of what was happening in the world, it is outrageously cruel that he has left behind a grief-stricken wife and two small children barely able to process the loss of their father.

I still remember what Danish told me when I met him after he returned from covering the epic folly of a Covid-times Kumbh mela. He had just completed his period of mandatory home quarantine. When I asked him how his experience was, I expected to hear something about poor Covid management or about the compulsion Hindutva idealogues felt to flout necessary precautions during a raging pandemic to host a religious festival. “Beautiful,” is all he said. It was the human spectacle that moved him, that energised him, not the politics.

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The Women’s Question https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6622 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6622#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:52:22 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6622 The crisis of Ray’s historicism is nowhere more acutely displayed than in his abandonment of the “women’s question.” His early works demonstrated an abiding interest and commitment to the women’s position in modernity and modernization. There was even an archetypal “Ray woman,” a normative female subject that emerged from his early corpus. He articulated her characteristics as follows: “Although they’re physically not as strong as men, nature gave women qualities which compensate for the fact. They’re more honest, more direct, and by and large, they’re stronger characters. I’m not talking about every woman but . . . [t]he woman I like to put in my films is better able to cope with situations than men.” Charulata was the archetypal Ray woman. “At the end of the film Charu is established as a figure of self-consolidation,” observes Keya Ganguly, even though “self-knowledge” is exacted at the steep price of her marital life. It was perhaps her self-consciousness that modernity is a one-way street from which there is no turning back, or in Ganguly’s words, being reconciled “to the burden of being a nabeena (modern woman) rather than a pracheena(traditional woman),” that made Ray’s Charulata markedly different from the literary original upon which the film was based.

Ray’s early films offered rich insights into histories of modern conjugality, family, and the self in colonial and early postcolonial India, including tragic reflections on those who were unable to enter into the developmental arc, such as the women in Pather Panchali and Aparajito.

Ray’s early films variously engaged with the project of the “new patriarchy” that arose in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The ideology of “new patriarchy” was an uneasy and contingent compromise between two extremes—a Western-inspired romantic model of the couple and the nuclear family, and an Indian extended family that gave little ideational space to the couple. The films of his early corpus directly address such issues as the status of the couple in the joint family, the place of the educated and/or working woman in such a family, and questions of modern subjectivity in a rapidly modernizing society. Thus, in Charulata and The Big City, the emergence of women as modern subjects is mapped through education, writing, employment, and protest, even as that emergence places tremendous pressure on the couple form and the family. The World of Apu and Devi explored the possibilities of, and challenges to, companionate romantic love within the form of arranged marriage. Considered together, Ray’s early films offered rich insights into histories of modern conjugality, family, and the self in colonial and early postcolonial India, including tragic reflections on those who were unable to enter into the developmental arc, such as the women in Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956). The city films represent the end of that project of individual, societal, and historical development.

Women in the city films, on the other hand, are ciphers, an admission perhaps of the fact that Ray was more confounded by the “new” women he actually saw around him than he was by men. The films are centered on the male protagonists. Their complexities and quirks are fleshed out in much greater detail than the women’s, even when the latter occupy considerable screen time and space, as in Company Limited. Women, insofar as they feature in the city films, are narrative devices whose function is to deepen our view of the crisis in masculinity. This helps us understand why the female characters are quite different from their counterparts in the novels from which the films were adapted. The novels portrayed them as weak, both within the family and in society. In the films, they are far more subversive and sardonic, shaming the male protagonist’s masculinity but without offering prototypes for a future, whether feminist or patriarchal. They do not fit the standard model of the heroine or vamp in Indian cinema. Contemporary critics who spilled a great deal of ink on Ray’s deviations from literary originals in the context of his early films say nothing on the question of adaptation when it came to the city trilogy, let alone on the significance of the female characters in them.

In between the early films and Home and the World, he noted that “we had the Calcutta stories which deal mainly with jobless young men or men with jobs.” His focus on men may be understood as symptomatic of his perception of the contemporary moment as a crisis of masculinity.

Ray made no bones about the fact that the city films were about men. In between the early films and Home and the World (1984), he noted that “we had the Calcutta stories which deal mainly with jobless young men or men with jobs.” His focus on men during this period may be understood as symptomatic of his perception of the contemporary moment as a crisis of masculinity. The resolute focus on men, in my opinion, signaled his inability to penetrate the world of contemporary women. As a result, we never explore women’s interiority in these films in the manner of Charulata, The Big City, and Devi. At best, women in the city trilogy are shown as impressionable and uncertain. To the extent that the films focus on women, it is to highlight the predicament of men: the male loss of control over normative scripts of family, conjugality, and social order, upon which the “women’s question” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was predicated.

Commenting on the character of the sister-in-law, Tutul, in Company Limited, Ray observed,

[T]he sister-in-law is in a tragic situation, because she came to Calcutta in order to find out what social success . . . and . . . her elder sister’s life with her executive husband was like. She’s disheartened by what she finds, but on the other hand she is not so sure that she can go back to the revolutionary and marry him. She doesn’t know how seriously involved with him she is. . . . She is in Calcutta because she had this great weakness for her brother-in-law, when she was a little girl in her teens. She hasn’t seen him for six or seven years, and now that maybe he’s such a success, let’s see what he is like, whether he has changed completely . . . So she arrives, and at first everything seems all right. But when the crisis comes . . . he collapses completely. It’s evident that he can only think about his own success, his own career going forward.

Kauna and Tapu in the films are a far cry from their literary depictions. . . There is no “reproductive futurity” in them as marriage or children are never invoked; nor are they femme fatales of Hollywood film noir who have some scheme that will be revealed by the end of the film.

Rejecting the interviewer’s suggestion that “this girl, in her relationship with the revolutionary, really poses a moral and political solution to the problems the film raises,” Ray declares, “she’s uncertain,” and disillusioned with the life she came to see. Of Shyamalendu, the male protagonist, however, Ray had more clarity. “He’s part of a bureaucratic and commercial machine, which has no place for one single man. If you want to live in a society, you immediately become part of the pattern, and that drives you into something you may not have been from the beginning. This man clearly has two sides: . . . his private feelings and his conscience, but the system forces him to dissemble them and to think only of his security and advancement.” There is merit in some critics’ argument that men such as Shyamalendu reveal themselves as full-blown on-screen characters thanks to women such as Tutul. It follows from these observations that the city films are about the psychodynamics of the contemporary man. Women function as the means by which male characters see themselves.

Kauna (The Middleman) and Sutapa/Tapu (The Adversary) are the earning members in their respective families in both the novels and the films. In her literary rendition, Kauna (Shiuli in the novel) is a demure young girl, quivering with shame as her family’s dire circumstances compel her to prostitution. Tapu in the novel is an emotional and headstrong girl who is forced to drop out of college after their father’s death and find a job so that the two brothers can continue their education. Her boss exploits her good looks until one day, in a defiant fit, she hooks up with a neighborhood wastrel, losing her brother’s affections forever.

Ray’s abdication of the effort to render women and their actions legible should not be seen as failure. They were a gesture in humility, an acknowledgment that postcolonial women’s histories were not fully legible by the terms established during the anticolonial, nationalist era resolution of the women’s question.

Kauna and Tapu in the films are a far cry from these literary depictions. But it is difficult to classify them into types. There is no “reproductive futurity” in them as marriage or children are never invoked; nor are they femme fatales of Hollywood film noir who have some scheme that will be revealed by the end of the film. While both women display a kind of brittleness on the surface, there is no way of guessing what goes on in their minds. What we make of them is a function of the ways in which they are projected in the imagination of the men who accompany them on-screen. For example, when Tapu demonstrates her dance moves to her brother on the decrepit, poorly illuminated terrace of their home, we see her in Siddhartha’s imagination as partying, drinking, and smoking with wealthy men. Likewise, we learn very little about the nurse who moonlighted as a prostitute. Siddhartha’s disgust and bewilderment when his friend takes him to her apartment is the film’s focus. Women are figments of his unconscious who appear in his fevered dreams. Similarly, in The Middleman, when it emerges that the prostitute whose labor would help Somnath secure a contract was his friend’s sister, Ray’s camera captures the perturbance produced by that knowledge in the male protagonist. Kauna, the prostitute, remains inscrutable. During the two-minute-long sequence in the taxi, Somnath’s frontal profile occupies most of the frame with the viewer only occasionally catching a glimpse of Kauna’s side-profile in the dim illumination of traffic lights. Only twice do we see her full face: when she insists on being called “Juthika,” her name for business purposes. In an otherwise perfect film such as The Middleman, described by scholars like Ravi Vasudevan as Ray’s “last substantial film,” the presence of women remains formulaic, anecdotal, and at best mysterious. No other character in the film is as empty as Somnath’s erstwhile girlfriend. I concur with Chidananda Dasgupta’s observation that everything in The Middleman is “carefully built up, brick by brick, towards the shattering climax at the end.” “Everything except the episode with Somnath’s girlfriend. . .  Unlike the rest of the film, . . . it is schematic, fitted into the structure because a certain weight was necessary in the direction of his personal affections to balance the preoccupation with career in the rest.” Unlike Ghatak’s female protagonists, whose extreme sacrifice and shame were held out in full display and heightened by melodrama, in Ray’s city films women are emblems of “present-tenseness,” without pasts or futures. But Ray’s abdication of the effort to render women and their actions legible should not be seen as failure. They were a gesture in humility, an acknowledgment that postcolonial women’s histories were not fully legible by the terms established during the anticolonial, nationalist era resolution of the women’s question. As Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, and others have shown, the refashioning of Indian patriarchal ideology by cultural nationalists enabled women to participate in western education and politics, and to engage in modern housekeeping practices, writing, and even join the work force, but so long as their behavior and comportment did not cross the boundaries of (a reconstituted) tradition. Laboring outside the home, in other words, did not necessarily produce the “freedoms promised to women in modernity.” Rather, as Keya Ganguly notes, “The solicitation to become ‘working women’ are a problem within capitalist social relations rather than a redoubt against them.” This is the present inhabited by the women in Ray’s city films.

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This is an edited extract from Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony (forthcoming from Penguin Random House).

 

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The World without Us https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6625 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6625#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:51:34 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6625 My sister told me two things on the same day, one after the other: that she was going to have a child, and that she would never reveal, not to me nor to anyone else, who the father was. I tried to reason with her, saying that no reason or explanation for this secrecy could compensate for the absence of a father that was to follow. All through my confusion and anxiety she kept calm, her secret securely fortified by her decision. She said she accepted this absence, that she would live with it, and voiced this with such implacable tranquillity as if this was a life she had already lived a million times. After a point, her refusal dissolved into the bloodstream of our daily lives. Perhaps her resolve was made easier by the fact that except for me, there was no one else left in our family to hide this absence from.

Illustration: Shamanthi Rajasingh

Illustration: Shamanthi Rajasingh

Deaths in our family had a habit of coming suddenly, in neat strokes of raw chance. For this reason the absences that followed these events went forever unredeemed by any sense of fate or destiny, or indeed, by sense itself. Our father, who is more secure and alive in my sister’s memories than in mine, was caught in a stampede at a train station on the outskirts of the city—the kind of death your eyes alight upon by chance while smoothing the crumpled corner of a newspaper page. I remember our mother better—a frail, sober woman whose appearance into rooms was announced by the silver sounds of her anklets, who sighed heavily after sitting down, and on whose face I never remember seeing any sign of anger or disgust. The last years of her life were eclipsed by the shadow cast by our father’s death, when my sister and I were much younger. She died four years after him, in a freak landslide on a rain-swept road, when she was on her annual pilgrimage to the four holy shrines that dotted our religion. In the consolations and condolences that followed after, relatives said that the supreme being who watches over us had loved her so dearly that she had been taken away, that there was nothing more noble than dying in a pious pursuit, that she was now with our father. My sister and I knew very little about the world and ourselves at the time, but we had instinctively sensed that there was something shameful in giving death the dignity of design.

My sister and I knew very little about the world and ourselves, but we instinctively sensed that there was something shameful in giving death the dignity of design. What followed was an absence divisible between us, a sorrow shared in silence, a grief with a grammar of its own.

What followed was an absence divisible between us both, an absence approached from either end, a sorrow shared in silence, a grief with a grammar of its own and known equally and only to us. We shared many things after their deaths—the house, a piece of property back in the village, and everything else they had left behind. Even those white spaces above dotted lines at the bottom of countless forms and documents were shared by our signatures. There was a pure limitlessness to their absence that their lives could never feign, and my sister and I knew there was enough for both of us in that strange, inexhaustible peace their deaths bequeathed to us. There was nothing to fight about, nothing to divide, nothing to envy, even if around us things changed like seasons. The visitors who frequented our house dwindled after a few days. The gardener could not be convinced to stay on, the postman seldom left a letter for us, and the nameplate that once shone in the sunlight lost its lustre. We both began to fear that we would turn into one of those families forsaken by the regular patterns of life, untouched by events large and small, living in one of those moss-covered, half-collapsed houses with weather-beaten walls that somehow seem to hold within them the ruins written in their future, and whose members are glimpsed now and then through dimly lit windows of cracked glass, a myth to others and a mystery to themselves.

In a certain sense, we did become this family, but our worst fears about our house did not come true. We lived in a single-storeyed, light yellow-coloured house at the dead end of a narrow lane. The rough pavement of cracked cement that began at our doorstep and ended at the main gate was roughly the length of a cricket pitch, bordered on either side by wild bursts of grass and a row of rose bushes uncared for. The façade, with its faded paint, had space only for a single window capped by a small rectangular roof of its own, jutting outside and laying the shroud of its own shadow on sun-shot days. There were four rooms inside, with a small veranda running through the middle like a spine, and a dark little cobwebbed store room tucked alongside the kitchen like a secret pocket. It was my sister who arranged and packed the many things that had lined our life but were not to be used anymore—the shoe stand that must be carried inside, the sewing machine that must be stowed in its carton. I followed her directions, moving things from here to there, covering them with sheets to not let them gather dust, sealing the boxes with tape, using a long stick to push the objects into the darkest depths of a high, attic-like space. She gave the most meticulous attention to preserve what our parents had possessed, collecting things from unkempt corners of the house to keep them together in the cobalt blue almirah that stood in the corner of the bedroom. She took care to keep everything clean and close at hand—their clothes, their pillows and sheets, the documents and forms that proved their past, clothbound photo albums with thick red covers, jewellery, wristwatches, purses—every item haloed by the history of hands that had touched it, all shelves dusted, all memories mothballed.

I lived under the illusion that I possessed a near-complete inventory of recollections of our time with our parents. I remember thinking that surely I had been alive long enough to salvage a variety of vivid episodes, surely I had memories that spanned weeks and months.

I was twelve and she sixteen when this life began, and soon there came the days when we could reach all the shelves, when we had opened all the bottles, and swept every nook of the house with the broom, and when thoughts of mother and father didn’t cross our minds even for a moment. The first time I realised the arrival of such days, I noted in my mind that this was the true date that our childhood had ended.

During our premature passage into a state of sudden adulthood, I lived under the illusion that I possessed a near-complete inventory of recollections of our time with our parents. I remember thinking that surely I had been alive long enough to salvage a variety of vivid episodes, surely I had memories that spanned weeks and months, and recalled enough to last my lifetime. But the truth was that the images that flooded my mind were pathetically finite and belonged mostly to the period immediately preceding their deaths, preserved as if by being caught and permanently illuminated in the blinding brilliance of their approaching ends. When I strained my mind to summon something from the past, I ended up recalling merely a handful of images that carried a whiff of dreamlike exaggeration, as if all the memories had fled like fugitives and left behind these imposters as consolations. Our father most often appeared no more than a modest, blue-shirted breadwinner lounging outside in the wicker chair, facing away from me, his tranquil demeanour somehow reflected in his languid grip on the magazines he was reading. Our mother too I see in a few images—roaming idly in the garden holding a cup of tea, or standing on tiptoe to place a bottle or a box on the top shelf.

When I saw her come and go with her friends, the lives of adults seemed distorted and strange, like something looked at through the wrong end of binoculars. She walked alongside unfamiliar faces, and on the phone talked loudly of things I found hard to follow.

More often than not it was from my sister that I listened to the memories of our past. She reminded me when we were cleaning the courtyard how father had once climbed the copper-roof in a last desperate attempt to catch the two parrots that escaped to blue freedom because he had forgotten to lock their cage where they had perched for most of their flightless lives. On humid nights when we had a power cut, we sat outside in folding-metal chairs to feel the breeze, and she recalled aloud how mother’s soft voice would start humming, humming, and then slowly cover like a cloak the lyrics of the song that played on the radio on nights like these. Listening to her narrate these things from the past felt to me like rereading particular passages of a book of which I only retained a vague sensation, or rediscovering bits of old paper with some surprise in one of my pockets. She made resurface in my mind memories of incidents that I had not known I’d forgotten: when mother broke her ankle after slipping on a polythene bag that was wheeling low on the ground, her near-accident on the street in front of our house when the motorcycle swerved at the last moment to crash into a big garbage truck. With each of her renditions I regained the various angles through which I had glimpsed these things all those years back, where I was standing and what I was doing, what month and year it was. Remembering them through her voice in the dark, silent air, with the wind periodically rippling through the swaying trees as if leafing through the pages of the night, felt like shining a torch-beam into the vast hazy hereafter, searching for the slightest trace of them.

Not only did my sister remember our father in elaborate and minute detail, she had also inherited many of his moods and tendencies. Often, in the background of her behaviour, I could sense the imprint of his impulses, as if she was the most recent layer of life being written on the palimpsest of our bloodline. In his manner, she preferred the scholarly seclusion of the desk, and his prudence and foresight in financial matters was well reflected in the decisions she took on our behalf. She had made father and mother’s room her own, since it already had all her and mother’s clothes in the wooden cupboard, while I was given the room we had once shared. The third one was made into a kind of study which she used more than I did, sitting at the mahogany table facing the front window and the daylight framed within it, her economics course books lining its ledge, her pencils that lived longer than her erasers pointing in different directions, her slippers lying parallel between the legs of the wooden chair, her steel table lamp inclined at a studious angle, and the rust-coloured rings left by numerous teacups on many a midnight.

The bed in the centre was a dense zone of blackness against the fainter shades of everything else around it. It took my eyes some moments to sense her presence on the bed—curled up, quiet, almost dissolved in the darkness, she was simply her own outline.

She used to have a routine when we were both in school, simple and similar to mine, but soon after joining college, she started carving a life of her own. There was a gradual and due divergence that diminished the things we had shared—school, pencils, tuition teachers, friends on the street we lived. She handed down her dog-eared textbooks, an old orange geometry box with the compass missing, along with a few other odds and ends that started living with me, while she stepped into a world unknown to me, without uniforms, timetables, and unnecessary subjects. She would stand for a moment on the doorstep, leaning on the sill while slipping on her shoes, and shout back into the house: “I’m going!” I’d murmur a response and emerge well after her voice had died out, to lock the door left half-open and the hinges slightly swaying in her wake. When I saw her come and go with her friends, the lives of adults seemed distorted and strange, like something looked at through the wrong end of binoculars. She walked alongside unfamiliar faces, and on the phone talked loudly of things I found hard to follow. As the days passed, the times at which we met or left the house changed too, and soon I started keeping my own set of keys.

In the following three years it took for me to finish school, she had graduated from college and was taking all sorts of entrance tests while studying for a diploma in accountancy. In the three years after that, when I was studying undergraduate history, she completed her course and studied at home for a year, preparing for the All-India exams for bank officials. Later, just as I chose to start my research in linguistics in the city university, she received the appointment letter from a state bank branch, a ground floor office merely two kilometres from our home. This contrapuntal harmony of our progress, as if I was a lower musical note running under the successes of my sister, pleased some of our relatives. But between us things remained much the same, with everything eventful lying a long way back in the past, floating up to the surface of our lives only now and then, in dinnertime talk, in the arrival of certain dates in the calendar, or in coincidences or patterns that we happened to notice and mull over for a moment.

Sometime in college I had realised that my true nature was not to finish my course and enter a profession, but to remain forever in a phase of modest indifference where any kind of goal, ambition, or proper prospect did not imminently await me. So I kept choosing paths that made me suitable for nothing but further study in the subjects I chose. Pushing the near future to a farther one, I hoped I could keep deferring everything else just enough to create an illusion of eternal learning.

*

It must have happened around then, in the summer or autumn of the year 1992. She had worked at the bank for a couple of years, and I was in the middle of my research while moonlighting as a temporary teacher for a batch of freshers. My day was finished by four in the afternoon while she returned by six, taking the town bus in the twilight, so that I didn’t see her depart and she didn’t witness my return. That day, she was quite late getting home, and speechlessly made her way into the room. I thought nothing of it. It was only after I made the customary two cups of tea in the evening and shouted her name from the kitchen did I realise how strangely stirless the house was.

I could see very little when I stepped into her room. A few long arms of light sneaking in from the streetlamps outside fell across one of the walls, casting a pale golden glow on the room. The bed in the centre was a dense zone of blackness against the fainter shades of everything else around it. It took my eyes some moments to sense her presence on the bed—curled up, quiet, almost dissolved in the darkness, she was simply her own outline.

I asked her what happened, and went closer. She was bordered on both sides by two pillows, with her oblong purse lying unbuttoned beside her. But I was already too late; at some point in the evening, she had made her decision.

It was true, we had spent our time barely aware of the momentous fact that half of their lives remain forever closed to us, just as a side of the moon is forever turned away from all humanity. I went inside their room at the hospital. She said he looks quite like our father.

The day after tried its best. There was something off, something aslant, about the renewed normalcy, as if it was an amateur impersonating the rhythm of professional yesterdays. When I woke up, I found that my every movement or gesture was becoming a feeble, vain attempt to restore the balance, seeking desperate shelter under daily routine to achieve an oblivion that was all the more haunted by what had actually happened. I asked again. All through my anxiety and confusion she kept calm, and said that she accepts this, and will live with it.

A haze of anger and shock clouds my memory of those initial days. I have a vague recollection of the dramatic feel of that period, my disbelief and panic, as if she had been infected with a terminal disease—how alike the aura of ultimatum in imminent death and near-certain birth. It was simply a matter of the passage of a few days, and then it would happen, and all you can do is prepare. Perhaps our case was especially strange because we were two people who knew not how to prepare for a sudden presence, and there was a certain oddness in remarking that for us death and life had come unseen and unwanted. By the end of the first month, it was clear that she was going ahead. We had both breathed in and out the absurdity of the situation so many times that it had gained the granular coarseness of everyday reality.

Sometimes I lost my temper. I remember threatening to cut off ties. I had even called her stubborn and selfish once, a woman unknown to the ways of the world. What more could I have said to convince her, I sometimes think. Maybe one of those days she could have said something equally horrible to me, something that could justify my packing my things at once and leaving her to herself. But, I would realise, as soon as my worst moments faded, that I was fooling myself. I had never told her how to do things, and there was nothing I could tell her about the world. There was simply nowhere else I could go, nothing I could say to convince her, and nothing could change what was going to happen. Every night, after all the voices were raised, all the tears shed and tablets taken, I would know again that everything would go the way she had planned it.

After a few days came the first pains, and in the following months she learnt a lot about herself—the awareness of her weight, the dark patches that formed on her fingers overnight, sudden shivers running between the shoulder-blades, the brief dizziness she would feel when she stood up suddenly. On the worst days, I had to stand beside her with a towel coiled on my hand and watch her bend over the basin and pour her stomach out. The doctor assured us that nothing was amiss and every sign of her body pointed calmly towards a new life. She tried to learn whatever she could, she bought books and special issues of magazines, and immersed herself in manuals collected from the sofas in the waiting room of the clinic. She wrote discreet postcards to far-flung school friends and telephoned relatives who had seemed to understand. She often searched for early morning or late night Doordarshan shows that discussed home remedies or invited a doctor as a guest for a programme on the topic. She kept a glass-encased thermometer by her side and walked with newfound caution for the world of objects around her, as if every edge or step could prove deceptively fatal. As the new year began, we started looking for the nearest ultrasound clinic, and soon I was taking her from shop to shop to buy all the new things and food supplements she needed, on dim sunless afternoons that had a February faintness of winter to them. By March, I was collecting prescriptions from the doctor on my way back from college, pushing them deep in my pocket, and flattening them on the tabletop of that one old pharmacy counter on our street from which we used to once buy Band-aids and Iodex balm. By April, she needed my help to mount and descend the foot-high first step of the town bus while going to office and, by May, her travels were limited to the outer gate of the house, near which she would water the few marigolds that edged our garden.

She spoke like someone who believed in the inevitability of happiness, its typical tenacity to sneak back in between long, grey intervals of grief. To her it seemed unbelievably foolish to pursue the thread leading to the source of the sorrow.

In those days, I made some changes of my own. After bringing the tea-table to her bedside so we could avoid the hassle of arranging the dining table altogether, I spread a mattress for myself on the floor in her room in case she needed anything during the night. Because I felt an ominous concern whenever I was in the other room, I moved my mint-green Remington typewriter to her table so I could work there too. After clacking away at my work for a few hours, as I would sink back in my chair and feel my mind descend from the noise of thoughts and settle down to the silence of the night, only in those crystal moments of midnight clarity would I become fully aware of the strange life I was living.

In August, just after we had finished lunch on a quiet, windless day, she gave me a meaningful look. I said I would call the doctor.

*

His birth meant that, for the first time in our lives, my sister and I had the chance to know someone from the very beginning of his life. Suddenly it struck me as terribly unfair that all that had happened to both of us, every moment of our past that had led to this moment, would be forever foreign to him. A ghost of its meaning could momentarily flash through those places where our past lay paused—in the albums full of our childhood photos, in the scribblings of our schoolbooks, or perhaps he would find them in the endless reserve of memories my sister kept of everything we know and remember that he can merely imagine. But this unfairness started feeling fair when she asked me to remember that both of us too had to imagine the way mother and father had led their lives in the world without us. It was true, we had spent our time barely aware of the momentous fact that half of their lives remain forever closed to us, just as a side of the moon is forever turned away from all humanity. I went inside their room at the hospital. She said he looks quite like our father.

A year later, I was told that I would be transferred to teach at another state college in a town four hours away. Before I left, on my last weekend with them, we thought of going to the riverbank. I stopped the rickshaw to buy two rolls of colour positive film from a photo studio. I had planned to take a few pictures of him in the sunset, and hopefully get them developed before I boarded the bus on Sunday. We walked back and forth for a while on the sandy gravel along the water, weaving past a few dignified families sitting on woollen rugs around open tiffin boxes for their afternoon picnic. After a while, I started clicking. In the tender, ebbing light of the afternoon, he sometimes half-turns towards the lens, and sometimes she has to hold him from running and face the camera. In between shots, he stoops and momentarily examines a pebble. Half a dozen kite-flying kids are dotted across the horizon behind, and we will wonder about who they were, maybe ten years later. In the viewfinder the two of them appear delicate and fragile, their eyes half-closed from the sun-flecks through the row of trees lining the road. Then she carries him up, and he is splayed flat across her loud, bright yellow dress. Within minutes, I had exhausted half the roll.

We sat down on a backless bench, facing the breeze from the river, and I asked her if she had reconsidered. She had to know that after some years, I wouldn’t be the only one wondering.

She said she knows, but she felt it will all be fine, no matter what happens in the middle, no matter who asks the question. She spoke like someone who believed in the inevitability of happiness, its typical tenacity to sneak back in between long, grey intervals of grief. From her point of view it seemed unbelievably foolish to pursue the thread leading to the source of the sorrow, to plead and beg whoever it was to complete the picture, to remain with us for the sake of an origin story. When I think about it now, her explanation was not totally unlike her. Even after our parents had died, she had found this idea of returning to roots vulgar, of going to the ancestral village and distributing sweets on death anniversaries, arranging a priest for the sacred fire, the rituals of ash and dust, drawing concentric circles from the centre of our lives to create a hierarchy of relatives—cousins first, then uncles and aunts, and then in-laws and outlaws swarming at the outermost rings. All this was too demeaning, this cheap chopping up of a tragedy and scattering it outwards, like breadcrumbs flung for crows. Perhaps she treated deaths and births as things arising out of small, strange chinks in the knitwork of intercrossing lives—better to not quibble about their reasons and simply accept the aftermath. The time had come for an absence of her own, something she would possess all by herself, and I was entitled to phantoms of my own.

After a patch of silence, I moved on. I asked her about something that had happened in the past, just like the old days. She thought about it for a bit, her face still until the ripple of recollection runs through it, and she answered. Again, I added, half-teasingly as usual, knowing perfectly well that she remembered, “And how are you so sure?”

“Because I remember that. . .,” and she described the scene and the events neighbouring it, every rendition surer than the last, as if memory is the purpose and not a consolation, and all of reality had been a rehearsal for remembering well. I think this is the closest thing to a family tradition we have—my forgetting and her remembering, and this will keep repeating itself, over and over again in our lives, until the world is without us again.

It was time to go. I picked up the camera and her bag—I’ve been carrying it ever since he was born. I have taken up the responsibility to teach him language. I said I’ll try my best to take the intercity bus and come home on weekends. Even at the end of a long reign of absence, I feel a strange warmth for whatever had begun all those years ago when we started living by ourselves, for the texture of that time, when the days undulated differently than they will do now.

***

 

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The Shah Rukh Shiksha Abhiyan https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6620 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6620#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:49:58 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6620 I met Manju in 2006. She was one of thirty-four young Muslim women I interviewed for a survey in populous and poverty-stricken Uttar Pradesh (you’ll have to read the entire chapter to understand why a Muslim woman chose ‘Manju’ as her pseudonym). Our interviews were short, part of a small-scale qualitative research effort conducted in two neighbouring villages in the district of Rampur. The district is classified as a ‘minority concentration’ area, as Muslim families account for half the population. Rampur has made significant contributions to Indian classical music and culture; the Raza library in Rampur town holds important texts, among them a 300-year-old Persian translation of the Valmiki Ramayan written in gold. The women I encountered were between fourteen and thirty-five years old. None had visited the famous library, nor indeed, completed primary schooling. They produced appliqué patchwork and embroidery at home, often working together in courtyards or in each other’s homes.

Manju was born at home, without a birth certificate. She was the first girl in her family to attend school of any kind, the only one able to do simple mental arithmetic and count numbers of objects quickly. I struggled at first to grasp what four or five years of government schooling had done for the young women I was meeting. Sure, Manju had acquired a very basic and already rusty understanding of math. She could recognise single-digit numbers. But more than the rudimentary education, formal schooling taught Manju and her friends about their own limitations. Through sitting in rooms listening to a dull teacher drone on, through watching the boys seated in a separate classroom with a better instructor, something important began to happen within these young girls. By realising that girls could not go to school if the separate toilet was not functional, by being unable to keep up with their lessons because of housework that was expected of them but not of boys, by being so proximate to the freedom boys enjoyed in public that was denied to girls, Manju and her friends had acquired a restlessness that was distinct from the equanimity displayed by their mothers and older sisters. These young women were unwilling to stay still and silent at home, bearing witness to their own misfortune. They too, like the boys, were somewhat literate, somewhat numerate and ready to explore the world.

In the years that followed our first meeting in 2006, I would often hear Manju describe Rampur and her hamlet as the ‘garbage-corner’ (kabaar-khana) of western Uttar Pradesh. “What you Delhi girls find useful about being here, I’ll never understand,” she scoffed at our research attempts. She thought girls like her needed kind and decent husbands and fathers, not a survey on wages and work. “Can your survey turn these men into Shah Rukh?” I explained that the state needed data to support workers’ rights and welfare, especially those without formal jobs and contracts. “The government will see us and our jobs through your survey, our suffering,” she said, “and then what? Have you met the local government officers? The post offices and police stations are full of fools and thugs, I become afraid if they even look at us.” She was confused. How would government involvement make anything better? Let’s discuss the new Shah Rukh film instead, she said. Fandom was a better use of our time together.

So I asked Manju about Shah Rukh, how they met and why she loved his persona. She was suddenly on fast-forward, hurtling through the fields towards Him. Taking deep gulps of air, giddy and full of half-smiles, she spoke without pause for forty-five minutes. This was our third meeting and first real conversation. “I was lucky, girls never get to go to the city here. But my mother needed to meet Aslam bhai for work and there was no one to help her carry the clothes.” She described her first visit to Darzi Chowk in Bareilly. In 1999, a few months before Eid, eight- or nine-year-old Manju and her twenty-something mother took a bus out of their village. The hour-long journey felt too short. This was the farthest Manju had ever travelled from her home. In Bareilly, she held her mother’s hand as they took a shared auto to Aslam’s house.

While Aslam and her mother talked business, Manju was offered a Pepsi and introduced to Aslam’s daughter Najma. Manju described the house to me, it was more opulent than anything she had ever seen. Aslam’s shop was also his home. The first floor served as his personal residence while the ground floor was for the shop and zari work. There were garments and order papers littered all over the two-room house. And then Manju spotted the television set. The pictures on the screen, she told me, were shinier than those she had seen on the three TVs in her village. She stared at Najma watching the TV all by herself. It felt like a dream. For a girl, having a TV to oneself in her hamlet was impossible. Najma invited Manju to join her. Together, they channel-surfed until they found a matinee telecast of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on the local network operated by the cable-wallah.

DDLJ was the first Indian film to be shot with Dolby sound mix, the 35mm colours were vivid, and the studio had invested heavily in equipment, technicians and production quality. The director Aditya Chopra, son of the legendary filmmaker Yash Chopra, said in an interview that he “wanted to give Indian film audiences a beautiful love story and a beautiful film. We wanted to shoot Europe as best we could, as a way for ordinary Indians to experience and see countries and locations they were probably never going to visit.” The unreal and unattainable foreign landscapes matched the unreal and unattainable love affair between Simran and Raj.

For Manju, real life tasted so incredibly dull after those hours in front of Aslam’s glorious TV with DDLJ and Najma. How was she supposed to return to Rampur and get on with regular life? Too young to give much consideration to Shah Rukh’s looks, Manju loved his energy. She wanted to scream his name, dance unceasingly to the songs in the movie and repeat each line, relay all that she saw to her friends, and gossip about every scene. Manju wanted to watch the whole movie again. It was an afternoon of accidental discovery. She discovered Switzerland, she discovered London, she discovered Shah Rukh and she discovered Najma. Aslam’s daughter was a dedicated student and a fan of all things Shah Rukh. She had audio cassettes, CDs, photos and magazine cutouts gifted to her by her older brother. At thirteen, Najma was a few years older than Manju and attended a private school in Bareilly. A kind girl, aware of her good fortune, she loaned items from her Shah Rukh stash to Manju, as her family could always afford new music, magazines or posters. Najma told Manju that DDLJ had been released four years ago, that they were able to watch it on TV only because it was so old.

Realising that Manju was hooked, Najma told her about Shah Rukh’s other films; one set in a college was a particular favourite. And a plan was hatched. Najma promised to find videos of Shah Rukh films to show Manju whenever she visited. The local audio-video shop had started stocking VCDs in Darzi Chowk. The shop was a few steps away from Aslam’s home, and would rent out CD players as well. Najma convinced her older brother to rent these pirated prints every month when Manju and her mother would come to deliver orders. Aslam indulged his daughter, on the condition that Najma study hard and do well in school. Manju’s mother agreed to the movie marathons on the condition that Najma help Manju with her writing and reading for half an hour on each visit. Najma loved the idea of playing teacher and threw herself into Manju’s education. Najma’s good grades and the CD rental shops in the markets of Bareilly allowed Manju to begin her new life lessons—all through the filmography of Shah Rukh Khan.

On occasion, as Najma and Manju watched their films, their mothers would join them. Some days, they would meet Aslam’s buyers, often super-elite Muslim women who lived between the Gulf, Lucknow and Delhi. They supplied fabrics and garments to fashion designers and ran their own private retail networks. “Taraashke banaya hai,” Manju’s mother would say about how carefully these women had sculpted themselves—all alabaster skin, tinkling laughter and punishingly exquisite taste. One of these buyers, a Mrs Naqvi, was married into a renowned business family. She had developed a fondness for Manju’s mother, sending Eid presents through Aslam. Mrs Naqvi was a progressive patron of women’s self-help groups and home-based textile workers in the region. An alumna of one of India’s poshest girls’ schools, she consequently had a posh and glamorous network. Manju told me that Mrs Naqvi had even met Shah Rukh at a party: “She said he was kind to everyone who wanted a photo, but very Punjabi not Pathan, though I did not understand what she meant.”

Everyone in Manju’s home and village understood that these monthly trips to Bareilly for half a day were part of her mother’s efforts to be a good woman who was trying to earn more money for her family. What Manju’s mother never disclosed was that these visits were also meant for fun and education—to get away from rural routines, to make new friends and connections. They laughed, watched films, gossiped. Aslam and Najma would be notified of their visit a week in advance, enough time to organise payment for Manju’s mother and a film for Manju. The arrangement lasted from 1999 till 2003, as Manju grew from nine to thirteen years old. These four years served as Manju’s greatest education—the ‘Shah Rukh Shiksha Abhiyan’. Najma helped Manju improve her reading, writing and ability to do simple sums. She enjoyed playing the role of film festival curator too. Her friends would also join. And together they saw Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Pardes, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, Dil To Pagal Hai, Dil Se, Yes Boss, Baazigar—the works.

Through that time, through those movies, Manju convinced herself that Love, the dangerous Yash Raj variety, was real. She knew, she told me, that Muslim women in rural UP would have a hard time finding love because they were denied the possibility of travel or going away to college. Discussing the films with Najma’s teenage friends, Manju learned that the term ‘girlfriend’ was used to describe the glamorous girls who accompanied rich boys at parties. And that these rich boys rarely married their girlfriends if these women only wore Western clothes. Manju learned too that there were men who looked just like her frowning, disciplinarian uncles in London and America. She realised that Indians could run shops in faraway lands. Manju danced and whirled with Shah Rukh, made certain to learn the ‘Mere Khwabon Mein Jo Aye’ song by heart. She watched the cool college kids in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and admired a life she knew she could never have.

Here was a kind, well-spoken man with dimples who lived abroad, paid attention to women and earned good money. Manju had never witnessed such masculine poetry before. There, in a tiny room in Bareilly, while her mother went about the business of earning an independent livelihood, Manju sipped her Pepsi and decided to fall in love with Shah Rukh. Her first favourite actor, her first favourite anything. Her first favourite of consequence. A man who taught her about her own desire for discovery. Just as importantly, he taught her that there were different kinds of men out there, that there was a large world beyond the torpor of traditional village life. I asked her what she thought of all these movies, and the first link she drew was with the men surrounding her. ‘Each time I’d watch his films, I wondered why the boys around us were so different from him. I guess that’s why he is a hero. I wish they would learn manners from him, but they keep racing bikes and building muscles like Salman.’

***

This is an edited extract from Bhattacharya’s forthcoming book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh (HarperCollins India).

 

 

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Q&A with Nisha Mathew Ghosh https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6614 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6614#respond Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:49:17 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6614 Curator for the India Pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2021, Nisha Mathew Ghosh’s practice has included architecture and product design. The India Pavilion at the Biennale, held in June 2021, was titled ‘Small is Beautiful—A Billion Stories’ and celebrated the work of designers, architects, scientists, craftspersons and entrepreneurs across India. The pavilion was designed to showcase narratives of grassroots movements as a collective voice critically commenting on sustainable practices in the country. The curated projects expressed the playfulness and beauty in small ideas, individual pleas that nevertheless resonate vibrantly.

Nisha Matthew  Credit: Mallikarjun Katakol

Nisha Matthew Ghosh
Credit: Mallikarjun Katakol

Can you elaborate on the opportunity of designing for a major event such as the London Design Biennale, and the experience of designing it during the pandemic? The proposal I had sent was selected in 2019 by artistic director Es Devlin and her team. The vision was for a large installation that would engage visitors and five large books that would contain India’s stories via design: on cleanWATER, cleanAIR, clean ENERGY, cleanEARTH&FOREST. I was disappointed that with the pandemic and the related budget crunch, we had to quickly reformat the show to be only a digital one. The Mathew and Ghosh Sustainable Creation Care Foundation and Sustainability Idea Labs was able to fund the exhibition in its new modified avatar. No regrets, because the 150 stories became the hero of our showcase.

Did the pandemic have an impact on the way you dealt with this year’s theme, ‘Resonance’? How did your interpretation of the brief evolve through the project? We had finalised the curatorial trajectory for the India Pavilion before the pandemic. However, it seemed appropriate during this crisis to refer to a plea for clean WATER and clean-AIR. The overall wellbeing of a restored urban ecology plays an important role in the health and immunity of a population. Everything we choose to do embedded a potential resonance, and every strategic gesture towards looking at interventions via design in the space of cleanWATER, cleanAIR or cleanENERGY and so forth, allows something to change and cause shift. The shifts must be purposeful towards a defined intention, and we need everyone to be a stakeholder in this via design or implementation or maintenance or policy.

Tell us more about ‘Small is Beautiful’. How did it best represent India on an international stage? The criteria for the project was that it needed to be an idea that made an impact, tiny or large, on water, air, energy, earth or forest. It was vital that we have a collective voice that represents the diverse yet common trajectories via practice. Ideas have a way of growing exponentially when knowledge is shared, and this was such an opportunity. What is more vital is that we in India see the length, breadth and depth of India’s design engagement with these issues to learn and collaborate with each other, growing this shared collective body of knowledge.

Art installation by Nisha Matthew Ghosh Credit and courtesy: Nisha Mathew Ghosh

Art installation by Nisha Matthew Ghosh
Credit and courtesy: Nisha Mathew Ghosh

You also designed an art installation for the event… The installation makes references to clean energy, and clean air, as a two-winged structure inspired by the form of a windmill blade, and the idea of the traditional Indian fan, the punkha, that was manually moved to bring breeze. A mnemonic humorous reference to the diagram of the Vitruvius figure during the process of a visitor pulling the wings down (via a pulley and counterweight system) confirms the notion of an intentional will or choice via man’s action. The structure is made entirely of natural bamboo harvested from the Northeast and dyed using natural pigments. The wing-blade is softened by waste textile connected as ‘feathers’ and nuanced via embellishment. The idea of ‘wings’ imply flight, movement, a soaring up, a future.

How can the localisation of ideas and impact build a sustainable future? We all agree that local is the future as far as the most sustainable approach is concerned. However, in a global world of large corporations and a hyper-capitalist thrust, we cannot go back. This is where the ‘Small is Beautiful’ strategy has value in its transformative potential to fill in the interstices with a hyper-local, truly democratic, equitable grain via projects and intentions. If this multiplies, one has the possibility of scale via multiplication—a billion ideas with everyone engaged in building the validity of the local. This is very important and this is where we have a gap. The showcase ‘Small Is Beautiful—A Billion Stories’ makes a plea of faith that ideas can build more ideas until we are able to reach critical mass. And everyone is a part of this story.

Has your multidisciplinary background informed your approach to your first curatorial project? Perhaps it has been vital to it! It is important for my artistic practice to fluidly engage between the domains of ecology, architecture, and art—that is the way I am wired. But, importantly, it gives me a lens through which to talk about the world and express my reflections of it.

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What impact did you intend the pavilion to have? What impact did it eventually have? I was frankly disappointed that the art installation could not make it to the Biennale due to Covid protocols that affected its completion. However, it did give us the opportunity for a simpler digital showcase of the work which met the desire to share India’s ideas of sustainability via design with the world, without any other distraction in the space. If budget were not a constraint I would have preferred a more intimate setting to engage with the ideas—viewer and screen intimacy.

You’ve been carrying forward the agenda of ‘Small is Beautiful’ with your platform Sustainability Idea Labs and the talk series on your Instagram handle. What do you see as the next steps in your journey towards building an ecologically resilient India? I am working on the possibility of taking this as a showcase tour around the country which is vital for the goal of building this world of ideas. I’m also working on an allied project for students to be a part of, through optional curricula.

***

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The Family Retainer https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6608 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6608#respond Sat, 09 Oct 2021 16:40:37 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6608 In my head he is always a wizened old man: thin, tall, and (regardless of season) dressed in a brown tweed coat or Nehru jacket over a white or beige kurta and white pajamas. A Gandhi cap sits always on his head. He is probably in his mid-sixties but he mumbles something about his parents being on the verge of finding a girl for him to marry. He seems bashful as he says this, then frowns distractedly, eyes darting, if he senses that his listeners are sniggering (which they usually are).

narain singh 2_600

Yes, yes, the girl might look like Nargis. Raj Kapoor and Nargis are his favourite actors. Dara Singh is his favourite wrestler and every month he likes to go and see his fights.

Narayan Singh. That’s how one would spell it, but in my mind it is ‘Narain’ or ‘Naren’—hurrying through the word, dispensing with the Y sound and condensing the last two syllables. Today it feels like it was part of our subconscious project of diminishing him.

It is 1988 and we are in South Delhi, far removed in time and space from the people and events he is talking about, but that doesn’t matter.

In a way he is a grandfatherly figure to me—he was around when my mother was born in the early 1950s, he knew her as a toddler, fed her occasionally, used to call her ‘Mala baby’ and still does—but I don’t address him with the respectful ‘aap’ or the suffix ‘ji’. It is always ‘tum’, and I call him by his name.

Narayan Singh.

That’s how one would spell it, and that’s how it appeared on our family’s ration card, but in my mind it is ‘Narain’ or ‘Naren’, because those are the pronunciations we used—hurrying through the word, dispensing with the Y sound and condensing the last two syllables. Today it feels like it was part of our subconscious project of diminishing him. I wonder what his name might have looked like on his birth certificate, if a birth certificate ever existed. It wouldn’t have been spelt in English anyway.

Narayan Singh died nearly 25 years ago, and I barely registered this when it happened—I only have a dim memory of my mother’s tears as she told me, before I put it out of my mind and moved on with the rest of my day—but I thought of him last year when I read a news story about a 94-year-old woman being reunited with her original family after four decades. Panchfula was slow, according to the article, and incapable of saying more than a few unconnected words; talking to herself, she would keep a roti aside during mealtimes for a member of her absent family. Eventually someone happened to pay attention to a new word she uttered, then made an effort to identify a possible place name. The rest followed.

narain singh 1_600

The story was powerful in its own right, but it touched a particular personal chord by evoking this figure from my early life: a man who had been both part of and not part of my mother’s family for decades. Like Panchfula, Narayan Singh resided in a world outside of time. Like her, he appeared to have conversations with people who weren’t there. An important difference, though: locating a family who would welcome him back would have been impossible by the 1980s.

*

He was sent to work for my nana and nani in Churchgate in the late 1940s, a young man with a ‘slow’ mind; he originally came from somewhere in Rajasthan and his own family didn’t want to be burdened with him, or so I was always told. After my Nana’s unexpectedly early death in 1975, Narayan Singh continued to be dependent on my grandmother, through a period that included my mother getting married in Delhi, my Nani having to move out of her prestigious Churchgate apartment to then suburban (and unfashionable) Andheri and finally to Delhi, where she helped my mother get out of a bad marriage and bought a flat for us in Saket.

By the time I was old enough to be aware of him, Narayan Singh was a living embodiment of the old-style family retainers we saw in Hindi films of the time, the Ramu kakas and Raghu chachas played by actors like AK Hangal, a dusting-cloth folded over their shoulders: a servant who for all practical purposes was tied to a family for life. Of course, the real-world Ramu kakas would have children or grandchildren with better options available to them in the years ahead (and Hindi cinema would come to reflect this societal change)—but Narayan Singh lived in a vacuum, no legacy to carry forward. In the decades that he worked for my grandparents in Bombay, they posted his monthly salary to his parents in the village; in the later years, long after his parents would have died, I’m almost sure there was no further contact with anyone from his family.

By the time I was old enough to be aware of him, Narayan Singh was a living embodiment of the old-style family retainers we saw in Hindi films, the Ramu kakas and Raghu chachas played by actors like AK Hangal, a dusting-cloth folded over their shoulders.

Most of my Narayan Singh-related memories now are sundry, abstracted images of a thin man sitting and muttering to himself in the ‘servant’s quarter’ we had made out of our tiny garage. This was an adjunct to our DDA (Delhi Development Area) building, a space for a two-wheel scooter at best, with a bit left over for our water booster. When I look into this garage today, I realise he would have had to sleep either with his legs bunched up or with the door ajar if he wanted to stretch them out. (It’s a relief to be able to report that in the colder stretches of winter, he slept inside the house.)

My mother was protective of him, but for me and my friends—and my cousins who visited from London and didn’t even share a language with him—he was mainly a funny old fellow whose ramblings offered minor amusement. I used to imagine that in his younger days he might have been like the slim, dim-witted Suppandi of the Tinkle comics I read. Photos show him sitting with a faraway look in a corner of a room, on the periphery of our lives. Or—in a very rare instance—occupying the centre of a frame where my cousins and I flank him, grinning as if we are being photographed with a gorilla at the zoo. Or, looking tired and haggard, pressing my Nani’s feet—which reminds me that she often called him “Oye, moya!” This is a term that for her, given her boisterous Punjabi nature and upbringing, was tinged with affection, but he would have experienced those yells and curses very differently.

There he is, making rotis in the kitchen, or the ‘French fries’ that my mother and I were so fond of (and which he had been making for her since the 1950s). An aunt who remembers him well tells me he was an excellent cook, but today I have trouble distinguishing the dishes he made from those of my Nani (which were also terrific). A vague regret is that as a child I had no interest in what was always advertised as a Narayan Singh ‘special’—the caramel custard he made was not chocolatey enough for my taste back then. For my mother, though, that pudding and the fries were memory-triggers to the happiest years of her life in her beloved South Bombay, when her father was alive.

Or there he is, smoking beedis downstairs, occasionally even showing a social side as he mutters at the daily-wage workers—plumbers, electricians, carpenters—in our colony. I like to think that, over time, they became friendly with him and gave him a few moments of kinship in a day. (The younger among them are now old men, still do odd jobs around our flat, and speak of him fondly. But it’s easy to remember a funny old man fondly decades after he’s gone.)

*

There is one memory clearer than the others, the most specific Narayan Singh-related memory I have. I came back to the flat one evening after cycling around the compound and when I went to my bathroom, I saw—in the sink and on the floor—what I imagined were dabs of the bright red Close-Up toothpaste I liked. What else could those glistening spots be? When I saw that there was no toothpaste in the bathroom, I mentioned the marks to my mother. She took a look, and after a quick word with Narayan Singh, conjectured that my Nani, during the course of a tongue-lashing earlier in the day—when mum and I were out—had struck him, drawing blood from his nose.

I remember my mother shouting at Nani—and the latter’s blubbering, tearful apologies a few hours later—and that mum was still seething the next day. She was especially distraught because she realised that Narayan Singh had deliberately used my bathroom to wash his face—something he wouldn’t ever do otherwise—and made sure to leave those drops there so that she would get the message; that this was this childlike man’s only way to communicate, since he couldn’t just go up to her and tell her outright (there was no precedent for that).

When I look into this garage today, I realise he would have had to sleep either with his legs bunched up or with the door ajar if he wanted to stretch them out. (It’s a relief to be able to report that in the colder stretches of winter, he slept inside the house).

Despite my mother’s protectiveness, this incident is also an unavoidable reminder that Narayan Singh was, for all purposes, a slave. Speaking as someone who has himself cowered before my Nani’s intrusive boisterousness, it would be easy for me to make her the villain of this piece, to contrast her bullying with my mother’s compassion. But in practice all of us were benefiting from this arrangement: having a round-the-clock servant who had nowhere else in the world he could go to, who would never take a single day off, who thought he was a teenager and would talk nonsense, confirming with every sentence—for anyone who listened to him—that indeed we were the ones doing him a favour.

Sometime in 1995, as Narayan Singh started to become frequently unwell, age telling on him, and as my Nani—pushing seventy herself—battled her own health problems, a decision was taken to have him sent to a home on the outskirts of Delhi for orphaned old people. This involved the help of a family friend, a large donation, and some subterfuge: my mother and grandmother went to see him once in a while but had to go as benefactors who were generally interested in seeing the place and its facilities; they couldn’t let on that they knew him, and he had to play along (though I heard that he almost gave the game away by greeting them like family).

It is telling, and saddening that I can’t find any specific references to his leaving in my daily diary; there is one passing mention in January 1995, in the context of me being disturbed in my studies—my 12th Boards were coming up—by “Nani’s constant shouting at N Singh”. And that seems to be it.

When you’re young and self-absorbed, you can’t be bothered beyond a point with the inner lives of even the family members you are close to, let alone a ‘servant’ whom you think of as part of the décor. Later, as you start to understand what life may have been like for those who were old when you were young—and if you have the time and inclination to reflect—you feel regret when it is much too late.

Writing about him now is primarily an act of selfishness, like most personal writing is. But I am able to accord to him in writing what I did not in life—his individuality, his personhood. And I wonder what he really thought about his life with us.

After I lost my entire immediate family in a relatively compressed period of severe illness and death, I spent a lot of time living in the past—trying to probe, excavate and understand it. Narayan Singh was a small part of my personal history but, more importantly, a much bigger part of my mother’s history. If I had taken the time to ask her about him when she was still around, I would have learnt new things about her youth as well (not just little details like the fact that she and her college friends used to affectionately call him ‘Nancy’).

Writing about him now is primarily an act of selfishness, like most personal writing is. But I am able to accord to him in writing what I did not in life—his individuality, his personhood. And I wonder what he really thought about his life with us. Did the teenager in an old man’s body feel like joining me and my friends in our games as we cycled wildly around our park, or played catch-catch, or with makeshift bows and arrows? How did he experience time and memory? Did he have to resolve the contradictions between what he thought and what he saw around him? When we took him along for a screening of Karma, a film that featured his favourite Dara Singh—along with other actors, Dilip Kumar and Nutan, whom he would remember—how did he make sense of how old they had become compared to the impression of them he retained in his mind? Or did he even recognise them, or think we were playing a prank on him, when we told him who they were?

How did he make sense of age? My mother’s elder brother—a domineering alpha male in most contexts, and one of the terrors of my childhood—was unfailingly soft and respectful with Narayan Singh during his visits to India. I’m almost sure that Narayan Singh referred to him as ‘Vijay baba’, as if my uncle had been frozen at the age of eighteen or nineteen. How, indeed, did Narayan Singh process the fact that ‘Mala baby’ had an adolescent son? I have no answers.

All I can turn to, ultimately, are the few happy memories: the sight of him laughing openly at a TV comedy, showing his rows of broken teeth. Or when my Nani, in one of her relaxed and friendlier moods, asked him if he remembered this or that episode from the past: such as my Nana, normally a very gentle man, getting angry at them bothbecause they were constantly bickering; or how Narayan Singh used to walk ‘Mala baby’ to the club in the evenings. “Haan, haan, wahaan jaayenge (yes, yes, we will go there),” he would mumble, nodding vigorously, when Nani brought up Churchgate. Maybe they are all in some alternative universe now, with the borders between them—class, mental condition—having melted away, leaving only companionship.

***

 

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The Magic Metro Card https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6601 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6601#respond Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:02:57 +0000 https://indianquarterly.com/?p=6601 At the time of this covert caper, Innocent Baby Chandy (IB to friends and classmates) was 10 years old and studied at a senior secondary school near the Guru Dronacharya Metro station in Gurgaon, NCR. She lived with her mother in a cosy 450 sq ft, one-bedroom-hall-kitchen flat in Sector-38. Her mother, Radha Mercy Chandy, was an Assistant Manager at a large South Indian sari shop, in charge of the Kasavu section, in Vyapar Kendra.

For a 10-year-old girl, not yet four feet tall, Innocent was fairly self-reliant. Every morning she made her own breakfast of two toasts buttered with Amul and a hard-boiled egg. She also ironed her school uniform with exemplary precision and polished her black Bata shoes to perfection.

Innocent’s father, Bijou Jolly Chandy, worked as an AC mechanic and all-purpose electrician in Dubai. He came home once a year for Christmas and then they would catch the Kerala Express from New Delhi Railway Station and visit their relatives in a small village near Khasak in the backwaters of Kerala for a month.

Illustration: Tasneem Amiruddin

Illustration: Tasneem Amiruddin

It was two years earlier, when Innocent was in the third standard, that Bijou Chandy went to Dubai for the first time. Both Innocent and Radha missed Bijou very much and at nights, sometimes, Innocent would lie awake for long, remembering the good times the family had when Bijou was home. But in the day she did not show her sadness in any manner, lest her mother too start to worry about her. Innocent couldn’t bear to see Radha unhappy and thus both mother and daughter tried to shield each other from their collective pain. It worked because when they were together, they were like two peas in a pod, never feeling any discontent. And a Skype call to Bijou after dinner cheered them both up immeasurably. Then they would watch a Shah Rukh Khan or Tiger Shroff movie on cable TV for some time before drifting off to sleep.

For a 10-year-old girl, not yet four feet tall, Innocent was fairly self-reliant. Every morning she made her own breakfast of two toasts buttered with Amul and a hard-boiled egg liberally sprinkled with black pepper washed down with a glass of cold full-cream milk. She also ironed her school uniform with exemplary precision and polished her black Bata shoes to perfection. While the family was not very well off by Gurgaon standards, they did not think of themselves as poor. But Innocent knew she had to be careful with money as her mother worked very hard for it and her father had to save a lot so that they could finally start building their own house on the 25 sq yard plot that her mother bought last December near Sohna, just outside Gurgaon city limits.

Once every few days, Innocent and Radha would take out the floor plan of the house, which Radha’s brother Lancy had drawn for them, and pored over it with much absorption. When the time arrives for construction, so will Lancy Uncle from Palakkad. In Innocent’s maternal village near Thasrak, Lancy is much respected as a master builder.

Innocent opened the top-loading lid of the machine and peeked inside. In the shadows, she saw something dark and flat. She foraged inside, while Radha held her by the feet and after some effort, enveloped in fumes of Surf Excel, her fingers touched something solid, something plastic.

The house of their dreams has two floors. On the ground floor, there is a kitchen and the sitting room; on the first floor, there are two bedrooms and a bathroom; and on the terrace there is a small room with an attached bath, a barsati, which Radha wants to rent out to offset the cost of construction. But Innocent wants that small room on the roof for herself. There is much discussion on the merits of Innocent’s claim every time the blueprint is brought out and after they are both satisfied it is locked securely in the steel almirah again.

*

One Thursday morning in late March, as Innocent got ready for school, dressed in her crisply ironed white and blue uniform, her mother gave her 20 rupees for her lunch of chhole-bhature from the school canteen. On other days she had puri-bhaji, masala dosa, or egg curry and rice. Though Radha would have gladly packed her a tiffin, as she did for herself before leaving for work at 10 o’clock, Innocent preferred eating in the school canteen. To her it seemed like a grown-up thing to do and she liked doing grown-up things. She couldn’t wait to grow up and wear kajal and burgundy nail polish like the 10th standard didis she so admired. Also she loved North Indian food, and the chhole bhature made by Varmaji at her school canteen was out of this world.

Innocent put the 20 rupee note in her skirt pocket and her fingers touched the flat keys that she carried. When she returned home every evening around 4.30, she opened the two Godrej locks and let herself in. She was, as previously mentioned, a very self-reliant and brave girl. She felt reassured while touching the keys and said ‘bye’ to Radha, who ruffled her hair and then smoothed it back again.

Innocent went down the stairs, hopping two steps at a time. The landlady, Mrs Tomar, lived on the first floor. As she opened the front gate, her sixth sense told her that something was amiss, and she again put her hands into her pocket and touched the keys. She then realised that she was not carrying her Metro Card. She had left it upstairs and it was already 8.15. Innocent checked the front pocket of her Wonder Girl satchel and then ran up the stairs and pressed the bell. Radha Mercy opened the front door.

‘Mumma, I forgot my Metro Card.’

‘It must be on your study table, Inu Kutti.’

But it wasn’t there. ‘Look in the steel almirah,’ but the card wasn’t there either. ‘Check the kitchen shelves, the top of the fridge.’ No, nothing there. ‘Maybe you forgot it in the bathroom, let’s look there, Inu.’ But the card was not there either and then  Innocent remembered that she had washed her skirt the previous evening as she always did every day when she came home from school, ever since the semi-automatic Samsung washing machine had arrived in January. Radha and Innocent had bought it from a shop in Vyapar Kendra on monthly instalments. After checking the pockets of the dark blue skirt drying on the aluminium clothes stand, Innocent rushed to the small balcony, where in the corner, by the side of a red tub, out of which marigolds grew in orange abundance, the silver-grey washing machine sat imperiously.

Innocent opened the top-loading lid of the machine and peeked inside. At first she couldn’t see anything other than the spotless white interior but then in a corner, in the shadows, she saw something dark and flat near the drain. She foraged inside, while Radha held her by the feet and after some effort, enveloped in fumes of Surf Excel, her fingers touched something solid, something plastic. It was the Metro Card. Wet, bent and misshapen. The thin outer plastic covering wrinkled and peeling off. All that fuzzy logic had done its work well.

‘Oh, Innocent, you should have been more careful. See, now your card is ruined. And you recharged it with 200 rupees only yesterday. Now all that money is lost too.’

‘I am sorry, Mumma. I don’t know how it happened. I will be more careful from now on. I promise.’

‘Yes, I know you will. Don’t worry. These things happen. Here’s 200 rupees. Buy a new card. But we won’t be able to buy the fountain pen you wanted this Saturday. We will buy it next month, Inu.’

‘Thank you, Mumma,’ Innocent said and put the 200 rupees wrapped around the bent Metro Card into her pocket. She really wanted that grand gold and maroon Chinese fountain pen with the long steel nib. She would make a fair copy of her Hindi poems with that fountain pen in her red leather secret diary which Bijou had got for her from the international airport in Delhi the previous year. Well, she could wait for a month, she was certainly not an impatient girl.

Innocent Chandy walked down to the Metro station deep in thought and in eight minutes had reached the security check-point at the Huda City Centre Metro station. As she walked towards the customer care window to buy a new Metro Card, a thought occurred to her. ‘Perhaps I should try out the old card once. Maybe it will work after all.’

Innocent walked briskly to the card barrier and put the old, wet, wrinkled card on the sensor and, lo and behold, the screen that usually displayed the balance amount on the card crackled with zig-zag lines, as if it were jammed and there was lightning inside. The only thing missing was a bit of smoke. But the barrier parted.

So it worked! The Metro Card was still functional. She ran up the stairs, the Samaypur-Badli train was waiting and as she stepped in, the doors closed. First IFFCO Chowk and then MG Road stations passed by and seven minutes later, at the Guru Dronacharya Metro station, the same thing happened with the Metro Card and the sensor display. The lightning, the crackle, the zig-zag lines of static, the works! Again a thought arose in Innocent Chandy’s hyperactive mind. ‘Perhaps I should check the balance at the Customer Care booth.’ The young lady at the window, in the crisp yellow shirt and bright maroon tie, told Innocent, ‘You have 175 rupees left in your card.’

‘Oh my God,’ thought Innocent, ‘even yesterday evening, the amount was the same. That means there has been no debit today. Oh my God, the Metro Card has turned into a magical one. I can travel anywhere with this and there will be no charge ever.’

All these thoughts came tumbling into her highly strategic mind at the same time. The young lady in the yellow shirt then sniffed at the card and said to Innocent cheekily, ‘You don’t actually have to wash your card in Surf or Tide, you know. You can just wipe it clean with your handkerchief if it becomes dirty.’

Innocent put the old, wet, wrinkled card on the sensor and, lo and behold, the screen that usually displayed the balance amount on the card crackled with zig-zag lines, as if it were jammed and there was lightning inside. The only thing missing was a bit of smoke

‘Yes, of course,’ said Innocent and quickly retrieved her Magic Metro Card, lest it be subjected to more official scrutiny. She pondered what to do with her unexpected windfall. Well, she had always wanted to see the Qutab Minar. It was only four stops ahead on the Yellow Line. Her mind thus set on this new adventure, she re-entered the station from the other side, went past security check again and put the card on the sensor. Again the hiss, the crackle, the zig-zag lines and, as the barrier lifted, so did her heart.

She was on her way to see the Qutab Minar. Thanks to her Magic Metro Card. Ten minutes later, at the Qutab Minar Metro station, she asked the security guard at the exit gate the way to the monument and he told her to turn left at the stairs below and walk for five minutes and it would be on her ‘ulte haath’, on her ‘left hand’ side.

Innocent bought a ticket at the gate, and then as it was still quite early and she had all the time in the world, she spent quality time observing the street vendors who were setting up their mobile shops, selling toys, wooden elephants, parakeets with glossy red lips, ceramic peacocks, ash trays, clothes and snacks: samosas, aloo tikkis, jalebis and her favourite chhole-bhature. Over the weekend she would write about them in her secret diary.

The thrill that Innocent Baby Chandy felt at her initiative, her independence, her good fortune, lightened the burden of guilt she felt at cutting classes and hoodwinking her mother. But then she thought, ‘I am not actually duping her, since what she does not know can’t hurt her’.

After a while, Innocent Baby Chandy went inside and tagged along with a tourist group from Osaka, Japan that had brought along their own guide, Mr Mifune. ‘Made of sandstone and marble,’ Mr Mifune informed them solemnly, ‘the Qutab Minar at a height of 73 metres is the tallest minaret in the world.’ It was started in AD 1193 by Qutab-ud-din Aibak and completed in 1220 by Iltutmish, his son-in-law. The tower had five distinct storeys, the first three made of red sandstone, the last two of sandstone and marble. She learnt all about 12th and 13th century India and the Slave Dynasty, the Khiljis and the Tughlaqs, in particular Firoz Tughlaq who in 1368 had the monument restored and constructed the top two storeys, the British who much later had constructed the iron railings which encircled the projecting balconies, and she also saw the magnificent rust-free iron pillar from the Gupta era. How truly advanced India was in steel-making in ancient times and how over centuries, with self-regard and complacency, they had lost that ability. The pillar was inside the courtyard of the Quwattul Islam mosque which was built from material reused from over 20 Jain and Brahmin temples. Looking at the pillars of the mosque, Innocent Baby was very glad that her country had come a long way from the chronic barbarism and rude unsubtle ways of the Middle Ages. No temples, churches, gurudwaras and mosques were destroyed in India anymore. In her Civics textbook, she had read that her motherland was the largest secular democracy in the world.

As it was widely believed that whoever could span the circumference of that seven-metre-high iron pillar with their arms while standing with their backs to it, all their dreams would come true, Innocent quickly climbed over the steel barrier protecting the pillar and stood flush against it before Mr Mifune could stop her. She then took several deep breaths, puffed out some air, limbered up and fluttered her arms like a butterfly about to float up for the Nikons, Yashicas, Canons and iPhones focused on her by the good and now somewhat anxious citizens of Osaka, and slowly started encircling the pillar, inch by hard-fought inch, a prayer for Bijou to be back home on her lips, but just as her fingers were about to touch, she heard the loud toot of an indignant whistle and the ominous sound of running feet clad in boots. It was the poor watchman Baankay Khan Gujjar, ever vigilant about intrepid dreamers and interloping schoolgirls. Innocent quickly climbed over the barrier and made good her escape. Mr Mifune bowed to the watchman in greeting and pointed his Mamiya at him. Baankay Khan Gujjar bowed back with a smile and twirled his mehndi-orange handlebar moustache and struck a regal pose. That magnificent moustache over the years had added lustre to many a reticent living room, from Patna to London to Madrid to Atlanta to Addis Ababa.

Innocent then saw the magnificent Alai Darwaza, named after Alauddin Khilji, whose tomb it contained, and Sanderson’s Sundial which was still fairly accurate in the times of Timex and Titan. It had a legend carved in Latin on its side: Transit Umbra Lux Permanet. Innocent quickly copied it into her secret diary, while Mr Mifune looked over her shoulder. ‘It means “Shadow Passes, Light Remains”,’ he told her sternly. Innocent dutifully wrote that down. ‘And it is “Permanet”, Latin and not “Permanent”.’ Innocent made the necessary corrections.

After the Japanese left, Innocent took out her olive green windcheater which doubled up as a raincoat from her satchel and wore it over her white shirt and blue-and-gold tie to camouflage her school uniform. It made her less conspicuous. She then tagged along with a group from Tamil Nadu that had come all the way from Kanyakumari in a Volvo bus. She made the circuit again and hung on to the words of the guide, Mr Nazir, with much concentration. But more than that she observed keenly and memorised everything that she saw. This time she steered clear of the iron pillar and the ever-vigilant Baankay Khan Gujjar.

She wandered looking at books and dresses and, importantly, the fashions, the hairstyles, the talking, the snatches of English, Haryanvi, Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam and Bengali. She observed everything and told herself, ‘I might one day turn out to be a very good spy.

The thrill that Innocent Baby Chandy felt at her initiative, her independence, her good fortune, lightened the burden of guilt she felt at cutting classes and hoodwinking her mother. But then she thought, ‘I am not actually duping her, since what she does not know can’t hurt her.’ Very true! And the monument itself, the Qutab Minar, the victory tower, was so magnificent, such a proud and sturdy structure of fortitude and ambition which sought to touch the sky, made Innocent Chandy’s brave little foray into misdirection and duplicity totally complementary, fully justified. Most dreams, if they come true, are let-downs but the Qutab Minar had made Innocent’s heart soar and given her an adrenaline rush which even a plate of Varmaji’s exquisite chhole-bhature would be hard put to match.

Around 1.30 in the afternoon, she began feeling a trifle peckish. She went out of the gate and had a plate of aloo-tikki with tangy imli chutney with the twenty rupees that Radha had given her for lunch. After she had a long draught of a drink from the Teen Titans water flask that she carried in her satchel, Innocent walked back to the Qutab Minar Metro station, feeling like a bona-fide superhero herself.

There were three hours left to 4.30. If she reached home early, her neighbours, especially Mrs Tomar, would notice and she would have to invent a lie. She didn’t want to have to do that and on the other hand she did want to see the Chhattarpur Mandir, which was just a stop away on the Yellow Line. So with her mind made up and her tummy fortified with crisp double-fried tikkis, their crusts brownish red with heat, Innocent made her way to the elaborate Chhattarpur Mandir complex. She realised soon that she would need a full day to explore the vast perimeter and its various attractions. She would need to return, probably in the winter, when Bijou would be visiting. She spent an hour there and on her way back on the Metro got down at the MG Road Metro station and spent an hour and a half wandering around a grand mall looking at books and dresses and, most importantly, the people, the fashions, the hairstyles, the talking, the snatches of English, Haryanvi, Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam and Bengali. She observed everything and told herself, ‘Given proper training, I might one day turn out to be a very good spy and work for the Intelligence Bureau.’ IB in the IB. Now that should be fun. Thus sated with her unexpected adventure she made her way home on her Magic Metro Card.

The first thing she did when she got home was to take out her precious Metro Card and put it in the skirt pocket of the next day’s uniform. Then, exhausted by her memorable day, she fell into a dreamless sleep on the yellow rexine sofa-cum-bed. When she finally woke up around 7.30 in the evening, the tube light was ablaze and Radha was ironing her skirt and her fingers were once again just about to touch, spanning the cold iron pillar.

‘Oh dear,’ Innocent Baby rubbed her eyes and thought, ‘My Magic Metro Card is inside the skirt pocket, I hope it won’t get damaged again.’ But, of course, she didn’t say anything to her mother.

‘Oh, so you are up now, Inu Kutti, you sleepyhead. You didn’t even have your dinner, I had made meen moilee and rice for you. And you didn’t even change out of your uniform.’

‘I will have the fish curry now, Mumma. Somehow I felt very tired today when I got home.’ Innocent loved the coconut-rich meen moilee that Radha made and since the age of five could eat the fish clean like a cat. The bones arranged in a neat sunburst, around a dollop of yellow dal, on her plate.

When Radha went into the kitchen to warm up her food, Innocent quickly went over to her neatly ironed shirt and skirt and fished out her Magic Metro Card, which was now as warm to the touch as a pop-up toast and as crisp. All the magical wrinkles of the morning were ironed out. One might as well as spread Kissan Mixed Fruit jam on it and eat it.

‘Oh no,’ despaired Innocent Baby Chandy, ‘I hope the magic has not died. I do wish to see the Red Fort tomorrow!’

This story is for my daughter Tara.

***

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