XII
Virmati and the Professor, in a room in a friend’s house, a meeting that has been arranged with some difficulty.
Virmati to the Professor, ‘I can’t do it, I simply can’t. We will have to forget about the whole thing. At home they will not listen to any more arguments.’
The Professor turned Virmati towards himself, and cupped her face in his hands. He took off her glasses, then stroked her face, with small, caressing gestures. He kissed her eyes, her nose, her soft, full mouth. All Virmati’s feelings were focused on his touch. As he smoothed the hair back from her forehead, and tucked the untidy strands behind her ears, she sank towards him.
‘Darling Vir,’ said the Professor, leading her to the white-sheeted takht that was against the wall of the room. ‘You must be firm. I know how difficult it is for you, but you must be firm.’
‘I can go on being firm, but the doli will be at the door, and I will leave my house in it,’ said Virmati, choking and hiccuping in a burst of sobs. She threw her dupatta over her head, and rocked back and forth, her arms tight around herself.
The Professor tried to turn her rigid face towards him. Not succeeding, he took her hand and spreading her fingers, pressed his lips to the white spot where they joined. Virmati tried to snatch her hand back, but the Professor laced her fingers with his own so tightly she could feel the blood going from them. Once more she struggled against his grip.
‘Soon things will be all right. Then you will see. We will one day be together,’ said the Professor, holding onto the kissed hand with conviction.
Virmati could not imagine how things were going to become all right, and she noticed that the Professor made no suggestions either.
‘It will never be,’ she muttered desolately to herself. Her situation was hopeless. Even crying was no good. She pulled away her hand and this time he let go, laying it gently in her lap.
‘Good girl,’ said the Professor, as her sobs decreased, and she grew less rigid. He transferred his kisses to her eyes.
‘Smile at me,’ he begged.
With great effort, Virmati twisted the corners of her mouth.
Cycling home, it was clear to her that she could not depend upon the Professor to sort out any domestic situation. It was up to her. At home, everybody assumed that her listlessness had to do with bridal nerves, and treated her with a tact rare in her family. Even Paro and Vidya, wild with excitement, were subdued before their sister’s absent-mindedness.
*
The morning after meeting the Professor, Virmati woke to find the verandas washed with blowing winds of rain. The grounds around the house were swirling with muddy brown waters, little waves lurching against the veranda steps. Inside Virmati kept bumping into one or the other of her brothers and sisters. They were all housebound, no school, no college, no work for any of them today. All of them had something to say to her, all of them wanted her to join in the excitement of the more-than-usual rain. Some of them were dancing about on the veranda, making dashes into the pool below, some of them were darting up and down from the roof. All were wet. Paro came running up to her.
‘Pehnji, come. Mati’s making pakoras in the kitchen!’
It was ideal weather for pakoras, there could be no two opinions about that, thought Virmati sadly. She was sure that the woman would be also frying them for her husband, daughter, mother and sister-in-law.
‘What kind is she making?’ she asked Paro, dully.
‘Oh, the usual. Onion, potato, green chilli, spinach, brinjal and pumpkin.’
Ah, pumpkin, potato, onion, and green chilli pakoras! Sweet, salty and sharp, with the sourness of chutney slathered on their golden crisp shells. But now what was the use of anything?
‘Indu Pehnji and Vidya are in the kitchen, helping Mati. Gopi Praji is there too, trying to finish the pakoras by himself. Come, Pehnji, before they are all gone! I was waiting for you before I ate any!’ Paro tried to make her lagging sister walk faster by pulling her dupatta.
‘I am coming, Paru,’ said Virmati. And she did hurry a little, despite her heaviness of heart.
In the kitchen all was noise and hot frying smells. Big pieces of wood were sticking out of the fire that was crackling under a large heavy kaddhai, half full of foaming oil. Indumati and a dripping Hemavati were cutting vegetables, sitting on wooden pattris on the floor. Gunvati was concentrating on cutting pumpkin pieces to the required thinness, and Vidya, young and inexperienced in the art of fine slicing, was vigorously grating a long, green lauki. Her body swayed back and forth over the grater. Kasturi was standing over the kaddhai, at one end of the kitchen, wielding a long, black-handled ladle. Some children were on the floor, on their pattris, with small tables in front of them, eating, swallowing, gulping, fighting pakoras. Paro quickly took her place, Virmati joined Indu in the cutting.
‘You eat now, Indu,’ she said. ‘You must have cut long enough.’
‘No, no, Pehnji. After all, you are here for only a few days now.’
‘Yes, yes, Pehnji,’ giggled Hema. ‘Let us do some seva for you, for a change.’
Virmati silently sat next to Paro, taking the little girl in her lap. She hugged her tightly, putting her cheek next to her damp hair. Paro, in response, stuck a pakora into her sister’s mouth, carefully smearing it with green tomato chutney first.
‘Nice, no?’ she asked.
‘Yes, darling,’ said Virmati, eating with small, careful chews, for she had no appetite.
‘It will be an auspicious omen if it rains on your wedding, Pehnji,’ said Hemavati.
It seemed to Virmati that her family could talk of nothing else but her wedding. Every word they said had so little relation to her inner life that she felt fraudulent even listening to them, passively, immorally silent. If they knew what she was really like, would they tolerate her? Look upon her lovingly, do seva for her, think of her comfort – even Paro, would she push a pakora into her mouth? Would anyone let her?
XIII
In 1849 the British formally annexed Punjab, completing a process that had begun with the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh ten years earlier. They set about establishing their control in a manner that would persuade the Punjabis that, of all possible political options, British rule was best. From the 1880s they started building canals, twisting the five rivers into courses that would change the demography of the area as well as the dry colour of the earth. Acres and acres of arable land were created in order to provide: gifts in return for the horses and soldiers that the military needed; the revenues that the administration needed; and the picture of a contented peasantry that the Raj morally needed.
The Upper Bari Doab Canal was among the first to be built, harnessing the Ravi at Madhopur Head. Broad, muddy and silent, the river flowed in its straight canal lines to Tibri, where it branched off into three equally straight subdivisions. The Kasoor Branch flowed past the village of Tarsikka where there was a small oil mill which Lala Diwan Chand bought in 1910.
Lala Diwan Chand loved Tarsikka, and he grew ambitious for the place. To the existing mill, which was for extracting mustard and rape-seed oil, he added a gin and a flour unit. And as his grandchildren grew, he kept adding to the place. They needed fresh fruit and vegetables which his six-acre garden would provide. He planted trees of mango, mausambi, cheekoo, jamun, pear, pomegranate, lemon, papaya, malta, loquat, lichi, and mulberry. In winter there were rows of seasonal vegetables. To house his frequently visiting grandchildren, he built a block of four large rooms bordered by a wide veranda in the middle of the garden. The kitchen was on one side with the hand-pump near the entrance. The outhouses were in the back, far from the house, kitchen, vegetables, fruit trees, and everything else. A great boundary wall, with huge, iron-studded gates in the front surrounded the whole property.
Four shops, of cloth, vegetables, dry goods, and freshly made sweets and savouries just inside the mill entrance served basic needs. The shops, the stables for the tongas, the garages for a car and twenty-seater bus, together with Lala Diwan Chand’s small office, formed a square in front. To get to the house, one had to cross a little bridge which spanned the narrow canal inlet that flowed from the main branch into the mill.
This canal stream, deep though narrow, ran through one end of the garden, and was a great attraction for Lala Diwan Chand’s grandchildren. They spent every minute they could in or around it, swimming and eating. The boys would raid the garden for litchis, loquat and mangoes, which they sank in the water in buckets to cool. After everybody had had their fill of fruit, the boys would go to the halwai for pakoras. With spots of grease spreading on the wrapping paper, they would run back, the hot pakoras in their hands, to be pounced upon by the rest and sent back for more.
At one end of the garden, next to the bridge, Lala Diwan Chand had built an enclosure so that the daughters of the house could swim in privacy, sheltered from any eye that might glance upon their fair bodies in wet and revealing clothes. Their sense of modesty prevented them from following their brothers, who sometimes preferred to go to the big canal outside, where lay vaster, grander spaces of muddy water.
*
The day after the floods and pakoras, Virmati could be seen trying to leave her house in the late afternoon. Just as she thought she had reached the gate unseen, Paro pounced on her.
‘Pehnji! I’m also coming!’
Virmati looked at her grubby sister. Paro had smudges of dirt all over, and her hair was loosened untidily from her plait. Wordlessly she bent down to put her face next to hers for a moment, tightly holding the thin child body, with its small round stomach.
‘Pehnji?’ said Paro, a little surprised.
Virmati’s chest heaved. Paro couldn’t believe that her strong sister might be crying. The very unusualness of it was enough to start her lips quivering.
‘Pehnji?’ she sniffed, wriggling around, trying to catch a glimpse of Virmati’s face. ‘Pehnji, don’t cry. What’s happened?’ and her own tears began to fall.
Virmati set her down by the side of the gate.
‘I’m not feeling well,’ she explained, as she dried Paro’s smooth round cheeks with the end of her dupatta.
‘Oh. I thought because you are getting married, but then it is only afterwards you cry, no?’
Virmati’s mouth twisted a little. ‘Yes, darling. Only afterwards.’
‘Where are you going? I’m also coming!’
‘Not now, darling,’ said Virmati, looking at this youngest of her sisters, almost a daughter, trying to memorize every line of her little face. As Paro started to protest, she added quickly, ‘I’ll bring you a notebook and coloured pencils. All right?’
‘All right,’ said Paro, distracted but doubtful. She was suspicious of such largesse. ‘But tell me, where are you going, and why can’t I …’
Before she could say anything more, Virmati had slipped out of the gate and left. She walked swiftly down Lepel Griffin Road, her head bent, her feet intent on avoiding the big, squishy mud puddles that laced the pathway. The watery overflow of the previous day had left rubbish residues on the road, and it was beginning to stink in the sun. What must it be like in the city, thought Virmati, where even on ordinary days the drains were always clogged and full. Her mind wandered to the thousands of mosquitoes that hovered around the drains and all the fruit and halwai stalls in the market. Then to her father’s shop, the old house, her old school, her new house, her new college, incoherent pictures jumbling about in her unhappy mind.
At the nearest crossing from Lepel Griffin Road, Virmati hailed a tonga. She was afraid she was going to be late for the bus,
but she was looking for signs from God and refused to urge the tonga-wallah to go any faster. If the bus was there at Hall Gate it meant that even God had declared that she was getting too burdensome for her family. Ah, there it was. Dear grand-father, your kindness to your fellows in providing them with this shuttle service between Amritsar and Tarsikka, for a four-anna one-way fare will also take me to my death. And seeing her fate resound prophetically in every step she took, Virmati climbed slowly and heavily into the twenty-seater bus. An old villager sitting next to a vacant seat got up because Virmati’s status entitled her to sit either with her own kind, or alone. As he shuffled to the front and squatted next to the driver’s seat, Virmati gratefully took his place, glad to be out of sight of the other passengers.
‘Bibiji,’ asked the driver who had recognized her, ‘is anyone else coming?’
‘No, no,’ said Virmati, confused, ‘no one is coming.’
The bus started, and Virmati fixed her gaze on the moving world beyond the window. The ride was smooth. Lala Diwan Chand believed in keeping his vehicles well. Virmati’s inert body rocked to and fro as she stared at Paro’s face, planted on the scenery outside. She could see the details of the tear marks she had tried to wipe away, see the big eyes fixed on hers as she promised coloured pencils, a notebook. How would Paro get these things? She would think her sister had forgotten. The scenery blurred as Virmati’s eyes grew hot and began to prickle. She hoped Paro would not think badly of her when she grew up.
Soon Kailashnath would finish his game of capturing rival kites on the roof, and give her letter to the Professor. She had composed it with unusual care, trying to make sure there were no grammatical or spelling mistakes in it. She knew those annoyed him.
‘I want you to be perfect,’ the Professor had told her. And she had blushed with pleasure. Nobody else had ever seen her as someone who could be perfect.
Of course, he would grieve at her going, she knew that. But then, there was always his wife for him to turn to. Strange to think they had been friends once.
It was growing dark as the bus turned off from the main road into the dirt path that bordered the side of the Kasoor Branch Lower Canal. The sun was setting, and the sky was a splendid series of serried colours, gold, pink, orange, red, purple, merging one into the other, a perfect monsoon sunset. The trees along the canal stood out, their leaves looking subdued and shadowy against the brilliance of the sky. If Virmati could, she would live with Bade Baoji in Tarsikka, and never go to Amritsar. But the luxury of living how and where one wanted was only for the old. When the responsibilities of life were over and the right to choice earned.
From the bus windows, Virmati could see that the canal was full after the previous day’s rain. In the slanting evening light the swift, muddy waters were faintly tinged with pink. Little frothy waves slapped against the walls. Virmati had times out of number cooled herself in this canal, sat on its banks to eat pakoras, to bite into hot, roasted corn smeared with lemon and spicy masala, to munch peanuts and see the shells swirling about in the water, to suck mangoes and watch the seeds and skins sink. Now its separate life struck her, the waters going strangely and mysteriously on, having a being in which her own would soon be inextricably mingled.
*
The bus, which had been stopping at intervals to let villagers off, finally crossed one of the bridges that spanned the canal leading towards her grandfather’s mill. A few furlongs down, it stopped before the gates, its horn blaring shrilly before the massive shut doors. As Virmati got off, the conductor shouted to the chowkidar, ‘Tell Bade Baoji that Chhoti Bibiji has come.’
‘I’ll tell him myself, Sukhdev,’ said Virmati.
She bought some pencils and a long notebook bound in red cloth. From the munshi sitting in the small front office, she borrowed a scratchy nib pen, and dipped it in the small glass inkwell on his desk. The ink was the pale kind made from a tablet dissolved in water, and she had to go over her letters several times. ‘Parvati’ she wrote on the copy, though it was difficult, the nib kept sputtering and dividing down the middle. The whole compound had seen her by now, but she supposed that was inevitable.
‘Send these things to the kothi,’ she told the chowkidar as she stepped through the small inner door set in the gates.
Briskly she walked up to the canal path, her dupatta fluttering in the pleasant dusk breeze. She turned left at the bridge, away from the direction from which the bus had come. It was more isolated here, and there were fewer chances of anybody seeing her. Now that she was actually going to merge her body with the canal she felt her confusion clearing. Her briskness increased as the chowkidar stepped out from behind the gate to stare thoughtfully at her disappearing figure.
The place where the canal branches off is secluded and shady. The water pours into a small artificial waterfall, down under the pathway which rises a little to become a bridge. If you lean over it on the big canal side, you can see the gates that, lifting and falling, regulate the size of the stream that enters the mill. On the other side you can see the water emerging, whirling around in foaming eddies before straightening out for its onward course. As children, Virmati and her sisters loved to first throw things down one side of the bridge and then rush over to the other to see them emerge.
Virmati walked a little beyond this point. She took off her chappals and folded her dupatta on top of them. She stared into the water. She knew that the spot where she was standing was where the water began to feel the strong pull of the small canal. Though a good swimmer, she did not expect to be able to resist the current. She hoped Paro would get the little presents, she hoped the Professor would forget her, she hoped her family would forgive her. With these thoughts she held her nose and jumped.
*
The Professor was on his last cup of tea that evening. He was sitting in the angan looking at the sky. His wife, watching him from the kitchen, could tell from his face how absorbed he was in the beauty of the sunset. His glasses, raised upwards, reflected the brilliant colours he was contemplating. In all her life she had never known anybody as crazy about beauty as her husband. He could talk about it at great length and in such detail that listeners would go away feeling that till the Professor had spoken, they had never really seen anything. She had heard him enough times to be able to predict the feelings of all involved. When the woman saw Kailashnath come to see the Professor, she thought, ‘Now they will discuss the sunset, and then he will tell him about colours, paintings, and whatnot.’
She was about to turn her attention back to the cooking when she saw Kailashnath hand the Professor something. Her lips tightened, and the movement of her hands grew mechanical and listless in the dough she was kneading in the thali between her feet. She was suspicious, but what could she do with her suspicions? Even such a trivial thing as Virmati’s brother handing something to her husband was enough to unsettle her for the evening. She made up her mind to visit Kasturi the next day and make inquiries about Virmati’s wedding, and could she do anything to help?
The Professor was by now getting up and making for his room. The woman finished kneading the dough, and got up to take his tea tray inside. All the breakable china on it she would wash and dry herself. Wash, so that the servant boy wouldn’t get a chance to crack or chip anything; dry, so that there wouldn’t be the water stains he hated on the crockery. Sometimes she would pass her fingers gently over the rim of the cup, thinking that his lips had rested there. She did this now. Suddenly she heard his tread, hasty, rapid coming towards the kitchen. She blushed and quickly put the cup down. The Professor lurched in and the woman stammered, ‘What … what’s the matter? Are you all right?’
‘Vir – Virmati,’ the Professor trembled over the name.
The woman moved the tea things about on the tray.
‘Vir –’ he tried again.
She put the tray down with a bang.
‘Tell them … Hurry, go tell her mother …’ Here the Professor choked, and looked terrible in his wife’s eyes.
‘What is she telling you that her mother doesn’t already know?’ asked the woman as snappishly as she dared. ‘You lie down. I will make you some desi tea.’