At 10 o’clock next morning Shivni came to tell Tara that Laxman, the chauffer, was ready with the car. Tara had sent the children off to their schools. Madam had stayed upstairs again for the second day. Tara’s mind was made up. She did not care what madam thought, but still sent a message to her through Shivni, went herself to the kitchen to tell the grandmother that she was going for her interview, and left.
How long could Mrs Agarwal keep on sulking on an empty stomach? To carry on this way was to prolong her own suffering and humiliation. She came downstairs in the morning of the third day, but kept to the kitchen area and away from the drawing and dining rooms. Tara as usual had seen the children off to school. She had to reach the P Block in the Central Secretariat. She had found that she could catch a bus from near India Gate to get there. As she left home at 9.15, she rather reluctantly went to madam to tell her where she was going. Madam was sitting on a low stool, stuffing some eggplants with a spicy paste.
Her head bowed, Tara said, ‘I’m going to work.’
Shivni had already given madam every scrap of news.
‘Did you tell Laxman to be ready with the car?’
‘I’ll catch the bus. I know the way. I’ll be going there everyday,’ Tara replied without looking up.
‘Just look at her behaviour!’ Madam said sharply. ‘Will it be proper for a young woman from a decent family to travel alone in a bus.’
‘Tell me, has she found a job in a government office?’ the grandmother asked in her typical Delhi accent.
‘Whatever I said to her was for her own good,’ madam said. ‘It’s up to her now.’
‘She looked like a well-balanced one to me,’ the grandmother said. ‘How would a young woman feel among all those men? Won’t she be nervous?’
Tara left and walked towards the bus stop.
After taking her job, Tara stayed on at the mansion for thirteen more days. Nothing was available for a rent that she could afford. There was no vacancy at the Working Women’s Hostel. If Narottam found out about a room or a shared accommodation, he would take Tara there on a Sunday. It was prudent to find a place suitable for a young woman. Narottam would tell her, ‘What’s the hurry, you’re not in the middle of some desert.’
Mrs Agarwal would ask, ‘What problem does she have here! If she rents some place, she’ll need a servant, or face the hassle of cooking her own meals. Here she has us if she needs anything. Who’d help her if she’s all by herself? I always considered her as a younger sister. If I criticized her that too was out of concern for her, for her own good.’
Mrs Agarwal actually did not want Tara to leave. Tara still took care of the children in the morning, which was the time they needed attention. Madam was not obliged to pay for Tara’s help, and could reap no benefit from having another empty room. More leftovers were thrown out than the meagre meals Tara ate.
In his search for a suitable place for Tara, Narottam remembered Miss Mercy Sorel, the nurse. Eight months before, when Puttan had become seriously ill, two nurses attended to him round the clock on twelve-hour shifts. One of them, Mercy, appeared to Narottam to be a wise, good soul. She had a phone in her flat that she shared with another nurse. That Mercy was the girlfriend of Comrade Niranjan Chaddha formed another link between her and Narottam. When Narottam was studying at Delhi’s European School sixteen years before, Niranjan had been a teacher there. Mercy had been on Narottam’s mind after the news of the arrest of several Communist Party members in the second week of March 1948. He contacted Mercy.
Mercy Sorel had been living in a newly built area of Daryaganj for two-and-a-half years. Beside a small sitting room next to the landing, the first-floor flat had two more rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a veranda. Mercy was her baptismal name, Sorel her family name, but everyone called her Lila.
Silva, her roommate who was also a private nurse, got married and went away to Mysore. Mercy continued to pay the old rent of forty rupees a month. There was no shortage of people willing to share, but she did not want to rent out her spare room to some family. What if she came home in the morning after a night shift, and couldn’t get to sleep during the day? She could not share the apartment with a single male either.
Mercy agreed to rent out a room to Tara on the recommendation of Narottam, but not before laying down her own conditions: Tara would not put up any relatives or friends in her room. She would not cook meals on a stove in her room or in the veranda. If she wanted to share all expenses for her room, two meals, breakfast, tea and the maid’s service, she’d have to pay one hundred rupees per month. If she wanted to have her meals out, she’d pay only thirty-five rupees for rent and electricity. If she used the telephone, she’d pay for that. The rent would have to be paid in advance, by the first week of the month. What better arrangement could Tara hope for? Paying one hundred a month sounded like being a spendthrift, but what did she need to save for? She accepted.
Lila Mercy Sorel, in her late twenties, had a glowing, dark complexion. With sharp features and large eyes her face looked striking, like something sculpted in bronze. She was the same height as Tara, with very long hair and the nurse’s belted uniform accentuated the narrow waist of her shapely figure. She had been a nursing sister at the Irwin Hospital, but had quit when passed over for promotion. She had maintained her contacts there, and got calls to work in the private ward. She charged fifteen rupees for working the day shift, and eighteen for the night. Her good relations with doctors ensured that she was seldom without work. She had been living in Delhi for five years. Having lived in Lucknow, she could converse in Hindi, with only minor lapses of grammar and a sprinkling of English which she spoke fluently because of her schooling. She was fond of reading novels and magazines, but had little interest in newspapers. With Tara she was rather formal for the first few days, addressing her as Miss Tara. Once she got to know her, she began calling her Tara. Then she said, ‘Why do you have to be so correct and call me “Sister”? Everyone in my family calls me Lila.’
Tara took a liking to her. Mercy was rather outspoken and forward because of her European upbringing, but guileless.
Tara had to invent a cover story for herself, not wanting to be reminded of the bitter and harrowing experiences of the past year. She did not want
to advertise the humiliations and tortures she had suffered, or be the object of pity from some and hatred from others. She made up a story of having been brought up by her sister. After finishing her MA, she had been working as tutor–governess, her sister and brother-in-law fled Lahore and went to Bombay, then she found a job in Delhi.
Mercy said consolingly, ‘You’re hardly an old lady. Being twenty or twenty-one is not considered old. Now that you found a government job, you’ll also find a good husband. Lots of chances of that in Delhi. I know many people here. I’ll introduce you to a few when I get time. I usually get to know the families of my patients. As you know only the well-to-do can afford to hire me. With the taxi fare included, they usually have to lay out as much as eighteen or twenty rupees per day.’
In the first week of May, yet another veil was lifted from between Tara and Mercy. Tara had returned from her office at quarter to six. Mercy was on a day shift. Tara had developed a taste for tea at the Double A. Chimmo the maid laid out the tea things for her in the sitting room. Tara poured herself a cup of tea after freshening up and changing her sari. The door bell sounded in the way Mercy rang: one long and one short, just like a dash and a dot. Chimmo was busy in the kitchen. Tara went downstairs to open the door thinking it was Mercy.
The door opened to reveal a young man. He asked with some hesitation, ‘Sister Mercy’s not in?’
‘She should be back in fifteen or twenty minutes,’ Tara replied, assuming the man to be an acquaintance of Mercy. His voice sounded familiar.
She offered the man a seat in the sitting room, and asked, ‘Can I pour you some tea?’
He replied affably, ‘Please do. When did you come here?’
Tara looked at him closely, ‘Bhai Hira Singh? How come! You’re now Hira Lal. I thought I recognized the voice.’
‘You’re living in Delhi now? Have you joined MA? Puri’s in Jalandhar. He’s publishing some newsweekly.’
‘I’ve found a job,’ Tara quickly collected herself, as if she knew about her brother.
‘That’s good. You look so grown up, may be because of the sari you’re wearing. Are you teaching at some school?’
‘No. I’m with the Rehabilitation Department. What are you up to here in Delhi?’
‘The same old thing.’
‘What d’you mean? Are Narendra and Pradyumna bhai here too?’
‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’
‘There wasn’t anything about you in the newspaper. Maybe I missed it,’ Tara said lightly.
‘Didn’t you read about the arrests? Narendra Singh was arrested in Ambala. Pradyumna’s gone underground. Comrades are being arrested everywhere after the last party congress. Bebe Zubeida had arrived here from Lahore in early February. She’s married Pradyumna and become an Indian citizen. She’ll definitely come and see you when she hears about you.’
‘Of course. I’d like to meet her too. I’ll go myself. Well, your reward for being an absconder is that you had to cut your hair short.’ Finding the door at the bottom of the stairs unlocked, Mercy came up. She was surprised to see Tara and Hira Lal talking to each other like old acquaintances. Hira Lal took an envelope out of his pocket and handing it to Mercy, said, ‘She knows my past identity. She used to attend the Study Circle in Lahore and was a great help to us. Her brother was also in the peace movement.’
Mercy took the envelope. She called out to the maid as she headed to her room, ‘Chimmo, get me a cup of tea also and something to eat.’
When Mercy returned to the sitting room, her face was washed and her hair combed. Hira Lal was deep in discussion with Tara, ‘… a bourgeois democratic revolution has little chance in our country. The political power is not in the hands of the feudalists or the zamindars, landowners; it’s in the hands of the capitalists. Our task is to capture political power with the help of the landless peasantry and the working class.’
‘How would you capture political power?’ Tara wanted to know. ‘The masses neither understand your ideology, nor your programme. Only two people in our gali understood what communism stood for; my brother and Dr Prabhu Dayal. They both didn’t agree with your party. Our office assistant Darbari Lal says that under communism only those get to eat who have blisters on their hands. I also heard people talking at the club who thought that communism means widespread looting and anarchy. Why would they sympathize with you?’
‘We have to fight that kind of ignorance,’ Lal said.
‘And you people have launched the revolution before removing that ignorance. Will you teach communist ideology to the masses after you have
seized power? But the masses won’t let you take over power. They are the very people for whose good you want to introduce communism. They’ll support Gandhiji’s successors in preference to you. People understood the struggle against the British, they’d never understand rising against their own government. You should have adopted the rational approach. How long did the Congress take to take the pulse of the masses? You want to accomplish everything in one fell swoop. Your party has been declared illegal in Madras and Bengal. What could you do to stop that from happening here?’
‘So we should just let the Tatas and the Birlas take over?’ Mercy said.
‘You mean that we should just wait for the right time and let the capitalists strengthen their grip?’ Lal asked.
Tara relied, ‘Does the good of the people rest with you or the capitalists? Until this January your party kept calling Gandhiji the Father of the Nation, and proclaiming that everyone should strengthen Nehru’s hand. Today Nehru has become the agent of capitalism. Won’t the masses be confused?’
‘Nehru surely is a lackey of the capitalists,’ Mercy said.
‘Achcha, I’ll give you our party’s programme to read. Then we’ll talk.’
Mercy laid down thirty rupees in bank notes on the table. Lal put the money in his pocket, and looking at Tara, said, ‘Now you have a job. Why don’t you help us? It’s a critical time for the party.’
‘I don’t have faith in your programme. I might contribute as a personal donation.’
‘You must help the party. Give at least twenty rupees every month. That’s not much for you,’ Mercy pleaded.
‘I’ll give something today, but can’t promise anything for the future. I don’t agree with the party line.’
‘Working for the government made you change your attitude quickly enough,’ Lal teased her.
‘What kind of argument is that? I’m willing to listen and be convinced.’
Mercy scolded Lal, ‘She’s willing to help you, and you’re being nasty! Do you want me to give something on your behalf?’ She asked Tara.
‘No, I’ll get the money.’ Tara took out twenty rupees and gave it to Lal.
Chimmo, an empty bucket in her hand, was coming down the stairs after sprinkling water to cool the roof. Tara went up to lie in the open air. The news of the marriage of Zubeida and Pradyumna brought back memories of Lahore and of Asad. ‘Zubeida has come to Delhi. If what I had wanted had come true then I’d have been in Lahore or somewhere in West Pakistan
now. What a life that would have been. Could I even dream of what has happened to me?’ She thought about the days spent with the family of Hafiz Inayat Ali. She had found that life intolerable. ‘Does that mean that whatever has happened was for the better,’ she wondered.
The air became cooler after sunset. Darkness was falling, but the stars were still not visible. Her unseeing gaze fixed on the sky, she sank back into her memories. ‘Had I been able to go with Asad, I’d have been his wife, just as Zubeida is Pradyumna’s wife. Asad never believed that Hindus and Muslims were two different peoples, still I’d have been in a Muslim home in Pakistan. Zubeida too will live among Hindus. Would I have agreed to stay back in Pakistan for Asad’s sake? At that time I could have, but not now.’ Tara turned on her side. There was no point in wallowing in memories.