She turned again and saw Mercy at the top of the stairs. Although there was another charpoy, Mercy chose to sit on Tara’s. She was worried: Comrades were being arrested. How long could they carry on like this? Gradually she divulged the cause of her anxiety, and many of her secrets: In 1944 Niranjan Lal Chaddha had gone into hospital for two months with a broken shoulder, and Mercy had met him there. Their friendship grew, and they fell in love. Chaddha was very intelligent, and high-minded. He was imprisoned for three years in 1942 for participating in revolutionary activities. He lost his job at the European School, and survived by acting as a private tutor. He was an important leader of the Communist Party. Mercy and Chaddha had planned a civil marriage in April, but he had to go into hiding in March. He had written to Mercy that he’d try to contact her.
On the third day after meeting Hira Lal, Mercy was still at home when Tara was leaving for the office. Showing that she now had complete trust in Tara, she confided to her that she was waiting for a message to go to see Chaddha.
That afternoon, Tara came back from her office to find Zubeida in her sitting room. They warmly hugged each other. Overcome by tears and emotions, neither could speak for a few moments.
Zubeida told Tara where Mercy had gone, and said, ‘I was amazed when Hira told me about you. I saw you last year, perhaps in early April. I don’t think I met Puri bhai after May that year. It was in September, may be 28 or 29, when Asad came to me. He was distraught. He wanted me to make some arrangement for you. In the evening we both went to the DAV College camp to get you, but you were gone. How did you get to Shaikhupura?’
Tara was silent for a moment, lost in thought. Zubeida knew about her past, which she wanted to keep secret. Although she and Asad had been very careful to hide their friendship, Zubeida was among two or three people who had inside knowledge of their feelings for one another.
Tara willingly described the traumatic circumstances on the night of her wedding, and the story of her escape after the house had been set on fire. In the end, she just said, ‘I haven’t told any of this to anyone here, nor do I want to. They all think of me as unmarried.’
Zubeida agreed with her, ‘You are unmarried! Who’d call that affair a marriage? I am glad that I didn’t say anything to Hira about you. I might have told Mercy, but we didn’t get a moment alone. No need to tell her now.’
Remembering Somraj’s behaviour at the university’s Senate Hall, Zubeida criticized Puri’s insensitivity to Tara’s feelings ‘Was Puri bhai out of his mind?’
She told a long story about herself without Tara’s asking: Just to please her husband’s family she had changed her name to Jamuna. For a while they both lived in his family’s house. If he noticed the family treating his wife badly, he’d threaten to leave. Since his going underground, the in-laws had made life miserable for Zubeida. The police constantly watched her in the hope that her husband might come to visit her. She finally moved into the Working Women’s Hostel. Several people sympathetic to the communists were trying to find her a job; she was also trying on her own. She had asked Miss Sewabhai to plead her case before the prime minister.
Mercy returned after half past nine, but Zubeida could not wait that long. From her manner Mercy seemed to like Zubeida very much. Tara had noticed that either Mercy liked someone wholeheartedly, or could not tolerate him or her at all. She apparently knew about Zubeida’s mistreatment at her in-laws; as an Indian Christian she herself had suffered from Hindu narrow-mindedness. Her anger boiled over in sympathy for Zubeida, ‘No one in the world is more self-righteous and intolerant than Hindus! Why are they so insufferably sanctimonious? They have been held down and conquered for thousands of years, but they still consider themselves the holiest of the holy. Other religions have some redeeming qualities, these people have only the arrogance of their holiness. Who can be more self-righteous than those who regard other people as untouchable!’
Tara usually got back home from the office at about quarter to six. If Mercy was home, they would have tea and a little chat lounging in their chairs. Sometimes they would send old Chimmo to wash clothes to get her out of the way, and cook Punjabi or Madrasi food and gossip some more. Tara seldom went out in the evening. Narottam showed up on Saturday evenings or on Sundays. If Mercy had guests, she sometimes went out with them, or entertained them at home for a couple of hours. On such occasions, Tara stayed in her room and read, laughter and conversation trickling from the living room. Sometimes Mercy would invite her to join the guests, mostly people she had met in course of her work. If the visitor happened to be a doctor, Mercy took special care and was particularly attentive in her hospitality. Such visitors had to be treated well, Mercy would later explain, for they were the ones who got her jobs. If they were not kept happy, they would criticize her at every step and make it hard for her to be hired as a nurse.
Mercy often complained about the unfair practices and rackets that went on at the hospitals, ‘State hospitals were nests of private practice for doctors. Doctors’ salaries were about four hundred rupees a month, but they could make another fifteen hundred by seeing patients privately. One could not be admitted to a hospital if one did not first pay a doctor for consultation. A surgeon in Lucknow did the most horrible thing at his private clinic.’ Her eyes widened with fear she said, ‘He opened up a sixteen-year-old boy’s stomach for an operation, then half way through said to the boy’s father, pay me another thousand rupees for me to stitch his stomach back up. You’ll find it hard to believe, but I know both the doctor and the patient. These doctors are nothing but butchers, they squeeze money out of you by threatening that they’d let you die. They won’t even touch someone unable to pay a fee. Who could stoop to something so low! I have to depend on them for my living. As long as you flatter them it’s fine, but you cross them and there’s no work for you.’
On the third or fourth day on her job, Tara could not believe her eyes when she came across a young woman, who was as surprised on seeing her and called out, ‘Tara bahinji!’
Tara was now sure that it was Sita, daughter of Purandei, her neighbour from Bhola Pandhe’s Gali. They jumped into each other’s arms. Unable to believe her eyes, Sita just stared at Tara’s face for a few moments. Tara too looked at Sita with some surprise. How much Sita had changed in the past
nine months! She was dressed and made up like a married woman. Her face was powdered and rouged, kohl on the rims of her eyes, lips painted, bindi on her forehead and hair done fashionably in ringlets. Her kameez fitted snugly and made her bosom thrust out in a way that made Tara look away in embarrassment. What a dramatic change comes over Punjabi refugee girls once they arrive in Delhi, Tara thought. They seem to lose all sense of decency and modesty.
‘You’re looking very nice. Where’s your mother? What’re you doing here?’ Tara broke the silence.
‘Where have you been all this time?’ Sita asked.
‘At first I tutored some children in Delhi. Now I am working at this office.’
‘I didn’t mean that. Everyone in the gali thought something happened to you when that Muslim mob set fire to your in-laws’ house in Banni Hata. We were told that you were never found, perhaps you didn’t survive.’
‘As you can see, here I am,’ Tara answered.
‘Yes, but what happened? Your mother, Masterji, Puri bhappa and Usha cried their eyes out and we all cried with them. We all thought that you were… Sheelo and Pushpa cried the most.’
Sita described in a few sentences how the people of the gali were evacuated to the Dev Samaj Camp. Some former pupil of Masterji, who looked like an official, took Tara’s family away. ‘They are probably somewhere in Hindustan—maybe UP.’
Tara stood lost in her memories, then said, ‘I’m late, and have got to get to my desk. I’ll see you again at one o’clock, during my lunch break.’
‘I work in this office too, Bahinji. A few minutes won’t matter.’
It was the first time Tara had met someone from her past life. The joy she felt turned quickly to anxiety. Sita had said that Tara’s family and neighbours thought that she was no longer alive. Asad had told her the same thing after her rescue from the house in Shaikhupura. For a moment the feeling of being thought of as dead made her feel depressed, then she thought, ‘Maybe it’s better for my family that I am dead. They’ve washed their hands off me. Why should I become a cause of worry for them again?’ She had given her name as Miss Tara Puri when applying for her job, in the same way her brother used Jai Puri as his pen name. ‘Sita is in the same office. She didn’t even finish her matric exam, but still found the job as a clerk. She knows about my marriage. In Lahore her mother could hardly make ends meet. Here Sita’s dress, her jewellery and make-up are very obvious.’
Tara thought up a story by the time of the lunch break. She told Sita, ‘The women at my in-laws had taken me to a room on the top floor. I wasn’t well that day. Downstairs the wedding feast was still going on when the Muslim mob attacked and set fire to the place. Everyone was trying to save himself, no one thought of me. The stairs were already in flames, I couldn’t go down. I climbed over a wall and jumped on to the roof of the house next door. I fell and sprained my ankle, but managed to limp down to the gali. A kind Muslim man showed me the house of a Hindu. By morning my ankle had swollen up and I had a fever. That good soul asked me many times if he could take me somewhere. All I said that I had nowhere to go, and that nobody was looking for me. They could, if they wanted, just throw me into the river. I lived with that family for about two weeks, then went with them first to Amritsar, then to Ambala. Eventually we came to Delhi. I’ve been working since I arrived here.’
There were few occasions for Tara and Sita to meet at the office. Tara’s position was three grades higher, and in a different section, and she seldom left her room during the lunch break.
Tara had no reason to socialize either; she had few acquaintances in the city. Mercy did sometimes drag her to the bazaar. The tide of refugees covered the city like a swarm of locusts. On the pavements of Chandni Chowk, in Daryaganj and Connaught Place, all one saw were Punjabi hawkers and peddlers. A shanty town had sprung up on the maidan in front of the Red Fort. Pointing to those structures Mercy would say, ‘That’s a whole new bazaar. People looking for bargains would rather go there than to Chandni Chowk.’
Tara took a bus from Daryaganj to her office. On her way back she often saw a curious sight near Connaught Place, a food cart built on a bicycle. A wire basket fixed to the handlebars held a pot of curried chickpeas and disks of
bhatura
bread. From the crossbar hung bags with other supplies. The bicycle was parked on its stand. A folding table over the rear wheel was fitted with a small brazier and a griddle. The owner–cook would take plates and spoons from the bags to serve chickpeas and bread warmed over the brazier to clients standing around the table. His six-or seven-year-old son would take out tumblers form a bucket hanging from the handlebars, and serve water from a municipal water tap. The boy would also wash the dishes at the same tap. After serving the clients on one corner, the mobile restaurant would move to the next. Tara always felt proud at the sight; what
could be a better answer, she thought, to the accusation that the refugees were freeloaders.
As Tara was given more responsibilities at the office, she began staying late to finish her work. Shivnath Misra, the office superintendent, was rather old-school in his approach to running the office. His Indian-style jacket remained buttoned up to the neck and his round Kristi cap sat firmly on his head as long as he was at his desk. He did not chew paan while in the office, and the peon was not sent to get his lunch. After his first appointment as an upper division clerk thirteen years before, he had risen to his present position by dint of hard work. When the director sahib appointed Tara as Misra’s assistant, he gave him the hint that she had come with the home secretary’s recommendation.
Being burdened with a twenty-one-year-old novice with an MA did not please Misra very much. How could she be expected to do any useful work? Several refugee girls like her had already found employment in the office. The doubts he had about giving Tara any work to do soon vanished, and he began sending more files to her desk.
At the beginning of June, Misra summoned Tara to complete the formalities of her appointment. Since she had been an MA student in Lahore and had done some social work in Delhi, she was considered to have graduated MA according to a government notification. Misra also formally asked her, ‘Are you a member of any political party? Do you have any sympathy or connection with the Communist Party or the RSS? Any person who does is not eligible for government service.’
‘No, sir,’ Tara replied without hesitation. After the news of general strikes in Kanpur, Calcutta and Bombay, she did not want to have anything to do with people who created trouble for no reason.
In June 1948 the refugee portfolio was transferred to a different government minister. Mohanlal Saxena, the new minister, wanted to pursue the policy of settling the refugees. Now the emphasis was not only on feeding and clothing them and providing medical services, but also to make them self-reliant. Small loans were given to the refugees for starting a business. In September the minister had a decree issued that all camps would be shut down in six months’ time, and the refugees would not receive free shelter and rations after that. In view of the major problems of food shortages and unemployment facing the country, the minister could not afford to spare
one million rupees per day for the upkeep of the camps.
There were several complaints against the refugees: That many of them had begun some business and were earning a decent income, but continued to draw free rations. They were accused of abusing the benevolence of the government, and of being unwilling to earn their own support. Also, in order to afford expensive clothes and food, they were reluctant to give up free rations and shelter. As if the partition of the country had given them some right to act as permanent non-paying guests! The refugees were offered land and accommodation in Okhla and Neelokheri, but nobody wanted to leave Delhi. How long could their countrymen go on tightening their belts in order to give handouts worth a million rupees each day? Such comments hurt Tara; she was also a refugee. She had never imagined that she would earn a salary of Rs 275 per month. She was willing to accept half that amount, she told herself. She did not need more than that.