Read A Fine Family: A Novel Online
Authors: Gurcharan Das
A Fine Family: A Novel
Gurcharan Das is an author and management consultant. He is the author of three plays, which have been performed Off-Broadway, at the Edinburgh Festival and in many cities in India and abroad. Mr Das graduated with honours in Philosophy and Politics from Harvard University. He presently writes a regular column for the
Times of India
and other newspapers. He and his wife live in New Delhi.
He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and Vice President and Managing Director, Strategic Planning, Procter & Gamble Worldwide. He is presently chairman of Chrysalis Capital, Inalsa, and the advisory board of Citibank India. He is member of other boards, including the government’s Foreign Investment Promotion Council. He also attended Harvard Business School, where he is featured in three case studies.
For
Vimla and Barkat Ram
Unlike other country towns on the Indo-Gangetic plain, Lyallpur was not merely a white, dusty, anarchic jumble of flat-roofed brick houses. Thanks to the canal, it was greener than most, and many of its roads were lined with trees. First came the canal in the last quarter of the 19th century; then an orderly town was planned and built; and they named it after the ruling British Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Sir James Lyall, BA. My grandfather, an ambitious young lawyer, proudly moved to Lyallpur in the early twenties of this century to start his practice. I was born there a generation later when the sheesham trees soared to the sky.
In the middle of the town was a brick clock tower, from where eight roads emanated, and the town spread out in concentric circles. Our house was off one of these roads, called Kacheri Bazaar, because the district courts were located there. Our road led to the Company Bagh, which sprawled sumptuously over forty acres, and was named after the East India Company. We were not far from the clock tower and our street was lively in the mornings and evenings, but quiet in the hot afternoons when most people slept. The days were drenched with sunshine and the nights were so clear that the stars seemed to hang like lamps as the fireflies glittered around the mango tree.
Since it was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, our daily life varied considerably with the seasons. We spent most of our time in the two open courtyards of our house. The main courtyard was on the ground floor, towards the north end of the house; the women’s courtyard was smaller and upstairs, towards the south side. In the middle of the main courtyard grew a tall shady mango tree, under which was conducted the chief business of the household. In the summer we even slept in the courtyard. As the sun became warm, we moved to the covered veranda which surrounded the courtyard. By midday we went deeper into the cooler rooms inside, as the chick blinds made of finely-split bamboo were lowered on the veranda to cut the glare of the burning sun. The servant sprinkled water over the matted screens, made of the roots of the fragrant khus-khus, which covered the important rooms, and the house prepared for sleep. Later in the afternoon we returned to the veranda around tea time, then back to the courtyard to enjoy the evening breeze and the brilliant stars at night.
In the winters, the process was reversed. The household slept inside in the cold nights and gradually came out with the sun. We spent most of the day in the luxurious warmth of the North Indian winter sun, moving our jute charpais according to the sun’s path, and returned inside at sunset.
Around four o’clock in the afternoon, Grandfather, whose name was Dewan Chand but whom everyone called Bauji, used to come home from the courts. We would eagerly await his arrival since he always brought home fresh sweets from the Bengali hunchback. He would bring spongy rasgullas of fresh cream, lustrous gulab jamans which floated in a thick syrup, and occasionally pistachio barfi for the sophisticated, but which attracted us kids because it had shiny silver paper on top. As soon as he reached the massive wooden gate of the house, Bauji would loudly clear his throat, which was a signal to everyone in the house. Bhabi, his daughter-in-law, would quickly cover her head and face with an airy du-patta so as not to be directly seen by her father-in-law; Bhabo, his wife and my grandmother, would say her last goodbyes to the Khanna ladies who would quietly slip out of the back gate after an hour of tea and gossip; Tara, his eldest daughter, would go to the kitchen and put on water for tea; Big Uncle, his stylish son, would go to his room and change for tennis; the grandchildren knew that it was the last round of the dice before scores would be tallied in the afternoon game of Parcheesi.
Bauji had other uses for his harsh, grating cry. When he cleared his throat in his office it was a signal to his client that the interview was over, much as in a government office the bureaucrat signals the end of an interview by noisily pulling back his chair. Occasionally in the middle of an interrogation he would suddenly strike terror in the witness’s heart with the same piercing, strident sound as he deliberately cleared his throat.
‘Bauji’ was a Punjabi corruption of the Bengali ‘Babuji’. It meant a man of western learning, specifically someone who had learned the English language. The word had not yet acquired its pejorative connotation of ‘a petty clerk’, and Grandfather was happy with it since it had a sense of honour attached to it.
As we sat drinking tea on cane chairs in the veranda, Bauji would talk of his latest case in court. Big Uncle would sometimes interrupt with an appreciative remark on the quality of the hunchback’s sweets. ‘Today the hunchback has used just the right amount of sugar and milk,’ he would say. Everyone would agree and Bauji would continue, not noticing the interruption. The children were not allowed to drink tea. Instead we got flavoured sweet milk diluted with ice and water. Once in a while as a treat we were allowed to drink coloured soda water from bottles which had a marble on top.
One day, much to our horror, Bauji did not bring sweets. Instead he brought fruit. Immediately the whole house rose in revolt. Bauji eventually won the day as he brought out all his legal tricks and by the end of the evening persuaded us that sweets were bad for health. And so the house reluctantly switched to eating fruit in the afternoons. He would bring mangoes, leechies and chickoos in the summer, apples in the autumn, and oranges and maltas in the winter. Slowly the air began to smell differently. But for months on end we talked nostalgically about the hunchback’s sweets.
Conversation was the great pastime in Bauji’s house. If two people were together at home, they would not read or work or go to the club and play sports; they would sit down with a cup of tea and talk. If there were three, so much the better. And they talked endlessly about people—who was doing what, where, to whom. They could talk for hours about people they had never met.
Around five in the afternoon Bauji’s friends came to play bridge. Bauji would go downstairs to a secluded part of the main courtyard, separated by a brick screen and filled with flower pots and surrounded by jasmine shrubs. There the men played and smoked the hookah. Soon after came the family barber, and he gave each bridge player a shave; he even obliged with a haircut if anyone was willing. He worked skilfully and the bridge game was never disturbed while he performed.
One hot July evening in 1942, this peaceful routine was suddenly interrupted as Chachi, my grandmothe’s aunt, burst into the house. She was tall, erect and seventy, and she wore her white hair in a bun at the back.
‘Hari Om
!
Hari Om
!’ said Chachi, invoking the gods as she entered the house.
‘It’s Chachi!’ exclaimed Bhabo from above.
‘Of course, it’s Chachi,’ replied Chachi sharply. ‘Who did you expect at this hour? The Collector’s wife?’
Having put her niece in her place, she directly went to the ‘men’s courtyard’ and sat down beside Bauji and his friends, who were in the midst of a bridge rubber. She took out her knitting and made herself comfortable. (She was forever knitting socks for herself. )
‘Well, well, you old fox, Dewan Chand,’ she addressed Bauji, ignoring the game in progress, ‘What mischief have you been up to?’
Bauji, a perceptive man of the world, quickly realized the futility of continuing the game. He put down his cards and the others followed suit.
‘Will you have a glass of fresh lime, Chachi?’ asked Bauji.
Chachi was the widow of a civil surgeon. Everyone was afraid of her because she was rich and she was honest. Although people laughed behind her back and told stories about her, they respected and feared her as well. They said that she had fought in the courts to deprive her drunken, good-for-nothing son of his inheritance in order to provide for her grandson and daughter-in-law. Bhabo used to relate how Chachi combined religion and management: ‘She wakes up before dawn, bathes and goes to her puja room; she picks up her beads, closes her eyes, and begins her mantra. Suddenly she interrupts herself. She has remembered that she must wake up the servants. So she screams at them to get up. In the next breath she resumes
“Ram, Ram, Ram”.
After a while she again shouts at the servant to go and milk the buffalo. A little later she is reminded of last night’s dinner and she intersperses her chant with curses at the cook for spoiling the pullao. And so it goes on.’
‘Well, are you going to the Collector’s “At Home” on Friday?’ Chachi asked the bridge foursome.
Bauji nodded.
‘Chah!’ spat out Chachi. ‘To be seen in a white man’s house during these days—I would rather die.’
‘He is the Collector, Chachi. It is a question of courtesy,’ said the bridge player who was playing the north hand.
‘Hitler is teaching them enough courtesy in Europe,’ she retorted.
‘The English are saintly compared to the Germans, Chachi,’ said Bauji.
The Collector’s party on Friday was the most talked about subject around town. The bazaars hummed with gossip about who was and who was not going. It was an attempt by the young new English District head to introduce himself and to create goodwill with Lyallpur’s gentry.
In the past an invitation to the Burra Sahib’s would have been regarded as a great honour, and the town’s elite would have scrambled for invitations. But now, in 1942, when everyone was politicized by Gandhi, there was much ambivalence, and Lyallpu’s society was divided into two well-defined camps. Originally it was thought that the Hindus would boycott the party and the Muslims might attend. Surprisingly the grouping was not taking place along communal lines—despite the growing alienation among the two communities—but between moderates and extremists in their political attitude to the British Raj.
‘Tell me, Dewan Chand, do you think the English will ever go away? Will I see India free in my lifetime?’ asked Chachi, suddenly becoming thoughtful.
Bauji sighed. ‘Once this war is over, perhaps,’ he said after a long pause. ‘But Chachi, do you think
we
are ready for freedom?’ He asked the question gently, as if talking to himself.
‘What kind of a damn fool question is that!’ exploded Chachi. ‘If I didn’t know you better, Dewan Chand, I’d say that is a very unpatriotic sentiment.’
There was a pause.
At this point Chachi noticed Bauji’s three youthful unmarried daughters peering down with curiosity from the first floor.
‘Look at those roofs you have raised!’ she said, pointing to the young girls above, who quickly turned away. ‘Remember, you have to marry them soon. You’ve done well with your older boy, Dewan Chand. You have found him a good wife with a good dowry. But don’t get complacent. When a man has daughters to marry, he cannot sit around playing cards.’
Bauji hands strayed to the cards he had put away, then withdrew.
‘Good boys don’t come easily’ she continued. ‘You should have thought of it when you were enjoying yourself with my niece.’
Bauji blushed. Bhabo shooed her daughters away from the railing upstairs. The bridge companions made murmuring sounds.
‘I have found a boy for your older girl, Bau,’ she announced sternly.
Bauji’s face lit up. Ears perked up upstairs.
‘Who is the boy?’ he asked.
‘Do you want the whole world to hear about it?’ she said staring at the bridge players, who sheepishly started to get up.
‘Now call my niece downstairs,’ she said as soon as the bridge players had left. Bhabo came down instantly. Big Uncle followed her downstairs looking sporty in his tennis whites. He bowed down as if to touch Chachi’s feet in the traditional gesture of greeting of the young to the old.
‘And what have you been doing, you young sinner?’ asked Chachi of Big Uncle.
‘Nothing, Chachi,’ said Big Uncle, looking confident and very much the elegant young man about town.
‘Boy, I don’t want you spoiling our family name with scandals.’
‘Scandals exist in the feeble minds of your town gossips,’ said Big Uncle boldly.
‘I like this boy,’ said Chachi appreciatively, ‘even though he spends too much time in his wife’s room.’
Chachi was referring to an incident a few weeks ago when Big Uncle had taken his fifteen-year-old bride for a drive in a horse-driven tonga, and had immediately created a sensation. In conservative Lyallpur young men and women were still not seen together in public. Men went out with men and women with women. Young brides and grooms were especially not exempt.
‘All by themselves, they shamelessly went out for all eyes to see!’ the town gossips had whispered.
Her friends had been pouring in streams to ‘commiserate’ with poor Bhabo, who had not been able to show her face in society for days.
Bauji too was constantly having his ups and down with Big Uncle. To begin with, Big Uncle preferred to play rather than work. And he preferred to play with women. To save the family embarrassment, Bauji had him married off young, while he was still a student. No one imagined, though, that Big Uncle would fall so completely in love with his fifteen-year-old bride, whom he saw for the first time on his marriage night. The result was that he was constantly with his beautiful bride and failed his law exams.
‘Get out of your wife’s room, you good-for-nothing fool!’ Bauji would shout every morning just as he was leaving for the law courts. ‘I curse the day I arranged your marriage.’ He did not mean that, of course, because secretly he was pleased with the shrewd match that he had made: the bride, whom everyone called Bhabi, had brought in a big dowry and was expecting a fat inheritance, which would become part of Bauji’s joint family property.
Big Uncle did finally get his law degree, and before he could get into further trouble, Bauji quickly took him on as his legal understudy. They both worked in the same office and Bauji passed him his easier cases. But Big Uncle did not mean to exert himself, and he was out on the tennis courts every afternoon. In the evenings he liked to play cards or give lively dinners where chicken was served. Bhabo would not allow meat to be cooked in her kitchen. So Bhabi used to cook the chicken outside. The pot in which the chicken was cooked had to be cleaned the next day with red hot charcoal.