Bhairavi Read online

  ‘Aha, kundani rangrootha

  Meri Raji ke nhilego!

  Meri Rajula bhali Baana-

  Meri Raji nhilego!’

  [The handsome Kundan has taken my Raji away!

  My beautiful Rajula was taken away by my Kundan.]

  These four lines and her foolish actions seemed to have thwarted the fortunes of Chandan’s mother. Nobody from the hills would be able to forgive the stupid girl who had run away with the son of a prostitute. In the eyes of the simple hill clans, it was a grave sin that could not be forgiven. Who would believe that Tiwariji’s daughter was unsullied? Which trial by fire would help reinstate her in society?

  Mahim Tiwari had even prostrated himself before his poor friends and pleaded with them. Perhaps, the son of one such friend who had only studied till Inter could be bought with the promise of wealth. A year ago, Tiwariji would not have even bothered to spit in that boy’s direction, but now he found that it was his friend spitting at him instead.

  ‘No, Mahim!’ The friend put his hands in the pockets of his torn coat, stood ramrod straight and said, ‘Though poor, even we have a reputation to think of. We might be hungry but we will not eat the leftovers of a feast.’

  That very night Tiwariji stepped out to find a groom for his daughter like a wounded snake, after shaking up the whole house with his anger. He was ready to marry off his feckless daughter to whomever he could find, be it a blind man or a man without arms or legs. He would wash his hands of that girl who had turned out to be a blot on his family name. He got more than he had expected. He found a rich man from the same caste as a son-in-law. In the fear that the extended family would turn the groom away by telling him everything, he took his daughter and wife away from Almora to Haldwani for the wedding.

  ‘Organizing a wedding in the hills in January is no child’s play!’ He cleverly circumvented the questions about his departure. ‘That is the reason I am spending so much money to go to Haldwani.’

  But people cottoned on. Some of them even said biting things to the wounded lion, ‘Oh Mahim, we hear you are even taking Rani Rampyari for the kanyadaan!’ Some of his so-called friends even laughed at that; after all, since the time Rampyari had married the king, she had acquired the title of queen without even wanting it. Mahim swallowed the bitter pill and hung his head in shame. What could he do? Had the cursed girl not even left him a pail of water to drown himself in?

  The groom was a childless widower who owned a huge sweetmeat shop in Shahjahanpur. Many years ago, he had run away from home and started a stall that sold gajak and rewri. In those days it would have been difficult to buy a mere bowl of oil. With Lakshmi’s blessings he now had two dozen servants playing about at the shop. Rajrajeshwari’s mother started wailing at the sight of the groom. A receding hairline, gap-toothed and to top it, a face that had turned black working in front of a roaring fire. Rajrajeshwari’s wedding seemed like a funeral. The sight of his wife’s tear-filled eyes perturbed Mahim Tiwari no end. He started staying away for business. One day, his troupe of yaks and sheep came back without its leader. Search parties found his dead body in a cavern after many days of looking. Perhaps an angry yak had pushed him off the hill or maybe the emptiness in his life had made him plunge into the abyss to scatter himself away.

  Within just a few days, Rajrajeshwari discerned from the behaviour of her fifty-year-old husband that news of her exploits had reached him despite her father’s many attempts to keep things from him. This made her careful and take every step with caution. She never laughed or dressed up or applied make-up. She didn’t even go to the veranda or the terrace, leave alone stepping outside the house. She never stood before the mirror. For his part, the jealous husband thought it prudent to fortify his fortress. He locked his wife in when he left for the shop. Chandan was born exactly a year later but her mother remained locked in. He could not accept with equanimity the daughter borne honestly by his beautiful wife. His ego had probably twisted his mind to a certain degree. The shop was being run by servants now. He kept buzzing around his imprisoned wife like a bee all the time. He kept asking her the same question, ‘Is she really my child? You haven’t diluted the milk, have you?’

  He would then frighten her with his demonic laughter only to calm down the next minute.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ She would smile with such sweetness that he’d be reminded of the sugar syrup in his shop.

  ‘So, you haven’t been touched even by air?’ He would walk around her, turn her around like a betel leaf and say, ‘Don’t be offended but I read in the papers the other day that some woman in a foreign land gave birth in the thirteenth month. Given a chance, I would shoot the journalist reporting such news. What do they get from messing with the happiness and peace of a household!’

  Rajeshwari’s skin would crawl with revulsion. She would feel like drowning her short, toothless black man in his own sugar syrup, but tolerating all this also felt like repentance to her. The more the suspicious man tried to oppress her, the more she would get oppressed. To distract herself, she would keep herself busy with fasts and ceremonies. She had become the better half of her old husband in the true sense of the word. He would keep testing her fidelity at every step and she would never let herself fail. At times, he would spit in the plate while coughing and then push it towards his wife, saying, ‘Eat from this plate, you have served too much vegetable. Why do you cook so much?’ And she would quietly suffer the punishment for having cooked too much by swallowing the leftovers from his plate like a meek cow.

  FOUR

  Chandan was not even two when Rajrajeshwari became a widow. When the old man died after suffering from a fever for five days, he had not even told her where he had buried all his wealth. What happens to inheritances is what happened in this case too. Because of an unwritten will, all Rajrajeshwari got was a big haveli, a blind and deaf 80-year-old mother-in-law, seven or eight cooking utensils and eight to ten plates of stale laddoos and barfis, which were eaten by whoever could get their hands on them.

  Her husband’s older brother was a tobacco merchant in Kutch; how could he drag the blind mother to that distant land? The younger brothers and their wives had backed out of taking her responsibility even earlier. That is how, poor Rajrajeshwari ended up living in that palatial haveli with her child and old mother-in-law. The only happiness she had experienced after getting married was that of living in a haveli. Attired in his worn-out vest and dhoti, her miserly husband had flung all desires into the oven that was his livelihood. It was a mystery how the same man had displayed such generosity in building such a splendid haveli.

  The wise Rajrajeshwari mapped out her plans for the future as soon as her relatives took her leave after her husband’s tehraveen. How was she going to live in such a large house with her infant, and an elderly, blind and deaf mother-in-law who was more of an infant? She retained three rooms for her own use and donated the rest of the house to a girls’ school. The news of the young widow’s generosity spread through the town. Some said, ‘How generous of her. She could have let out the house to an office and lived off the rent for the rest of her life without even lifting a finger.’ Still others said, ‘Just wait and watch! That miserly old man will climb up the chest of the principal of the girls’ school and take her life.’

  Nothing of the sort happened. The school started running and became a college and with that college progressed the courageous Rajrajeshwari. The school’s principal was the old Mrs Khanna. She had herself suffered at the hands of child marriage. The cracks in her feet had made her feel the misery of other people. She had revolted against widowhood and left it far behind. She taught all the skills of dealing with a lonely heart and a raging society to her young and talented protégé and then dragged her straight to the ring. Rajrajeshwari started studying under her loving guidance. The childless Sharda Khanna took Chandan into her loving embrace. Chandan addressed her as Dadi and called her own dadi, Hauva.

  Chandan’s Dadi had indeed become a hauva by then. Some
times, she would undo her bun and spread her tangled white hair all over her face. She’d howl out her dead son’s name and at times, at times she’d create such a vulgar display of her unsatisfied youth’s boisterous memories that all the ruffians on the road would clap their hands and egg her on with the crassest of words. One night, she left the house in such a state, crying and wailing, and never came back.

  After having put Rajrajeshwari on her feet, Sharda Khanna also took voluntary retirement a few years before her time and went to live with her sister abroad. She had really wanted to take Chandan with her but that canny woman knew that Rajrajeshwari lived for her only child. She did not insist on taking Chandan with her. She did not want Rajrajeshwari to think that she was being asked for a fee for what she had done selflessly. The benevolent Mrs Khanna made sure of that. Mrs Khanna embraced Chandan who had become dearer to her than life, dried her tears and dragged Rajrajeshwari to a quiet corner of the aerodrome.

  ‘Rajeshwari!’ On her way out, she whispered her gurumantra into the ears of her friend and protégé, ‘Get the girl married at the earliest. Don’t give her too much freedom, understood?’

  ‘Why?’ Rajrajeshwari’s heart started sinking.

  After all, she always kept her eyes clapped on her beautiful daughter. She was determined that her daughter would not suffer the same fate as hers at the hands of youth. Each day, she went with her daughter when the latter went to college and came back with her. She kept circling her daughter like a vigilant lioness. But hadn’t she cheated her similarly vigilant mother in her time? Amma had never been able to guess anything, then how would she? Perhaps, Sharda Behenji suspected something.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Sharda caught hold of her lithe wrists, ‘For you, your Chandan is still the one without a frock, panty-clad child running around, isn’t it? You will not find a prettier girl in the entire city even if one were to set out to search with a lamp, Rajeshwari! Such beauty that even old women like me forget to blink our eyes, then how can any young man remain unmoved? Just look at your neighbours for example. That house is filled with strapping, young men. Had they been of your caste, I would not have worried. You could have organized a swayamvar of a thousand princes in your courtyard with just a flick of a finger. But I pray that none of them clap their eyes on Chandan. Which is why I am telling you, Rajeshwari, you have accumulated a lot of leave; take a long holiday, go to the hills, find a good house there and get this done with. Finding a groom for a beautiful girl is not a problem in any society. Such lucky mothers do not need to look for grooms. The grooms find them.’

  Sharda Behenji had spoken the truth.

  Drowning in anxiety, roaming in the veranda, Rajrajeshwari kept looking at the havelis around hers. The tall houses of the wealthy Rohilla Pathans of Saharanpur surrounded her haveli as if resting their hands on its shoulders. The fair, blue-eyed sprite-like maidens [of those havelis] would invite beautiful Chandan over every day. It would be one festival or the other and she’d have to go with Chandan for every one of them. Before Rajrajeshwari could say yes or no, sometimes Tahira whom Chandan had known since childhood would drag her away or sometimes Naseem! She did not know when their Eid would become her daughter’s Eid! The thought started bothering her. At the end of the day, when Chandan would return from her friends’ celebrations, decked in khus and henna, Rajeshwari would scrutinize her so closely that she would see the very marrow of her innocent face. She hadn’t noticed Chandan’s beauty till now. Had Sharda Behenji’s wisdom changed Chandan in one day?

  Such fair skin and incomparable eyes, the latter highlighted by the kohl that Tahira had applied in them, and that dupatta, in the deep green favoured by Muslims, made her fair skin even more prominent.

  ‘Aunty insisted on making me wear all these bangles, Amma! They are worth four rupees.’ She would stress on ‘aunty’s’ generosity, trying to soothe her mother’s frayed temper. She knew that though her mother did not say anything, she could reprimand with her eyes in such a way that it would seem like corporal punishment.

  All the boys in the Muslim neighbourhood were also one handsomer than the other. One was studying at Pakistan’s Engineering college and had come here to spend his vacation and another was training to be a doctor in Aligarh; they would all whistle and roam around the house. The minute she’d hear of any of them coming home for vacations, Rajeshwari would start following her daughter everywhere like the Gestapo. She was familiar with every warren of the city of love. She could sniff out when and how her daughter might bamboozle her. However, she had sensed no deception or betrayal on the part of her innocent daughter so far, but any moment could turn into dynamite and detonate her household. Then why shouldn’t she, who had been burned herself, take precautions in time?

  Before this, she hadn’t taken even ten days off her long, boring job, but the very next month, she applied for two months’ leave on the pretext that a letter had arrived from home. It appeared the house that her parents had lovingly built was falling into ruin, and she had to take care of it.

  There was no end to her daughter’s excitement on their journey but as they started approaching Almora, her mother’s mood began to turn uncharacteristically sombre. As soon as they reached the Lal Kuan station, Rajeshwari was filled with terror. She suddenly felt like she would once again have to face her father’s violent rage. That her lover, shivering in the foggy winter, would have turned into a white statue, waiting under a lamp post for her.

  She had not informed her relatives about her arrival in Almora. Instead she had sent a telegram to one of her dear fellow principals, who was now waiting with her army of teachers for the mother-daughter duo at the bus stand. They had done their LT together. Shanti was Sharda Khanna’s maternal aunt’s daughter. When she took the two of them to her bungalow, Rajrajeshwari felt she couldn’t move for a moment, as if somebody had shackled her legs.

  ‘This is such a beautiful bungalow, Amma. Looks just like a king’s palace!’ Chandan kept prattling on excitedly but her mother was being taunted by cruel destiny at every step.

  ‘Yes, yes, what your daughter is saying is right,’ Shanti said. The speed with which she took them into the drawing room, Rajeshwari wasn’t prepared for it.

  ‘Please excuse me, Shanti, I still haven’t recovered my wits from the winding journey.’ She plonked herself on a velvety chair in front of her. Had the chair not been there, she would have probably sat on the floor itself. Her mind was spinning but was it because of the journey?

  Every chair, every desk, every memory tied to every drop of the chandeliers was like a ghost or skeleton surrounding her in a dance. A thousand memories that she had drowned in the sugar syrup of her sweet-maker husband, that she had left at the doorstep of her household now took aim at her like a thousand spears. It seemed like someone had breathed life into the very picture of the dead king. His moustache seemed to go up, mocking her, piercing her.

  ‘Come, lie down in my room, Rajeshwari!’ said Shanti, ‘It looks like you are very tired. I’ll give you a cup of lemon tea. It will revive you.’

  There was no room in that house where she could rest. No room where her lover’s ghost wouldn’t climb up on her chest and try to strangle her.

  She felt more anxious in Shanti’s room. This had once been Kundan’s room. She had scratched the letters ‘K’ and ‘R’ in the memory of their love on a wall of this very room. They were probably still there!

  Shanti had gone to make tea and her daughter, who was seeing the hills for the first time, was running around to admire the swaying Deodars or the peaks of snowy Kamet or Trishul. Finding herself suddenly alone, Rajrajeshwari started walking around the room, surveying the walls, taking stock of her memories.

  She found the letters they had scratched in under the layers of paint. Is the writing of an emotional youth so impossible to erase? She kept thinking of a saying in English—one’s first love never dies. That had been her first and last love.

  ‘Here, drink the tea.’ When Shanti entered wi
th the tea, Rajrajeshwari was so startled that it felt like she had been caught stealing red-handed.

  Shanti gave her the tea and sat in a chair with her cup.

  ‘That is the joy of living here, Rajeshwari!’ Shanti said in between sips of tea, ‘I got this furnished bungalow for a very small rent—came with the carpets, rugs and sofas, everything. I’ve heard that some king had had it built for his mistress but whoever is destined to live in a house lives in it, isn’t it so? The house was built for a mistress but in it lives a headmistress.’ Laughing at her own pun, she continued, ‘Let me see where your daughter has gone off to. Let me give her a cup of tea, Rajeshwari.’ On her way out, she turned around to say, ‘When you wrote to me saying you were coming here to look for a groom for Chandan within your community, I got a little angry at how regressive you seemed. You made yourself independent after having suffered the blow of widowhood and you won’t even allow your innocent daughter to finish her education? I was very surprised. The girl has just finished her Inter, such a little girl—and nowadays girls only lose their milk teeth after starting Inter. I wondered whether Raji had lost her mind that she is thinking of marriage at such a tender age. Today, when I saw your daughter, I had to laud your wisdom.’

  ‘Why?’ Yet again, Rajeshwari’s suspicious nature started rearing its head.

  ‘You madwoman!’ She laughed and said, ‘Is a precious diamond ever kept by a wise householder in a knot? The sooner you can get this valuable gem deposited in a well-established bank, the better. I have fixed up the room upstairs for the two of you. Sunlight streams in as early as six in the morning and wakes you up.’ Shanti was wrong, thought Rajeshwari.

  Sunlight reached that room at a half past six in the morning and sometimes, the handsome sleeper in that room was tickled awake by someone else.

  ‘The landlady is also visiting.’ As soon as Shanti said this, Rajeshwari’s head started spinning like the circular roads of the hills.