And Then One Day: A Memoir (12 page)

I think there is nothing more about that episode that I need go into except that we were married on the 1st of November 1969 with no one except her mother and Asif’s mother Mrs Zeba Rahman as witnesses. My poor parents, completely oblivious to these developments and perhaps finally beginning to feel some easing of their anxieties—for to all appearances I was showing signs of straightening myself out—were now to be hit by another thunderbolt.

We had resolved to keep the marriage completely secret but should have known better. Within a couple of days it was common knowledge throughout the university. Aligarh is not far from Meerut and people go back and forth so the news quickly got there as well. I have no idea who broke it to my parents, nor how they reacted; and I have felt too ashamed of myself to even try and imagine it. But their heartbeats must have gone faint in disbelief. This surely was beyond even Baba’s paranoid imaginings about me. I received a stunned letter from him telling me I was ‘a gullible fool’. Ammi too wrote in Urdu, asking why I’d kept it from them. ‘If you’d told us would we have refused?’ she asked rhetorically. Baba informed me he’d had quite enough and my life was my own to live now, the way I pleased. Poor soul never knew that that was exactly what I’d been doing all along. I guess it’s an indication of how far from them I’d travelled that all I did was mock their response.

In a misguided attempt, a couple of months later, to repair what was now becoming an impassable breach, I suggested to Purveen that she accompany me to Sardhana on Eid to meet them. She had travelled to Delhi on other occasions but now the anxiety of meeting them probably caused her to protest about being restricted from travelling to places for which she didn’t have a visa. She was adamant that leaving Aligarh even for a day was risky. It took a couple of hours of persuasion before she finally consented, lying supine in the back of a cousin’s car in case the CID was hiding in the bushes all the way there. I had miscalculated the time the drive would take, and hadn’t factored in her opposition to my hare-brained scheme so we made it to Sardhana a good four hours later than I had planned, around ten thirty, dead of night for that one-jeep town. In my enthusiasm to persuade her to come I had painted a picture of hordes of carousing relatives awaiting the new bahu. My parents, I assured her, would be delighted, in fact would be the first to welcome her. I may even have promised a brass band and an all-night revel, I don’t recall. Whatever she was expecting, it certainly wasn’t what we got.

We arrived to the sound of deep silence; both Baba and Ammi had eaten and were struggling to stay awake. The greetings were edgy, almost curt. Neither the two of us nor the two of them knew quite how to handle this. Some food and strained conversation between Baba and Purveen followed, Ammi and I stayed silent. We informed them we’d be leaving before daylight, they didn’t insist we stay. Ammi presented Purveen a necklace and a pair of earrings, kissed the top of her head and went to bed. Baba, never loquacious at the best of times, sat squirming for a while then also retired. At five in the morning we departed without saying goodbye, and got back to Aligarh before the CID could notice we were gone. Both the Zs, neither of them married yet, later came to visit us in Aligarh bringing gifts, and presumably went away baffled. Some decades having passed between then and now, I think I can understand why.

Some weeks before the wedding I had already shifted out of the hostel and was now ensconced at 2 Diggi Road with Purveen and her mother. Everything was going swimmingly, and then one day Purveen, who not too long ago had had to educate me on the menstrual cycle, informed me there would be no more ‘chums’—she was expecting a baby. This possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. At that age I had no fondness whatsoever for children, no fondness in fact for anything but myself. The enormity of bringing new life into the world escaped me entirely, and I don’t suppose any amount of contrition later could compensate for my utterly insensitive treatment of the child when she was born, and when all she needed from me was to be hugged and comforted.

Meanwhile, I was admitted to the National School of Drama as a first-year student, and left for Delhi at the end of my final year at Aligarh. Moving into its unique common-for- both-sexes hostel was unbelievably liberating after Aligarh, as was living in a big city again though Delhi seemed positively tame after Bombay, the mother-in-law of all Indian cities. The scholarship stipend we received after fees and hostel charges were deducted saw me quite comfortably through the month. I didn’t have to ask Baba for money—in any case the tap had been shut off a while ago—but better still, I didn’t need to ask his permission any more. This feeling of independence was heady. What slipped my mind was that a child was on its way and that I was not equipped either financially or emotionally to handle the situation that would ensue. I had been in Delhi a little over a month, and one Monday morning I discovered a telegram a day old, stating that Purveen’s ‘confinement has begun’. Having taken a few seconds to decipher the message, I caught the first bus to Aligarh. It was around noon by the time I got there. Early that morning, some hours before I arrived, Heeba had already been born.

T
he bus fare from Delhi to Aligarh was about seven rupees, and the rickshaw fare from the bus stop to the hospital Purveen was in was half a rupee, eight annas. I alighted right in front of her room as her mother emerged with the news that ‘it’s a girl, at about six in the morning’. Evidently a successive telegram had already been sent informing me of this. Until that moment, I didn’t realize how fervently I had wished it would be a boy. I am far enough removed from the day now to confess to the sense of crushing disappointment that seized me at that moment and didn’t let go for a long time. ‘A daughter!’ My adolescent virility had convinced me that true men had sons. My friends would mock and sure enough, led by JR, later did. A daughter? How would I deal with this?? In my head I had already been arm-wrestling with my imaginary son and teaching him about guns and cricket—when I had a moment to spare from myself to think of his impending arrival, that is. A daughter demolished all those dreams. The rickshaw puller, overhearing the conversation, smilingly tucked away the rupee note I had given him, presuming he was to keep the change on this joyous day. I insisted on my eight annas back and a most inauspicious argument over the sad little amount I should have let him keep in the first place followed before I had even seen my child.

The reality of it hit me when I first saw Heeba (Purveen had decided on the name if it were a girl; a boy’s name I hadn’t thought of, funnily). She was a tiny apparition asleep in a crib covered by a mosquito net. I didn’t have the nerve to touch her. When she later awoke and I heard her voice for the first time something stirred in me, but I had never held a baby before. In fact I didn’t like them, they were noisy and messy; it was a challenge holding her in my arms. And later when she was being fed and I was being ignored I, like all immature fathers, experienced the most intense jealousy which only men ever feel, jealousy of their own child.

Through the period of her pregnancy, Purveen had turned really moody, and my utter incomprehension of the miracle occurring within her and total oblivion to what was expected of me didn’t help. Many serious arguments, which I always got the worst of, were the result. Priapic twenty-one-year-old that I was, hopelessly self-absorbed, incapable of contributing in any way at all to making her feel good about herself, I found the bar on sex not easy to handle either. My attentions had already begun to wander and were beginning to zero in on R, a rather good-looking second-year student who as a whore in the NSD production of
Three-Penny Opera
had earlier caught my fancy, and now the two of us began spending a little more time together than was absolutely necessary.

My entering the drama school had coincided with the final month of the pregnancy, always a difficult one, and for Purveen now in her mid thirties, not the best time to bear a child. As for me, without a clue of the responsibilities it entailed, the trouble that’s part of the whole deal, and then the indescribable joy it brings, I had no time to spare for the life I was helping bring into the world; only my own gratification took priority, nothing else mattered. I took no part in the building of the baby crib Purveen was fashioning out of an old basket and some sawn- off bamboos—a beautiful piece of work finally, in which Heeba spent her first few months. I did occasionally steal some roses from the university garden and bring them to Purveen in my cycle basket. That pleased her, but apart from that I played the part of the obnoxious adolescent to perfection. The role of father was way beyond my ken. After a dressing-down from Mother-in-law I started helping with the dishes but that was as far as it went. I slowly began to resent this child who was coming between me and the only woman who had ever given me any attention; and when the baby finally arrived, the neglect I displayed still shames me deeply all these decades later.

Four days after her birth Heeba was brought home, but in the interim I had had to rush back to the school to attend classes—being absent from class was rewarded with a further deduction from one’s scholarship and I could scarce afford that. The following Saturday I returned to Aligarh to accompany mother and baby home in a rickshaw. It was a bumpy ride and I held Heeba in my arms. Mercifully no one I knew spotted us and we made it home without mortification. Heeba was laid in her crib, and I caught the next bus back to Delhi.

I wrote home about Heeba and not so astonishingly Baba immediately made his way to Aligarh to see her. A few days later I got a deliriously happy letter from him saying that he had just seen ‘that lovely little thing, I have named her Attia’. His desire for a girl in the family was to find more sublimation than he had hoped for; Heeba was to be followed by four more girls in both my brothers’ families. I informed Purveen of Baba’s choice of name but he didn’t exactly figure in the list of her favourite people and the name Heeba stuck. Heeba was the first of Baba’s (now) ten grandchildren and when both the Zs later had their daughters, he ecstatically dubbed them all with archaic double-barrelled appellations which, to the girls’ massive relief, were never employed. Heeba’s arrival actually caused Baba and me to be civil to each other for a while, but now the gulf with Purveen had widened.

Her whole life now revolved around Heeba and she and I had precious little to say to each other any more and even less to share. The stimulation of being on the cusp of a life of professional acting ensured that I didn’t miss her at all, and she seemed to lose whatever interest she had had in my obsession. The physical distance too began to grow. I was no longer this amusing little chap for her; I was now cast in a role which seemed like a hugely unpleasant chore and which I was ill-equipped to play: father of a child. It filled me with unease and inadequacy. The weekly visits to Aligarh became monthly visits and the stay there successively shorter. Now it was all milk bottles and diapers and suckling and cleaning and burping the baby, I couldn’t be bothered with any of it. While I had absolutely no interest in baby care, Purveen was consumed by it—she had to be, this was something she had waited a long time for. My indifference to Heeba can only be explained, though not condoned, by the fact that I myself was then an insecure, ill-adjusted twenty-one-year-old with absolutely no conception of what it took to rear a newborn, and I completely shirked my share of the duties, while idiotically attempting at the same time to assert my rights as a husband. The only way of dealing with a wife, in the world according to the Shahs, was with firmness and authority. Not unaware that I was thoroughly incapable of either, I retreated into a resentful shell. It hurt to know I was no longer the most important thing in Purveen’s life. There was no telephone in Aligarh and her replies to my letters got more infrequent and finally ceased altogether, as then did my visits there.

In Alkazi I had at last found an inspiring teacher—one who liked and appreciated me and didn’t make me feel like a fool, one who was interested in helping improve my mind, and pushed hard to make me realize the potential he perceived in me. Purveen’s family had already had that positive influence marginally, but now I was under the wing of someone who could show me the way; he tried to teach us art appreciation, introduced us to classical music, to the myriad Indian theatrical forms, to serious cinema; he goaded us to read, to wake up early, to work on our instruments. I learnt that Eugene Ionesco and Anton Chekhov were not the only great playwrights apart from Shaw and Shakespeare. Reading things I could actually understand was a tremendous high. The fascination and admiration I’d had for Purveen got transferred many times magnified to Ebrahim Alkazi.

I have no idea in what sort of light I will appear if I say that for an unconscionably long time I felt nothing whatsoever for the child Heeba, but it is necessary that I confess it. She didn’t figure at all, it was almost as if she didn’t even exist. When I did visit her in Aligarh she’d look at me as at a stranger, she seldom came near me and neither of us was comfortable when she did.