My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  There were amateur let’s-take-a-guess scientists like Chaturvedi who said, ‘Walking in the hills takes away so much energy. The brain doesn’t get enough food to develop properly. See, it’s like this – a donkey is a donkey because it walks all the time. Have you seen a donkey sit down to think?’

  This was followed by a-horse-is-not-a-donkey arguments by the end of which Biswakarma and I were still staring at each other in disgust and disbelief. Even those who were making a case for the donkey had decided that in this election through popular mandate, the horse was the symbol for the plains and the donkey for the hills.

  Jha, always enthusiastic, asked the horse supporters what he considered a central question. ‘What colour is the horse in your imagination?’

  Some said white, a few others brown, the Botany professor was the only person who offered a metaphorical – and what to him was a superior – answer. ‘Black Beauty.’

  Jha’s thesis had been proved – his anger showed even in his hair. Or so the movement of the spiky ends told me. ‘As if “Black Beauty” were an ox... What do you call it in English?’

  ‘Oxymoron,’ I said.

  Prerna had thus, even before she began attending classes, become a celebrity student. What she would never know was how her innocent question had divided the faculty staffroom into fractious denominations. It brought out a side of our characters that we might never have known, the kind of bitterness that sometimes rises to the surface in a quarrel between a married couple, for instance. Biswakarma and I had so long identified ourselves as residents of northern Bengal, but I was from the plains and he from the mountains. So Prerna’s question broke our team. It left Biswakarma lonely but it left me lonelier. The ‘plains-wala’ – as Biswakarma now referred to the people from the plains of Calcutta – had never considered me one of their own. I was a hybrid in their mind, much like the Dooars region where I came from, a mix of plain land encircled by mountains. But they were purists.

  If it had remained contained within these silly binaries, it might have been only a temporary damage. One students’ agitation and all the teachers would get back together, plains and hills. But because Prerna’s question had given birth to many such discomforting queries in the staffroom, the wounds we had inflicted on each other were still raw. I doubted whether they would ever disappear. I, for one, knew that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – ever forgive Chaturvedi for suggesting that my son might have been born ‘normal’ had I listened to my in-laws and gone to Calcutta for the childbirth. I had come a long way in the last fourteen years to know that there was no one ‘normal’. Kali-di, the Group-D staff who served us tea with generous servings of office gossip, seemed to have been severely struck by the battle of words that flowed in front of her. I noticed that she now spoke only with Jha, who had metamorphosed into a patron of the dark and beautiful people in her eyes. Jha’s Bangla was unsteady and Kali-di’s Hindi acquired from watching television serials, but the conversation they had was charged with the energy of the unstable.

  ‘That is the problem, Kali-di,’ I heard Jha tell the aged woman one day. ‘If you’d been born very fair, your parents wouldn’t have named you “White-di”. As if fairness – whiteness – was a norm and anyone who was disobedient ought to be punished with a name like yours: you are dark, you must be called Kali!’

  I saw tears gather in Kali-di’s eyes and then propel words that I’d never heard coming out of her. ‘That is why no one married me, bhai.’

  In another corner of the staffroom, I eavesdropped on a conversation between the zoologist and botanist about the centrality of coconuts in such a discussion.

  ‘If only coconuts grew in the Himalayas, the Nepalese would have some intelligence,’ said the zoologist.

  ‘Yes, coconut water is better than mother’s milk,’ supported the botanist.

  Both had decided that the mountain people were indeed of inferior intelligence.

  Adhikari, who did not like being addressed by her surname, preferring her Tagorean name of ‘Charulata’ instead, added another angle to the debate. The Nepalese had a natural talent for music, for style, but she wasn’t sure whether their brains responded to books in quite the same way as it did to the guitar. ‘The musical beat is not the same as the paragraph,’ she had concluded in her self-important manner.

  I’d never liked her. How could I, after she criticised my taste in saris, saying yellow suited only flowers, not women?

  ‘But you’re from Santiniketan, where women wear yellow saris to celebrate spring,’ Biswakarma had spoken on my behalf.

  ‘Yellow saris on red soil – only that.’ With those words, the debate had been closed.

  It was this snobbery and superior air that Biswakarma and I detested most. We laughed at it sadly at times, how the people from Calcutta – it was an amorphous planet to fit the types we disliked – moved about in college behaving like missionaries on a civilising mission. They were saviours who would rescue the poor Nepalese students from their own culture.

  There were so many theories to explain the presumed low intelligence of the Nepalese. Adhikari’s was hilarious – at such moments, I thought of the saddest events of my life to stop myself from laughing. Charulata was a professor of Bangla, but because not a single student had enrolled to study the subject in this ‘Nepali-speaking area’, she’d taken up the role of cultural ambassador of the plains of Bengal. The only things that came to our ears about her experiments were her complaints about the lack of dedication and discipline among the Nepalese people, their limited vocal range, their inability to remember long dialogues in plays, their focus on costumes and make-up; it was a long list of lacks. If I hadn’t been angry, I might have laughed at her silliness in making these deductions about a community from such a small sample size, but I did not like talking to her.

  My fluency in Nepali, a language I had picked out of love for its music, its onomatopoeic sounds, was dismissed as an affluent person’s disease, like someone seeking out biri after smoking a fine cigar, an aberration from expected decent behaviour. The generalisations were tragicomic: Nepali cuisine was momo and thukpa, Nepali music ‘MTV copy-paste’, Nepali literature a thing of wonder. ‘Really, so many writers?’ or ‘That old? I thought it couldn’t be more than a hundred years old or so. Did they have a written script then?’ If it had been a tourist’s ignorance, there might have been laughter, but it was all a case of I-told-you-so.

  When annual results came out in the summer, the analysis inevitably turned to anthropology. Biology was to blame, not the teaching skills of teachers, these imports from the plains. Lack of sunlight, lack of oxygen, lack of nutritious food, poor parenting, poverty, short days, all the boxes were ticked without guilt or self-questioning. Adhikari inevitably led the trip on speculations. She could begin from anywhere.

  ‘Rabindranath Tagore has so many songs about the eyes, you know. How light enters through the eyes and turns into knowledge...’ No one paid her soliloquy any attention until she arrived on how the ‘small eyes of the Nepalese people’ was preventing them from being intelligent learners.

  The zoologist said that he would use this opportunity – his posting in a hill college – to study the relation between straight hair and low intelligence.

  The racist nature of these assumptions and discussions did not strike anyone as odd. In fact, quite the opposite; their words had the impulse of the do-gooder’s kindness.

  By the time Prerna would begin her first class in college, her question, and the consequent trail of explanations, had turned the Nepalese into a people suffering from an epidemic of low intelligence. This was a natural outcome of living in the mountains, it was concluded, as natural as the birth of deformed children in Chernobyl or Hiroshima and Bhopal.

  On the morning of 20 July, when everyone was busy rehearsing for the Orientation Programme for the students, Charulata Adhikari inaugurated the discussion again.

  ‘Have you noticed that there isn’t a single classical singer from the hills? A sing
le Nepalese classical musician, can you believe it?’

  When none of us responded, she teased us, ‘All of you must be eager to impress that girl – whatshername – with your political correctness? But the truth is that people here, from the Himalayas, have low intelligence. Like Africans. It’s not their fault, poor people. They were born here, what can they do?’

  I noticed Jha from the corner of my eye, fighting this assault on his beliefs and politics, but I chose not to respond. As I said, I did not like speaking to Adhikari. I had, in a bout of bad temper one day, made an unkind remark about how her husband and children tolerated her snobbery. In spite of the cultivated silence of the staffroom, Adhikari did not stop.

  ‘It is common wisdom – the best scholarship of centuries has been produced by people from the alluvial plains of the Indian subcontinent. Why, you tell me why?’

  Rao, a professor of Philosophy who, like Adhikari, had found no students in this college, had not participated in the discussion at all. He looked depressed all the time – it was possible that he missed his family, I could not say.

  ‘What about Tamil Literature and Philosophy, Dr Adhikari? And the allied literature south of the Vindhyas?’ I had never heard Rao speak like this.

  But Adhikari was nonplussed. ‘It’s the same thing, Professor Rao. Water. Water is what the brains need. Water for intelligence. We have the river, you have the sea. Same thing, you see. This water, that water...’

  Jha cut her short. ‘There’s more water in the jhoras and streams and rains in the Himalayas than there is in the anorexic Ganga.’

  The bell for the first day of the academic session had rung.

  Jha returned happy after the students’ Orientation Programme. Prerna was in his class. He’d convert her into someone like himself. I sometimes overheard him speaking to students in the corridor – I was once particularly struck by his weighty scolding of them for calling the local coolie ‘Laata’, meaning someone deaf and mute. The man was indeed deaf and mute, so his name was a cruel tautology, but it was a common colloquial in Nepali. Jha had immediately given an assignment to his students: they were to compile a list of cruel and racist expressions in the Nepali language.

  From time to time, I’d congratulate Jha on his endeavours. The young man only smiled politely in response – I recognised his disappointment in me, in my lack of collaboration in his mission. Only once did he let his personal disappointment out of his gate.

  ‘I know how it feels to be abused and judged inferior on the basis of where you come from. All my life, even in Presidency College, I have always been “the Bihari”, the cunning hard-working donkey, without taste and culture, dirty, miserly, parasitic, a coolie on a railway platform.’

  That Prerna had not quite forgotten her sad question became evident the day the Inspector of Colleges visited our college. The team wanted to see whether this hurriedly assembled college was obeying university regulations, they wanted to meet students to listen to their complaints. It was difficult to prettify the tiny rented building. Two bottles of Phenyl had just been emptied into the bowels of the commode to abolish its history of stink.

  Prerna stood up to ask a question to the College Inspector.

  ‘Is it true, Sir,’ she asked the marigold-garlanded man sitting on the dais, ‘that students from the plains get more marks than students from the hills?’

  We were all prepared for a careful and politically correct answer, but Dr Sengupta, backed as he was by the current regime in power, said it like it was. ‘Yes, statistics will tell you that is indeed true. Part of the reason is that there are more colleges in the plains than there are in the hills. Also, the quality of education offered by the feeder schools in the plains is better.’ The words were said without any emotion.

  Prerna seemed to be possessed by the question. It looked like she had joined college just to find an answer to that question. She wasn’t letting go so easily.

  ‘More marks by students from the plains imply that they are more intelligent, doesn’t it?’

  Dr Sengupta pulled the broad end of his tie away from himself. ‘Did I say that?’

  The Principal looked at our faces, indicating that we should get Prerna to stop her questions. Quite strangely, none of us moved from where we were.

  Adhikari took over from Prerna, using the opportunity to house her own grouse. ‘No one studies Bangla here, Sir,’ she began.

  Dr Sengupta smiled. ‘That is a choice we must let them exercise, Madam.’

  ‘What I meant to say is...if they were forced to study Bangla. You will agree with me that intelligence cohabits with language. Man is more intelligent than other animals because his language is more developed than theirs. Students here only speak Nepali. Their poor marks, their low intelligence might be... You know, if they could be forced to learn Bangla.’

  I was looking at Prerna’s face as these bizarre words moved in the freshly painted hall. There was no anger on it. It seemed to me that Prerna Subba from Kalimpong subdivision wanted to be convinced that a Prerna Roy from Calcutta would be more intelligent than her.

  ‘Is it true, Sir, is it true...’ It was Prerna again.

  The Inspector of Colleges looked at his watch and said, ‘Things collect at the bottom. And so marks in the plains’.

  ‘There is no Nepali Philosophy that I know of,’ Professor Rao was telling Jha in a near whisper when I entered the staffroom. ‘Only six students have opted for Philosophy as their Elective Subject. They’re just not interested in the subject. It’s an old man’s subject for them, one of them was kind enough to explain to me once. How can you expect me to give a public lecture on Nepali Philosophy then? C’mon, Jha, try to understand.’

  ‘Pardon my ignorance, but anything that helps them understand their mountain-life better? Well, let me rephrase that – any philosopher, any philosophical text that helps to rid them off this new inferiority complex about hill people being unintelligent?’

  I was coming to this conversation after being harassed by Prerna. Why wasn’t there a single text about the hills in the Compulsory English syllabus? Quite naturallyI did not have an answer. A tiny group of people at the centralised university designed the syllabi. I was merely a spoke in the wheel, implementing what I’d been asked to. I was narrating this to Rao without looking at Jha (I don’t know why I was angry with him) when Jha told us about a similar predicament.

  ‘I was telling them about various kinds of political structures and their histories of origin when Prerna asked me whether the hills – the mountains – had given birth to any political structure or philosophy. That is what made me seek out Professor Rao’s help.’

  Rao was a kind person, and now that he had become a grandfather, he tended to look at his students as older versions of his grandchild. He had confessed to this ‘long-distance grandfatherhood’ himself.

  ‘It is sad to see these children suffer from such mass inferiority complex. That thin girl,’ he said, trying to recollect Prerna’s name, ‘she asked the History professor – I forget the young fellow’s name – why not a single important treaty had been signed in the hills of India.’

  ‘What did Laha say?’ asked Jha.

  ‘He’s a smart fellow. He mentioned the Shimla Agreement,’ said Rao, laughing.

  I was a bit ashamed to admit that I could remember almost nothing about the Shimla Agreement.

  Rao was ever-forgiving. ‘The one signed between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, remember?’

  ‘And what did Prerna say to that?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘That is the saddest thing, Madam. She said – perhaps because it was signed in the mountains, in Shimla, it’s been such a failure.’

  The Independence Day celebrations in college would be different this year. Professor Rao would deliver an open house lecture, the students, and not the Principal or Chief Guest, would hoist the flag, and not ladoo and nimki but squash and onion momos would be served with milk tea.

  Professor Rao said a few lines about M
artin Heidegger, about the significance of his work in Continental Philosophy, and then he began reading from the German philosopher’s short essay, ‘Why I Write from the Provinces’.

  The gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow – all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up there, and not in forced moments of ‘aesthetic’ immersion or artificial empathy, but only when one’s own existence stands in its work. It is the work alone that opens up space for the reality that is the mountains.

  I was studying the faces of the students as they tried to catch or ignore Rao’s reading. Would it rid them of the inferiority that was torturing Prerna? Most of them looked bored – they would be happy for the programme to get over. My eyes searched for Prerna. Where was she? I expected the stylish girl to be in a tricoloured sari like many of her classmates, but I couldn’t spot her in the crowd.

  Rao’s lecture – a reading actually – might have been considered a success from the thunderous applause. But Rao knew better. He smiled sadly.

  When the time for the flag hoisting arrived, I spotted Prerna at last. She looked lovely in her green sari. She was one of the six students who’d been chosen by Jha to hoist the flag.

  When the flag was unfurled and rose petals fell out of it on to the heads of those gathered below it, the national anthem shivered out of the lips of students. All of them were shocked at what they saw moving to the beat of the air.