Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  Summer holidays were spent in Washington DC, as a family guest of India’s Ambassador to the US, B.K. Nehru (Uncle Biju and Aunty Fori to me, as they were good friends of my parents). Jawaharlal Nehru was still alive at the time. Indira Gandhi, his daughter, and B.K. Nehru’s cousin stayed there when visiting the US. I was the nineteen-year-old fly on the wall during breakfast when we all sat at the dining table in our dressing gowns. Indira Gandhi shared concerns and confidences about her sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. Although she had no complaints about Rajiv, she was troubled by Sanjay who had gotten into removing hubcaps from cars* in the company of his unruly bunch of friends. He was not interested in his studies at Doon School, and refused to listen to her, she complained.

  It was at Smith that my sense of public activism first blossomed. The Chinese had attacked India in 1962. We were at war back home, and our soldiers were getting killed. Without any prompting from anyone, I decided to collect money for the Jawan’s Welfare Fund or whatever it was called in those days. I wrote to the Indian Embassy asking to be sent a full-length Indian feature film—Satyajit Ray’s Devi. In the meanwhile, I designed a poster and printed copies of it myself after learning screen printing at the college arts activity studio. They were put up all over college. I booked the large Sage Hall there, and screened Devi at a dollar a ticket following which I cooked an Indian meal to thank my friends who had helped with the arrangements. I had not been taught cooking but I managed a chicken curry, rice, spiced potatoes and even jalebis taken out of a recipe book. I made the yeast-infused batter rise overnight in a bowl on my window sill for the crisp, tasty sweet, served later with ice cream. Everyone enjoyed it, and I realized that contrary to my mother’s dislike towards cooking, I had taught myself how to cook.

  I collected a thousand and seven hundred dollars which I proudly sent to the Embassy in Washington DC to be forwarded to the Indian government. I also collected a free body massage from my dorm mate Wendy Cutter, for working so hard to make the event possible.

  ~

  Smith College developed a sense of independence so strong in me that I did not want to return to India directly after graduation. Firstly, I had no real home to go to, and I dreaded settling back with my mother and other relatives, without the freedom to do as I wished. The idea of renting a small apartment of my own in Delhi and living independently, as many single girls can do these days, was unthinkable in the early sixties. I knew I wanted to get married to Ashok Jaitly who had been my friend from Delhi University days, but did not want to be unschooled in running a home of my own before that. So, I shot off a spate of letters for a summer job in New York with many well-known magazines so that I could share an apartment with a friend and live without being supervised by a nervous mother or strict aunts. No magazine bothered to reply, so I set my sight on a gap year in London since Cambridge, where Ashok was studying, was close. My mother agreed to that since she was confident that Ashok was a ‘good and responsible’ boy who would not let me come to any harm, and who was in any case, going to marry me. After some effort and with my mother’s family contacts in Air India, in July 1963, I got a job as a filing clerk in the Air India city office in the swanky New Bond Street in London.

  I had illusions of becoming a stylish receptionist on the ground floor but my smart talk and literature degree from Smith College did not help. There was simply no vacancy. I was relegated to a tiny back room with a Sindhi and Gujarati woman for company as the junior staff member. We spent our days opening or dispatching letters, noting reference numbers in a register and filing away letters and documents. It was utterly boring with no intellectual conversation at all, but I earned nine pounds a week which paid for half my rent, meagre food and transport on the underground rail network. Subsistence level, but exciting and challenging.

  I shared a flat in Bramham Gardens near the Earl’s Court Road tube station with my old school and college friend Nanu (Pratima Bhatia Mitchell), veteran journalist Prem Bhatia’s daughter. We remain close friends till today. Our building was dingy with a scary landlord named Mr Buckle, who was built in the dimensions of a large refrigerator. He had large, bulging eyes and wore the same brown tweed coat every day for the whole year. He had a looming sort of personality that intimidated us whenever he came to ask for the rent. He had installed lights that were programmed to switch off periodically in the corridors to save electricity. If they went off when he was with us, we were plunged into darkness, frozen mid-sentence, but with his booming voice he would always try to reassure us by shouting, ‘You have nothing to fear!’ Mr Buckle always reminded us of a character that should be in a scary story for children.

  It was difficult in those days for Indians to find accommodation. The British thought we would make the place stink by cooking curry. The Indian ‘take-outs’ did not catch on till a couple of decades later. In that respect, our eerie landlord seemed kind and unconcerned about the personal lives or preoccupations of his tenants. Our upstairs neighbour was a tall, gorgeous blonde, who struggled bringing up a dark-skinned equally gorgeous baby boy with no sign of a husband. The gossip in the building was that the baby was illegitimate and belonged to someone from Pakistan’s Bhutto family.

  Both Nanu and I could only afford cornflakes and black coffee for breakfast. I bought a small carton of yogurt and a banana for lunch, and we cooked rice and a chicken or dal for dinner. It was a frugal but free life that taught me that I could manage my own establishment without any huge mishap except that work, exhaustion and too little of nourishing food made me faint flat out a couple of times. However, we were quite nonchalant about such things. On weekends, I travelled by train to Cambridge where Ashok and I would spend the weekend walking, eating out and going to the movies with friends like Kamlesh Sharma, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Dalip Mehta who all later joined the foreign service. I spent the nights on a mattress on the floor of Gita Patnaik’s (Biju Patnaik’s daughter, who became the famous author Gita Mehta, later to marry the publisher Sonny Mehta) single-room ‘dig’ at Cambridge.

  Rajiv Gandhi was at Cambridge at the same time as Ashok. We moved in separate circles but met during our visits to cheap Greek restaurants or during informal social occasions. Rajiv Gandhi began courting Sonia Gandhi as we watched. She was then a shy au pair lodged with a local family to earn her stay and learn English at a local language school. She barely spoke to anyone. We used to joke among ourselves that since the female students speaking European languages were far more attractive than the University-going English ones who were largely studious and intellectual, some of our boys from India preferred to socialize with the prettier ones even if there weren’t to be any deep conversations between them.

  Anyway, getting back to my source of livelihood—the advantage of working with Air India was getting a free ticket to travel back to India after completing a year of work. We would not have had the money otherwise. I also got two free trips on an inter-airline transfer agreement to visit Brussels where I had a nostalgic reunion with all the places and people I had known when my father was still alive. I also managed an exciting trip to Israel after having read The Diary of Anne Frank earlier and wondering what creating one’s own country would be like. It was incredible to see the fervour and energy of the people who, having experienced the horrors of Nazi Germany, were deeply dedicated to turning a barren desert into green and fertile land. I wished our Indians would work for their country with such commitment.

  In Israel, our guided tours involved visiting a kibbutz, going to the Gulf of Eilat and discovering the streets and sights of Tel Aviv, Haifa and various sacred places. There was a British member among the Air India staff with me in the group of people from different countries of which I was the youngest at twenty-one. At one tourist site, towards the end of our trip, our elderly, wrinkly and red-faced Israeli guide, nearly three times my age at least, suddenly said to me that he was deeply in love with me and wanted to marry me. I hadn’t bargained for this kind of situation on the side. All my co-tourists thought it was a joke. It
may have been a great subject of fun but I had no idea about how to deal with this ardent but strangely respectful old man who kept trying to convince me that he was very serious. As we flew way above Tel Aviv, I wondered whether he did this to every young female tourist just to add a little spice to his life. It was surely a good story to tell when I returned to London, but nonetheless, quite embarrassing.

  In those days many countries had not established diplomatic relations with Israel, or, like some Arab countries, were hostile to them. We had to have special passports made for the Israel trip so that it was not reflected on our existing passports and dispose of these upon return. Consequently, I have no proof now that I ever went to Israel.

  ~

  During our year in London, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And in 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru passed away. These were momentous events around the world, and momentous, even for us. As Indian students and young workers, we gathered outside the US Embassy, standing in line for hours, to sign the condolence book. We did the same at the Indian High Commission. After Welles Hangen’s book titled After Nehru Who? which implied he was irreplaceable, it was a pleasant surprise to see a quiet, self-effacing Lal Bahadur Shastri take over as the Indian prime minister and I was even happier to see India managing the transition in a mature and dignified manner.

  Ashok sat for his Civil Services exam from the London Centre for overseas applicants while staying at my cousin’s home. We travelled back to India when his exams were over, and my stint at Air India ended, with me flying on my free ticket. We journeyed in a leisurely manner through Paris, Rome and Beirut, seeing all the famous historical sites, eating bread and cheese on park benches, with money enough only for one good meal a day. In Paris, I remembered my Smith College professor’s exquisite choice of words and gestures in explaining Marcel Proust’s writings. In Rome, in the midst of sightseeing, when the afternoons were too hot to venture out, I buried myself deep in finishing The Alexandria Quartet, a set of three books with a fourth some years later by Lawrence Durrell, which I had begun to read while travelling on the train back and forth on weekends to Cambridge. Anyone interested in an intense, deeply philosophical and almost mystical story of the same event through different perspectives, seen through a set of four characters (which also form of the titles of the four novels), Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, should not go through life without reading these remarkable literary works. I remember the effect those books had on me as I read them, more than I recall the low-budget romance on our journey back home.

  Back in India in 1965, Ashok and I were met by our loving families who set about planning our engagement and wedding right away. I chose to design my own simple wedding card, refused to indulge in a trousseau, instead getting blouses stitched for all the saris I had with me already. My aunts collectively made a new red ruby necklace for me in a typical ancient Kerala design; I wore my grandmother’s gold odyanam around my waist, a new gold-edged, Malayali, two-piece mundu-veshti for all small pre-wedding ceremonies, and a decade-old Banarasi tissue sari that belonged to my mother. We took my friends from Smith College who had come all the way to attend our wedding in Bombay along with us on a small tour of the Taj Mahal and other spots after the wedding. So, on this supposed honeymoon, the bride and groom ended up as tourist guides for their foreign friends.

  ~

  Ashok had hoped to get enough marks to join the Foreign Service like his friends. However, we ended up, most unexpectedly, in the state of Jammu & Kashmir to find ourselves face-to-face with an extraordinarily different life.

  *This incident also finds mention in Coomi Kapoor’s The Emergency: A Personal History, New Delhi: Penguin, 2016.

  9

  ‘MY’ STATE OF KASHMIR

  Through War, Darkness and Light

  THE STATE OF KASHMIR IS a conglomeration of histories and theories. Every person with an experience of any kind there, claims to have the last word on it. Add to this the ‘opinions’ of historians; political analysts; media personalities, who have become self-styled experts; interlocutors who became pompous about their intellects; and local writers, who have nursed sorrow, anger and angst. Then you also have the majority of ordinary citizens, who are gentle, scared, peace-loving, and hate the violent noise. They remain silent, being subjected to high- and low-intensity wars, and sandwiched between militant guns and the ever-present security forces. Ever since the three regions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh became one political entity and acceded legally and legitimately to the sovereign Indian nation, the citizens of the valley and those living in areas bordering Pakistan, have had nothing but recurring cycles of peace and violence.

  As the wife of a young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, allotted Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) as his state cadre, I had my share of witnessing the wars, border areas, curfews, blackouts and democratic and undemocratic elections in the state. In between, I spent long hours among artisans; those were idyllic times. However, it was quite a contrast to life in London, New York and Massachusetts amidst progressive and peaceful times. Drawing from five decades of my own relationship with all regions of the state allows me to define ‘my own state of Kashmir’.

  My husband did not choose to be in the J&K cadre. IAS probationers are offered preferences. His were Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. No one knew that J&K was an option. There were only two officers who had gone there from the central administrative services before him. Someone in Delhi thought he was enlightened, well-educated and bold, and therefore well suited to J&K, a state that needed to be handled sensitively. We also heard that a UP Brahmin marrying a South Indian had something to do with being considered ‘broad minded’. Having come from Cambridge, UK, and Smith College, USA, we thought this was quite a funny yardstick for assessment. Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq, commonly referred to as Sadiq Sahib, was the chief minister of J&K at the time. These were not the brightest of times in the political history of Kashmir where nomination papers of candidates from only one party were found to be legitimate. People often asked about India as separate from the state which seemed strange at the beginning but we started speaking that way ourselves when we realized that it was more due to geographical isolation than a feeling of political separatism. Anyway, the posting landed us and our Tibetan terrier Chinky at the sarkari dak bungalow in Anantnag in 1965.

  ~

  The annual Amarnath Yatra was due a month after we arrived in Anantnag. Multifarious arrangements had to be made for thousands of pilgrims to travel to the holy cave where the ice Shiva lingam was five feet high during the full moon of August. This task came under the civil administration of Anantnag. The District Commissioner appointed Ashok as Observer Officer but did not put him in charge. I could therefore accompany him on this five-day trip. We walked, or rode on ponies along precariously narrow mountain ledges, slept in tents in the extreme cold and passed crystal streams and quiet forests which suddenly opened up to patches of luxurious expanses of grass. For five days we were a part of a slowly moving stream of hundreds of sadhus covered in ash and flimsy loincloth, old people with sticks, men carrying trishuls, and young families with bottles and backpacks. Devotion seemed to carry everyone through. At rest stops, I made sketches and wrote my first article as a travelogue of the yatra which the Statesman published in full on the editorial page. While I was pleased no end at the proof of my fancy Smith education, I doubt if anybody in Anantnag even noticed.

  While driving back to Anantnag from Pahalgam after the yatra late in the evening, the wireless in the jeep announced that ‘Pakistani huqamrans’ (infiltrators) had entered the district. The excitement of the journey ending in seeing the legendary pigeons representing Lord Shiva and his consort Parvati flying out of the Amarnath cave soon faded. We were instructed to put out our jeep headlights and keep our heads down. By the time we returned to the dak bungalow, we were in the midst of the first Indo-Pak war of 1965 with shots being fired in the vicinity. We covered window panes of the dak bungalow with newspaper. The freshly minted IAS officer now had
a full-blown job on his hands. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s calm sagacity and the ‘jai jawan jai kisan’ slogan hailing soldiers and farmers, saw us through this tense time. Although the war did not last long, it was tense and dark. There were continuous reports of where the infiltrators had been spotted, on which portion of the highway shots were being fired, and where gunfire could be heard. I was confined to room in the dak bungalow, going outside only to walk the dog in the garden. It was not the time for women to be seen.

  When the war ended, we went to Pampore in November to view the fields of saffron flowers in the moonlight. The fluorescent mauve aura created naturally is what people do through digital manipulation on their computer screens these days. The shimmering stillness made it hard to remember this was the scene of fierce firing between soldiers of India and Pakistan. When Shastri died in Tashkent two months later, it seemed that our part of ‘India’ absorbed the shock in uncomprehending silence rather than grief, as the country had hardly come to know him. The dominance of the Nehru dynasty following that, ensured the country forgot this great leader quite easily.