Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  My mother loved an audience. What made her get one easily was her vivacious and hilarious ways of recounting her experiences—the kind that always seem to happen to some people repeatedly and not to others. Maybe she just picked up the quirks and funny bits of life and knew how to share them well with anyone who was willing to sit back and listen. Friends, relatives, her only daughter, and her grandchildren, often rejected her tales outright as outrageous concoctions, but that was a part of the fun of listening to them. Everyone knew that she was incapable of fabricating a lie or hide a truth.

  ~

  In the early nineties, Kollengode loomed large again in my life. A resident of the town, Sreedharan Nair, arrived in New Delhi at the doorstep of the office at 3, Krishna Menon Marg, with a bunch of files and an agitated air. He described how he and the citizens of the town had been waging a battle against the illegal dismantling of the oldest section of the Vengunad Palace. This section, known as the kovilagam, was where my grandfather and the subsequent rajahs had separately resided. The longer, more sprawling construction where all the fun and games took place was called kalari, and contained the quarters where all the women and their families lived. The kovilagam had a certain sanctity about it since the family deity was housed there in a small area designated as the temple. It overlooked the men’s side of the bathing tank. The stone pedestal on which the image of the family deity was placed had an inscription saying it had been presented by Tipu Sultan. A priest was there full time to carry out the prayer rituals and it was he who brought the oil lamp, lit from the one in the sanctum sanctorum, to everyone in the household in the evenings after everyone had had their baths when I was little.

  A cousin, the youngest daughter of one of Ammu Amma’s sons, had entered into an unauthorized deal with a local person believed to be a big timber merchant, to dismantle and take away the entire kovilagam building, piece by piece, for sale elsewhere. The broad teak pillars, the beautifully carved wooden panels that ran along the pelmets, the smoothly worn wooden staircase with its elegant banisters—were all being systematically torn down. In a short while, there would be no building left standing there. She was not a part of the matrilineal line and therefore had no rights on the property, the same way as I did not. Her actions were thus unlawful.

  Sreedharan Nair showed me all the papers describing the efforts of the people of Kollengode town in trying to save a portion of its architectural and cultural heritage. They had led impressive processions, blocked roads, and gone to court. He told me of his interactions with other sections of the family who expressed their helplessness in putting a stop to it. He had collected photocopies of old documents after painstaking research in the office of the local government authorities describing the historic value of the Vengunad complex. In between, they had won a stay from K.T. Thomas, a respected and upright judge of the High Court of Kerala. The opposing side had engaged the most expensive lawyers and had often seemed to be able to ‘fix’ things in the small registry rooms making the task of the citizens of Kollengode a Herculean one. But the small respite gained by the stay given by Judge Thomas ended when he was elevated to the Supreme Court of India. The stay was soon vacated by a more amenable judge, and the huge teak beams, valued at twenty lakh rupees each, started coming down again.

  By a lucky coincidence, a trade union meeting took me to Palakkad. Thus I was able to visit Kollengode and see matters for myself. Things had changed quite a bit. The palace grounds had gone to seed and only a minimal staff ambled around. All the relatives had dispersed to the USA, Madras, Coimbatore, Ooty and Bangalore, visiting occasionally to see that all was well. Piles of massive teak beams lay waiting to be transported away at the cannibalized kovilagam.

  Quite typically, I jumped into the fray with my sentiments and sense of injustice aroused. I assured Sreedharan Nair that I would stand by them and fight their battle. Never having had interest in owning property other than wanting a small and secure nest for myself and being clueless about the changing rules of matriliny and the intricacies of the succession laws, I decided that since I was a mere member of the public we would deal with this with a Public Interest Litigation (PIL). My approach was simple: I took the whole issue first to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) asking them to examine the historical value of the property and consider stepping in to save it for posterity. I believed it was a part of the valuable cultural heritage of the state which scholars, architects and historians could study and admire. Kerala needed such buildings to demonstrate its rich cultural traditions. Achala Moulik, then Director General of the ASI, and a batchmate of my former husband in the civil service, was very sympathetic. She studied the papers on Kollengode’s history and the value of the old palace carefully. An ASI officer in Ernakulam was asked to intervene in the case being fought by the citizens of Kollengode but he never seemed to be able to reach the courts on time as there was always a bandh or a strike that obstructed him. I asked one of my Party colleagues in the Janata Dal who was a practicing lawyer to help out whenever necessary. When the stay was lifted, a dismayed Sreedharan Nair came to Delhi again. I took him to consult senior lawyers Ashok Panda and P.N. Lekhi at the Supreme Court. The ASI, in the meanwhile, examined the papers in further detail. They issued a letter saying they were actively considering adoption of the Kollengode palace building and needed three months to survey the property carefully to decide whether it would come under its protection. Armed with a fresh PIL, we approached the Supreme Court in an appeal to stay the destructive operations going on at a rapid pace in Kollengode. The letter from the ASI was extremely important as it recognized the value of the cultural property, and was a document from a responsible and concerned government body. We were sure it would give us a respite of three months till the ASI visited the site and decided whether it should be declared a protected monument of historic value that was more than four hundred years old.

  On the day of the hearing, we entered the courtroom and took our seats. When our case came up for consideration, our lawyers who had not charged us any fees, began placing the facts before the judge. P.P. Venugopal, a prominent lawyer, stood on the other side and kept smiling calmly while our impassioned presentation went on. He did not need to argue. The judge listened briefly and looked contemptuously at P.N. Lekhi. He refused to open the file and take cognizance of the letter provided by the ASI. He remarked: ‘These poor rajahs and maharajahs are out on the streets these days. Even if they have golden palaces, it is their right to sell them off if they wish and the public has no right to stop them.’ He tossed the file aside and went on to the next case. We left the courtroom in a state of shock and the counsel left victorious.

  My nephew, who lived in the USA and was legally in custody of the property, expressed his helplessness to act from such a distance and in fact, it was conveyed to me that he had been worried that since I had armed myself with a letter from the ASI, being a socialist, I was keen to remove the property from private hands and let the state take it over. I did not bother to argue that I had spent eighteen thousand rupees on court fees and other expenses from my own personal account—which I lost anyway. However, had we won, I would have saved the property from destruction for everybody with no material benefit to me. Sreedharan Nair returned dejected to Kollengode, and I, to my various other public causes with anger at my cousin’s perfidy and the legal system’s hollowness.

  The same nephew has now come to an arrangement with the Casino group of companies to run kalari as a heritage health resort. It seems ironic that many people will now be paying a lot of money to have luxurious oil massages and baths that we used to have for free, years ago. It seems as if heritage is worth preserving only if there is money in it for everyone. Whether illegal acts are committed in the process, the ASI brushed aside, citizens’ sentiments trampled upon and family relationships twisted, it does not seem to matter. At least the property will be well maintained, of course. However, the older and more historic portion is no longer by its side. Someone told me that the d
ismantled Vengunad kovilagam has been reconstructed in Thrissur as a heritage building by some private party. I intend to go see the building some day, to check the veracity of this piece of information. There is no hurry, since to mull over it would only bring a feeling of regret for the loss of what was part of my childhood memories.

  *Chole bhature and pani puri are forms of popular Indian snacks.

  **Vadyams refer to musical instruments. Chakyar Koothus are a kind of performance art in Kerala that involve monologues containing narratives from Hindu epics. These are usually performed inside Hindu temples. The stories are narrated by a single individual dressed in distinctive attire.

  *Shakuntala’s story and my experiences with the ouija board were also part of an article titled ‘Memories of Kerala’, The Daily Star, 10 January 2009, http://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-70568

  *Etamma is a little used form of address applied in our home for the younger grand aunt. Valiachan, to come later in the chapter, literally means big father and refers to the husband of my mother’s elder sister. Valiamma means bigger or elder mother, used to address my mother’s eldest sister. Some use it to address their grandmother. Achan means father. Forms of address for relatives alter according to the region in Kerala. These are from North Malabar.

  **Arattu is a ritual of giving a temple idol a holy bath. The ritual also includes bedecked elephants surrounding the idol.

  3

  DELHI AND GANDHI

  Points of Return

  DELHI WAS A CENTRAL POINT for my parents after their honeymoon. There seems to have been another trip to Europe, as I discovered after coming across a paper-cut silhouette of my mother done by a roadside artist in Zurich. It was carefully preserved in an envelope which had the amount she paid for it in francs written on it by her in pencil. She always kept meticulous accounts where even what she gave a beggar on the street is recorded.

  Later, before I was born, they were sent on a posting to Rangoon where my father was handling a financial portfolio on behalf of the government. However, it was Delhi that saw us through the Partition days and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. The capital of India took on many forms in front of my eyes over the period between the 1940s till this first quarter of the twenty-first century, changing its personality perceptibly as time went by.

  ~

  Delhi, new and old, had all become one. It spilled out into a maze of colonies growing upwards and sideways and joined together with tangles of electric cables like shabby black cobwebs. There was no sense of order to anything. Shanty clusters attached themselves like fungi against the walls of elegant residences guarded by dogs and men. These grew—unregulated, unnoticed and unlawfully—under the benign go-ahead of local mafia who then endeared themselves to the political class. Delhi became a city of cluttered marketplaces, shabby parks, food stalls on pavements and hundreds of small and big monuments, supposedly protected by the ASI only through a faded notice board that people never bothered to notice. In the centre, was the seat of power which made Delhi the capital of democratic and free India, a city of wheelers and dealers, power-brokers and con men all looking for self-aggrandizement and a slice of free profits. Stretching all the way from Gurgaon at one end to Ghaziabad on the other, from Rohtak to Rohini and Serai Rohilla, from Nizamuddin to Noida, refugees and other settlers were engulfed in a vast, cultureless, rootless, cauldron of mayhem. It took a while for the bullock carts, two-wheeled, horse-drawn tongas and cyclists to understand that the traffic lights were meant to regulate them as well. However, when it finally happened, the new labels stuck onto the rear windows of their cars as they drove through red lights defiantly said, ‘SO WHAT?’ All the chaos, aggression and lawlessness of Delhi’s new soul was delicately camouflaged by manicured cosmetics only in the area tended by the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC). Here, diplomats, parliamentarians, bureaucrats, senior defence officials and senior members of the judiciary—in other words ‘the Establishment’—lived.

  This charmed area of New Delhi was created by the British who built parts of what came to be known as Lutyens’ Delhi with its spacious bungalows surrounded by vast gardens and half a dozen servants’ quarters. Its avenues were lined with flowering jacaranda and gulmohar trees. Tennis courts at the Gymkhana Club allowed browns and whites to play a few games together and share jokes over a burra (or large) peg. The Viceroy’s abode with all its liveried accessories and regal embellishments that became the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the residence of the President of India, reassured the Establishment that whether India was a colony or republic, the pomp and style of the colonizers could now all be theirs.

  One was a world of genteel comfort—the world of the rulers. The other consisted of people lurching in tightly packed buses, moving about on foot or in tongas—the world of the ruled. As within the Red Fort at Old Delhi, the capital was a division between the Diwan-e-Khas and the Diwan-e-Aam, the divided world of the chosen few and the commoners, the anointed and the rabble. It has remained this way from the days of the Mughal Empire, through British rule, transiting through the traumatic days of Partition, until today. For the washerman who still toils in the homes of the Establishment, freedom has brought with it some important, if only minor, changes. His son now wears blue jeans and runs a public telephone booth allotted to him at the recommendation of the politician-resident of the big bungalow. He launders his clothes for free in exchange for a servants’ quarter. He still, however, acknowledges the master with a huzoor, janab or sahib. His emancipated son prefers to say ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ to skip the tenor of servility.

  ~

  It was in a house like the one described above on Tughlak Road that my mother and father hid their Muslim friends till they could arrange safe travel for them to Lahore during the terrible days of Partition. Their hastily packed suitcases lay in piles in our storeroom till they could be sent by my parents, one by one, to their owners who had fled in disguise to avoid being slaughtered by rampaging mobs. One of their dearest friends who had to leave in a hurry was Apa Ghiasuddin who probably fussed over me more than the summer-only aunts of Kerala bothered to do. Aunty Apa had a pale green satin sherara stitched for me which I was made to wear on many festive occasions. It made no difference whether a girl of eight wore a Malayali pavada and blouse, or a north Indian sherara and kurta. Even as people found that the politics of both the British and a section of the leadership of India and Pakistan had created two countries instead of one, dividing Hindus and Muslims like never before, it did not necessarily have to be reflected in dress and language. The Hindu kayasths and Sikh taxi drivers read and wrote Urdu, the Hindu cobbler greeted the Muslim tailor with a Jai Ram Ji Ki, and we all spoke Hindustani which was a comfortable blend of Hindi and Urdu.

  Even after Aunty Apa left for good she regularly sent small parcels from Pakistan till we lost touch after the sixties. Fifty years later, in 1998–99, her daughter Nighat sitting in Lahore, regularly watched me anchoring ‘The Woman’, a weekly programme on Zee TV that went on for a whole year. She finally wrote to me, care of the television network, in April 1999, to ask whether I was June, the same person who was the daughter of Aunty Meenakshi, her mother’s old friend. Enclosed in the letter was an old photograph of my mother and me with Nighat and Aunty Apa, taken in Delhi sometime in the late forties. Unexpected general elections and the Kargil conflict diverted my attention and delayed my reply which went only sometime in the winter of 1999. Overzealous authorities in one of our countries might have nabbed it along the way. I have never heard from Nighat again.

  ~

  In the late forties, Tughlak Road led only to Safdarjung Airport, after which there were no buildings or serious habitation. A long Sunday drive with my father meant going all the way into the countryside up to the Qutb Minar and back. Everyone slept outside in the garden under mosquito nets, whether they were senior government officials or small- time farmers and shopkeepers. I was always a bit scared until my parents came to bed alongside me as I could hear the jackals howli
ng in the night from the nearby grasslands at Safdarjung Tomb. Cows would wander in to the garden and snort into our nets. No gates were locked and armed guards were unheard of. For many years after Independence, even Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru rode from his official residence at Teen Murti Bhavan alone in the back seat of an Ambassador car, with only the driver up front. Preceding this car was a single outrider on a motorcycle. Ugly pomp and security systems were diseases that came to our democracy later, but feudalism, caste oppression and colonial voices still existed in the many clubs, offices, villages and towns of India, either blatantly or in different disguises, unfettered by the democratic spirit of freedom.

  One morning, we awoke to discover that the entire cane sofa set that lay in our verandah overlooking the garden had vanished. The Tughlak Road Police Station was only a hundred yards away as you walked out of our gate and turned right. A complaint was lodged. My father was Secretary in the Ministry of Finance so the crime was solved with zealous briskness. My mother and I walked to the police station to identify the furniture. There was a pleasant-looking man in his late thirties nonchalantly sitting on our cane sofa, one leg perched on the other, smiling and conversing with the policemen who stood around him.

  ‘Is this your sofa set, memsahib?’ asked the station house officer.