Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  ‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘But how did you find it so quickly?’

  ‘This fellow is a habitual thief,’ the policeman explained with a laugh, pointing to the man sitting on the sofa. ‘He was let out of jail just last week, but he says he has no job and nowhere to go. He steals only to be caught, so that he can get free food and lodging in jail from the government.’

  The sofa set returned to our verandah, the thief returned to the lock-up, and the police notched up another solved crime. Everyone was happy. At home, we laughed whenever we sat on that cane sofa, remembering the sheer enterprise of the thief. The expression on his face had been so unforgettable that often we could almost feel the man sitting beside us.

  Many years later, in 1996, I began an academic study of the socio-economic condition of artisans. It was to be published as a book named Vishvakarma’s Children: Stories of India’s Craftspeople.* I found that the average earning of an artisan through his craft across the country was 2,000 rupees a month. For a family of five, this meant only Rs 13.33 per head per day. During the very same period, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, answering a question raised by a Member of Parliament (MP), informed the country that the state exchequer spent Rs 48.60 per day on each prisoner it housed in Tihar Jail in Delhi. I shared this information with a group of craftspersons. One of them looked at me with a bemused expression and said: ‘That means it’s better to commit a crime and be in jail than struggle to carve a stone idol, isn’t it?’

  After forty-eight years, the thief in Tughlak Road was sitting beside me smiling again.

  ~

  Delhi was also where I discovered, lost, and gained from Mahatma Gandhi.

  In the evenings, my mother would hold my hand, walk out of the gate and turn left. The road would lead to a roundabout so typical of Lutyens’ Delhi. Turning right from there we would be at Birla House to attend Mahatma Gandhi’s daily prayer meetings. For my mother, it fulfilled both her sense of nationalism and religiosity. I quite enjoyed singing the bhajans as it reminded me of Kollengode and Trichur in the summer holidays. These bhajans, however, were in Hindi.

  On the evening of 29 January 1948, the crowd was particularly heavy. I sat a few feet away from Gandhiji. He saw me getting squeezed by a plump lady who was trying to edge her way forward. He put out his hand and drew me closer to him till I found enough room to sit comfortably. For a few moments, he stroked my head. When the prayer meeting ended, my mother hustled me out so that I did not get crushed in the crowds again.

  The next day my mother and I had just set out for Birla House—a little late. We had reached the end of Tughlak Road when we heard a loud, sharp, short noise, like something bursting. It made the hundreds of mynahs that had settled on the trees along the Albuquerque Road for the night, fly out in all directions twittering and chirping loudly. Loud cries came up from the direction of Birla House. Someone ran down the road shouting to anyone who was listening, ‘Gandhiji has been shot!’ My thoughts and memories are lost in the confusion that followed. Even the memory of Mahatma Gandhi gradually became distant and did not impinge on my life for many years. It was only in the late seventies when I returned to Delhi after living in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) for fifteen years, that Gandhi came back into my life and provided the economic and social rationale not only for my work in the handicraft sector but also for the ideological moorings during my unplanned journey into politics.

  ~

  Some months after the Emergency ended and a new government was formed in 1977, my husband was posted to Delhi after serving as the Secretary and Commissioner for Industries in the J&K government. He was appointed as the Special Assistant to George Fernandes, the Union Minister for Industries in the new Janata Party government. He had been recommended to the minister by L.K. Jha, the then Governor of J&K, but who had been a deputy secretary working under my father in the Ministry of Finance in 1950. We found George Fernandes, the famous hero who had gone underground during the Emergency and the person who had, as we had heard, led the biggest railway strike in Asia. He was a man fiercely committed to democratic socialism as defined by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Ram Manohar Lohia. Intensely energetic, single-minded about his work, and completely dedicated, among other things, to the protection and sustenance of the cottage and small sectors in the rural economy, he created the New Industrial Policy Resolution of 1977 for India that took serious note of the livelihood of the village artisan and handloom weaver. We had never seen a politician up close before, other than Sheikh Abdullah in Kashmir, who was by then like a benign father figure compared to the fiery Fernandes, who could fell people with his oratory alone. Both Ashok and I were happily surprised to find a man whose integrity and consequent fearlessness were remarkable, and who, although at a personal level rather shy and devoid of the ability to make small talk, was intellectually incisive and deadly sharp. This, despite the lack of a full and formal college education. He spoke at length about the importance of village industry and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas about sustaining rural India. He put it into practice by reserving 817 items in the small-scale and cottage sector from encroachment by the larger sectors. He spoke with Madhu Dandavate, who was the railway minister, about introducing earthenware pots in the railways to serve tea rather than the plastic or paper cups that had become fashionable.

  ~

  In the mid-nineties, I was in the Tees Hazari Court for a short but sad final hearing for my divorce by mutual consent. As I came outside, I saw a municipal worker being let down a stinking manhole into thick, black, ugly looking water to unclog something that had lodged there, blocking the underground drainage system in the outer surroundings of the court complex. He had no special protection against filth or infection for his body or for his face and hands. A dirty, pathetic person from the ‘scavenger’ class, although no one used that word anymore by law, was being let down into this lethal liquid garbage with no consideration for his health or human rights. Despite being appalled at the callousness of the municipal authorities, I resisted the temptation of going back into the court and filing a complaint with the same judge who was present during my divorce hearing. He would surely have thought I was going through a temporary mental breakdown because of the divorce. He may not necessarily have appreciated that my husband and I had shared a common lawyer and I had neither contested anything nor sought any alimony as I believed that we should share earnings only if we were together. If we were to separate, I did not want to claim the right to anything and preferred to manage on my own without any demands or bitterness. Driving back alone to New Delhi, on a sudden impulse I stopped at Rajghat and sat under a tree on a gentle grassy slope surrounding Gandhiji’s samadhi—where he was cremated—for two hours, reading from a small book of his most famous quotes. When the intense feeling of sadness and loss inside me subsided and I could face going back to work at 3, Krishna Menon Marg, and later home to my daughter, I found that I did not need to seek solace from anyone else. Gandhiji had somehow comforted me again.

  In 1998, the Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti held a commemorative programme for Kasturba Gandhi’s centenary and asked me to deliver the keynote speech on Gandhi and the present status of women. I spent several days reading from Gandhi’s writings and speeches over a period of twenty years and found a distinct transition is his attitudes and ideas from conservative to progressive, from casteist to liberal, and from patriarchal to almost feminist. I was keen to avoid the pitfalls of a clichéd approach to Gandhi. If one is examining anyone or anything objectively, one cannot allow it to be coloured by one’s own likes and dislikes. This only leads to intellectual dishonesty, a very common characteristic among many Indian politicians who lay claim to intellectual ability. I found that Gandhi had the intellectual honesty to constantly reexamine his opinions and pronouncements, correct his earlier advice given to his followers, and indulge in self-criticism in order to arrive at a better understanding of himself and any issue that he was tackling. I had put all this down in a lengthy paper and delivered the address
to a rather small gathering at Gandhi Darshan near Rajghat. Hardly anyone took notice of it until I discovered that the Gandhian institution itself had found it to be a ‘brilliant new analysis’ and printed thousands of copies to distribute as a lecture, they later published it in a book of essays on various aspects of Gandhi. I was particularly happy that the request to deliver a speech on him had led me to study and explore Gandhi’s metamorphosis into a liberal supporter of women. I had delved into little-known letters of his to various women colleagues, and his own writings in Young India, and compared his hopes and aspirations for women with the rather miserable little the Westernized women’s movement of India had done for itself in the contemporary scene.

  I suppose it would be honest and correct to say that it was George Fernandes—referred to in those days as a stormy petrel, rabble rouser, and later as unreliable, inconsistent and opportunistic—who brought Mahatma Gandhi’s life and teachings into my life. He has been both consistent and reliable in his advice that I should refer to Gandhi and Lohia whenever I needed answers to complicated political or moral questions.

  I began to understand that my work among craftspersons did have a larger and more meaningful relevance for the development of India and that it encapsulated all the other things that Gandhi spoke and wrote about—the dignity of labour, the role of women in the village economy, the needs of the poorest man, the political and economic meaning of khadi, the handloom sector, the village potter, the ill-effects of alcohol, the importance of writing as a means of communication, the spirit of swadeshi, and the meaning of political freedom. While over the years, George Sahib (as I came to call George Fernandes often) demonstrated that politics had to be a combination of struggle, constructive work, and political party-related activity, it was Gandhi who became the guiding factor in my understanding of public causes and my moral guide when the deafening chaos of self-serving politics needed to be quietened.

  ~

  In 2001, after the attack on me by Tehelka journalists in an ugly and fraudulent sting operation, I felt indignant and greatly insulted by the fact that I was being required to prove my moral integrity and honesty against accusations of corruption. One morning, there was an article in the edit page of a Hindi daily about the intrinsic characteristics of good and evil and how, quite often, the forces of corruption win because those indulging in it are ruthless, tough, rich and selfish, leaving the good weak, disorganized and ineffective. The article was in the context of the battle fought in Uttar Pradesh by a group of civil servants to identify corrupt colleagues, which came to naught. The closing lines of the article described an incident in Mahatma Gandhi’s life when he was asked by a journalist what he had to say about the allegation that he had two million pounds stashed away in the Bank of England. He had replied that if his life itself was not a good enough answer to that question, his response then would not be of any use. I knew I had been put into a situation in which I was having to and would have to spend time answering many questions; I knew I had to face many more months of accusations, allegations and taunts by a section of the media and its friends in a section of the political opposition. Reading the article, I got strength from knowing that even Gandhiji had to face the ugliness of such evil. In comparison, I was nobody, but my life and the areas of concern in my work was there for everyone to see.

  Gandhiji’s words had found a way of soothing my troubled mind. I was also reminded suddenly of the day when his gentle hand had provided me with comfort. I wonder whether the incidents we remember of our childhood stay with us to give a meaning to later incidents, and thereby a sense of cohesion and continuity in life itself.

  *Vishvakarma’s Children: Stories of India’s Craftspeople, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Co., 2001.

  4

  JAPAN DAYS

  Insight into Diplomacy

  SOON AFTER MAHATMA GANDHI’S DEMISE, my father had a disagreement with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He had been asked to carry out some work which my father believed to be neither correct nor justified. His refusal on file annoyed the prime minister enough to order my father out of the country to head the Indian consulate in San Francisco. All the arrangements had been made—our living room carpet had been sold, we had said our farewells in Kerala, and I had been taken out of school, when the prime minister’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, as we heard later, intervened with her brother to demand that a certain favourite of hers be sent to San Francisco instead. All of a sudden, our baggage labels pointed east instead of west. My father was appointed as the Head of the Indian Liaison Mission in Japan.

  In the early fifties, it took three days to reach Tokyo from Delhi by air because aviation technology did not provide for such long hauls. The first stop was Bangkok, then Hong Kong and finally Tokyo. My father went ahead. My mother and I flew a few weeks later in the midst of the typhoon season. The aircraft was tossed about so much that the luggage fell from the top shelf, the crockery flew down the aisles, the airline staff belted themselves onto their seats, and the lights went out. The passengers were petrified but, innocent of new dangers, I kept reassuring my mother that the more the ‘aeroplane’ bumped, the sooner we would reach my father. The aircraft was forced to land at the Okinawa US Air Force Base till the typhoon abated. The passengers were crowded into a large tin shed, which served as an airport, along with a large number of American soldiers lying stretched out on sofas made of rexine, exhausted and mud-caked from the battle in Korea, waiting to fly home. The typhoon shrieked and buffeted the shed. The sky was black outside. The periodic flashes of lighting however, helped see the trees getting tossed in all directions, their huge swaying branches, being blown away into the howling night. Everyone sat huddled together on the floor waiting for the storm to pass. The rough and ready canteen at one end of the airport lounge had a juke box in which the American GIs repeatedly played ‘La Vie en Rose’ till I knew it by heart. It was the first popular western song I had ever heard and have not forgotten since. There were of course the nursery rhymes taught to me by Nanny Gwynne in the calm confines of the house on Tughlak Road that we had left behind.

  We arrived at the Kato House residence in Kamifujimae-cho in Bunkyo-ku District of Tokyo in mid-July 1950 to be greeted by a gentleman housekeeper, three maids, two chauffeurs and a gardener. My parents had taken along Atholi Chandu, the bright, young scheduled caste cook who had worked in S.K. Chettur’s house in Madras. My mother had come a long way from the need for Brahmin cooks that she had asked for on her honeymoon. Chandu had impressed my parents by going to night classes and doing well in his exams while spending his days as a domestic help cooking meals for my uncle’s family. In Japan, they asked him to help out when Indian meals were required for dinner parties but paid for his studies at Tokyo University. This enabled him to pass his Grade B examinations for the Indian Foreign Service. Kato House became the Indian Ambassador’s residence for many years till a subsequent Ambassador bought a new place. Today, that imposing double-storeyed house has been torn down and a school has come up in its place. Earlier, the house with its many rooms and passageways leading to various wings of the building, lent themselves to the curious for exploring, and in its vast garden one could gather enough snow to make many a snowmen.

  Obviously, in such an establishment, my mother did not have to spend any time on housekeeping. Instead, she decided to dedicate herself to voluntary hospital work at the Blood Bank and in the General Hospital which were understaffed and full to the brim because of the Korean War. She had to wear a nurse’s uniform. For a lady from Kollengode and an Ambassador’s wife to wear a cap, stockings and a short dress may have been only mildly unusual, since trained Malayali nurses became as ubiquitous as Sikh taxi drivers all over the world. However, cleaning all kinds of messy substances off hefty American soldiers brought injured and unconscious from the Korean front, was another matter altogether. My mother would come back from hospital with a variety of stories to tell my father and me. The one that most pleased her was of how she had learned
to light a cigarette and puff it a few times to get it going before holding it to the mouth of a soldier whose hands had been blown off. Many well-known people, decorated and liveried, came to donate blood at the blood bank. My mother would give them juice, stick plaster on and hold their hands before and after a pint of blood was transferred from their bodies to the bottles, and recount to us later with great amusement how some very important person had passed out flat on his back at the sight of his own blood.

  In the meantime, I forgot all my Hindi and in three months learned to speak Japanese fluently. I even spoke Japanese in my sleep as a result of having forged an undying friendship with nine-year-old Noriko Sato across the road. Kiko-chan, as we called her, and her younger brother Kotaro, who played the violin well at a very young age, spent every waking moment with me after school work was done. We often slept nights together in one big bed. Halfway through the night my mother would hear a thud from the next room and come to find that one of us had pushed the other off the edge in our sleep. We bullied seven-year-old Kotaro most of the time and gave him no choice in the role he could play in our games.

  One day, my mother bought me a toy electric iron, which only became mildly warm, from the American PX*. Noriko and I were terribly excited and set up ‘house’ under the dining table after which we got down to ironing anything we could find that was not absolutely flat. After ironing table napkins, handkerchiefs and other sundry things we could find around the house, we decided to pull off Kotaro’s shorts and iron them as well, to discover that Kotaro had some protruding appendages underneath. We immediately decided that these too needed to be ironed. The hapless little boy had to lie still on his back, naked waist down, while two diligent and determined young housekeepers tried unsuccessfully to iron his appendages till they stayed flat! Today, Kotaro San has three children, and is a well-known musician and conductor of an important orchestra in Japan.