.The books I wasn’t supposed to be reading at 15 were stacked up in the narrow alcove behind the sitting room door in Munni mousi’s little flat. When you pushed the door open, it covered the racks and that’s probably why most people didn’t notice it. Well, I did, but then I had been coming there for years, almost every winter vacation. That was where I pushed myself in on lazy afternoons, when the grownups were catching up on a post-lunch siesta or chatting in the sun.
I would sit down on top of the stack of old newspapers (waiting to be sold to the raddiwallah some Sunday) next to the shoe boxes containing her best sandals and the gardening tools with a little bit of dry mud still sticking onto them. There I would sneak into pages from MAD comics and books like Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even Harold Robbins’ Carpetbaggers, goose pimples erupting on the skin as my eyes slipped furtively over words that I knew I should not be reading. While stealing into Munni mousi’s stack of adult literature, I would often get waylaid by thin volumes on impressionist and post-impressionist artists. That’s where I got introduced (if only in passing) to Claude Monet’s Bridge over a pond of water lilies, Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres, Gauguin’s ripe brown Tahitian women, Cezanne’s vivid colours and Vincent Van Gogh’s chopped ear and sunflowers
I would sit down on top of the stack of old newspapers (waiting to be sold to the raddiwallah some Sunday) next to the shoe boxes containing her best sandals and the gardening tools with a little bit of dry mud still sticking onto them. There I would sneak into pages from MAD comics and books like Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even Harold Robbins’ Carpetbaggers, goose pimples erupting on the skin as my eyes slipped furtively over words that I knew I should not be reading. While stealing into Munni mousi’s stack of adult literature, I would often get waylaid by thin volumes on impressionist and post-impressionist artists. That’s where I got introduced (if only in passing) to Claude Monet’s Bridge over a pond of water lilies, Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres, Gauguin’s ripe brown Tahitian women, Cezanne’s vivid colours and Vincent Van Gogh’s chopped ear and sunflowers
Prithvi Raj Banerjee is a writer, cartoonist and blogger. You can see more of his work at http://pbnerge.blogspot.com/weeblylink_new_window
I had discovered this forbidden literary treasure quite by accident one winter morning, while on an errand to fetch Nanaji’s big black umbrella. Going on that errand was considerably more respectable than the other that he would sometimes send me on – fetching his striped blue ‘janghia’ from the balcony of the lower floor flat where the wind would routinely blow it away. No doubt enamoured with its vivid design or maybe its sheer size (it was stitched by OK Tailor from 2 meters of cotton fabric home delivered in Lansdowne by a cloth merchant who considered it a great honour that Vakil sahab chose his ‘dukan’ for sourcing material for his underpants). The wind would lift it off the clothesline where it had been flapping after a wash, without a clothes peg to contain its amorous movement, and after making it float enticingly down five storeys of government flats would deposit it in the balcony of the ground level residents. That’s where I would have to sheepishly go with eyes downcast and ask them politely to have it back. I would then roll it up into an unidentifiable bundle and rush up the stairs taking them two at a time, my ears turning red from sheer embarrassment.
“Jao hamara kala chata dhund ke lao” Nanaji would summon from his throne – the large cane mouda he sunned himself in in the balcony – wrapped snugly in his thick housecoat with the big tassels draped around his ample waist. Compared to the other task, this was like asking a specialised Commando to swat a fly and I would obediently scamper off like a well trained retriever confident in the knowledge that the “chata” rested on top of the newspaper stack in the alcove behind the sitting room door, because it had fallen on me, only the other afternoon. Next to the cane mouda in the sunny part of the balcony, creating atmosphere, was the pot with the champa tree that nearly always bore two fragrant white blossoms, with yellow wombs.“I don’t know why Munni keeps this plant. It attracts snakes,” Nani would say every time the Champa tree came in her range of vision, her lips looping down at the ends, adding some more fascinating folds to the creases that age had plucked out of her papery facial skin, always gleaming from a coat of Vaseline. But since there was no chance of snakes clambering up five storey’s of stairs or taking the elevator to C 502, Curzon Road Apartments, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, nobody paid attention to her fears. Frustrated with this complete disregard for her ominous proclamations, Nani would open her fat and frayed copy of the Mahabharata to show me a picture of king Parikshit being bitten by the serpent Takshaka who had come to him as a worm inside a fruit. “Parikshit, who had put a dead snake around a rishi’s neck, was cursed to die from snake bite, and he did even though he locked himself up in a fortress where he believed no snakes could ever enter,” Nani would tell me, peering into the book from behind her thick black rimmed glasses.
Nanaji, sitting on his throne, arched at a gravity defying angle of 120 degrees, would just snort in response. And with a sly half smile he would say, “What is Hindu mythology? Full of stories concocted by crooked brahmins with selfish motives. Don’t read that rubbish. Here, read the newspaper instead.” I would have to reluctantly tear myself away from those fascinating pictures of handsome kings with pencil moustaches and bright yellow jewellery, queens with almond eyes and daringly cut blouses, and shape-shifting gods who could turn themselves into the wind, or fire, sometimes even another man, to entice away people’s wives. Ungodly behaviour, I would think, but leave it at that and get down to reading the boring newspaper headlines bracing myself for the general knowledge quiz that would inevitably follow. “Spell Nadia Comaneci” was a question that I almost always passed.
Now Nani could not have read the newspaper even if she wanted to. That was because she did not know how to read though I didn’t know it then. I’m still surprised at how many years it took me to figure this out. If you could have seen her turning the pages of the two big books she had – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - and heard her recounting those fascinating stories of Dushyant and Shakuntala and Shravan Kumar and Sati Anusuya, you would not have believed it either. In her delicious salty voice that rubbed into my soul like sandpaper, though I seem to have forgotten its texture now, she told me the same stories year after year, and they always sounded new. Her withered old finger with the cracked gold ring moving along the bold text, she would recount dialogues and point out Ram and Sita (I was made to fold my hands every time a god was mentioned) and tell me how he made the only mistake of his life by doubting his wife, shaking her head sadly. When she first started telling me these stories, I couldn’t read either and it was easy to believe that she was reading them out. When I did learn to read and made this disturbing discovery (shrewdly reading ahead of her slow moving finger) I never did tell her that the typed words did not match what she was saying. Her stories were always more real and fascinating than what some stranger had written hundreds of years back.
So maybe I got my story telling genes from this old Garhwali woman who never learnt to read or write because she never went to school and was married off at 11 years to a man, who must have loved her because he kept her secret well.
“Jao hamara kala chata dhund ke lao” Nanaji would summon from his throne – the large cane mouda he sunned himself in in the balcony – wrapped snugly in his thick housecoat with the big tassels draped around his ample waist. Compared to the other task, this was like asking a specialised Commando to swat a fly and I would obediently scamper off like a well trained retriever confident in the knowledge that the “chata” rested on top of the newspaper stack in the alcove behind the sitting room door, because it had fallen on me, only the other afternoon. Next to the cane mouda in the sunny part of the balcony, creating atmosphere, was the pot with the champa tree that nearly always bore two fragrant white blossoms, with yellow wombs.“I don’t know why Munni keeps this plant. It attracts snakes,” Nani would say every time the Champa tree came in her range of vision, her lips looping down at the ends, adding some more fascinating folds to the creases that age had plucked out of her papery facial skin, always gleaming from a coat of Vaseline. But since there was no chance of snakes clambering up five storey’s of stairs or taking the elevator to C 502, Curzon Road Apartments, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, nobody paid attention to her fears. Frustrated with this complete disregard for her ominous proclamations, Nani would open her fat and frayed copy of the Mahabharata to show me a picture of king Parikshit being bitten by the serpent Takshaka who had come to him as a worm inside a fruit. “Parikshit, who had put a dead snake around a rishi’s neck, was cursed to die from snake bite, and he did even though he locked himself up in a fortress where he believed no snakes could ever enter,” Nani would tell me, peering into the book from behind her thick black rimmed glasses.
Nanaji, sitting on his throne, arched at a gravity defying angle of 120 degrees, would just snort in response. And with a sly half smile he would say, “What is Hindu mythology? Full of stories concocted by crooked brahmins with selfish motives. Don’t read that rubbish. Here, read the newspaper instead.” I would have to reluctantly tear myself away from those fascinating pictures of handsome kings with pencil moustaches and bright yellow jewellery, queens with almond eyes and daringly cut blouses, and shape-shifting gods who could turn themselves into the wind, or fire, sometimes even another man, to entice away people’s wives. Ungodly behaviour, I would think, but leave it at that and get down to reading the boring newspaper headlines bracing myself for the general knowledge quiz that would inevitably follow. “Spell Nadia Comaneci” was a question that I almost always passed.
Now Nani could not have read the newspaper even if she wanted to. That was because she did not know how to read though I didn’t know it then. I’m still surprised at how many years it took me to figure this out. If you could have seen her turning the pages of the two big books she had – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - and heard her recounting those fascinating stories of Dushyant and Shakuntala and Shravan Kumar and Sati Anusuya, you would not have believed it either. In her delicious salty voice that rubbed into my soul like sandpaper, though I seem to have forgotten its texture now, she told me the same stories year after year, and they always sounded new. Her withered old finger with the cracked gold ring moving along the bold text, she would recount dialogues and point out Ram and Sita (I was made to fold my hands every time a god was mentioned) and tell me how he made the only mistake of his life by doubting his wife, shaking her head sadly. When she first started telling me these stories, I couldn’t read either and it was easy to believe that she was reading them out. When I did learn to read and made this disturbing discovery (shrewdly reading ahead of her slow moving finger) I never did tell her that the typed words did not match what she was saying. Her stories were always more real and fascinating than what some stranger had written hundreds of years back.
So maybe I got my story telling genes from this old Garhwali woman who never learnt to read or write because she never went to school and was married off at 11 years to a man, who must have loved her because he kept her secret well.
Janghia: Large cotton underpants; dukan: shop; chata: umbrella; Jao hamara kala chata dhund ke lao: Go and find our black umbrella; Mahabharat, Ramayana: Hindu mythological texts
Copyright© 2010 Rachna Bisht-Rawat. All rights reserved. Reproduction, or re-transmission, in whole, or in part, or in any manner, without prior written consent of the author, is in violation of the copyright law
That's Dadi, I don't have any pictures of Nani. Photo by Brigadier BS Bisht (retd)
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