A Life Misspent Read online

  SURYAKANT TRIPATHI NIRALA

  A Life Misspent

  Translated from the Hindi by

  SATTI KHANNA

  NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • NEW DELHI

  I could not find a worthy person among the eminences of Hindi letters to whom this book could be dedicated. Eminences who possessed individual qualities similar to Kulli’s seemed inadequate in comparison to the sum of Kulli’s character. Therefore, I am deferring the ceremony of dedication.

  Nirala

  Contents

  Preface

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  PS Section

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  Kulli Bhaat, who was formally known as Pandit Patvaridin Bhatt, was my friend. This little book provides an account of his life. It also happens to provide an account of my life, more openly perhaps than the orthodox would like. But genuine literary people enjoy novelty. They may forgive the inclusion of autobiography in my tale if the telling has quality. It is to those who are open to the quality of things that I am most devoted.

  Kulli Bhaat was human in a way that other human beings will honour. When I spoke to Pandit Devidatta Shukla, editor of Saraswati, about Kulli, Pandit Shukla said Kulli was his older brother’s friend. Let the reader understand by this statement that Pandit Shukla esteemed Kulli as he would his elder brother.

  The tone of the book is comic. It would be good if people did not take offence at it and thereby reveal their inadequacy as readers.

  Nirala

  Lucknow

  10.5.1939

  One

  For a long time I had been unable to fulfill the wish that I should write a biography. There was no suitable person to write about, no leader of men. I looked everywhere. I tackled histories of the great ones. Book after book enumerated their ideals. I read biographies written by the great ones themselves. It became clear to me why India is an enslaved nation. Our heroes compensate for their weaknesses with grand statements. The blaze of light around what they say hides how they live.

  I read this somewhere. A filmgoer saw a film star scale the wall of a house in a movie. The viewer, too, caught in the grip of passion, raced up the wall to his lover’s house. He fell off and broke his back. I was glad. Many poets accomplish great deeds pen in hand. They put their lives in danger. They scale the seventh heaven of literary mastery. They father socialist revolutions.

  The poet Tulsidas wrote:

  ‘If I list my faults the tale grows long,

  If hints will serve I can carry on.’

  Tulsidas believed in a poetic style suitable for ordinary, thoughtful persons. He said nothing about flourishes suitable for heroes. Literary critics are quick to remind us that Tulsidas was no hero; he was an ordinary man. Be that as it may, we know that Tulsidas retained his manly virtues from the time he came of age to the time of his demise a century later.

  The poet Bhagvati Charan said to me—and poet Ramnaresh Tripathi knows this to be based on the latest research—that Tulsidas died of heatstroke. What made it so hot for him? Was it the dancing girl Ratnavali? And was heat the cause of the pain in his left arm when he composed the Hanuman Bahuk1? I am weak on history, but I do know that Tulsidas was a man, not a hero. Whereas Emperor Akbar was a hero. He started the Din-i-Ilahi faith. He married a woman from each of the religions practised in his empire. He gathered a large following.

  My great-great grandfather’s great-great grandfather, Raja Birbal Tripathi, was a follower of Emperor Akbar. Birbal married his daughter into the Vajpeyi priestly clan. Since then the Vajpeyis too have become capable of greatness. Kanyakubja descendents like myself, of course, benefitted directly from grandfather tripled.

  In any case, just when I was hunting for a worthy subject, Kulli Bhaat died.

  Two

  Kulli Bhaat was not a public figure whose image could be managed. Only one person would have understood Kulli Bhaat’s true significance and that person is no longer alive. I am speaking of Gorky. But Gorky too paid more attention to the figure a person cut than the substance of a person’s life. He was an ideologue, a debater. Is there anyone in the world of Hindi letters who can judge such things? I hear a loud ‘No’.

  I may write a biography of interest to the wide Hindi-speaking world, but Kulli Bhaat himself lived in the provinces. The district of Rae Bareli was all he knew of land. In his declining days, he did travel once to the town of Ayodhya like a sailor voyaging across seas. The rest of his life he spent in the area around his native town of Dalmau. Through Kulli Bhaat I understood how Kabir could stand looking at ditchwater and imagine the seven seas.

  Kulli never met any celebrity whose fame could rub off on him. The exception was Pandit Devidatta Shukla, editor of Saraswati. I was the one who informed Kulli that the man he knew was a famous editor. By then Kulli had only six months left to live.

  ‘We were friends in elementary school,’ Kulli said. ‘Really, is he somebody important?’

  I smiled. ‘Your friend from elementary school edits the periodical Pandit Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi used to edit.’

  Kulli seemed sceptical; he must have been a lot bigger than his friend in elementary school. Besides, Kulli was the one who introduced Shuklaji to Baiswari poetry. The relationship between them would have been Kulli guru and Shuklaji disciple. It was Kulli who had introduced me to Baiswari poets as well, to Narhari, Harinath, Thakur, Bhuvan and many others. I was overwhelmed by their poetic power. How could I count myself a poet compared to them? Kulli may not have known how low I ranked myself. To give him some sense of Shuklaji’s stature I said, ‘You think highly of me, but I am not fit to lace Shuklaji’s shoes.’

  Kulli was pleased at my words. He began to speak as an elder brother might or as Shuklaji himself might speak. ‘Practice makes perfect. Which year was it when you came to take your wife home for the first time?’ A look of timidity crossed his face, whose meaning I could not understand then, but which came to me in a flash now. Images of my first meeting with Kulli twenty-five years ago passed before my eyes. Let me begin with that first meeting.

  Three

  I had crossed the age of sixteen, as good as reached the end of my life according to J. P. Shrivastava. Not J. P. Shrivastava alone, but all our neighbours in the village thought the same. I remember Pandit Ramgulam speaking to my father: ‘His voice has cracked. There’s moustache on his lip. Hair has sprouted under his armpits. It’s time to perform the bride-fetching ceremony and bring his wife home. Gets into fights, too, I hear.’

  ‘Yes,’ my father said and lapsed into thought.

  In the same way, when we went to fetch my bride—she was thirteen—there was a puja going on knotting us together symbolically—I don’t think it was a puja to the god of love—her grandmother said to her mother, ‘Our daughter is of age. The son-in-law is of age. If they have come to take her away, let her go.’

  So we brought my bride home.

  But the plague was raging in our village. What were we to do? The custom was to abandon one’s house during the plague and encamp in orchards. The day we travelled from Bengal was the day villagers were abandoning their houses. Before we left for my in-laws’, my father had two bamboo huts constructed under a mahua tree in our orchard.

  It was the month of June. I had never encountered Uttar Pradesh’s scorching summer before. When we reach
ed our village we were assigned one of the two huts. The door was shut upon us. Things I had never dreamed of became natural at the mere touch of my wife. I can assure young people that no maturing—not even what greybeards acquire over decades—goes as deep as this maturing.

  On the fifth day, my father-in-law came to take his daughter back for the ceremonial return to her house. He did not want to drink water from our wells and he wanted to leave before nightfall. My father was offended. My father had not travelled from Bengal2 to welcome the bride to our ancestral village for a paltry five days. He expected the daughter-in-law to stay longer. Father-in-law arrived in the morning. I had been up late the previous night and was asleep at the time. I heard about his visit from a friend in the village. By the time I awoke, Father-in-law had left with my wife. He didn’t want her exposed to the plague.

  Father was livid. ‘Weren’t you worried about my son being exposed? If this is how much you care, we can find a new bride for our son.’ Father’s threat might have had its desired effect if Father-in-law had not been hard of hearing. Father-in-law kept up a parallel flow of muttering of his own while he oversaw preparations for his departure. But Father-in-law’s daughter was all ears. One can guess how the talk between her father and father-in-law about a second bride might have struck her. The ox-cart was summoned for the trip to the railway station. My father bade them a brusque goodbye.

  The barber from Dalmau came the next day, bearing a lengthy letter from Father-in-law. The word ‘apology’ was sprinkled liberally over its pages. Father-in-law’s hearing was going. He had been unable to ascertain Father’s wishes. He invited us to come and fetch the bride for the gavani move to her husband’s home. Pleading. Pleading. And then the matter of a second marriage for me mentioned within hearing of a girl whose permanent teeth hadn’t all come in.

  Father softened. ‘You can go to your in-laws,’ he said to me. ‘But make sure you eat three times as much as you eat here.’

  ‘I will ask for three times the usual quantity of ghee and almonds. I would ask for pomegranate juice every morning if pomegranates grew there.’

  ‘Insist on a perfume oil massage every day. That should stagger them back to their senses.’

  I began preparations for the four o’clock train. The servant was sent ahead with a bedroll and a trunk. I followed him at two-thirty, fully apprised of my father’s view of my in-laws. I had dressed in the Bengali style—dhoti, shirt, shoes, umbrella. I thought of every place except Bengal as wild forest or barren desert. I believed like Bengalis that Aryans became civilized when they crossed into Bengal, and really civilized when they came into contact with the British.

  It had been cool in our water-sprinkled hut under the mahua tree. Ten steps outside the hut and Uttar Pradesh’s summer wind hit me with the force of a blow. My kundalini came awake. It was, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore says of goddess Saraswati: she parted all the veils with a single flourish. The difference is that Tagore had the veils parted sitting in his easy chair, the Prophet Moses standing on top of a mountain, and my humble self jumping over a trench dug between the orchard and the main road. ‘Go back,’ the winds of reality said to me. ‘Now that you have gained true knowledge, return to your hut.’

  My steps did not turn homeward. The courage I had imbibed from Bengal was backed by the power of love. I stumbled into a ditch as I marched ahead. I was lucky that a wild plum bush growing there broke my fall. I picked myself up smeared with Uttar Pradesh dirt and plum juice; I no longer looked the Bengali gentleman. But praise to the poet Surdas! I could find a frame of reference for my misfortune. I had only recently seen the Bilvamangal play in Calcutta. Bilvamangal rode a corpse across a river thinking it a raft. He climbed up a live snake to the balcony of his beloved thinking it a rope. Bilvamangal pursued a mere courtesan while I was travelling to rejoin my newly wedded wife. I remained resolute. Another gust of UP air assailed me. It’s not the earth that scorches; it’s the air. Kalidasa’s line sprang to mind: ‘Vanquish the earth by force of will’. Onward. My shoe waged its own battle with a stone on the footpath. The stone pried its jaw open. Never mind, I thought. I have a spare pair in my bag. Another gust. The umbrella turned inside out. I had to spin around to right the umbrella.

  The Lon river came into view, dry eight months of the year and choked with thorny bushes. The region used to be called Forest-killer, probably from all the plum and babool bushes which overran it. And yet there were twelve principalities carved out of this tiny region, twelve different princes seeking independence for their locality. I had on a dhoti with a multicoloured border. The border flew up to embrace a thorn bush and refused to be parted. A hundred thorns poked through the dhoti. I was getting late. A hard tug at the edge of the cloth and the dhoti filled with gashes. Triangular victory pennants fluttered on the thorn bush.

  It had been an expensive dhoti, woven in Shantipur and purchased expressly for the first visit to my in-laws the way writers write essays expressly for particular magazines. I took comfort from the thought of other dhotis packed in my bag.

  I climbed out of the riverbed. The Behta cremation ground lay ahead. I heard the growling of an engine. A mile of barren ground stretched between me and the train station. I broke into a run. ‘It is unbecoming to run,’ I scolded myself. Umbrella tucked under my arm, shoes in hand, mid-afternoon heat overhead. I could see the station. The engine was taking water. I quickened my pace. The sand beneath my feet burned like coals. Faster. My clothes clung to my body. Any second now I would stumble and break my neck.

  Our servant, Chandrika Prasad, the one whose permanent teeth never grew out, chose this moment to raise his head and look in my direction. His lips sat unevenly over the hollow mouth. He had already bought train tickets. I was filled with hope. He smiled on seeing me, handed me my ticket and pushed the luggage in from the side of the station where there was no railway platform. There was only one platform at the station. Chandrika had gotten off it wondering where I was. Now he helped us get in from the wrong side.

  The interior of the carriage was hot as an oven. If Chandrika had not fanned me with his shoulder cloth I would have passed out. It grew cooler once the train began to move. I put on fresh clothes.

  Dalmau was the fifth stop. The sun was low on the horizon, but there was enough light to make out faces. Chandrika picked up our luggage and walked past the ticket-checker. There was a man standing by the gate, dressed in the Lucknow style—hair slicked down, curls, Nehru cap askew. A Bengali would have glanced at his kurta, his black-bordered dhoti, his fine shoes from Meerut and typed him immediately as a small town crook. Whether Muslim or Hindu hard to tell. Age twenty-five, give or take a couple of years. To the ordinary eye, tall and well-built.

  He approached as soon as I had surrendered my ticket. ‘Which way are you headed?’

  ‘Sherandazpur,’ I said.

  ‘Come with me. I have my trap here.’ He called out to the driver while inspecting me carefully. ‘Where are you staying?’

  I gave my father-in-law’s name. I took no special notice of the man. I had judged quickly that the man’s shape and build did not match my ideal. He was two inches shorter than me and lighter of build.

  I sat in front with the driver of the trap. Chandrika sat by me. The master of the trap gazed at me for some time before taking his seat in the back. I did not recognize the gaze then; I do now. It is the sort of gaze bestowed upon an exceedingly beautiful woman at the height of her beauty.

  Chandrika stared idiotically first at him, then at me. The master of the trap was silent, lost in his emotions. I had nothing to say. The trap moved forward, entered the quarter where my father-in-law lived and stopped in front of his house. The master had jumped off at the street crossing. I didn’t think he had spoken to the driver before he got off.

  When I began to count out the fare, the driver said his master had instructed him not to accept payment. ‘I know nothing about your master. He is not my master in any case. If he didn’t want to be paid he shoul
d have told me so at the outset.’

  The driver put out his hand, but added, ‘I will lose my job if he finds out.’ I realized he would pocket the fare. By now many people from my in-laws’ house came out to the trap. I got ready to greet them.

  Four

  I bent down and touched my mother-in-law’s feet. She pointed me to a bed on which a galeecha had been laid. When I looked up I saw anxiety written on her face. ‘Was it Kulli’s trap you travelled on from the station?’

  Kulli must be an untouchable. ‘Such scruples are outdated now,’ I said. But Mother-in-law’s anxiety did not disappear. She kept glancing at my long, wavy hair combed in the Bengali way. Had she made an unnatural choice for her daughter? Would her child’s life be ruined forever? The printed border of my dhoti seemed to confirm her suspicions. She heaved a sigh and went into the inner rooms.

  From where I sat, I could see a chilval tree in the courtyard. That must be the branch from which they hang a swing, I thought to myself. The girl who swings on that swing singing ragas of the rainy season must be singing about me—about the pangs of separation and the joy of union.

  A young woman’s laughter rippled out from an inner room. I had not heard this particular laugh before, but I had no trouble recognizing whose it was. Its waves carried deep meaning for me. They said, ‘You are mine, I know it. Having you, I lack nothing. Others may not recognize who you are. I recognize you and I am content.’

  Chandrika was sitting on a bedroll staring at the sky. The stars were out. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘Are there more people on earth or more stars in the sky?’

  ‘What is your view?’ I asked.

  Chandrika smiled, ‘Who says the earth is smaller than the sky, horizon to horizon, end to end? There are more people.’

  Mother-in-law brought lemonade. Their servant had just stepped out. When he returned she asked him to serve water. Her face was radiant, brighter than the bright moon. Her daughter must have dispelled the doubts in her mind. She said to me in an affectionate tone, ‘Here, son, drink your lemonade.’