My Name Is Radha Read online

  She wasn’t beautiful, but she was a model of femininity in her own way. Humility, the desire to respect and worship, and adarsh, so characteristic of a Hindu woman’s nature, had come together in Nigar in a most pleasing combination. Back then the image would never even have occurred to me, but now whenever I think of her, she appears to me as a beautiful confluence of the Muslim namaz and the Hindu aarti.

  She practically worshipped Shahzada Ghulam Ali. He too adored her. When I asked him about her, he told me they had met during the Congress rallies and after a brief time together had decided to tie the knot.

  Ghulam Ali wanted to marry her before his imminent arrest. I had no idea why. He could just as easily have married her after his release. Prison sentences used to be quite short in those days. Three months, at most a year. Some were let go after only a fortnight to make room for others. Anyway, he’d told Nigar of his plan and she was willing. All that was needed was Babaji’s blessing.

  Babaji, as you must know, was a major figure. In those days he was staying outside the city in the palatial lodgings of the city’s richest jeweller, Lala Hari Ram. Ordinarily he lived in his ashram in a neighbouring village. But whenever he came to Amritsar, he encamped at Hari Ram’s. For the duration of his stay this house became a shrine for his devotees, who would stand in long lines, patiently waiting for his darshan. In the evening, seated on a wooden platform laid out under a cluster of mango trees some distance from the house, Babaji gave a general audience and accepted donations for his ashram. This was followed by the chanting of bhajans, and the session would end at his bidding.

  Babaji was an abstemious and God-fearing man. He was also very learned and intelligent. These qualities had endeared him to everyone—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Untouchable alike. Everybody considered him their leader.

  On the face of it, Babaji was indifferent to politics, but it was an open secret that every political movement in Punjab began and ended at his behest. The government found him intractable, a political riddle that even the brainiest government functionaries could never hope to solve. His barest smile stirred up widespread speculation, but when he proceeded to interpret it himself in an entirely novel way, the populace, already in thrall, felt truly overwhelmed.

  The civil disobedience movement in Amritsar, with its frequent arrests, quite clearly owed a lot to Babaji’s influence. Every evening at darshan, he’d drop an innocuous word from his toothless mouth about the freedom movement in the whole of Punjab and about the fresh and increasingly harsh measures being taken by the government, and the mighty leaders of the time would scramble to pick it up and hang it around their necks like a priceless amulet.

  People said that Babaji’s eyes had a magnetic quality, his voice was magical, and he had a cool head—so cool indeed that the worst obscenities, the sharpest sarcasm, could not provoke him, not even for the hundredth of a second—which made his opponents writhe in frustration.

  He must have taken part in hundreds of demonstrations in Amritsar, but, strangely, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of him, from near or far, although I’d seen every other leader. Thus when Ghulam Ali mentioned that he was planning to seek Babaji’s permission to marry, I asked him to take me along.

  The very next day Ghulam Ali arranged for a tonga, and we arrived at Lala Hari Ram’s magnificent mansion.

  Babaji was done with his morning ashnan* and worship, and was listening to a beautiful panditani† sing patriotic songs. He was seated on a palm mat spread out on the immaculate white tile floor. A bolster lay near him but he wasn’t leaning against it.

  The room had no other furnishings besides the mat. The panditani’s light brown complexion looked stunningly beautiful in the light reflecting off the tiles.

  In spite of being an old man of seventy or seventy-two, Babaji’s entire body—clad only in a tiny red ochre loincloth—was free of wrinkles. His skin had a rich dark colour. I learned later that he had olive oil rubbed into it before taking a bath.

  He greeted Shahzada Ghulam Ali with a smile, and glanced at me. He acknowledged our greetings by a slight widening of his smile and then made a sign for us to sit down.

  Today when I recall that scene and examine it closely, I find it quite intriguing. A half-naked old man sitting on a palm mat in the style of a yogi; his posture, his bald head, his half-open eyes, his soft tawny body, indeed every line in his face radiated a tranquil contentment, an unassailable conviction that he could not be dislodged, not even by the worst earthquake, from the summit on which the world had placed him. And beside him sits a just-opened bud from the vale of Kashmir, her head bowed partly out of respect for the elderly man, the effect of the patriotic song, and her own boundless youth yearning to spill out of the confining folds of her coarse white sari and sing not just a song for the country, but to her youth as well; she wanted to honour not just the nearness of this elderly man, but also that of some healthy young man who would have the courage to grab her hand and jump head first into life’s raging fire. Opposite the elderly man’s granite confidence and serenity, her light brown complexion, her dark lively eyes, her bosom heaving inside her coarse khadi blouse—all seemed to throw a silent challenge: Come, pull me down from where I stand, or lift me up to sublimity.

  Nigar, Shahzada Ghulam Ali and I sat somewhat off to one side; I was frozen like an idiot, equally flustered by Babaji’s imposing personality and the unblemished beauty of the young Kashmiri woman. The glossy tiles also had an effect on me, indeed quite an effect. Would the pandit girl let me kiss her eyes, just once? The thought pulsated through my body, and my mind immediately darted off to my maidservant, for whom I’d begun to feel something lately. I felt like leaving the assembly and heading directly home—perhaps I would succeed in stealthily luring her upstairs to the bathroom. I just might. But the second my glance fell on Babaji and the passionate strains of the nationalistic song filled my ears, a different thought began to course through my body: If I could just get hold of a handgun, I’d rush to the Civil Lines area and make short work of the English.

  And next to this idiot sat Nigar and Ghulam Ali, a pair of hearts in love, somewhat tired of their long and uneventful throbbing, ready to melt into each other’s embrace and find those other shades of love. In other words, they’d come to ask Babaji, their uncontested political leader, for permission to marry. Obviously it was not the song of the nation that resonated in their ears at that moment. It was their own song, beautiful, but as yet unsung.

  The song ended. With a hand gesture Babaji gave his blessing to the panditani and then turned, smiling, to Nigar and Ghulam Ali, again managing a small glance at me as well.

  Ghulam Ali was perhaps about to introduce himself and Nigar but Babaji—goodness, his memory!—quickly said to him in his sweet voice, ‘Prince, you haven’t been arrested yet?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ Ghulam Ali replied, his hands folded in respect.

  Babaji picked out a pencil from a box and toyed with it as he said, ‘But you are—I think.’

  The remark went over Ghulam Ali’s head. So Babaji looked at the panditani and said, pointing at Nigar, ‘Nigar has captured our Prince.’

  Nigar blushed. Ghulam Ali’s mouth fell open. And the panditani’s light brown complexion flushed with good wishes. She gave the pair a look that seemed to say, ‘How wonderful!’

  Babaji looked at the panditani once again. ‘These children,’ he said to her, ‘have come to ask for my permission. How about you, Kamal, when are you going to get married?’

  So she was called Kamal! The abrupt question caught her off guard, and she turned red in the face. ‘Me?’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I’ve decided to join your ashram.’

  She said this with a trace of regret, which Babaji’s perceptive mind registered instantly. He gave her a smile, the soft smile of a yogi, and then turned to Ghulam Ali and Nigar and asked, ‘So have the two of you made up your minds?’

  ‘Yes,’ they answered softly in unison.

  Babaji scanned them with his politician�
��s eyes. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘one is obliged to change the decisions one has made.’

  For the first time in Babaji’s lofty presence, Ghulam Ali unleashed the boldness of his coltish youth, saying, ‘Even if our decision is put off for some reason, it will never change!’

  Babaji closed his eyes and proceeded to question him in the manner of a lawyer. ‘Why?’

  Surprisingly, Ghulam Ali didn’t lose his nerve at all. His ardent love for Nigar made him say, ‘Circumstances may force us to put it off, but our decision to free India is irrevocable. Absolutely!’

  Looking back, I now feel that Babaji hadn’t thought it worthwhile to query him further on the subject and just smiled—a smile which everyone present must have interpreted in his or her own way. And if asked, Babaji would have given it a radically different meaning. Of that I’m sure.

  Anyway, stretching the smile which evoked a thousand different meanings, he said, ‘Nigar, come join our ashram! It is only a matter of days before Prince is sent to jail.’

  ‘All right, I will,’ she answered softly.

  Babaji changed the subject and asked about the revolutionary activities in the Jallianwala Bagh camp. Ghulam Ali, Nigar and Kamal filled him in for what seemed like a long time about various arrests, releases, and even about milk, lassi and vegetables. During this time I sat there like a bumpkin, wondering why Babaji was dilly-dallying so much in giving his blessing to Ghulam Ali and Nigar. Did he have doubts about their love for each other? About Ghulam Ali’s sincerity? Had he invited Nigar to the ashram just to help her get over the pain she’d feel upon her husband’s incarceration? But then, why had Kamal responded to Babaji’s question, ‘Kamal, when are you going to get married?’ with ‘I’ve decided to join your ashram’? Didn’t men and women marry at the ashram? These kinds of questions kept raging inside my head as the four of them speculated on whether the number of lady volunteers was enough to deliver chapattis for five hundred militants on time. How many stoves were there? How large were the griddles? Couldn’t one get a griddle big enough for six women to bake chapattis on all at once?

  This pandit girl, Kamal, would she just chant national songs and religious bhajans for Babaji’s edification once she was admitted to the ashram, I wondered. I had seen the male volunteers of the ashram. True enough, they all took their ritual bath and brushed their teeth every morning, spent most of their time out in the open air and chanted bhajans in accordance with the rules of the ashram, but their clothing still reeked of perspiration, didn’t it? Quite a few had bad breath to boot. And I never saw on anyone even a trace of the good nature and freshness one associates with outdoor living. Instead, they looked stooped and repressed, their faces pallid, eyes sunken and bodies ravaged—as blanched and lifeless as the udders of a cow from which even the last drop of milk has been squeezed out.

  I’d seen these ashram-wallahs on numerous occasions in Jallianwala Bagh. I couldn’t imagine Kamal, who was moulded in her entirety out of milk, honey and saffron, being subjected to the gaze of these men with nothing but filth in their eyes. Would she—a being swathed all over in the scent of lobaan—have to listen to these men with their mouths smelling worse than the stench of rotting mulch? Perhaps, I thought, the independence of India was above all this.

  But this ‘perhaps’ was not something I could understand, what with my patriotism and passion for the country’s freedom. I thought of Nigar, who was sitting very close to me and telling Babaji that turnips usually took quite a long time to cook. For heaven’s sake, what had turnips got to do with marriage? She and Ghulam Ali had come for Babaji’s blessing to get married, hadn’t they?

  My thoughts wandered off to Nigar and the ashram, which I had never visited. Ashrams, vidyalayas, jamat-khanas, takiyas and darsgahs, all such places inspire only the deepest revulsion in me. I don’t know why. I’ve often seen boys and the caretakers of orphanages and schools for the blind walking in a row along streets asking for handouts. I have also seen jamat-khanas and darsgahs: Boys in shar‘i pyjamas worn well above their ankles, their foreheads marked with calluses despite their tender age, the slightly older boys sporting thick bushy beards, the younger ones with a revolting growth of sparse bristles on their cheeks and chins—all absorbed in prayer, but their faces reflecting pure beastliness.

  Nigar was a woman, not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Christian, just a woman. No, she was more than that, a woman’s prayer intended for her lover, or for one whom she herself loved with all her heart. I couldn’t imagine her—she who was herself a prayer—raising her hands in supplication every morning as required by the rules of Babaji’s ashram.

  Today as I recall Babaji, Nigar, Ghulam Ali, the ravishingly beautiful pandit girl, indeed the entire atmosphere of Amritsar, engulfed as it was in those days in the fine romantic haze created by the movement for independence—all appear like a dream, the sort one longs to have over and over again.

  I still haven’t seen Babaji’s ashram, but I hate it as passionately today as I did then. I don’t care at all for a place where people are subjected to an unnatural way of life. To strive for freedom is fine. I can even understand dying for it. But to turn living people into mere vegetables, without passion or drive, is beyond me. To live in poor housing, shun amenities, sing the Lord’s praises, shout out patriotic slogans—fine! But to stifle in humans the very desire for beauty! What kind of humans have no feeling for beauty, no zest for life? Show me the difference between the ashrams, madrasas and vidyalayas that accomplish this and a field of horseradishes!

  Babaji sat talking about the other activities in Jallianwala Bagh with Ghulam Ali and Nigar for a long time. Finally he told the couple, who, apparently, had not forgotten the purpose of their visit, to return there, and promised to wed them himself in the evening on the following day.

  The two were elated. What greater fortune could there be than to have Babaji himself perform their marriage! Ghulam Ali later told me that he had become so overjoyed he thought it couldn’t be true. Babaji’s slightest gesture turned into a historic event. He couldn’t believe that such a great man would personally come to Jallianwala Bagh for the sake of an ordinary man, a man who had become the Congress’s ‘dictator’ merely by accident. Precisely the headline which splashed across the front pages of newspapers throughout India.

  All day long Ghulam Ali wondered whether Babaji would really show up. Wasn’t he a terribly busy man after all? But the doubt, which he had raised as a psychological precaution, proved wrong. Promptly at 6 p.m., just as the bushes of raat ki rani were beginning to pour forth their fragrance, and a band of volunteers who had set up a small tent for the bride and groom was decorating it with jasmines, marigolds and roses, Babaji walked in, supporting himself on his lathi, with the patriotic song-spouting pandit girl, his secretary and Lala Hari Ram in tow. The news of his arrival came moments before when Lala Hari Ram’s green car pulled up at Jallianwala Bagh’s main entrance.

  I too was there. In another small tent, lady volunteers were helping Nigar into her bridal attire. Ghulam Ali had made no special arrangements. He’d spent the whole day negotiating with the city’s banias for provisions to feed the volunteers, after which he’d stolen a few moments to talk briefly with Nigar in private, and then, as I recall, told the officers under his charge only that at the end of the wedding ceremony he and Nigar would raise the flag together.

  Ghulam Ali was standing by the well when he heard that Babaji had arrived, and, if I remember correctly, I was asking him, ‘You know, Ghulam Ali, don’t you, how this well was once filled to its mouth with the bodies of people slain in the firing? Today everybody drinks from it. It has watered every flower in this park. People come and pluck those flowers. But strangely, not even a drop carries the salty taste of blood. Not a single petal of a single flower has the redness of blood in it. Why is that?’

  I vividly remember that as I spoke I had looked at the window of a neighbouring house where, it is said, a young girl had been shot dead by General Dyer as she stood w
atching the massacre. The streak of blood had begun to fade on the old lime wall behind the window.

  Blood had become so cheap that spilling it no longer affected people as it once had. I remember I was in the third or fourth standard at school, and six or seven months after the bloody massacre our teacher had taken us to see Jallianwala Bagh. It hardly looked like a park then, just a dreary and desolate stretch of uneven earth, strewn all over with clods of dried dirt. I remember how the teacher had picked up a small clod, reddened I believe from paan spittle, and showed it to us, saying, ‘Look, it’s still red from the blood of our martyrs!’

  As I write this story myriad things keep coming to mind. But it is the story of Ghulam Ali and Nigar’s marriage that I want to write, isn’t it?

  Anyway, upon hearing that Babaji had arrived, Ghulam Ali rushed to gather the volunteers in one place. Together they gave Babaji a military salute. The two inspected different camps for quite some time. All the while Babaji, who had a keen sense of humour, fired off numerous witty remarks during conversation with female volunteers and other workers.

  In the meantime, the evening haze began to settle over Jallianwala Bagh and lights came on here and there in nearby houses. A group of volunteer women started to chant bhajans. They sang in unison, some sweetly, but most harshly and out of tune. Together, though, they sounded pleasant enough. Babaji was listening with his eyes closed. Roughly a thousand people must have gathered. They sat on the ground around the platform. Except for the bhajan-singing girls, everyone else was quiet.

  The chanting tapered off into a silence which seemed anxious to be broken. So when Babaji opened his eyes and trilled sweetly, ‘Children, as you already know, I’m here to unite these two freedom lovers in marriage,’ the entire Bagh resonated with loud cries of jubilation.