Shueli's Star

Novel
Anna Sujatha Mathai

Previous Chapters

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Tent School and First Love 
​
When they left the Presentation Convent, it was to join the Cathedral School in New Delhi. This meant they had to get up very early to catch the School Bus, as they had miles to travel from the College campus. The driver, Afzal, would horn thrice, and wait till the children had climbed in, laden with school satchels, lunch boxes and plastic water-carriers. Then he would drive like a madman, scattering tongas, cyclists and indifferent pedestrians, to right and left. The new school was altogether different from the Convent school - wild and chaotic, holding its vital existence together in a sprawling complex of tents, - randomly pitched in the compound of the Cathedral of the Redemption. It was as if a series of accidents had thrown these tents, this Cathedral, and these children all together. Presiding over the entire scene was a rather red-faced Englishman, who believed in old-fashioned discipline and chastisement to keep the children in good order. But how could  you keep any order in tents , which seemed like parables of the nomadic state, rather than firm buildings, proclaiming an ordered state of things? The children weren’t quite wild, but managed an unusual degree of freedom, because of the openness of the school. Principal Harrison’s attempts at discipline became almost a joke. Dhiren Roy or Atul Dhingra, the worst of all the boys, would turn up in class, boasting: “Got to get a caning from old Harrison today, yaar. Who cares, I say? Got three books to save my bum!” They had provided ample protection for themselves, in the form of books stuffed into the seat of their pants. The English Principal kept a series of canes, which were proudly displayed in his Office, and which landed unceremoniously on many a padded or unpadded bottom. The likes of Atul Dhingra always came out, grinning unashamedly. “Yaar, I didn’t feel a thing. Bottom was too well padded, yaar!” He would become, at least for the day, quite a hero to the girls, and the other boys would give him congratulatory slaps on the back. Benches were arranged in each of the tents, and the teacher sat at a desk in the middle. There was no segregation between the boys and girls, only the natural segregation of shyness and dislike that exists between boys and girls at that age.. When it rained, everyone stood on the table, as the compound got flooded, and the rain beat in. Children would be screaming, yelling with delight. Teachers would call out, half-heartedly: “Order. Order, boys and girls. BEHAVE yourselves!” With absolutely no effect.. If all this didn’t much aid the process of education, it certainly added to the excitement of growing up. There was one particular teacher whom the children liked to tease. Only years later, when Kartik was telling her of one of his teachers, who was a constant target for the boys, did Shueli, remembering those times, think that the fun had bordered on cruelty. Mrs. Wagle,  only 4ft.10” in her heels, taught them Indian History, and, as the saga of the Moghuls, and the romance of British India, was unfurled before them, the children did everything they could, to distract and disturb. “The very idea! I mean to say..” was Mrs. Wagle’s frequent and ineffective way of dealing with insurrection. The boys would pull up their chairs very close, asking question after question with feigned interest. “How many wives did Akbar have, Ma’am? Ma’am tell us about the Battle of Plassey again. Did Mumtaz Mahal really have 14 children, Ma’am?” The girls, Shueli included, would be in splits with giggling. Finally, in despair, Ma’am would yell at one or two of them:  “Shueli, go and stand OUTSIDE.  I mean to say!  The very idea! I don’t know what the world is coming to these days!” She had very few teeth left, and, chewing furiously on these, she would mumble: “The very IDEA. You don’t know a thing about Suttee and how Lord Bentinck abolished it. Of course, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others were the Indian reformers who brought about the end of that terrible practice. Take out your note books at once, and write...”
Her sparse henna coloured hair would escape from the small rubber band in which she tied it. One of the boys who teased Ma’am most, had green eyes, and loved to scribble lines of poetry everywhere, while gazing enigmatically at the girls. Whether this was calculated or not, Shueli would never know. A strange shiver would run down her spine every time he fixed his limpid green eyes on her. His note-books, covered with lines of poetry were left carefully, carelessly all over the place. They seemed to deliver messages, unexpressed feelings... Sometimes in green ink.  Sometimes in red.
“O lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fall!
And let thy love in kisses rain
Upon my cheeks and eyelids pale.”
Or “The champak odours pine
Like sweet thoughts in a dream,
The nightingale’s complaint
It dies upon her heart
As I must die on Thine,
Beloved as Thou art!”
Though not the visionary Keats of the Bright Star that Shueli loved, but the seeping, rotten, decadent, sickly sweet, romantic love of the adolescent Percy Bysshe Shelley, it yet held great appeal for Shueli, just on the threshold of the teens. A kind of grief would seize her - the grief of a distant, hopeless, unattainable love, though it was an emotion she knew little or nothing of at the time. Young Arif’s green eyes seemed to open doors to that unknown country, and the poetry carried one into the heart of that forbidden world. She was so shielded, so sheltered in her life - she could only guess at that state of being, which seemed to cause so much pain and joy to adults. “Sometimes” she whispered to Gaya, “I feel like running through the streets at night, free as the wind..” But that was an impossibility. That desire to break the bars that held her prisoner, would come back, cruelly mocking, in Kavipuram. More  cruel, because there she seemed denied of even hope.
One of Shueli’s best friends in school seemed to her to have this kind of freedom. Her father was a diplomat, and it was only between schools in Washington, Rome or Amsterdam, that Shalini spent a term or two at the Delhi school. Shueli would feel the thrill of far away places, when the letters from Shalini, with bright stamps on them, reached her. Shalini’s handwriting was as flamboyant as her imagination. “I met Charles Boyer in the lift of the Hilton. He asked me if I was a Hindu..’ or “Was walking down the Via Veneto, and the Italian boys whistled and called ‘Bella. Bellisimma. Molto Bella.” Shueli believed every word of it, and was suitably impressed. Shalini’s letters, too, were covered with quotes from here and there, mostly lines of poetry: “Lips that are for others! O Death in Life! The days that are no more.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of course.
When Shalini came back to the Delhi school, she thought up a great many exploits that made life altogether more exciting. One of them was to slip out of class, and creep into the Cathedral. The two girls would climb the narrow stairs leading to the church belfry and up to where the great bell-metal bells of the church hung. There they would sit, looking down at the gardens below, and the tents of their school just beyond. Utterly happy in their rebel truancy, they quoted lines of poetry to each other, or repeated some of the further exploits of Green Eyes and the other boys, amidst giggles. The possibility of being caught and punished by Harrison made it even more thrilling!
Because of the great distance between the University campus and the school, Shueli and Gaya almost sleep-walked in the  early morning dark.  “Shueli, tie your shoe-laces. Gaya, brush your teeth. Stand still - let me comb your hair properly. Don’t forget your lunch dabba and water bottle.” The sleepy children would be hustled into the bus by Ram Singh, or maybe Papa. By the time they got home, late in the evening, exhausted by the long day, and being packed into the crowded bus, it was too late to do much else. Shueli would have loved to study music, - Ammy had played both the veena and the piano as a girl, - but the difficult timings kept music a distant possibility. Shueli had felt a passion for drama and the theatre at a very early stage. She and the other children of the campus staff would write short plays, and invite the college staff to be the audience. There would be a great flurry of bed-sheets and strings, and odd-looking costumes, and then the play would start, followed by polite clapping and murmurs of  “Clever girls! Aren’t they clever?” It was a passion that was to dominate Shueli in her coming years, fuelled by her winning the coveted award of Best Actress at the University several years later. She remembered the thrill of meeting an impressive old couple at a Theatre Group, and listening to their readings from English poetry. The lady had piercing blue eyes, and a voice that haunted Shueli for years...”She bade me take love easy,/ As the leaves grow on the trees, / But I, being young and foolish,/ With her would not agree.” Those words moved Shueli to tears, suggesting the tenuous and dangerous border between her own youthfulness, and the love and experience she thirsted for. At home, too, there was plenty of poetry. Often they would creep up on Papa, reading poetry aloud to himself. Tennyson, Shakespeare, Eliot, old Sanskrit poetry (he had studied Sanskrit in his little Honavar school, and later at Bombay University.) Once when  he found Shueli reading a rather silly romance, he suggested she should find something better to read, “But why not?’ she muttered rebelliously, “What’s wrong in reading romances?” “Nothing wrong” said Papa, “but suppose you had only one day by the sea, and never collected any of the beautiful shells, because you were so busy collecting stones, .. or sand? Mightn’t you regret it later? On one of their long, evening walks, he suggested to Shueli that she should keep a Diary. Fat note books were bought, much poetry scribbled in it, between comments on life and death and human misery. And, of course, a great deal about the boys in the class, especially Green Eyes and his scribblings and calculated stares.
One of the other teachers at school was an old Anglo-Indian lady, whose life was, perhaps, even more wretched and isolated than Ma’am’s.  Miss Metcalfe taught Mathematics, which Shueli detested, and no amount of teaching could get it across to her. Miss Metcalfe would walk into the class absent-mindedly, sometimes with the wrong shoe on each foot. She seemed to emerge from some hoary world where these things did not matter. She would struggle to teach maths, or, sometimes, the greater complexities of trignometry, algebra or geometry. but the class sat in stony-faced refusal to respond. Her grey, drab clothes, enlivened only by her eccentricities in sartorial taste, made Shueli feel grey within. She would come to life only to hear Miss Metcalfe, in despair, crying out: “You scholars! You are  Hopeless. Why can’t you Understand?  Here I am, telling you about the theories of Pythagoras and Euclid, and you don’t even care to listen... I shall Fly  away, out of this room, one day.” Shueli had visions of a witch on a broom-stick, with one red shoe and one blue shoe, flying off into the sky, waving and calling, “Goodbye, scholars! Goodbye!” One day the Principal informed the Class that Miss Metcalfe would no longer be taking their Maths class, which was cheered by them. A smart, young lady in a sari, recently returned from an English University, very firm and efficient, took Miss Metcalfe’s place. Miss Metcalfe never returned. She had, indeed, vanished on her broom to that other world, free of troublesome “scholars.” She had no relatives, no one to mourn her.  Quite unlike Mrs. Wagle. When Ma’am died, her son and daughter-in-law and grandchild were by her side. Her students, taken in a bus to the narrow ‘mohalla’ lane where she lived, filed in, in an orderly fashion, to pay their last respects. She lay on the wide bed, where she obviously slept alone. The sparse, mehndi-dyed red hair hung pathetically around the shrunken face. Her jaws had dropped, and the mouth which had so frequently dwelt on ‘the very idea” - had almost disappeared. No more History. No more Vedic Period. No more Moghuls.  Ended, the British Raj. Ma’am had always told Shueli that if she decided on History as her subject, she’d be “a First Class student throughout.” But Shueli couldn’t resist the lure of Literature, and besides, as everyone would say to her in ponderous tones: “So you’re going to follow in your father’s footsteps?” To which, she’d reply a shy, but joyous “Yes!”
Now Ma’am would never return to persuade Shueli to study History. They had teased and pestered Ma’am so much, but she had cared for them to the very end, and not given up. That, it seemed to Shueli, looking back, was what caring meant. Shueli wept uncomprehending, but real tears for her first ever death. They followed the little van, carrying Ma’am’s shrunken body in the last embrace of death, through the crowded, winding mohalla lane, for the final journey to the cremation grounds. There, her son would light the fire that would consume the remains of her wasted body, and release the spirit, a caged bird, within.
There was a quietness in the classroom for some days after, as if the children had been cowed by the appearance of that strict disciplinarian who had visited Ma’am, and carried her away. But, noisiness and chaos were soon back. Shueli decided she would not take History as her subject after all. History told you about events, studied the politics of power, but Literature took you within , to the mystery of the inner world. For instance, the sting of jealousy and possessiveness which Shueli felt for the first time - surely it was Literature that would help her understand. Shalini had just returned from Rome, very bouncy and full of stories, wearing a gorgeous pleated skirt, with a striking emerald green blazer. Shueli didn’t  have such pretty clothes, she and Gaya had to make do with things that Ammy could afford from her small household budget, as Papa still sent home money for one or other of his younger brothers and sisters. Just the other day, at a Sale organised in the College, Ammy had picked up a rich chocolate brown dress, with embroidery on it. Shueli wore it with a belt, and it looked quite good on her emerging young body, but it really was rather long and old-fashioned. The College Principal and his wife, smiled and said: “How sweet Shueli looks. Our sweet little missionary” - which threw Shueli into the very depths of gloom. To make things even more unbearable, that very week, in class, Green Eyes, staring at them in his hypnotic, other-worldly way, wrote in bold green ink on his notebook: Star of the Class! and left it, very conspicuously, close to Shalini. Shalini was filled with the pride of the preferred and outstanding, while Shueli felt an inexplicable dark abyss open up within her. She began to wonder if it was this - this Horrible Pain - that people referred to as Love. She lay on her bed and wept. She snapped at Ammy and Gaya. In her Diary, where she scratched dark, inscrutable images of the pain of living, she wrote: “How can I ever be happy with a Mother and a Sister like this, who don’t understand me one bit?” They would never understand! But when Green eyes asked her to act in the School Play, she touched the heights of heaven. She was like a girl on a swing.  Up, then down. Like when she was drawing water from the well at Tiruvella.

CHAPTER NINE

Partitions
 
An unearthly yellow light hung over the city of Delhi. It was shrouded in a miasma of - what was it? - something that smelled like evil. Shueli had never known that light, that smell before.
“Ammy, Ammy, come out and see! What is this strange light - making the whole world frightening and ugly?” Everyone came running out, looking upwards apprehensively. “Locusts!” someone shrieked. And then they saw that the locusts had cut off the sun. They flew in great regiments of menace. Where to? To plunder the fields, leave famine in their wake. Ammy had told Shueli about the Bengal Famine, in which people had died of starvation all over Bengal. “People used to fall dead on the streets of Calcutta. Those fat, wicked banias and lallajees used to hoard food, and make money out of all that misery. You see all the ships that used to bring food there, had been taken off by the British, because they were afraid the Japanese would land there..” And now, as the locusts flew, a kind of darkness seemed to cover the land. The servant boy, gentle, handsome Rasheed, whose father was a cook in the College Mess, ran out, crying in a strangled kind of voice, “Bismillah, ya Allah! The night of slaughter is here!” The lawn glimmered with an iridescent glow, somewhat like snow in moonlight, as petals, or dying locusts  plummeted down. After the locusts had flown over, a deathly silence followed. This was broken by the cries of people from neighbouring houses, and Rasheed saying “The One Upstairs is angry. It is an ill omen!”
Shueli had heard of such omens and “auguries” when she read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which was her text play for the Junior Cambridge examination. Many evil omens had preceded the assassination of Julius Caesar by a coterie of his own senators.
“Beware the ides of March1” a sooth-sayer had warned. In the dramatic reading of the play, organised by Miss Crawford, Shueli’s favourite teacher, she had been asked to read the part of Mark Anthony: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..” she would read, with an elocutory flourish, while Miss Crawford admonished “Excellent, Shueli. But no need to get so carried away!” Miss Crawford often yelled at the class: “Don’t be Stoo-Pid” but never at Shueli! Actually, both Miss Crawford and Miss Carstairs, who both looked and spoke like Englishwomen, were thinking of leaving India. They were much younger than Miss Metcalfe who had vanished on her witch’s broom. They were Anglo-Indians, and spoke of “going Home” quite often, as talk of Indian Independence became more and more a reality. Home, of course, was  either England or Australia, and thousands of Anglo-Indians, dark or fair, depending on the degree of English blood they had inherited, left the shores of India, on the great P.&O. and Lloyd Triestino liners, for other shores. Meanwhile, cries of “Quit India!” and “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai!” were often heard in the streets. Some of the girl students of the College had banded together, and were marching with a flag held upright by one of them. One of the girls jumped onto the College gate, shouting: “Hindustan hamara hai. Swatantra Bharat ki Jai!”  Many people were wearing khaadi, or homespun cloth, some rather ostentatiously. The Mahatma and other leaders used the spinning wheel as a symbol of their rejection of foreign cloth, foreign domination. “Gandhiji is on a fast again...Nehru is in prison once more.”  Over the shining possibility of freedom, the dark clouds of a separatist movement began to obtrude. As dark as the night of the locusts. Distrustful of both Nehru and Gandhi, eager for power, Jinnah was insisting on the country being divided. so that the Muslims could have their own land. Neither Nehru nor Jinnah was willing to sacrifice power. Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, (who was to stay on as the first Governor-General of independent India) yielded to the pressure. Perhaps he could not withstand the antagonism between the leaders, or perhaps it was a culmination of the Divide and Rule policy which the British had followed in India.. It was a tragedy for India that they did not wait for another year as Lord Wavell, the earlier Viceroy had suggested.. Jinnah died a year later. Could the great tragedy that struck the sub-continent have been averted?
Gandhi agonised over the separation. Once, Papa, with a visitor from abroad, deeply sympathetic to India, went to meet Gandhiji. When he came home, Papa told Ammy “We went to the Bhangi (sweeper) Colony today, to meet Gandhiji. The whole Colony has been converted into a Camp. There were hundreds of Congress ‘volunteers’ hanging around. One of them shouted ‘Quit India!’ into Dr. Jones’ face, as we were going in! He was very annoyed. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was acting as a kind of secretary to Gandhiji, and was by his side on the platform where he sat cross-legged. While we were discussing Pakistan, I said to the Mahatma: ‘Gandhiji, isn’t this demand for Pakistan somewhat like the prodigal son in the Bible story, asking for his share of the father’s property? Would it not be best to concede the demand, and hope that the prodigal son will return?’  Gandhiji reacted with an emphatic: ‘Pakistan is sin.’”
“When we met Nehru,” Papa continued, “there was no crowd around him, in the quiet Hardinge Avenue house. But Nehru got truly agitated when the subject turned to the demand for Pakistan. He was really angry, and said: ‘If I could take a broom, and sweep out the Muslim League, I would do so..’”* 2
While most Muslims in India were getting ready to move to Pakistan, many just opted to stay on. “I’ve lived here all my life.. so many generations of my family - our roots are here - where shall I go to now, at this late age?” said their old friend, Ashraf Imam. “All our dearest friends are Hindus. How can we just leave those we have known and loved for so many years, and go away to strange places to live among strangers? The graves of my ancestors lie here, and, when my time comes, I want to be laid to rest with them, not in that strange land.” “But the children are going” said Mrs. Imam, in a choked voice, to Ammy. “who will look after us in our old age? Must we live without even seeing our grandchildren?”
“Allah is merciful.” her husband said, looking at her, not able to hide the pain in his eyes. “He will provide!”
The children asked Afzal, the school bus driver: “What, Afzalbhai, are you off to Pakistan too?” He replied with his usual toothy grin: “Inshah Allah! I will stay on, and drive you all to school until the day I die. That’s if Principal Sahib doesn’t send me away. I have three small children, and my old Ammyjaan lives with us. Where can we go?”  Shueli wondered why the politicians had drawn these lines across the country, dividing friends, brothers, parents, if ordinary people didn’t really want these changes. “Supposing some great politician comes along, and draws a line through our house, putting you and Ammy, and Graany and Rahel Aunty on one side, and I’m left on the other side, with Papa, Graandpaa, and Honavar Appacha ... how would we feel?” And what about Arif, Shueli silently wondered. Arif, with his enigmatic green eyes - would he go to far away Pakistan too, never to be seen again? A furious pain struck at Shueli’s young heart at the very thought. However, this pain was dispelled by all the lively activity in the school, in preparation for Independence Day. Shueli didn’t dare go straight up to Arif, and ask him, looking directly into his green eyes: “Arif, will you go far away, to Pakistan?” No, how could she, who hardly ever spoke to him? Besides, if he did confide in any of the girls, it would be Shalini, wouldn’t it, she being his favourite? Instead, she overheard Arif tell Dilip Kaushal, his friend: “Dilip yaar, I’m not going to Karachi now. Abba has already left, but Ammyjaan and I will go  later, only after my exams are over..”   Mr. Bannerjee, the Bengali teacher, was entrusted with the job of teaching them the national anthem. So they, who for years had been learning songs about bluebells and spring, found themselves moved to tears by the vastness of this country, now their own, at last: “Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga, Ucchala, Jala ditha ranga ..” they sang, filled with patriotic emotion. The great mountains and rivers of this land, the many peoples from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin - so many people had come, as travellers, as conquerors, but India had absorbed them all, which made India the winner in a way. Shueli felt a thrill go through her at this thought. It was what Ma’am had always pointed out to them in her History classes. “Look at all the great architecture of the Moghuls - the Taj Mahal, the Jumma Masjid - it belongs to all of us now..” Every day, in the school bus, Shueli passed the Jama Masjid, a glowing pearl set against the fiery sky. Its passionate purity of mood, the aspiration of its dome and minarets touched a chord in her own being. This, though she knew women never worshipped there.
On Independence Day, there was going to be a great parade and procession down the wide street stretching between the Viceregal Lodge and the Statue of King George Vth, which stood at the heart of the city of New Delhi, that Lutyens had built. In the pageants or tableaux that were to be presented - moving slowly on trucks, converted into stages, there was to be one scene presented by the Cathedral School. Principal Harrison was very proud of the honour: “You’ll jolly well put up the best show ever, so that every one will say Shaabaash! So practise well, and don’t forget to be punctually on time for the flag hoisting.” Shueli was thrilled, almost dazed, when she was chosen to be Sujatha, the disciple of the Lord Buddha. The Buddha had left his sleeping wife and child, and all the glory of his palace and kingdom, to lead an austere and ascetic existence, seeking to understand the pain and suffering in this world. One day, worn out by his wanderings in the wilderness, he became thirsty, and it was Sujatha who ministered to him, bringing him food and drink. Ammy had a favourite teacher in her Madras school, who was a Ceylonese Buddhist called Sujatha Samaranayake, and she had often told Gaya and Shueli of the Buddha’s search for enlightenment; his life-long endeavour to decipher the meaning of existence and the endless cycle of human suffering. Who was going to play the part of the Lord Buddha, she wondered, and wished - impossible hope! - it could be Arif. But it wasn’t. In fact, Arif had been absent for some days now. Perhaps he was saying goodbye to his father, and other members of his family, who were leaving for Karachi. Shueli wondered whether he would stay on at his home in Curzon Road, or move elsewhere. She knew that his mother’s sister was married to Professor Shafeeque Baig, who taught at the college. But no, it was too much to hope that he might move there. And then, she got so caught up in the excitement of the preparations for Independence Day, that she almost forgot about it.
That night, on the radio, they heard Nehru’s voice, filled with the drama and poetry appropriate to such a historic occasion: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom...”
“What a poet!” said Ammy, who often read out passages from Nehru’s Discovery of India to them. The next morning, they had to get up very early to get the school bus in time to be at the flag hoisting in school by 7a.m. And, for the first time, the Indian flag, with its three colours, and the Buddhist ‘Dharma-Chakra’ or wheel, taken from the Ashoka Pillar at Sarnath, flew over a free country. And Shueli and her classmates burst into the National Anthem, standing proudly at attention. Shueli felt the deep thrill which the word FREEDOM always gave her. Later, at home, when they talked about the happenings of the day, Papa told them about the flag hoisting he had attended on the ‘King’s Mile’ or Rajpath, as it was later named. As the flag went up, said Papa, “I looked up at the sky and saw this beautiful rainbow, and felt happy that this sign of a blessing had appeared. But then, when I looked again, there was a cloud  cutting the rainbow in two. I don’t believe in such things, of course, but I do hope it isn’t a bad omen.”
“Well, let’s see how our leaders - and all of us - handle freedom,” said Ammy, who was busy knitting a sweater, while their little kitten jumped up every now and then, to play with the wool.
After the flag had been unfurled, and fluttered proudly in the sky of a newly free nation, the children were led off to get ready for the pageant. “I say, yaar, what if my robe slips?” muttered Ramesh Goswami, an Assamese boy, who was going to be the Buddha. Shueli wore a simple white robe, with a garland of flowers round her neck, which she would lay before the Buddha, as the procession reached the ‘India Gate.’ Her long thick hair which came, as she often said, “right down to my bottom” - was coiled into a simple plait and wound into a chignon on top of her head. “Oh my!” said jealous Janaki, “Who thinks she’s just too la-di-da?” But Shueli was too happy even to retort. Shalini was away somewhere in Europe. She wished Arif could have seen her dressed as the Buddha’s devotee. Perhaps, if he had, he might have changed his mind about the star of the class!
  As they played out their innocent drama, no one  realised the terror that would sweep like a wild fire across their dreaming lives.
They knew nothing of the sleeping volcano, which would  erupt malevolently, with no warning at all, until  the bad news from the borders began to pour in. Terrible stories were emerging, like nightmares besieging a prisoner of the night. “People are fleeing from their homes in Lahore, and all over the Punjab. I wish we could get some news of the Suris and Rai Bahadur Om Prakash’s family,” said Papa anxiously to Ammy. But there was no news - none that was good. Even as Gandhiji’s song echoed through the streets: “Ishwara Allah there naam / Sabko sammathi de, Bhagwan!” (Your name is both Ishwar and  Allah. Give peace to all, O Lord!”) the molten lava of hate was pouring out. “They are stopping the trains from Pakistan, throwing people out, setting fire to the carriages. Women are being raped and their breasts being cut off. Small babies are being snatched from their mothers, and thrown into boiling oil..” the terrifying stories, told in hysterical tones, made the listeners shudder with horror. Was this a nightmare, a story twisted from a tortured soul, or was all this really happening? The Khannas, who had been their friends in Lahore, had managed to escape “just in time, before the lootings and burnings began.” But, Mrs. Khanna sobbingly told Ammy: “Maijee (her grandmother) was too old. She was 97 years old last birthday. Maijee began to cry and beat her breast when we told her to get ready to leave, as there was danger. Maijee fell before our household gods in the Puja Room. She lit a diya before Parvati and Ganesha, and begged to be spared the ordeal of moving from the only home she and her ancestors had ever known. Amaal, can you believe it?  Parvati heard Maijee’s cry! Just as we had decided to pick her up and carry her to the waiting car, we found her lying dead before the gods and goddesses, with all the flowers, and the diyas shining..”
“The Musalman log are burning all the villages.”..”Our old Muslim neighbours hid us and helped us escape, at great risk to their lives..”
Others told of how headless bodies lay in piles at the railway stations. As the stories of cruelty and horror poured in, like an evil virus, the epidemic of hatred spread. They heard how Gandhiji, in agony of spirit, had undertaken a ‘Fast unto death’ unless the senseless killings stopped. Shueli remembered the story of the first murder, of Cain and Abel, from the Bible, which Honavar Appacha had told her so many years ago. Cain, in jealousy and anger, murdered his brother Abel. When God asked Cain why he had done it, he denied it, asking angrily: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”


*

2. From An Autobiography by SAMUEL MATHAI (Unfinished.)

Anna Sujatha Mathai grew up in St. Stephen's College Delhi, where her father was Head of the English Department. It was an idyllic childhood, reading wonderful books, hearing poetry, seeing plays. She and her sister spent many sunny days exploring The Ridge, unimaginable now! Sujatha started writing Short Stories and Essays for The TREASURE CHEST, an All-India Children's Magazine edited by an American Editor, and translated into many Indian languages. At 14 she was chosen by Treasure Chest to be their youngest Special Correspondent! 
 What she loved most was the Theatre. She was selected, at age 14,  by the Shakespeare Society of St. Stephen's College, to be Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Later, doing her B.A.{Honours} in English Literature at Miranda College, she won the College Drama Prize, and later, the Best Actress Award of the University of Delhi.
  Getting married at age 20, to a young surgeon, changed her life completely. In Edinburgh, she joined the University for a Post Graduate Course in Social Studies. She worked in that field for several years, in York, Sheffield, London. Leaving it all behind, coming back to small-town India, was traumatic for her. She used to write on scraps of paper, and throw them away. Her sister, in Bangalore, sent her a cutting in which American professor, Howard McCord of the Univ. of Seattle asked for poems by "avant-garde young Indian poets" for his Anthology. Her sister wrote "At the most, you'll lose a few stamps!" Prof McCord's warm response to her poems, made her start taking her writing more seriously! Her first poems were published in P. Lal's MODERN INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. She continued to write, and, later, moving to Bangalore her dream of theatre was somewhat realised. She had roles in plays by Shaeffer, Ibsen, Sartre, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, Lorca and others. She was a co-founder,with friend Snehalata Reddy, of THE ABHINAYA POETRY/THEATRE GROUP.
Her poems have been published in The Commonwealth Journal; Indian Literature; The Little Magazine; The Times of India; Dialogue India; Chelsea (New York); The London Magazine; The Poetry Review (London), Two Plus Two (Switzerland.), Contemporary Asian Poetry Ed. Agnes Lam, Hong Kong/Singapore: Post-Independence Poetry in English ed. by Arundhathi Subramaniam She was among 4 poets "show-cased" on the 50th Anniversary of the Sahitya Akademi. She was an Associate Editor of the prestigious Literary Journal, Two Plus Two,based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She has 5 collections of Poetry in English, and her poems have been translated into several Indian and European languages.
She now lives in Delhi. ​

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