SHUELI'S STAR

Novel
~ Anna Sujatha Mathai 

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Previous Chapters

CHAPTER THREE
 
​Growing Up in Delhi
 
It was only after Papa’s return from Oxford, that the family moved from Lahore to Delhi. Papa was Head of the English Department at St. Stephen’s College, which was still located in Kashmere Gate. It was more than a year later that they moved to the Stephen’s Campus, at the foot of the Delhi Ridge, and it was there that Shueli wished upon the shooting stars. Till then, they lived in an old cream-coloured mansion, built almost like a fortress, with many terraces, and hidden places, filled with paintings from England, velvet seats, old Colonial furniture  -  a study lined with books - a house with an aura of mystery. It was said to be haunted - people swore they had seen and heard strange things. There was a rocking chair in the Library, where the ghost was said to come and sit, rocking, rocking, waiting for a lost lover, perhaps?  C.F. Andrews, the missionary, who supported the movement for Indian independence, and was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, had lived there. There were many young and idealistic missionaries, and some rather strange and eccentric ones, who came to stay in the guest rooms, or to have tea or supper with them. In the evenings they would go for walks in the nearby park, or visit Atasri and Srila, the Bengali girls who lived near the Kashmere Gate. Ammy, who had studied History at College told them that the Gate had kept out marauders from the North through the years, and was where the British had fought and put down the mutiny of 1857.The children could imagine the Officers of the Cavalry on horseback, the poor doomed sepoys fighting on foot, the sound of cannon, and the blood that flowed, maybe right down to the Jamuna River, which was close by. In fact, just last Sunday they’d gone down to the Jamuna with Ammy and Papa, who wanted to call on their English acquaintances, the Hortons. And wasn’t it strange that, after giving their name to the magnificent bearer who came to the door, with a red cummerbund sitting grandly round his tummy, and white gloves on his hands, got a card on a silver tray saying The Hortons are Not at Home. How strange the English were, thought Shueli. Saying they weren’t at home, when they were. Once, they were taken to the cinema by Kashmere Gate, to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. But the wicked stepmother’s terrifyingly evil face had Shueli shrieking, half in Malayalam, half in Hindi, “Hamko pedee atha hai”,  till she was carried out by an embarassed Papa.  Maitland House, the old Victorian house, with its velvet love-seat, and book-lined study, offered lovely, long days of adventure and discovery to the two little sisters. Shueli, taught by her mother, was just learning to read. She discovered the immense thrill of words coming together to form a meaning. For days, she struggled over the word p-e-o-p-l-e. Peeopl didn’t make any sense. What joy when it suddenly fell into place. “It’s pee-pal” she shouted at Gaya. Pee-pal - like You and Me. Shueli loved grand and sad stories. Her eyes stung as she peered at the Bible, which did not yield its mysteries to her then, as she could not read, only stare at the exciting, inviting print. Ammy told them many stories: fairy stories, the story of Rama and Sita, of Nala and Damayanti, of the bold Draupadi,  of Moses being left by the river by his  sister Miriam, and being discovered, and made a son by an Egyptian princess; and many other stories from the Bible. They wept over little Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who “never was  bornded.”  And most of all, Shueli loved the story which began: Once upon a time, where the sea was as blue as the bluest cornflower, there lived a little mermaid. The girls loved to lie on either side of Ammy on the bed, with their legs over her stomach. They were specially thrilled when she let them look at the long, dark scar that ran across her stomach. How did you get that? they would ask again and again. And she would tell them she had had to have an operation called a Caesarean, because the doctor had said it would be dangerous otherwise. Apparently Julius Caesar had been taken from his mother’s tummy in that way. That made them special. So Ammy’s scar, and the times when she let them snuggle against it, gave them the thrill of belonging. One day there was a great big function at Atashree’s house. Shueli didn’t really understand what it was all about...she could hear strange sad music, and the chant of voices. People had brought garlands, and lots of people were peering in through the bars of the windows. Shueli peeped too, and saw a very, very old man, with a beautiful face, white hair and beard, speaking in stirring, rhythmic tones to the people. Who on earth was he? “That is the great poet, Rabindranath Tagore,” someone whispered to Shueli, who just stood and stared. Ever afterwards, the word poet was excitingly exalted in her mind, by that memory.
Shueli being the older one, was the one who thought up what they should do. One day, fed up with Ammy, she said to Gaya “Let’s run away and go Round the World.”  Ammy had told them about Dick Whittington and Puss-in-Boots going off with knapsacks on their  backs, to seek their fortunes. There were always milestones, leading to London Town, whose streets were said to be paved with gold.  “London? Where’s that?” asked Gaya, who wasn’t too keen on going Round the World alone with Shueli.
 “It’s Far Away. We can make our fortune there and never see Ammy again. Poor Dick Whittington became the Mayor of London in the end, didn’t he?” 
So they wrapped some tea-cakes, which the old cook gave them, in a napkin, and set off towards Kashmere Gate.. They hadn’t gone far, when they saw the towering figure of a Pathaan. They had been frightened often enough by old Ayah’s stories about Afghans, and lived in terror of them. Ammy had told them the story of a kindly old Kabuliwalah and a small girl (actually Tagore’s story) over and over again, and it should have taken away their fear, but it didn’t.  So, when they saw the stalwart Pathaan looking at them across the road - or so they thought - Shueli’s heart began to thud.  Gaya clutched Shueli’s hand, and said “I’m frightened.”  Just then Old Cook came up behind them, and told them they were to come right back home, as Papa and Ammy were anxiously searching for them. Shueli got a spanking, and Ammy said “Shu is the one who starts the trouble, and spoils the little one too.” And that was the end of their Trip Round the World.
On Sundays they went to St. James’ Church for the service. Shueli loved the singing, and the beautiful stained glass, the altar filled with flowers and gleaming silver candelabra. They sat in rows on the polished wooden benches. The Skinner Regiment had been connected with this church. There were many English people in the congregation, the ladies with their flowered dresses and hats of all kinds. The missionary wives often looked dowdy, harrassed by the heat and the strain of living in India. Some of them looked guilt-ridden, others looked like pious madonnas. The officers and I.C.S. families were quite different. They had the look of rulers, slightly contemptuous of “the natives” - and mostly, Not At Home!
The Indian Christians who attended the Church were, many of them, from the old Punjab families. Highly Westernised and educated, leaders of their people, they were quite different from the Christians who had been poor or low-caste, and converted by the missionaries. Years later, when a few of Shueli’s Hindu friends spoke accusingly about the way the Christian missionaries had converted the low-caste, by holding out jobs and education as bait, Shueli had retorted, “Well, if the upper-caste Hindus had not oppressed their own people, depriving them of all rights, even of clean water, they would not have turned to these people, who treated them as human beings, worthy of God’s love, or at least some human respect, for the first time in their history.”
Outside the Church, in the cemetery garden, a great white angel, with outspread wings stood holding out her arms, and Shueli, too young yet to understand much, seemed to hear Jesus whisper “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I shall give you rest.” The cemetery was full of the graves of English people who seemed to have died young. Here lies Elisa Todd, gone to her eternal rest, aged 22. Women, children, young officers, administrators, they had been called to “the peace that passes all understanding”, too young to appreciate it. Was it the heat and the rigours of the climate, along with the difficult conditions, that had killed them?
Death was always close by in this country, a whispering presence they could sense. Or had they died of broken hearts, so far away from the cool greenness of England, the  country lanes  winding past those flower filled English gardens, and the familiar faces of their own people? Even now, some of the English missionaries, who came out to teach at the College, or work in Hospitals or schools, who went up to the Language School at Mussoorie, seemed such strange misfits in this huge, mysterious country. The girls would stare shyly at the Reverend Mountjoy, in his cassock, with his pale, sweet looking wife, like an English flower, and their brood of English children. Or, at the Hardys, who were first-class English eccentrics -both of them architects. She, with very short, straight hair, cut in an untidy bob, mannish and ugly in her badly cut tweed suit, probably made by the local darzee. Her long nose and bad teeth only set off her unduly red complexion. Her husband, often seen in shorts, was equally red-faced. They knew a great deal about India and its buildings, and their advice was often sought and taken. They would either stride around with great English steps, or arrive with a great whirring of wheels and blowing of horns. “There come the Hardys”  Shueli and Gaya would giggle, as the couple arrived, in a cloud of dust, in their old Morris Minor convertible.
Ammy and Papa chose a Convent school, not too far from the house, for Shueli. Run by Catholic nuns, it had two sections, an English Section and an Indian Section! Not that there were many English. Mostly Anglo-Indians, some of them rather dark-hued. So it puzzled Shueli (who was fair-skinned by Indian standards) when they called her Darkie, and laughed at the parathas or idlis her mother had packed so lovingly for her tiffin. But one day, Sister Rita, the pretty Irish nun asked Shueli to read out a poem in class. Snot-nosed Chander Aggarwal:  Pushpa Kumar, whose head was filled with lice:  and tiny Usha Jain, petite and pig-tailed, listened raptly as Shueli began to recite in the language she had learned to love. She had only spoken her mother tongue, Malayalam at first, but later, had picked up English from her mother, and also from her father, who read out poetry to her in his study lined with books.
“Kate rose up early,/ As fresh as a lark/ Almost in time to see/Vanish the dark” she read from Songs The Letters Sing. Sister Rita was thrilled, and said so: “Listen to Shueli read. Isn’t that lovely now? Sure I think she’ll be alright for the English Section.”  And that’s how Shueli entered the English Section - which should have been a great triumph, but wasn’t. She didn’t fit in with Pushpa or Chander, but she was lost in the English Section as well. There was one huge, fat English girl, who, by her very size, seemed to represent the entire British Empire. Her father was in the I.C.S., and so she was extra grand and bossed over everyone. One day, when they were trying to play tennis on the rather run-down tennis courts, she lifted her racquet and threatened Shueli. Blood rushed to Shueli’s head. Hot and reckless anger rose within her, an anger she would feel years later, whenever confronted by a bully. Diminutive as she was, she lifted her racquet and faced the bully who towered over her. “Don’t you ever dare lift that at me again, or I’ll hit you’ she threatened, and was astonished when Molly Langford drew back, pretending it was all a joke...
In the Concert Hour, they learned songs like The British Grenadiers, and stood stiffly while the band played “God Save Our Gracious King”.. (some of the children giggled and whispered that they always murmured ‘Shave’ instead of Save, just to show they were patriotic Indians.) They valiantly sang “Some talk of Al - ex - a- a -nder,/ And some of He - er -cu - lees./ Of Hector and Ly-s-a-a-a-nder,/ And such great souls as these. /But of all the world’s great he - e -e-roes/ There’s none that can com - p-a-a-re/ With a tow - row-row, row ro 0 0 w/ To the British gre -he-nadiers.”
In the School Band, she played the triangle or the tambourine, for gypsy music, or old Irish ditties, Welsh and Scottish ballads, and bits of Strauss or Mozart. It felt pretty silly to her, making monosyllabic sounds on the triangle. The poetry they were taught was all about daffodils and crocuses and “sweet eglantine”, about snow (which she had never seen, and never did until she went to Kashmir at the age of 15) and Spring; never about the dust-storms and heat of a North Indian summer; or about jasmine and the brilliant hues of wild bougainvillea which covered the walls; never about the crow or the parrot, or the mina, or even the chameleon or the ordinary lizard which she saw every day. It was not till Ammy read her Toru Dutt’s ‘Casuarina Tree’, and some of Sarojini Naidu’s lilting songs, profuse with the smells, colours and sounds of India, that she could begin to make some sense of her own landscape. Then, there were the exotic poems about India, such as “Pale hands I love beside the Shalimar..”  In the cruel summer of Delhi, the ‘Loo’ would hit the North. A yellow pall of smoke would fill the air, and they would choke with the dust, which lay thick upon the floors and furniture for days afterwards, Ammy would cover the high skylights with navy blue cloth to keep out the blinding sun. Why then was spring and summer so eulogised in the songs and poems they heard? It was all very confusing for a child.
In the Chapel, where the children stood and repeated Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lord is With Thee, Blessed art Thou among Women, And Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb .. the nuns murmured over their rosaries, repeating it over and over again.. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners.. Shueli didn’t understand a word of it. Only the other day, when she was pulling off her sweater, and it got stuck, Gaya had said that her head  “looked like the virgin’s womb.” But what did it actually mean? Maybe they’d find out later?
 When the Catholic Service was held in the Church to which the school was attached, the children were sometimes allowed to attend. Shueli gazed at the gleaming silver and copper and flowers on the altar, and heard the poetry in the voice of the priest, as he used lovely words like sacrament and grace and benediction, - and decided to become a Catholic! This idea was rudely shaken when a handsome book of Bible stories, given to her by her Uncle Thomachan, which she brought to class to show off, was confiscated by one of the nuns during a class. She was told, when she hesitantly asked for it, that Mother Superior had it in The Parlour. The Parlour was where some of the girls practised Western Ballet, or where cups of tea, in dainty china, with slices of fragrant, just-baked cake, were served to important visitors. When Shueli asked, at the door of the parlour, for her book, Sister Angelina asked her, “What’s the matter, child? I can hear the bell ringing for the next period. Just you get back to class at once.” No amount of asking got her back the much-loved book, which had unusual black and white wood-cuts, and a rather unorthodox way of presenting the text. That was another time that Shueli realised, in her own child’s way, that freedom to think and know and love, was, alas! not free, but was controlled by authority of one kind or another. Soon after, not quite by coincidence, Ammy and Papa moved the girls to the Cathedral School in New Delhi.
 
                                                          
 
CHAPTER FOUR
                                                           
Tiruvella
 
For Shueli and Gaya, the two years spent in Tiruvella, while Papa was away at Oxford, were the happiest years of their lives. At least that’s how it seemed to Shueli, looking back on that lost time, floodlit in her memory for ever. They called Ammy’s parents Graany and Graanpaa because Granny herself changed the rather Westernised ‘Granny’ and ‘Grandpa’ into a more pronounceable Indian equivalent.
Graanpaa planted two Sapota trees at the entrance of the house, and  called them Shueli and Gayathri. One day they too would be shady trees, with wings like bright birds, and many would find shelter beneath their branches.. The house seemed so magical, so full of endless possibilities. Graany had green fingers., There was a bed of canna flowers with seeds ordered fom Polson’s Catalogues. There were many temple trees, with sticky milk flowing out of the white pink and creamy flowers that decked the branches. And of course lots of coconut, bread fruit and guava trees, laden with fruit. Their neigbour, Chellamma Kochamma told her  neighbour, Pennammachi:  “Annamma is a bit uppity because she has lived in Calcutta. I believe she used to wear those thin chiffon saris there. She may be fair, but who is she to show off to us? With her Polson’s seeds, and her cakes made in that kerosene stove!”  Chellamma Kochamma could not help thinking that this uneducated girl was putting on airs, though she had had hardly any education, having been married off at the age of eleven. Chellamma Kochamma had been the first girl to graduate as a matriculate from Nicholson School, the  best school for girls in Tiruvella, and she had gone on to college in Madras. She only spoke   English, though of a strange kind, and attended the Y.W.C.A. meetings regularly. She looked down on all the ladies who were so keen on cookery and stitching classes. She, of course, was an intellectual, and quite above such things. Her husband got her novels written in English, such as Jane Eyre,  and Mill on the Floss, and she would show them, with an air of smug superiority to her neighbours, who could hardly read English. Among them was Shueli’s Graany, who, however, didn’t care too much, as she was busy getting her house into perfect condition. “Your Graanpaapa knows nothing about life,” she would tell the girls. “If it were not for me, everyone would cheat him.” So she worked ceaselessly around the house, and in the compound, managing the servants and the labourers. Fellows with gleaming, muscular bodies and mundus tucked around their bare middles, were sent up the coconut trees at regular intervals, to bring down coconuts for cooking. These had to be husked, and used for scrubbing, and the branches for firewood. Women ground paddy with two metal pounders in the big stone grinding vessel kept on the back verandah. They threw the pounders from one hand to the other, moving rhythmically, in a kind of half twist, their shapely, lean bodies encased in a tight mundu and blouse, moving to an unheard rhythm. All the brass vessels had to be cleaned with tamarind, ash and mud, so that they gleamed in rows on the red parapet of the back courtyard. You could always hear the squeak of the well, as the maid servant, lowered a pulley with a brass bucket attached to it, and drew up the water to fill the large copper vessels for the kitchen and bathrooms. Graany had green fingers, so there was not only coconut and papaya and pineapple, there were yams and bananas and breadfruit, with which she could create culinary miracles. Old Kunjan Chovan, with just a short mundu tucked aroud his spare, muscular, gleaming body, would come and report things to her. He was her most trusted overseer. He usually covered his mouth with his hands when speaking to those he accepted as born superior to him. This would make Shueli and Gaya giggle, and imitate him later when they were on their own. They didn’t realise, at the time, that it was a habit born of years of degradation. The Chovammaar, Pulayas, and Parayans were of the lowest caste, and dared not or could not step out of their subhuman positions, which remained so, despite the coming of Christianity. Their servility had been imposed on them by centuries in which a cruel feudal system had flourished. Not that Graany or Kunjan Chovan or Shueli gave it a thought at that time. Graany kept chickens and cows, and would walk around the compound with her white kachumuri tucked up almost to the knees, but not quite! She had shapely calves and fair skin, and Shueli, when she was older, thought she would like to get Graany a gold bordered kashava kavani to wear over her starched white chatta and kachumuri -“at least when you go to church or visiting.” But Graany said that such frivolity was “not for a woman of my age, and what will the neighbours say? After all, when do I go out? Only very occasionally, to see step-mother and a few relatives, to one or two weddings or funerals, and to church.” Despite the horribly unmusical tones that emerged from the church, Shueli was touched by the atmosphere of suffering and faith which lay in these songs and prayers - a mix of Victorian hymns and ancient Syriac chants. Shueli and Gaya had stood shyly by when real, live bishops in resplendent robes visited the home, and held out their hands with the bishop’s ring upon it, to the forehead in blessing. The first time it happened Shueli ran and hid. “Why does he want to take my temperature?” in a frightened voice. The bishop had laughed - a loud, booming laugh of reassurance. “The children are from Delhi. They don’t know our customs.”  Grandpaa would explain apologetically. Later,  Shueli and Gaya would don a bright headdress, wrap a fine sari around, pretend to swing incense-laden censers, and chant away at each other in mock Syriac, hands held out in blessing, touching the brow with a massive cross and a hand with a huge ring upon it, while the other kneeled, with bowed head. Devame, nee parushudhan agunnu, they would chant rapturously.
But, really, it was far more of a thrill to run down to the cowshed, where Graany’s pet cow lay, giving birth. She lay prostrate there, her thin body heaving with heavy, painful breaths. Then there was sudden, violent movement, and the young calf’s head began to thrust out. They, watching, hardly dared to breathe. So helpless. Birth. No choice. Was the mother’s body heaving like that, because she was in agonising pain? Now she seemed almost dead, but in a few minutes the calf leapt up, and the mother struggled up to lick and caress her little one. Shueli, breathless with worry, and on the verge of tears, took Gaya’s hand to dance up and down, both clapping their hands with joy.
In the afternoons, when the only sound was of the rustle of coconut trees outside the thick barred windows, Graany would lie down on her bed, which had only the metha-paa upon it, placed under the attic staircase. Shueli would lie down close, and listen raptly as Graany told her a bit about her life, a little in English, a little in Malayalam. Skhe had never learned to read or write- “We were motherless children...”, though later, with Graanpaa’s help, she mastered enough English to wade laboriously, but joyously, through some of the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.
Or, it would be that thick black, starless Kerala night. Kunjan Chovan would carry a flaming torch made of coconut fronds, lighting up that impenetrable darkness, and bar the heavy garden gate, which squeaked and groaned on its hinges. It was the night, so oppressive, so filled with furtive life, with death creeping around the house, with ghosts that refused to die, with whispering voices, and creaking wooden stairs. Frogs would croak in the paddy fields outside. There would be that heavy smell of fungus, old wood and paper, of coconut oil and thailam, the herbal medications Graany used. Outside, in that dark night, the snakes shed their skins on the damp, red earth. Graany often got up at night to “pass water”, as she had a prolapsed uterus, and was plagued by many feminine ills. So many, that nobody listened to her complaints any more. Kurumba Chovathi, the old servant woman, toothless and almost blind, with her shrivelled breasts hanging like dried mango skin above her mundu, who had been with Graany since they were both seven years old, now sat massaging her legs with thailam. “Aiyo, Kurumbe” Graany would sigh. “What is left now? The old days are gone. Kurumbe, tell the child about my ‘arinyaanam’ (jewelled chain for hip or waist) strung entirely with gold sovereigns. And how tall and handsome my father was...” And Kurumba Chovathi would drone away, massaging still, yawning, talking about the glories of the Shankara Mangalam family. Of the distinguished looking lawyer, Graany’s father. Of how Graany and her sister had had solid gold sovereigns on their arinyaanams, and such heavy gold ear-rings that their ear lobes had hung right down to their necks - they were so beautiful and aristocratic looking - which made Shueli giggle. It may have been the height of fashion to weigh the ears down so much with thick, finely crafted gold, but Shueli was glad that  fashion was no longer around, and she didn’t have to wear those heavy ear-rings, and have ugly, hanging holes in her ear lobes. Anyway, Kurumba went on, a stepmother had come and taken away everything. When Graany was married off, at the great age of fourteen, she was stripped of all her jewellery. Graany was bitter, because she felt that her step-mother had purposely arranged for her to marry a poor, and not at all good looking man, whose only strong point was that he had a B.A, from Madras University, and asked for no dowry..
On her wedding day, she was bathed in turmeric, and came out with her fine, fair skin glowing. The step-mother, in a fury, took up a heavy jewellery box and threw it at Graany, shouting, “Adee (Girl), who do you think is going to do all the work for your marriage.?”
Shueli, listening, invariably shed tears thinking of the young motherless girl whose one moment of glory was darkened.
Years later, when they used to arrive in Tiruvella for the holidays, Graany, obsessive about cleanliness, would insist that they were utterly dirty children, and scrub them with inja (coconut fibre) and turmeric. Maybe, because she was particular about fair skin, she was trying to scrub them fair! One of her favourite expressions was “What will people say?” or “That is mosham (a disgrace) to us.” This, Shueli was sure, was what kept her from saying too much against her stepmother. She had chosen to forget that woman’s ill treatment of her, her sister and her brother. But the children had heard about it, and hated it when Graany would insist on their dressing  up and going to visit her step-mother. The old lady sat upright in her old teak bed, supervising the cutting of the jackfruit and mango trees outside. She spat rivulets of red paan (betel nut and areca mixed with white lime, wrapped in a juicy green leaf,) aimed accurately and at long distance, into a brass spitoon kept near her bed. She was fat and fair, with no neck, and a marked hump. Her once full breasts, now hung pendulously down, covered only by a thin Travancore  towel. She had only one eye, which made her sinister to the children. Her short, curly hair made her seem more bizarre, and she wore the heavy gold earrings and bangles of Travancore. She would insist on their eating the black sticky sweets made of jackfruit and mango, with horrible sickly sweet yellow-coloured pineapple juice. Shueli wondered how Graany could sit there talking so dutifully and affectionately, smiling so politely. Graany was only six or seven when her own mother died. Soon after, her father, a Vakil or lawyer had been persuaded to “take another wife, at least for the children’s sake.” The stepmother, who was a youngish widow, had had a horde of children, and had made Graany and her sister slave for them. They also had to sweep the compound, and scrub the great bell metal and brass vessels in which the food was cooked. “Adee. Don’t be lazy. Use the coconut inja and sand, and scrub harder, you useless creatures.” Or “Adee, can’t you see that the little one has run out? And why haven’t you wiped up where our mol has done shu shu?” Poor Graany, child of a lawyer, and of aristocratic birth, had to wake up while it was dark, so that she could sweep the compound unseen, so as to avoid the shame  which she always dreaded so much. They weren’t even given enough to eat, and were often hungry. Their young brother, Georgekutty, who ate with the men, had enough to eat, but Graany and her sister Chinnam were allowed to go hungry. In any case, the men always ate first, before the stepmother and girl children. By the time, Graany and Chinnam got to sit down to eat, all that might be left of the steamed red fish curry, would be the bones and the black tamarind floating in a bit of gravy, which they would ravenously eat with the left over coarse but tasty red rice, and the dregs of the seasoned buttermilk. Often, there wasn’t even that. One day, when Georgekutty returned from school, he found both his sisters sitting mournfully on the compound wall. “Why don’t you go in and eat something?” he asked. Chinnam, who had a sense of fun, rubbed her stomach, and looked heavenwards. “Stepmother wants us to live on grass or wild fruit,” she replied, spitting out a bit of raw guava she had been chewing. Enraged, Georgekutty went into the kitchen store room, shouting, “So there’s no food in the Shankara Mangalam  house now, is there?  So, my sisters have to starve now, do they?” There were huge tins and bottles full of delicious Malabar sweets and savouries. “Who is all this being saved up for?” he fumed. “Robbers? Future generations?” He broke the bottles and smashed the tins, in a red-hot fury, shouting, “Will you starve my sisters again?” The step-mother’s one eye flashed in horror. She stumbled around, picking up things, and muttering, “I have looked after those two girls, and sacrificed my own little ones. All they want to do is complain and cause trouble. Ungrateful creatures! What do they expect? The milk from my breast, and all the food in the house?” But she didn’t say it loud enough for Georgekutty to hear. And after that, she was a bit more careful. Graany’s father, a handsome, aristocratic man, essentially refined and gentle, did not like to precipitate more trouble and acrimony by standing up openly for his young, motherless daughters. But Shueli, looking at his picture in the Tiruvella house, knew how much grief he had borne, and how troubled his heart must have been. He had, perhaps, she thought, gazing into the troubled brown eyes of his portrait, seen discretion as the better part of valour, and avoided outright confrontation with his second wife. So, both Graany and her sister had led a joyless childhood, and gone straight into their marriages with resignation, or perhaps, just the relief of escape. “I was married before my fourteenth birthday. People had already begun to say I was getting ‘too old’ for marriage!” Graany told them, making both Shueli and Gaya gasp with disbelief. “Your Graanpa was a scholarly young man , and was doing his B.A. degree in Madras then.” She couldn’t tell them that there was nothing in common between them, he, always reading, excited by knowledge and ideas, and she, a little girl who’d had hardly any schooling. He was short and dark, while she was quite a beauty, slim, with a fair skin and acquiline features. She always liked tall, fair fine-featured people, like those in her own family - her father and brother, who looked like the young Jawahar Lal Nehru - her sisters, who, with their blue-veined skin, looked like the Italian beauties of Renaissance paintings. “Graanpa’s looks must have been quite a disappointment to her” thought Shueli. “She never loved him as we did, dear kind Graanpaa.” Added to that, the motherless young girl went into a new home, where the mother-in-law was a strict old martinet, who ruled the whole family with a rigid hand. Graanpa’s mother had pearly teeth and a heart shaped face, with small, neat features. Her first marriage, when she was a very young girl, had been to a man she had liked (‘loved’ was a word unknown at that time.) He had been an exceptional man, and his death had devastated her. But she had little say in her own life -she was only eighteen then, - and had to agree to a second marriage, which was to a rambunctious, rather excitable and loud-voiced man. Graanpa’s mother hardly ever reacted to his excesses, only once in a while saying in a steely voice of disapproval: “In that direction, or, from there, let there be silence!”
Graanpa may never quite have appealed to his young wife, but there were many things he did for her, which gave her a small measure of hope and dignity. One of them was to help her to learn a little English - both to read and write. She struggled painfully with the unfamiliar script and strange sounding words, so different from the familiar, beloved Malayalam. She was somewhat spurred on by Chellamma’s barbed remarks about “these uneducated women here, what can one discuss with them?”  After a while she was able to read simple stories, and even go on to Dickens’ David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. She loved Becky Sharpe, and delighted in her victories, which were despite her social disadvantages and poverty. She also loved Anna Karenina, which seemed strange to Shueli. In her own life, Graany was fiercely conformist, most cautious and conventional. It was only in her unguarded moments, especially with the children, that her romantic, hidden nature would surface. Hadn’t Anna Karenina done a terrible thing? Leaving her respected husband for a passion, for a lover, who would ultimately destroy her. Shueli said she, too, would risk everything for love, but Gaya said: “I would never leave a kind and caring husband for a wild man like Vronsky.” But Shueli, like Graany in her secret moments, knew that the flame which singes has a powerful, irresistible magnetism. Graany’s sister, Chinnam, had - or hadn’t she - been something of an Anna Karenina, and it had destroyed her. Perhaps it was better to be a survivor, cling to the drifting boat on the stormy ocean, and get across, somehow or the other, to the shore. Shueli was always drawn to the idea of love and passion, and believed that it should be free and pure. How could she, a child, know that love and sex too are ruled by social norms and politics, and nothing in this world is free? When she was fourteen Shueli wrote an essay on Free Love, which shocked her aunts, who were her only readers, and it never saw the light of day! Shueli wondered how both Graany and her sister Chinnam had borne such joyless and unfulfilled lives. “Do you think they had any special dreams, like we do?” Shueli asked Gaya. Dreams like the ones she shared with the shooting stars over Delhi? “They had to hide away their dreams, crush them, till finally, there was nothing left. That’s what must have happened, Gaya,” Shueli would say, as they lay on the wicker beds in the hot afternoons looking up at the old framed photographs that lined the bedroom wall. But Aunt Chinnam’s eyes seemed to say - “Make your dreams come true. Live them out in your life. Don’t let your dreams be drowned - realise  them.” Because Graany and Shueli were as close as people ever can be, Shueli knew that Graany had always had to cover up a great deal for her sister Chinnam, who had apparently been a rebel and a misfit. Trying to skip the passage of time, Shueli peered keenly at the yellowing portrait of Graany’s beautiful sister. She caught a glimpse of the proud defiance in those eyes. She had made a “good marriage” to a conventional and pompous man, who had never understood his young bride’s romantic and passionate nature. He had then gone off abroad, to England, for “higher studies” which was what everyone able to afford it, did in those days. When he returned, there was whispered talk of a possible love (the Malayalam/Sanskrit word ‘sneham’ for love, is a beautiful word, thought Shueli. Why then, did it become ugly in the whispered insinuations of those people?) which had arisen between the youthful Chinnam, just beginning to burgeon into a young woman of classic beauty, and a young cousin, living in the joint family. There was no way of actually knowing what had happened. The eyes that looked down from the faded studio portrait were remote, and a whole world of unspoken secrets lay in them.
When Chinnam’s husband returned from England, some of the ugly gossip must have been carried to him. “They had the gall to write love  letters to each other. That ungrateful fellow, and she, a married woman.” Chinnam’s censorious and rigid husband had sent her back home to her father. He, already sad about his daughters, received his disgraced daughter back, with tears in his eyes, saying with profound sorrow “My daughter. You have rubbed coal on my face.”
Humiliated, and publicly disgraced, the young woman lived in her father’s house, mocked by her step-mother, with the malicious whispers of other women in her ears. “Poor ChinnammaKochamma,” Ammy told them, “she lived in total isolation, like a woman prisoner, or one in purdah. Not a letter, not a word of love or hope or forgiveness, for three whole years...” Years in which she left her childish days, her girlhood, behind and became a sad faced woman.
Shueli, who gazed for hours at her grandaunt’s picture, saw the tight line of the mouth, the pain in the eyes, not quite obscured by the mask. And when she was finally taken back, with condescension and reprimands, by her husband, it was to spend the next three or four years bearing children. And then to die, nursing her youngest, at the tender age of twenty-six. When life should just have been beginning, not ending. It seemed to Shueli, when, as a seventeen year old, whose own life was just beginning to blossom, looking into those eyes in the portrait, that Aunt Chinnam spoke to her from the very depths of her soul. “Grasp love when you can. It is life itself. It is breath. Don’t die without knowing it.” Shueli had been a child when the picture first began to speak to her. Later, in her own stormy teen-age, she knew that even if only for a day, a month, a year, she would have to grasp love, hold life in the palm of her hand, the wind in her fist.
Did people always die disappointed and bitter? No, death when it came, had to be a shining, a willing return to a familiar, though forgotten shore. Like in Ammy’s stories of Savitri and Satyavaan, or Nala and Damayanti. “Aiyo! Girls, listen..” Ammy would begin. “Satyavaan was only a woodcutter. One day, when he and his wife were cutting and gathering wood in the forest, the God of Death, Yama, appeared and claimed Satyavaan’s life. But girls, do you know what Savitri did? She wouldn’t let go of her beloved husband’s body, threw herself upon it as it grew cold, and refused to be parted from him. She pleaded to be allowed to go with Satyavaan at least part of the way. Thus, fearlessly, she followed Death right up to his kingdom, refusing to listen to his admonitions to turn back. So, girls, finally, Death, that ugly old man, gave up, seeing her courage and determination. Breath returned to Satyavaan, and Savitri’s great love triumphed over death.” Ammy, tell that story of Savitri and Satyavaan again,” Shueli and Gaya would plead, as they lay in bed, just before Papa came in and put out their bedroom light, and firmly told them to go to sleep.
In the evenings, in Tiruvella, Shueli and Gaya would dress up and sit on the black marble parapet in the verandah. The other retired gentlemen, passing by on their evening stroll, would come in to have a chat with Graanpa. Shueli and Gaya would sit there avidly taking in every word that was said. One of the old gentlemen was an eccentric, who spoke in an Anglo-Indian tone. “My God! These Malabar fellows.. the rascals!..” spaced out with occasional humming and whistling of old English tunes. The other, urged on by his ambitious wife, had just become part of Sir C.P. Ramaswamy’s government, a very pro-British one.. Shueli and Gaya revelled in all their talk, as the old gentlemen sat there shaking their legs and slapping their knees. They heard odd references to the British government, and how Nehru and Gandhi and others were fasting for Indian Independence. They spent long periods in jail, and their families were neglected. Poor little Indira Priyadarshini (Nehru’s beloved daughter) had to spend long days alone. “Her poor mother, Kamala, died in a sanatorium in Switzerland” Ammy told them, which was why Shueli read “Letters From a Father to his Daughter” with a world of sympathy for that little girl who was deprived of both her Ammy and Papa. As they sat there, with Graanpa and the visitors, Shueli, out of the corner of her eye, would see Graany at the teak door of the verandah, wildly gesticulating to them. They’d pretend not to see her. When she finally got hold of them, she’d say how shameful it was that grown-up girls should sit with men, joining in all the arguments. But they didn’t care. They loved it. Weren’t they Delhi girls, who were going to do great and wonderful things as soon as they were grown-up and free? This, despite the fact that Shueli often felt oppressed by just the fact of being a girl, and Graany’s constant reminders that she’d have to be “married off’ as soon as a “good boy” was found. Shueli felt prison walls closing in. “We must find a suitable boy for her soon - before she becomes too old and  the light goes out of her face,” said Graany, not at all sensitive to Shueli squirming. Gaya and Shueli conferred with Ammy on this issue. “How can the light go out of your face? What kind of light?”
“She means that a girl’s beauty vanishes soon,” Ammy would tell them, “So it’s better to get married soon.”
“Oh God can’t we do anything except Get Married?” 
In despair, Shueli turned to her Graanpa and asked: “Can’t girls do anything ?”  Graanpaa, her dear, kind Graanpa, who knew just how to comfort her, said: “Don’t be sad. When you grow up, men will adore you.” Would they really, Shueli wondered. She’d like to be beautiful and adored. Though, given the choice, she preferred to have lots of adventures, do many exciting things, travel and be famous. And what if she fell in love with a Hindu? Just to test her Graanpa, she asked once: “Supposing I meet a good Hindu and a not-so good Christian, whom should I marry, Graanpa?” He’d think a long time, and then answer: “The Hindu, of course.”
But Graany, conventional Graany, insisted that “a good boy, from a good family, from our own community, of course” should be found soon for Shueli. It made Shueli furious and afraid. Couldn’t she at least choose her own husband? “No” said Graany “that is all modern rubbish. Your parents will choose a suitable boy for you. They have to start searching now, and making proposals to the boys’ families in a few years, and also start saving up something for your dowry.”
“But Graany” protested Shueli, “I will only marry someone I fall in love with. Besides, I have to go to college, travel, do lots of things..”
Graany couldn’t pronounce the word “Love”. In fact she was highly contemptuous of people who fell in ‘lauu’ - people who went off and did strange, wilful things like that, upsetting order and decorum. Her cousin’s daughter had fallen in love with her young lecturer at college, and, against everyone’s advice, had insisted on marrying him. “It will come to no good,” prophesied Graany. But, in fact, the young lecturer went on to achieve high position, and the erring girl was a happy wife. Shueli, who felt trapped by all the traditions and rules of her community, liked the idea of the ‘Swayamvara’ which she learned about in her History classes. This was a custom among noble Rajput families, and other old Indian communities. When Graany talked of dowry, and behaved as if it was a great favour a boy did to a girl, marrying her, - Shueli would refuse to listen. She’d begin to dream that she was a princess, dressed in a beautiful red and gold sari, with flowers in her long, thick hair, which would be piled up high on her head, or twined into a single plait. Handsome young princes would all come to the swayamvara, and wait anxiously until she had walked around the hall, finally placing her garland around the neck of a very special prince. If it didn’t work out, and people like Graany and Ammy and Papa interfered, the reckless young prince would carry her away on his horse, as Prince Prithvi Raj had done with the Princess of Kanauj.  Gaya told Shueli she was “very silly”, when she shared this secret dream with her.
As for Graany, her main concern in life was - “What will people say?” Propriety was, for her, the very essence of life. She rarely let the image of the pious and conforming housewife slip. Only once, lying with Graany, in the wooden bed under the attic, with the smell of the whole mango pickles in huge bharanis, and the soporofic rustle of the coconut trees outside, Graany, talking of her difficult childhood, suddenly said, “Actually, I don’t believe in God.” Shueli was really shocked, as Graany was always exhorting her to pray and believe in God, and such things. Having said such a totally unexpected thing, Graany immediately retracted, letting her dissidence be only a very momentary one. “Don’t tell anybody” she concluded. And Shueli never did.
Tiruvella was, literally, a one horse town. Retired people of comfortable means had built pleasant spacious houses, tiled, with gleaming red polished floors, gardens, large verandahs and wells. Many of the houses even had “septic tanks” and flushes, instead of the thatched outhouse or “cuckoose somewhere at the end of the compound. Most of the families knew each other, or of each other, even if they weren’t directly connected by blood or marriage. Shueli and Gaya had thrown away their sunhats and shoes, and had discovered the joys of walking barefoot along the country road to visit their friends. But despite that, they always felt they were the outsiders. Chinnakutty and Elsiemol would giggle and switch over to Malayalam, so that they felt left out, and would return to their story books.
Graanpaa was beautifully disciplined in his own life, as well as in the way he dealt with the girls. Unlike Graany, who had a lavish hand, Graanpa would give each of them one  sweet or chocolate after a meal, absolutely no more. And because it was understood, it was accepted. At breakfast, Graanpa would give each of them a little bit of butter, taken from a precious tin of Polson’s Butter, to put onto their ‘Poottu’ (Rice flour and freshly grated coconut, steamed in long coconut shell vessels), which they loved hot, with butter, sugar, and the tiny, delicious Malabar bananas. Shueli herself preferred Graany’s ‘appams’ (rice cakes, with a lacy edge, leavened with toddy) eaten with chicken stew.
Graanpa would go for a walk, regularly each evening. He had a slight limp, and held up one edge of his dhoti when he walked, his walking stick in the other. How Shueli and Gaya had laughed, when Graanpa told them that, years ago, when he had first gone to England as a student,.. “I was riding  along in a carriage in London,when we saw a little English boy, running behind, shouting “Stop, stop.’ When we stopped, and asked what the matter was, the little boy, who was now joined by another boy, said: ‘We was just wond’rin, Sir,..me mate and me, we just had a bet .. we was wond’rin if the palm of your hand is also black, or is it white?’ Graanpa good humouredly held out his hand, and the boys, satisfied, left.
Graanpa was always reading and writing, spending hours in his little study, lined with book-shelves right up to the ceiling. He wrote articles, in his retirement, on a regular basis for The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. Instead of money, they sent him magazines like Time and Newsweek, all of which, later, Shueli and Gaya found stored, with an exciting smell of mould, in the old wooden attic over the house, - a veritable treasure house  of lost smells, memories, old books and charts. Once, Shueli found a little blue box in which Ammy had put together Nutrition Charts for her Education Degree at Madras. It showed all the milestones, all the dangers, diseases and hurdles which human beings had to face in a life time. Life seemed to be an endless series of threats and hazards. It was like the Westerns. You had to keep jumping or dodging, or else you’d be hit by some bullet or other. If you were a boxer in a ring, you had to keep on, taking the blows, or giving them, or be knocked out, carried away senseless, blood oozing from your mouth, while the other man remained a victor, cheered by the crowds. That impression remained with Shueli to the end, the menace of life, the constant threat to human happiness, which seemed such a fragile thing. Anyway, laughter helps, thought Shueli. So does routine. At exactly a certain time, both morning and evening, and again at 9 p.m. Graanpa would sit and tune his old radio, and listen to the B.B.C. News. It was thrilling hearing the chimes of Big Ben every day,  even if they didn’t understand the news. “India will be free one day,” he told Shueli.  Graanpa, with K.T. Paul and other Christian leaders, was fiercely for Indian Independence. Many leaders, thinkers and political figures came to call on Graanpa in Tiruvella. Among them was Sadhu Sundar Singh, mystic and charismatic, who had been a Sikh in his youth. He had hated and despised Christians, and had burned a Bible one day, while he was a young man. Soon after, he had had a vision of Christ, which so overwhelmed and dazzled him, that he became a Christian himself. “Just like St. Paul, who had been a rabid Christian hater himself, until he was blinded one day by an intense light, and had a vision of Christ...”, said Ammy. Sadhu Sundar Singh had gone up to Mount Kailash in the Himalayas, and there, he claimed, he had met ‘rishis’ or sadhus, ascetics who had given up the worldly life. Some were aged 300 years or more. Sadhu Sundar Singh had gone back to those great white spaces some years later, and vanished forever. His body was never found. Perhaps he was killed by wild animals. Or perhaps he joined that community of ageless seers.”
Others who were friends of Graanpa’s included Charlie - C.F. Andrews, a friend of Gandhi, and a staunch supporter of freedom for India. In the old attic, carefully wrapped up, they found letters from Mahatma Gandhi. Graany and Graanpa had lived in Nagpur, “right in the centre of India” before they retired to Tiruvella... And it was in Nagpur that Shueli had been born. Shueli had a faint memory of how Graanpa had taken her with him, and driven to a place called Wardha, where there was an Ashram. They went into a building, where there was a stone slab, which formed a kind of seat, at the entrance...An old man, with just a dhoti on, sat with his legs folded sideways, upon the slab. He smiled as he saw them approach. Graanpa said: “This is my little grand-daughter.” The old man smiled a toothless smile, placed his hand on Shueli’s head and blessed her...They were tired when they got back to Nagpur late that night. The next morning, Shueli lay on the string bed in the verandah, watching the fluffy clouds assume exciting shapes, and she heard Graanpa telling Graany: “Yesterday, Gandhiji blessed Shueli.”
It seemed to Shueli, when she heard Graanpa use the word freedom, that it was the sweetest word in the whole world. Graanpa took down a dusty book from his shelves, and said, Shueli, look at this book by this Frenchman called Emile Rousseau. He made us see that ‘Man is born free, but everywhere is found in chains.’ Shueli  could never understand why cruelty and suffering dogged people’s footsteps all their lives, or why people tortured and killed one another. “Graanpa, if God is so powerful, and created us all, how can he allow all this to go on?” asked Shueli, who moved always between poles of dark despair and joyous affirmation. “That’s because we are free to choose between good and evil,” Graanpa explained. And went back to his eternal tuning of his radio. That radio! Shueli and Gaya took it for granted, but Graany told them how, when Graanpa first told her that soon there would be a way for people to talk to each other across the seas, she had laughed, unbelievingly, insisting it was “just another story. Quite impossible!”  But, in fact, so many impossible things had come to pass, from that time to this time, spanning almost half a century, that there was no longer quite the same thrill as of those first discoveries: - the radio, the telephone, and the moving picture. It was in Lahore that Shueli first found out what the ‘bioscope’ or moving picture meant. Nathoo, the boy servant said “See, Missy Baba. See this small book? Turning very fast fast, you see cricketers play on playing field.” Shueli was enchanted when she flipped the pages, and saw the cricketers bowl and bat and make graceful runs. Another time, Nathoo, a true and original aficionado of the movies, showed her a small glass box in which pictures of the Jog Falls kept moving, so you felt you were right there, and the water was striking your face. “Missy Baba like?” Missy Baba was too thrilled for words, by the miracle of movement, of the moving pictures.
 
 
CHAPTER FIVE

Honavar
 
Shueli was actually named Anna after Honavar Ammachy, Papa’s mother according to Syrian Christian custom. Luckily, it was also Ammy’s mother, Graany’s name This also meant that Gaya, who was born two years after Shueli, missed getting her maternal grandmother’s name, and got Graany’s sister’s name instead. Sara. But everyone called them Shueli and Gaya, which was what they christened the two sapota trees, planted by Graanpaa, that stood at the entrance to the Tiruvella house. Gaya’s real name was Gayathri. But when she was born, in a hospital in Lahore, where Papa was a Lecturer in English, and Shueli, who was just two then, was taken to see her, couldn’t pronounce  Gayathri.  “Gaya. Gaya’ she said. And so, Gaya stuck. 
The summer holidays were usually spent either in Tiruvella or Honavar, where  the
grandparents lived. Shueli had her first taste of sadness when she was nine. A telegram had come to Papa in Delhi that Honavar Ammachi  (his mother) had died. A tonga was summoned, so that Papa could leave his wife and two children with friends, and travel by train to be at the funeral of his beloved mother. Shueli looked out of the tonga at all the people bustling by, people with cart-loads, mothers and children, horns and clip-clopping of the tonga horses, coolies with loads on their heads.  Didn’t anyone realise how sad they were?  No, it looked as if the rest of their world was quite undisturbed by their sorrow. That was the first time Shueli realised that each one must bear his grief alone. The rest of the world didn’t care that Honavar Ammachi, who had borne eleven children, and endured a life of hardship and deprivation with the greatest dignity, had vanished into the unknown at the young age of 53. Of course, to  Gaya and Shueli,  53 was old. After her death, all their visits to Honavar stopped. The mud cottage, with its semi-tiled, thatched roof, where they had spent so many of their summer holidays, just vanished from their lives.  But not really. In their imagination, it grew and grew, for that was the gift of the shooting stars - nothing would die - everything would live, and become richer, in their secret heart. Like the stained glass, decorating the small church, which stood so near the cottage; the bright poinsettia and lantana flowers, which grew wild there; or the two cows, Nellie and Sundari, who’d given such rich milk, that Papa as a young boy, had put his mouth to the udder, and drunk deep of that generous cow’s milk. Honavar Ammachi had no fancy words. She had to keep her large brood together somehow, feed them, clothe them and send them out into the world.  Ammachy kept chickens in baskets in a corner of the dark old bathroom. The eggs and chickens, along with the abundant flow of milk from Nellie and Sundari, and Appachen’s beehives from which came the most delicious honey, helped a great deal in supplementing Appachen’s small income from the mission school where he taught. When Papa matriculated from this small village school, where everything was taught in Kannada, his father told him he’d have to get a job in one of the local Tehsil offices, as there were so many younger ones to educate and feed, and far too little money to manage it with. Papa, though just a village boy, had already acquired a larger horizon. Once, he had dared to question a master who had flatly stated: The earth is round.
“How do we know it is round?” asked Papa.
The master shouted at him: “You arrogant fellow. How dare you ask unnecessary questions? I have to answer your impertinent questions, do I? It is round because I have told you so.”  He then planted a stinging slap across poor Papa’s face. He had to write 200 times The Earth is Round, because our Master has told us so. He also had to stand outside the class for half an hour, holding his ears, while the other boys jeered at him. Papa was filled with despair at the thought of a dreary clerical job as his fate for the rest of his life. The boy, desperate, went to his mother, dearest of all in the world to him, and pleaded with her for a chance to study more.  “We can do it” she told her husband with determination. She was only a village girl, but knew how important education was, and that this was a matter of life and death for her son’s future. She grew vegetables, sold the fresh cow’s milk, and the eggs. She had taught her children to be thrifty, but by instinct, she knew how to give her family the healthiest food. The rice was never polished, they ate a lot of raagi and jowar rotis topped with home-made butter. The vegetables were cut coarsely and just steamed. and they ate plenty of fish which came in from the West Coast. Now, her son’s First Class marks had secured him a place at one of the Bombay University colleges. But how would he go? What would he wear?  Skilful with her hands, and with the help of an old sewing machine, she stitched a shirt and coat for her son to make his journey to Bombay, that distant city she herself had never seen. Wearing that hand-made suit, Appa travelled by bullock-cart part of the way, and then by bus, to reach the city of his dreams, to study among Bombay’s fashionable young students. There, he lived in a squalid little room, sharing with two other students. After the healthy air of the coastal Ghat area, he was almost suffocated by the stale smell of food, and the sweat and dirt of human beings crowded together in the metropolis, jostling for a living. They had been poor in Honavar, but they had had fresh air, and good, wholesome  food, and human dignity. Papa got malaria, and lay ill for days together, sick with the smell of rice and sambhar, brought in an overflowing tiffin-carrier, by the small boy servant from the hotel nearby, and dumped in a corner of the room. At one stage he found he had absolutely no money left to pay his fees. Desperate, but determined not to give up, he racked his brains for a solution. The rich Parsi boys he studied with, sons of some of the leading industrialist families, could have no idea of his struggles. They respected him for his brains and integrity, but could not in any way enter into this young man’s fears and uncertainties. But Papa had been brought up on the story of the peasant boy, David, who, with his sling, which wasn’t much more than a catapult, fought off, and slew, the giant Goliath.  So, that night when he found he had no money left to pay the fees or room board, he did not give in to his despair. There was a notice pinned onto the College Board in the Literature Department, which said:  “Homejee Cursetjee Prize for Essay on Thomas Hardy.  Prize : Rs. 600/.”
Still weak with the malaria, the young man sat night after night working on the Essay. “Glory of glories” Ammy would tell Shueli and Gaya proudly later, “He finished it somehow, and -yes - he did win the Prize. That six hundred Rupees was enough for him to pay the fees for a whole year. And all those lovely books you see today in his study - you know, those blue bound ones with the gold spine and lettering - they were all a part of that Prize.”
Ammy was a great story-teller, though a bit unpredictable in her moods. She would often jump up in the middle of a story, saying, “Wonder if Nathoo Ram has put the butter in ice..” or “Must stir the pot on the stove. The meat curry will burn. I’ll be back in a minute.”  But that might be the end of the story for the day, till she picked up the thread again another day. In a way, she was rather like Scheherazade, who, the girls had heard, spun endless stories, night after night, just to stay alive. If she had ended the stories, she’d have been put to death by the cruel king. Ammy’s stories could be so funny that tears sometimes rolled down their faces, as they laughed together over the doings of some odd old character, or some of their eccentric relatives. But they always came back to the picture of the three little children. Over the years circumstance had parted the two families. Ammy’s father, who had a University degree, was very liberal in his thinking. He was no fundamentalist, and could not fit into the narrow stultifying atmosphere of that small community on the West Coast. While Papa’s father continued as a teacher in that little village school, Ammy’s  father moved to a job in another part of the country.. He was already devoted in his mind to the idea of Indian Independence. He kept and maintained steady contacts with many of  the great leaders who were fighting for India’s freedom. So, the families were parted, and it was years later, after Papa had done so well at college, and got his first job as a Lecturer at Ferguson College in Poona, that Ammy met Papa again. Papa laughs and tells  Shueli and Gaya, “She had her eye on me even then. And what could I, a mere man, do?”  Had Ammy really set her heart on Papa at the age of two?  Ammy, a young woman in a satin silk sari, with a narrow red border, the sari worn up to her ankles, peered out at them enigmatically from innumerable studio portraits.  Sitting  on a Victorian love-seat, looking coy, with a Mona Lisa smile on her face, had she really had the guts and will, to get her man, despite all the odds against it? Ammy said that when she was about twelve years old, two of her classmates in Madras, where she had grown up, had told her they could call the spirits of dead people. All you had to do was to sit in the dark, and put your hands on a 3-sided table with two others, your eyes closed, and call the spirit by name, asking for an answer to your question. The spirit always came.  This time they had asked “Who will Amaal marry?” and were told quite clearly ‘Philipose’ which was Papa’s name. Of course, she had known him when she was two. But how could the spirit have told her that when she was twelve? It couldn’t have stayed secretly in her mind all that time, could it?
When Papa, a young man who had survived the hardships of his student days in Bombay, coming through with distinction, got his first job as a Lecturer in Poona, the  family he called on was that of the Cherians who lived there now, because he had been told of these old friends of his family. Ammy’s heart was set on him right away. What happened? Shueli wondered. Did an electric current pass through each of them, as they stood there looking at one  another?  “And if they hadn’t looked at one another like that, would we ever have been here, as Us - Shueli and Gaya?” wondered Shueli. Or, had the friendship grown slowly, on Philipose’s frequent visits, - he always spent his Sundays with the Cherian family -when both of them discovered their feelings towards each other?
Ammy had grown up in the orthodox, yet intellectually liberated and open atmosphere of Madras in the early part of the twentieth century. This was the time of the Theosophist Movement. Annie Besant and others like her shot mercury into the veins of a highly rigid, but intellectually enquiring society. She had gone to a school where her best friends were mostly Hindus - often Brahmins - whose parents had dared to let their daughters acquire a bit of education, at a time when it was still rare for girls to study much. Ammy had learned to play the veena as well as the piano. Shueli, who had so longed to learn music when she was at school in Delhi years later, had been denied that joy, because their school in Delhi was so far from their home.  Shueli loved to hear her mother play, in later years, on her old Tanjore Veena, intricate ragas of Swati Tirunaal, and other great composers of South India.
Ammy had gone to a school started by British missionaries in one of the most conservative parts of Madras. Few girls attended school at that time at all. “Who will marry a girl if she is so educated?” many Hindu mothers were heard to ask.  Christians, at that time, were rather more enlightened in this regard, as they were exposed to the ideas of  Christian educators and missionaries from England. Some of the luckier, richer girls had governesses or tutors at home; most of them had just a very few years of grace, the chance to learn a bit of English, acquire a few accomplishments  (which could help in “the marriage market”), before they found “a suitable boy”, often by the age of eleven or twelve. Ammy told the girls how one of her best friends had been married off when she was only nine, to a young man who was a University student at the time. Horoscopes had been matched, and a brilliant future had been forecast for the couple. However, when the pretty young child-bride was only eleven, the young man had died of a  raging fever. Malati, the bride, was still living with her own parents at the time, as she was too young to go and live in her husband’s home. It was usually only after she reached puberty that the bride was sent to her in-laws’ home. The look of uncomprehending terror on Malati’s face, when the news was brought to her in the classroom, was something that haunted Ammy to the end of her days. “She was so bright. Her laughter was like the tinkling of bells, and there she was, a widow at eleven, pulled out of school,” said Ammy. 
“Ammy,” said Shueli, “I don’t ever want to marry, and become a widow. I want to be free all my life!”
Malati’s mother, and oher relatives, had agreed with the elders of their community that, in accordance with their tradition, Malati’s bangles should be broken (this breaking of bangles on the wrist of a frightened little girl, could injure or even break the frail wrist), -all her jewellery and fine clothes be removed. She was condemned to wearing a plain white sari the rest of her life, and worst of all, her hair would be shaved right off. (Sometimes the barber was rough, and there would be little nicks and cuts on the tender scalp.)
“Just think. Such small girls had to perform a life-long penance for “the sin” of letting her husband die before her. Everyone knew that auspicious brides always died first, and blessed their husbands with long life, health and prosperity. Such a bride is the Sumangali or the one whose sacred thread is blessed. That’s why she was supposed to be the Goddess Lakshmi, who brought prosperity into her new home.”
“But that’s not fair. Either way, they’re bound to be cut and wounded by the two-edged sword! Whatever happened to your poor friend, Malati?” asked Shueli, near to tears.
“Malati’s  father was in the I.C.S., - a very enlightened and brave man for his time. He
came and consulted Miss Donohue, the Principal of the school, and arrived at his own  conclusions. He didn’t yield to orthodox beliefs and sentiments. Why should he let his beloved, bright little Malati, his own little Lakshmi, suffer like that? So, a few weeks later, Malati returned to school, minus her bangles and jewellery, and bright silk sari, but in no other way deprived. Her hair hadn’t been shaved off, thank Heavens.”
“But why did they do such a terrible thing to little girls?” asked Shueli.
“Maybe to make her lose all her beauty and attractiveness, so that no one would want her again. They weren’t even allowed the dignity of a blouse, and had to wrap themselves in a white. or sometimes red sari. Sometimes these young, helpless women had no home to return to, and were left destitute, or at the mercy of male relatives, who might seduce or rape them. If they became pregnant, they were thrown out, without shelter, and sometimes took their own lives. One of the worst abuses was  ‘You child of a widow!’ “ Years later, when Shueli visited the sacred city of Banaras, whose feet were immersed in the holy waters of the River Ganga, she saw the sad, wasted widows, their lives drained away,  draped in their shroud-like saris, who came as pilgrims, to have a few scraps of charity thrown at them by those seeking salvation, and to end their bitter lives in the Holy City...
“Malati continued her studies, despite the harsh whispers of the other girls, and she even went to College later,”  said Ammy, glad to see Shueli’s sad face brighten up again. ”But, of course, that was because her father was brave. And also, because a noble soul like Pandita Ramabai (she was a Sanskrit scholar, - molle,- who later became a Christian) - had taken up the fight against the cruel, savage treatment meted out to helpless young women like Malati..”
Ammy’s own progressive minded father had been a great admirer of Pandita Ramabai. Ammy grew up with ideas and music and stories..which she passed on to Shueli and Gaya. It was only when she insisted, after Ewart School, that she’d like to study music at
Shantiniketan, the University associated with Tagore and the Bengal Renaissance, that her father did not agree. “Well, that just ended my interest in studies” Ammy said flatly. She didn’t care for the rigidly Christian women’s college her father did send her to, with its “oh so pious and hypocritical atmosphere. Imagine, the girls called you a “sinner” if you weren’t always praying!”   She’d won the Short Story Contest there, and was considered bright. With her tight curly hair, infectious sense of humour, her love of history, she was liked by her teachers and friends. But the slight note of rebellion and dissent kept her apart. As Shueli grew older, she found somewhat the same thing in her own life, forcing her to stand alone. While Ammy was at school, her vivacity had led to her being selected by the staff to present a bouquet, - an honour vied for by all the girls,- to Lady Willingdon on her imperial visit to the school. But, in college, with its narrow and self-righteous atmosphere she began to feel bored and rebellious. Her performance plummetted. They had just moved to Poona, and she was in a kind of vacuum, when the young Philipose  - her friend from age two, whom she hadn’t seen all these years, turned up as a Lecturer at Ferguson College. It was his first job, and there was an immediate attraction between them. When he proposed to her, Ammy was thrilled, but Graany and Graanpaa both thought it a very bad idea. They warned her that she’d have a very hard life, as the Philipose family was so poor, and there were so many younger brothers and sisters to educate, and much of the responsibility would fall on the older children. Ammy replied with no drama, but quite simply,  “Alright. I won’t marry him. But then I won’t marry anyone at all, if I don’t marry him.” So Graanpaa, never an autocrat, essentially gentle and liberal, had given in. This, despite Graany’s  muttered predictions of disaster. And Ammy, with her parents, had gone to the mud and thatch cottage in Honavar for the marriage. She wore that long gold chain which Shueli and Gaya had noticed in those pictures on the wall, tripled and multiplied into several layers, a few gold bangles and gold ear-rings.  She always liked very bright Kanjeevaram saris with their classic and ageless weaves, - no pastels or placid colours for her. The service, in the little church with its beautiful stained glass windows, was bright and full of hope, in a mixture of Kannada and Malayalam, with some of the old Syrian Christian rituals added in - such as the stringing of a tiny grain-like cross, or minnu - onto the mangala sutra or sacred thread, which was blessed by the priest.  Honavar Appachan and Ammachi had been happy about the alliance with their old family friends, but there was a slight undercurrent of sourness. Why had their son, who was not yet twenty four, gone and got married so young? They had so much to hope for from him. Wasn’t he being irresponsible, indifferent to his duties and responsibilities as the oldest child in such a large family? Ammachy was pregnant again, and expecting her eleventh child at the time when her son got married. Her youngest and last child was born five months after the marriage of her oldest son! There were ten young ones at home, to educate, feed, clothe.  If their oldest son didn’t help, who would?  There was some barbed and wounding talk about how the young couple would only care for themselves now, leaving the family to drown...Once, Shueli and Gaya, going through a drawer, guiltily read some old letters they found there. One was a love letter from young Phillipose to Amaal. It was full of romantic lines like
“Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams”  which Shueli found entrancing. But there were bitter letters from Honavar Appacha, blaming his son for taking out a small insurance for his young wife and daughters. It accused him of lack of faith and complete selfishness. As they were growing up, the children sensed the tension such letters created. When Papa was angry, he would just leave the house and go for a long, brisk walk. They must both have felt calmer by the time he returned...
When Ammy first married Papa, she’d been distressed not only by the poverty and hard life, but by the somewhat bitter tongue of Ammachi, who didn’t much care for the spoilt city girl who’d taken away her dearest, first-born son.  Ammy was quite unused to this poor, rural life. To the family, it was annoying to find the young bride fussing over trifles. Ammachy kept chickens in baskets in a corner of the dark old bathroom. There were also huge copper vessels and an old copper boiler in which the water for baths was heated. Once, in the dark and dingy bathroom, when Ammy had just begun to undress, and pour the hot water over herself, trying not to care about the chicken feathers floating from the chicken baskets on the side, looked up and froze when she saw a snake hanging from the thatched roof, the greens and browns of its coppery sinuousness, not quite camouflaged. Ammy let out a most terrified scream, hastily wrapped herself in her towel, and ran out, still screaming, Honavar Ammachy chided her for making an unnecessary fuss. After all, it was only a harmless grass snake,  that wouldn’t bite. To add to it all, Ammy had come as a bride, “with a long gold chain that doubled and trebled, and reached right down to her feet,” and, instead of humming hymns, was apt to hum sacred Carnatac music! 
She missed her Tanjore veena, which she had learned to play very well at school in Madras, all of which seemed quite alien to the somewhat narrow, fundamentalist thinking of the family at Honavar. Later, when Shueli and Gaya  arrived with their parents, for the summer holidays at Honavar, they’d fuss terribly over the way the floors were cleaned with cowdung. They’d get up onto the table and scream “Dirty...dirty”
while the aunts and uncles stood round, laughing, saying, “Oh, these city children! What a fuss they make!” They’d love to sit on the wooden chairs, with crossed stitch cushions, and gaze at the embroidered sayings from the Bible, also in cross-stitch, framed and gracing the mud walls. “God is Love” of course, or “I am the Light. He that followeth me, shall not walk in darkness. ”And even better: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Shueli would imagine a crowd parting, and she and Gaya walking up to the magnetic personality that had said that, and looking into his compassionate eyes. For Shueli, direct touch meant more than all the churches in the world...When Shueli was older, and her hopeless struggle with mathematics kept her school marks down, Honavar Appacha taught her how to add and subtract with some red beans he kept for the purpose, and she learned wonderfully. There was  also an old tin in which coins of tiny denominations were  kept. Every Sunday, the poor and dispossessed would come and call out in front of the house:
“In God’s name, help the poor. We are hungry. We are dying. Help us.  A morsel of food, a few rags for these poor children.. these orphans of the earth.”  
The girls loved it when Appacha gave them some coins to go and distribute among these pathetic people. Ammachi would come out with rice in an old copper rice measure, and the old clothes, not one of which was thrown away, but stored carefully, for these people in such dire need. Honavar Ammachi and Appacha weren’t rich themselves,  but some miracle enabled them to give to those far poorer than themselves. “How, Ammachy? How do we have so much to give?” asked Shueli. And Honavar Ammachi, who always allowed Shueli to lick her fingers as she churned the butter from the butter-milk with a wooden churner, would tell Shueli about how Jesus had fed a multitude upon the mountains, with only one fish and seven loaves. In the evenings, Honavar Appacha would call the entire family together for prayers. The paraffin lamps would be lit, around which the moths and monsoon insects would hover. In the pitch dark night outside, fireflies would swarm, much like their Delhi stars. Even the maid servants joined in, and the prayers, in the majestic language of the Bible (translated into Malayalalam by one of their ancestors who had been fervent in the Reform Movement of the Syrian Christian church in Travancore), would fill the night air: God of our fathers, Thou who knowest the deepest desires of our heart, guide us, we pray thee.  Devame nee parushudhan agunnu.”  The sonorous, poetic words flowed over them, and filled their childish hearts with rapture, though they didn’t understand any of it. Though Shueli liked this changeless quality of the life in Honavar, change was actually gnawing at the root, a worm in the hidden darkness. The two older girls, who should, according to tradition, have been married, had to take jobs as teachers in District Schools, because there was no dowry for them. The fact that their eldest brother had got married, and taken on his own responsibilities, instead of getting his sisters married, only added to the underlying bitterness. The Christian community in Travancore  (later, Kerala), -  being agricultural, feudal and patriarchal, - maintained the practice of giving ‘sthreedhanam’ (the girl’s wealth or share), as did most communities in India. As the girl was going away to another home, she took her share  (which was usually a fraction of the family’s assets) with her. In poor families, unlike wealthy ones, this created great hardship. Six girls in the family, and where would the dowries come from? In the Honavar home, everything was still strict and uncompromising. The girls were not allowed to use powder on their faces, wear high heeled sandals, or even part their hair, or look in a mirror. Both Rahel and Shosha, the younger sister, were beautiful. Papa managed to get his sisters to Bombay to study at the University there. They shed their old-fashioned ideas and inhibitions, and began to dress fashionably, attracting quite a bit of attention. “They not only looked in the mirror, but wore high-heeled shoes, powdered their faces, and parted their hair in fashionable styles, and flirted a bit with the many young men who admired them.”   Papa was proud of his good-looking sisters, and defended them stoutly if anyone made jealous or malicious remarks about them. They had many admirers, but were very conscious of their family responsibilities, and questions of dowry and family often overshadowed everything. Rahel was softly beautiful -(Shueli always thought that she looked like the painting of the Sistine Madonna, which she’d seen hanging in the old Maitland House) and very feminine. She broke many hearts, and was quite the femme fatale. Shosha was far more stern and sharp, and conscious of her duty to those at home in Honavar. She did finally get a proposal which sounded very good, from a young man who was going to study Accountancy in England. He wrote her many letters, but after a while, the letters became rather scarce. She had a terrible shock when she heard that he had got married to an English girl, with never a word to her!
After University, Rahel and Shosha accepted jobs that took them across the Western Ghats to places like Kumta, Sirsi, Bijapur, and Karwar,  jutting out into the Arabian Sea.  Shueli, being a bit older, was allowed, sometimes, to go with the aunts for short stays at these places. So exciting. Heart pounding. Almost grown up. Facing the world alone, though not quite! The wind from the sea in their faces, as the bus twisted and wound across the narrow Ghat roads, the sea down below, great forests of sal and teak on the inward side,  filled with lantana and hibiscus flowers. They even went to stay once with friends, who were forest rangers or dealers in timber. How heavy and mysterious those nights would be. Fireflies, and the rich, elusive smells of the forest, and the tortuously winding road down to the Ocean. Shueli had had her first glimpse of the sea in Karwar. So-o- much water, going on and on, sparkling like jewels in the sun. She’d gone quite mad, and run, shrieking and crying out, to get her feet wet and run along by the sand edging the sea. In the evenings, they’d eat spicy hot crab curry and rice. Against the insistent pounding of the waves, they’d sing “Rock of Ages cleft for me, / Let me hide my face in Thee.”  Human beings seemed so small and frail against the sea and the forests, - they had to have some shelter, something to cling to when the storms came. When Shueli was five,  Rahel Aunty said “Gaya is too little. But I’ll take Shueli with me when I go to Kumta and Karwar.” That was the time they stayed in an old  dharam-shaalaa, or shelter for travellers. Shueli and Aunty went from the small wayside station in an ekka. Later, when Aunty had to go out for a little while, Shueli, staring out of the open window at the busy street, had a moment of terror. A terrible fear swept over her, when she saw a man standing staring vacantly across the garden outside. He began to sing, shout and gesticulate. “He’s a madman” said Aunty in a matter-of-fact voice. Poor madman. Would he hurt anyone, or himself? Wasn’t there anyone to help him? What had made him like that, wondered Shueli.
Rahel Aunty had a friend, tall and strong, and he seemed to be very fond of her. He came and picked them up one day in a jeep. He swung Shueli up in the air, and said  “Let’s go to the sea, to Karwar.”  Just as the sun was sinking, and the fishermen were singing and heaving their catch onto the wild sands, they arrived. Oh, the  smell of that sand, and those fish, heaving and struggling for air. Shueli didn’t know about death throes. Was it joy, was it excitement at being out on the sands, that made them writhe around like that? As the violent colours of the sunset receded, a pale moon with a wistful light began to glow in the sky. She sat alone, on a towel, on the sand, as her Aunt and the unknown man, who seemed to be a powerful swimmer, swam out into the ocean together. Shueli felt part of that oneness, and when they swam back, and threw themselves upon each other, on the beach, a little away from her, she felt their rapture. This it is to be alive! Perhaps this was what people called madness? She was too young to know what their feelings were, and what it really meant, but it all became part of that memory later, shrouded in moonlight, and drowned by the roar of the sea. It was mixed, in her mind with a visit to the ‘bar’ in Honavar, where the river met the ocean. There was a shimmering, blinding light at this meeting point, and, for ever after, it stood in Shueli’s mind for the elemental mystery and wildness which lay at the heart of all life. Later, at school, she read a poem by Alfred Tennyson about the harbour bar,  and it kept pounding in her head, like the sea. Years later, when she was about seventeen, on a visit to her maternal grandparents in Tiruvella, in what was then known as Travancore, she had gone with Ammy’s brother and his wife to Cape Comorin, the southernmost tip of India, the meeting place of three oceans, which serenely, sometimes wildly, merged with one another here in a passionate embrace, obliterating all boundaries. The sun’s setting and rising over expanses of sand dunes, which seemed to stretch in trackless mystery, made one feel as if one had reached the very limits of the Universe. Clambering over some rocks at sunrise one day, she suddenly noticed, with a lurch of her heart, something bobbing up and down in the water, between the dark rocks. She managed to scramble across part of the cliff and rocks, while the restraining, cautioning voices of her uncle and aunt followed her. ”Be careful. Don’t go there, Shueli.  Aiyo, keep away. Let’s go..”  Cradled by the gentle lap of the tide, upon the black rocks, lay the body of a young man, without even a stitch of clothing to cover him. Shueli had never seen a naked man before. Not having had brothers, this helpless male nakedness took her by surprise. He was burnt brown by sun and sea. A rough sea had torn even his loin-cloth off him. Possibly he was a fisherman, whose boat had been shattered into pieces by the sudden, treacherous storms that struck that coast, during the monsoon. He could be a fisherman of the Malabar coast, or an Arab from more distant seas. Perhaps he had a wife, or a mother or children wailing for him in some small home by the ocean, calling him, who had now become nameless. Shueli thought he was utterly, perfectly beautiful. She wanted to kneel beside him, and see if he was still alive, or could be restored to life - perhaps by the kiss of life. But he was absolutely still, radiantly peaceful, kissed by death.
Now her aunt and uncle had caught up, insisting that they should leave at once. –
“Don’t touch him. It will only lead to trouble. He may be a smuggler, or might have been murdered - it will become a police case...”   Shueli felt a tender pain within her, for the beautiful young man, far from all who loved him, alone with the cruel ocean. She could think of no prayer for him, as she turned away helplessly. She could not stand against her aunt and uncle as they voiced their conservative cautions. But in her heart she held him and comforted him, letting a remembered sea-song flow over him:
“Those are pearls that were his eyes  / Nothing of him that doth fade /
But doth suffer a sea- change / Into something rich and strange.” 
​

 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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