SHUELI'S STAR

Novel
~ Anna Sujatha Mathai

Previous Chapters

CHAPTER SIX

Trains
 
Shueli knew that the first time Ammy and Papa had left Honavar after their marriage, to travel so far away, right across the country, to North India, they too, must have experienced some of the fear and sense of wonder she always felt in the presence of the sea. In their case, it was the journey into the unknown, crossing boundaries they had never crossed before. They had to spend three days, travelling by bus and train, away from the lush beauty of the West Coast and the Ghats, to hot, dusty North India, to Lahore, their first home. Trains, rushing across that vast sub-continent seemed to embody a wild, unknown mystery, tinged with fear. As the trains went grinding and shrieking along into that dark night, languages began to change, people began to look different. Food changed from the rice and fish, and lightly steamed vegetable ‘thorans’ of Honavar, to chapaatis and daal, with kababs and salads of raw onions and tomato. The young couple, despite their sense of delighted adventure, were tense and nervous, and were glad to be taken charge of by a kindly old gentleman who called himself Rai Bahadur. When Papa took out his purse to pay, Rai Bahadur ordered him : “Put that purse away, young man. You have now entered the Punjab. You are my guests from this point on.” And so, they reached Lahore, where they were met by someone from the Forman Christian College, where Papa was to become a Lecturer. All their baggage was piled onto a fine tonga, and off they went. Lahore, where Anarkali, the slave-maid who had been loved by the young Prince Salim (later Jahangir), had been buried alive by Emperor Akbar, his father, in the walls of the old palace. Shueli, who had been born in Nagpur (“right in the heart of India”) where her mother’s parents had been at the time, remembered little of this frontier city later. This was where Gaya was born, so it was hard for them to accept, years later, when the leaders, Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, Mountbatten, allowed the country to be carved up, so  it became separate countries. “How can it become separate, when it’s written in your heart? When your child was born there?” Ammy would ask. When Gaya was born, and Shueli was taken to the hospital to meet her newly born sister, Shueli couldn’t say her name - Gayatri - properly. Only two herself, she kept saying “Gaya - Gaya” which was why she became Gaya rather than Gayatri to everyone.
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Journeys, journeys - from that time on - across the country - from Lahore to Honavar to Nagpur to Tiruvella in the Travancore State, and then to Delhi. Journeys, creating maps of the hearts, diminishing distances, separating people, bringing them together. To Shueli and Gaya, the train journey from the North, right down to Alwaye, where they caught another connecting train, to Tiruvella, was like the unfolding of a mystery, an extended geography lesson, or the village dramas behind coloured sheets, in which all sorts of strange characters kept appearing. Here, the different faces of India, grotesque, sad, funny, afraid,  took the stage. Trains were so crowded at that time. People used to jump in through windows, or travel holding on to the foot-board, or even cling perilously to the roof of the train! Mostly poor people, escaping from the villages where there were no opportunities, to escape the hunger, disease, oppression there, to look for work, and maybe hit the big time in those frightening large cities they had never seen. Shueli could hear people running up and down the station shouting “Hindu water” and “Muslim water.” Both girls found this very strange. “How can water be Hindu, Ammy?” “That’s because Hindus won’t drink water polluted by others.” It seemed to Shueli that even water had lines drawn across it, separating people from one another. But how could that be? Water was God’s miracle, for all to share. In the Women’s Compartments, Muslim women, huddled in burqas, sat with Hindu women.. Some of the North Indian women covered their heads with odhanis, when the men came by, to ask if they needed anything. But how could women in burqas bear to stay covered up in black, only peering out at the world through slits, like horses? “Why, Papa?” Shueli would ask, and be told that the Muslims wanted to protect their women from lewd gazes, and keep them safe. “But why don’t the men cover their eyes with a bit of cloth instead, if their look is so dangerous?” asked Shueli. She’d been told that the poor Muslim women often got T.B. and other such diseases, because they were shut away from sunlight and fresh air. To be free, thought Shueli, even then,  that was God’s greatest gift. Anyway, on those long train journeys, stuck in the same compartment together for as long as three days, people forgot about their differences, became friends, exchanged confidences, helped one another. Strangers told each other the deepest secrets or problems of their hearts. Once, just as they were getting into the train at the crowded Old Delhi station,, an Englishman, very red-faced, in khakhi shorts and shirt, slapped a coolie who was rather persistent in demanding a little bit more money., The Englishman had a small leather-covered stick in his hand, and was threatening the coolie with that. Shueli was shocked, angry and upset that no one did anything, just looked away. “The English can do anything they like here. After all, the whole country belongs to them. So why can’t they hit a poor coolie?” Childish anger and fear would fill Shueli’s heart. But the Englishman at the station was so different from some of the other English people they met, who came to build schools and colleges and hospitals in small run-down district towns, and never seemed to mind the heat, dust or squalour, because they saw it as their duty. “We do it all for Jesus Christ.” But Jesus seemed very far from this crowded train, speeding along the great rail-tracks - which the British had laid - which held that vast sub-continent together. The heat and dust and flies, the flat-roofed mud houses, the open drains, with buffaloes and pigs rooting around in filthy puddles of water, would soon give way to the lush greenness of Malabar. Shueli and Gaya would run from window to window as the train swept over great bridges and rivers, to the backwaters, and then the ocean. Now they knew the long, tiring journey would soon be over, and they’d be home with Ammy’s parents in Tiruvella.
Despite all the fears and bitterness sparked off by Papa’s marriage, the family at Honavar held together. Papa took tuitions, apart from his lectures, and marked exam papers, and sent every extra bit home. He had acquired a fine reputation as a brilliant young lecturer, and also as someone with a rare integrity. A young  princeling, with no interest in study, whose family had forced into getting a tutor, suggested he be allowed to slip out. “Of course, Professor Sahib, you will get your tuition money.” He was taken aback when Papa said “Nothing doing! I get paid for putting something into your head. And that I shall certainly do!” With the money sent home, many of the younger ones at home got on their feet, and began to help out. Each and every one of the children went to school, and then on to University. Papa’s younger brother, Johannan, came to stay with them at Lahore, with a heart full of hope and expectation. He joined the college where Papa was a lecturer. Shueli and Gaya loved the handsome young uncle, who took them to Nicholson Bagh for walks, and told them stories. But, shortly after, Papa got a scholarship to Oxford. Ammy couldn’t stay on alone in Lahore with two small children. So, she went off to Madras, to enrol for a Degree in Education at St. Christopher’s College. Shueli and Gaya were sent to Tiruvella to be with Ammy’s  parents. Johannan stayed on alone, in the College Hostel. With no one to care what he ate or drank, he came down with the deadly typhoid fever, raging across the parched and dusty plains of North India just then.  Shueli imagined how he must have felt.  Sick, afraid, with no one to hold his hand, the eighteen year old boy died in that far away Northern city. Distances were so great at that time. A telegram reached the Honavar home late one evening, simply stating that P. Johannan was dead. They felt so helpless and heart broken, knowing they were too late even to reach him as he lay dead.. The first death in the family left them all stricken. It was so hard, they thought in their terrible grief, to bow their heads in acceptance of “God’s will.” Shueli, in later years, faced by the deaths of Ammachy and others, more rebellious in spirit, felt that it was too cruel to be acceptable. She didn’t see much evidence of a personal, loving God, who would not let “a single hair” on our head be harmed. A few years later, when Rahel Aunty went to Lahore, she searched young brother’s grave, but there was no sign of it. Perhaps there was a simple cross or headstone put up for him, but it seemed to have vanished - like that young life, so full of promise, put out so cruelly. Only the hostile winds from the North West Frontier knew where that boy, who came with such youthful hope from Honavar, lay.
 
 
 
CHAPTER SEVEN

Hauntings on the Ridge and Dreaming Spires
 
When Papa came back from Oxford, the girls, shy and distant, hanging coyly behind curtains, surveyed their stranger father, who managed, very gradually, to win their hearts back with chocolates and two dolls called Margaret and Toinette.  Gaya, who often conducted long conversations with plants, spoke to her doll alot. But Shueli  was not too keen on dolls, though she did feel very protective to her Toinette, and hoped she wasn’t getting suffocated when she put her to sleep in the cupboard. Graany told everyone proudly that her “Oxford returned son-in-law” was back, and stuffed him with appams, chicken stoo and payasam. Ammy glowed with pride over her young husband’s achievement. Appa had shone at Oxford, but with no financial backing, and his small family far away in India, it was a struggle.. At one stage, he found he just didn’t have the money to pay his tuition and other expenses. “What did Papa do?” the girls would ask Ammy again and again, as it was a story they loved. “Aiyo, girls. Think of that young Appa of yours, all alone in that cold, far away country, worrying about how he could see it through. And then, do you know what happened?” “No. Tell us. Tell us” the girls would chorus, though they’d probably heard that story a hundred times already.  In the same way, many years later, the little boy who didn’t like sad stories would ask Shueli again and again, “Ma, tell me that story once  more, about how you found me.”
And Shueli would tell, once more, how she had gone to the hospital with Kuri, her husband. She had been most unwilling, sure that all those years of misery would end in her carrying a baby of her own. But when Mother Jocelyn took them to the Ward, and showed them the round little baby sleeping there, she was startled. The baby opened his eyes wide, with a start, and looked straight at her. “Then Amma knew that she had been waiting for you all those years, and you  had been waiting for her and Dadu, and she picked you up, and from that moment, till the end of time, you were her very own  baby...”   Once more, once  more, tell me again, Kartik would plead, his eyes shining with the joy of that story.
In the same way, Ammy would tell the girls the story of Papa at Oxford just one more time. Years later, when these stories were retold, some of the details differed from the original. “That’s just the spice Ammy added,” they would laugh! “Papa was in dark despair, because he thought he’d have to drop his Oxford degree, and return to India half-way through, for lack of funds. Just then, he and another Indian student, Arvind Damle, were invited for lunch by a Mrs. Armitage, an elderly English lady they knew, who liked to be kind to these young students in a foreign land. Mrs. Armitage had terrible arthritis, and sometimes, even her jaw had to be bandaged up.. After lunch, Mrs. A. asked our Papa: ‘You do seem a bit down at heart  today, Philipose. Anything the matter?’ So poor Papa told her how worried he was, and that he might have to give up Oxford and return without the degree he had hoped to get. You know what English people are like -“ said Ammy, - “they never make a promise if they can’t keep it. So Mrs. Armitage just listened quietly, and Papa and Damle went home. Just imagine, girls, what a surprise Papa had, when he got a letter, a few days later, from an unknown English woman.. ’Dear Mr. Philipose,’ the letter read, ‘I heard from my dear friend,  Rosamund Armitage last week, about the unhappy plight you find yourself in. Something tells me you need a helping hand. I shall be glad to lend you £200/- which, I hope, will enable you to complete your degree at Oxford.’ Papa just couldn’t believe it - it was like a direct gift from the heavens above. Shueli, hand me that tray, and put the shelled peas in that bowl. - £200 was a lot of money in those days, and saw Papa through the whole of his remaining year at Oxford.”  “Ammy, is that what they call a miracle?” asked Shueli, and Ammy said, with a smile, “Yes. That’s God’s way of working - through people.”  “And what happened then? Did Papa have to repay that money?” Gaya wanted to know. “Well- after so many years, when Papa returned to England for a conference, he searched a great deal, and found that lady. He told her he had never forgotten her generosity, and wanted to repay that money. She just said ‘Oh dearie me! I am so dreadfully absent minded, and can’t seem to recall that at all. There were a great many foreign students I lent a helping hand to. Instead of returning that money to me , why don’t you just give it back - to some other young student who might need your help?’ And that’s how we moved to St. Stephen’s in Delhi, where Papa became Head of the English Department.”  That was when they moved to the beautiful new Campus of St. Stephen’s at the University, just below the Ridge.
St.Stephens had been set up by, and was closely related to the Cambridge Mission, and had a system based on the Oxford and Cambridge Halls of residence; the Tutorial system; a great deal of extra-curricular activity, and strong inter-relationships between students and professors. If Ammy occasionally tired of the rather cut-off life of the college staff, she was told by the College Principal to “Look at the roses, Mrs. Philipose. Just look at our roses, and let them make your heart glad!”  And indeed, they were perfect roses, which even included  the legendary Black Prince among them.  “Can we live on roses?” Ammy would ask Piloo rather bitterly sometimes. Papa loved his work, and was completely involved with his students, who adored him for his challenging, intellectually stimulating approach, and for the way he opened up their horizons. The College was close to the old Coronation grounds, where King George V had come, at the height of the British Empire, for the Durbar. Sometimes, on full moon nights, the College principal and his wife would invite all the staff for a moonlight picnic. They would set off, in their old Morris Minor started with a lot of cranking and revving, followed by the servants, carrying big vessels full of biriyani and chicken curry and puris, crisply fried ladies finger, and raita. How magical was that long ago Delhi moonlight, and those tumbling stars. Where had they all vanished to? Even the skies had changed. For Shueli, who always loved poetry, the discovery of a few lines by the Greek poetess, Sappho, seemed to grasp, most exquisitely, the aching loneliness of moonlight on a dark landscape:
“The moon is gone  / And the Pleiads set, /
Midnight is nigh;  / Time passes on, /
And passes, yet  /  Alone I lie.”
The pain of those lines were to haunt her in the lonely years before, and after the break-up of her marriage, and were only dispelled by her coming together with the love of her life, Mitran.
But the young Shueli, overwhelmed by the moon’s pure radiance, listened with faint comprehension to the tinkling laughter of “the young people” or teenagers, who were allowed to be a bit apart, and flirt discreetly. Someone would sing - old nostalgic English ballads: Danny Boy, or Drink to me Only, or Clementine. Sometimes these songs were sung at the Principal’s parties. The Principal’s wife, a gracious and Westernised woman, generally played the piano, while one of her five sons sang. She was tiny, diminutive and dainty, while her husband and sons were all very tall. They all admired her, and she would refer to them as “My six handsome men!” The “young people” at these parties, too, were permitted a bit of mild flirtation. There were some “love seats” scattered  across the drawing room. The boys generally sat on cushions in front of the girls, who would bend over them, whispering, or the boys would lean back, talking affectionately, ardently. It all seemed very grown-up and exciting to Shueli and Gaya, who were far too young to be included in this subdued world of romance. They hardly understood the meaningful glances across the room, or the haunting and disturbing songs, which hinted at a world of love and loss and parting. Every evening, Ammy, Papa, Shueli and Gaya would set off for a ramble across the Ridge, which had hidden horse-paths, and secret ways winding through the woods. There were many memories of the British here. Not just the well tended bridle paths, but the Flagstaff Memorial tower, still pervaded by an aura of terror. During the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, the rebel sepoys had held Delhi for nearly a month. “Imagine, molle” said Ammy, who loved history, and always added that little bit of extra ‘masala’ to her recountings. “Imagine what the British ladies of the Cantonment must have gone through. They dreaded the ‘natives’ as they called all Indians, but were totally unprepared for the fierce attack by the sepoys, and the Native Infantry. Meerut was set ablaze;  the entire Civil Lines, where the British lived;  and then the sepoys rode towards Delhi, determined to destroy every British person living there.” * “News never reached the British in Delhi till the morning of May 11th. One of the officers, and his wife, were eating melons for breakfast on that hot summer morning, listening to the sounds of vendors, the cry of  the ‘bistee’  (who carried water slung across his shoulder, in a large, leather bag), and the squawking of crows, or the distant sound of a cuckoo at the end of the garden. Outside sat the tailor (durzie) and his assistant, working on a gown for the Memsahib .. Suddenly, the darzie dropped the clothes, and rushed in, shouting: ‘Sahib, Sahib, the army is here.’ Only after the officer had rushed off to join his commanding officer at the barracks, did the news reach his wife, pacing the verandah in a frenzy of anxiety. She was told she should immediately head for the Flag Tower, with the children. There they found other terrified women, some in a state of collapse, who agitatedly told her that all was practically over. All English people in Meerut had been massacred and two thousand rebel Sepoys had taken Delhi. The British Resident and some other families had been slaughtered. ‘Oh, what shall we do/ There’s no hope for us,’ moaned one woman. But that night, crowded into a small buggy, the women -(two of them were pregnant), their children, fled on the Karnal Road to Ambala. But later, the First Officer’s wife, Harriet Tytler, had to return to Delhi, where in that burned out cantonment, she gave birth to a child!” Later, after the Mutiny had been put down at the Kashmere Gate battle, the British proudly hoisted their flag on the Flagstaff Tower. And there it would stay for the next ninety years! * (This account is from The MemSahibs by Pat Barr.)
                                         
Ammy, Papa, and the girls would sit for a while below the Tower, enjoying the cool evening breeze, and look at the graves of young English soldiers nearby. People said the Ridge was haunted by the ghosts of these dead soldiers. Papa would quote from Wilfred Owen, the British war-poet, who died young on a foreign battle-field:
“If I should die, think only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field, / that is forever England.” The whisperings of young British soldiers seemed to fill the air of the Ridge. Hyenas wailed over the graves at night, howling to the moon. Peacocks joined in the nocturnal dirge, with their cat-like voices. When Shueli joined the new women’s college a few years later, she heard more such stories. One of the Hostel residents, Sita Chhabra said she’d left her notes behind in the Library, and went back to get it. “ There was only the light from the stairs, so I climbed in, and was about to grab my notes, when, guess what? I saw a young English boy standing there! I froze, yaar!”  “How did you know he was English?” the sceptical girls asked.  “Well how do you know, yaar, in the middle of the night? By the dim light from the stairs I could see he had very blue eyes and golden hair!”  All the girls burst out laughing, and teased poor Sita so much that she ended up agreeing she might have imagined it! But, a few months later, Shueli had reason to wonder if Sita hadn’t been right after all. Ammy and Papa were going to England for a month. As Shueli had some exams coming up, they arranged for her to stay in the Hostel while they were away. It was a lovely change for Shueli, who enjoyed the late-night “feasts” – toast made over the small electric stoves which the girls kept hidden in their rooms. With hot tea, and maybe a little sabzee saved from the dining room, or a bit of breakfast omelette saved up, it tasted divine. Shueli’s room had a wide verandah running along the front. On the other side, inside, there was a corridor, along which the other girls had rooms. That particular night, there was a full moon, and Shueli, lying awake in her bed, watched the moonlight flooding through the closed skylight above. She felt very much at peace…The College Chowkidaar could be heard making his nightly rounds. He carried a huge, thick stick, which he periodically banged on the floor, shouting in a threatening voice: “Khabardaar!” Drenched in the magic atmosphere created by the moonlight, listening to his cry, Shueli remembered how she and Shalini used to love the lines from Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga: “Only the cry of the nightwatchman: How long? How long?”  As she was musing on that, the skylight flew open with a loud sound. She didn’t feel a bit afraid. Perhaps the chowkidaar’s bangings had made the skylight fly open? And then, she had a strange sensation. She couldn’t move. Not at all. She tried to shake herself free, but something, or someone, very strong had pinned her down! She just lay there, totally motionless, unable to move an inch. It was like a nightmare – except she knew she was definitely wide awake. And she was not a bit scared. A little later, she drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep. By morning, she had forgotten the strange happening of the night before, and the incident might have faded from her memory, had there not been some strange coincidences. Brushing her teeth in the communal bathroom next morning, she heard Jyoti say: “Don’t know who was walking in the Corridor so late at night.. I was mugging away for today’s Maths Test. I heard someone come towards my room. I thought it was you, Shueli, and even called out to you. But there was no answer, and I heard the footsteps go away.”
“Well, guess what – something mahaa awful happened to me,” Rita burst in, “ I was also cramming hard, and then I got really fed up, like, you know. So I said, what the hell, yaar, I’m going to get some neend. I’d just about shut my eyes, when I got an awful shock! Something hit me hard on the hip, I was thrown clear out of the bed, I swear!”
Shueli suddenly remembered her eerie experience of the night before, and a chill ran down her spine. “How on earth could we all have had these weird experiences in the same night? We couldn’t all have imagined those things at the same time….!” Exams and other activities soon claimed their attention, and diverted them from the hysteria that might have spread like wild fire otherwise. Once or twice, Shueli saw a young English boy appear in her dreams.. He had blonde hair, and blue-grey eyes. He looked remarkably like the picture of the poet, Rupert Brooke which appeared in her father’s copy. He had found it in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, along with many other precious and rare books. There was also a very old edition, in three volumes, of Addison’s Tatler – which was a kind of newspaper. The volumes had been rescued from a ship that had sunk, actually rescued from a library under the sea! But it was Rupert Brooke that she loved best. She had shown the precious old copy to Shalini, smuggling it out of the house one day, and they had sat up in the Church belfry, reading from it:  “Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, - Day that I loved, day that I loved,/ The  night is here.”  Well, Shueli thought, if you had to be haunted by someone, who better than the handsome poet, Rupert Brooke, who had been killed in the First World War! Perhaps that, too, was a gift of the stars!
 
“Let’s go back through the University grounds” Papa would say. The University was the old Viceregal Lodge, where the Viceroys of India had lived, until the Capital was moved to New Delhi, which Lutyens had built. Shueli and Gaya could run about in the great verandahs of the old Viceregal Lodge, peer through the splendid old doors and dormer windows to the grand rooms with wood paneling and floors, where the University senate meetings were held, presided over by the authoritarian and paternalistic Vice-Chancellor, Sir Maurice Gwyer. These were also the very same rooms where Lord Louis Mountbatten proposed to his future wife, Edwina. How romantic, thought Shueli, and imagined Edwina dressed in a sylph-like white dress,
with a rose in her hand, as Lord Louis placed his hand upon his heart, and asked her to be his wife. A few years later, Shueli’s admiration of Edwina Mountbatten increased.. There was a big meeting at the College. Shamianas had been erected, and all the important guests were seated. Shueli, who had a precious autograph book in which were inscribed verses of such profundity as:    Roses are red, my love,  /Violets are blue. /Sugar is sweet, my love, /And so are you…..armed herself with the little book, which Aunt Rahel had given her for her last birthday, and slipped through, and approached one of the severe looking ladies sitting there, next to an English lady, who wore a colourful printed dress, and a lovely little hat. Shueli said shyly to the severe lady (who happened to be India’s Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur,): “Please may I have your autograph?” The lady turned haughtily, and said, in an annoyed voice: “Go away at once. Don’t disturb us.” Shueli was shattered, almost in tears, until she felt an arm come round her, drawing her close. “Will you promise me something, little girl?” asked the English lady. Shy and tongue-tied, Shueli didn’t even look up, just murmuring “Yes.”  The English lady said “Promise me that when you grow up, you will do something for your country.” Shueli nodded fervently. The lady, with a dramatic flourish, signed across the page of the little pink autograph book:  EDWINA, COUNTESS MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA!
Walking on the Ridge, Shueli and Gaya loved to gather the small red berries, which hung in tight profusion on the bushes, especially in winter. Often they would hear the harsh, mewing cry of the peacock, or catch a glimpse of it, as it spread out its gorgeous wings like a fan, and danced for the extraordinarily plain pea-hen! They would try smuggling some of the fallen peacock feathers into the house though superstitious Ammy warned them it was unlucky to keep them in the house. Papa teased them when they asked why the peacock was so beautiful, while the peahen was so plain and dowdy:  “In the bird and animal world it’s always the male who is beautiful, and attracts the female by displaying its splendour and strength!” This seemed strange to Shueli, because people always referred to the beauty of women, rather than of men. She did sometimes think, though, that men were actually the beautiful ones, and did their own secret dance to attract a woman. Weren’t some of the College boys, playing cricket, walking laughingly down the corridors, utterly beautiful? Sometimes, from their hidden shelter up on the roof, looking across the green lawns and gracious brick buildings, Shueli would find herself looking into one of the students’ rooms. The boy, with a towel wrapped around his middle, would move hastily away from the window, embarrassed by the fixed gaze of a little girl.
Little though she was, Shueli knew that one day, not too far off, she would “become a woman”, which seemed an exceedingly exciting and important destiny. Ammy had told her that “some blood” would come, and Shueli understood that this happening would usher in the important state of being adult, and being a Woman. One evening, she felt some odd sensations pass through her body. The whole family was out.. Shueli walked up and down the lawn, filled with self-importance, sure that the mystery of womanhood was at last upon her. This state of exaltation soon vanished, however, when absolutely nothing happened, and when Ammy got back home, she squashed Shueli further by saying: “Don’t be silly. Not yet. You have to wait a few more years.” When it did happen, it was most unexpected. At school, in the Athletics class, under the strict green-eyed supervision of Miss O’Rourke, forced to do high jumps over hideous hurdles named Horses. “Now come along Shueli. You can do that better. One. Two. Three. Ready, Steady, Start, GO!” And that was when Shueli “became a woman” at last. She didn’t know what was wrong, till she felt something sticky, and saw that her panty, under the divided skirt she wore for sports, was stained a bright red. “Oh God! Now I really have to be grown up,” thought Shueli, going home to tell Ammy the momentous news. Ammy deflated her, by telling her it was “quite normal” and that she would have this bleeding for three or four days every month. Shueli was utterly shocked: “But I thought you meant that it came once in your lifetime, as a sign of womanhood. You mean I have to go through all this every month, for the rest of my life?” Overwhelmed by the sudden realisation that being a woman was not just a glory, but quite a burden, Shueli sat and wept alone. Gaya didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and tried to comfort her, which made Shueli say: “You won’t understand yet, Gaya. You’re too young. And you’re not yet a WOMAN!” This was the summer of the shooting stars, when Shueli began to wish for so many undefinable things.. Lightning passed through her body. Unexplained storms, like the dust storms outside, swept through her. After the long, hot summer, the parched earth would be shaken by monsoon winds, and the first drops of rain would fall. A cool fragrance of wet earth would seize them. The girls and the servant boy, Ram Singh, would run out shouting excitedly “Rain, Rain.”  Shueli wanted to lie on the grass and roll about, but Ammy forbade her with “What will the neighbours say?” But when they were a bit younger, the two sisters were allowed to go up to the terrace, and bathe in that fragrant, cool, first rain - with only their underslips on. If they thought no one was looking, they’d throw off those wretched undergarments, and dance naked, in the monsoon rain, screaming excitedly.
When Shueli wished upon the shooting stars, and asked for love and fame, she knew nothing, actually, about either of these, except as words she’d come across here and there. As when Ammy found out that she was reading Forever Amber in the bathroom! Papa was in charge of the College Library, and interesting books of all kinds passed regularly through their house. That’s how Shueli managed to get hold of the original Arabian Nights, and pored, in secrecy, over the erotic stories. Never before had she heard of such things. Boys and girls who caressed one another so thoroughly, and melted into one another - this was spine-tingling stuff, even though devoured in haste, for fear of discovery! Shueli’s insights into the hidden, magical world of men and women, was heightened considerably by these forays into forbidden books. Anyway, Papa and Ammy soon found out what Shueli was up to, and the books were hastily returned to the Library. Of course, they read alot of different kinds of books. The sisters spent long, magic hours on the roofs of the college, reading for hours on end - Les Miserables, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was a favourite, Pilgrim’s Progress, Little Women was the one American classic they read till it was almost a part of their lives. How they loved Marmee and Joe and all the four sisters. Joe’s literary ambitions especially inspired Shueli. Then there was The Old Curiosity Shop, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and Wendy, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice - they loved them all, read and reread them. The somnolent cooing of the pigeons on the roof, the chatter of the occasional parrot on the spreading branches of the trees surrounding them, and the benevolent buzz of the huge bees, made the long days magic they would treasure for ever. Not for a moment could Shueli envisage the storms and dark skies that loomed in her future. It was only through her books that Shueli gathered there was a very dark side to life. The first time she read a  really sad book was Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She realised how cruel and capricious fate could be - how life defeated, humiliated and broke so many people - and she sat and wept over the book.  Shueli and Gaya loved sad and dramatic stories, -unlike ‘the little boy who didn’t like sad stories’ - of later years.   Kartik, Shueli’s young son, was just the opposite. Every time she wanted to tell him a sad story - especially the one beginning  Once upon a Time, where the sea was as blue as the bluest cornflower, there lived a little mermaid - would cover his ears with his hannds and say ‘No, don’t - don’t. I don’t WANT to hear any sad stories. I wont hear them . Tell me happy ones.’ But sad stories and happy ones always get mixed up, Shueli tells him. Sad-happy. Isn’t that LIFE?  ‘No’ he would reply, determined in his four year old wisdom -‘I can’t bear sad stories.’ But then, if you didn’t bear the sadness, wouldn’t it creep out on you some day, and destroy you utterly. Wouldn’t it be better to make friends with sadness, and let it be a part of your life, so that it wouldn’t shock you when it appeared as a stranger one day at your door? Make sadness a familiar, don’t close your door on grief, but laugh - laugh when you can, fully and with deep breaths. Kartik’s eyes would crinkle up so delightfully when he laughed. Joy was his way of being, and he always kept sadness at bay.
    Papa’s study was a treasure house of books. Shueli loved the old Victorian rotating book shelf, and the musty, timeless smell of the books.. Here she found a blue leather bound book, with gold lettering, one of the prizes Papa had won for his Essay on Thomas Hardy.. The title was strange, and intrigued Shueli:   Jude, the Obscure. Why was he obscure? Well, he was only an unknown lad from a small village. But he had a dream. He yearned, with all his heart and soul, to reach some day, the ‘city of dreaming spires’ - the ancient University town of Oxford. It represented all the wisdom, knowledge and grace, so beyond his reach, that he most ardently longed for. Soon Jude’s dream city became Shueli’s. With her  eyes smarting, she would creep into the study, even in the dark, to read and reread that book. Beyond all beauty of imagining, the dreaming spires, the ancient city, beckoned to her. Those ‘dreaming spires’, she was sure, were like filigree points of light, many faceted, like the shooting stars that so magically enlivened the night sky over Delhi.


[1]* (From Pat Barr: The MemSahibs.)
 

 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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