A Day in a Life

On 30th April 1975, after an indulging indiscreetly in chhole bhature at Bhimsain’s Bengali Sweet House, I came down with a particularly bad bout of hepatitis A. I spent the month of May suffering exhaustion and abominable abdominal pain, and condemned to the most miserable diet, especially boiled potatoes, for which I still have a loathing. The only redeeming features was that I could eat mangoes and drink unlimited volumes of nimbu-pani and home-crushed cane juice (what kitchen equipment Amma used to extract it I have forgotten, but surely it was some magical art she learnt in her childhood, eating charuku grown in her family fields on the banks of the Tungabhadra). I had read through all the books in my shelf and my level of boredom must have reached such heights that I found myself scanning the schedules of the local trains and wondering what it would be like to travel to Baghpat or Hapur.

The invitation from NVK Murthy to spend a month with his family in Bombay was a welcome break. I was extremely fond of Kittu mama and his family; Krishna atta was a darling, and we were very close to his daughters, particularly Janu and Anu, who would come after school and spend the afternoon and evenings more than a couple of times a week before they had moved to Bombay. The holiday in their Hyderabad Estate apartment on Napean Sea Road was to be one of my most enjoyable childhood vacations, and an important one as I completed my twelfth year.

My holiday was cut short by the declaration of the Emergency, when my mother thought the situation in the country was likely to go out of hand, particularly with threats of railway strikes. Poor Kittu mama had to use all his charm and connections to get me a train ticket urgently. He managed to arrange this, and found a colleague who was travelling to Delhi on the 26th of June whom I could accompany.

Being away in Bombay in June 1975, I perhaps missed seeing my father going through the prelude to one of the most stressful periods of his professional life. What he went through is recounted by Bishan Tandon in his PMO Diary-I, from which the following extract is taken:

As I was leaving for office, Sharada [H Y Sharada Prasad] phoned to say, “You must have heard, it is all over. We will talk when you come to office.”  He sounded very dejected.

On reaching office I went straight to Sharada’s room.  He told me in detail whatever he knew.  Last night the PM had summoned him and Prof. Dhar to her house at 10pm. Barooah and Ray were already there. When Prof. Dhar and Sharada reached there, the PM told them, “I have decided to declare an Emergency.  The President has agreed. I will inform the Cabinet tomorrow.” Saying this, she handed over the draft of the Emergency proclamation to Prof. Dhar.  He and Sharada were stunned. They had been summoned only in order to be informed and for their advice on the propaganda to follow. She also told them to prepare a draft of her address to the nation.  They were at the PM’s house till about 1am. The cabinet was to meet at 6am.

All those ministers who were in Delhi attended the cabinet meeting.   The PM told them what she had decided to do but not one of them protested, not even faintly.  Only Swaran Singh raised some administrative issues.  The arrests were not discussed at all.  One of the ministers said that he had heard about the arrests but the matter was swept aside. Even Prof. Dhar had no idea about these arrests. Sharada said that all the main leaders of the opposition, including JP, Morarji, Charan Singh have been arrested.

Sharada also told me that Sanjay was in full control of the PM’s house.  After the cabinet meeting he [Sanjay] called Gujral to one side and scolded him for the poor propaganda effort. He told him to send every news bulletin to the PM’s house henceforth: Gujral told him that from the functional point of view, some official should be deputed for this. He could be stationed at the AIR, where he would be shown all the bulletins.  He suggested Sharada’s name for this but Sanjay put Behl on the job.

VR [V Ramachandran] also joined us. After hearing Sharada he said that Indira too would have a `guided’ democracy.  Sharada said yes in a very low tone. 

He was very tired.  Since June 12 he has had to work the hardest in the PM’s secretariat because the PM’s entire strategy is based on propaganda.  But more than physical tiredness, he was in mental agony.  I have never seen him like this.  He must surely have wondered if this was what he had gone to jail for in 1942. He is a journalist. After independence this is the first time that pre-censorship has been imposed. 

Ghachar Ghochar

GHACHAR GHOCHAR (Review written on 21.6.2017)

GHACHAR GHOCHAR sounds like it comes from Bengali (Bangla), a nonsense word that Sukumar Ray may have invented. The title of Vivek Shanbhag’s highly acclaimed novella makes sense once you understand it means a hopeless entanglement, the ghichad-michad in which you find wires or naadas (or your chuddies in a twist), and when you pronounce it quickly, not with a ponderous elongation or emphasis. This is not (as NYT gauchely titled a review) The Great Indian Novel but a slim novella about "money control”, the disfigurement of the lives of a family that transits from having very little to having more than its members can handle.

The effortlessness of Srinath Perur’s translation is remarkable — unselfconscious and unobtrusive with no dramatic effects, but with just the right level of local flavour (“iron box”) to make you hear the contemporary Kannada of Shanbhag’s original below the English at the surface*. There is no stilted dialogue, even when the conversations are apparently formulaic. Apparently formulaic, since so much of what is said by the characters often connotes something else.

This is a story with no dramatic twists and turns, and no magical realism. There is drama, the kind that lies menacingly below the quotidian. This is a tragedy but not of the spectacular kind. No deaths, but loss. Rather, the unravelling of melancholy family life which has transited from the ``lower-middle class poverty’’ (that many of us have seen in our lives) to an arriviste prosperity (towards which we seem to be working) takes on a greater sadness because of its very banality. The descriptions of the old little house and the furniture, particularly the observations about the ants, are superb. They glow, not conspicuously like deliberately set jewels, but with the warm richness of fine observation.

The narrative is not without its flaws. The narrator and his observations seem far too sensitive for someone who is given to fleeing the domestic conflicts and retreating to Coffee House. The narrative is too narrowly focussed on his family, with little about neighbours and friends, schoolmates and teachers — figures who normally loom large in our lives and memories. The waiter Vincent hovers too prominently in the beginning, only to disappear though the main course of the narrative — although he briefly reappears at the end. The conclusion leaves us with a sense that something has been lost forever, but without any empathy for the narrator, without us sharing his sense of bewilderment and hopelessness.

But in a summer where we will be ministered over-the-top yappiness of the utmost variety, this understated masterpiece is the book I will be pressing into the hands of friends.

(*) I don’t read Kannada, though I understand the language well enough to appreciate some of the literary nuances; I suppose I got a smidgeon of this from my father, who was considered a Kannada man of letters, having translated several works from his mother tongue to English, most notably some novels and the autobiography of the polymath Shivaram Karanth.