The Afternoon Visitors

Breaking Tradition

My mother told me the story of her family slowly over many years. It emerged somewhat gradually and spontaneously as I grew older and my base of knowledge grew as well. She loved to ponder, think aloud and talk as she went about her daily routine, while I sat reading or working on something in the same room. She would be looking through her wardrobe for a suitable sari for an occasion, carefully tying and draping her sari, sometimes changing her mind and replacing the sari with one more suited to her mood, combing her long hair and fastening it into a neat chignon at the back of her head, looking into and posing before the three long hinged-mirrors on her low dressing table.

She would talk as she carried out her household chores, ironing, folding and putting away laundered clean clothes, making the beds, tidying up her dressing-table with the three long mirrors, arranging flowers, picking through raw rice or semolina, shelling peas or stringing green beans for my grandmother, sifting flour and baking powder together and beating eggs to bake one of her moist and substantial cakes, or as she sat darning, stitching, knitting or embroidering and supervising our homework, in her old comfortable armchair near the large bay windows in the hexagon-shaped bedroom overlooking Kohinoor Road.

My mother told us stories all the time; often they were fables, plot-lines of films she had seen and novels she had read, real life-stories and biographies she knew of, family anecdotes, episodes, epiphanies, morality tales. In the early years, my sisters were too young to understand her narratives but I listened avidly and absorbed much.

Later, as we grew, we would all listen, sometimes half-attentively as she talked while we caught up on our homework or read novels or the teenaged preoccupations of daydreaming and listening to music in the background. Occasionally our ears would prick up when we heard something of interest to us at that particular stage of our lives; at other times, her quiet and composed voice with occasional inflections was just soothing to listen to without paying full attention.

Over time, all the stories I had heard began to meet and fit together like a massive jigsaw puzzle, with some missing pieces nevertheless, perhaps never to be found, which made them all the more intriguing. It was always interesting to talk to my mother and to hear her opinion or even to just get her started on thinking aloud. Sometimes, I would just ask her a question, any question, where the answer was not obvious, and she would be off, on her stream of consciousness. I learned a good deal from her in this way.

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Like my father’s ancestral family, my mother’s family had also been settled on the west coast for countless generations; they were part of the same larger community of Saraswat Brahmins that my father’s family belonged to, and they too believed in and told the same stories about our Kashmir origins, the long migration southwards, the on-going sagas about escapes and flights to safer places down the west coast over a millennium. The two families were not connected by kinship or marriage initially. Those connections came later, one on the heels of the other, in the mid-forties and then, again in the early fifties – first, when a marriage was arranged between my paternal aunt and maternal uncle and, later, when my parents met for the second momentous time in their lives and decided to marry each other.

At first, decades before she was born, my mother’s family lived in their ancestral village in a hamlet near a spectacular rocky beach towards the southwestern part of the narrowing Indian peninsula along the Arabian Sea. Then in the late 1800s, my maternal great-great-grandfather took the decision to move the family inland to a more economically vibrant area where much fertile land was available for sale and settlement. Here, a family homestead was built, adjacent to the extensive paddy fields and fruit tree groves that they now owned. Looking after the affairs of the property and taking care of all those who worked on the land were the generational family responsibilities that eventually passed down to my mother’s father.

In keeping with tradition, my grandparents had an arranged marriage when my grandfather would have been 22 or 23 and my grandmother about 16. Soon, children arrived and their family grew; over the next 17 or 18 years, they had six children. My mother was third in the order of birth. She recalled hearing that she had been a happy child who was very physically active and who enjoyed her studies as well. Like her three sisters born before and after her, she attended the local school and later went away to study at college in one of the southern cities as a young woman.

Side by side with managing the family property and land, my maternal grandfather practiced and became an established barrister handling civil cases in the district. He traveled extensively to take on and represent cases. His reputation grew quietly and clients came from afar to ask him to represent them. In due course, he assumed the position of a local magistrate and tried to administer with fairness and empathy.

By all accounts, he was an astute, compassionate and farsighted man who tried to walk the straight and narrow in his dealings with all people. Over the decades, along with others of similar bent and commitment, he both started and became involved in many local initiatives such as setting up a school and college and other civic associations within the community.

I remembered my grandfather as an observant and quiet older man almost always composed and at ease wherever he was, with a sense of humor and warmth in his affection towards us, his grandchildren. He did not talk much about himself or what he did even to his family and so, decades later, when he passed away at the age of 75, his wife and children were astounded to discover, from the long stream of visitors who came to pay their last respects over several weeks, how many lives he had touched and helped through his actions and apparently without any thought of return.

Simultaneously with his career spanning his legal practice and government service, and possibly, to establish a contrast to his daily workday, and following a vision, my grandfather also became an entrepreneur in their small town at a time when few of his contemporaries would even consider starting a business and in a realm that was far removed from the usual traditional Brahminical aspirations. He started a cinema theatre in the early 1950s in the heart of their small town. Initially, the town was abuzz about what this would do to their time-honored traditions and ways of life.

My grandfather was a cosmopolitan and progressive at heart and believed in the importance of being open to ideas, other ways of thinking and to the promise of modernity. The Indian movie industry was in the infancy of the spectacular growth to come, and my grandfather followed his instincts as a businessman and a humanist, believing that the films screened at Aruna Talkies would serve both to edify and unify audiences in their corner of a newly independent India.

At first, they held only two shows a day and the theatre was powered by a generator at a time when the rest of the town was yet to become electrified. So as to put their patrons at ease especially when they brought their families, the theatre was built with a low wall dividing the men’s seating section from the women’s.

Some of his critics opined that it would not be a success but word spread and credibility, reputation and support grew along with trust, and so did the frequency of screenings and matinee shows. Year round, people traveled on bullock-carts, jalopies and buses from other villages and towns, sometimes through severe rain deluges to come and watch a film at the theatre.

Over the next few decades, the theatre became a hub and a local landmark, prompting the growth of other enterprises and of the town itself. New shops and eating places opened, impromptu marketplaces proliferated. Film distributors came calling, eager to have their films screened at my grandfather’s cinema.

I remember as a child strolling through the town, with those of my cousins, aunts and uncles who happened to be visiting my grandparents at the time, to Aruna Talkies, with its hoardings and billboards proclaiming the offerings of the week and coming attractions. We would be shown to our seats in one or two long rows usually reserved for family or special guests. Refreshments would sometimes arrive during the intermission – chilled cold drinks and tiny packaged squares of sweet biscuits.

In between, I would glance around at the star-like lights in the roof of the darkened auditorium and at the screen in front, and think about all the things that had to come together to make my grandfather’s dream come to fruition. Sometimes, during intermission or after the show, we would visit the projection room and meet the projectionist and his assistants who seemed almost invariably to be busy spooling up yards of loose film or organizing the big film spools into large metal canisters to stack away on a shelf.

Back at home in my grandparents’ house, sitting on one of the beds and looking out on to our upper terrace through a wall of windows, I would rummage through old twine-tied stacks of Picture-Post and Screen curiously looking at pictures of film stars famous at the time. My older uncle seemed to be the one who read these the most; he would suggest to my grandfather names of films they might want to screen, based on how well they seemed to have appealed to audiences in other parts of the country.

Most movies seemed to do well, attracting audiences year-round and especially during certain times like festivals or local or state fairs. Films made in the southern languages and in Hindi from Bombay's fledgling studios and growing post- Independence movie industry were welcomed as enthusiastically as those that came across from England and Hollywood in America.

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My mother told me that, back in the late 1940s, my grandparents decided to build a roomier house so that their grown-up children and their children, those who had arrived in the last few years and those yet to be born, would have a large-enough place to get together in. My grandfather spoke about the kind of house he envisaged, it would be a spacious welcoming structure with many windows looking out and sprawling verandahs and balconies surrounded by a large garden and trees on all sides.

He thought that it should be at least three storeys tall with enough interconnected rooms on the first two floors to accommodate what would be a large and growing extended family. The third floor would have a central hobby room with many windows surrounded by extensive decks and viewing points from where one could get far views in all directions. Like a ship’s deck, he thought, with the breezes blowing from all sides. They would name it “Dilkhush” meaning “Heart’s Happiness”

The new house was ready by 1950 and they moved in. The old house was demolished and a large garden was built in the space it had occupied. By the late 50s, all the children were married and in different parts of the country. Many of the grandchildren had arrived by then; the rest were born by the mid-60s. The new generation was in place. And as my grandfather had visualized, the housewas big enough for us all. I remember seeing the look of quiet happiness in his eyes and the sweet smile of my maternal grandmother as, sitting on the large curving verandah, they would look around at us all and then at each other, her diamond nose-ring unexpectedly catching the light of a setting sun.

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My Indian Childhood

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