Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned. And as guests become witness to the drama that plays out on the border, little do they realize the drama unfolding within the hotel precincts itself : a grandfather who is a war veteran, a love affair, a friendship with a British officer who himself turns strangely senile; a disinterested father who develops a maniacal obsession with the hotel and then the narrator grandson whose love for melodrama has tragic consequences. In this surreal story, real life borders mingle with borders between what is real and what could be almost so.
This is part three of the long tale…
My Father
In the last years of granddad’s life, as my father learnt unwillingly to take over the ropes, I was educating myself in Delhi. Trying out various courses that gave me an excuse to stay on and not return to the fixed monotony of life in the village. I would return every few months or so, to find that the hotel had changed a bit more. The foyer, for instance, that was so empty earlier that you could hear your own footsteps following you, now had a picture of my grandfather in the centre, looking as if he had never looked before. There he was, straddling a hefty cow, Robertson behind him, and both of them looking embarrassed and happy at the same time. Behind them stretched the lush green and the tall, white mountains that left me in no doubt about the probable location of the photo. But I was less sure of the timing. On the walls all around were portraits, the likes of which I had never seen before. Landscape scenes you saw only in children’s story books or in collections of fairy tales. Laughing springs, remote yet gentle mountains, belligerent looking cattle with that hungry look in their eyes and smiling plump children. Father explained they had belonged to grandfather, something he got back from his war experience. And that putting it up now was good for the business.
My father did not have to try very hard to be a good businessman. My grandfather had been so lucky that even after his death, there were lots of it left in spare for my father. But of course, grandfather, right till the end, had planned well enough so that father did not have to overly stretch himself in any manner. It was left to me, I would think bitterly, to make up for all that.
When they were deciding the way the boundary line would run, grandfather would often be in Delhi. The village elders and others in the council had put aside their grudges when they asked him to be their representative. We don’t want to go either India or Pakistan, said Sardar Piara Singh. We are happy where we are. Tell them not to cut us off., he had tears in his eyes and grandfather assured he would do his best. We have lived here like brothers, others said. And now this talk of cutting up this village into two parts. It’s like killing a person.
I never really knew what grandfather felt about it. I remember how he had ruffled my hair the last time he came to Delhi, and we met at the coffee shop at the hotel Imperial, and he had been his usual jokey self. They are cutting us up, these British. They are so tired after the war, that they just want to finish up the job any way they can. He looked tired too, my grandfather. I saw the way his hands shook as he lifted the cup, the musty smell about him that reminded me of mothballs in an old cupboard and I assured him that things could not be that bad.
They were sensible men, Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel. And grandfather retorted, his cup clattering back on the saucer as the words hurried out of him. They have become too civilised now. For them, life has become like a hotel room, they refuse to deal with unpleasant aspects. They don’t want to waste time taking decisions. Somebody else should do it, they feel. Just as somebody now makes their bed up for them, serve them breakfast, even arranging their clothes for them. They don’t know how the world works. How much do they really know?
He left that evening, looking more tired than he had earlier. Disillusionment had scattered its way into his thin beard and drawn new lines on his forehead and cheeks. What about the hotel, Grandfather? I asked. It will stay as long as our family does, he said, with a return of his old spirit. And our family can survive most odds, from petty enmity to wars..
And even Martha. This time we laughed but grandfather’s ended abruptly, as if the past had rolled up to him suddenly and admonished him.
I grieved for my grandfather when he passed away one night, in his sleep. They cremated him in a hurry. Father said it was bad for the business, the guests would take amiss to having a corpse in the building. And it would give rise to all kinds of superstitions. But I was happy grandfather did not live to see the last of his illusions come crumbling down. Perhaps his going was some kind of symbol that times would now change irrevocably and that it was time I left behind my boyhood.
Partition tore up the world as I knew it. I remember reading of the refugees that crossed over to the other side, in anticipation of a line that no one had as yet defined into existence. The line that came up finally, after much number counting, already seemed considerably smudged, with the bloodshed, the sorrow and grief that accompanied Partition. The hotel, my father hinted to me darkly, came to the Indian side. We are best here, he wrote, and I have already made my wishes clear to Radcliffe’s men. They would respect his wishes, I was sure. Some of them had availed of the hotel’s hospitality on their sojourns to and from Kashmir. Resting their tired feet, getting their cars washed and loading up with supplies for the journey ahead. All this the hotel provided at a discount.
Father kept me informed through his letters, insisting that I do not return. It is fine, I can manage here. I am seeing to the renovation to be done here.
It puzzled me, this desire of his to change the hotel. It was as if he had only put up with my grandfather’s way and was determined now to do things his own way. He might possibly put up more of my grandfather’s pictures, the photos he had taken, but everything else he would have had altered. Four months later, when I returned home, sharing a train with passengers as sorrowful as I was, the hotel was no longer as I remembered it. But so bowed over with sorrow I was because it was only a few evenings back that Gandhi had been inexplicably shot down, that I did not really make it an issue. Perhaps if I had, expressed my distaste at the new decor, argued with my father as to why he was so determined to change things, father might have hesitated, changed his mind. But I sank into a weird depression, the reasons for which still remain unclear, even to me. Perhaps I was also mourning my grandfather and it saddened me that everything that reminded me of him was being erased. Gently, in very insidious a manner, and in the name of renovation.
Grandfather’s bust, in the foyer, had him looking like he must have in his army days. No one in the hotel, even the people who had worked here for nearly three decades now, could recognise him as the man who had lovingly lorded it over them for so long. Bullying them to work late into the night, because that was when the guests came. Attending to the ghosts, I let myself smile as the thought strayed in, that flitted in and out at night.
Anu Kumar’s latest book is The Dollmakers’ Island. (http://www.flipkart.com/dollmakers-island-anu-kumar-book-8190939130) More about her on Story Wallahs.