Teatime For The Firefly. Shona Patel
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Indian kurta made of the finest Assamese Mooga silk, custom tailored to fit his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Bolshevik frame. He gave a rousing speech, and just as he was walking across the stage in his fancy mirror-work nagra slippers—which any Indian will tell you are notorious for their lack of traction—he inadvertently stepped on a fallen tuberose. His foot made a swiping arc up to the ceiling and the nagra took off like a flying duck. Boris Ivanov yelped out something that sounded suspiciously like “BLOOD!” I later understood he had yelled “Blyad!”—a Russian expletive—before landing with a thundering crash that sent quakes through the room. A horrified groan went up in the audience; small children shrieked, and in the middle of it all, I saw fat Mrs. Ghosh roll her eyes heavenward and whisper to her neighbor that this was allokhi—a very bad omen indeed. Just as well Dadamoshai did not hear her, because he would have flattened her out for good. My grandfather had very low tolerance for “village talk.”
Boris Ivanov was forced to change his itinerary. He had planned to leave for Calcutta the next day to visit Rabindranath Tagore’s famous experimental school in Santineketan. Instead, with his leg cast in plaster, he moved into Dadamoshai’s house as our guest and stayed with us for three whole weeks.
He accepted his fate cheerfully and slipped into our life with barely a ripple. He was a big, bushy man, bearded and baritone, who spent long hours reading and writing on the veranda with his plastered leg lying on the cane ottoman like a fallen tree trunk. Most afternoons he dozed in the plantation chair with the house cat draped over his stomach, his snores riffling the afternoon. He woke up to drink copious amounts of tea with four heaped spoons of sugar in each cup, blissfully unaware that it was wartime and sugar was in short supply. He spent the rest of the evening contemplating the universe.
The veranda was the most pleasant room in our house—open and airy, with soft filtered light creeping through the jasmine vines. Dadamoshai’s big desk sat in one corner against the wall. On it were his piles of papers weighted down with river rocks and conch shells. His blue fountain pen sat snugly in its stand, right next to the chipped inkwell and a well-used blotter. There was a calendar with bird pictures on the wall, busy with notes and scribbles on the dated squares.
A door from the veranda led to Dadamoshai’s study. It was packed from top to toe with books of all kinds: art, philosophy, religion, poetry and all the great works of literature. Here The Communist Manifesto leaned comfortably on Homer’s Odyssey, and the Bhagavad Gita was wedged in by Translations from the Koran. Just as comfortably inside Dadamoshai’s head lived his thoughts and ideas—separate skeins interwoven with the gentlest compassion and wisdom to form his rich philosophy and outlook on life.
Boris Ivanov was writing a treatise titled Freedom and Responsibility, a rather obtuse and philosophical work full of difficult arguments. He spent long hours debating ideas with Dadamoshai on the veranda. India was on the cusp of her independence after more than two hundred years of British rule. A great renaissance was sweeping through our nation and many social and educational reforms were under way.
Many people considered Dadamoshai a great scholar and independent thinker, but others saw him as a blatant anglophile and called him an English bootlicker. He was unabashedly Western in his dress and liberal in his thoughts. He lived frugally and thought deeply. He did not take siestas in the afternoon and cursed fluently in seven languages.
Dadamoshai believed that women were not given a fair chance in our society, largely due to their lack of education. Why were Indian boys sent to study at the finest universities abroad, he argued, while girls were treated like some flotsam washing in with the river tide?
Traditionalists accused Dadamoshai of rocking the social order and luring women away from their jobs as homemakers. What good would it do for women to bury their heads in math and science? Or, for that matter, to go around spouting Shakespeare? Pots and pans would grow cold in the kitchen and neglected children would run around the streets like pariah dogs.
In many ways, Dadamoshai saw me as the poster child for the modern Indian woman. He gave me the finest education and taught me to speak my mind. I was free to forge my own destiny. Sometimes I struggled to stay grounded like a lone river rock in a swirl of social pressures. But in truth, this was the only option I had.
* * *
Miss Thompson, my private English tutor, lived in a small primrose cottage behind the Sacred Heart Convent. A spry woman with animated eyes, she had about her a brisk energy that made you sit up and pull in your stomach. Her father, Reginald Thompson, the former District Magistrate of Assam, was Dadamoshai’s predecessor and mentor. Dadamoshai had seen Miss Thompson grow up as a young girl.
I was Miss Thompson’s first Indian student. Ever since I was seven, I took a rickshaw to her house three days a week. After my lessons, I would walk over to Dadamoshai’s office in the old courthouse where I’d sit and do my homework, surrounded by the clatter of typewriters and the smell of carbon paper until it was time for us both to come home.
Miss Thompson was a stickler for pronunciation. She made sure I enunciated each word with bell-like clarity with the stress on the right syllable. I learned to say what, where and why accompanied by a small whoosh of breath I could feel on the palm of my hand held six inches from my face. It was Miss Thompson who instilled in me my love for literature. She encouraged me to plumb the depths of Greek tragedy, savor the fullness of Shakespeare, the lyrical beauty of Shelley. As I grew older, I saw less and less of her, until our meetings became just the occasional social visit. She had more Indian students now, she said, thanks to Dadamoshai’s flourishing girls’ school.
I decided to drop by and see her. She was usually home on Tuesday mornings, I knew. I arrived to find a rickshaw parked outside her gate and an elderly servant woman sitting on the porch. Miss Thompson must be with a student, I imagined. Young girls were never sent out unchaperoned in our society. Dadamoshai, on the other hand, always insisted I go everywhere alone. This raised a few eyebrows in our town. I was about to turn around and walk away when Martha, Miss Thompson’s Anglo-Indian housekeeper of sixty years, called out to me from the kitchen window. She said Miss Thompson was indeed with a new student, but asked me to wait as the lesson was almost over.
I sat on the sofa in the drawing room. Through the slatted green shutters a guava tree waved its branch and somewhere a crow cawed mournfully. Nothing changed in Miss Thompson’s house. Everything was exactly where it was the very first day I walked in ten years ago. The small upright piano with a tapestry-cushioned pivot stool, the glass-door walnut curio cabinet with its fine collection of Dresden figurines I knew so well, the scattering of peg tables topped with doilies of tatting lace. On the wall were faded sepia photographs of Reginald Thompson in his dark court robes, his pretty, fragile wife who’d died young and Miss Thompson and her sister as young girls riding ponies.
Voices trickled in through the closed door of the study. I heard a timid, female voice say something inaudible, followed by Miss Thompson.
“Breeze. Lengthen the e please and note the ‘zee’ sound. It is not j. It’s z. Zzzz. Make a buzzing sound with your lips. Like a bee. Breezzzze. Breezzzze.”
“Bre-eej,” the girl repeated hesitantly.
I could just see Miss Thompson tapping the wooden ruler softly against her palm, a gesture she made to encourage her students, but it only intimidated her Indian girls, who saw the ruler as a symbol of corporal punishment.
“Breeze,” Miss Thompson said patiently. “Try it one more time.”
“Brij,” said the girl.
“That, dear child, is j like in bridge. You know a bridge, don’t you? The letter d coupled with a g has a j sound. Bridge. Badge. Badger.”
Badger! My heart went out to the poor girl. How many Indian children were familiar with a badger? A mongoose, yes, but a badger? I only happened to know what a badger was because, thanks to Miss Thompson, I had read The Wind in the Willows as a child. British pronunciation was completely illogical, I had concluded a long time ago. I remember arguing with Dadamoshai why were schedule and school pronounced differently. If schedule was pronounced shedule should not school be pronounced shoole? Dadamoshai said I had an intelligent argument there, but