Silent Life

  About the book

  From the small town of Sialkot in pre-Partition Punjab, through the bustling streets of Delhi, to the scholarly environs of Cambridge and the bistros of Turin - Chaman Nahal walks us gently through his life. A life rich in literary scholarship and discipline, but equally in humour and a cynical eye capable of looking as critically at himself as at the follies and foibles of other human beings. If his 'Rules' for subjects as varied as writing a full-length book while coping with a fulltime job, fighting depression or even addiction to drink, bring a smile to one's lips, his achievements as writer, teacher and litterateur, often in the face of great odds, can only induce respect. Nahal's delightfully candid accounts of his encounters with Nirad Chaudhuri, the great Sir Vidia, Manohar Malgonkar and others; his diatribes against the tardiness and indiscipline that marks so much of 21st century India; and his frank appraisal of the trials and tribulations he has faced as an Indian writer in English, both at home and abroad, make this a memoir significant in today's literary context, as well as an absorbing cameo of an earlier time and place.

  About the author

  Chaman Nahal was formerly professor and head of the English department of the University of Delhi, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977 for his novel Azadi. The same year, he received the Federation of Indian Publishers Award, also for Azadi. He again received the Federation of Indian Publishers Award in 1979 for his novel The English Queens. He was awarded the Medal of Honour by Turin University, Italy, when he was a visiting professor there in 1988. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the East West Center, Honolulu, while holding the Dai Ho Chun Chair at Hawaii University in 1998-99. He is the author of twenty-two books, including nine novels, among them: My True Faces (1973); Azadi (1975); Into Another Dawn (1977); The English Queens (1979); The Crown and the Loincloth (1981); Sunrise in Fiji (1988); The Salt of Life (1990); The Triumph of the Tricolour (1993); and The Boy and the Mountain (1997).

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR CHAMAN NAHAL’S FICTION

  ‘Nahal’s work will take its place as one of the rare tragic narratives in Indian fiction, intensely felt, poignant.’

  – Mulk Raj Anand on Azadi

  ‘A classic.’

  – Diana Athill on Azadi

  ‘Full of the flavour of India, the Punjab and the time.’

  – John Kenneth Galbraith on Azadi

  ‘Chaman Nahal is refreshingly unpretentious.’

  – Amrit Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, on My True Faces

  ‘An encounter between love and death, free will and fate, collective obligation and personal desire.’

  – The Statesman, New Delhi, on Into Another Dawn

  ‘A humorous and at times scathingly critical look at the way Indian society is evolving in our cities.’

  – Indian Horizons, New Delhi, on The English Queens

  ‘The picture of Gandhi is most moving and unusually frank.’

  – William Golding on Salt of Life

  ‘Chaman Nahal’s Quartet is likely to make literary history.’

  – Financial Expess, New Delhi, on The Gandhi Quartet

  Silent Life

  ROLI BOOKS

  This digital edition published in 2014

  First published in 2005 by

  The Lotus Collection

  An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

  M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market

  New Delhi 110 048

  Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000

  Email: info@rolibooks.com

  Website: www.rolibooks.com

  Copyright © Chaman Nahal, 2005

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Roli Books. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  eISBN: 978-93-5194-066-1

  All rights reserved.

  This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or cover other than that in which it is published.

  TO

  THE UNKNOWN FRIEND

  WHO EVER WALKS BESIDE ME

  Contents

  ONE Bejewelled City

  TWO Partition and After

  THREE Uncle Sam's Home

  FOUR Eastern Shores

  FIVE University Dons

  SIX Spirit Worlds

  SEVEN Organized Violence

  EIGHT Native Origins

  NINE Cambridge Frills

  TEN Hills and Plains

  ONE

  Bejewelled City

  I was born in Sialkot, a small town which is now in Pakistan and lies only a few miles away from the state of Jammu & Kashmir. It has been my good fortune to travel a great deal in life, but this town continues to remain at the heart of my consciousness. Its freshness, the expanse of its fields, the cluster of huge trees that adorn its countryside, the hustle and bustle of its streets, its music and dance, the sanguine ambience that greets one as you get up in the day, have not been duplicated by anything that I have known anywhere else.

  The year, I am told, was 1927, the month August. That makes me a Leo, if it means anything. All Leos can’t be lion-hearted, forthright and aggressive. Even though such astrological summings-up are flattering, they take the zest out of living – if I have to be one of a type. Each individual on this earth is unique and virtues that are bestowed on us collectively diminish the glory of our existence.

  My father was a jeweller, a profession which unfortunately carried a stigma in those times. Goldsmiths, by what permutations in our history I don’t know, were not regarded as too high at the social level. Our father made light of this and pointed out what a gifted trade it was, requiring tremendous skill and care. He had a towering personality and no one could directly insult or attack him. But every now and then, we children continued to be reminded of our humble status.

  As a child I must have watched these artisans so often, and if later I became a writer, I believe I owe the gift partly to my class origins. Every gold ornament has to be cut, moulded, soldered, set with precious or semi-precious stones, washed and polished with absolute precision. Nowhere have I seen such a collection of small hammers – some of them smaller than gravel – as in a goldsmith’s cluster of tools. Holding the gold nugget in one hand, with these hammers and his other implements, such as tweezers and teeny-weeny blowpipes into which he blows through his lips to divert the flame before him on that nugget, the man would transform it to shapes beyond the realm of probability – his shoulders bent, his legs crossed, his feet tucked under, his eyes focussed in line with the length of his nose. If gold is precious, a gold ornament is even more so, for it is altogether the brainchild of the artisan. Isn’t that what a work of art is, too?

  My father never made those ornaments himself. He might have at some earlier stage, but now he only accepted orders and had them executed by his workmen who sat in another building. He was so highly regarded in his profession, people often visited him to have their ornaments evaluated. He rubbed them on his black stone and could instantly tell where they stood, how much of real gold was in them and how much just impurity such as copper. He made only a small scratch, longitudinally or horizontally, held the stone at arm’s length and knew. Often he made several scratches close to each other and made me point out the best one, I invariably making the wrong choice. ‘You’ll never get anywhere in life,’ he said with disgust.

  He also acted as a banker and many people pawne
d their valuables with him. Local banks used his services too, to assess the ornaments and gold pawned with them. As he rose in status, he added the suffix ‘Saraf’ to his name, meaning a jeweller only but a dignified one, to set himself apart from the common run of goldsmiths. The word ‘Lala’ he had assumed years ago as a prefix, which was merely the Indian equivalent of a mister or sir. His full title, thus, became Lala Gopal Das Saraf, which seemed formidable enough to us children. If anyone asked us what our father’s name was, and we inadvertently left any part of it out, and if perchance our father came to know about the lapse, we were in for a severe reprimand from him which could even include corporal punishment.

  All this might give the impression that we were rather well off; actually we were not. We had all the necessities, but not many luxuries. We lived in a rented house, where for a number of years we had no electricity; I remember reading by the light of a hurricane lantern initially. TVs had not yet arrived on the scene, but we had no refrigerator, no geyser, not even a petty radio or any other electrical gadget. We had a grandfather clock on one of the walls, but just one for the whole house, which my father personally wound up once a week, using a rickety stool to stand on and glaring at us if our hold of that rotten platform became shaky. My father walked to his shop on foot and walked back. If he had to go and see a dignitary – which included several Englishmen posted in Sialkot – he took a tonga.

  We were not poor, either. We had always enough to eat and clothe ourselves. There was a telephone at our shop – which took a formidable amount of time to acquire in those days, eight to nine years at the least. Then a telegram arrived at our house each morning from Bombay, giving us the latest current and future rates of gold and silver in many varieties. My father dealt in forward trading; he and many of his clients bought now and sold later, or bought in anticipation at some time in the future but paid at the present price. Called ‘sitta’ in the local language, it was our equivalent of the stock exchange. People made quick profits – lost as well – in these deals, and my father had to have the newest rates before the market opened everyday. My father made a good deal of money this way, I understand.

  At the marriage of my uncle Ram Rakha Mull, I am told, my father took a bioscope company along with the marriage party, and screened several movies for the bride’s entire village; my aunt tells me that at the wedding, he gave her one hundred tolas of gold (worth five lakh rupees today) and many other fineries and precious items as gifts. It seems my father just kept a tight hold on his purse, from which bounty his children were completely excluded.

  We were two brothers and three sisters. The eldest child of the family, a sister, was already married when my memory became operative. As I was the oldest son, one would assume a measure of indulgence in my upbringing – a little more than just ordinary comfort. We all grew up in a very thrifty atmosphere, though. Waste was equated by our father with crime and sinfulness, and a paisa spent extra without a legitimate reason was a patent waste for him.

  It amuses me to think how I got my first lounge suit to wear only when I had reached college. Up until I matriculated, I wore only churidars – tight pyjamas, which were monsters of inconvenience if you had to go to the toilet. They simply couldn’t be removed easily, and you had to use paper pieces like shoehorns to make them slip up and down your heel. Or I wore knickers; brown ones being part of the school uniform. When the grand finale came for the suit, my father agreed to only the cheapest and the coarsest material he could find in the bazaar: a thick, black woollen stuff with off-white lines. This is hand-woven, he declared as encouragement; Gandhiji forbids us to use mill-made material. I have never seen anyone quote Gandhi more conveniently!

  I had a watch to adorn my wrist only after I had cleared my M.A. I had my own radio only when I got my first job. One of the ravages of Partition was my black suit which was left behind in Sialkot when we fled the city. At the time of my convocation, when I received the M.A. degree at Delhi, I was obliged to take a suit on loan from a friend. I took the tie as well from him. Few would know that the smiling, shy boy in family photographs of the moment is dressed in borrowed plumes!

  None of this made me unhappy, though. Our house was small, but it was so warm and genial. Indeed the happiness inside our home, the food there, the clothes, the arrangement of furniture, the wall hangings and decorations, the bright kitchen with its shining utensils, has made the physical features of a home as a gauge for me to judge how well any family is doing. I have only to look at the interior of a house to know whether the people living there are content or wallowing in misery.

  And then there were things outside the house, the discovery of which was the constant joy of my childhood. There were other families in the very building in which we lived. The lane outside connected us to bazaars, in which there were more buildings and still more families. The man at the corner of our street was a doctor, who made me well when I was sick. The man on the other side was a stationer, who sold books I read at school. At the distant end, there was a gujjar, who sold us the milk I drank. The milk came from cows or buffaloes, looked after by the gujjar. There was a temple at that end also in which were installed our deities, Radha and Krishna. Only the gujjar wouldn’t go inside that temple since he was a Muslim. The bazaars led to chowks, the chowks to more bazaars. There was a railway station near one of the chowks, where came trains from other cities.

  The hoot of the train engine, I could hear in my room; it was the loudest noise in the town. How many more cities were there in the world, how many more people? There was a small river, called Aik, which flowed next to Sialkot. How many other rivers were there? Some of these were supposed to be sacred – like the Ganges and Yamuna. Why were they sacred?

  And then these people around me, they smiled and they cried. Why did we smile? How did tears form in our eyes? Why did we swing our arms when we moved? Why did our chest move up and down while we breathed? Why did we flicker our eyelashes? Why did we go pale suddenly or blood rush to our cheeks in moments of excitement? Many of these activities were totally beyond our control. Why were they beyond our control? Why did they happen at all?

  When my father took me to school and putting me in the midst of small, noisy boys and a formidable, unsmiling teacher, asked with concern, ‘Will you be all right?’ I didn’t sob at the prospect of being left alone; I rather wanted him to go so that I could get on with my queries. This childish delight I have in making discoveries has not ceased in me.

  I had not the least foreknowledge I was going to be a writer one day – and that too in English. In a gratuitous manner, I can’t boast I was born with a pen in one hand and a tablet in the other and started scribbling the moment I was out of my mother’s womb. But I had a tremendous fascination with words from the start – how they were formed, broken up and combined again to form other words, having other meanings. Though my mother tongue is Punjabi, the first language I learned at school was Urdu. Then came Hindi, English and Persian – in that order. At one stage I was so proficient in Persian, I could hold a running conversation in it with ease – though I eventually lost the language after Partition through lack of usage.

  To my great regret I never learned to write Gurmukhi, the script for the Punjabi language. I made half-hearted attempts several times, giving up quickly enough, consoling myself that Gurmukhi was like Hindi only, which it is not; the script is quite different. Later, through self-help books and dictionaries I taught myself Sanskrit, a process I continued for years. One of my major satisfactions in life was when I translated from Sanskrit into English the great Indian classic, the Bhagavad-Gita. The translation is not a literal, word-by-word rendering; I still can’t understand Sanskrit words when joined into an unintelligible mass like hieroglyphs – and many slokas in the Gita figure like that. Instead, I selected the key phrase or phrases in each sloka and built my translation around them.

  Coming to English, no one in our household spoke the language. My father, extremely intelligent as he was, could always get
the hang of a sentence when someone addressed him in that tongue, but he had no formal training in it. Maybe it was lip-reading, or face-reading, or mind-reading, the clairvoyant that he was he could easily get away with it. My two uncles were quite proficient in it, they had even travelled abroad, one to the Middle East the other to Indonesia, using apparently this very language, but they lived separately and were of no help or inspiration. None of the masters in the school I went to, Khushal Chand Arya High School, was a shining star in this respect either, as but for English proper they taught us the other subjects in Hindustani, and usually conversed with each other either in Urdu or Punjabi.

  I began reading English only in Class V, when I was about ten. Its script provoked me, especially its consonants ever scrolling up or sliding down the page, but I found the Persian and Devanagari scripts more challenging and more intelligently devised (no problem of spelling in them!). I believe my true association with English began in Murray College, which I joined after high school. The college was run by Scottish missionaries, and there were a number of Scots and Englishmen on the staff. They fed us with Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Dickens, the staple fodder of English teaching in India; and they fed us with the Bible. But they spoke with a different accent and had a different way of forming their sentences. Very often they communicated just through their tone, as we did too in our languages, but their exclamations and interjections were placed differently; the tenor of their pitch was different, too, as were their gestures. And I was told how English was used in so many other countries around the world. Where were those countries, in what corners? The missionaries had arrived here from England over the vast seas. What was there beyond the seas? And what beyond that? Fired as I was already with the idea of diversity, the English language funnelled me towards the same end: speaking or writing in it meant reaching out to the unknown numbers whom I could never see or meet.