by Niaz Zaman

She was the younger sister of the most beautiful actress of the Kolkata screen in the forties, he was the younger brother of a petty hill chieftain and, as fate would have it, they fell in love at first sight. But, as fate would have it, by the time they met, she was already married to the petty hill chieftain who had long hankered after the beautiful actress, but, not getting her — she was happily married to a small businessman — had settled for her younger sister, quite as beautiful and a BA from Lady Brabourne College as well. The younger brother of the hill chieftain was unmarried and, in the tradition of romantic myths and legends, remained a bachelor till he died fifty years after he fell in love.
   Of course, all this I learned later, in bits and pieces, putting together the little scraps like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle of which there was no picture guide so that I didn’t quite know how the picture would turn out.
   I first met her because she was the mother of a classmate who came from a hill community and I was doing a thesis on the role of women in the hill community. When I was doing my thesis, the home of the petty chieftain — the son of the petty chieftain who had married the younger sister of the actress and who had died in mysterious circumstances after fathering four daughters —Rajeshwari was the youngest daugher — and a son — was still across the river. We crossed the river in a small rowboat which deposited us in thirty minutes before the gate of the palace, guarded by lions in the tradition of the Far East.
   The Ranimata was fifty years old at the time and still very beautiful, though her features seemed to have just slightly loosened as they do with age. Strangely enough, she didn’t have the oriental eves of the hill tribes that my friend had. My friend explained that her mother did not belong to the hill tribe - she was a plainswoman from Kolkata, a Hindu, rather than a Buddhist like the tribe. That was when my friend told me how her father had admired the Bengali actress from Kolkata. He had seen all the movies that the actress had made. Once during a visit to Kolkata -still spelled Calcutta in those days - he had expressed his desire to meet the actress in person. A. small reception had been arranged. The actress came along with her younger sister, who everyone said looked very like her famous elder sister. Within a week my friend’s father had married the actress’s younger sister. Seven years later her father was dead. Her brother - one year old at the time - became chief.
   “Weren’t there any problems?” I asked.
   My friend shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. My mother did the ruling, I suppose, aided by my uncle, my father’s brother.”
   Used to the fratricidal struggles of the Mughals and the palace intrigues where uncles manipulated their young nephews to marry their daughters, I was surprised that the year-old boy had been allowed to live till, seventeen years later, at the age of eighteen, he had assumed the kingship. For six years, the uncle had continued to work as Chief Minister, till, at the age of twenty-five, the King had retired him and appointed another Chief Minister.
   “And what does your uncle do?”
   “He does not keep well these days. He stays in a nursing home.” She named a hill resort in India.
   For a week my friend and I visited the women in their huts - many of them built on stilts, to keep away the wild animals, my friend explained. I saw the small, primitive hand-held looms on which the tribal women wove remarkably fine lengths of cloth.
   “Every girl must learn to weave,” Rajeshwari explained, showing me the sampler - with rows of different motifs. “Even I have woven a lungi for myself. We wear these woven lungis, you know, while the Muslim women of Chittagong wear machine-made, printed lungis. Mother has, of course, never worn a lungi. She always wears saris, but she has had several shawls made, in traditional colours and patterns as well as in untraditional colours. She has also brought silk yarn for special shawls. She always keeps these special shawls handy for giving as gifts. When Avub Khan visited with his daughter, Mother presented a dark green shawl to the daughter, who was married to the ruler of Swat. Swat is famous for emeralds, and Ayub Khan’s daughter often wore emeralds, so Mother chose that dark green for her.”
   The week whizzed by with me writing down notes, taking pictures with my small Ilford. Soon it was time to say goodbye. While taking my leave, partly as a mere formality, I told Rajeshwari’s mother that if she ever came to Dhaka my parents would love to meet her - I wasn’t married at the time and was still staying with my parents. My invitation was just a form of politeness. With two daughters married in Dhaka, she had no dearth of places to stay and perhaps no time to visit people she didn’t know.
   Time passed. I got married. Rajeshwari finished her Honours and left to study abroad. There she met a small chieftain from an Indian state and married him. But the small chieftain soon found that he had no chiefdom left, so Rajeshwari and he settled abroad and turned to making documentaries on little-known tribes of the East.
   And then, one day, Rajeshwari’s mother was suddenly in the limelight. There were few women in the public arena, and when the new president looked around for mature - meaning above a certain age - educated women, he was given a list of twelve women who met his requirements. He had once visited the Raja, Rajeshwari’s brother, and been charmed by the hospitality and bearing of the Raja’s family, particularly the dignity and elegance of the Ranimata. He offered the post of State Minister for Tribal Affairs in a newly created ministry to the Ranimata. She graciously accepted.
   Dhaka was still a quiet city then, and I would meet the Ranimata about twice a year. Despite the passage of time, she hadn’t forgotten me and, after meeting me a couple of times at receptions, invited me over to her place.
   “Why don’t you come to my place?” I asked. “I’m sure that if I go over to your place there will a hundred and one people there. Come over to my place. I have a lovely little cottage, in the heart of Dhaka, with a tin roof and a bamboo matting ceiling as well as a lovely little garden of fruit trees and hasna hena. Come, spend Sunday with me.”
   She laughed. “Though I do not have much work, I am not free. Still...” she hesitated, but then said, “Perhaps I will.”
   “You’ll have lunch” I asked. She nodded.
   “Anything you don’t eat?”
   “Just beef.” -
   When I told my husband, he laughed, disbeieving. “You’ve invited the State Minister for Tribal Affairs? The Ranimata?”
   “So what?” I retorted. “She’s my friend’s mother, after all. And I’ve been to her place. And. even though she lived in a palace, the palace wasn’t all that different from our house. Many of our private houses are much more ornately decorated than her palace.”
   So Ranimata came the next Sunday. She dismissed her car and asked it to return later. She looked around my little cottage, tin roof and all.
   “Does it leak?” she asked, looking up at the ceiling.
   “Sometimes. We put buckets and bowls to catch the rain water, but it’s always nice when all the holes have been plugged up and there are no leaks and the rain goes pitter-patter all night.”
   Next to my bedroom I had my study. As usual, my table was piled with books and papers. On the table, in a little space, was a writing pad, a page half-written, the pen sticking out from between the pages.
   “What do you write?” she asked.
   “All sorts of things. Notes for classes. Papers for journals —but also stories,” I said, showing her the shelf with my books.
   “Do you ever write about yourself?” she asked, looking at the titles and then pulling out a book.
   “Sometimes,” I replied. “But usually I write about others.”
   “How do you know whether what you have written is good or no?”
   “I don’t always. Sometimes I think I have written something good and when people read it they agree that is good, but sometimes they don’t like or understand what I have written. Especially when I don’t say everything. People are lazy but writers do not have to tell them everything. After all, real life stories don’t always tell everything.”
   “Do you tell real stories?” she asked.
   “Real stories?”
   “Yes, real stories about real people, about things that actually happened?”
   “Sometimes,” I said, “but real stories have a habit of turning out badly unless one does something to them. Also one can’t always tell the truth. Someone can get hurt.”
   “But don’t you sometimes think that real stories must be told?”
   “Yes,” I said hesitantly.
   “I’ll tell you a story,” she said, “write it down if you can, it’s about a young woman, nineteen years old, a girl really, who married the wrong man. He was tall and handsome and, when he proposed, her head swirled with excitement. He married her a week after meeting her and took her away to his kingdom in the mountains - well, they weren’t really mountains, they were hills really. There the beautiful young queen found that her powerful husband, who distributed land to his subjects, also often wanted something in return. Money yes, tax for land use because in the hills the land doesn’t belong to anyone - not even the king who only keeps it for his subjects who pay him for its use - but also something other than money: their beautiful daughters - perhaps just for a night. In the hill girls are free to choose the men they wish to marry, and among the hill tribes there are trial marriages so virginity is not as prized as it is elsewhere in the world. Most girls choose their men. But the word is choice. Here the girls were forced to submit to the hill chieftain. So even as the Raja slept with his young queen - impregnating her again and again so that for the seven odd years of their married life she remembers being sick almost every day and waddling around, heavily pregnant - he also enjoyed the droit de seigneur - I learned this word afterwards, learning that it was a right that European kings also enjoyed before they became ‘civilised.’
   “In between her bouts of sickness and her giving birth, the young queen fell in love - no, not with the king, but with his younger brother. He was kind and gentle and sensitive, and he understood her pain and loneliness. They knew that they could never be lovers, but they would spend moments together - always surrounded by people so that any feelings they had could only be expressed during stolen moments.
   “And then one day the Raja died. The queen was relieved. She was free - true there were children, but she could now marry the man who had loved her silently all these years. That was when the rumours started that the king had died in mysterious circumstances. He had been poisoned - fingers pointed at the younger brother. He was ambitious, he wanted -to marry the widowed queen. He wanted to kill the baby prince, the heir to the throne. The queen - she was only twenty-six years old - was terrified.
   “She decided that she wanted her son to live, but she also wanted the man she loved to live. So, as Ranimata, she called a council of elders. Boldly she proclaimed that the prince’s uncle, the Raja’s younger brother, would be Regent until the child came of age.
   “Seventeen years passed, years during which the Regent met the queen for official purposes and no more. How she looked forward to those official meetings/ The rumours faded but never disappeared. They were always there, like a sword over their heads. Like an old couple, their love settled down to friendship.
   “When the prince turned eighteen, he was crowned. The queen was happy. Now her son was old enough to look after himself and the chiefdom. Perhaps she could finally marry the man she loved. She hinted as much to her son.
   “Impossible, he said. Don’t you think that I have heard the story of how you and he poisoned my father?’
   “The queen did not plead any further. Seven years later, when the king was twenty-five, he changed his Chief Minister. At the annual durbar he thanked his uncle for the work he had done, first as Regent and then as Chief Minister, and told him that he had served the chiefdom long enough. It was time to retire. Perhaps even to go abroad for rest and relaxation.
   “It wasn’t a holiday the king was offering. It was exile. The prince bowed and accepted.
   “That evening he came to say farewell to the queen he had loved and for whose sake he had so staunchly guarded and guided the young king. For twenty years he lived abroad — and the queen remained locked up in her mountain world, remained there till a president released her and brought her to his capital. For twenty years she had written letters to the man she loved, letters in which she spoke of her love, but also about the jhum cultivation and the waterfalls and the houses on stilts.
   “For twenty years he had replied, brief notes about how he was, where he was, what he was doing. Bare letters that mentioned not a word of what he had felt or continued to feel about her. And then a week back she got a letter from him saying that he was tired. He wanted to come home. How long could he stay in exile, alone? What was the queen to tell him?
   “My son is Raja and I am the State Minister for Tribal Affairs. What do I tell him?”
   It was her story that she was telling me — as I had guessed halfway through the telling. This old woman, dressed in widow’s white, without rings or chains or bracelets, without any touch of colour on her lips, her wrinkles still slight but very much there round her eyes and her lips proclaiming her age — she was Laila and Sohni, she was Heer and Hero. The only difference was she was alive as was her Majnu and Mahiwal, her Ranjha and Leander. For whom had she put on white? For the king or her lover, the king’s brother?
   “You write. Tell me, is it worth it after all these years to marry? Or shall we continue to pretend that our relationship is merely of sister-in-law and devar? I am not really afraid of people saying I poisoned my husband. Because we didn’t. It was a lie — but a lie that everyone preferred to the truth — that he had collapsed over a young girl while making love and that his dead body had to be pried loose from her by six men while the young girl screamed in pain and horror. The young woman was never sane again until the day she drowned herself in the river.
   “Tell me,” she said again, “what would you as a writer say? What would you as a woman do?”
   They are both old, I thought, past the age when men and women are attracted to each other physically, when they have to touch and mingle their bodies and their fluids, but their love had not dwindled into the familiarity of old married couples. She was as nervous as a young woman on a first date. And she was asking me, not as Rajcshwari’s friend but as a woman and a writer.
   She looked into my eyes and sighed. “No, you cannot tell me what to do. And perhaps I will allow things to go on as they have before. We are both old. Old men and women can be together as young men and women can’t. So perhaps the rumours will no longer go around as usual. But one day,” she said, “you must promise me, one day when he and I are dead, you will tell our story to the world. I want my grandchildren if not my children to know that I am-not a murderer, that the man I loved - love - is not a murderer. And yet, in telling it - in clearing my reputation and his - must the whole truth be told of how their father and grandfather died?”
   “If truth must be told,” I said, “it must be the whole truth.”
   “Very well then, the whole truth. But tell them also how I loved one man all my life and how he loved me all of his. And also tell the world that it wasn’t fear of being labelled murderers that kept us from marrying but the desire of not wanting to shame my children before the whole world. By the time I am gone, the truth will not hurt as much perhaps. Wait to tell my story until he and I are dead.”
   We had lunch, a quiet, sombre lunch, and then her car was there.
   We met after that again, once or twice a year. And then the government changed, and her ministership was gone. She returned to her home in the hills, alone. The man she had loved was killed in a plane crash while returning home. The Raja performed the last rites of his uncle, spoke about how much he owed the man who had been Regent while he was a small child. The Ranimata died shortly afterwards, suddenly, in her sleep.
   I would like her to know that I have kept my promise to her.