3

No Easy Path

LUCKNOW, 1955–56

After that first visit to Bhagalpur, Didi and I yearned to go back. Amma seemed somewhat ambivalent about our reaction, but she did not prevent us from spending very available holiday with Shankar chacha, who, besides welcoming us into the family home and introducing us to our brand-new cousin, another boy named Praveen, would sometimes take us on train rides to other parts of the country. We had found an anchor, a source of stability and dependable love.

Back in Lucknow, we were spending more nights than ever at Lalita mausi’s house, where Didi and I had, eventually, made friends with some of the adults and struck an uneasy truce with the younger inhabitants. Dadi ma calmed down perceptibly whenever Didi read aloud from the Bhagavad Gita or I sang devotional songs, especially Jhini jhini bini chadariya, “Fine, fine, is the weaving of that shawl,” Kabir’s bhajan reminding us that the body is but a delicate shawl that the soul discards at the end of our time on earth. No matter where we were, Didi and I religiously wrote daily letters to our parents, some of which got mailed to Babu once every month. Babu’s letters to us arrived only sporadically, and were always devoid of answers. Sometimes they contained a poem he had written or a passage translated from a book he had been reading, and always they ended in blessings of happiness, health, and good karma.

Didi and I had by this point become voracious readers of the Hindi books in our collection, but Babu’s library included books in French, German, and Russian, as well as in Bengali and several other Indian languages that neither Didi nor I knew. We wondered why Babu had chosen to study those particular languages, but that was just another of the questions he would never answer, and for the most part we just ignored their presence on his bookshelves. We sometimes tried our hand at books in English or Sanskrit, but they were too much work. In any case, Amma and Babu’s ever-growing collection of Hindi titles made up the bulk of the hundreds of books that lined the walls in the living room of the bungalow.

In the meanwhile, Amma was travelling further and further afield, her trips no longer confined to the welfare centres in semi-urban areas. She was now going deeper into rugged wilderness, to rural villages inaccessible by highways or railway links. Reaching these remote locations sometimes involved crossing through territory inhabited by bandits, making Amma’s journeys unpredictably lengthy and potentially dangerous. She travelled along unpaved roads in a government Jeep, in the company of Deen Dayalji, who still struggled to not call her “Saheb.”

Often, the only rest stops for Amma and Deen Dayalji along the road were the dak bungalows for government officers that still stood in some of the more remote parts of the country. Back in the 1840s, the British had begun building these bungalows as staging posts for the imperial mail, the dak, and many had evolved into resthouses for travelling British officials. The accommodations ranged from barely functional to utterly ostentatious, some located in spectacular settings and some in godforsaken terrain.

On one occasion, they returned from a trip looking especially haggard. When Deen Dayalji asked Ramu kaka to get him some water, I noticed that he seemed unusually relieved to be home. Only later did he tell us the full story.

The welfare department was planning to open a new multi-purpose welfare centre in southwestern part of the state, in the Bundelkhand area, which borders the ravines of the Chambal badlands. Amma and Deen Dayalji had travelled down to Jhansi and, on the return trip, had set out in their usual government Jeep, heading for Hamirpur, about 125 miles to the northeast. Partway along the route, though, the Jeep had broken down. Since they were not far from a railway station when this happened, Amma chose to ignore the advice of the driver and Deen Dayalji that she spend the day and possibly the night in the nearby town while the Jeep was repaired. Instead, she decided to continue on to Hamirpur alone, by train.

Deen Dayalji tried to explain to her that the Hamirpur train station was not in the town of Hamirpur itself and that, to reach the town, she would have to cut across a dense expanse of forest that was controlled by dangerous dacoits. Amma was undeterred. It was barely midday; the district magistrate and the district welfare coordinator of the area were expecting her. There was much work to be done over the next few days. So she asked Deen Dayalji to join her as soon as the Jeep was fixed and, in the meantime, to phone the office in Hamirpur and inform them that she would be arriving by train that evening.

It took several hours for Deen Dayalji to organize the repair of the Jeep and then find a telephone. Dusk was already falling as he listened to the district coordinator, a young woman, yell at him from the other end of the line. She was hysterical with anxiety at the news that Amma was travelling alone at night in those parts. If the train she had boarded was on time, it would have arrived at the Hamirpur station a couple of hours earlier, but there was no sign of her. The two of them fervently hoped that Amma had decided to wait at the station rather than try to make her way to the dak bungalow through the jungle at night. Sick with worry, Deen Dayalji pleaded with the coordinator to send someone to look for Amma—at least to the edge of town.

Meanwhile, Amma had gotten off at the remote Hamirpur railway station, where the only transport consisted of a few rickety mule carts that rapidly filled with people and their substantial luggage. She took a seat on one of the last ones, which joined the convoy of carts on a narrow road snaking through a patchy network of trees and farmland. They were riding toward the forest that separated the train station from the River Betwa, on the other side of which was Hamirpur. Two policemen walked behind them, armed with rifles.

A few miles from the station, as the foliage began to grow dense and the trees taller, the convoy of mule carts stopped in a clearing, where several people dismounted and unloaded their luggage. Accompanied by the policemen, they started walking down a sliver of a road that led along the edge of the jungle toward the cultivated land of the nearby village of Rampur. The remaining passengers, all men, sat on the ground in a tight group, with piles of jute bags, tin canisters, and other goods in the middle, prepared to wait for morning light before resuming their journey through the thick forest.

Amma, however, refused to get out of the cart and quarrelled angrily with the cart driver, who had promised to take her to Hamirpur. The driver argued that entering the forest at night would be an invitation to death. He would rather take his chances with wild beasts, he said, than die at the hands of dacoits. He told Amma to follow the walkers to Rampur if she did not want to wait with the group of men. Frustrated by their mutual stubbornness, the cart driver and Amma began raising their voices to out-shout each other.

Suddenly, two men appeared from the shadows, the metal glint of their long rifles clearly visible in the flickering light of a small hurricane lantern held by the taller of the two. At this sight, the driver’s teeth started to chatter, and beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead despite the chill winter night. The men seated on the ground only a few yards from them froze into silhouettes, like a collection of cowering statues.

The two dacoits were wrapped in coarse black lohis, which allowed them to melt into the darkness of the night. The taller man raised his lantern to peer into Amma’s face, meeting her unwavering gaze. The thick silence of the cold, foggy night was broken only by distant howls and hoots from the forest.

Amma looked unblinkingly at the lantern-bearer’s hard face, with its stiff moustache curled up at the ends. The man’s gruff inquiries slashed the silence. “Who are you? Where are you going?”

“Bhaiya,” she replied calmly, “I need to go to Hamirpur. The district magistrate is expecting me. Will you help me reach my destination?” Amma explained that she was the deputy director of the Social Welfare Department and told him about the breakdown of the Jeep on her way to the new field site. She said that he might have heard her scolding the cart driver, who had promised to take her to Hamirpur but was now refusing to budge. The cart driver stammered that the bridge gate would be closed by now, and the path through the jungle was dangerous for a woman.

“No danger survives our presence,” the tall man rumbled. He took the lantern away from Amma’s face and made a sign toward the bushes. At that, two more men appeared, also wrapped in dark lohis, the metal barrels of their guns visible above their shoulders. The tall man told the cart driver to stay in the middle of the road and follow them.

So they marched through the forest, Amma and the driver in the mule cart, with two dacoits leading the procession and the other two following behind. Their march was accompanied by loud chants of Hum hain, hum hain, “It’s us, it’s us.” After nearly a mile, they emerged from a thicket by the bridge on the river. The flickering lights of the town on the other side were in clear view.

The bridge gate was indeed locked, as the driver had predicted, so the tall man used the butt of his rifle to knock on the door of the little shanty next to the bridge, calling for the watchman to unlock the gate. The watchman appeared with his lantern held high, shivering with cold, or terror, or both. He looked up at Amma in the mule cart and spluttered, “Sister, where are you going with these men?”

Before Amma could respond, the tall man rumbled again, “She is a guest of the district magistrate. Open the gate.”

The watchman’s trembling quickened, but he bravely held his ground. “I can only unlock the gate at this hour upon written orders.”

The tall man’s body tensed and his eyes flickered. It looked like he was going to break open the gate himself, probably with the head of the watchman. Miraculously, however, he responded to Amma’s firm command to wait, as she fished out her official letter pad from the depths of her cotton shoulder bag and scrawled a note for the watchman—the written orders he required.

Still trembling, the watchman unlocked the chains that held the gate of the bridge shut for the night. As soon as the cart started rolling across the bridge, the four dacoits disappeared noiselessly into the shadows. In stunned silence, the driver steered the mule toward the lights of the town, and the watchman locked the bridge shut again behind them.

At the edge of the town, they met a small group of men with flashlights. When Amma asked one of them if this was the town of Hamirpur, the incredulous man asked her whether she was the deputy director they had been waiting for. He introduced himself as the father of the district coordinator, who was beside herself after learning that Amma was alone in these parts, where not even groups of men dared venture into the forest at night.

The cart driver, who sensed his safety, now burst into loud expressions of gratitude to all the gods and all his ancestors for protecting their lives. With widened eyes, he declared that they had just been escorted through the forest by one of the most notorious dacoits in the region. At this news the townsmen joined in voicing their grateful praise to divine powers for sparing Amma’s life. This, she replied irritably, was why the area needed a welfare office.

Deen Dayalji arrived the next day with the Jeep and found the whole town talking about Amma’s passage through the jungle, re-telling the story repeatedly to him, attributing Amma’s survival to the power of the goddess who must have been with her that night.

Now safely back in Lucknow, Deen Dayalji was pleading with Amma not to bother with any more field trips. They had seen enough to prepare the reports, he said. Amma’s brow was furrowed more than usual as she listened from her chair on the veranda, but she let Deen Dayalji finish saying his long piece, which ended with a mention of his little children and their possible future without a father. He stopped abruptly and got up to leave, mumbling something that sounded like either an apology or a resignation. Amma watched him leave and then turned to us to ask about our upcoming exams. I got up from the swing to sit on the floor next to her chair, so that I could hug her legs while she talked and stroked my head.

Even two years after we had left our home in Jaipur, I missed it every day. There, we had been a seamless extension of the various families that surrounded us, never letting us feel alone or unprotected, even when Amma was busy and Babu was away. I could ride my bike wherever I wanted to in the walled city. Everyone knew Amma and knew Didi and me as her daughters. We had learned to expect love, kindness, and respect from friends and strangers alike.

Lucknow was still far from feeling like home, except for the brief periods when Amma was around. Our large isolated bungalow with so little neighbourly contact was a frigid and lonely place. When we stayed with families who had generously made space for Didi and me, it strangely increased our ache for home.

I often had nightmares that made me scream and cry in my sleep. Amma placed a small folding knife under my pillow to keep the vague ghosts of the night at bay, which did seem to help. The cold, sharp steel was strangely reassuring to feel under my pillow every time I woke up at night.

Everywhere we went, our outsider status was loudly announced by our clothes and speech. Except for our school uniforms, Didi and I dressed differently from other girls our age. Amid the colourful dotted designs of bandhani silks and cottons in Jaipur, the delicate shadow of chikankari embroidery in Lucknow, the golden tussar silk of Bihar, and, for special occasions, the intricately woven splendour of Banarasi jamawar brocades, we stuck out in our simple white or beige khadi ensembles, as did Amma. Our fluency in standard Hindi, with its Sanskritic vocabulary, was useful to us in school, but our classmates made fun of the way our tongues stumbled when we switched to Awadhi, the local language. Six years earlier, in 1949, Hindi had been designated one of the country’s two official languages, along with English, but, in a profoundly multi-lingual country, the choice, we knew, had been controversial. Speakers of the Dravidian languages of southern India had resented the imposition of one of the Indo-Aryan languages of the north, while, in the north, rivalry existed among various linguistic groups. Awadhi, in particular, had a long literary tradition, and we soon realized that, as Hindi speakers, we were regarded as linguistic interlopers.

We were also no longer the daughters of the principal of the school. My teachers in Lucknow did not expect to talk about our progress with Amma, who was one of the few mothers who ever visited the school for that purpose. The other mothers wore pointy shoes, chiffon or silk saris with fashionable blouses, jewellery, and perfect hairdos. The suited-and-booted fathers did all the talking with the teachers.

Even some of the teachers stared at Amma in her unchanging white saris and flat khadi-leather chappals, which gave way to equally utilitarian khadi-leather shoes in the winter months. The way Amma spoke also got sniggers from the girls in my school. One particularly unkind girl loudly asked me in class if my mother worked for All India Radio, since she sounded just like the evening newscaster. Her remark was followed by muffled titters from many of the other girls. I was embarrassed to the core and wished that Amma would never come to school again.

Unlike in Jaipur, where people’s respect for Amma and Babu had protected us, Didi and I were subjects of prying enquiries in Lucknow. Most often, people asked questions about our absent father, but even after we had spent three summers away from Jaipur, away from Babu, we had few answers that satisfied us or them.

On the last day of school before the two-week-long Dussehra holidays, which we would be celebrating in Bhagalpur, I was trying to concentrate on what the teacher was saying, barely able to keep at bay my daydreams about our upcoming escape—the adoring aunties, the affectionate cousins, the delectable delicacies, the generous orchard, the majestic river, and, above all, our very loving Shankar chacha.

The teacher and my daydreams were both interrupted, however, when the school peon handed the teacher a note that summoned me to the principal’s office. As I rose to leave, I heard “Gangway for Kali avatar!” followed by snickering behind my back. I kept my eyes on the white marble floor and resisted the urge to drag my shoes deliberately—just to annoy any of the staff who might be watching.

The passage curved toward the principal’s office.

I looked up and froze.

In the garden beside the principal’s office, on a stone bench under the ancient pipal tree, Didi was huddled next to Shankar chacha. I started running toward them, heart singing and feet dancing. Hearing my stomping footsteps on the cobbled path to the bench, the man’s face turned toward me. It was Babu!!

I couldn’t stop running in time and nearly fell into Babu’s lap, where I let out all the tears that had been waiting for over two years. We huddled together and cried until sadness could no longer seep through our eyes.

After what felt like an eternity punctuated by sobs, Babu said in his sonorous whisper, “I have to catch the next train back.”

The long silent moment was broken by one word from Didi: “When?”

He replied, “In an hour.” The grip of silence tightened around my chest.

We continued to sit on the hard stone bench, with Babu in the middle clutching us close to him. When it was time for him to leave, he lifted our chins, kissed our foreheads, wiped his own tears, and walked away without looking back. The only reminders of his visit were our moist scarves and kerchiefs, which we held close to our sore hearts.

MATHURA, 1956–57

As Amma’s travelling increased, our Lucknow bungalow began to seem less and less like our home. The chaotic rhythm of Lalita mausi’s house had become part of our daily lives, and the shelves and cupboards in Dadi ma’s room were slowly filling up with our school books. Didi and I were still writing letters to our absent parents, but we often devoted more time to entries in our personal diaries. We also kept busy after school with dance, music, painting, embroidery and riding classes. Didi excelled at playing the sitar and graduated to advanced-certificate training. It was hard for me to decide which I loved more—the expressiveness of music and dance, the vivid eloquence of painting, the meditative peace of embroidery, or the exhilarating grace of riding.

All of this changed, however, a few months after Babu’s visit to the school, when Amma unceremoniously announced that Didi and I were to move to a residential girls’ school in Mathura. Didi, who would be fourteen on her next birthday, was about to start her final year of high school, and Amma wanted to ensure a year of strict and uninterrupted routine. We were packed away within two days of our final exams, despite the high drama to which Didi and I took turns subjecting our mother. We were grateful for not being separated, at least.

In Mathura, then still a small town, Amma had another adoptive family, who lived in a house not unlike our home in Jaipur and embraced us much as our former neighbours had done. Ravikantji was like a brother to Amma, and thus Didi and I addressed him as mama. He was a bony man with kind eyes who called our mother Shanti. His three children, wife, and elderly mother lived with him in the three-storey house, on the main floor of which he ran his Ayurvedic clinic. The entire house was permeated with the aroma of the herbs, flowers, and barks that were variously boiled or dried and then mixed, often with the addition of ground minerals, into powders or little round tablets or liquids poured into dark-brown glass bottles. Ravikant mama’s practice was strictly not-for-profit. The ground floor clinic and dispensary thus had a constant flow of patients from far and wide.

Ravikant mama was our official local guardian, so we were allowed to visit his house on Sundays and other holidays. The entrance to the building was through a small gate opening into a narrow passage, which widened into a square courtyard. The passage had two doors facing each other—the clinic was on one side, where Ravikant mama sat on the floor behind a traditional munim writing desk, and the formal living room was on the other, the only room in the house that was locked up and used only on special occasions. A couple of small rooms around the enclosed courtyard contained the paraphernalia and ingredients needed to prepare Ayurvedic medicines, deftly employed by a husband-wife team of assistants.

The first floor had the busy kitchen and many rooms of various sizes. None of the rooms on the top two floors had any clear demarcation in terms of ownership. Ravikant mama and his wife had only three children, but their hospitable home hosted several visitors at any given time. Even after a number of visits to this teeming household, during which we were affectionately fed and looked after by Ravikant mama’s wife, Rani mami, and his old but agile mother, also called Dadi ma, we had difficulty establishing who was living with the family, who was visiting, and how they were related to each other, if at all.

Didi’s sitar now lived in Ravikant mama’s formal living room on the ground floor, since our room in the school’s dormitory had barely enough space for our school books and a few belongings. When Didi was not working on her homework or practicing the sitar, she liked to help the ladies in the kitchen. I looked forward to playing with Ravikant mama’s children, little Deepak and Shradha, and the oldest, Gayatri didi, who soon became my good friend. And, of course, we were welcomed each Sunday with an array of puffy puris stuffed with spicy potatoes, peas, or lentils.

Our boarding school was located in a tall and narrow building that enclosed a small atrium, which served as the space for our morning assemblies. The ground floor contained the principal-cum-warden’s offices, the kitchen, the dining hall, and a room for the use of faculty. All the classes, from grade 6 to matriculation, were taught in classrooms that filled the second and third floors. The topmost floor under the rooftop terrace was meant for the few girls who were boarders. There were eight small rooms on this floor, accessible through a continuous balcony that looked into the atrium. Didi and I shared one of these rooms with each other, and we shared the two toilets and tiny bathrooms on this floor with fourteen other girls.

The elaborate uniform of our school in Lucknow had changed from navy skirt, sky-blue blouse, maroon scarf, and long white socks in the warm months to navy blazer, sky-blue blouse, maroon tie and white pajama-pants in the winter. Our new school uniform was an unchanging beige sari with a burgundy blouse. In the winter months, a burgundy sweater was added to this ensemble. Unlike the bobs, bouffants, and fashionable braids of Lucknow, there was also a prescribed way to tie our hair in Mathura: a single tight braid folded to a length of no more than eight inches.

On Amma’s first visit to our dormitory, I had tried to get her permission to cut my long hair into a “boy cut” to avoid the problem of having to conform to the hair rule by folding my braid twice. When Amma refused, I had argued with her, calling her refusal ironic, since she told us to not be ruled by external markers of beauty like long hair.

Amma had simply smiled knowingly at my clever attempt to get my way. It turned out that I had only opened the door for a lecture on self-reliance: cutting our hair short would mean that we would become dependent on someone else to style and maintain it, rather than being able to manage it on our own. She stroked the black sheet of straight hair that cascaded over my shoulders and reached my lower back, much longer than Didi’s waist-long wavy hair. “You do have beautiful hair, and beauty must be appreciated,” she said tenderly. “But beauty is all around us, even in the wispy intricate tentacles of a bug. What I ask of you is not to be defined by specific ideas of physical beauty dictated by others.”

I was not too thrilled to be compared to a bug, even in this way, but I did manage to get Amma’s permission to shorten my hair enough to conform to the length requirement of the school without having to fold my braid. Unlike Lucknow, Mathura had no salons for women, just some hereditary barbers who went to people’s houses to cut the hair of men and children. So Didi reluctantly chopped several inches off my hair.

Also unlike Lucknow, our small school offered no extracurricular activities—no music or dance classes, no sewing lessons, no horseback riding. A big brass gong in the courtyard was struck with a wooden mallet at five in the morning, to signify the start of the day—in other words, the start of the skirmish to use the limited facilities shared among all the girls living on the top floor of the school. The gong was struck again at six, summoning us to the courtyard for an hour of yoga, meditation, and prayers, followed by half an hour for breakfast.

Classes were small, with no more than a dozen girls in each class, and ran from eight in the morning until four. Each class level had an assigned room, and students stayed in the same room in the same seat all day, except during two half-hour breaks. In the evening, the sixty or so day-scholars left the tiresome tower, as we boarders made our way down to the dining hall.

Breakfast and supper rotated between dalia, a savoury wheat porridge that was served with lentils, and shallow-fried paratha accompanied by pickles, yogurt, and vegetables. The school also gave the boarders fruit for snacks during the breaks, which the boarders added to the pool of savoury and sweet dishes in the lunch boxes brought by the day-scholars.

From six to eight every evening, we used the dining hall tables to do our homework. At nine we were given a hot glass of milk sweetened with jaggary, just before lights-out. Most girls had supplies of homemade snacks in their rooms, such as sugary laddu and flaky mathri biscuits, and again we found that the practice here was to share them communally. So Didi and I contributed to this shared pool the contents of our steel jars—almonds, cashews, walnuts, pistachios, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, cantaloupe seeds, and sundry other nuts, roasted in ghee and flavoured with different types of salts and spices.

In the beginning Didi and I were somewhat reluctant to participate in the communal spreads that unfolded on the terrace during lunch breaks, a scene so unlike the vast grounds of our school in Lucknow, claimed by exclusive clutches of girls and their ayahs. Didi and I had just been getting comfortable navigating our way around our complex lives in Lucknow when we were unceremoniously uprooted. By the time we left, we had even made some friends and allies at school, but we always ate by ourselves. Now Didi and I found ourselves trying hard not to be regarded as snooty girls from the big city.

We finally crossed an invisible barrier into a closer circle of camaraderie when someone played a prank on Didi. To be the first to claim one of the two toilets each morning, Didi would shoot out of the room like a bullet the moment she heard the five o’clock gong. The rest of us snuggled down in our cozy beds, even if this meant waiting in line at the toilet. The prank needed only one perpetrator, who crept out in the middle of the night and struck the gong at two in the morning. Didi was awake in an instant, sprinting to the toilet and then leaping into the shower, oblivious to the fact that no one else seemed to be stirring. When she emerged from the shower, she hurried to wake me up. But I was sound asleep and determined to remain that way. As Didi was shaking me and calling my name, her voice rising in exasperation at my refusal to respond, a murmur of laughter encircled the whole floor. Only at that point did Didi finally realize what time it was. Instead of complaining or pouting, she took the prank in stride, even regaling her classmates with the story later that morning. The backslapping and chuckling seemed to dissolve some of the vague tension between us and the other girls in our dormitory.

MATHURA, 1957

It felt like years since I had seen Amma or Babu. I missed them both so much that my whole body hurt. Didi sounded worried as she reminded me that Amma had visited us just the previous week. Didn’t I remember the books she had given us? The worry in her voice increased when I showed no interest in reminiscing about the delicious snacks that Amma had brought along with her.

The dormitory warden said that I was delirious with fever and would be going home very soon. I felt the warm streak of a tear roll down the side of my face. “Which home?”

Didi was standing by the bed, applying a cold compress to my burning forehead. I heard the sound of my own tears in her voice: “Can I read you something?” I wasn’t sure whether I nodded or shook my head.

Through the haze of my fever, I heard Babu playing a bhajan on a cranky harmonium . . . Babu thundering, “It was all a waste. EVERYTHING. Everyone has sacrificed their souls at the altar of personal greed. EVERYONE!” The clop-clop of Babu’s wooden khadau . . . the goddess Kali dancing to the rattling of the skulls strung around her neck.

I woke up to the strong smell of holy basil. Ravikant mama was holding a spoon full of basil extract, which was searing its way into my chest through my dry throat. Didi helped me to sit up and then offered me a cup holding something that smelled of camphor. I could barely keep my eyes open and spluttered when I tried to drink from the cup.

When I next awoke, I felt the warmth of a familiar presence—Babu? No, it was Amma. Sitting on the bed beside me, Amma had both her hands on my stomach, her eyes closed as if in meditation. I smiled to myself and drifted off again.

Amma at her desk writing in her diary . . . nameless faces in Amma’s diaries clamouring to escape . . . a fire searing a hole in my stomach . . . Amma’s cool hand on my burning forehead . . . beautiful ochre walls surrounding Jaipur . . . a crowded sea of terraces. . . kite-flying under the mild January sun . . . chasing after the dangling thread of a kite falling from the sky . . . people everywhere, looking at you, looking out for you, all the time.

We had been living at Ravikant mama’s house for a week by the time the high fever broke. I had had typhoid, I learned, and it had left me very weak. The principal said that I could stay at Ravikant mama’s house for one more week so I could recover my strength. Didi was not allowed to miss classes, especially so close to exam time, but she had permission to stay with us after school. When that week came to an end, it was time for Amma to return to Lucknow.

Didi and I sat on a divan next to Amma to say goodbye, just as we had sat with Babu, holding onto her from either side, like sparrows huddled together on an electric wire in the rain. Didi was wiping away tears, and I was complaining about everything in the dormitory, particularly the oily, insipid, and generally uninspiring food. Clearly, I was back to normal.

Ravikant mama walked into the room, his eyes smiling more than his mouth, as always. “Are we done with tears, or are there more to come?”

I sank deeper into Amma, my pout drooping to the lowest level I could muster. I felt Didi’s hand reach for me from behind Amma’s back. We linked fingers.

Ravikant mama deposited his tall frame in one of the chairs next to the divan. His kind eyes moved from Didi to me as he leaned back. “Did you know that your mother went to the same school that you do, nearly thirty years ago?” His elbows resting on the armrest, palms apart but fingers touching, he paused to check for our reaction. “It was a different time, a different building, much smaller.”

This information prompted me to sift through the many bits of information about Amma’s life upon which we kept stumbling unexpectedly. Suddenly I remembered hearing Amma mention her principal, Manoramadevi from Mathura, whom she had called her first ever mentor, and who had taken her to political protests in Lucknow. Mathura!

Ravikant mama didn’t wait for us to search our memories further. His smiling eyes shifted to Amma’s unhappy face. “I think your Amma should tell you the story of a little girl born in Allahabad many years ago.”

I sensed Amma’s straight back stiffen even more. “Bhaiya, I am not sure if it’s time yet.”

His gentle voice urged her on. “Shanti, your little dolls are almost young women. They are wiser than you think. I think the story will help them in these difficult times.”

Amma closed her eyes for a long moment. “You may be right.”

“Trust me,” Ravikant mama reassured her, “just like you did all those years ago.” Amma smiled absently at some comforting memory from her unmapped past.

We had been staying in the living room on the ground floor, so that we could to be closer to Ravikant mama’s watchful eye and because the upper floors were always such a hive of noisy activity, even this late at night. Amma got up from the divan and shut the door of the living room. It was too late for us to be disturbed by any visitor or patient, but she closed the latch for good measure nonetheless.

Her face a battleground of emotions, Amma walked over to a chair next to Ravikant mama and sat down. She looked from Didi to me as though we were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that she wasn’t sure how to fit in. Her eyes moved slowly from Didi to me until, gradually, we saw resolve set in. Then she began to speak.

In 1918, a baby girl was born not far from Lucknow, in the ancient city of Allahabad, located at the confluence of India’s three most sacred rivers: the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the invisible Sarasvati, which, according to legend, has not flowed for four thousand years. Nobody remembers the exact date of her birth, but she was told that she entered the world as a sickly baby at the end of a very hot summer. With a lot of love and care, she even managed to survive a bout of smallpox as a toddler.

In 1926, when she was about eight years old, she went with her three older sisters to bathe in the Ganga at its junction with the Yamuna. Thousands of people came each year to this sacred spot to wash away their past sins, in hopes of attaining spiritual release. For the sisters, the area was familiar terrain, as their great house stood on the elevated banks not far from the place where the two rivers merged in a serpentine embrace. It was an auspicious day for a ritual bath, and the four sisters arrived at the river early in the morning, before the crowds.

The oldest sister had recently been married and was visiting the family for the first time since her wedding. She was also the first one to feel the powerful tug of the eddy in the middle of the river. She tried to warn her sisters not to come near her, but they saw her flailing hands as an invitation to join her. By the time they, too, felt the pull of the swirling eddy and realized the danger they were in, it was already too late. The younger sisters were terrified, but they would not leave their sister to drown. They formed a human chain, trying to use a sari to throw a lifeline to the drowning sister, but they were trapped in the powerful embrace of the two rivers, and dark waters soon swirled above all four of their heads and their long, flowing hair.

The youngest sister had not let go of the sari despite the strong current pulling her into the dark depths of the water. Her little limbs ached with the strain, but just as her nose and lungs started filling up with water, she felt another tug that pulled her toward the surface. She struggled against it. Her body was caught in a net that now dragged her out of the water. The corner of the sari was no longer in her hands.

The fisherman threw the net into the churning waters repeatedly in an effort to save the others, but in vain. As the sun rose on the horizon, he carried one limp little body to the big house on the bank of the most sacred river, a house that was about to drown in a mourning from which it could not be rescued.

None of the riches of the household, the privileges of birth, or the enlightenment of education had prepared the little girl or her family to cope with a tragedy of such proportions. The little survivor was shocked into a stubborn silence—not crying, not eating, not talking. Later that night, as her mother’s heart-rending shrieks dulled into aching sobs, the little girl stole out of the house. She ran into the broad orchard that separated her house from the banks of the murderous river that had so cruelly rejected her, seeking to return to its arms.

A pair of strong arms grabbed her little body in flight and knocked the wind out of her lungs. A stout man with a big head of short-cropped hair glowered down at her. He hissed, “Ai, laundiya, what are you doing out so late in the night? Aren’t you from the big house beyond the trees? Why aren’t you in your comfy bed?”

She sat down abruptly on a smooth rock to recover her breath. Above the rock spread a familiar mango tree, in whose wide branches she could hide for hours reading, far from the summoning of concerned parents, siblings, or servants—a tree that had always yielded its sweetest mangoes to her brother’s slingshot. In this orchard, she had once run into a donkey with her new bicycle, having not yet mastered the brakes. Now it was filled with sinister shadows and a strange man. Overwhelmed, she bent her head low onto her knees.

She had not shed a single tear since the moment when horror dawned—that indelible moment when she stared at the palm and stubby fingers of her empty hand, the hand that no longer held the sari, that no longer held any connection to her sisters.

Now tears flooded her face. Her little body shook as she wept for her precious sisters, for the cruel spectacle of her mother, fainting at the news, for the memory of her stoic father pounding his heart with his fists to make it stop hurting, for grown men forcibly restraining her brother, who was determined to jump into the river himself to search for his lost sisters.

Her sobbing alarmed the stout man, who tried to calm her. Then, out of the shadows emerged a second man, lean rather than stout, who whispered urgently, “What’s wrong, little girl? Have you run away?”

She could only nod her head numbly as she continued to sob, unable to find words to express the impossible vastness of her despair. The two men stood helplessly beside the rock, unsure what to do or how to comfort her.

Eventually the second man addressed the small sobbing figure, his tone clipped. “I don’t know if you understand any of this, little girl, but the police are looking for us. We can’t risk getting caught. We need to move fast and stay out of jail. We are working for the freedom of our country.”

She lifted her tear-soaked face. “Death is the ultimate freedom,” she said, not knowing where the words came from.

Her statement startled the men as much as her crying had. They stood watching her for another long moment before the lean man spoke again, much more gently this time. “But you’re just a little girl. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

Calmer now, the girl asked the men to let her go her way. She said that she would trouble them no further.

So far, the stout man had said little. Now he made a terse offer to the little girl. “I don’t know who told you that. But some people think we need to do something good with our life before we die. So why not help us fight for freedom here on earth?”

Pushing his round spectacles further up his nose, the lean man explained that there were many revolutionaries active in the area. They needed to travel far and wide, from one place to another, without raising the suspicion of the police or local people who didn’t support their objectives. Their work was dangerous but important; it would mean that the people of India would one day have their own government. All over the country, hundreds of young boys and girls were helping with the struggle for independence.

The two men reminded the girl of the rich and long history of the country in which she was born, and of its enslavement. She had already heard of someone named Mahatma Gandhi, who said that people should spin their own yarn so that they wouldn’t have to buy high-priced cloth from British. She also remembered hearing about a massacre in Amritsar, when British soldiers had opened fire on a crowd of unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered for a festival.

She was about to learn much more. The two men told her about a number of revolutionary groups—Anushilan Samiti, Jugantar, the Hindustan Republican Association, and now the Bengal Volunteers—that favoured armed rebellion against British rule. Members of these groups and others targeted the lifelines of the British Empire by destroying railway tracks, telegraph posts, and government buildings. They travelled throughout the country to spread news of the revolution and to connect pockets of rebellion. The men boasted that moral and material support for their activities came from places all over the world: Turkey, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Japan, and the United States.

The girl listened intently. “But how can I be of any use?” she asked. They explained that the police would never suspect two men travelling with a little girl, especially if they pretended to be a family. Her mere presence would make their movement swifter and easier, since they would not have to wait to move until after dark.

The little girl stood up and declared, “All right. But we have to leave quickly.”

Just like that, she embarked on an arduous journey that took her through jungles, remote villages, and ancient towns. She trained in traditional martial arts and was especially good at wielding the small kataar dagger and the curved khukhari blade used by the Gurkhas. She helped to produce nationalist pamphlets and even wrote some of her own, and she learned to hide messages in her clothing. For more than a year, she was on the move, covering the length and breadth of the country by train and by foot.

Radicalism was growing in the cities, but those who lived in the vast countryside of the subcontinent were difficult to reach by either road or radio. Small groups of activists took the message to the countryside by posing as wandering singers, using local devotional songs and religious imagery to spread nationalist ideas. The little girl was not much of a singer, but she never missed a beat, keeping perfect time with a tinkling pair of small brass manjira.

She also enjoyed altering simple folk verses to replace mythical lore with images of the country as the goddess Durga, the British Raj as a demon, and Gandhiji as the ascetic whose penance and suffering would be the means to end the serfdom of the goddess. They had to be constantly on the move, avoiding not only the wrath of the police but also that of the local zamindars—who were unhappy with the effect of the revolutionaries on the tenant farmers who tilled the land.

Then, in 1928, the British government convened a commission to study the impact of constitutional reforms that had been introduced in British India a decade earlier and to make further recommendations. Not a single member of the Simon Commission was Indian. Mass strikes were organized, and wherever the commissioners travelled in the country, they were met by throngs of protesters carrying black flags. British authorities responded with unbridled assaults on unarmed protestors. Crowds of men and women were trampled under the hooves of horses, and tough prison sentences were meted out at the slightest suspicion of nationalist activity. Recognizing the increased risk to their lives in this new political climate, the band of revolutionaries and their network of sympathizers arranged to take the little girl to Mathura, where she might be safer.

Amma paused, as though she were looking for the right way to continue. Despite her care to maintain a distance from her young self in her storytelling, I could see the little girl in my ever-composed mother. I noticed it in the way her left thumb kept rotating the gold bangle on her right wrist and in the way her toes clenched the cotton rug under her feet, as though the rug were the only thing preventing her from falling deep into the bowels of the earth.

Didi and I sat with our backs straight, slowly letting her words sink in, waiting for Amma to finish sorting through some unknown memory chest and go on. I tried to prompt her: “Why didn’t you go back to your parents instead?”

Amma’s silence gave way to a resigned sigh. In the end, it was Ravikant mama who broke the silence. “By leaving the family of her birth, she embraced the whole world as her family.”

For the next little while, he took up the narration, relieving Amma of the burden of words. He told us how Mathura was a hotbed of nationalist activities, largely owing to the influence of Raja Mahendra Pratap. In 1909, he had started a technical college at his palace near Vrindavan, convinced that education was the key to equality. Prem Mahavidyalaya was free for all students, among whom were many of the earliest social and political activists in the region. During the First World War, Raja Mahendra Pratap travelled to Europe to enlist support for a plan to overthrow the British government of India via Afghanistan and, in December 1915, established a provisional Indian government in Kabul. He subsequently journeyed to Russia, at the invitation of Lenin, and the British finally became so concerned about his activities that they put a price on his head. In 1925, he fled India for Japan, where he lived for more than two decades. His political activism had the effect of transforming Mathura into a centre of nationalist activity, which continued even in his absence. The Congress Party held many of its meetings there, drawing even devoted householders like Ravikant mama into the political arena.

Ravikant mama looked affectionately at Amma’s contemplative face. “When I first met your Amma,” he said, “she was a puny little girl, all muscles and brawn. But her eyes had the meditative depth of an ascetic.” She joined the household as his supposedly long-lost younger sister. Ravikant mama had acquired two other sisters under similar circumstances. Under his protection, these young women embraced new identities, and the other two settled into domestic lives. But not Amma.

Ravikant mama then told us about the principal of her school, Manoramadevi, a committed Gandhi follower who anointed the little girl “Shanti,” or peace—wanting to bless her with tranquillity after the harrowing experiences of a life barely begun.

Manoramadevi was a courageous young widow who used her education to save herself and to help others fighting for dignity. Under her mentorship, little Shanti learned to reconnect with the independence movement, but this time on her own terms. Noticing her advanced reading and writing skills, Manoramadevi encouraged Shanti to study on her own for middle-school certification rather than join regular classes. She taught Shanti that education was the only key that could release the unwieldy chains of custom and religion, especially for women. At the same time, she took her to protest rallies in Mathura and Lucknow.

Drawing upon her love of reading and writing, Shanti wrote her exams. In 1929, under Manoramadevi’s tutelage, she earned a middle-school certificate, becoming one of relatively few young women to have acquired such a credential. The same year she agreed to move to Jaipur to become the head teacher at a school for girls run by the Agarwal merchant community. Shanti was not yet twelve years old. But she had been in her new position for only a few months when Mahatma Gandhi embarked on the Salt March.

The heavy taxes levied by the British on the people of India had long been a source of bitter complaint. The most onerous of these taxes was the salt tax, which, in 1930, accounted for 95 percent of the price of salt in India. Especially in a hot climate, salt was an essential commodity, and the burden of the tax fell on the entire population. Rather than focus on exorbitant land taxes or stifling industrial taxes, Gandhiji used this most basic commodity as a symbol of the injustice of British rule and the rallying point for the civil disobedience movement.

On 12 March 1930, Gandhiji left Sabarmati Ashram, near Ahmedabad, to walk to the coastal village of Dandi, 240 miles to the west. The march lasted for twenty-four days, passing through four districts and forty-eight villages in western India. Hundreds of thousands of men and women joined the march at various stages, and, before long, the throng of people stretched for more than two miles. Dressed in white, the marchers sang Gandhiji’s favourite chant, Raghupati Raghav Rajaram, invoking Ram and Allah as two names of the same divine presence, asking for the gift of wisdom for all.

International journalists were watching intently, calling the march a “White Flowing River,” relaying images of this extraordinarily peaceful mass movement all across the globe. Upon reaching the coast at Dandi on 5 April 1930, Gandhiji picked up a handful of salt from the ground in defiance of the Indian Salt Act. Then, setting up little fires, the marchers began boiling seawater to make salt.

Ravikant mama seemed momentarily overwhelmed by the power of these memories. The Salt March was, he said, a stroke of genius. It transformed the freedom movement into a “poor man’s battle,” a struggle of the humble against the arrogant. There could be no better illustration of satyagraha—a reckoning with the force of truth.

Shanti responded to Gandhiji’s call for civil disobedience by resigning from her job and returning to Mathura to attend organizational meetings of Indian National Congress workers. Because of her familiarity with the region, she was asked to go back to Rajputana. At the time, the Rajputana Agency consisted of almost twenty sovereign kingdoms, of varying size, bound by subsidiary alliances with the British Raj. The princely state of Jaipur was one of these semi-sovereign domains. The Maharajas of Jaipur were loyal allies of the British, as, for the most part, were Jaipur’s influential and wealthy merchant classes.

Unlike the rest of Rajputana, the city of Ajmer, about eighty miles southwest of Jaipur, was ruled directly by the British, as part of the tiny province of Ajmer-Merwara. The site of military cantonments since the rebellion of 1857, Ajmer was a railway hub as well, and it was here that Congress workers were trying to mobilize mass civil disobedience by organizing protest rallies and the picketing of shops selling British goods or alcohol. As a result of their tireless campaigns, civil disobedience had already spread to many corners of the subcontinent, both British-ruled and semi-independent. Defiance of the unpopular land, forest, and agricultural taxes was widespread.

And so Shanti rejoined the freedom movement, this time in full public view. Mahatma Gandhi had been arrested early in May, and the Indian National Congress and its activities were declared illegal by the British. The onus was now on local Congress workers to keep the nationalist fires burning. Shanti reached Ajmer in August of 1930. We listened in rapt silence as Ravikant mama told us how she immediately took to addressing public meetings organized by Congress workers—speaking without the aid of a microphone, before throngs of men and women gathered in city parks, urging them to fight for their independence. On 13 August, when the police came to arrest Shanti for making seditious speeches, she calmly surrendered, in obedience to the principle of non-violence, and, at the age of twelve, became the first woman Congress Party worker to be jailed in Ajmer.

Ravikant mama went on to explain that the city’s Indian residents were outraged by the arrest of a young girl, and the next day a general strike was called. However, Mayo College—the elite boarding school for the sons of Indian aristocracy—refused to show solidarity with the strikers. In response, hundreds of men and women gathered outside the wrought-iron gates of the sprawling campus nestled in the Aravalli Hills. Police armed with lathis attacked the chanting protestors and arrested three hundred men and twenty-five women. Those arrested joined the more than eighty thousand political activists imprisoned nationwide for various acts of civil disobedience that year. Seventeen thousand of those political prisoners were women. An overwhelming majority of these women had stepped out from behind domestic walls for the first time in their lives.

As we were well aware, Amma was deeply concerned about the status of women, the plight of widows in particular, and now we learned that her commitment had a long history. As Shanti continued to fight for the country’s political freedom, Ravikant mama told us, she realized that women wore another set of chains. As a tribute to Manoramadevi, she made a vow to champion the cause of the “living corpses” that were Hindu widows at the time. She also vowed to wear only khadi until the country gained its independence, in accordance with Gandhiji’s vision of non-violence and self-reliance.

At the mention of khadi, Didi and I looked at each other like conspirators who shared a guilty secret. In Amma’s view, despite the Nehru government’s industrialization projects, economic self-reliance remained a vital need, especially in rural areas. So, even after the country gained its independence, she had not forsaken her vow to wear only khadi, and, as her children, we had inherited this vow. Yet we were often envious of the clothing that others wore, made from traditional silks or machine-made cottons and chiffons. With their rich colours and often intricate patterns, such fabrics stood in stark contrast our relentlessly plain clothing. Even khadi silk, which does have a certain lustre, is coarser than regular silk, as the process by which it is made produces shorter strands of silk thread.

Now, hearing the story of Amma’s vow, I felt ashamed of my attraction to un-khadi fabrics. I also suddenly realized the connection between her vows, made so long ago, with the widowed “sewing ladies” of my childhood in Jaipur. But Ravikant mama interrupted my thoughts.

“Your mother followed the right path, not the easy path,” he said. “Are you girls going to be the true daughters of that brave little girl?”

Suddenly, I felt very small and lonely. I wasn’t sure that I could ever be my mother’s true daughter, no matter how hard I tried.