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Mehnurissa: A love story from Lahore

Part 2

Mehru’s first memories were of music, the sitar, the table and the harmonium; the smell of roses, or the overpowering fragrance of the gainda flower that Bibi insisted on having and always the odours of heat and spices.

She first became aware of something missing, something intangible in her life when she was six. A man came to visit her mother. He brought dolls for Mehru, but he was always in a hurry, and always apologetic. Her mother cried every time he came, and for three days, sometimes weeks after he was gone.

Mehru disliked the man for making her mother feel sad but the dolls he brought were so very special. No one had even seen anything like them and all the girls she played with from her building were jealous. They had huge weddings for their dolls. Her doll was always the bride.

Mama was sad all the time but at times, she sang songs with her, they did arithmetic together, read about King Arthur and his Knights, of Mowgli and Riki-Tiki-Tavi and all their friends. Their stories were very fashionable.

One evening, when they’d been riding in the carriage, a rare occurrence, her mother had pointed out the various buildings and the legends associated with them. She said she’d once met the man who wrote The Jungle Books. He used to live in Lahore too. In fact, Lispeth told her, that the man’s father, Mr. John Lockwood Kipling, had been the Principal of the Mayo Art College. The very college they’d just passed by.

Freemason club

Then they crossed the freemason club on the Mall Road, where Rudyard Kipling had been secretary to for three years.

‘I want to be a writer too,’ Mehru piped.

Her mother shook her head at Bibi.

Bibi was beautiful. Her raven hair, those large dark eyes always lined with kohl, her full lips stained with beetle-leaf juice, and the little diamond sparkling in her nose had made Mehru declare to her that she wanted to grow up to be just like her. Her mother was pretty too, but in a child-like, delicate way, with her blue-grey eyes and her light hair. Bibi was beautiful in an earthy way. She reminded Mehru of the Hindu goddesses, Radha and her parents worshipped.

Bibi had behaved very strangely at her announcement. First she’d laughed and then dissolved into tears and said, ‘No, no, my sweet Mehru, never like me. Be like your Mama.’

‘But she cries all the time. I don’t want to cry. I want to smile like you and laugh and do all the things you do. My hair is black like yours.’

Like your father’s, her mother would say with a sad little smile.

Grey eyes

‘I have your eyes though,’ Mehru replied mournfully. Her grey eyes were just like her mother’s as was her fair skin. She did not look like a Hindu goddess at all.

‘Mama, why don’t you look like Bibi? Why’s your hair yellow?’
Her mother laughed and Bibi said, ‘Lispeth, this one’s going to be trouble.’
‘I’m right here, you know.’

That made them laugh again for some reason. It made no sense, because Mehru was quite serious. People talked about her like that all the time, as if she was invisible or deaf. And not just about her, they did that with all children. Grown-ups were strange. If they thought she’d forgotten her question they had another think coming.

‘How come you are so different from each other and yet we’re a family…’
‘We are not family, little dove. I…I’m just a…’

‘Of course you’re family, Bibi. Don’t you dare say otherwise,’ her mother interjected. Bibi had tears in her eyes but she laughed.

Companion

‘Faruk Mian, employed me as your companion Lispeth. Your kindness to me is beyond anything that I’ve ever experienced, and I thank you, but you shouldn’t…you should remember my past. I was a courtesan nearly all my life and…’

‘Don’t tell me about should and shouldn’t, Bibi. And the past belongs to our past selves. Don’t drag it around with you Bibi, it’ll tire you out.’

‘What’s a courtesan?’ Mehru asked.

Her mother and Bibi exchanged a look and then Bibi said, ‘You want to hear another story about Raja Ranjeet Singh and his court?’

‘Yes!’ exclaimed Mehru. These were her favourite stories. She knew all about the different Rajahs, Badshahs, Malikas and Ranis of Hindustan.

Chandragupta Maurya’s stories and how his throne had vanished into thin air after his death, with the sepulchral pronouncement that it would only return when a king as worthy as Chandra Gupta Maurya ruled Hindustan again.

Or so the story went.
Mehru sighed.

‘Once upon a time, there was a Sikh warrior, his name was Ranjeet Singh and he raised an army so great…’

Soldier

‘No, no, no, Bibi. First he was a child and he got small-pox, which ruined one of his eyes and he was one-eyed but that didn’t stop him from becoming a soldier like his father and then he raised an army to capture Lahore, at the age of nineteen.’

Bibi raised her perfectly shaped eye-brows and asked, ‘Would you like to tell the story, young lady?’

Chagrined, Mehru shook her head vehemently.
‘Alright then. So Ranjeet Singh….’

Mehru loved stories and she and her mother often went to the Kashmiri Bazaar near Delhi Gate, close to their home, to buy cheap books that the British families sold before they went back home for good. New families took their place at times and sometimes, the officers retired to remain in their chosen home.

The first time Mehru realized she was different was when Radha, the daughter of one of their neighbours in the building they lived in, yelled in a quarrel, ‘You little half-caste trash, reading your English books like the devil and with your coloured eyes, give me that doll or else!’

Of course that was just in anger and they were great friends but what she’d said remained with Mehru. Half-caste she’d heard before but she’d never been called a devil before.

She went to her mother and asked what it was and why was reading, which was the only brightness in her life, a bad thing?

‘I told you Bibi but you didn’t listen. What would Faruk say if he found out his daughter was reading and writing in English? People are talking already.’

Bibi clucked her tongue.
Modern education

‘Really Lispeth, look around you. It’s 1910! It’s a new age. You think all these girls from ‘good families’ will remain ignorant of modern education? No, they’ll be going to all these new schools that are cropping up all over the city. Faruk Mian is 20 years behind times.’

‘Ha! As if he’d ever let his daughter wear a skirt and blouse and go to an English school!’

‘Oh Lispeth! She’s not going to an English school is she? She should…but I agree, we cannot let our Mehru be exposed to all that ferengi environment. But I’ve seen some of the oldest families here adapt to the modern and to their benefit. Mehru is a gifted child and she will learn all she can. We don’t have to tell anyone. FarukMian comes only for a little while after months. He doesn’t need to know.’

Mehru’s education were as eclectic as her teachers. Bibi, amongst them.

Mysterious

‘A woman must always be mysterious. Don’t stare into the eyes of a man ever. Your eyes are the windows to your heart and a man must never own the knowledge of your heart, Mehru—the heart yes, but not its secrets.’

Bibi was always saying things which made Mehru feel that being a woman was the worst thing ever. There were so many rules to follow. She couldn’t remember half of them. Like the time she’d started teaching the son of the sweeper.

The little boy came with his mother and looked hungry and scared so she’d fed him and started teaching him the alphabet. Bibi had been angry. The boy’s mother, the sweeper had cried and wailed; why, Mehru wasn’t sure, because she switched from crying about how a sweeper’s son could never be more than a sweeper in this unjust world to raving about the devil’s language that Mehru had exposed her son to.

‘You should never interfere, Mehru.’ Then there was that time when she’d climbed a tree. She’d only been eleven but her mother had almost fainted with fear that her father might have visited. When had she realised that the sombre man who visited once in a blue moon, was her father? She didn’t remember.

Prostitutes

The time she had confronted a kotwaal, the policeman who did the rounds of their area in a discussion about how he treated the prostitutes, was the worst. She’d seen him take money from one. The girl had been only a little older than Mehru. Her eyes had flashed, her lips compressed but she’d handed him the few coins tied to the end of her sari pallu in a knot.

‘Kotwaaljee,why do you take money from her? Doesn’t the angraiz Sarkar pay you enough?’

The policeman and stared at her. Bibi had pulled her back, apologised to the man and dragged her home. She hadn’t been allowed outside for two weeks.

‘Women of good breeding do not speak to a man they are not related to or haven’t been introduced to by their father or brother! Mehru, Mehru…what are we going to do with you?’

Bibi had intoned almost in tears.
Same question
She was still asking the same question 10 years later.

‘Mehru, just because your grandmother has let us stay, doesn’t mean that we have a place here. You have to win her heart. Why won’t you see sense, child?’

Mehru looked at Bibi and sighed.
‘Bibi, I cannot win my grandmother’s heart.’

‘Of course you can. Is this what I have taught you? You’re going to give up without even trying? She’s given us the opportunity and you’re going to just…’

Mehru stared into her eyes and interrupted, ‘Bibi…I cannot win her heart because she doesn’t have one.’

Glossary of terms:
Gainda: yellow orange flowers
Mian: Used as Mister
Badshah: King
Malika: queen
Rani: queen
Rajah: king
Ferengi: foreigner
Kotwaal: policeman

Sari pallu: traditional Indo-Pakistan dress of sari. The pallu is draped over the shoulder.

Angraiz Sarkar:
British government

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