’Our Shiv Sena’

When I first met them, the Viswamurthys were already packing to resettle in Mysore. Their daughter Rajani was a classmate of mine at the University. And I was among the friends she had called to her apartment in Chembur in central Bombay. Their flat already sold, it was the last few weeks before Rajani’s parents moved to Mysore.

I heard Durga Aunty shuffle inside the softly lighted living room, tinkle her huge key ring to find the right one. After a few muffled, metallic turns the wooden door to her living room opened. She stepped into the verandah, which was secured behind a grill of fabricated metal. If she smiled I could not see. In my mind’s eye, I have only seen her smile. But the light from the living room fell from behind, and she stepped into the darkness. She stepped right back, and switched on the bulb that illuminated the verandah. She was bathed in the light, a short podgy figure. Some more tinkering for the right key and the lock which secured the gates of the grill was unlocked. The crude latch grated open.

She stepped into the dim light of the driveway to reach the main gates of the house where I was standing. And, while I was still trying to see her, she was busy with another shuffle of the keybunch.

“Don’t bother Durga aunty.” I said cheerily, and hoped like mad my cheeriness was convincing. I had never been to that house in any other way. And this, my first meeting with her after her husband died weighed heavily on me. He had died after a prolonged fight with Alzheimer’s disease. The situation was sombre and I was never good at offering condolences.

I jumped over the low gate. And promptly hugged her.

I had saved her the more laborious opening of another gate by working through the key bunch and the lock. Behind so many locks, behind so many varying shades of light, behind so many chasms lived a woman nearing sixty, a veteran of eight surgeries. And she lived alone, in reasonably safe Mysore. And yet, somewhere, sometime, the lady who shuffled through three layers of light had been somebody whom I have always known as an accursed cheerleader of life. Through all those years when her husband deteriorated from the early signs of an executive diffidence of the sure footed losing their balance. He had crumbled into an uncomprehending greyness. It started off by his avoiding all but the most familiar. Later, as he worsened it turned into the childish rebellion of refusing to take medicines. His memory slipped from him so alarmingly fast that it was a tragedy being enacted right in front of his only constant companion, his wife.

In one of my earlier visits, he had accompanied us to the Mysore Palace. In those three hours he kept repeating the story of how his grandfather was a nobleman in the court of the Raja of Mysore and entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining the royal horses. Rajani’s father was a man of impeccable sartorial taste, even a fastidious man when it came to grooming. He retained his grooming and his pin stripes. But on the grounds of the Mysore Palace on that visit, all I saw was a man of corporate bearing fumbling with the granular residue of a fast depleting memory. And with that memory, he was losing his sense of the self. He was losing his bearings in the world. It brought a gulp to my throat when Rajani excused herself from us, and burst into tears a little away while he was retelling the story of his grandfather for the eighth time.

That same visit, he had locked me inside the bathroom of their house in Mysore, without realizing I was inside. I heard tales of his forgetfulness and its acute effect on his self esteem. Once he drove away in the car from a family gathering. He was found fumbling around the parked car some kilometres away. He could not figure out why he was there, nor could he remember what had made him excited. The family thought it might have been some imagined slight.

Through this all, the Viswamurthys kept their life centred on a temple in the neighbourhood. It was the place where the neighbourhood met. Everybody knew about his condition. And he was happy to be engaged in the religious rites and hymn chanting rituals there.

In fact, Durga Aunty believes that it was that single ritual that gave two people the strength to bear their situation. Through it all, the worst sufferer was Durga Aunty. The man did not know how he had deteriorated, and when the absence of memory frustrated him, his only response was an irrational outburst against her. Their elder daughter Rashmi was in Mangalore, with her doctor husband and their two children. They did drop in occasionally, but Rashmi’s husband Krishna was a very busy man, often away from his wife and kids on short tours. Rajani, the other daughter was first in Bombay. Later, in Bangalore.

Towards the end, Durga aunty told me that night, he had started to become violent. And while his memory powdered away inside his head, he remained in robust physical health. He was a strong man. Her eyes welled up in tears.

“I must be the only wife on earth who wished that my husband die before me.”

I did not know what to say. I kept quiet. Later she collected herself.

“The best thing is that through all these years, once he was bathed and seated before the idol for his morning pooja, he chanted the entire Vishnu shahastranamam flawlessly”

She wiped her tears from her eyes. And said “I’ll make coffee.” She went into the kitchen. I followed. She turned to ask about me. Rajani’s other friends in Bombay. She said she had wanted to meet me during her last visit to Bombay, but could not. As the aroma of filter coffee filled the kitchen, slowly the melancholy I had feared lifted. She was normal.

We moved back into their living room.

I asked what she intended to do. I had heard she was thinking of selling the house, and moving out. The house was too huge, and too vast for her to maintain single handedly.

“I’ll sell it, and move to a flat.”

I gently asked her if she was going to join one of her daughters. She was resolute, she wasn’t.

“No. I’ll buy a flat in a building here in Mysore only. I cannot take care of this house. And there is more security in an apartment block, with neighbours.”

Then, all of a sudden she said.

“What stupid people no. This is really evil. What they did after Godhra. I hate that fellow Modi.”

I was taken aback. I knew she watched the news. Perhaps, she remembered I was a newspaperman. Perhaps she just wanted to divert attention from the morbidity of the talk.

“Yes.”

“They killed so many poor Muslim families. Women and children. I saw it on television. Even God will not forgive them.”

By them she meant the BJP. The VHP. The Bajrang Dal.

“They are goondas just like our Shiv Sena in Bombay.”

I was struck by that word “our” in her sentence. She had been living in Bombay. She had been familiar with the Sena’s goon brigade and its terrorizing of opponents. The activists of the Sena were periodically in the news for blackening the face of the principal of some English medium school which refused to admit some children who were Maharastrians, ransacking the office of a newspaper which criticized their leader Bal Thackeray, or vandalizing the cricket pitch in Bombay so that the scheduled Indo-Pakistan match did not take place.

So what was ‘our” about them?

She had been in Bombay since the latter edge of the sixties and through the seventies when the Sena was targeting south Indians. And, as a south Indian family, she must have been part of the fearful whispers about the Shiv Sena.

The Sena had started off by publishing the list gleaned from the telephone directory of South Indian officials in public sector companies as well as other big corporates based in Bombay. It was published in a Marathi weekly called Marmik. The list was headlined with a derisive “Read and keep quiet.” That rhetorical poke into the dormant pride of unemployed Maharashtrian youth was how the Sena was built, for Marmik was owned by Bal Thackeray.

Its cadres were roused into direct violent attacks on these officials. And at that time, my friend Rajani’s mother must have been a young south Indian wife of a south Indian officer of Fiat India, one of the biggest companies in Bombay. She must have been touched by that fear. She must have been part of the airless conclaves where others like her gathered and talked about the Sena. Their loathing reducing their fears into the whispers of the impotent, in the airless claustrophobic cloisters of pigeon hole flats in Bombay.

The Sena moved on to more expedient causes. The party grew. And eventually it even won the municipal elections in Bombay. By 1995, the Sena had appended the BJP’s bigger and more sustained Hindutva campaign, and was ruling Maharashtra with the BJP as their coalition partners. Incidentally, a local ruffian of the area where the Viswamurthys lived was a corporator then. This man, Narayan Rane, even became the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. That still could not have made her call the Shiv Sena “ours.”

Or is that true? Is it a case of the Stockholm syndrome working late. As a young wife and mother she was a victim, ever fearful, of the terror of the Shiv Sena in Bombay. She was part of a minority held hostage by the fear of a majority. And the real fear of physical attacks. Thirty years later, she called the Sena “ours.” It definitely was mere association of a known and closer enemy. She meant it only as a geographical association since she was talking to a person who was from Bombay, and despite the last six or so years in Mysore, considered me as part of the city where she had lived out her youth, which was what she and me shared.

And yet, I could not reconcile the irony of the personal pronoun “our.” The Muslims of Gujarat. They had been with us for more than fifty years since partition. Did the majority Hindus consider them similarly “ours.” In individual Hindu families, especially non-urban families, the Muslims were always “them” versus Hindu “us.” But that the Sena which had once intimidated her, should so easily be “ours” to bring into relief the greater brutality and injustice of the Gujarat hordes, was still unsettling. I felt at the moment that perhaps there was that special bond that is created between the tormentor and the tormented. That psychological perversity that militates against the common decency of common people.

“I hope Advani never becomes the prime minister.”

“Yes. He is the hardliner. Maybe he never will be,” I said.

The deputy prime minister of the BJP LK Advani has always been the hardliner of the BJP. He had that reputation. While the prime minister himself, Atal Behari Vajpayee, is seen as an avuncular figure by the entire nation. Almost a statesman, and a far more comfortable hero to liberal not-too-particular- about-nationalism Hindus across the country than Advani. Advani of course, had reinforced the divide across Hindu opinion by being a far more forceful and less convincing defender of Gujarat chief minister Modi than Vajpayee. There were some columnists who felt that Vajpayee was playing the good cop to Advani’s bad cop, but the fact was that Vajapyee’s act was more credible, and easier to like.

It was already past three. The remnants of the coffee had long dried into a neat circle in bold around the bottom of the porcelain mug. She asked me about my plans. I told her about some of the places we had gone to. Eventually, she said I’d better sleep if I had to catch the early morning train to Bangalore.