Sad? Yes..No..Maybe?

Its amazing how different people react towards sorrow and misery.. There was Munshi Totaram, who rightfully blamed himself for the death of Mansaram, and of course went into chronic depression and stopped going to the courtroom, stopped taking cases, but.. did not stop living a 'healthy' marital life.. if you know what I am alluding to here!

There was Nirmala.. who did not blame herself entirely, but was torn to bits thinking about what happened.. but still moved on with her life.. and as a matter of fact made new friends.. ! Jiyaram and Siyaram - the remaining two son's of munshiji went on to hate their father based on the half presumed, half interpreted truth of their brother's cause of death.

The rest of the world hated Nirmala - based on complete presumption and prejudice that step mothers can never make good mothers and she was the reason that a young and bright kid like Mansaram was forced into depression and ultimately death.

Time they say heals all wounds no matter how deep, but conviniently the saying does not quantify the time needed. So as time went by Munshiji's depression got worse and his debts grew and house was seized and auctioned.. Nirmala fortunately found solace in Sudha - wife of the doctor who treated Mansaram. Sudha and Nirmala would talk for hours and hours.. about various things.. it does help to have a good friend in times of depression.. but little did Nirmala know that she had more in common with Sudha than their new found friendship.

Sudha's husband - the Doc was the same person who had rejected Nirmala's alliance years back! Had he only listened to his mother and married Nirmala ... her life would have been soo different, may be even Mansaram would not have been subjected to torture and ultimately death. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could see the future - the consequences of your actions - perhaps we could be better people and a better society. But since our crystal balls with smoke aren't really efficient - we aren't efficient decision makers either , with exception to those who really use their grey matter to think before they act. - But our doctor sahib ain't one of those.

Sudha after deducing from Nirmala's narration of her woes, that its her husband thats the culprit in destroying the life of young and good natured Nirmala, was all red and boiling with anger. She confronts her husband and after a lot of shouting and guilt tripping, Doc realizes his folly and volunteers to help Nirmala - first financially - then .... hold your breath .. fixing Nirmala's Sister Krishna with his brother for holy matrimony!

Talk about irony! So at this point in the story - Nirmala was having mixed feelings - One side she was really happy that at least her sister was going into a better household - with all pomp and glory! She was depressed on the other side that they had to auction Munshiji's house and live in shackles almost - Thanks to his depression-triggered-no-work-no-money situation. And on another side she was soon to become a proud mother of a baby girl.

Que Sera Sera

Misunderstandings are common in any relationship, no matter how hard you try you can't possibly avoid them, the best solution then is face it .. head on, don't hide, confront..

Alas neither Nirmala nor her husband nor her step son believed in this simplistic approach. Honesty and trust are the two most important values in life that can change things for the good and thats something that lacked in Munshi totaram. He wants his beautiful wife to be with him, and yet never says it to her! He wants his son to be away from his wife and says the wrong things, he scolds the kid for no reason, calls him a vagabond - a total no no! The poor kid is confused as to what to do about it. Feels guilty of having hurt his father and betrayed his dead mother, runs away from home to the hostel..But the worst comes when he realises why his father's persecuting him.. and thats the day things turn ugly..

Thoughts of his father even considering a possibility of adultry with his new mother made him ill mentally.. gave him suicidal thoughts, but he did not need to go that far, he fell ill physically too just thinking about the situation he was in. As his conditioned worsened day by day the onl good it did was that it made Totaram realize his folly but.. as the famous saying goes 'honi ko kaun tal sakta hai' . Nirmala tried her best to save the poor kid, she tried giving him food, tried talking (she figured it was easier talking to the kid than the father!) but the kid was so taken aback by his fathers misunderstandings that he even refused to look at his his step mom. He finally took one shot at clearing his name - so when Nirmala came to the hospital to see him despite all the growls from Totaram (- the nasty!) and donate blood, he fell on to her feet and told her and the rest of the world that he always looked upon her as his own mother.. and with that display of affection he breathed his last breath!

Tragic.. yet I get the feeling its all in vain.. only if Totaram had been a litte more sensitive to his son. Only if Nirmala chose to be vocal right in the begining of the misunderstanding, only if the son did not place his father so high up on the pedestal and give his life up...But as the song goes
Que Sera Sera... whatever will be will be....

Speaketh thy heart

I apologize for my long absence from the blog scene had a lot of other reading to do, but here I am and lets go back to the 20th century story we started on...



Nirmala's woes were just beginning when she began her new life.. as the wife of Munshi Totaram. She was married alright, to a person she had no romantic interest in and to her utter dismay there was her Sister In Law - Rukmini (finally a decent name) who wanted to play Lalita Pawar all the time. Every time poor Nirmala made an effort to reach to someone outside the house, Rukmini would call her names and say she's characterless trying to talk to everyone shamelessly and when Nirmala not wanting to conflict with Rukmini, would confine herself to the kitchen or the bedroom, devious SIL would call her names again accusing her of being an anti-social. Many more tiffs and quibbles like that arose over time between the in-laws.



At this point I really wondering why the kid was quiet, Nirmala could have raised her voice back, she could have stood up for herself, told her SIL that she was the one who reprimanded her to go quietly to a corner.. gave her SIL a piece of her mind. After a few pages she did do something more than be a church mouse, but before I go into what she did when her patience crumbled, I have to mention here that Totaram being the man he is and the times and trends that this novel is set in felt hurt and retired when his beautiful young wife refused to come close to him (romantically). So he tried and tried in all ways to impress is wife and get her close. And when Nirmala's patience with Rukmini ran out, Totaram got the oppurtunity to win his wife's heart.. She complained, he screamed, ending Nirmala's tiff with Rukmini and Rukmini's monopoly in the household matters. Responsibilities of money and house shifted to Nirmala's young an inexperienced hands..

Of course this did not make things better for Nirmala or for Totaram, except that it gave a Nirmala some importance in the house and a connection to Totaram's kids, but Nirmala was still not as close as Totaram would have liked. The responsibility of kids and home took toll on Totaram's moves to woo Nirmala. She'd always be with the kids, feeding them, learning from them or teaching them, playing with them... yes yes you get it.. its always them them.. never Totaram.. and another drama in line.. this time fury was directed towards the eldest kid - Mansaram. Without divulging any details, Nirmala was in for the most miserable time of her life! Her husband suspected her of having 'feelings' for Mansaram.

I closed the book there.. I felt anger rising, I know its only a novel, but then, I read novels as though I were a part of them, and putting myself in that situation, I loathed Totaram. I mean first you marry a girl fit to be your daughter, and suspect her natural instincts of gelling with people of her age and that's what she did, gel well with her step son. She was spending some quality time and sharing few laughs with him.. how can the husband assume she is having an impure relationship.. and after all would you suspect a mother of illicit relation if she enters the son's room at late hours to enquire why he hasn't eaten food? What was the husband thinking! And the feminist in me says, so what even if she was in his room, it is quite natural for people of the same age to be drawn towards each other, at least initially, values and customs do have a role later to ward off any thoughts.. if you are really bound by them.

What would have been an interesting twist would be if the boy Mansaram really liked Nirmala as herself and not as his mother and left the house with her, ridiculing not just the relationship his father wanted so much to establish, but also the customs of those times, that did not see the tenderness of age, did not see the willfulness of a woman's heart but saw the girl child just as a burden.. or the wife as an object not even an entity let alone human...

Literature repeats itself?

When time gets tough and all leave your side, the only people that you can rely on is your family, though it doesn't happen too often these days, at least in the times that Nirmala's saga was based, families did stick together in crisis, or so is my assumption. Nirmala's family did come to her rescue when her marriage came to a sudden stop, but was it for her good?

Kalyani was bent on getting her daughter married no matter what happened.. she could at no cost have a unmarried girl in her home for long.. even though her age was only 16! and adding to the misery was lack of funds. Kalyani's favorite Panditji would bring matches from near and far, but they all asked for money.. some thousand, some three thousand..but I should say there were some interesting ones that seemed a reasonable, like a zamindar's son, 20 years of age.. good looking; then there's an owner of a printing press, 18 years old.. for a minute there I thought, may be there is something better in store for her, like the famous saying goes, 'Jo hota hai, acche ke liye hota hai'...But I think Premchand (the author) was in chronic depression or was in a sadistic mood of making all others depressed when he penned Nirmala so he continued to add to Nirmala's woes. Kalyani was a very concerned mother, when it came to her sons' future, their studies but wasn't so concerned when it came to her daughters' lives, the ill-fated girl child syndrome! I can't believe the lady gave up good suitors just for a thousand rupees.. Perilous times those were, only for women though.

Finally the lucky one.. a certain lawyer named Munshi Totaram, I am sure the author has some good explanation for the choice of names (remember Rangili?). And so Nirmala was to wed the Lawyer who was more than double her age and had three kids!!! Deja-vu? yes its a la Devdas. Come to think of it, Nirmala was in the same position as Paro was in Devdas, not just that Munshiji's first son was a year or two younger than Nirmala, doesn't that sound like Mahender, Thakur's eldest son in Devdas? Similarity ends there though.. Nirmala did not have any childhood friend providing 'love-relief' in her life . Nirmala resigned to her fate, accepted Munshi Totaram as her pati parmeshwar.. well at least she's married now, I thought as I closed the book for the day, but on an after thought is being married to a man who is good enough to be your father better than not marrying at all? If I had a choice I'd choose latter unless he's insanely rich! or looks like Sean Connery or for that matter even George Clooney. But in this story, the women don't have choice as a part of their vocab!

Cruel Destiny

ESP.. extra sensory perception.. we all have it.. the sinking feeling, the knots in the stomach.. just when something really rotten is going to happen.. Nirmala did feel that when she went to sleep the night that Udaybanulal stepped out of his house in fury, but resigned to the fact that she was to get married, can't help it.. and made her mind up to face the music! You might argue though that process of marriage is anxiety prone.. and definitely if you don't know whom you are going to get married to! But this wasn't a case of cold feet... something happened that night that changed the entire course of life for Nirmala... her dad died!

How he did I ain't going to reveal here.. lets just say.. lonely lanes aren't safe for a lawyer! The news devastated the family.. but more than anyone it was Nirmala's loss.. why?.. I'll explain. When Udaybanulal's news of death reached the next village, to her would-be-in-laws, they were in a dilemma as to what to do about the marriage.. until the fated day that a letter arrived from Nirmala's house, that Kalyani had written, pleading the in-laws to continue with the marriage as much money has been spent already on the preparations.

The messenger who carried the letter to the in-laws was sent away and babu-saheb as he is known popularly and his wife Rangili discussed the marriage.. Rangili.. though her name sounds very filmi.. was not the typical saas-type. She supported Kalyani and said.. they have done a lot, we should get our son married.. but Babusaheb had second thoughts.. devious ones at that. 'Udaybanulal is dead, there is no one in his house who can earn.. until he was alive there was at least hope of getting dowry.. now that he is dead.. these people can't give us any more, why can't we get our son married into a richer family, after all my friend Udaybanulal is no more.. so there is no obligation'. At this point of the story, I thought the father-in-law should be shot dead! What was he doing.. ruining a girls life with his menial thoughts about dowry, not even dowry.. extra dowry! I know these were times when the custom of dowry was eating up the very institution of marriage, but one can't help thinking that a family who had settled marital ties would then sever them, in a time of utter confusion and despair just for a sake a few thousands of rupees. Where was his conscience.. and so I waited for the verdict to be given to the messenger.. but the sane ma-in-law.. with her filmi name said "Lets wait for our son to come, let him be the final judge, left to your means, you'll disregard the condition the poor family is in, the relashionship we were to establish with them, all that matters to you is the money"..

I cheered for the lady..I hoped and waited for the knight in shining armor to come and rescue Nirmala from the depths of misery.. The groom-to-be comes home and is made to read the letter from Kalyani. His mother, the lovely lady that she is, looks at her son, half expecting him to be tearful after reading the heartening letter. A cold glance is what she gets in return.. she asks him.. 'So what do you want to do son? Should we not continue our alliance with Udaybanulal's family?' The son answers, gives the verdict.. 'I'd rather marry a girl that can give me more dowry, you see I am just out of college, I need time to get a job, till then I need money, what I get from this house is not enough.. now that we have an opportunity to move away, we should do so'..and I thought the father should be shot! The son's worse! Poor Rangili stuck in a family like that.. But I must agree, this was unlike any other saas-bahu type saga I had ever seen or read, the apparent ma-in-law was the sanest in the family!

So the messenger was sent back to Nirmala's house, with her destiny in denial...many a times when things go bad.. and you can't really explain why, you feel like looking up at the invisible forces of nature and crying out loud.. why me? .. I pictured Nirmala in the very same frame...just when she was ready to commit her self to marriage, it broke!

Clash of the Egos

'Marriage.. the one big step, a lifetime commitment and to whom?' thought Nirmala, she thought of all the good things that she had in her own house and was saddened by the fact that she would have to leave them all behind, and not expect to call them her own anymore. But Nirmala was not the only one who was sad.. so was her father Udaybanulal, reasons were different though. While his daughter wept over breaking ties with her maika.. her father fretted over the cost of her marriage.. day by day the costs were increasing, breaking the borders of a planned budget.

Udaybanulal, after speaking to his sons about whether to use ghee or oil in sweets, hurried into his room to calculate how much more money would be spent on the ghee.. he went to his account books and brooded over them, a while after mumbling numbers, started perspiring and and started all over again... this can't be happening he wondered aloud.. I am already past 15,000 rupees, when I had actually kept 10,000 rupees aside for the marriage, and the costs seem to be increasing without limit.. what do I do oh Lord! ...

'Why don't you stop everything.. enough has been spent on her already, we dont want to spend all money on her alone, we will get done with the marriage with what we have now.. no need for anything else'... said a voice from behind Udaybanulal.. It wasn't Lord answering his question.. it was just his wife Kalyani.. and he starts to argue with her as to why this marriage should be grandiose.. Its afterall the question of status.. and ones 'nose' in the biradri... argument goes on and becomes a full fledged war of egos... I have always wondered why petty things always end up being major issues for break up.. I have seen couples break up over issues as petty as why the boyfriend does not shut close the toilet seat.. and stuff like why the girlfriend does not watch action movies... hmm I think its the 'E' word! the dreaded one!!

But back to Udaybanulal and Kalyani.. they argued until each said to the other 'get out of the house'.. well actually in the end the husband says it to the wife.. and she walks out in a huff... but then she melts at once when her last son comes running and says .. mom where did you go.. please put me to sleep... Ah Mother's love.. don't mom's really dote on their kids! so she abandons her idea of leaving the house and carries her darling son to bed..

But in the room Udaybanulal.. apparently has a greater problem than the budget going out of hand..no prizes to guess.. its the evil ego again playing games with his mind... he thinks to himself.. 'what do these people think.. they know everything.. they can handle everything.. well, I should make them realize, how important I am' and in fury, in rage, in a moment of madness he arises from his chair and looks at the clock, its close to midnight.. he grabs his walking stick and thinks.. 'If I go missing for two days .. then she will know who the master is.. she wont know how to manage anything, let alone money.. then let me see what she does! I will happily spend two days in Ramlal's house (conviniently in the neighboring village) and be back to see fear and agony dancing on their faces' . He chuckled to himself and set out to the bus stand in the pitch darkness of the lonely night!

So.. what do you think? Did he do the right thing? Does ones ego cover the eyes so much that they can't see that at the end of the day its all petty, can't they hear above the din of their own voices? Can't they pause and think for a moment? And all for what?

Nirmala by Premchand

My first ever hindi novel, and it had to be a soap opera style! Well for all those people who love the saas-bahu sagas on air whether truly or for comic relief, you are in for a treat! Although this makes a little more sense than the ones aired.. and well this does have an ending.. and you'll get to read it within this year, unlike the K-series that run for generations! And no! there are no 20 year leaps.. so try not be disappointed too much!!

Nirmala is a story set in the 1960's Benares, of a poor little girl by the same name, who has the world falling apart and the sky falling on her too.. and yet she lives through it all misery after misery and still hopes and waits for those fabled "better days" to come by.

Nirmala is the eldest daughter of a small time lawyer, Udaybanulal, and the story begins with preparations for her marriage. Nirmala has a sister, Krishna and two younger brothers. Marriage for girls in general is a big event, its one of those things in life that many girls look forward right from 'teenhood'. Ahem.. pardon my language, but could not find a better word for late childhood and early teenage! So getting back to the story, Nirmala felt nothing like that, she felt desolate, disheartened and sorrowful. She's just over 16, not yet mature to get into a marital relationship, and naively thinks - 'why are my parents so bent upon driving me out of the house? Am I so bad that they are so enthusiastic about driving me away' . In a conversation with her younger sister atop the terrace over her house she complains..'why are we girls treated this way? Its as though we don't elong to a house anymore, the moment we age, they think of marrying us off to someone as though we were a burden on them' .

Thinking of which I wondered.. do women of the current generation also think the same way? May be my question is more directed towards the parents..do parents still feel a girl child is a burden to the society? We are living in an age where a girl can go out earn as much and take care of her parents as much the sons do. There are many educated families that send their daughters out into the world to live their lives.. but do all of them give them the freedom of choice when it comes to marriage? Not just over the guy they want to marry, but the time they want to get married? And ofcourse the time they want to bear kids! Well I wont go too deep into that.. but looking at my friends and their families, I would say.. nothing has changed from Nirmala's time to now.. Its all the same, girls are still considered a burden.. and have to get married as soon as possible!

I'll leave the story at that note, more will come soon!

My Take On...

I read.. and read.. and often wondered what people do when they read a book.. how much does a person involve himself or herself into the book, does one identify with the characters? judge them? be prejudiced or get annoyed with the negative shaded ones? There's a limit of course.. it is understandable if one can't relate to a murderous alien thirsty for the magma flowing in the earthly volcanoes (if there was ever a character like that!) .. but in the normal more "humanistic" novels.. where there is a home , a family , some friends and outsiders.. some romances.. some tragedies or mysteries, lotsa emotions.. exaggerated sometimes.. but there is a trace of truth somewhere and I would always think .. what would I do if I were that person.. would I be afraid of the mean looking mamaji.. would I be pleased with the chance meeting of a sparkling person as the book's character was?

Almost like living through the novel.. there is a sense of completion when you finish the book and put it down, and if its really a bad novel then you know there could have been a better ending and this it how it should be! I thought it would not be a bad idea to share the thoughts that run through my mind when I am reading some book.. after all.. there might be someone who'd appreciate my parallel stories.. or support my author bashing ;).. or just simply enjoy the journey through a book with me!