(A Story by Vinayak Lohani)
The year was 1982. Mr. Sundar Raghav, an Indian Administrative Service officer had been transferred to Bhopal at Vallabh Bhavan, the state secretariat, after doing two stints as District Magistrate at Dhar and Chhatarpur. His wife was an Associate Professor in Political Science in Government colleges wherever Mr Raghav moved and now taught at the Maharani Laxmibai College in the city. Their two children – daughter Sunila and son Neel were eleven and eight respectively. Sunila was admitted in city’s prestigious St. Josheph’s Convent that counted Jaya Bhaduri as its most illustrated alumna. The son was enrolled in Campion School which (as this tale is being told) boasts of Raghuram Rajan having walked its corridors as small child.
The Raghavs got a bungalow with a large garden just below the main hill of the city, which divided the new capital township with the old Nawabi era city. Indeed the two parts of Bhopal were and continue to be so different and isolated from each other, both culturally as well as demographically, that it seems that they are two different cities. This hill even then had eminent buildings like the beautiful Birla temple, the Secretariat and still later the new Vidhan Sabha designed by the celebrated architect Charles Correa. This locality below the hill, where the Raghavs lived, was a beautiful semi-forested area called the 74 bungalows. It was arguably the most elite part of the town, not in terms o wealth, but power and prestige, with its spacious bungalows occupied by ministers and high civil servants of undivided MP, the largest state in the country by area then.
The city, however, was not particularly known for any significant enlightened civil society presence, even while it counted among its denizens doyens of classical music like Dagar Brothers, Gundecha brothers and theatre stalwart Habib Tanvir and poet Dushyant Kumar before his untimely death. The new town was mostly composed of Neta-Mantris, Afsars, petty power-brokers, Babus (who filled the ranks of middle and lower bureaucracy), chaprasis and of course those belonging to the humble working class like sweepers, gardeners, artisans, street vendors and other similar indispensable poor without whom society can hardly function smoothly.
The officers’ children of 74 Bungalows had imbibed the prevalent norm that they should not associate with the families of the menial workers living in bungalows’ outhouses, called the servant-quarters. Sunila and Neel were no exception to this convention. These servant-quarters’ children, were usually seen to be playing gilli-danda, kanche (marbles) and similar such games that did not need any elaborate paraphernalia. Quite often they drove and steered the ‘chakka’, a discarded tyre usually of a bicycle, with a stick. Occasionally some luckier ones among them got a discarded tyre of a motorcycle and they were looked upon with awe and envy by their peers. Sometimes the servant-quarters’ children were joined by their buddies from a nearby slum of Om Nagar on the slopes of the hill, which was so infamous for its filth that even municipal officials, in the infrequent visits they perforce had to make, had experiences almost approximating to Dante’s vision of hell.
The children of the servant-quarters almost invariably attended the government school named after Sardar Patel just outside the 74 Bungalows area. This school was till Grade 8 and hardly any of them proceeded to study further. Meanwhile this school has been demolished under the Smart City project and a skyscraper which is inviting expensive booking for flats stands in its place. It was perhaps thought that a school for the poor sat incongruously with the tidiness and ‘smartness’ of the Smart City. A school had to come under the juggernaut of Development.
The children of the Sahabs were told that association with this ‘other’ class of children would only corrupt their manners, make them wayward, and might even bring disrepute to their families. Sunila once received a severe scolding when she shampooed the hair of Guddi, a servant quarter girl from an adjacent bungalow, with the noble intention of washing the latter’s scruffy hair.
The social dynamic of 74 Bungalows was in fact slightly more complex than this. The children of the officers only mingled with those of other officers and not even those of the Ministers, who were not considered to be cultured enough and often suspected of moral turpitude. Thus the 74 Bungalows witnessed a peculiar triangle-shaped class system – the Mantri and Afsars on the top, but not on social terms with each other, and the servant class of outhouses at the bottom. The last named served more as props to the scenario – their existence noticed only by its absence.
The sons and daughters of the officers were addressed by the servants as the ‘Baby’ and ‘Baba’ and the house ladies as Baisahabs. While conversing with each other the officers’ children showed a marked predilection towards using English, often vying with each other in polite but ill-concealed verbal duels to display their mastery over the language. Some of them like Sunila often lamented that years of being transferred to smaller towns across the state had deprived them of the advantages that the children living in the great metropolitan cities of the country enjoyed and often impressed upon their parents to seek a transfer to Delhi that would surely enhance their career prospects. Most parents like Raghav Sahab tried their best to make up for these apparent disadvantages by introducing them to reading English from their early years – right from the lowest rung of Enid Blyton’s Noddy to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and later graduating to popular fiction like that by Agatha Christie, with occasional classics like Lewis Carrol, R.L. Stevenson or Jonathan Swift. Sometimes they went to the Rabindra Bhavan, the city’s main cultural auditorium where high–brow films like those of Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani were screened. It would therefore be fair to say that the officers’ children of 74 Bungalows were the crème del la crème in the city of Bhopal.
However, by no means one should think that the all belonging to the officer-class were unabashedly snobbish. On his children’s birthday Raghav Sahab ensured that at least a few invitees were the children of neighbouring servant-quarters. There were other officers too who were conscientious and high on empathy, but did not quite breach the class rules in anything close to being viewed as radical.
As has been noted earlier, the officers’ children hardly interacted with those of Ministers. If reasons for keeping a distance from servant-quarter children were purely of social hygiene, in the latter case the reasons were both social as well as professional, as these officers in their day jobs were after all reporting to these very Ministers at the Secretariat.
In their closed door chats, the officers and even their children often scoffed at the Ministers, regaling choicest anecdotes about them. A favorite laughing stock for Sunila and Neel was Naveen, a Minister’s son, in a nearby bungalow, who after miserably failing for two successive years and with no hope of passing in the third attempt at the prestigious and expensive Boarding School, the Daly College at Indore, was reportedly eased out of the institution. His father, the Honourable Minister, had to look out for a more modest school in the capital where his son could at least advance till High School. Poor Naveen, not being able to befriend any of the officers’ children, when not loafing around with other loutish boys with long hair and racing motor-cycles (something not common for young boys in Bhopal then) spent time with the boys from the servant-quarters, with unkempt hair, torn and dirty clothes, often having no footwear – that is with a completely dishevelled appearance, often giving them rides. The Ministers’ households, notwithstanding their oft-suspected ill-gotten wealth were undoubtedly more egalitarian in the small world of 74 Bungalows.
It is not that officers’ class folks were always spared the mockery that went privately in their own circles Mrs Kutty, wife of an officer with roots from Kerala, often presented them with comical instances with a queer amalgam of broken English and even more amusing Hindi. Another butt of ridicule was Mr. Dhoot, an alumnus of the famed Trinity College of Cambridge, who regarded by successive regimes as an incorrigibly inept and listless officer, was marked as a ‘give up’ case and almost permanently shunted to a marginal posting. Mr Dhoot was often seen at his morning walks well past 10 o’ clock, working out his hangover, it was commonly conjectured, caused by taking one too many at night at his home bar or at the Arera Club, the chief socialisation space of the high mandarins of Bhopal. Mr. Dhoot, however, was indefatigable in making his colleagues aware about how closely he knew a British Prime Minister who was with him at Cambridge. He also rolled out names of several of his ‘buddies’ who had adorned the ‘House of Lords’ one time or the other. It was most regrettable that this did not raise his stock with those who decided on the postings.
But till now in this piece the chronicler has only attempted to familiarise the reader with the milieu in which our tale unfolds, which is where we now come to.
The Raghavs spent about 15 years in 74 bungalows. All through these years they had been served loyally and devotedly by Madhavlal and his wife Indirabai who occupied the two tiny rooms of their outhouse. Madhavlal came to Bhopal at the age of 22 with his wife and daughter from his village on the banks of river Ghaghara in the district of Mau in eastern UP. He often recounted how his family was almost devastated during a certain flood that caused havoc in his village. He was now employed as a temporary (officially called ‘contingency’) worker in Raghav Sahab’s department. With Sahab’s blessings he got ‘regularised’ in due course. Three of his later children were born during his service with the Raghav family.
All six of them lived in one room while the other small room had a chulha and much later a stove along with other basic cooking appliances. The four children together sat and ate out of a single aluminum plate. There was always an unmistakable odour in their room, that could be quite foul and disagreeable to those unaccustomed to it, but which is often characteristic of the poor household with their worn-out, and unclean mattresses and chaddars, which, on account of absence of any substitutes, simply cannot be be put away for wash or sun-dry. The conditions were thoroughly unsanitary but solely out of compulsions beyond their control. Where there were no such compulsions like taking bath, nobody could find a fault with them. They took bath daily and often in early hours. That it did not bring any noticeable change in their appearance was chiefly because they had to again put on the same shabby wear.
They also had a small mirror which helped them comb their hair. They also occasionally applied powder while going out to some ceremony in their social circles. This, they supposed, would jazz up their looks but also, importantly, act as a marker of prestige, a statement that they could afford these cosmetics. It was the usual case of a poor man trying too hard to pass oneself as a lower middle class guy at least on some occasions.
Madhavlal used to work from 7 am till 9 pm at the Raghav household, with a three hour break in the afternoon. He helped prepare the school tiffin for the children, dropped them to their school bus stop, which was some 300 meter away, and brought them back carrying their school bags, often using an umbrella to shield them from sun. He also assisted for cooking though there was a separate cook for that purpose. The reason for his presence during those hours was because he was the man authorised to take supplies from the stores, a privilege not accorded to everyone. Indirabai did the dishes and the entire family laundry, in addition to sweeping, mopping and dusting. The utility of the last named task always remained an unsolved puzzle to her.
Madhavlal’s family went to their village at intervals of one and half years – alternating between Holi in one year and Diwali in the following. The Raghavs were greatly satisfied by their service and Mrs Raghav was often complimented on her good luck by wives of other officers – they always lamented at the difficulty of finding decent and trustworthy servants to live in the quarters. Most of the lot, they thought, were given to drinking, littering in the backyard and even having the insolence of entering into arguments with the Baisahab. The Raghavs were often mindful of helping Madhavlal’s family – they helped place one of their boys in a government hostel and often gave away clothes that Sunilla and Neel did not have much use for. Mrs Raghav, however, was not so keen on parting with her sarees, even those which she had hardly used for years. She thought, with her uncanny sociological insight, that those sarees would not agree with Indirabai, given her social standing and general appearance. She had once thought of giving away some imitation jewelry to Indirabai but on careful reflection changed her mind thinking that it might cause a gossip across the servants-class that all the jewelry Raghav Baisahab wore was only paltry imitation ones. It would be even worse if it reached the officers’ wives.
People who belonged to that generation know that television in the 80’s was a commodity that had barely entered the households of the urban poor. When Mrs. Raghav and the children watched their favourite operas like the Ramayan, Buniyad and ‘Ye jo hai Jindagi’, Madhavlal’s children jostled with each other near the window of the hall to catch glimpses of what had become their favourite ‘Nataks’ too. Raghav Sahab when noticing this often asked them in and made them sit on a mat and watch TV.
If TV was scarce, cameras were even more so. Even among the privileged class only those interested in photography owned one. Usually people commissioned a professional photographer on special occasions like birthday parties, special Pujas etc. None among the humble proletariat could even fancy having a camera. Among them it was common for the newlywed couples to get themselves photographed in front of huge ‘Shankh’ at the Birla temple where photographers for the poor hung around. Commoners also had themselves photographed when their relatives came and reserved their best dresses for such occasions.
Madhavlal too had a precious collection of about a dozen such photographs most taken at Birla mandir and a few at the Bada Talaab, the famed lake of Bhopal. He kept them carefully in a thin plastic foil in ‘sandook’.
As years rolled by, Sunila went to St. Stephens College to study Economics and later to an American university for her Ph.D. Neel pursued engineering from the Regional Engineering College at Nagpur. It was in the midst of Ph.D. tenure that Sunila’s marriage was fixed. Madhavlal and his wife considered the question of whether they should give a present to Baby and if yes then what. For some time Madhavlal had been thinking of purchasing a photo-album for his family. This gave him the idea that they could present a photo-album on Baby’s wedding. He thought that a nice and large photo-album should make a useful gift for anyone even Baby.
Indirabai was a bit unsure about the appropriateness of making a gift. People like them, her wiser self suggested, were only expected to be receivers and gifting might be tantamount to defying social conventions. But Madhavlal was keen that they should make a gift and his view finally prevailed.
Madhavlal went to the New Market, the main bazaar of the new town, and selected a fine album with small designs of tulips in pink and purple on a hard-bound red surface. He purchased it a week before Baby’s wedding and while his children excitedly saw it Madhavlal did not allow anyone to touch it, lest there be any marks of mishandling. He also got a gifting paper and carefully wrapped it.
A couple of days before the wedding Madhavlal and Indirabai took it to Baisahab – it was only proper, they thought, that it should be presented to Baisahab and not directly to Baby. Mrs Raghav unwrapped it and remarked, “Madhavlal iski kya jaroorat thi.” She called Sunila and showed it to her, who during this special time of her life, was naturally keeping an exceedingly jovial disposition “How sweet of you. Thank you so much Madhavlal,” she said and hugged Indirabai with genuine affection for a moment or two. Madhavlal and his wife, moved within, happily returned to their quarters.
Two more years passed by. Raghav Sahab was selected for the post of Secretary to the Government of India and had to soon relocate to Delhi. Having lived at one place for long years the Raghavs had accumulated a lot of wares – essential as well as non-essential. The apartment at Motibagh which they were expecting to be allotted in Delhi would only be about half the size of their present bungalow. They now braced themselves for the humongous task of sifting through everything and selecting the things they would transport to Delhi. Mrs Raghav took a long leave from her college duties (which in any case she did not intend to continue with) and took upon herself the task to assiduously do the selection and elimination, something she soon realised was nothing short of an ordeal. Raghav Sahab had to depute four chaprasis from his office to assist his wife on this job.
The exercise took a whole fortnight. Lots of things had to be discarded but they often presented a dilemma. Certain things had hardly any utility but carried a sentimental connect with the past. However, it also gave an opportunity to make some parting gifts to their subordinates and other social underlings, and also do some charity at a local orphanage and a Lepers’ Home they knew. Raghav Sahab also dutifully joined his wife for half an hour after his office hours to superintend the decisions made and advise on cases where doubts lingered in his wife’s mind. He also had to spend time going through his own papers and memorabilia.
On one of the last evenings they came across a red photo-album stowed amidst a heap of other things. It was dusty but never used. Mr. Raghav decided to present it to one of his stenographers. Mrs Raghav observed that her husband was leaving a lion’s share to his office staff already and suggested that it should be instead given to Madhavlal. “What else are we giving to him,” asked Mr. Raghav. “Why, didn’t I tell you about the four tin chairs you have been holding on to as a royal treasure since your first posting in 1972? Even peons do not use such stuff these days!” Raghav Sahab chuckled and conceded the point ‘Okay, add the album also to Madhavlal’s list.” And a neat jotting was made in her diary by Mrs Raghav.
They proceeded to examine a few other items and presently retired to bed with the satisfaction that comes upon one after completing a strenuous task that calls for marshalling all of one’s energies.
Vinayak Lohani,
8th March 2023.