Gods, Graves And Grandmother , livre ebook
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English
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2001
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122
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English
Ebook
2001
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Publié par
Date de parution
21 novembre 2001
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351184478
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
21 novembre 2001
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351184478
Langue
English
Namita Gokhale
Gods, Graves and Grandmother
Content
About the Author
Praise for Gods, Graves and Grandmother
Author s Note
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
GODS, GRAVES AND GRANDMOTHER
Namita Gokhale was born in Lucknow in 1956. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, was published to widespread acclaim in 1984. Her other books include A Himalayan Love Story (1996), Mountain Echoes (1998), The Book of Shadows (1999) and The Book of Shiva (2001).
Namita Gokhale lives in Delhi with her two daughters.
Praise for Gods, Graves and Grandmother
Gods, Graves and Grandmother is remarkable on two counts. First, its structure of a modern fable held aloft by the gauziest of irony. And second, its searching scan of life in the downwardly mobile class of the Indian metropolises . . . Gokhale exposes the humorous underbelly of merchandized religiosity.
- India Today
Gudiya s picaresque adventures cover a cross-section of Indian society . . . the novel is filled with people of all sizes and shapes . . . Like the Pied Piper, Gokhale has them marching to her tune.
- The Statesman
(Namita Gokhale) brings considerable literary maturity into achieving this tour de force.
- Financial Express
Set in the backdrop of semi-urban Delhi, the book effectively moves between the everyday details of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy and the supernatural realm of the temple which forms the focal point of Gudiya s life ... A racy and engrossing book.
- Sunday
Author s Note
I am convinced that every novel has its own horoscope, its special kundali, an observation with which Pandit Kailash Shastry would certainly concur. Gods, Graves and Grandmother was written in 1992, when I was recovering from a serious illness. It was completely unlike my first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, and met with a somewhat puzzled reaction. David Davidar of Penguin had first encouraged me to write it, but it is only now, several years later, that he is publishing it. Jatin Das was to design the cover for the first edition, but could not; his son Siddharth has brought it to life this time.
Some changes have written themselves in in this new edition, but the story still inhabits a long-ago time which could very well be today. Suspend disbelief if you must when you read this book, but not belief.
One
W hen my mother went away, my grandmother and I were left to fend for ourselves. I had always been given to believe that we had once been enormously rich, but at that time we were on the very verge of penury. We would indeed have starved had not my resourceful grandmother stolen a marble slab from the building site behind our shanty. This marble-clean, cold and veined with the merest hint of green shadows-she placed beneath the holy peepul tree which shaded our little hut. Then she found five rounded river stones, purloined them, really, from a sahib s rockery, and arranged them on the marble altar. Mangold flowers from the sahib s garden, and the third stainless steel thali which we didn t need, now that mother had gone, and our shrine was complete.
Grandmother extracted a ten rupee note from the folds of her withered but still substantial breasts, and we walked together to the tea shop at the end of the road. She ordered a cup of tea, which I was instructed to drink. I felt grand and important sitting in a chair with a table before me.
I ordered a biscuit from Shambhu, the Bihari giant who owned the tea stall. Shambhu had a mass of flesh where his left eye used to be, and I was convinced that he was a dacoit on the run from the police. I even felt a certain affectionate complicity on this score.
Grandmother didn t object to my ordering the biscuit (it wasn t really a biscuit but a nankhatai) and when I was finished, she paid the bill and we returned to our hut. She extracted the change we had collected from Shambhu out of the voluminous drapes of her sari bodice and placed it ceremoniously upon the stainless steel plate which had been mother s. Then she prostrated herself before the pebbles and the marigolds on the green marble slab, lay down so still and silent and for so long that I was afraid she might be dead or in a coma.
Are you all right, Ammi? I whispered in her ear. By then the eyes she possessed in the back of her head had alerted her to the presence of a passer-by, and a garbled chant, distinctly pious and devotional, emanated from her trained singer s throat.
In the evening we lit an earthen lamp at the shrine and performed aarti. Shambhu of the tea stall produced a large luminous conch shell from which he coaxed an awesome and angry wail. Two strangers stopped by on their way home from office. They clapped and kept time as grandmother clanged the brass bell that had magically materialized and now hung like some mystical fruit from the branches of the peepul tree. I was still a stranger to the paraphernalia of religion, brought up as I had been, ignorant of God or Divinity, and I puzzled to make sense of the unfamiliar tableau as the flickering lamp cast new shadows on my grandmother s trusted face.
After everybody had left, we put the change from the stainless steel thali back into a pouch and locked it in the tin trunk, which was the only furniture we possessed besides our two charpoys.
The next morning the notes and coins were back in the thali. As I was returning from my ablutions from behind the building site, I heard the clink of metal on metal and miraculously there was more money on the plate than there had been when I left. A man in a helmet, clutching a briefcase in his folded hands, was standing beneath the peepul tree, his head bowed in prayer. You could say that we were in business after that.
Sacred to Lord Shiva, the peepul tree was a presence in our lives. Its leaves talked to me in a sibilant murmur, and I knew that ghosts and spirits dwelt in its enormous gnarled branches. At night I was sure I could hear them, laughing and talking in a perfectly normal way. Sometimes they would scream soft, strangled sounds that only I could hear, which would make the hair on my arms stand up on end and send a shiver down my spine.
My grandmother, never well-versed in the higher tenets of Hinduism, knew enough about practical folklore to warn me about disembodied souls that flocked to the murmuring branches of the sacred tree, waiting only to pounce into the mouths of unwary travellers and take possession of them. She made me take a solemn oath never to yawn under the peepul tree, or open my mouth in any way, without first snapping my fingers to scare away these phantoms.
Then, to assuage my fears, grandmother pointed out that these spirits were helping us, actually serving us, that they were in a sense our familiars. It was the shrine beneath the peepul tree that kept us fed and clothed, although we were of course not as rich as we had once been, very long ago.
Money poured in: eight annas, five rupee coins, even the occasional fifty rupee note. The miracles were not yet manifest, but we were already rich beyond our wildest dreams. We had no neighbours to discredit us, and as the tea-shop wallah also shared in our sudden prosperity, having diversified into the sale of coconuts and marigold garlands, we faced no scepticism from that quarter. So must it have been in the first heady days of Mecca.
Two
B ut to begin at the beginning. Before mother left, in a long-ago time, we had been very rich. There was a big house, a haveli with a hundred-and-thirty rooms. Besides twenty-two servants, these hundred-and-thirty rooms were occupied by my mother, my grandmother and my grandmother s younger brother, whom my grandmother had brought up as her own son.
My grandmother had been a great singer, a kothewali whose voice was more liquid and beautiful than Lata Mangeshkar s. Eleven nawabs and two Englishmen were besotted with her. Carriages, buggies, Rolls Royces and Daimlers used to line up outside the house in the evening. Perfume from the flowering mogra and chameli spilled out into the street, and if a man were to innocently walk past that house, when he got home his wife or mistress would sniff suspiciously and ask where he had been.
My grandmother s younger brother, my mother s Mamaji, grew up in a distant wing of the haveli, and was kept protected, even innocent, of the gaiety and abandon of those feminine evenings. Mamaji had studied in the best schools and colleges, and was destined to redeem the family. Although he was only a few years younger than my mother, they hated and despised each other.
I confess I cannot really remember actually seeing my Mamaji. Memories can be quite confusing. Sometimes they run in slow motion or are jerky and abrupt like an old black-and-white film. My memories of my childhood are marked by a sort of sepia tone, like the photographs in a very old album. There were actually some old photographs in the bottom of the tin trunk, but Ammi tore them up and threw them away. I still carry the torn edges of many of these memories, but they merge into each other, they do not match.
One of the things that I can remember perfectly well is the design of a large carpet. It is a blue carpet, with a pattern of leaves and flowers woven in reds and pinks. The pink leaves puzzle me; I wonder why they are not green. My memories are inhabited by such contradictions. There is an image in my mind of a peek-dan, an elaborate brass spittoon, into which my grandmother, a diamond flashing on her fine nose, would squish out chewed-up betel-nut juice with unerring aim. I ca
