Vanishing Acts
by Anu Kumar
Cherry Resort Temi Tea Garden, India, Wikipedia
One month, in the time of the early 1990s, when the monsoon rains lashed large parts of north India, an older cousin of mine vanished. He did have a habit of suddenly falling out of touch. He traveled for work often, and when he was deep in the interior somewhere, or where there were no phone booths, days would go by before we heard from him. This time he was somewhere in the Himalayan foothills, dotted by the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh, some four or five hours out of Delhi, and it had already been ten days, even a fortnight since his last call.
My siblings and I were several years younger, and we always envied our cousin and his job that made him travel so much and around the country. The time I am talking about, it was July in Delhi, and it was humid, the rains erratic and splashy, but cousin was in a rented car traveling by the serene, mystical Himalayas, passing one lovely town after another. I’d imagine his car taking the rounding, twisting paths up the hills, the scent of pine in the air, the thick hedges of rhododendron against his car, swishing away like a wand the clouds above.
~~~
I always thought of cousin in a white Ambassador, those dome-roofed sturdy cars made in a factory out of Calcutta in the east. These cars, used especially for long-distance motor travel, remained popular for a long time in India before the other foreign branded cars became common in the mid-1990s. My cousin would see schoolchildren on his way; they always walked in groups to school or back, keeping carefully to the rough, unpaved parts on either side of the road. He would stop at roadside tea-stalls and stay overnight at the small, haunted dak bungalows that dated from British times.
These bungalows now functioned as hotels, and I loved the welcoming old time feel they had. Red crenellated roofs, rooms with high beamed ceilings, a fireplace always crackling, and staff who wore high red turbans, crisply ironed white uniforms, belted with a sash, and who served up every misty morning a fine, multi-course English style breakfast.
I knew this from old movies and from the old novels I read then. Books by the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma and films such as the Merchant-Ivory productions, like The Householder, based on a Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala novel. Leaning close to the screen when the movie played, or smelling the paper as I read the book, I could almost breathe in the smell of tangy pine cones, feel the nip of the cold breeze, hear bells ringing, and I’d be overcome by a wave of longing. And when cousin did call, from places like Almora, Ranikhet, Haridwar, Rishikesh, I looked these up on the map, on the green-brown pages of my atlas, and followed his route with my forefinger.
This time, though, he hadn’t called. And already his wife in Calcutta had called, twice in the last week. That itself was a giveaway. Usually, she would never give in to her vulnerability, expose herself to being teased, for showing so much concern for her husband.
There were things, especially related to matters of the heart, that remained between husband and wife, that were never aired aloud. At least not in the India of my teen years. The hypocrisy bothered me. They are married, aren’t they? So why shouldn’t she call? I thought this, but never said this aloud, knowing that the same scornful judgments—that I was too big for my age, that I should not talk about grown-up things—would come my way.
~~~
To me, relations between two married adults appeared very complicated those days. In the film, The Householder, my favorite actor, Shashi Kapoor and Leela Naidu, who played the woman he had just married—in the arranged way of course—were just getting to know each other when his mother decided to invite herself to their home. Such things always happened then; parents could really do whatever they wanted. When this film was made, Shashi Kapoor, in real life, was already married to the British actor Jennifer Kendall, who was part of a touring theater company just like the Kapoor family that she had married into.
I recently rewatched the film, and several scenes filled me with nostalgia, reminding me of how Delhi looked when we first came to live there. I was then about five or so, and we lived in the area that today makes up a fashionable, upper-class part of South Delhi. As in the film, a rocky gray wilderness existed cheek by jowl with the new apartment complexes then coming up, along with the marketplaces that had clothes and stationery shops on the first floor and smaller establishments on the floor above.
In The Householder, the newly married couple lived in one of the old houses, the kind one can still see in areas now far from the main city. A mud-walled, one-story house in its own compound, and a terrace. An old abandoned mosque formed a backdrop of sorts. It was the kind of scene that always defined India for me, long after I had left the country.
~~~
My cousin worked for an electronics company, one involved in setting up and maintaining the big, wired switchboards that made telephone exchanges work. These boards with rows and rows of switches that looked like constantly clacking teeth rose tall as ceilings and hummed in a lifelike way. I had seen pictures in the pamphlets cousin carried, or in the loose sheaves of paper in files he habitually left around.
I remember now how he was always doing things like this. Leaving his things around to make his presence felt in some way. My cousin, no matter where he traveled or where he put up, spread himself around, not just with his things, but with his ability to make people laugh. His jokes, I remember this too, were never cruel, but genuinely funny and, more often than not, he made fun of himself. When he sang nasally and terribly off-key, everyone told him off, laughing, scolding him for ruining a perfectly good popular song so magnificently that no one ever wanted to listen to it again.
He broke into a song whenever he was repairing something: a transistor, or anything electronic. Sometimes he sang and hummed along with my mother who had trained as a singer and who had a sweet, lilting voice. I remember this though: they never finished a song they began. It was always informal. He would join her when she sang, as she did her chores in the house. But she would invariably break off, laughing, a hand on her forehead in mock frustration, for cousin would go off-key, or forget the right words at the right time.
My cousin, unrepentant as always, sang in the shower, in his room, or when he smoked by himself on the balcony. That was the other thing he was careless about: his smoking. He did a lot of it, especially when he had things to keep to himself, or when he couldn’t tell anyone his real feelings. Like the time he lost his baby daughter to cancer, and some years later his mother to another malignant form of the dreaded illness. Even after, he remained his same jokey self when he visited us, or when he travelled to small hillside towns to meet the people he worked with and stayed on to repair their switchboards. He joked, sang off-tune, knowing if he paused, if he looked back, the sadness would catch up, far too quickly.
~~~
That time of his vanishing that I remember so well, and after cousin had been out of touch for far too long, he finally called out of the blue. He was somewhere in Srinagar.
In Kashmir? And when mother said that she sounded startled and concerned. It was, after all, 1990, and from late autumn onward, mayhem and chaos had started in Kashmir. Every evening when we switched on the TV, the news brought details of yet more killings, the worrying rise of terrorist incidents in the state just north of Delhi.
Kashmir had always been contested territory between India and Pakistan. The two countries had already fought three wars, and the dispute had never been settled. And when there was no war, there were always the border skirmishes, and terrorist attacks, sudden and gory, always tragically violent.
My cousin laughed in his jokey way; the sound reached my mother in a series of broken stutters; a trk-trk-trk sound I could overhear as I stood near her. He clarified that there was a town named ‘Srinagar’ in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the town by that name in Kashmir. The town he was in was just northeast of Delhi. This Srinagar, he said, was north of the town of Rishikesh, and like it, just by the river Ganga.
I have never seen a place lovelier than this. I could hear his voice crackle through the receiver that mother held close to her ear, her eyes narrowing as she listened. Only the way she bit her lips gave away her worry.
It’s really lovely, he repeated. And can you hear? There was silence, and I realized he was now holding his receiver out, so we could pick up the sounds he wanted us to hear. But a crackling came over the wires again, and mother said hello, and then hello again, the way people did when the voice at the other end vanishes. My cousin came back on, and asked if she could hear the river.
Just some disturbance, mother said.
It’s the river, he told her, and mother relayed this to us moments after he had hung up. The river Alaknanda, as the river Ganga was known in these higher reaches. The river, as she—the Ganga is always a woman—descended from the Himalayan glaciers, tumultuous and rippling, the eddies forming errant circles, the surf falling and rising, in a series of rushed, small waves. Rugged ridges, irregularly shaped rocks rose high on either side, streaked gray and white as the skittish river brushed, threshed it on either side, as she had done since time immemorial.
I looked at the phone long after mother’s call ended, after she had turned away saying with some relief that cousin’s wife would perhaps not worry so much now. He had called after all. In my dog-eared Oxford school atlas, the one I had had since fifth grade, I looked up the town he mentioned. The other Srinagar, and I traced with my finger the black line of the river as it narrowed toward the north and rose even higher up in the Himalayas, and once again a great longing filled my heart. These were places I would always know secondhand, from books and films, and I envied my cousin and his long and solo journeys.
River Ganga at Rishikesh by Gauraang Pradhan
~~~
The town of Srinagar my cousin mentioned, different from its namesake in Kashmir, was a small town in the Garhwal region, right by the foot of the Himalayan mountains. Clusters of small houses lay far below narrow pointed peaks. In the 19th century, there had been a rope-bridge across the river Alaknanda between two high peaks.
Later, I would see in the British Library archives an old painting by Thomas and William Daniel showing the old temple, a brown squat cylinder-like structure, with a darker brown overhanging roof, almost touching the mountains. An old fort, brown and somewhat octagonal in shape, also huddled over a peak. This was once the center of a kingdom bordered on the east by the country of Nepal. The town had grown, in patches, over the last century. And now it had a telephone exchange too, which explained why my cousin had traveled to this town.
I could imagine how the telephone exchange office looked. I had seen them in all the small towns we had lived in before we moved to the capital, Delhi.
Unobtrusive looking structures, their small compounds packed with bicycles and people. Before one open window with its narrow bars, people queued up to pay phone and other utility bills. The musty rooms inside, the ceilings damp and peeling, had steel, green-colored tables, and chairs. Almirahs, similarly colored, had drawers with rusty handles, packed with thin, brown files tied up in string.
The switchboard stood like a big silent animal along one wall, humming and chirruping occasionally, as if reminding people of its existence. The small towns up in the hills were usually depleted during the winters when most people—and usually it was the men—traveled to the plains for work, returning to the high hills once the weather changed. The end of winter also brought in the tourists. All of which meant that systems like telephone exchanges always had to work efficiently, to ensure phone calls went through, that families kept in touch, that news moved seamlessly and quietly, at all hours, at every moment.
~~~
These years were a time of change all over India, and nothing epitomized it more than the telephone. In most towns across the land, manually operated telephone exchanges still existed, where an operator with huge headphones and a microphone on took your number and put you through. There was one town in Odisha, the time we lived in eastern India, where the operators had become very familiar to me, recognizable from their voices the moment I picked up the receiver.
I would never forget the woman with the bored voice, the man who always sounded as if he was choking on his own laughter, and the other one whose ‘one moment please’ never failed to impress me. His clipped, faraway voice would make me imagine what he looked like in person—someone with silver hair brushed neatly back, a pointed face, a neat well-ironed shirt, and shoes polished to a shine—before I realized that I was thinking of the actor I had recently seen on television.
Now these old systems were giving way to electronic switchboard systems made with the new fiber-optic technology, and calls were now much easier to place. Voices would not crackle, people would not scream into receivers just to make themselves heard, and I knew I would miss the old systems when they were finally gone.
Besides the new kind of exchanges, phone booths had begun appearing too, ubiquitous in places like bus-stations, the corner-side shops, and post offices. And my cousin moved from place to place, ensuring these machines, the old and the new ones too, ran well.
I always picture the car he rented, usually a white Ambassador, parked by some small telephone exchange, and he, sitting with the telephone operators—mostly women in their colorful patterned shawls, knitting needles in hand, for the new systems had eased things somewhat—sipping warm milky tea, flirting with them, parts of the machine opened and exposed before him.
It was one of the busiest times of his working life as an engineer. Across the country these new exchanges and new kinds of telephones came up, all with the government’s encouragement. In some more years, when I began to work myself and had a living of my own, cellphones would take over, and the old Bakelite instruments that had been the center of our lives for so long would become redundant. It happened too suddenly, almost overnight.
Even the big switchboards, humming with life, once majestic in their air-conditioned chambers, watched over and attended to by dozens of telephone operators, were transformed into silent, looming statues, their humming slowing down in days and weeks, until in months they fell absolutely silent.
~~~
Still, such possibilities seemed remote, even too futuristic, at the time my cousin vanished. He did call a second time from Srinagar, that loveliest of towns, as he referred to it himself, to tell father he would be stuck there for a few days. He had come there to look at one of the big exchange machines, but now it could simply not be located.
It’s vanished, he said.
We thought it was one of his jokes. After all, we had joked, and then worried, about cousin’s own vanishing act. And I’d always remember later with some mortification how we had been amused at his wife’s worry, how panic-stricken she had sounded when she had called long-distance from Calcutta and insisted on speaking to my father. As the oldest male figure in the extended family, my father was the patriarch, the one who adjudicated on serious matters involving the family and who advised and comforted.
My father had been his most reassuring self. Soon after he hung up, he called up his own colleagues in the police service to track down my cousin, his errant nephew. So it was that my cousin called a second time, from Srinagar, the “loveliest of all towns,” and talked about a machine that had vanished, and then about the other things and people who vanished too.
Like the local policemen who were never there at the police station every time cousin turned up to follow up on the matter. The excise collector too never appeared, though there was a day when cousin had stationed himself at the tea-stall outside his office for several hours, chatting and conversing with others, those who had come to pay a fine, ask for a refund, or various other requests that only important small-town government functionaries could help resolve.
When people like them don’t turn up or act difficult, father told him then, it could be a sign that they want something.
That something meant a bribe, the amount of which varied depending on the nature of the favor. Or how important the officer thought himself. But my cousin protested. It wasn’t a favor. It was a machine that everyone needed, an exchange system like the one used in other cities, and he hadn’t paid any bribe in all these other places.
Father understood what cousin really wanted, something that he couldn’t quite articulate clearly. Every family lives by its own code, and father understood what a certain pause in the conversation meant. So he relented and said he would try to use his influence. That is, he would find someone who could speak to these bribe-seeking officials, and maybe work out a compromise.
Sometimes, I heard father tell cousin at the end, people do this, ask for things, because it’s accepted, and a matter of prestige.
It was one of many things that puzzled me then, before I figured out some things about how life worked. As for cousin, I don’t know if he found father’s reasoning strange, or even grotesque—a government official hinting about a bribe because it was a matter of tradition, something accepted, or simply to maintain his status as a high official— but then cousin dropped out of touch once again for some days.
He called again, just when our worries over him resumed. This time he also made sure he called his long-suffering wife. And it would be quite some time, several months later, before we saw him again. I didn’t know then that I’d missed his jokes, and his totally unique and wacky sense of humor.
~~~
My cousin, who was my aunt’s son, was the older brother I never had. Ever since I had known him, he was always tinkering with radios and transistors, and once with the old black telephone that stood on a teak wooden stand in a corner of our living room. These instruments were treasured and greatly cherished then. They sat majestic on their lacy doilies, sometimes covered with a towel to keep the dust away.
We learned to recognize calls from how the phone rang. The local calls were sharp and insistent, but the long-distance ones, the trunk calls, came slow, the rings more measured, each one stretching for seconds. When I was young, my siblings and I used the telephone to make silly blind calls. We took turns to dial numbers at random, and we read out the newspaper headlines or just remained silent, trying to gauge the person at the other end after their first hello. The telephone directory proved equally fascinating; a thick, unwieldly tome, its pages flapping and falling over the moment one opened it, reminded me always of an elephant’s floppy ears.
In the small Delhi apartment where we lived first, I remember my cousin coming home with a huge rectangular box hoisted on his right shoulder. That was when we got our first radio set, and instantly the world came closer. My parents were always looking for shortwave radio stations, moving a dial that made the red indicator on the panel move too.
I loved the radio sounds; the bubbles, the scratchiness, the sudden bursts of people speaking a foreign language, the songs I did not know, and other voices sounding a long way away that became recognizable over time. Like the announcers and newsreaders who appeared over and over again at a set time of day and became familiar like family members.
~~~
Sometimes my cousin and mother, along with two of her friends, who lived in the same apartment complex, bought tickets to watch Hindi films at a nearby theater. From the balcony of our house, I’d see them cross the Ring Road, my eyes following them as they walked through the narrow lanes with the four-story government quarters on either side, to get to Sangam Cinema, an imposing white stone building with star-like patterns cut into its front façade, through which one could see a spiral staircase leading all the way up. My cousin’s presence made it safe for mother and her friends, no matter how late it got.
My father wasn’t too much for the movies, but mother and cousin always looked forward to a new movie, especially when it starred the big actors of the day. For days after, cousin would hum songs from that film, or other songs too. He would cheerfully sing off-key, making us all laugh. During the festival nights every October, when the old classic movies were screened in the open air via a projector before a huge audience who did not mind sitting on the dew-strewn grass, cousin came home even later, as dawn streaked the sky, with mother and friends.
~~~
Cousin was always a bit on the plump side; he was never really careful about what he ate. He was also reasonably tall, had wavy hair that he brushed back, giving him a gelled look. He had a square face, and sharp features.
Once a domestic helper who worked in our house for a time,
and who was crazy about Hindi films too, told my mother—for she really couldn’t tell cousin directly—that he looked rather like Sanjeev Kumar, a film star of the 1970s who always earned rave reviews for his performances. My cousin was pleased at the compliment.
I wasn’t allowed to watch too many movies, but now I kept a
lookout for what Sanjeev Kumar looked like. I read the film magazines cousin sometimes brought home, like Cine Blitz and Stardust. Sanjeev Kumar was described as a fine actor, one of the best in the country, someone who could easily slip into a role.
But at that time, the years cousin lived with us in that small Delhi apartment, Sanjeev Kumar played mainly old men’s roles. He was quite effective playing an older man for he had some girth around the middle, and a ponderous gait to match. He only had to whiten his hair and put on glasses. And perhaps smoke a pipe.
In a film for which he won a major award, Sanjeev Kumar
had two roles, a ‘double role.’ He was first a young doctor who falls in love with a girl he meets at a hill-station. The film had lovely music, especially a song that played right at the very beginning, the music unfolding as the initial credits appeared. The notes wafted out of the screen, following a lone car, an Impala, as it made its way up curving hill roads, with lush green chinar trees on either side.
The hill-station looked like Darjeeling, high up in the hills of
West Bengal, known for its tea gardens. I had never been to Darjeeling, but I had read about it and seen pictures too. The small rattling mountain train, colored blue and green, that ran all the way from Darjeeling to Siliguri and back, the women plucking tea in fields that stretched green as far as the eye could see.
In Darjeeling, an aunt of mine once said, it rained so much
that it poured through roofs and into people’s homes, and they had to open up their umbrellas even when inside. I believed her, and for days afterward, walked around in our apartment in considerably dryer Delhi, holding up my mother’s nicely patterned parasols.
Darjeeling with its gentle unmenacing forests, its winding streets, its quaint street shops, and single one-story cottages, proved an ideal film setting. But the romance proved blighted, in a tragic way. The doctor was called back home—the big bad city where there was always the chance of promises being forgotten, as does happen in a convoluted way. By the time the doctor returns, he is old, more formally dressed, complete with pipe and glasses, and with a slower gait, and he finds not just sorrow but other complications to contend with.
~~~
My cousin was only two years younger than mother, and that meant they were more friends than anything else. Mother had married young; she was then only 18. She told me later how soon after her marriage, when she had moved into her new home in Calcutta, my cousin and his younger brother would take the bus, a thirty-minute ride, to visit her.
At first, no one really minded, especially not my mother’s
mother-in-law, my grandmother, a strong-willed, dominating woman. But then the visits got more frequent and he was told to concentrate on his studies. He was 16 then, and maybe even then he wasn’t sure of his own crush on my mother. It was glossed over, never mentioned, and the formal relationship that existed between them shadowed everything that had gone before.
For most of my young life, my cousin was always part of the family. He was my parents’ nephew, and our cousin, though I remember how he never figured in formal definitions of a family. I wonder now if that hurt him. For instance, one evening he came home early from work and sat around waiting at the table for a long time. Neither my father nor my mother said anything and then cousin bent down low to touch my father’s feet in the traditional way. He blurted out that it was his birthday. He looked a bit abashed saying that, and my parents looked contrite immediately, but I imagined he must have felt left out.
His own parents lived in Calcutta then, as did his three younger siblings. Soon after he married, he moved back to stay with them. My cousin’s family lived in the city’s south, within walking distance of the popular street market of Gariahat. The house sat in the corner of an old street, painted yellow, with louvered windows, and terrible, old-fashioned bathrooms, with uneven stone floors, and a toilet where one had to squat and gaze into a dark, unending hole.
When cousin moved back to Calcutta, father called him quite a homebody then. He couldn’t keep away from family, father told him, half in jest. My cousin said he was the oldest son of the family and had some responsibilities.
I was in my teens then, and far too ready to make moralizing arguments. Being responsible was all very well, I told cousin, but it was irresponsible to keep smoking, and to overindulge on junk food. Cousin laughed it off. He always talked about going on a diet, but never did. On another occasion, he assured us that he was on a diet. Between mealtimes, he elaborated, and laughed when he saw the amusement on our faces.
He had gotten into the habit of making people laugh. A few
months after he lost his young daughter to cancer, he came back to Delhi on a work-related assignment. Like before, he stayed with us, sitting in front of the TV late into the night. His eyes were glazed, and he was watching nothing in particular.
He hummed his songs, sang them out of tune, substituting
funny words for real ones, while mother kept him supplied with tea and samosas, pampering him as well as offering comfort, in the way she knew best. He remained generous the way he had been, taking his younger cousins, including me, to some of Delhi’s most popular fast-food eateries. And the one time he went abroad, he got me my first pair of corduroy jeans.
I always thought my cousin did not know how to be sad.
~~~
Weeks after his vanishing act in the hillside town, the other Srinagar—as we always told ourselves—cousin reappeared in our house. The machine that had vanished, that he had been in search of, had been located in a government warehouse. Cousin had taken the police inspector out for an expensive lunch to resolve matters.
We had to drive to Rishikesh, and he ordered the most expensive things for himself. He didn’t have it all, cousin added, patting his own stomach, and then I noticed how much weight he had put on. A button on his shirt wouldn’t close, and his netted vest was in full view, but cousin didn’t seem to care. His wife called later that evening, and I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation. It wasn’t a big apartment and I studied at the dining table, with the telephone not too far away. Cousin spoke low into the receiver, his words soft and insistent. There is no one else in my life but you, and her, he said, for they had had a second daughter by then. Why else do you think I work so hard? There is no one else, he repeated, and I knew then that his wife was accusing him of having an affair. The very idea amused me for it was so unlike him.
~~~
Cousin’s travels always made me yearn, made me long for faraway worlds and places. I’d travel, I told myself then, if not in real life but in my imagination. When he traveled to the hill regions, to towns and places that I became familiar with from his occasional phone calls and my atlas, I wondered if he missed home, whether Delhi, or Calcutta, the presence of familiar faces, and homecooked simple food that he claimed, as he told mother once, to really love.
When I look at old photos of him, for cousin died some years
ago, I find myself agreeing that he did indeed look like the actor Sanjeev Kumar. Whenever old films starring Sanjeev Kumar come on TV, I remember those old remarks and the compliment cousin once received. Had cousin lived longer, I think now, he might well have looked like the older man Sanjeev Kumar played in that movie set in Darjeeling.
On YouTube, I listen often to the song from that old film of long ago, where Sanjeev Kumar doubles up as a young-old man, and now the lyrics make even more sense to me. I watch on my screen the white Impala car slowly rolling up the hills, moving in and out of the cloud of chinar trees, and the singer’s deep voice breaking out as the credits appear. My cousin wanted to be home, but he also liked being away. He mourned for people he had lost—his daughter, his mother too, and then his beloved grandmother—but he had learned not to show it.
It had become a habit for him to make others laugh. But on his
own, he did give in to things unacknowledged. Feelings that he could share with the emptiness around, the hills looming over him, and the starlit skies above. Things he could talk about with my mother when he made those long- distance calls. Or, he would talk to the strangers he met, flirt with the women operators, bribe officials on occasion and take them out to lunch, and he would always make them laugh, especially when he sang off-key, nasally, and always out of tune. Even the song Sanjeev Kumar sings as he returns, now an old man, to the place of his youthful love.
The heart keeps searching
for the old days and nights of leisure
when I spent moments
just thinking of my beloved.
My heart keeps searching.
My cousin often tried to live up to that comparison with a film
star. That made him popular, he thought. But he was truly his own self when he was on his own, in these hillside towns, and every now and then, doing his vanishing acts.
The River Ganga in the Lower Himalayan Foothills, by Gauraang Pradhan