Virasat: From one woman to another.

I don’t know much about her. She passed away 9 months before I was born. So given how very Bihari our family is, they used to think that I was her punarjanam. They even would have named me after her, Vidyottama. But perhaps Papa was not strong enough to have me remind him of his loss and loneliness. He would have naturally wanted to move on. So I was named Vidhi, a close second.

Papa never told me much about his relationship with his mother. But every year, on the day of her barkhi, I would find him lying on his bed, both his hands folded behind his tonsured head looking far into nothingness. His pursed lips and eyes red with tears too stern to spill, he looked scarier than usual. A part of me wanted me to go to him and hold his hands in silence. But it fell defeated in front of the other stronger part, which Papa had raised and which knew the boundaries. “Baap Baap hota hai”, which was his usual refrain would echo in my mind and I would run to the gosain ghar, and weep, not for a dead woman I had never met but in place of a living man who couldn’t.

I could have never been anything like my grandmother. I was raised that way.
She was a grihalakshmi.”Khajuri toh Dadi maa banati thi, waisa ras to nayi Kaniya ke haath mein bhi nahi hain,” my Dai-maa would say, much to the dismay of my mother. I was never even let in the kitchen. Till the day, I can’t cook to save my life. And, I am not very proud of this. This is not to say that I was spoilt with love.  It was simply because, for my Papa, my education was the priority. “ Padh likh kar kuchh ban jaye toh bahut mil jayenge khana banane waale ise.” I inherited Papa’s Library. Although it would be presumptuous to claim that a middle-class man owned a library, my Papa had never thrown a single book in his life. Apart from the ones that were given away to his students and friends, a small room in our house with racks going high to the ceiling was home to all the books that my Papa ever owned. By the age of 10, I was reading

Nirala’s poetry alongside Newtonian Mechanics.
Maa wasn’t very happy with this attitude of his. “Sasuraal mein gaali sunwayengi hume ye”, was her worry. That didn’t go very well with my Papa. So averse was he to this idea of my marriage that once when he saw me dressed as a bride in a game of ghar-ghar with a boy from the neighborhood, he assigned my Bade Kaku with the task of teaching me Vedic Mathematics. I never played ghar-ghar after that, any other game for that matter. Maa started calling me ‘Kitaabi keeda’. I took pride in it.
I was the bada babu of the house. Unless I was in serious trouble, I was referred to in the masculine. “Kya padh raha hai tum aaj?”, Papa would ask, entering my room without ever knocking before. Is there even a Hindi word for Privacy?, I find myself asking now and then.  And there weren’t any objections when I bought my clothes from the boy’s section. Maa would call me bedhangi.
And this is how I grew up, like a trishanku hanging between Papa’s pyaar and Maa’s phatkaar.

It was the summer that we went to my Papa’s nanihaal, Mahisaar in order to settle some property related business with the patidaars. And I just had to tag along just uphold the sanctity of yet another moniker that my Maa had endowed upon me, “Papa ki Poochh”. Although since it was a business-trip, Papa refused at first, I had my own plans. I woke up early in the morning just when he was about to leave and shouted, “ Kaha jaa rahe hai aap?!” Daimaa, who usually slept in the porch shrieked from her khatiya, “ Ye lo jatra bana diya isne. Ab le jao isko bhi warna kaam nahi hoga.” Papa smiled at my ingenuity and asked me to get in the car in 5 minutes.

With no special treatment at my service, I was moved to the upper-most floor in the corner-most room with nothing to do.I wanted to grab the earliest chance to go out but since Papa was always out for his chaupals, I had to keep indoors with no network on my phone and an inordinate amount of energy for khurafaat, stemming from my earlier adventures in the day.

Within a few hours of our arrival, I found myself in the attari of the house going through what seemed like years of viraasat at my disposal. Hoping to chance upon something precious, I chances upon a big, black attaichi with the words ‘ Mahisaar Kaniya’ painted on it.

It was a trunk filled with moth eaten cloth pieces, broken earthen dolls and a ragged antique-looking diary with nothing but ‘ Sushri Vidyottama’ s etched out on the cardboard cover.

My first instinct was to smell its rusty pages which resulted in a prolonged allergic reaction to dust. After I recovered, I did not have much of the ethical concerns of not reading what seemed like a dead woman’s diary. I could not read much of it, partly because of my ill-versedness with vernacular bajjika and partly because much of it was too faded to be read. However, it moved to enough to write about a story at your disposal, laying my family’s secrets bare, which I would not have otherwise done.

The prefatory entry was from the first day of Chaitra, the beginning of the Maithili New Year. Written in roli-sindoor instead of ink, this entry was made by her Babu, the Mahant of the Gaura shrine, the central temple of the place as he presented her the diary in order to write and learn the geet that were taught to her and that she would be expected to sing in her sasuraal.

Instead she wrote of her own life.

It was the third month into her marriage with my grandfather while she was awaiting her gauna, or departure to the husband’s house that she took to writing her thoughts into the diary to escape solitude and boredom. As a ritual, she was not allowed to roam out or even do the house chores after the marriage, so forced into her room with no one to talk to, she would weep until she could not anymore. Words came out of her instead. This comprised of the first entry preceded, of course as was a tradition by an invocation of Ganesh-- the Ganesh Vandana.

She started off by writing about  how she learnt to write. She would never have been allowed in the local school being a Brahmin girl, that too from the family of the Mahant. Being a motherless child with five elder brothers, her access to the riti-riwaaz was any way limited. This she felt was unacceptable as started sneaking into the local pathshala that was run in the premise of her house by one of the elder brothers. When asked to leave the room full of adolescent boys, she would start crying and beating herself up until she was allowed to sit around. When this was reported to her father, she knew she was up for a beating. But she coyly went to him, and said, “Babu, you told me of Vidyottama Savitri and her sacrifices to save her husband from the mouth of death. But if Yamraj comes for my husband, how will I protect my husband if I am illiterate? Who would want such a bride?” Her father couldn’t but laugh at the innocence of the child and asked the brother to teach her separately every day and make sure she becomes a Vidyottama. This was the beginning of the metamorphoses of the little Nanki (her ghar-ka naam) into Vidyottama Devi.

Her pursuit was cut short soon when her father died of Lung failure. It dawned upon the brothers to get her married off as soon as possible before the name that their father has earned fades into obscurity. They did not have much else to offer to her prospective sasural, being young mahants and shashtris. Many offers came on their way but Vidyottama Savitri did not just marry anyone. So how could my grandmother? Much to her brothers’ dismay, she rejected many offers that came her way, many of them being sons of wealthy brahmins in the nearby villages.
When my grandfather’s house offered his hand in marriage, the brothers did not pay much heed to it. A pravisiya brahmin boy with nothing but a meager salaried job, working as an engineer was of hardly any appeal. He did not even wear a janeu! His family of landless brahmins did not add much to his credit either.
When the families first met, the first question that my grandfather posed was whether they have taught their daughter to read and write. He told them how he, along with his female colleagues were teaching the womenfolk in the slums of Ranchi. They taught them to read and write to prevent them from signing in on heavy interest loans or selling off their lands and the basics of hygiene to fight against malaria which was an epidemic there.

When she heard of this, she wanted to meet him. Doing so was forbidden as it was abhadra behavior. But she was adamant. She snuck out at night to see him at the saray he was staying in. Donning a long kurta and dhoti she had stolen from her brother, her face covered in a gamchha, she walked through the chauraha in the dark where she found a man tending to a dog who had his flesh eaten out by another. She was called upon by the man struggling with the torch while trying to tend to the injured dog. She covered as much of her face with the gamchha as possible and rushed to help with. After covering his wounds with his handkerchief, he moved his hand across the head of the dog and chanted a mantra. He saw a curiosity in her eyes and told her it’s a little something that his mother had taught him. Asked whether he was a brahmin, because no brahmin of the village ordinarily would touch a dog, he replied by saying that his mother never taught him how to be brahmin. This stayed with my grandmother. She came back home.

Next morning, she told her brothers that she wanted to marry the man. The brothers were shocked at her audacity and called her a kulta. But my grandmother was not the one to be defeated. She wrote to my grandfather a long elaborate letter asking him to come to calling once again and signed it in the name of her eldest brother. Through one of the brahmacharis who lived in their home for education, she sent the letter off to him. When my grandfather came calling, her brothers were shocked but since they recognized the handwriting of their sister and could not reveal the actual truth to save the name of the family. They ultimately gave in and asked for his hand in marriage.

But my grandfather had a request. He wanted my grandmother to have her gauna only when she has come of age and after she had completed her education so that she could help him in his works with the womenfolk of Ranchi. The brothers agreed.

My grandfather got bedridden when my father was ten. He was paralysed for life. My grandmother had raised them through hardships which were never spoken of. Not by herself, nor by her sons. I can only but imagine what her life had been like-- the life of Vidyottama.

By the time Papa came back from his chaupal, I was done reading whatever I could understand in the diary and had already packed the diary in my backpack. On our way back, Papa talked about the importance of preserving one’s Viraasat. Never once have I ever told him about the Virasaat I acquired on that trip. “Baap Baap hota hai”, is still a thing at my place. But in my khurafaat, I sometimes sing in unison with my Daimaa of “DadiMaa ke haath ka ras”. Maa laughs a confused laugh.

Key:

Khijuri: a type of thekua

Gosain Ghar: The inner chambers of the house, wherein the Gosain or the House-God is Kept.

Patidaar: People with common lineage who share one’s ancestral lands