Conjugal snippets from the past

 

Tau Devi Singh looked like a Frenchman from many angles, fine-featured, very sharp, and very fair in complexion. He retired as a thanedar in Delhi Police. However, our Tai was the polar opposite in looks. Those were the days when to be eligible for marriage meant to be simply a male or female. The family elders fixed the marriage alliance. Who got paired with whom was as good as a draw of lots. It churned out, sometimes, very interesting, though very funny pairs.

One of our Buas in the extended family was a wee bit shorter than four feet, while her handsome husband was slightly above six feet. Despite all the incongruities, the mismatching couples somehow managed to stick around. It was mostly because the womenfolk were as inert as the walls in the house. The slow fire of dissent, from the one who felt to have been more wronged of the two, smoldering in little-little insults, tart words, abuses—a kind of dismissive attitude that fell short of pushing out the unattractive partner altogether because that wasn’t the norm. Divorce was looked down by the society but slow-torture of the unfortunate wife (mostly it happened to be the woman in the pair) was also accepted as a norm. So you stood a chance to receive social agreement even if you beat your wife but fell short of abandoning her altogether.

Honorary Captain Zile Singh looked like a son to his prematurely old wife with pinched cheeks and shriveled skin. She had a blast finally when one shopkeeper at the town market kept addressing her as ‘dadi’ and her husband as ‘bhaiya’.

Till his old age, Tau Devi Singh kept his baton of dissent wagging with full force against his unsuitable partner. Poor Tai was the primary target of his ire. He had a great justification for his mistreatment of his wife. Whenever I gently pointed out his harsh behavior, he would stoically recite Chanakya in Arthashastra: ‘Vidyarthi, pashu or nari/Ye sab tadan ke adhikari!’ It meant the students, cattle and women were best handled with stick and sharp words.

My grandmother died quite young. The surviving grannies of her times told me about Grandfather’s relish for abrasive behavior targeting her. She had a sharp tongue and he always had sharper hands. In his late nineties, when Grandfather was bedridden—he was on bed during his last year—we had put his cot under open sunshine in the yard. ‘Grandpa, why were you so rude to Dadi? They say you used to beat her!’ I asked. Frail and slowly biding a bye to the world, he looked into the skies with his dulled eyes and all he could say was, ‘Well, everyone did the same. Maybe it was more of a custom during those times.’

As Father grew older and frailer, he still had a very stingy tone for Mother. Mother was a strong peasant woman and she bore his sharp words with nonchalance and sometimes dismissed them with a smile. A few people of their generation told me that Father was worse in behavior towards her in the past. But she bore it very calmly like all the women of her age and times did. They had taken it as a custom of the times. Tau Devi Singh’s wife also accepted his stinging barbed arrows with a smile. ‘Tai, you never seem to get angry at Tau for his mistreatment of you,’ I would say sometimes. ‘He is already angry for both of us,’ she would smile, adding, ‘Well, that’s the way he is. I’ve always seen him like this. It doesn’t matter son. It would have mattered had I seen him better. Then the change would have been painful. Now it hardly matters.’

Our Bua—we had nicknamed her Chalti, although why did we name her as someone translated as ‘smart walker’ with her tiny legs is a mystery—also bore the lifelong ire of her handsome six-footer husband. Despite all the repulsive shoves and even kicks she kept sticking to him—there was no other option, where to go, how to survive, what to eat, where to stay. She bore him many children, all of good height except one who took to her in stature. All along these years, her husband kept throwing his tantrums and even utensils at her. It made her a very strong, stubborn defender against the agents of fate that would constantly tug at her ego to revolt. But that would count as spoiling even the little she possessed. During his old, bedridden days she took a good care of him. During the fag end of his life, when there was hardly anything else to do with either hands or tongue due to imbecility, he would still somehow manage to topple the glass and thus spill over water, milk or medicine she was making him drink. It was meant to augment the inconvenience to her. Whenever he did it, she would understand and say gently, ‘See, do whatever you want in this life. Abuse me, slap me. I’ll fulfill all my duties as your wife. But don’t expect me to bear all this in the next birth as well. In this life I can guarantee that I’ll do it all. But for future births I won’t commit at all.’

I remember this old man during our childhood. He had gone completely blind. His wife was considerably younger to him. His blindness got some advantage to the woman because now he missed his mark with his throws of brass tumblers. The throws from the rasping tongue usually mattered very little to these rural women. Unaffected by his tantrums, she carried her old man on their horse, unmindful of his relentless mutterings and grumblings all targeting her as if she was the source of all his miseries.