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.        

A little chronicle of intimacies

 Old Taus and Tais would pour out their hearts to me. I have been lucky to listen to their very personal tales, the exciting chronicles of their youth. Dozens of old people from the village shared very personal stuff with me. For the sanctity of their trust, I would keep their names secret and call them Tau A, Tau B, Tai C, etc. I don’t think that even if I mention them by names there would be any big scandal. These are routine things in the countryside in the lives of the farming community. But still from my own code of conduct I should keep the identities secret. Most of them are gone and a few survive almost like God with that marvelous surrender and cool detachment. But it’s exciting to imagine that they were once warm-blooded with hormonal excitement. Further, you never know some semi-criminalized grandson of one of them might break the hand that writes about the histories of their forefathers.

I remember Tau A fondly retelling those glorious old days when society was simpler and the sense of brotherhood among clan members and extended families ruled supreme. ‘Those were real good days! Brothers shared a great bond. We tolerated very easily most of the things for which there would be bloodshed these days. See son, I would be out during winter nights irrigating the wheat crop and would return after midnight. And most of the time I saw my younger brother hurrying out of the quilt of my wife. I knew it. But I always pretended not to see it. Most of us pretended it and allowed the younger brothers to have good fun with our wives. Where would they go?’ he told it so easily in full flow without slightest inhibition.

I was pretty small then but I recall the episode pretty clearly. Tai B was telling the episode when intimacy was forced upon her by Tau C—good lord, was it the same Tau C who appeared so disciplined after joining an ashram during the old age. It was clearly a case of enforced intimacy but her hollow-cheeked laughter makes me feel that she had long forgiven if she carried any anger. ‘I was cutting fodder one noon. There wasn’t anyone around in the fields. He came very politely and asked me to help him tie his fodder bale. I followed him to the place where he indicated his fodder was lying. He kept saying a bit further into the furrows of tall Jowar. Then I found there was nothing to tie down. It was a ploy to untie…my cord. Once it started I thought there was no point in resisting. If it is so, then let it be! There were bigger issues for us to sort out than this. At least he wasn’t bad at it!’ she laughed nudging at the old ribs of another woman. All of them heartily laughed. ‘If it can be passed so casually, where would ‘rape’ fit in then?’ I wonder now. Well, it depends upon people’s own choice. It started without her consent but ended with her approval so much so that she compliments Tau C who is no more and must be feeling proud of his virility in the other world.

Tau D was too proud of his wee-wee. He would pretend to urinate when young women passed. Getting tongue-lashed was very normal for him. But then he ran out of luck and got more than a tongue-lashing. A Banjara woman—an audacious gypsy woman—hit the item of his pride with a mulberry switch. He nearly fainted. His flashing escapades withdrew. Maybe the concerned anatomical item withdrew into its shell after the strike.

Tai E was very liberal in the matters of intimacy and explored the groins of many farmers during her prime. Now all of them were drooping with age and fragile bones. I remember her as a petite woman. She wasn’t hesitant about publicly discussing how much milking she had performed on a particular bull. We remember her doing her duties till the fag end of her life as she would unabashedly visit an apish Tau F who seemed to be still active in his old age.

Tai G was more comfortable without her skirt than with it on. So we need not repeat the obvious. She was known for her rivalry with Tai E for the much-in-demand Tau F. He must have been a good bull for milking because everyone agreed that he was still active in his eighties.  

Tau H had lost his wife many years back and thus carried a big load of lust in his bulky body. In his late seventies he lunged at a chance to vent out all his pent-up lust. A middle aged Banjara woman was roaming in the streets asking fodder for their cattle. It was a hot noon. Tau H got her into the barn on the pretext of giving her fodder. He was successful in his mission. But he turned a miser at the time of payment. He had promised her a big bale of fodder and thought of duping her by giving just a little amount of wheat husk. I think he underestimated the audacity of these gypsy women. There she was shouting expletives at the top of her voice. The little amount of fodder was put in the streets and her top-voiced denouement of Tau H went sashaying across hot air. The people came out of their houses. ‘See-see, this is what this shameless oldie has given me! Just a fistful of fodder for all that devilish *** he gave me!’ she was shouting. She was putting up her stick to notify the measurement of Tau H’s endowment. So everyone came to know how much Tau H measured and what he did. ‘He is a cheater!’ she declared.   

The first and the last lady don of the entire area from our village, Tai I, can fill up entire chronicles full of her sex trafficking, robberies, charity, bride abduction, armed squad and much-much more. She ruled the prime land of Jat patriarchy during the thirties to the sixties of the last century. Those who were born after her demise still know her name. So that gives the idea of her popularity. I tried to gather material on her from the old men in the village. But they were all dismissive about her. It’s understandable because she had hit very hard on their wee-wee at a time when a woman was considered even lower than a buffalo in a farmer’s house. If I get enough material I plan to write a book on her sometime. Regarding intimacies, it’s understandable that she was far-far advanced than her times. 

Tai J turned out to be a pioneer in the art of intimacy. She was reputed to be very beautiful in her youth and carried faded traces of that charm even in her seventies. One of my classmates from the village school was eying her granddaughter. He was around fifteen at that time. He started visiting Tai J's house quite regularly. Tai J, experienced with age and full of wisdom, smelt the hormonal storm going inside the teenager for her granddaughter. As a wise matriarch she channelized the direction of the storm towards herself. The boy was expertly seduced and looked very happy during those days. Tai J looked even happier on having a lover of her grandson's age. I came to know about the reason of their happiness when only the old neighborhood dog and me were left out of its knowledge. He shared the information a few years back only. 'You didn't know? I thought only the cattle, dogs and cattle were out of the loop of this open-source knowledge!' he wondered when I shared that I never had any clue to this. Tai J carried the most contended smile among all the elderly women of her generation. In fact, I interpreted it as the smile of a sage. Now I know the worldly causes of the saintly smiles. God must have been very creative in fabricating such an interesting world. 

The groom-hunting squad

The villagers fondly called him Pahalwan. And pretty aptly so; just that he would look suitable for wrestling with skeletons only, having just a slight addition of skin over the bones. A wrestler of extreme feather-weight category I would say.

Those were the days when the fabled Indian arranged marriage was at the peak of its authority over the society. It churned out fabulous pairs. Six-footer burly guys got paired with thin, midget-sized gals. Or an above six feet girl had a tiny dulha whom she could easily carry in her arms like a baby. Or an extra-heavy girl had a thin groom whom she could easily crush with her weight. Or a prince charming in looks got a wife that would make anyone run for life after looking at her face. Or a demon-looking guy got a heavenly houri.

People would just fall into the pools of matrimony with a distinctly unassuming self, sweetly giving into the tersely teasing illusions of youthful desires. It was more of a draw of lots. Luck was the supreme decider in what did you get. It could be a grain of sand or it could be a nugget of gold. Those were but extreme cases. Most of the time it was a rundown mix of all the good and bad in both sexes involving physicality and natures. And with all the expected frictions, altercations, fights and quarrels the creaking cart of matrimony would drag on with its drama. Despite all the triggers, there was no tear-jerking drama. The teasing travails of a rough and tough countryside life made a motley mix of everything available.

Beyond brooding over twisted destinies and doomed fates, after the brief spells of buck-passing, the sediments settled at last, and people usually accepted what fell in their lot and moved on with life. The seamless conundrum of marriage carried a huge social sanction and breaking it on such inconsequential grounds would amount to breaching social and divine law. So divorces and partings were an exception even though the husband and wife were the most ill-paired ones.

During those days, parties of elders from the girl’s side would go scouting for a groom. They walked authoritatively in a file, wearing starched dhoti-kurta, carrying well-oiled sticks and their big turbans fitting majestically like warrior helmets for the groom hunt in the battle of matrimony. They carried an onus to hunt successfully. Someone would recommend a name and there they would go creating ripples of excitement among the youngsters of marriageable age.

A party on scout for a suitable groom arrived suddenly at the house of this Pahalwan. He hadn’t been forewarned. He hardly got any time to turn presentable. He was washing clothes on a stone slab wearing only a sleeveless vest. They stood around him. He panicked like a little hare hounded by old turbaned wolves. The leader of the expedition inspected him closely and calmly said the words of wisdom becoming his age, in fact chimed matter-of-factly, ‘Don’t take him for pheras, take him to a doctor!’ The file of groom hunters walked out silently. 

Take a long walk before decising to marry

 In the year 1988, a Serbian artist named Marina Abramovic and her German partner named Ulay, much in love and looking forward to marriage, egged on by the unfaltering command of mutual infatuation, fully enamored with each other and eager to share the paradisiacal joy of matrimony, decided to walk from the opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. They planned to marry at the point they met on the historic wall, considering it an aesthetical and classical culmination of a journey to mingle into each other at many levels. It was a nice trekking from both ends. They walked pleasantly and finally met at some point. But they met with the realization—airlifted into the momentum of newer truths—that they didn’t want to marry and returned to their places separately.

Seeing the life through a fresh kaleidoscope, after going through multitudes of dew-fresh experiences, you turn a stranger to your old self. You are no longer held at ransom by the beliefs and emotions that defined your former sense of being. Maybe walking on open paths, with their daring allurement, with their untrampled and wild prospects, makes you see the truth better. The long-eyelashed coquetry of flimsy, skidding emotions gives way to a healthy pragmatism. Inhibited and repressed truths about the self and the others sneak out as you lose your grip on them. The bindweed and wild clover on unpaved ways, which you dismissed earlier as inconsequential clumps of weed, guide you to a mysterious unearthly splendor which any well-planned, properly paved and designed rosebed, properly gated and guarded with the grills and railings of our fears and insecurities, would fail to accomplish. The floating façade made of large-scale assumptions crumbles down. And the absurdly overstretched, congested self opens to glorious scenarios.

So all the couples who are in a dilemma about marriage must walk for a few hundred kilometers from opposite directions and meet on the way. Walking on earth gets us grounded and makes us realize the futility of staying on cloud nine forever. As you walk and see the naked realities of life, without pretentions and hypocrisies, with each kilometer walked you get better like wine with age. Your vociferous ideologies melt down and the smart, savvy, lionized self reshapes to acquire more realistic outlines.

A swordish wife

 Bunna has an avant-garde, sharp-edged wife. He has been a withdrawn youth but at last fate has feted him with an instrument to beat his brooding self trapped inside a recalcitrant persona. He is safely drafted into matrimony, having hit the jackpot to get a wife at last. There is no scope for any sort of discontentment now as long as there is a wife. So now as a young man, looking for the satiation of the customary desire, he easily gets what he needs at this stage of life. These are bewitching days suffused with enchantment of flesh. Life seems a cakewalk with varied compilation of the much-touted sense pleasure; a kind of true-to-life tenderness blooming like lotus among the mud of tyranny and suffocation.

Mostly all relationships carry love-hate shades. Apart from the usual recreations and raptures, his wife’s requirements but cover a broader horizon. She is very quick to hit the belligerent trajectory. She sandblasts her husband, so much so that hers is a legend-spinning persona in the neighborhood. Although evocative and vivid in her fun-games with her husband, she scratches his face and spits at him when she suffers from the fits of her volcanic temper.

He is receptive to all this with a wobbly cuteness. He carries an ironic, wispy half-smile. As she gallantly takes a crushing grip at the last traces of his freedom, he coolly bears all this, knowing fully well that this is the investment he has to commit in lieu of all that he needs. In fact, he considers himself lucky to have a wife. He is the only one fortunate enough to get a wife among three brothers. He is wise and understands that if he reacts, on the spur of an anarchist moment, his grip on matrimonial pleasure may be gone with an extraordinary twinkle. So he is joyously yoked into the affair with a womanly compliance. I find him pretty strong willed in this, a sort of strong-charactered guy who is compellingly consistent in his demeanor. 

He works in a needle-making factory. It’s a very careful work where you cannot afford to be in estrangement with caution even for a moment. In this way, he is completely used to needling by his perk, petite, curvaceous, young, temperamental wife. On a Sunday, he lets his guard slightly down. It’s late morning. He takes few pegs of the cheap desi liquor, offering one to his razor-sharp wife also. A romantic Bollywood song then shatters the neighborhood walls. It’s eroticizing and exoticizing romance beyond limits. The exquisite lyrics carry their sensuous notes with incorrigible loudness. The locality’s peace lies in shambles, almost in disrepair.

The frivolous notes sneak into serious corners. Someone is in the middle of an online examination going. Bunna and his sharp wife are caught in dulled, gyrating moments, as a prelude to their tumbling fight in the bed, by the complainant who arrives at the door of their small upstairs room in their tiny house. This is a clear KLPD. Her romantic energies then change to vendetta against her husband. He is sympathetic to the complaint raised by the neighbor and hence lowers the volume. Now the sizzling energies in the razor-sharp wife need an escape medium. She pounces upon her husband calling him a floundering sissy and coward who pees at the instructions of ever-exploiting neighbors. The volume of sound stays the same, as loud as earlier, just that now it’s the wife raising a storm.

At a Peasant Wedding

 

It’s quite tough to be a non-drinking member of a wedding party in Haryana. Everyone is drunk to be in an enlightened dimension, leaving me the poor earthling struggling with the ground realities. Since truth is decided by the majority, I feel myself clueless and almost an idiot. The marriage DJ starts blaring. The massive woofers and speakers of the music system shake the ground under my steady feet. The liquor-lovers look more sure-footed with their unsteady feet on a shaky ground. The loud blasts of music leave my ribs shaken.

Drunk peasants give a fantastic thrust to their spirits. They challenge all norms of established mindsets, cultural matrix and constitutional niceties. It’s madly adventurous to be among them, I tell you. If you aren’t a fellow seminarist to them, then be prepared for an onslaught by the agents of anarchy.

Hinduism is indeed very liberal. The starting song is a dedication to drunkenness. ‘Bhola takes a bucket of bhang and shakes his bum to ecstatic dance’ is the approximate translation of the rowdy Haryanvi song about Lord Shiva’s fondness for bhang. They are so happy that the Lord Himself loves drinking. Dozens of liquor-lovers turn ecstatic.

Flying drones is prohibited without authorization in India. And so is celebratory firing. But most of what we do in celebration falls on the other side of law. A young man is flying a drone to make it the best marriage party ever to have visited the village. Another is firing angry vollies of bullets into the body of a helpless sky. I try to add value to their fun. ‘A drone just hovering around is no fun and so is the blind and aimless firing into the sky,’ I call their attention. ‘You try your aiming skills at the drone,’ I propose the scheme to the gun wielder. ‘You prove your expertise in flying by taking it away from the bombardment,’ I suggest to the drone flier. Dozens of voices grab the option and they are egged on to start the game. Even random, close-eyed shots would have a better chance. The boozed man’s careful shot shakes the skies. An electric wire finds the aim. Snap goes the wire with a bang. The scared drone crashes on an attic, making it a perfect drone attack.

There is a spin-off from the same wedding. I come home at night, hugely relieved to come in one piece. But someone bangs fists at the iron gate. He is a most distant relative, so distant that you lose the trail of the relationship if you try to go to the source, who has come attending the same marriage function. He is curtly denied entry into any of the houses he thought had a duty to entertain his stay. Perhaps someone suggested that the writer is a good option under the circumstances. So here he comes to my place. He is unsteady in gait but very steadily holds his feeble right to stay at my place. What will you do, if even after you declaring his totally unwelcome status through your gruff behavior, he pretends to be most at ease as if flowers have just been sprinkled over him, making him the most esteemed guest on earth? You have to be an out and out rascal in bad behavior to help him accept his unwelcome status. The roughest cut-sharp notes are simply songs of welcome to him, so here he is sprawled comfortably on the bed and I take my bedding on a cot in a corner in another room. But before that he prefers to be more welcomed through talks. He is very proud about his vast travels. ‘How many places you have visited in India?’ I am finally forced to ask, getting curious about his far and wide travels. ‘I have travelled far and wide!’ he declares. Then he enlists a thorough sketch of his forced entries into the houses in the neighboring districts within a diameter of 50 km. ‘I have travelled a lot,’ he declares with the world-weary finality of a traveler who has just returned after taking a trip around the earth or maybe even beyond. Thank God, this feeling of world-hopping travel got him sleepy and he dozed off.

But well into the depths of night, another liquor-lover is singing his bawdy songs against humanity. He has drunk away his land and domestic peace. The last installment of the compensation money for his land acquired for a new road project was swiftly drunk away. All that was left was a lakh of rupees. A smart guy cleverly branded his old car at 1.25 lakh rupees. The real price must be around 75000 rupees. He gave a discount of 35000 and sold the car for 90000 rupees. The liquor-lover hits the ceiling in hitting the jackpot.

In return of the favor done to the purchaser, the seller gets a promise to use the vehicle as and when needed till he gets a new car himself. It will be an exception though, he promised to the new owner of the dented old car. In addition, there was another condition. This one made the liquor-lover really happy. He had to promise to take the old owner and his group on two trips to Haridwar. Fun trips, they promised. The two proposed trips to the pilgrimage town saw the rest of the money going out of the pocket. The borrowing of the car turned out to be a generality, not the exception as promised earlier. There is no new car purchased by the previous owner so far. The frequent borrowings result in repeated tiffs between the neighbors. And carrying the momentum from one of the numerous tiffs, he is now tearing apart the shrouds of dark night with his piercing shouts.  

The New Bride

 

She is a new bride, pretty looking, slender and curvaceous with a biting pout on her lips. Whatever energy is left after the night revelries driven by the youthful passion, she spends it on her mother-in-law. The old woman has a loafy, gruffy, rumbling tone that booms in a dull way. It’s highly inept for fighting. The young woman, on the other hand, is incisive like a knife. Her high-pitched, sharp notes cut through the buttery, loafy resistance of her mother-in-law. Who wins is a foregone conclusion. She easily tames the old woman during the day. For the nights, her pretty face and slender figure is more than sufficient to tame the already exhausted husband who works in a needle factory in a nearby town. He is well aware of the dangers presented by small, sharp, incisive things. And thus starts another little story of lengthening another pedigree.

The Matrimonial Bamboo

 

A guy married very late, at the age of forty in fact. In the conservative village society, it’s almost like getting married while you are peeping into your grave. They would love child marriages any day. His classmate in the village school meets him after a few years. ‘I hardly meant to marry but this society, peer pressure, and family and relatives nagging my soul day and night forced me into marriage at last. I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was like they had put the end of a stick into my bum and held it to maneuver around,’ he lamented. ‘And now by agreeing to get married, you have allowed the stick to be entirely thrust inside you, so carry it smartly now,’ the friend quipped matter of factly.

Village marriages of the bygone era

 

We eagerly looked forward to weddings at our village during childhood, especially the girl weddings. Cheap, various-colored sweets looked like divine desserts in those days. But then a girl’s marriage would mean the groom’s wedding party coming to the village. It’s very difficult to decipher the entire set of monstrosities unleashed by the sloshed wedding party members. It was a special day for them under patriarchal rules. So even their most goonish conduct was viewed as funny at the most. They were entitled to the entire set of follies expected from a sloshed person.

They would mistreat the music band members, kick the groom’s horse, wallow in mud, shout profanities, make lewd gestures and make passes at the entire village womenfolk. Save the groom, whose face radiated some semblance of grace for getting a wife, the rest of his party would be a perfect example of ugliness and puerilities. It was a kind of unutterable indulgence that chucked out the entire village’s peace.

No wonder, thrashing the groom’s party before seeing off the bride wasn’t an exception. They would unleash a firmament and the helpless villagers, cumbered with fathomless woes, would forget the sublimities of welcome offered to the party a few hours ago and pounce upon the evil. It was a gigantic necessity to do so in most of the cases.

The drunk revelers would do snake and monkey dance to the drumbeats and throw coins and even 10 rupee notes in the air. It would enkindle a stampede among the onlooking village boys and they would rush to pick up the coins. Then the impervious baratis would beat the culprits who had picked the coins. And the beaten boys would take revenge later. As the buses and other vehicles started to go back, they would throw stones to break the maximum number of windowpanes and rival heads if possible.

Once we felt well recompensed when we hammered a wooden piece into the exhaust pipe of a wedding party bus and it won’t start causing a lot of anxiety and inconvenience among the foes. This slimy novelty was hurtled in their face because one of the boys from our group had been slapped because he had caught a 10-rupee note mid air that was hurled into the skies by a wildly drunk barati in celebration. So the bus won’t start for a long time and once it did there was a hail of stones. That’s how weddings were celebrated during our childhood in the eighties of the last century.