1st India Visit

At the time of my first trip back to India, my oldest nieces and nephews were still small children. I lived a long way from everyone else in the family, but I saw them from time to time and knew them all quite well.

I didn’t really know my relatives in India at all. None of us had seen any of them since we left. I knew a little bit about them because Mum sometimes got short notes with Christmas cards from Grandma and Uncle John. Mum always sent a letter with a card at Christmas.

Both grandads and the other grandma had died within a few years of our leaving India, and Dad had completely lost touch with both his brothers. They were much older than him, and had left Evansganj to go and work in Bombay when he was still small.

I wrote to Uncle John to tell him I was coming, but never received a reply. I was confident of simply finding somewhere to stay whether I managed to find the family or not, and fully intended to travel around India independently quite a bit in my six months anyway. But I thought I’d go to Evansganj first.

October 1978

India was quite a shock, even though I’d spent the first seven years of my life there, and knew quite a lot about it in theory. I stayed in a guesthouse in Delhi for a couple of days, and then caught the train to Evansganj.

The train had already done a couple of hundred miles before arriving in Delhi, and was two hours late and very crowded. I’d reserved a berth, but until nine in the evening anyone can sit anywhere. Your berth is exclusively yours only from nine until six – or, to be strictly accurate, from the place where the train should have reached by nine in the evening, until the place it should reach by six. It was midnight before I got my bed to myself.

But I didn’t care, everyone was so friendly, and all of them wanted to practice their English on me and feed me. I’ve heard tales of travellers being given drugged food or drinks on trains, but these things don’t happen often, and I’m sure that they happen even less often on trains that rarely have foreign tourists on them. And there were plenty of other people around, so I felt pretty safe.

It’s a twenty-one hour journey according to the timetable, and we were five hours late by the time we arrived in Evansganj. It was beginning to get dark by then. I had Uncle John’s address, of course, and I got a rickshaw to take me.

A young man about my own age answered the door.

“Does John O’Malley live here? Is he at home?” I didn’t try to use my rusty, childish Hindi on him. I hoped he’d understand English.

He turned and shouted into the house, “Dad!” just like that, in English.

Uncle John appeared. He looked older of course, but he was the same Uncle John I remembered from twenty-two years earlier. He took one look at me and grabbed me in a big bear hug, lifting me clean off my feet. Then he put me down and held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down.

“Well!” he said at last, “Is it Penny-Lou or Pippa-Liz? How am I supposed to know? We never thought we’d see you again!”

“Ravi – go and get your Mum, and tell Shanti to make some chai.”

The young man disappeared into the house. “He’s your son? He seems about my age!”

“Yes, he’s my son – your cousin. He is your age, near enough. Just a year younger than you. Come inside and sit down. We’ve got an awful lot to talk about!”

A very black lady with silver hair, a very round face and a beaming smile appeared. She was even smaller than me.

“Chhoti, this is – ah – this is your niece, but I still don’t know whether it’s Penny-Lou or Pippa-Liz.”

“I’m Penny. Pippa’s much bigger than me.”

A surprised look appeared on Uncle John’s face, but he went on, “Penny-Lou, this is Chhoti, my wife. That was Ravi, our eldest, you just met. Now let’s go inside and sit down.”

Chhoti is Hindi for Little (feminine), or Little One, and is often used as a nickname for little girls, but I’d never heard it as an adult’s name before.

The house brought back memories of the one Grandma and Grandad lived in when I was little, which was very similar. The furniture looked as though it might have been the same pieces – all obviously handmade from local timber, aged to a lovely dark chocolate brown, and a little irregular here and there. The three of us sat at a small table. A girl of about twenty brought a tray with three cups of chai and a glass of water. Ravi followed her in and sat down. The girl put the tray on the table and went and stood in the corner of the room looking at me shyly.

“Shanti, Shanti – no need to be shy. Penny-Lou, this is your cousin Shanti. Shanti, this is your cousin Penny-Lou.”

Well, I knew from Mum that Uncle John was married and had three children. Their ages were a bit of a puzzle, but I was beginning to guess.

“Yes, you’ve guessed, I can see. I wonder what your mother will say?”

“She doesn’t know? I was beginning to wonder whether she’d been keeping secrets from me. If you’d rather I didn’t tell her, that’s easy enough. She wouldn’t think anything of the facts themselves, but she’d be hurt that you’d never told her.”

“She wouldn’t think anything of the facts themselves? She’s changed a lot in twenty years, then.”

“There’s been a lot of water under a lot of bridges in that time. I lived with a chap I wasn’t married to for three years. She came to terms with that in the end.”

We talked and talked. Ravi put in the odd word from time to time, but Chhoti and Shanti said not a word. They just sat and stood there smiling, and sometimes laughing with the rest of us. It was nearly all Uncle John and me.

After a while, Chhoti and Shanti slipped quietly out of the room. A little later Shanti popped her head round the door and whispered to Ravi, “Idhar ao!” – Hindi for “Come here.” Ravi excused himself and slipped out too. He was gone for about half an hour, but then he was back with us.

Shanti brought another round of chai and some sweetmeats, then disappeared again.

I told John all about Paul, and my University work, and Patrick’s and Pippa’s families. I learnt how he’d lived a double life for years, with no-one in Evansganj knowing about Chhoti and their children in Dhumshakti, ten miles up the line where he worked at the railway station. Well, no-one who didn’t keep diplomatically silent, anyway! Then, when Grandad died, how they’d decided to get married and make it all official, mainly so that Ravi could move to the mission school in Evansganj, that was so much better than the government school in Dhumshakti.

I could imagine how it was all quite a scandal in a rather puritanical white protestant Christian community in a small town in India. I gathered that attitudes had changed a lot in Evansganj – and suspected that John and Chhoti had had a lot to do with the changes. Well done John and Chhoti! But that was all eighteen years ago, and apart from John and Grandma, all the other white people in Evansganj had either died or left since then.

Kamal, their other son, between Ravi and Shanti, was working in Dhumshakti, and only came home two nights a week – different nights depending on his rota. John joked about him maybe having a family there and no-one knowing about it, but he thought it a bit unlikely. “I think he knows it wouldn’t be necessary to keep it secret! And it would be hard anyway, with so many of Chhoti’s relatives there.”

Chhoti and Shanti appeared with a massive feast and set it on the table in front of the three of us, then disappeared into the shadows. John called them back to the table, “Penny-Lou is family, not an outsider! Come and eat with us.” Beaming smiles and a little reluctance, but John insisted, and they did eat with us – but still they didn’t say a word.

The meal was wonderful. Ravi had been sent out to procure a chicken from a neighbour who kept them, and had killed it on the way home so I wouldn’t hear anything – but I only learnt that later.

After the meal, we carried on talking deep into the night. Chhoti and Shanti went to bed, but then got up again when John wanted to make arrangements for where I was going to sleep. I was to sleep in Shanti’s bed, and Shanti would sleep with some blankets on the kitchen floor. I said no, I’d sleep on the floor – I was used to sleeping anywhere. “I’m used to sleeping on the kitchen floor!” Shanti insisted; but I wasn’t having it. Eventually I saw the bed – it was wide, nearly as wide as a typical English double bed, and Shanti and I ended up sleeping side by side.

When the two of us were alone, Shanti broke her silence, and we talked and talked and talked. Shanti kept switching back and forth between English and Hindi when she got excitable, which brought my Hindi flooding back, and we ended up chatting in a complete muddle of Hindi and English. We laughed and laughed. It was dawn before we finally went to sleep – or I did, anyway. I think Shanti got up when I went to sleep, but I’m not sure, it could have been a bit later. She’d certainly been up and about for a long time by the time I surfaced not long before midday.

John and Ravi had already gone to work when I got up. John worked at the goods yard, and Ravi worked at the cement works. Chhoti and Shanti both worked in the mission hospital in Evansganj, but they were both on their day off. They took me round to Grandma’s house as soon as we’d eaten – lunch for them, breakfast for me, but the same meal anyway.

Grandma was still living in the same house that she and Grandpa had lived in twenty odd years before – for much longer than that, in fact. Both Mum and John had been born and raised there.

Grandma was still sprightly, and said she’d had a feeling she’d see at least one of us before she died. She complained that Mum hadn’t sent her a card last Christmas, and I said that she always did, every year. Then Grandma got to complaining about the Indian postal service instead.

There was a knock at the door. “That’ll be Miriam,” said Grandma. “You answer it, Penny-Lou. She’ll be so pleased!”

Miriam was our Ayah when we were children. I’d always known her name was Miriam, but no-one had ever used her name talking to me before – she was always Ayah.

“Penny-Lou!” Uncle John hadn’t known whether I was Penny or Pippa – but Ayah did.

I didn’t remember Ayah as small at all. In reality, she was even smaller than Chhoti.

Hugging isn’t the usual thing amongst Indians, but this was my Ayah, who’d cuddled Pippa and me every day for the first seven years of our lives. It was my turn to hug my tiny Ayah. There were tears in her eyes, the first I’d seen in India.

It wasn’t until many years later, after Ayah died, that I learnt something about her history.

She had been a member of the Christian congregation in one of the outlying villages. Like many Indian Christians, she hadn’t married young like most of her Hindu peers. In her late twenties – probably, no-one knew exactly which year she’d been born – she’d married a much older man.

For several years, they had remained sadly childless. In those days, in that culture, if a couple remained childless it was quite normal for a man to blame his wife and abandon her. But Ayah’s husband was a better man than that, and remained faithful to her. Then, probably in her late thirties, she fell pregnant. She was heavily pregnant with their first child when her husband died.

It was a difficult birth, and there wasn’t much help available in the village. An older woman, experienced in helping at childbirth but not trained, did the best she could, but it was clear than neither Ayah nor the baby were well. A boy was sent by bicycle to the mission compound in a village fifteen miles away, and the missionary – not a qualified doctor, but experienced in such matters because he’d found it necessary to be – came and patched Ayah up as best he could. Ayah and the baby were despatched to the mission hospital in Evansganj, but it was a long and difficult journey in those days. It still is a long and difficult journey, but it was much worse in 1948. The baby was dead by the time they reached Evansganj.

Ayah survived, but the doctor in Evansganj said she’d never be able to have another child.

She had no hope of getting married again, and once she’d recovered sufficiently to get out and about, she went looking for work – just at the time the doctor told my parents that he thought Mum was going to have twins. He was right. That was Pippa and me.

Having once made contact, I did my best to keep in touch. I exchanged letters with Shanti and Uncle John at intervals, but the postal service in and out of Evansganj is not the most reliable. I’m not sure exactly where the problems are – whether they’re in Evansganj itself, or somewhere on the way. I gave up trying to send photographs. Nothing thicker than an envelope with a single folded sheet of paper seemed to have any chance at all of arriving.

October 1981

Happily I did get the letter inviting me to Shanti’s wedding. Ravi had been all the way to Kanpur to post it, just to be sure. Flights to India around Christmas time are particularly expensive, and it was quite a stretch for my budget, but I just had to go. They told me later that inviting me was simply their way of telling me about the wedding, without offending me by saying I wasn’t invited. They didn’t actually expect me to come, but were very pleased when I wrote and said I was coming. I sent two letters, on different days and one in an aerogram and the other in an envelope to make sure they got at least one, and both of them arrived.

Their reply never reached me despite being posted in Kanpur, so I didn’t know I was going to three weddings in two weeks until I arrived. Both Ravi and Kamal had decided, with their fiancees, to change their plans so the weddings would all be while I was in Evansganj.

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