Even in fiction, these lives are intertwined with India’s history and Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings

Munna is a nickname used throughout northern India to address boys. Its counterpart is Munni, used for small girls. Both have become so ubiquitous that now, few parents choose them as a specific nickname for their child. Earlier, this was not so. When my mother used it to address Viresh Pratap Singh some seventy years ago, his parents appreciated it so much that they switched over from the nickname Vir, which they had given him, to Munna. Vir suited his royal background more, but my mother’s affection for him, and her own status as an educated woman in that small town in a princely state ensured that her choice prevailed. She had been appointed as the headmistress of the first-ever school for girls that Vir’s uncle, the King, had established. At that time, central India had hardly any educated, let alone trained, women who could serve as teachers and headmistresses in schools for girls that the provincial government of the newly independent India was keen to promote. This region had not yet fully merged into the Union of India, so the King’s initiative was highly appreciated.

His brother, Viresh Pratap’s father, rented out a part of his mansion to my parents who had come to this town as Partition refugees. They had lost the last of their belongings and had narrowly escaped with their lives before crossing over from Pakistan to the Indian side of Punjab. Despite this unimaginable calamity, they were able to strike fresh roots rather quickly in this faraway kingdom in central India because they were both highly qualified professionals. My father had been a practising lawyer in the High Court of Lahore. As for my mother, her graduate degree and teacher training qualifications were unique for a woman of an era where even the Queen was not all that literate. My mother’s pioneer spirit and Punjabi energy to persuade local notables and others to hand over their daughters to her care in her school were appreciated by the royal clan. So, when my mother began calling VP Singh Munna, that nickname stuck.

Munna had vaguely curly hair, large light green eyes – quite typical of Bundela royalty – and a barely visible chin, amply compensated for by a prominent nose. By contrast, I had hardly any nose and outward-looking ears, like my father’s. People must have wondered why I had failed to inherit my parent’s long Punjabi nose. I suppose Munna’s nose had to do for the both of us. Munna’s mother was a delicate and beautiful, short-statured lady who held me in long hugs whenever she met me. Very few things kept her occupied in her mansion where servants lurked in every corner, one for every possible chore or errand. My mother, by contrast, was tall, hardy, and always busy running our newly established home without much help. At the same time, she managed all the various tasks and responsibilities that the first-ever school for girls in a conservative community involved. Amid all the commotion of her daily routine, my mother still found time to indulge Munna – and rather more time than she found for me, or so I thought.

Now the thing about Munna as a nickname is that, in most cases, it sticks for life. No matter how stout and masculine an adult a little Munna becomes, and no matter how high an office he occupies in his career, he continues to be called Munna in the family and by neighbours, early playmates and even perhaps by their offspring. This is how I too started calling VP, Munna, though he was a year older than me. We played the inconsequential games of early boyhood together with great vigour before cutting our teeth on cricket, hockey and badminton. Munna’s father was, in fact, a member of the local cricket team and led it in some of the five-day-long test matches against the team of our neighbouring princely state.

Our boyhood days gave us generous opportunity for pranks, most of which were innocent though some were not. The main thing was that our parents, though markedly different in temperament and backgrounds, displayed a confident and jolly hands-off attitude towards the two of us and our bond of friendship, which was to last for life. It was only towards the end of our elementary grades that Munna’s father declared his intention of sending him away to the Scindia School in Gwalior so that he might learn how to ghitter-pitter in English. Up until this point, we had both attended the new experimental school for a full eight years, some four miles away from the town in a forested location through which flowed a noisy and bubbling river.

Kundeshwar, as the place was called, was famous in the area for a Shiva temple built on a high sandstone promontory overlooking a tremendously deep pond formed, according to legend, by a meteor, millions of years ago. Our school was barely visible from the temple, surrounded as it was by tall mango, teak and neem trees. The school had been established by the interim provincial government of what was then known as Vindhya Pradesh, each of whose seven districts was a princely kingdom intent on setting its terms for agreeing to merge with the Union government of the newly independent nation. After Gandhi was assassinated at the end of January 1948, the minister in charge of education in the interim provincial government, who happened to be from our district and had participated in the Quit India Movement in the early 1940s, selected Kundeshwar as the site for an elementary school, where Gandhi’s Nai Talim, or New Education, could be put into practice. There could have been no better location than the peaceful – yet rocky – sylvan Vindhya landscape.

Close to our school were the extensive orchards of mango and guava owned by Munna’s uncle, the Maharaja. No one dared stop Munna and me from spending fine time among the orchards, climbing the trees and plucking raw fruit, or scaring away the parrots digging their strong red beaks into the ripening mangoes and guavas – depending on the season – before we could pick them. This was a paradise for two young boys before and after school, which itself was a grand experiment in child-centred education.

The curriculum of our school was unique. The range of activities featured in it covered all the usual subjects but with more than a tinge of reinterpretation of the conventional knowledge these subjects stood for – and still do in several schools. We learned math from measuring cotton plants that we had ourselves sown and watered and weeded; watching them grow, caring for the buds as they developed. As for science, we learned it from the colours and oils used in creative ways—through skills such as bookbinding, dyeing thread, and spinning and weaving and cooking. And, of course, there was a language – Hindi – that was enriched and enhanced by everything that we did with our own hands and discussed threadbare among ourselves and with our teachers. Even the Hindi grammar exercises prepared by our teachers were cyclostyled by us, children, on a Gestetner machine that we adored, cranking out sheet after sheet, one for each child…and perhaps a few more.

Along with a new Ambassador that he drove himself, Munna’s father had an old green Dodge that chuntered with a brave racket along the not-so-smooth road flanked by mahua trees, four miles out of town to our school in Kundeshwar. The school day officially ended at 3 pm; Munna and I would engage in an intimate dialogue with the chatty driver, Bhagwandass, requesting him to let us take a swim in the river or climb the trees of mango or whichever fruit was in season, before heading back home. After such secret adventures and the school day’s densely packed activities, we had plenty of time for long conversations in the backseat of the Dodge while going home. Neither of our fathers had any interest or idea about what our Gandhian school was imparting. They were satisfied that the school was being run well by the government. My mother also had little idea about what the Nai Talim associated with Mahatma Gandhi was all about, but she was greatly impressed with the little things that we brought home, which we had ourselves made at school. One day when Munna gave her a papier mâché cat that he had made and painted, she felt touched. When a few months later, he gave my father a sheet of handmade paper, he said, “That’s good”, without taking a second look. But my mother was beside herself with joy and contentment – that a princely boy could do so much with his hands. She could spot in Munna a great seed of transformation – a seed that she thought would bring change to India.

Excerpted with permission from Thank You, Gandhi, Krishna Kumar, Penguin India.