Fiction: Militancy and madness reach the quiet town of Patiala, triggering unexpected changes

It was not an easy world to live in, particularly if you belonged.

As an outsider you could move on: a posting here, then on to yet another town. For Patiala was a town like any other in Punjab, with mushrooming supermarkets and beauty parlours and food joints; boys on bikes, hanging out where all the girls would be, and now, increasingly, the girls too, hanging out with the expectation of being found. You could simply pass by, spurning the old-world ambience and the sense of has-been royalty that settled on everything like winter fog. You could zip past the sprawling, majestic houses with their arched doorways and long cool verandas, sheltering behind the groves, and miss them altogether. You could absorb the town entirely through the Quickie Chicken Soup Corner or the General Merchant Store at Baees Number Phatak, the railway crossing, with its display of stacked socks, underwear, banians and pointed bras.

But if you belonged to the place, the past had a presence that was impossible to ignore. The Patiala Royal House, with its coat of arms which went back to the 18th century, was a “real” working palace with a current king and queen, and it continued to tantalize the local imagination long after the royal houses had been subsumed into the Indian state. Like all other royal houses, this one too had its history of annexing territory and providing protection, of excesses and magnanimities, of stories that continued to be worth the telling, and others that needed to remain skeletons in the regal cupboard. And Patiala had never quite got over being the prima donna of states during the Raj, with its polo team that boasted the highest handicap in the world and a flamboyant Maharaja who so overawed the British that they usually let him have his way.

Social gatherings in Patiala featured heads discreetly veiled in sheer chiffon, the subtle glint of family jewels, tall, imposing men in long black achkans and conversation in soft, sibilant Punjabi. However, the men had very English names. There were the Jims and Larrys and Georges and Sams, all born with very Punjabi Sikh names carrying the customary “Singh” as the suffix, but their easy-on-the-tongue British names were what they were known by. And they all had wealth enough to continue playing tennis, calling out “Ball boy!” with the well-preserved hauteur of a British sahib and partying away the night. Their days were not tainted by the urgency of the early-morning rush to work. Nor was the style of their evenings cramped by a lack of funds.

Their progeny were equally easy-going. They had even acquired a defining nomenclature. “Kakas”, they were called, which would merely have meant “young lads” in the original. But in this context the term resonated with the overtones of “rich young lads hanging out in open jeeps at the Baees Number Phatak, then zipping around town with a brutal foot on the accelerator”.

Even if you weren’t the manner born, you could fake it by digging into the royal closet of secret liaisons. Or you could hark back to a history where so many queens had fought for their king, and families had branched out in such profusion that almost anyone could trace his or her royal lineage down a complex route of marriages and kinship.

Monty could not. And perhaps that was where his troubles began. It is quite another matter that he did not want to belong, though his mother did. Her father, like his father before him, had been appointed administrative head of a village and was, therefore, an emissary of the Maharaja’s court. Now, a generation later, this legacy meant little in monetary terms. But it did mean that Monty had to be a part of the “royal” set whose members could focus on a partridge shoot to the exclusion of all else.

Monty’s father was from a different world altogether. He ran a construction business in Delhi and made money, at a time when neither was the done thing. In the fifties, trade was an absolute no-no, and the businessman was a scumbag who waited long hours at the bureaucrat’s door to get a licence or a permit to build. For true-blue respectability, money was just supposed to be there in the family coffers. You did not earn it.

“He looks like a peon,” Monty’s grandfather, educated at Chiefs’ College, Lahore, had told his daughter in his immaculate English. “And imagine having Mehta for a surname!” He had been horrified at the thought of her marrying somebody who had no greening Punjabi acre to his name. “What are you going to live on?” he had asked. And with a final damning statement, dismissed the entire bank balance of the young man in question: “He earns nothing at all. A businessman is rich one day and poor the next.”

“He earns more than enough,” his daughter had retorted, the sparkle in her eyes reflecting the magic moments of clandestine drives in her lover’s car and visits to opulent hotels whenever she was in Delhi.

“One bad deal and he may be left with no money,” her father had countered. Of course, after this ominous prediction, which she would recall many times afterwards, Monty’s mother had been left with no choice.

“I will marry no one but him.”

Her father had given in to her finally, because he was a typical Punjabi mix of an open mind and stubborn conservatism. His decisions were always a surprise, emerging from either of the two extremes of his temperament. So, he let her become Mrs Mehta, although the name never quite tasted right on his tongue. The life she had chosen for herself would be very different from the one she had known since childhood, and he resigned himself to seeing her back in Patiala before long.

In sharp contrast, Monty’s maasi, his mother’s sister, had done the right thing and got married to someone who was very much of the regal conglomerate. He had money, he had land, he did nothing at all, and he beat his wife every night. But he did not marry again, unlike many other gentlemen of consequence, and that left Monty’s maasi with a lot to be grateful for. It was all a part of this whole business of belonging. In Patiala, you could count on your fingers those who did not matter. However, as a statistical observation, this applied only to families of repute. The rest were only the hoi-polloi and did not matter in the headcount.

So, Monty’s maasi had married right. His mother had married all wrong. Though she was no revolutionary. Perhaps, her opting out of the charmed circle stemmed from her inability, or to put it in its right perspective, her disinclination to run an immaculate, patrician house. Monty’s home always seemed to have a mind of its own. Objects went their own way and surfaced at will. There were no defined spaces for the various activities that are usually carried out within an average household, except, of course, for the bathroom.

It was a huge house – a material part of the ancestral inheritance. The rooms were many. And there must have been a design to it when it was conceived. But by the time Monty began going to school, their home had become a bewildering but workable chaos. They had stopped using the front half of the house. It was only the bedroom at the back that remained in use. Here, a pair of single beds sat at arm’s length from each other, and Godrej almirahs hinted at other possessions. Across the courtyard was the kitchen, the location of which might have worked better in a feudal set-up. Translated into modern terms, it merely meant that you might, occasionally, need an umbrella to fetch a glass of water. However, given its current mistress’s attitude to domesticity, the kitchen was in its rightful place as an unnecessary appendage. Monty’s mother had often thought how simple life would have been if human beings had also grazed on the grass to sustain themselves instead of going through the rigours of chopping onions and garlic into fine slivers for a meal. The spirit of an open house would, then, have been complete, since any new entrant could simply join the others on all fours and make the most of the patch of wild grass at the back. Of course, a knife and a serviette would be provided for that touch of finesse. This was an open house, though, for the door was never locked. The practice was to push a moorah against the closed bedroom door, securing it against the odd stray cat that might wander in. In any case, the creature was likely to prefer the kitchen.

Yet, this is, perhaps, a hop, skip and jump in time, encapsulating years in moments, since it had taken all of Monty’s childhood for the household to move from the drawing room in the front to the bedroom at the back. The sofa set was still there, out in the front, but whoever came to visit went purposefully from the front gate to the bedroom door. And the moorah told them whether the family was in or not. Family, by this time, meant Monty’s mother and his sister. From the recounted version of his family’s history, Monty knew that at one time they had lived in Delhi, and were like any other family. His father had gone out to work and his mother had kept house. But all that was so long ago, it seemed never to have been. His father had long since been seized by wanderlust. His construction business had eventually hit one of those prolonged slumps characteristic of the line, and his business partner having defrauded him, he had become yet another Punjabi businessman selling auto spare parts, travelling to Kolhapur, to Thanjavur, and then back again, before setting off for Bhagalpur and Dibrugarh. It was then that they had decided to move to the family house in Patiala, which had been waiting stolidly for them for years.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Patiala Quartet’ in The Punjab Stories Two Novellas: Patiala Quartet and Remember To Forget, Neel Kamal Puri, Speaking Tiger Books.