Nehru and My Mother
What causes us to unravel memory? My mother unraveled memories via her saris.
by Sophia Pandeya
A t the age of five Bia rejected the name my Nani gave her and renamed herself Shehnaz, Pride of Kings. However, even before this tempest in the chipped old teacup that was our ancestral haveli in Bhopal, took place, everyone knew there was something different about my mother. Arresting of eye and regal in style, the family had already taken to calling her by the honorific “Begum” in acknowledgement of her commanding presence at a tender age. It would be a name that they would address her by all her life.
A few years later when she was thirteen, my mother asserted her will again by going on a hunger strike to avoid an arranged marriage. She also successfully agitated to get an education and was the first in the family to go to boarding school at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Poona. This led her to be even more problematically unmarried at the ripe old age of nineteen.
Around this time an unusual proposal of marriage came that eschewed any substantial dowry in exchange for the cachet of marrying into nobility. An Oxford educated Bombay lawyer with political aspirations and a roster of movie star clients. Bia said, “They allowed me to see him once, from a distance, I knew he was 38, almost twice my age but I really wanted to marry an educated man and see the world beyond Bhopal.”
So it was at Victoria Terminus Bombay in 1951 that my nineteen year old mother arrived as a newly minted politician barrister’s wife. For the next seven years her self assurance would be constantly put to the test. She would be confronted with the challenge of making witty yet uncontroversial conversation with the leading lights of her era, princes, pop idols, potentates and political personalities. In the last category one of her brief yet memorable encounters was with India’s first prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
What causes us to unravel memory? My mother unraveled memories via her saris. In our garden on the season’s first perfectly sunny winter morning she would once again pull out the rusty metal trunks and out would tumble diaphanous geographies of silks, chiffons, georgettes, plainer muslins and workhorse cottons, all bookended by rolled up milestones of borders. Remnants & reminisces would be aired and sung. There were many more borders than saris.
Where were the saris that were once attached to those borders, you might reasonably ask. Well, to backtrack a bit my mother had acquired a smoking habit in Bombay which was unfortunately rather injurious to her saris. However, she was also such a miser that she could never bear to throw away the borders. So each time another sari got pockmarked with a cigarette hole, she would carefully cut its border off to be possibly recycled on another outfit.
Usually these borders were lavish affairs, gold, turquoise, paisley and prancing peacocks abounded, but one border which was carefully wrapped in a handkerchief bundle was so perilously thin that it could be mistaken for a ribbon. One morning in the late winter of her life I asked Bia why she kept it and she replied, “because this was the border of the sari that I wore when I met Pandit ji, I remember when we met he was completely taken with me and called on all the photographers to take lots of pictures. It was wonderful, but later on I never wore that sari because at the end of that evening I noticed it had a cigarette burn.”
Many years later, while trying to assemble my recollections for this essay I look at the picture of my mother with Pandit Nehru. Bia is holding her purse with her arm crooked at the elbow. Nehru’s arm is outstretched and dangling. At its end in an elegant holder is a lighted cigarette, its glowing tip only inches away from her chiffon folds. My mother is not around to confirm or quash my idle conjecture about the source of the cigarette burn on her sari. There are some borders that memory cannot cross.
Sophia Pandeya is an in-between, an inhabitant of hyphen. A South Asian-American poet whose ancestry lies in Allahabad-Bhopal, she was born on the “other” side of an artificial border trumped up from identity politics and the entrails of empire. Her poetry has been published in the print anthologies, Cactus Heart, Askew Poetry, Bank Heavy Press and Spilled Ink as well in a number of online journals including Poetry International, The Adirondack Review, The Daily O, Lantern Journal, Convergence Journal and Full Of Crow. Links to published work can be found at her site trancelucence.net. She blogs at https://www.tumblr.com/blog/rootsandwings
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