I've known Swati ever since we were kids. We grew up in the same small city in Maharashtra. Our mothers knew each other as they belonged to the same little taluka town in the interior of Maharashtra. Since they came from the same place, they shared a natural affinity. So our families used to visit each other quite often and we children used to play together. Swati is around three years older than me and my earliest memory of her is that of a thin, gangly, bossy girl in pigtails towering above me. She is the eldest in a family of two girls and a kid brother, while I am an only child. She was (and is) a natural take-charge type and would always be the one to decide what games to play and she would be the one to take one's complaints to whenever there was a fight or a dispute. All of us kids just naturally accepted her writ.
Her parents' marriage had caused quite a scandal in its time. Her father Laxmanrao was an ambitious, smart, flamboyant, aggressive, wheeler-dealer lawyer / businessman / smalltime politician belonging to one of the so-called "backward" castes while her mother Kusum came from a conservative small town Brahmin family. They had met while both were studying in the city – she was enrolled in the medical school while he studied law. Both were active at the fringes of India's freedom struggle. However, those were the waning years of the Raj and the British had already made up their minds to cut & run at the earliest opportunity. So her parents had not had to face the lathi & rifle wielding might of the British police. Quite fortuitously, the timing of their entry into the freedom struggle had been exactly right: early enough to be rated as "freedom fighters" while not so early as to be actually put to the inconvenience of being sent to jail or worse. Laxmanrao was smart enough to extract the maximum advantage out of his status as a "freedom fighter" and (much later) as a "backward caste" person in post independence India.
Like many people belonging to the "backward" castes, Laxmanrao too had an enduring fascination about Brahmins & all things Brahminical. Although he was very proud of his own caste identity, it was his secret ambition to become a part of the Brahminical upper stratum of society. So, his falling for the slim, fair, pretty Brahmin medical student wasn't just the normal response of a red-blooded male to a desirable female. For him, her charms were multiplied a hundredfold because she was an alluring symbol of everything he aspired to become part of. He made up his mind to have her and set about assiduously to woo her. Although he was several years older than her, he was dashing and worldly, had excellent contacts and was adept at getting things done. Besides, he was swarthy, well-built and fairly good-looking in a rough-hewn, macho way.
Swati's mother Kusum was born into a poor middle class Brahmin family in a small taluka town. He father was a highly respected school teacher. He came from a very old fashioned, conservative family. However, he had enthusiastically and wholeheartedly adopted the progressive and enlightened values and attitudes preached by the many great thinkers and social reformers whom Maharashtra was blessed with in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since he believed that educating the populace was the ultimate panacea to all the ills besetting the Indian society, he had chosen teaching as his calling. He had also supported & encouraged all his children (including daughters) to acquire the best possible education & become self-reliant. He was an ardent nationalist. He had inspired an entire generation of young people to make sacrifices in order to attain freedom from the oppressive British rule. He also firmly believed that the deeply entrenched caste system was at the root of most of the evil in India. So, it was no wonder that Kusum's family commanded the highest respect in the community, in spite of being poor.
Kusum was a very bright, idealistic & rather naïve young girl who had imbibed all the values & attitudes of her father. In reality, she was swept off her feet by the swarthy, bold, self-assured young freedom fighter taking so much interest in her. Her upbringing had not quite prepared her for this and she didn't know how to respond to him. After initially rebuffing his advances, Kusum had eventually succumbed to his persuasive charm. They had waited patiently while she completed her arduous medical course. He was always there to give her a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, as needed. They gave notice of their intention to get married just a month prior to the date of her examination results & got married in a civil ceremony the very next day. Neither of them had any relatives in the city. So, there were only a couple of close friends present to witness the marriage.
Their families lived in distant taluka towns. The state of communications in the pre-independence days being what it was, they came to know about the wedding only when Laxmanrao & Kusum came to seek their blessings as man and wife. There was utter consternation all around. Kusum's father was the first to calm down & bless the couple. He could see that this was a logical culmination of the principles & values he held so close to his heart. After the arrival of Swati exactly nine months & nine days after her parents' wedding, Kusum's mother too reconciled herself to this unequal match.
Laxmanrao's parents didn't accept their Brahmin daughter-in-law. In fact, the elders of their caste panchayat decided to ostracize Laxmanrao & forbade their caste brethren to have any contact with him. They considered his marrying a girl from another caste to be an insult to the honor of their own. It was only years later, when continuing to isolate themselves from Laxmanrao's growing wealth, influence & power became detrimental to their self-interest did they finally reconcile with him.
Laxmanrao had all the right contacts in the new post-independence dispensation. If he had wanted, he could easily have arranged to get himself elected to the state assembly and become a minister too. He however preferred to operate in the background. He quickly grew adept at working the levers of the "license-quota-permit" system and soon acquired substantial wealth. He built a big bungalow in the best locality of the city and acquired a new Hindustan 14 car.
Laxmanrao was determined to ensure that his children had all the advantages that he himself had had to do without in his childhood. Swati & her siblings were always well dressed and attended the best English medium "Convent" school, rubbing shoulders with the children of other privileged parents. Laxmanrao had given his wife a free hand in bringing up the children. Kusumtai had largely succeeded in instilling in the children her own middle class Brahmin values like thrift, hard work and a respect for education. In consonance with her own progressive & liberal outlook, her children were encouraged to make friends across barriers of class, caste and gender. As her children grew up, they became aware of their parents' mixed marriage and implicitly understood that they too had the freedom to choose their life partners. In matters of sex, Kusumtai like most women of her generation was very conservative; her children were made to understand quite clearly that sex in any form before marriage was taboo.
Unlike Swati's mom, my mother had a rather more conventional life. She too had grown up in a poor but highly cultured Brahmin family. She had gotten married at nineteen to a groom selected by her parents. My father was a man of progressive values. He had encouraged his young wife to complete her education. I was born three years after my parents' wedding, a year after my mother had graduated from university with a first class honors degree. Post natal complications unfortunately rendered my mother unable to conceive again, to her lasting sorrow.
As I said, my early memories of Swati are of a tall, thin, gangly, bossy girl. I didn't take much of an interest in girls those days and she was just another playmate in my disinterested pre-adolescent eyes. What I distinctly remember is that she had a few rather prominent pock marks on her face, the result of a recent, particularly severe attack of chicken pox. Anyways, my father (who had a transferable job as a middle level civil servant) was transferred out to another town and we lost contact with Swati & her family.
***
We Meet Again
After an almost five year hiatus, my father was transferred back to our city. By this time, I was in high school while Swati was studying arts in a prestigious women's college. Kusumtai (Swati's mother) invited us to dinner one day and that's when Swati hit me between my eyes. I could hardly recognize her. She had filled out in all the right places and rather puzzlingly, seemed to have grown shorter as well. I later realized that she was of just about average height for an Indian girl and appeared shorter to me only because I had gained quite a few inches in the interregnum.
Her face was round. Her nose was short & up-turned. Her lips were full, almost thick. She wore her thick, silken, dark brown, shoulder length hair tied in a ponytail. Her skin was fair, smooth and velvety. She didn't have any problem with acne, the bane of many youngsters. Even the pock marks didn't look so prominent now. In fact they seemed to add character to her face. However her most striking feature was her large, sparkling, expressive eyes. They shone & danced mischievously as she spoke animatedly. In addition to the fact that all girls of a certain age look very pretty, her self confidence, grooming & manner of speech made her even more so, although she was by no means a raging beauty. That day she wore a simple cotton blouse and a matching, dark colored cotton skirt that modestly covered her knees. Her calves and ankles were slim & dainty. Although her blouse was loose fitting, it didn't conceal the fact that she had a well developed, high bosom.
Her parents' marriage had caused quite a scandal in its time. Her father Laxmanrao was an ambitious, smart, flamboyant, aggressive, wheeler-dealer lawyer / businessman / smalltime politician belonging to one of the so-called "backward" castes while her mother Kusum came from a conservative small town Brahmin family. They had met while both were studying in the city – she was enrolled in the medical school while he studied law. Both were active at the fringes of India's freedom struggle. However, those were the waning years of the Raj and the British had already made up their minds to cut & run at the earliest opportunity. So her parents had not had to face the lathi & rifle wielding might of the British police. Quite fortuitously, the timing of their entry into the freedom struggle had been exactly right: early enough to be rated as "freedom fighters" while not so early as to be actually put to the inconvenience of being sent to jail or worse. Laxmanrao was smart enough to extract the maximum advantage out of his status as a "freedom fighter" and (much later) as a "backward caste" person in post independence India.
Like many people belonging to the "backward" castes, Laxmanrao too had an enduring fascination about Brahmins & all things Brahminical. Although he was very proud of his own caste identity, it was his secret ambition to become a part of the Brahminical upper stratum of society. So, his falling for the slim, fair, pretty Brahmin medical student wasn't just the normal response of a red-blooded male to a desirable female. For him, her charms were multiplied a hundredfold because she was an alluring symbol of everything he aspired to become part of. He made up his mind to have her and set about assiduously to woo her. Although he was several years older than her, he was dashing and worldly, had excellent contacts and was adept at getting things done. Besides, he was swarthy, well-built and fairly good-looking in a rough-hewn, macho way.
Swati's mother Kusum was born into a poor middle class Brahmin family in a small taluka town. He father was a highly respected school teacher. He came from a very old fashioned, conservative family. However, he had enthusiastically and wholeheartedly adopted the progressive and enlightened values and attitudes preached by the many great thinkers and social reformers whom Maharashtra was blessed with in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since he believed that educating the populace was the ultimate panacea to all the ills besetting the Indian society, he had chosen teaching as his calling. He had also supported & encouraged all his children (including daughters) to acquire the best possible education & become self-reliant. He was an ardent nationalist. He had inspired an entire generation of young people to make sacrifices in order to attain freedom from the oppressive British rule. He also firmly believed that the deeply entrenched caste system was at the root of most of the evil in India. So, it was no wonder that Kusum's family commanded the highest respect in the community, in spite of being poor.
Kusum was a very bright, idealistic & rather naïve young girl who had imbibed all the values & attitudes of her father. In reality, she was swept off her feet by the swarthy, bold, self-assured young freedom fighter taking so much interest in her. Her upbringing had not quite prepared her for this and she didn't know how to respond to him. After initially rebuffing his advances, Kusum had eventually succumbed to his persuasive charm. They had waited patiently while she completed her arduous medical course. He was always there to give her a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, as needed. They gave notice of their intention to get married just a month prior to the date of her examination results & got married in a civil ceremony the very next day. Neither of them had any relatives in the city. So, there were only a couple of close friends present to witness the marriage.
Their families lived in distant taluka towns. The state of communications in the pre-independence days being what it was, they came to know about the wedding only when Laxmanrao & Kusum came to seek their blessings as man and wife. There was utter consternation all around. Kusum's father was the first to calm down & bless the couple. He could see that this was a logical culmination of the principles & values he held so close to his heart. After the arrival of Swati exactly nine months & nine days after her parents' wedding, Kusum's mother too reconciled herself to this unequal match.
Laxmanrao's parents didn't accept their Brahmin daughter-in-law. In fact, the elders of their caste panchayat decided to ostracize Laxmanrao & forbade their caste brethren to have any contact with him. They considered his marrying a girl from another caste to be an insult to the honor of their own. It was only years later, when continuing to isolate themselves from Laxmanrao's growing wealth, influence & power became detrimental to their self-interest did they finally reconcile with him.
Laxmanrao had all the right contacts in the new post-independence dispensation. If he had wanted, he could easily have arranged to get himself elected to the state assembly and become a minister too. He however preferred to operate in the background. He quickly grew adept at working the levers of the "license-quota-permit" system and soon acquired substantial wealth. He built a big bungalow in the best locality of the city and acquired a new Hindustan 14 car.
Laxmanrao was determined to ensure that his children had all the advantages that he himself had had to do without in his childhood. Swati & her siblings were always well dressed and attended the best English medium "Convent" school, rubbing shoulders with the children of other privileged parents. Laxmanrao had given his wife a free hand in bringing up the children. Kusumtai had largely succeeded in instilling in the children her own middle class Brahmin values like thrift, hard work and a respect for education. In consonance with her own progressive & liberal outlook, her children were encouraged to make friends across barriers of class, caste and gender. As her children grew up, they became aware of their parents' mixed marriage and implicitly understood that they too had the freedom to choose their life partners. In matters of sex, Kusumtai like most women of her generation was very conservative; her children were made to understand quite clearly that sex in any form before marriage was taboo.
Unlike Swati's mom, my mother had a rather more conventional life. She too had grown up in a poor but highly cultured Brahmin family. She had gotten married at nineteen to a groom selected by her parents. My father was a man of progressive values. He had encouraged his young wife to complete her education. I was born three years after my parents' wedding, a year after my mother had graduated from university with a first class honors degree. Post natal complications unfortunately rendered my mother unable to conceive again, to her lasting sorrow.
As I said, my early memories of Swati are of a tall, thin, gangly, bossy girl. I didn't take much of an interest in girls those days and she was just another playmate in my disinterested pre-adolescent eyes. What I distinctly remember is that she had a few rather prominent pock marks on her face, the result of a recent, particularly severe attack of chicken pox. Anyways, my father (who had a transferable job as a middle level civil servant) was transferred out to another town and we lost contact with Swati & her family.
***
We Meet Again
After an almost five year hiatus, my father was transferred back to our city. By this time, I was in high school while Swati was studying arts in a prestigious women's college. Kusumtai (Swati's mother) invited us to dinner one day and that's when Swati hit me between my eyes. I could hardly recognize her. She had filled out in all the right places and rather puzzlingly, seemed to have grown shorter as well. I later realized that she was of just about average height for an Indian girl and appeared shorter to me only because I had gained quite a few inches in the interregnum.
Her face was round. Her nose was short & up-turned. Her lips were full, almost thick. She wore her thick, silken, dark brown, shoulder length hair tied in a ponytail. Her skin was fair, smooth and velvety. She didn't have any problem with acne, the bane of many youngsters. Even the pock marks didn't look so prominent now. In fact they seemed to add character to her face. However her most striking feature was her large, sparkling, expressive eyes. They shone & danced mischievously as she spoke animatedly. In addition to the fact that all girls of a certain age look very pretty, her self confidence, grooming & manner of speech made her even more so, although she was by no means a raging beauty. That day she wore a simple cotton blouse and a matching, dark colored cotton skirt that modestly covered her knees. Her calves and ankles were slim & dainty. Although her blouse was loose fitting, it didn't conceal the fact that she had a well developed, high bosom.