A Poet-Shopkeeper

I do not mind doing dishes but our grimy kitchen, lit by a dim bulb, depresses me. Had the bulb been brighter, I would have seen my fingers through the worn-out, gauze-like scrub pad. The liquid detergent has lost its viscosity, diluted with water, it is the colour of jaundice all over my palms—the sickly reminder that I am both in my kitchen and in my mohalla. Since my family has been in the business of utensils for five generations, our house has generations worth of plates. And half a generation is piled before me in our granite sink. In the last few decades, the business expanded to trophies, so we also have surplus cups and mementoes stowed in cardboard boxes.

Only my grandfather lived a life worthy of accolades, so he both enthusiastically sold and graciously received trophies. Ten years after his death, his name is still around the house. Mementoes from local literary gatherings peek out from stuffed cupboards. His name is etched in Hindi on these hidden honours, and the utensils in the sink. Baba Sahab would never do dishes, even on a day like today when Kanti Aunty is truanting, yet, even as I scrub a bundle of greasy spoons, I only think of him. On glasses and bowls, his name is carved on the outer curve; on spoons, it is on the handle. As I trace Raman Lal, the steel surface feels grainy against my finger. A few older utensils even bear my great-grandfather’s name, Chaman Lal. After washing, I stack the plates, glasses, and bowls in the steel rack to drip-dry, as if I place both the grandfathers on a mantel in Yahiyaganj.

On Holi, men intoxicated on bhang would assemble outside the mandir and chant the names of other men on the mandir speaker. A brief respite from bhajans set to the tunes of film songs—most distinctly heard through the kitchen skylight above me, which admitted only sounds and no light. Answering these summons, more men would trickle out of their houses, embracing each other, applying colour, and joining the procession of cheering. They would chant “Rammu bhaiya-Rammu bhaiya,” outside our house. Baba Sahab, who had been labouring over his thandai since six in the morning, waiting for his name on the speaker, would emerge with his supply of the special drink. He’d wave at the crowd from the window and throw at them buckets of coloured water he had made from tesu flowers. After he had anointed the men with his colour and care, he would embrace them in the street.

Later in the evening, these young men visited him, bathed and scrubbed but still a little pink, to eat Holi sweets and receive their festival money. After the Holi celebrations concluded, bhang would wear off, making my father and grandfather sleep for hours. Although nobody voiced their displeasure, the women often resented his insistence on making everything at home, for they would spend the previous evening grinding nuts, fennel, and poppy seeds for thandai, cutting fine slivers of pistachios to garnish it, and sorting tesu flowers.

His insistence went beyond sweets, sherbets, and ghee; he even made his own books at home. For the longest time, he got them printed at a local press. Then, in the late 2000s, all his printing and typesetting work was delegated to the computer operator hired to digitise trophy work at the shop. The operator, being literate and in possession of computer skills, was slightly superior to his colleagues, but, like the women, even he was unable to voice his displeasure. Quietly resentful of my grandfather’s insistence on making everything at home, he kept ‘setting matter’ from morning to evening, pressing print once Baba Sahab was happy with the set matter. These books were given along with sweets at family events or to visiting guests. Baba Sahab often went on the stage or the center of the living room to read out lines he had composed for the event.

For Raman Lal, my grandfather, or Baba Sahab as I called him, the desire to leave Yahiyaganj, our damned mohalla in old Lucknow, never existed. He was perfectly content with its market sounds, lanes, drains, bovines, rodents, and hordes of relatives. With three great-grandfathers on the living room wall, we traced our ancestry not to villages or provinces but to our mohalla. These great-grandfathers had peopled four-five streets in their time, so everybody who lived around us was some sort of a cousin. Baba Sahab lived here as bhaiya, chachaji, tauji to the entire neighbourhood. I, too, lived not as an individual but in degrees of relationships.

As a marker of respect, he made us call him Sahab to echo the polite customs of the old city he grew up in. He invented something new, ditching the usual suffixes of respect like shree or ji. This ‘ji’ became my reply whenever he called me, replacing the more popular haan or yes with ‘ji, Baba Sahab’. While introducing me as his granddaughter, he sometimes addressed me as his poti-sahiba, his honourable granddaughter. He rarely used my childish, onomatopoeic nickname, Tuk-Tuk. Instead, he always addressed me by my proper name. Even in my earliest memories, when he humoured me, he conferred seriousness on me as if I were a little adult in the world.

Born in the wake of independence in 1947, Baba Sahab could not have escaped awareness of Babasaheb Ambedkar. Apart from the honorific, which sounded similar to Babasaheb, nothing in my grandfather’s life—his books, writing, and worldview—suggested a reference to Ambedkar. His chosen name for us must have been a coincidence. My Baba Sahab bought books without discrimination, even writings on Maharaja Agrasen, from whom he claimed caste and descent. Sometimes, the local Hindi daily printed his picture taken at a charitable, cultural, or literary event in the city. Surrounded by his books, the ones he printed and those that lined his shelves, and by people who identified themselves as poets and writers, his own literary ambitions must have been serious. But I did not think of him as literary. In fact, I didn’t think of him at all. Yet, now, when I find myself on a literary path, trying to tease out my own will to write, my path winds through him. Hoping that by understanding his motivation to be a poet-shopkeeper in Yahiyaganj, on his adamant insistence on appearing literary, his ability to occupy space on the stage, in the stuffed cupboards, in the dirty sink, I might be able to trace a slight biographical detail, a link to a time and space, a seed, an inkling, an outline, the provenance of my strange insistence on a life with words.

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Baba Sahab was short-statured. He had thick brows on a dark face marked by vitiligo. In summer months, he wore crisp white kurta-pyjamas, with pockets the size of notebooks, ironed so well they showed fold lines and gave him the appearance of being dressed in bleached paper. In winter months, he wore cashew-coloured silk kurtas, starched to rustle like autumn leaves, a Nehru cap, and a half-jacket. Behind his crispness was Bina Chacchi—sincere, sweaty, and frail. Each day, she carried a bucketful of clothes up the stairs to the terrace; starched them in leftover rice water, wrung them, shook out the creases, and finally spread them on the line. She even studied his kurtas for paan stains and bleached them out with an earbud.

Whenever he attended poet gatherings or stage events, he wore delicately embroidered chikan kurtas. Motifs ran along the neckline like tendrils of a plant. His clothes were embroidered at his shop under the personal supervision of his friend, Bhola Baba. He wore a set of square buttons, held together with a chain, peeping through the buttonhole. A gold square ring, full-rimmed golden glasses. Whatever little hair he had, he oiled it well. With surma in his eyes, to conclude his sringara, he perfumed himself with khus itra if it was summer and with rose itra if it was cold outside. I loved watching him get ready, though he looked identical every day.

Each monsoon, he would take us, as a part of a special coterie, to the nearby temple to prepare for Janmashtmi. My sister and I would stand quietly by the altar curtain and watch the congregation of men bathe, scrub, and clean the idol. After the bathing rituals were concluded, the men would begin Krishna’s sringara by picking out clothes, flowers, and ornaments for the idol. I loved watching their stubby fingers delicately working on the idol ensconced in someone’s palm. Two fingers placed a tiny jewelled crown on its head, two others would emerge with beaded necklaces, and finally, tuberose garlands held between someone’s index finger and thumb. The idol’s clothes, often yellow and pink with a trim of golden lace, were stitched by the women of nearby houses. To culminate this ritualistic dressing, my grandfather would sprinkle rose itra on the idol. The altar curtains would be drawn to give Krishna some private time to rest and sleep. No visitors were allowed during this time. In the evening, a band of singers of devotional songs gathered with a harmonium, a pair of cymbals, and a dholak to play music and sing in praise of the deity.

All these respectable old men, too dignified for child’s play, made time in their day for dressing an idol. Struck by its tender incongruity, I keep returning to this scene from the temple as if it were a tenet of fiction—one of the early recognitions of something in the world of adults that was an imagined reality yet not without heft or credibility. I take note of Baba Sahab’s      surrender to the event. He participated in an invented world, making it real through his attention, investment, and sincere gestures. Once he said it was time for god to rest, the curtains would be drawn, no visitor allowed between two and four in the afternoon. There’s a similar immersion in the invented world when I work out the details of a character’s life. Or, even as a reader, when I invest in the invented world of the page, ready to draw the curtain if the character wants to rest between two and four.

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Baba Sahab moved between the likely and unlikely. His stories were often heroic and didactic. Of the vitiligo marks on his face and body, he would say: I got them by courage. He had battled a lion. Because his stories were narrated with such flair, I would imagine his hands in the paws of the large cat. And as a patriarch, he could be as angry as a lion. But I was spared his anger. What angered my grandmother, like using liquid handwash wastefully or being boisterous, did not anger my grandfather. His peculiar anger was about the propriety of being. He got upset not with the subject matter but with the manner of people’s speech. Quick to take offence if he perceived impoliteness. Vegetables had to be diced symmetrically. Inconsistent chopping of radish or potatoes would upset him. His displeasure would be clothed in such delicate words that I would not know about the tension surrounding us in the form of unevenly chopped vegetables. The women of the family would caution me, as if his anger needed to be translated.

The expectation that we existed to please the patriarch of the family was clear, and the unlikely pleasure this patriarch found in well-diced vegetables never seemed odd. It was an extension of his personality bound by flourishes, always in search for beauty. How it emerged from the wild disorder and filth of our mohalla is what I found unlikely. Our house was one of the few in the lane with a terrace full of plants. The allamanda he planted has climbed over the terrace grill, even outside the house. It bursts into yellow flames wherever it finds sun. Bougainvillea, growing next to his favourite China rose, showers its papery pink flowers on us when it’s windy. I could never comprehend his capacity for beauty against his capacity for rage, as if he were competing with his older brother, Mangal. Named after angry Mars, Mangal Chand was the angriest man of Yahiyaganj. Baba Sahab, by trying to be the angrier man, was perhaps trying to be the better patriarch.

Sometimes, his mere presence would subtly change the behaviour of other family members as he moved through the house. Kanti Aunty would place utensils more gently on the rack after washing. My mother would not shout my name down two floors to call me. As if to do salaam, Rinki would suddenly become more attentive if he passed through the rooms where she was cleaning. If Baba Sahab left later than his usual time for the shop or a poetry event, his continued presence would interrupt the rhythm of the entire household. Everyone’s working hours had been fixed around his schedule. Bina Chacchi, after collecting everyone’s clothes for laundry, would chat with Kanti Aunty before she began washing clothes. Upon sensing his footsteps, their chatter would stop, and she would retreat to a corner with her tea. Bibbo Chacchi would stop massaging my grandmother’s legs, only to resume later. Maa, delighted by Bibbo Chacchi’s street gossip and firm hands, would be annoyed at the interval. She would wait for Baba Sahab to collect his papers and finally leave for the day. Only Rinki, because of her youthful insolence, continued mopping when he was in the same room. Baba Sahab, smelling of roses, humming a couplet in his white kurta pyjama, walked all around the house, even on the wet mopped floor, leaving behind his footprints on the dark mosaic.

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At the onset of winter every year, Baba Sahab went to the Yahiyaganj Sunday market and returned with the nearby rickshawallas hired to carry saplings and sacks of mud up the stairs. My siblings and I gathered around him as he prepared each pot for the sapling. He usually bought marigolds, calendula, and nasturtiums for the cold months. He taught us how to be gentle with the roots. Under his supervision, jute would be coiled around sticks to support climbing plants. In the middle of these gardening activities, whenever he had our attention, he would recite dohas to us. Hoping they clung to us as a moral lesson, and remained on the tongue like an aftertaste, inflecting our speech with his recitation.

After each recitation, he would explain the dohas. These lessons around the plants were my first instruction in how a person ought to be. Baba Sahab’s reading was simple and didactic. The dohas he selected for us spoke of honouring love. He would quote Rahim: once the thread of love snaps, knots appear in relationships. Or Kabir, where the poet advocates for a speech as gentle and cool as a breeze. He’d warn us against arrogance by reminding us of the tall date palm with its out-of-reach fruit, incapable of shade. His dohas were also my first instruction in images; my first consideration of a figurative order of thinking.

Deception and suspicion were often not their subject, yet the other, more prosaic lesson he imparted to us was to look out for ourselves, so we weren’t cheated by people we trusted. He imagined threats from the most unsuspecting sources. He refused to pay a rupee more to the rickshawallah, not out of frugality, but because refusing to be taken advantage of had ossified into a core belief. He’d secretly give money when he judged a person’s condition as truly abject, deserving of his mercy, but continued wondering if he had been fooled.

Despite his caution, his older brother, the patriarch of the entire neighbourhood, had turned him out of the house after a feud. The tale of fraternal cruelty is still told in the streets. This inflected his prosaic lessons, making him interpret a doha on self-improvement as a lesson in suspicion. “Nindad niyare raakhiye, aangan kuti chhawaya/ Bin paani saabun bina, nirmal kare subhaaya.” In Baba Sahab’s reading, the doha changed its tune to caution the listener to keep one’s critics so close as if they inhabited one’s courtyard, an intimate distance from where one could always watch one’s detractors. The feud affected the shop as well. It got partitioned. Knots developed in our family ties. Even this      ousting did not compel Baba Sahab to build a life outside Yahiyaganj. His older brother moved to new Lucknow, while he planted himself at the site of his losses.

His losses were big and consuming. For years he had been privately tending to his biggest loss: the death of his first wife from a cylinder leak, the woman he was married to before Maa. Out of fear and regard, nobody spoke of this tragedy; Baba Sahab went on reciting dohas, watering flowers, writing ghazals, and accuring losses. His close friend and financial advisor made off with his money and went into hiding in the hills. When my mother started investing her money in stocks, Baba Sahab clearly stated that all her gains were hers, and so were her losses. He wanted nothing to do with her fiscal adventure. Still, he opened a trading account and gave her all his passwords to buy stocks for him. His gains were his, and so were his losses. Because of his disregard for gains and losses, he tarnished the reputation of poets in our mohalla.

Poets make for bad shopkeepers. Perhaps this is why, after his death, there hasn’t been another poet in Yahiyaganj, a mohalla closely associated with commerce, because it supplies steel and brass utensils to the entire city. As a poet-shopkeeper, he was considered too temperamental to undertake matters requiring mercantile logic. People—poets, professors from the local university, schoolteachers, lawyers, careerless men and women—surrounded him even at his workplace. Spoons, pressure cookers, glasses would be displayed for customers; orders for medals and trophies would be noted by Zaheer Chaccha, the shop’s accountant and bookkeeper. Poets, unfazed by the buying and selling of spoons, would keep chatting. Drinking tea from glass tumblers, they would read a verse from their newly published poetry booklet. These were all local poets published by local presses, containing endorsements from each other. A regular customer would interrupt, exchanging the usual platitudes, asking after Baba Sahab’s health, and then demanding his usual discount. Baba Sahab would call for a chair, inviting the customer to tea, he would drop him in the ebb and flow of poetry. And the customer would find himself surrounded by a flock of babbling poets.

All the steel containers of Baba Sahab’s evening tiffin would be laid out on the counter. Everybody would partake in boiled kala chana and compliment Maa’s cooking. Maa prepared most of Baba Sahab’s meals herself. They would notice the added radish and raw mango, making food without onion and garlic delicious. People would trickle in and out of the audience. Further into the evening, Baba Sahab would order matar chaat from the cart outside the shop, and another round of tea would be served with mini samosas over more conversation. The poet-customers leaving the gathering would walk out of the shop after hours of talking, their lips stained red with paan.

Some customers or poets even tried to curry small favours with him. As the owner of a trophy shop, his favours were limited to offering snacks and sponsoring trophies at literary gatherings or temple festivals; if he felt particularly generous, his benefaction included cash. People gathering aimlessly, dropping by to exchange polite greetings evolved into a peculiar tradition that persists even today. Over time, the shop has acquired a domestic air. Customers are given beverage options: more milk, less milk, sugar, sugar-less, coffee for the English speaking and packaged mango juice for accompanying children. They sit together, sometimes for hours, waiting for their repair or polish work, drinking a beverage, talking to everyone around them, as if they were on a train journey together. Often, they leave without any utensils or trophies.

These weren’t fleeting commercial exchanges. Customers became his friends and friends became his customers. They felt a claim not only over your utensils but also your life. Just like relatives, customers became another category of people in the life of our household. In an area and time where relationships between men and women outside kinship were rare, his women friends tied him rakhi and became his sisters. We would be taken to their house, and we’d go as reluctantly as one visits a relative.

His friends often arrived unannounced for tea or a meal; if they liked a mango pickle, Baba Sahab sent it to them during the pickling season. We’d often take homemade condiments or sweets from the halwai during our doctors’ visits, for the doctors refused money. He expanded my understanding and vocabulary of friendship and family through this investment. Despite being in Yahiyaganj, where we were distantly related to everyone, family was not the centre around which we organised our lives. Life could be more expansive than that. He welcomed my friends as warmly as he welcomed me, “Aaiye aaiye! Aapko dekh kar tabiyat khush ho gayi.”

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Baba Sahab’s itra left a trailing fragrance that stuck to you, making you smell like him for days. It was the smell of poets, for the scent grew in strength whenever he returned from a poetry gathering, as if all poets took turns sprinkling rose water on each other. The cabinet in our living room was a shrine to hold his trophies. I often wondered which he deserved and whether he got any because he was the owner of a trophy shop. Though he lived a public life as a poet, he never imposed that life on me. Only after he returned home wearing garlands or with a memento did I guess that he had been doing something on a stage. It seemed as if garlands were doled out everywhere. Almost everyone got one at local poets’ gatherings. There were garlands at charitable or religious events, even for people presenting trophies while felicitating others.

I was never interested in his garlands or his writing. Over the years, I grew even less interested in his worldview. In college, I had newly come into mine, and it was only through my reading of the world that I could view him. Eventually, he, to me, was just a mouthpiece for his religion and politics, and like an angry lion, I’d pounce at both.

The ceiling border of his room and an entire wall had been painted gold. It felt like the insides of a gold-foiled book. It was a room fit to hold garlands and trophies. Though I rarely read them, for me, this was also the colour of his poems. A small wall cabinet held an old broken transistor. Other shelves had animal figurines, small cups, mementoes, and his pictures. Maa lived in the same room but was absent from the cabinet. His bookshelf stood high on the wall, running along the wall’s width. It was lined with all kinds of dusty Hindi and Urdu books. He would have had to stand on the sofa under it to reach the shelf. His books overlooked the dressing table, where he sat each morning, getting ready in his starched kurta-pyjamas. I often watched him dress. But I never saw him read. He wrote a lot. But I never saw him write. The only act of creative expression done in front of his home audience was when he would break into rhymes:

Rimjhim rimjhim paani barsa,
thandi hawa ka jhonka aaya,
Jiji ka bhi mann lalchaya,
jhoole pe jaa kar wo baithin,
Baba Sahab ne khoob jhulaya

It was like a personal gift to me, the older sister, jiji, my sister, Rimjhim, and him, Baba Sahab. An anthem to sway on the swing. It clearly defined our roles: he would push the swing, I would sit on it, and my sister, like her namesake and a proclaimed crier, would rain all over us. It also made me alert to the act of creation. A creative expression could emerge playfully from anywhere. One had to be attentive for even scenes from daily life could direct one to a literary utterance. In turn, scenes from daily life became fuller with their own fecundity. The act of being on the swing became more charged with rhythm and celebration as an act with its own anthem. Apart from these spontaneous bursts of creation, he hid the labour of his poetry. And because I never saw the writer at work, I never thought of him as one.

When I was old enough, my mother confided in me that she thought most of Baba Sahab’s poetry was written for his first wife. Years after her passing, she suggested, we continued living in Usha’s shadow. Despite rejecting my grandfather’s literary impulse, here I was, eight years after his death, unravelling his life to understand my literary impulse. He never spoke of Usha. The woman whose photographs I will later find locked away in a suitcase, letters written to her still preserved, mothballs hiding in her sarees.

As I went through his things to order scraps into a narrative, his trunk drowned me in bundles of paper. Some were records, accounts, poems composed for weddings, the birth of someone’s child or chhati-mundan. Most pages, even if they were accounts of things bought for the shop, had a line in Hindi scribbled on them, some in Urdu. Baba Sahab worked out a couplet as he recorded the rate of brass and steel. His stories surprised me, for I never knew he wrote prose. I set aside the legal documents. The older ones in Urdu were addressed to his father. Then I found an elegy he had composed for him. Another poem he contributed to the booklet of poetry published after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, titled Indira Hi Kyun? I was surprised to see his devotion to Indira Gandhi. Towards the end of his life, he would show a similar devotion for another authoritarian prime minister. There was even a book of poetry written in remembrance of his first wife’s mother. Not a single comment on the young and abrupt death of Usha.

Older papers from the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged. His fluent Hindi—neat and small, some lines in Urdu—rare and big. I recognised a hesitant hand as I traced his pen, practising Bangla: Usha’s language. This page of Bangla lines had the deliberate, sharp strokes of someone who recently came into the script. This was the most intimate I felt with Baba Sahab’s inner life. I noticed his capacity for love, a path that wound through language. For the first time, I saw beyond the gold-foil and read his writing with attention. I noticed his two registers: Sanskritised Hindi and Hindustani. His compositions for god, for official sounding documents like wedding invitations, or his writings for the Ramleela committee were in a Sanskritised register of Hindi. His diary entries, margin notes, poetry on love were in Hindustani, the language of his everyday life. Yahiyaganj’s language.

Though we were bound by the mohalla’s kinship, our experience of Yahiyaganj was different. He was occupied with its rituals, relationships, myths, even its daily civic functioning. For me, the mohalla was the street on the road in the neighbourhood where my house stood. My relationship with it was mediated by the road to the city. My house was as alive as my imagination allowed. For Baba Sahab, each day must have felt like the Holi cheer of “Rammu bhaiya-Rammu bhaiya” on the streets. But we still had a common experience: its language. He found that language in the streets. And it came to me inside my house, making my ears sharp to its sounds. Everybody who came home—Kanti Aunty, Rinki, Bina Chacchi, Bibbo Chacchi, our relatives and friends—spoke in their distinct tongues of Awadhi,  Hindustani, and even influences from Hindi spoken in the eastern and western belts of the state.

Baba Sahab was the first person who made me consider words, even the words of others. It is not a coincidence that my own path to words winds through his. I had wondered if behind my impulse to write was the impulse to perpetuate his literary occupation, however tenuous, and however tenuous my attachment to it. My father and brother perpetuate his shopkeeping, and I perpetuate his sentence-making. But I was never interested in his public life as a poet. It was a private kind of creation that interested me—his spontaneous bursts; his insistence on supposing a word before uttering it; the richness of his own everyday language. He relished in words and made me relish in them. As I work through my impulse to write, I understand, now, that I have been tracing a link to a time when someone first made me consider words. In passing on this consideration to me, it is as if he bequeathed something to me. As a true son of Yahiyaganj, it isn’t material inheritance that he left his granddaughter, for women do not inherit material wealth in this mohalla; he bequeathed an abstraction, a gesture, a pause before language, a delight in words.

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Baba Sahab died abruptly. Rushed to the hospital one night, he predicted he would not outlive his failing kidneys. The market outside the house, Bartan Bazaar, pulls down its shutters to honour the dead, so the street was silent. He was cremated at Gulala Ghat: the ghat he helped build. In the pursuit of perpetuity, men in Yahiyaganj leave behind spaces inherited by and serving other men: temples, businesses, rest houses, and shops. Baba Sahab left a crematorium. A crematorium, in its exclusion of women, is the same as businesses, rest houses and temples, but unlike other enterprises, it is not in the service of life.

After his passing, the house became a ground for everyone’s unmoored projects. My brother moved into the room next to the back kitchen with a populous family of nine guinea pigs. My grandmother covered the iron grill around the courtyard, even the windows with a black tarp and lived out her grief in a black box. Giant, pixelated photographs of Baba Sahab receiving honours and presenting trophies at public events started dotting the pelmets of Maa’s room. I’d see them and hear his entreaties to me to translate his poems into English. She stopped making pickles, and we stopped eating his favourite black urad dal khichdi. My parents, as if to mark a regime change, demolished the inbuilt wall-to-wall television cabinet, the shrine that had held my grandfather’s trophies, exposing the crumbling wall behind. It dawned on us that we could finally leave Yahiyaganj. Videos and photos of new houses began circulating on our family WhatsApp group.

In my grandfather’s diary, I found a margin note about the naming of Gulala Ghat. He wrote that note as the ghat itself, which, taking on the vivid pink of holi, became the colour, “I became like the colour of gulaal, so they named me Gulala.”  I imagined Baba Sahab as the colour pink, slowly spreading all over the ghat.