Relationship

Preface to the Second Edition

Relationship was originally published in 1994. The only change in this edition is the ‘Chandigarh Diary’ in place of the essay ‘The Secretariat-Field Relationship’ by E.N. Mangat Rai. I made these brief jottings during the winters of 1963-65, describing the experience of settling into the new house at Chandigarh, referred to in the letters, and from where many of them were written. Part III of the diary becomes the prelude to the marital crisis discussed in Relationship.

I am also including here two letters I received, one from Padmaja Naidu and the other from my mother, both offering support at a difficult time.

Nayantara Sahgal

August 2008

Raj Bhavan, Darjeeling

May 5, 1966

Tara darling

For many months now I have been wanting to write to you, yet I could never complete any of the letters I started because each time I was overcome by a sense of the utter futility of human speech.

Though you yourself have never said a word to me about it—and I have admired your reticence—to whom it has been a bitter sorrow—I have watched with pride and affection your gallant efforts for the sake of the children to save a marriage that I always feared who doomed from its very start—and now that you have taken the brave decision to make a clean break and lead your own life in peace and freedom, what is there I can say? I have always hesitated to intrude upon the sanctity of another’s life but you have been so dear to me since your childhood that whatever touches your life is of importance to me. You have been so constantly in my thoughts of late that since the beginning of the year I have re-read every one of your books in the desire to understand your better.

May the New Year of your life bring you joy and peace and whatever is your heart’s desire. I wish could have spent your birthday with you but I resisted the temptation to press you to come and stay with me because I felt that you still need a little time to settle under your own roof. But I hope you will come something during the year and spend a few days with me.

Do you known that according to the Buddhist calendar today is the anniversary of Mamu’s death? The Buddha Purnima – the day he was born, attained Buddhahood, and died, is calculated from midday to midday. It was on the 26th of May in 1964, and he died on the 27th, about the time the Buddha Purnima ended.

Did Mamu ever recite to you a poem on the Buddha that he loved? He had come across it is a magazine and did not know who wrote it. I

I have sent you a little birthday gift through the Talyarkhans who were here. Hope you will find it useful.

All my love to you, darling,

Yours as always,

Padmasi

In the train, going from Delhi to Dehra Dun

September 16, 1974

Darling Tara

There are so many things that I who have such a facility with words, never seem able to express. One of them is love. My love for you has been an enriching experience—the fact that you are what you are and that I have had the supreme good fortune of having given you birth, has always been a big factor in my life, and yet when I think of you it is not your achievements that I see but all the sorrow that has come into your life and against which you have fought so gallantly, with supreme courage. To say that I admire you would be very trite. My feelings for you are a combination of many things, but above all a deep abiding love with which I try to surround you, but which, alas, has not been able to project you. How I wish, and how I have prayed, to be able to share your burdens even if I could not carry them for you, but life is not like that and perhaps some unkind fate has ordained that I should suffer through you. In the final analysis how little love can really achieve. But because it is there, firmly embedded in the faith one has in the loved one, perhaps it does convey some little comfort when it is needed.

I am writing at Hardwar. It is pouring with rain and the train is late.

My thoughts are with you—

Mummie

Introduction

These are extracts taken from a collection of letters written over about three years. Rereading them, I am glad we did not destroy them as I, at least, had wanted to at the time. The story they tell may be of some interest to others: those caught up in a similar human situation; those in such a situation who have hidden it out of sight of their domestic and working lives, in a sealed compartment where it did not offend the proprieties and they need not account for it; and even those who have chosen to forget they ever had such thoughts and feelings, or took part in such events, for societies are built as much on what people choose to forget as what they remember, and conventions are so much easier to maintain by a deliberate forgetfulness that erases whatever may be inconvenient to their smooth observance. From this point of view it is best, of course, to bury the subversive, jeopardizing example. One can then safely and righteously condemn the deviant and the non-conformist. Enchanted gardens there may be, but so long as they are cultivated in secret, no one can point to them, no one say what happend there, and in due course even the two who planted one can disown it, swear no garden existed, nothing happened at all, for there is not a telltale petal nor a blade of grass to prove it did.

Fortunately oblivion was not the fate of these letters. Wiping out the past does nothing to advance our knowledge of ourselves or others. For those who wonder why people behave as they do, or what circumstances bring about that behaviour, letters are more personal and more revealing, especially of the immediacy of raw emotion, than perhaps any other form of writing, written as they are with the complete confidence of privacy These may appeal, also, to those who enjoy a turn of phrase or a light on character, or are attracted by ideas, and above all to those who have ever questioned the foundation of what convention considers moral and respectable, though there may be the reader who decides honesty is a fool’s policy and pen is best not put to paper.

Most of these are love letters, read, absorbed, and possessed repeatedly and lingeringly when they were received. Nearly everybody has written a love letter, or wishes he or she had, and the predicament and expressions contained in these may strike a universal chord. But what struck me at the time these were being written, and again now as I reread them, was what the two people concerned made of their encounter: ‘Faith and belief and confidence were not what I created, but what we created between us. It would be difficult to unravel my contribution from yours; they are inextricably one.’ (Mangat Rai, p. 257) It was this ‘we’ and ‘us’ that gave the encounter a terrifying strength and compulsion which neither letter-writer alone possessed. Starting as an invitation to transparent truth-telling between them, it grew in the process of writing—for meetings were rare and hard to arrange—into a relationship with a life and integrity of its own, a ‘higher morality’ both writers took as their first allegiance, although they were well aware that conventional morality is quite differently assessed.

Neither of them was insensitive to social conventions. Both were acutely aware of their respective homes and responsibilities, even of each others’, and of all the human beings involved, which gave their dilemma a painful poignance. It had its public side too. The man was a well-known civil servant at the height of his career who, when the correspondence began, had just been appointed Chief Secretary to the Government of Jammu & Kashmir after serving as Chief Secretary Punjab. His reputation for incorruptibility, including a disinterest in the scramble for position, favour and profit, were as well-known, as were the distinctly individual values he lived by. Yet a career that steps out of line becomes a target for attack, and there is a price to pay.

The woman, a writer, sought no advantage from a family in power, and was soon to become, as a political commentator, a forthright critic of its misuses of power. But as a woman she was vulnerable to publicity particularly any that adversely affected her marriage. A childhood of upheavals and partings during the national struggle for freedom, when her parents were never certain what tomorrow would bring, had given her a craving for continuity and permanence, and she believed this was what marriage should mean. Fun, laughter and affection had been her experience, as of nature and of right, in her parents’ home, regardless of national upheaval or personal disagreement. When she found the health of her marriage seemed to depend on the woman’s devotion, submission and nurture, she gave it all these, not only because she had a natural propensity for devotion, and submfssion in the cause of a structure built to last seemed worthwhile, but because this was what women were expected to do, and she had a woman’s instinct to cherish and preserve. And if submissiveness was at odds with her own upbringing, it had, in any case, been the men of her family who were feminists, the women fulfilling their potential and achieving personal, social and (in this family) political stature as a result of the atmosphere and opportunities at home. In her own very different circumstances, she, on the contrary, went out of her way to compensate for the openness of her upbringing and her American college education, by accepting the traditional male-dominated culture which her marital environment took for granted. So this relationship, as it developed, became a testing ground of courage, and a battleground of value.

Such situations are always harder on women. All but a few societies make a ruthless cult of male honour and female virtue. Down the ages the halo of virtue has extracted an awesome range of self-denial in return, from the sacrifice of life, as in sati, to the sacrifice of personality, expression and ambition, depending on the times, and more crucially, the culture of the home, especially of its males. The concept of an equal partnership between’ husband and wife is not unknown, but it is unusual. Religious mythlogy has carried virtue into fantasy in the worship of a woman who, though it was conceded had conceived, become pregnant, and given actual birth, was pronounced an immaculate virgin in order, apparently to remain worthy of worship. What is virtue in a woman? Is it compliance with society’s laws, or should it be judged by a larger vision and standards? These were questions ‘we’ of the correspondence discussed.

The word ‘society’ covers a multitude of attitudes. And whatever ‘society’ decrees, it is people who decide. Even in our tradition-bound country the marriage bond has survived all kinds of turmoil and turbulence. Husbands have respected their wives’ separate identities through marital crises and conflicts, including affairs both open and covert. Wives have exercised varying levels of freedom with no destruction to their marriages or themselves, and in this respect the village culture has shown far more tolerance than that of the more rigid urban middle class. Looking back I still can hardly believe or accept that the virtue/honour contract need have prevailed in mine, that mine was judged and broken on these terms. The true meaning of union between a man and a woman in marriage surely consisted of far more than this. Curiously, no other marriage among our friends and acquaintances—whether modern or old-fashioned—in similar, or far more radical circumstances, was judged by this yardstick. No husband or wife exacted the extreme penalty of divorce. The pound of flesh in this case was not society’s demand but of a husband’s individual temperament.

Afterwards I greatly desired some form of healing contact with Gautam and his new wife to help repair the ravages of divorce. This he never allowed. But the family whose daughter-in-law I was for seventeen years stayed lovingly in touch. In this uprooted, post-partition family—my first experience of Punjabis, and of the riotous humour, ardour, vigour and impetuosity of the Punjab—I remained warmly and generously welcome. My two sisters-in-law and their children have showered me with their affection; my brother-in-law and his wife have been unfailingly courteous, considerate and kind; even my orthodox mother-in-law, whatever her views, treated me gently as long as she lived, whenever I had occasion to meet her. These continuing bonds, along with my own family’s support, provided a ballast which eased the transition to a new life.

The women of my next two novels limped their bewildered way to a new definition of virtue, one that meant leaving home. They had no idea there were human equations that did not extort obedience as the price of love and shelter, but they chose to take risks rather than settle for the shaky security only obedience would ensure. Like myself they had a tendency to grieve over broken bonds, and a longing for ordinary, uninterrupted living. Like myself, too, they were undramatic creatures on whom drama had insisted on descending, to beckon or goad them to decision and action. My rupture with tradition seems to have had a subduing, even inhibiting effect on my fiction for some years, preoccupied as I was with the rigours of earning a living and the well-being of three minor children. Possibly it was too difficult to fight on two fronts, both in life and fiction, and soon a third front of political confrontation with my flesh and blood on the throne at Delhi. Possibly my sort of woman, possessed by an ache for virtue, takes years to square her account with a tearing break. But the women in my fiction did finally emerge, and so now can these letters.

How one woman reacted under stress, what she thought, felt, did, may interest other women in what is still a man’s world. But ultimately sharing these letters is a celebration of the relationship they brought to birth.

Nayantara Sahgal

Dehra Dun

1994

Part One

E-8 Mafatlal Park, Bombay

February 9, 1964

Dear Bunchi¹

The dispute, or the no-dispute, seems to arise out of the fact that I am essentially a secret person. Reserve is natural to me even with those I know best. This may be, as you once suggested, a desire to keep from being hurt, but also to keep from hurting—which frank expression, often ignores. It has another aspect. My rewards stem from solitariness, and perhaps this is vital to many of those who ‘write books and dabble in the human substance’ Haven’t you noticed such people give and share less easily in everyday life, and at great cost when they do? I agree that this creates barriers, but being so constituted, it is difficult to be anything else. I cannot share myself indiscriminately, and this is what lends enchantment to the special encounters that do take place from time to time. If such a possibility does exist between two people, I think it comes through the barrier in time. Are there really shortcuts to the high points of living ?

You said at Hardev’s,² ‘You have been coming here for four years and we still don’t know you.’ And that night I realised with a shock how appallingly forbidding a creature I must appear. I realized, too, that I had never lived in a society that had demanded more of me than I in my reticence was prepared to give. Inch by inch had always been enough before. But suppose you are right and it is not enough, in all honesty I do not know how to project that ‘wholeness of impact’ you talk about, if whatever I have projected has been so little as not to be evident at all.

I’m glad you remembered it was not I who used the word immoral. I do not see things clearly in terms of moral or immoral, right or wrong, and this may be why I choose compassion and consideration as guides. I envy you your certainty, but I am less and less certain. This dreadful detachment is probably the fate of all those who cannot fully involve themselves with their fellow human beings. If one cannot, the next best thing is to know such a person. So, without realizing it, you do me a service.

Love

Tara

E-8 Mafatlal Park, Bombay

March 26, 1964

Dear Bunchi

I was relieved to get your letter. I am full of anxiety every time I open a newspaper… There must be some reason why Pakistan is carrying on the way it is, but it is hard to understand how any government can be so wildly irresponsible in its utterances and behaviour. It was somehow reassuring to know you could drink a quiet cup of tea in a garden. I suppose since they had to set someone down in the middle of a crisis, it is as well it was you, though the news came as a bit of a disappointment as I had hoped to see you here this month. I can imagine the difficulties of the set-up, but perhaps its very strangeness for you qualifies you all the better to cope with it. Certainly the fact that you are working with men whom you consider outstanding is a great redeeming feature. This happens rarely enough in one’s working life.

It is getting hot here and I am up to my ears in children, household, school and pointless comings and goings. I wonder what it feels like to be quite unencumbered. I have been wanting to go to Delhi for a few days to see Mamu,³ sometime towards the end of April, but this is almost certain not to happen. Something invariably comes up to prevent my leaving, so I am sure to be stuck fast here till our Chandigarh trip in winter. I shall envy you in May when you move to Srinagar.

Love

Tara

Raj Bhavan, Bombay

April 19, 1964

Dear Bunchi

I moved here to Raj Bhavan on Friday with the girls. Their holidays have begun and Mummie⁴ has given us this guest cottage right on the sea so that we can have a change from the flat and use the nearby beach every day. The sea is so close here, a huge shining expanse, so beautiful and terrifying. In ten years of proximity to the sea I am still not used to the sight and the power of it.

I am intensely interested in what you have to say about Kashmir. Sadiq’s⁵ speech, reported today, is so confident and courageous. One feels also that the Kashmir government acts as a team, a feeling so lacking in so many other states. I was unhappy about the Sheikh⁶ being released before the Security Council meeting, and just before Id, but perhaps this was the psychological moment.

I wonder if Delhi is the best place to meet you, since you must be fully occupied when you are there. On the other hand, what other place is there? Rather a dim conclusion considering it’s such a big world.

There are about ten thousand other things I’d like to write about. One cure for this malady is complete silence.

Love

Tara

Prime Minister’s House, New Delhi

June 3, 1964

Dear Bunchi

Your letter about Mamu was forwarded to me by Gautam. I feel an utter desolation. For years I have dreaded this event⁷ and since last January I have tried to steel myself to accept the possibility. How little I have succeeded is apparent to me now. I have never been as passionately devoted to anyone as I was to him. He was a rare and wonderful human being. There will not be another like him in a thousand years. He would have hated to be mourned with tears and yet I cannot help myself, and sit here crying. I know that I shall miss him till I die, and the thought of returning to Bombay and living my ordinary life again is somehow unbearable. We are taking his ashes to Allahabad on the 7th. It will be the last time, too, that I will see my childhood home since it will now become a memorial to him. This is right and proper, but it will sever the last link with my childhood. All thoughts of a trip to Kashmir or anywhere else are very far from my mind at the moment.

Love

Tara

E-8 Mafatlal Park, Bombay

July 23, 1964

Dear Bunchi

We are flying to Srinagar on the 7th from Delhi for the weekend. Gautam has work in Chandigarh, and a magnolia to plant at Anokha which he brought from Switzerland, and this is why we are going there for a couple of days. I don’t generally make these short trips with him but I have been wanting a break for a long time. I feel a deadly detachment though life goes on and there is plenty to do, plenty one must do. My difficulty is partly finding my sort of people. I must admit I have not looked too hard since I am happy enough to be alone, but there are moments when one yearns for true companionship, whatever that might be. What exactly is it? I have had such satisfactory relationships with my sisters, my parents, and my uncle that I have not made a real effort to look beyond. My college days were spent abroad and I haven’t been able to establish a similar closeness with anyone here. It has taken me years to find myself in the smallest way, because I tried too hard to adapt to a new sort of life and erased too much of myself in the process. Only within the last few years I’ve traced my painful way back to a point where I can, in a sense, start again from the real me. And now at last I have the confidence to be myself.

Love

Tara

1 Church Road, Srinagar

August 10, 1964

My dear Tara

I have returned from office a few minutes ago (6:10 pm now) and would much prefer writing when I was fresher, but I see a long day stretching before me tomorrow, and wish to write. I have much to say, but the thoughts are disjointed, and may not come with any ease or vigour.

The enclosed chit was handed to me at the Cabinet meeting about 12 noon from my PA, whom I had asked to ring up to find out about the Viscount. So the clouds did not help to keep you here as I had wished they would. I am sorry you have left, and I am sorry I did not get a chance to talk to you, or be with you, adequately I wanted both, and am presumptuous enough to believe that you did also. Did you? Always say No to me when that is so, as I can understand and take it.

You talked of greed—was that the word? I am glad you were greedy. So was I. I wanted you to know, as soon after I met you as possible, what had happened and was happening to me. I decided I may not get the opportunity and even if I did, it may be difficult to talk about it, and so decided on the letter, which puts the facts fairly chronologically and clearly, and included some of the feelings. So I wanted to thrust on you knowledge of me as soon as I could possibly do so. Was that not greed?

And if you were also greedy, as you said you were, I am glad of it, for to me it means you wanted me to have knowledge of what you felt and were. And greed I value, for I think it is the only way people give something of themselves to each other. Unless you want, the processes of giving and taking do not even start, and we remain indifferent and closed up within our wretched or ‘disciplined’ independence and isolation. I hope you will continue to be greedy; I hope we both will. It may be a different, or difficult matter later as to what we do with our greed, in taking or growing. But let us be grateful at the moment that we were both, after many years of acquaintance, able to talk with each other, though only, for lack of time and opportunity, only a bit.

And you say in the brief note you left with me that you would like to do something for me. But don’t you see you have done something for me already, made me anxious to know you, anxious to make myself known to you. You have touched me, and I want to have more, and I hope I have touched you, and you want to have more. Could we not leave it at that for the present, accept the mutual greed, practise it when we get the chance? And you must accept from me the responsibility of deciding whether this will do you damage.

I hope you will come here in October. Please let me know as far in advance as you can, as I am to visit Leh sometime before the government goes down to Jammu,⁸ and would like to make my plans so that they did not clash in any way.

Bunchi

1 Church Road, Srinagar

August 12, 1964

Lovely Tara

Forgive the effusion, but that’s how I thought of you at Dachigam, as you lay on the durrie mid the shine and shadow of hills and trees. Why should I not say it, and add that I cast a glance at the pale hue of that loveliness. I looked where I should, and where I should not, and I’m afraid mostly could not, for you were hidden (by clothes) from view. And I hoped I’d have a word from you today, from Delhi. Greedy?

Bunchi

1 Church Road, Srinagar

August 12, 1964

I have ventured to make a few (minor) modifications in your Kashmir article,⁹ for your consideration. Can you make more comment on lack of communal feeling? For example, it is well understood practice that persons who hate each others’ politics, socially and otherwise are friends. There are few inhibitions about food—even the Dachigam bear is supposed to eat meat. All leaders of whatever views in the Valley—I regret not Jammu—have even through the gravest provocation of the ‘47 massacres, not only stuck to, but been able to enforce, that there shall be no communal killing. All this sounds trite and obvious perhaps, but I think some amplification of what is a unique point about this place, seems called for. In fact it is my belief that communalism (and of course at political levels it does exist today) is an injection by India and Pakistan.

Could you work in somewhere, though it may abhor your soul to indulge in propaganda, the almost duty of Indians to visit this place, as not only a need for Kashmir’s tourist trade but for their own understanding and enjoyment of Kashmir, both as a state, and as one of India’s biggest international problems. I do believe the attitude has been cowardly this year particularly. There is no danger whatever to any tourist. The Kashmiri well understands that his politics are his own, as far as the future of Kashmir goes, and has never bothered (or inflicted these in any way on) the visitor, unless the visitor himself is a politician.

And now briefly what I think of you:

a)   Somewhat of a cheat—big fat envelope sealed with scotch tape and inside no Tara, only an article. I liked getting the article, but surely something from you was needed (by me).

b)   Somewhat of a cold fish—reasons same as above.

E.N. Mangat Rai

E-8 Mafatlal Park, Bombay

August 15, 1964

It pours and pours all the time and Srinagar seems so remote in all its loveliness.

I am in the rather peculiar state of carrying on a perpetual conversation with you while I go about my work, so bad for discipline (which I highly prize) and peace of mind and routine, and it is hard to be a good wife. I have been thinking about the type of relationship I would like to ‘invest’ in with you.