The Soldier who Annexed 3 States for 3 Daughters

Chutzpah is the Esperanto of the whole universe, and it never has a tale of unrequited love. At the heart of this subliminal yet foolproof communication is a shared value, the uninhibited nakedness of individual motivations. Once you kill the possibility of style, essence becomes almost instantly convertible currency, and probably has the fairest exchange rate ever. And what’s more, it is even better than the American dollar because, besides language, it also makes the tourist’s ubiquitous Japanese calculator redundant.

At the Bangalore railway station Rohan got our bike out of the luggage van. Turned out, the 18-hour journey and that bit of above-permissible level of petrol in its belly had pumped up the hormones of our steady Bullet. In an amorous moment, the big bad boy toppled over our co-passenger’s dainty Hero Honda. Though, the latter was not physically violated, Rohan was amused and justly proud of having caught the two bikes in a compromising position. He was not a man to hide his pride over the masculine tendencies of the bike he considered his son.

In Bangalore my hostess was Maggie. And she was the first person on earth to ever welcome me with a frown. The reason was the wild goose chase she finished before I tapped her from the back, to find a scowling, sturdy, attractive young woman turn back into me, her non-existent Bazooka almost poking my solar plexus. Her eyes could cut through human flesh as lasers do through pretentious plastic.

She was reading up the arrival board to check if I had arrived, or at least if the train containing me had. I had been in touch with her through the short messaging service on Rohan’s cell. Once our train had reached the suburbs of Bangalore we were on the network, but the problem was that our cell had no charge left. So we established SMS contact with Maggie, because that was all the cell would allow us, we couldn’t call or the damn thing would collapse with a blink that blanked the screen. And we were so constantly fearful of losing that contact too, that we would send a message, and immediately switch off the cell. After some time we switched it on and by then we would have generally got our reply. We kept checking out the platforms where the train kept exhuming its passengers. But the cell’s fast deteriorating charge was inversely proportional to our excitement at reaching Bangalore. And
that excitement must have seemed a little confounding to our fellow passengers. Can’t blame them. Who would understand the peculiar discomfort of sitting on a sofa after having been a little over 2000 kilometres astride a bike with a seat about as comfortable as riding Rodin’s Thinker bareback. An exquisite sculpture but plain painful rock if you were riding it.

It was under such extenuating circumstances that Maggie’ message arrived.

Where r u?

“Camp.” I typed away with the confident ferocity of the uncomprehending. My train was at that station, which means, I had presumed, Maggie would know how far I was from Bangalore station itself.

What I discovered after her grim faced welcome at Bangalore railway station was that she had assumed that to be the station we would get off the train. She had double backed to Camp through the grimy and claustrophobic city traffic. In between, when I had called her from a landline she had not responded to the calls. Naturally, she was in the middle of traffic, trying to reach Camp station. When she did respond to the call she realised that she was about 16 kilometres away from where we were. By the time she hotfooted it back to Bangalore station, the heat, pollution, and traffic had transformed the sweet natured Maggie into a very foul faced reception committee of one.

I thought it would be a good strategy to introduce a very flabberghasted Rohan, as an immediate catalyst to change Maggie’s mood. It did not go a long way though.

“Where is your bike?”

“Right here,” I said with a smile straining for infectiousness. But Maggie was particularly immune to any infection.

“Chalo. My bike is parked in the parking lot. Follow me.”

“Right away.” I sneaked close to Rohan and told him that she was not really that bad.

“It was just the heat,” I told him, “I’ll ride on her bike and see if I could talk her into her regular sweetness.”

Rohan, quick on the cue, agreed and said he’d follow on our bike.

I sat with Maggie, and soon we zipped back into the Bangalore city roads she had just crisscrossed. Any conversation I might have wanted to spark, was always sabotaged by my involuntary, if muffled, screams.

Maggie just did not know the road back home from the station. So she was racing away to the point from where she knew her familiar road home. In the process, she travelled about twelve kilometres to reach the Bangalore station again. She put a call through to her sister Raaji, who directed us from there.

That was the time I suggested that we go to a pub on MG road, where we could grab a quick bite, and a swig of cold beer. I kicked myself for my exquisite timing. But Maggie surprisingly relented.

We moved to a pub, and ordered a beer each. Maggie did not drink the beer either. Eventually, she regained her composure.

“Mummy has made food for you. She’ll kill you if you don’t have lunch.

And we are already two hours late for lunch,” she said.

And kill us Maggie’s mother did. Kill by stuffing. She would listen to nothing, and before long, we had slipped into the early darkness on the wings of sleep. That was when disaster struck.

Something landed bang on me. It was all of 60 kilos, and had a beaming
smile to present to my curled pain.

“Hi, I am Raaji.”

Raaji was the eldest of the three girls, but the most outrageously tomboyish in her tendencies. Male, all of seven years, if facts of her arranged marriage to an armyman were to be discounted.

It is interesting that the name ‘Maggie’, though seemingly Christian, is short for a very Hindu Maageshwari. Her elder sister ‘Raaji’, is short for aajeshwari, while the youngest sister was Aruna for Aruneshwari. Ishwari is the Hindu feminine for a god’s name. And these three sisters were all named according to the places they were born in, to a gallant soldier of the Madras Regiment of the Indian Army.

Their father, H Ramiah, retired as a hawaldaar from the army. But the man had a very illustrious career for a lowly soldier. He was the veteran of both the 1965 war against Pakistan, as well as the 1971 war for the Liberation of Bangladesh.

Retired Hawaldaar Ramaiah was a fat man with a handle bar moustache that his wife trimmed in the night while he was asleep. But beyond that loveable cameo of in-house romance, the Ramiahs’ was a treasure house of army stories, stories that Hawaldaar Ramiah’s household had grown impatient of for many years. His battles against diabetes and asthma were far more intimidating enemies for the household of four women than the old soldier’s tales of valour in the past tense.

However, Maggie’s father had real tales of valour. So much so that even today officers senior to him by rank as well as years land up at the doors of his humble apartment in the third week of January.

Many old soldiers love to go the Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 26 every year. However, not all have earned enough medals for bravery on the battlefield that would clutter the full swathe of Khakhi that now would drape their much fattened and overly broad chests. Hawaldar Ramiah’s hard earned medals, all ten of them, add that extra gleam to the puffed chests of several officers.

So completely was Maggie’s father a soldier, that each of his three daughters was named according to the place he was posted at the time.

His first daughter was born when he was in Rajasthan. He named his first girl Raajeswari. Maggie, my friend was born in Madras, and promptly named Maageshwari, after the guardian Hindu Goddess of Madras. And the youngest, was born when Hawaldar Ramiah was posted in remote Arunachal Pradesh in the North East of India. She was promptly christened Aruneshwari. The simplicity of the soldier’s soul had a graduated scale in his progeny.

Maggie liked to be called Maggie and actually detested being called by her full name. I do not know, but I think she preferred the auditory ontemporariness of Maggie to the religious reverberations of Maageshwari. And the fact that Maggie seemed so Chrisitian hardly bothered her. In fact, she liked being thought of as Christian and contemporary, rather than Hindu and unfashionable.

My friend Maggie is not given to the needless and time consuming distraction of philosophising narrow, real life issues in the macro. To her everything is micro, period. She likes being called Maggie. Her identity being mistaken for a Christian does not even distract her, forget impact her. She remains a girl trying to get ahead in life seeking better promotions, pay-packets and even a better man.

The fights for her are not the intellectual and essentially esoteric issues of identity. Her primary fight is to make sure that she gets her official due. As in, her performance be rewarded, her bosses recognise her worth. In a multinational software company, she is interested only in professional growth within her organisation. And outside the office, she is the responsible daughter of a poor family. She pays the greater part of the loan that bought her the apartment she, her parents and sister share. All the sisters had the good fortune of being educated in good schools all over India, because they
were a soldier’s children.

However, they never seem to value the emotional idea of a soldier that most civilians like to get sentimental about. In many ways, they even do not grow out of their father’s rank. In the case of Maggie, whom I know a little more intimately than her family, her inability to imagine herself as an "officer” always rankled my passionate discussions with her.

Maggie had entertained a childhood desire to be a policewoman. She wanted to and had prepared diligently to join India’s elite Indian Police Service. She did not make it. But somewhere, someplace, Maggie always looked made for the uniformed authority of khaki. She had it in her to be commanding, and she had it in her to be obsequious. It was merely a question of who was in front of her. An instinctual response to hierarchy seemed to be the only congenital debilitation of her military legacy.

I have found in Maggie a toughness that I have found in other children of the armed forces. During my stint with a television company I had the chance to meet several sons and daughters of officers from the armed forces. They all shared good looks, which I presume owes to the male vanity of the officers with a single point focus on getting good looking wives. And in a social situation where marriages are arranged, good looking women are easily available to highly placed officers.

However, as their children age they discover that dishonest bureaucrats and worldly wise businessmen have a richer and more lavish lifestyle than handlebar moustaches with all the force their drilled and trained personalities can command. And children eventually understand that the pomp and pageantry of their fathers are finally merely the empty ritual of social peasantry. In the big cities the progeny of brigadiers are merely poor fools who tout an imaginary claim to superiority that has worn thinner than the shroud of Turin.

But they all have a good education. And often, the right accent. That helps them get glamorous jobs. And these jobs they project as both the evidence of their individual merit as assessed by an outside non-services world, as well as substantiation of their total and complete disdain for the overly glorified and severely underpaid hierarchy of the much hyped business of defending the national borders.

Soldiering and the military have lost any charm they might have once had for Indian youth. Software and management, besides media, have finally and forever dispensed to the countryside the whole exalted business of defending borders. Nationalism hardly sells among the English speaking youth of India.

And this was available in bold strokes inside the Ramiah household on Hosur Road. The three daughters worked as independent women in three different companies. In different capacities. And their parents were absolutely and resolutely behind their daughters’ chosen ways of life.

What connected them was an old world emotional commitment. Just like Patriotism, is not so much a responsible stand as a debt acknowledged. The family stuck together, the girls though women, reached home before it was too thickly dark, and none of them ever contemplated any striking out which would include the prospect of displeasing the parents.

Maggie’s father was a presence that filled their modest two-bedroom house with a benign ferocity. He had a very lush moustache that swooped away from over his lips, hiding the corners of his mouth and dipping a centimeter downwards before the final rising in a conflagration. Hawaldar Ramiah was a huge man chained most of the time to a chair by his diabetes, blood pressure and asthma.

I tried to imagine this man as a wounded soldier. In the 1971 Indo Pak war his convoy was bombed. The second driver Subbiah was left untouched by the explosion that killed everybody else. It left one more man alive, but mostly dead.

Hawaldar Ramiah fractured his hip bone, right leg and his right hand. And he lost consciousness. Mrs Ramiah, the genial rotund woman with a moony smile was informed by her husband’s Unit that the convoy had been bombed. Everybody had died. The dead included Hawaldar Ramiah. Two days later, she was told he had survived. And was in a hospital being treated.

It was difficult to imagine what that young, barely educated woman with two young daughters must have gone through. How much of the devastation would have been because her husband had died. How much from the fear of bringing up two daughters. Coming as she did from her modest economic and stringently conservative background, she would have been terrified at the prospect.

Cut to 2002. Three daughters all well educated. All in corporate jobs. Not all were in what one would call envious posts. The eldest Raaji, short for Raajeshwari was a receptionist. The youngest Aruna, for Aruneshwari, was executive assistant to the managing director of a prominent hosiery multinational. And the star of the household was Maggie, an administrator with a German software company. Maggie was both the most accomplished in terms of career, and the most travelled; she was the bosswoman of the house, the economic backbone of the Ramiah family.

And it was Maggie that Mrs Ramiah wanted me to influence. She insisted that I should either find a man for her, or at least persuade her to marry a man they find for her. Maggie resisted the idea of marrying by their choice, mostly to buy time to find her own man. The eldest had married a soldier through the arranged route, but was in some sort of trouble on marital front.

The best part was that the youngest had a boyfriend. She loved a young man and the family had not the slightest resistance to their marriage. They only wanted Maggie, the elder sister, to marry before the youngest could be hitched to the man of her choice.

The easy, natural liberalism in the Ramiah family is an astounding thing. Throughout India, families with such an attitude to the marriage of their daughters must rank among the most liberal. And almost without exception, the elite. But to think this was a lower middle class family of a humble soldier in peninsular India is almost an aberration.

What made the Ramiahs so liberal? I think that a soldier’s life provided the insulation from the ghettoizing instinct of communities. All the three daughters spoke Hindi better than their parents. They were all exposed to a more secular, more varied life. Plus, perhaps, the insignificance of their individual histories must have easily crumbled before the assault of differences in the various cantonement towns of India where they stayed, educated their daughters, and developed the idea of a composite Indianness that, had they stayed in Tamil Nadu, the state of their origin, they would never have. In their case identity was a slow and gradual accretion of attitudes, influences, graces in the fermented matrix of cantonment life. And this process is simplified, and innocently accomplished, in the quarters for soldiers sharing rum than the pedicured lawns of officer’s mess.

Rohan in the meantime hit if off with Raaji. The reason was felt on the skin in tingling pinches, Raaji’s way of walking into a conversation and ringing the bell.

She had a robust disregard for worries. Like Rohan himself. She even had a short naughty boy haircut that enhanced her impish and often endearingly foolhardy behaviour. Plus, the clincher, was her daredevilry on the bike, her easy way with stunts, weaving through traffic. The utter disregard that she showed for safety as the rider was met with a more experienced Rohan’s unperturbed pillion. Raaji made Rohan more comfortable with the Ramaiahs who were new to him, as he was new to them.

Unlike Raaji, Maggie as well as her shy younger sister Aruna, both were reluctant conversationalists. And Rohan’s braggadocio was hardly the best way to thaw their quiet, introvert ways.

Once I was sure of the comfort level Rohan now felt, I decided to make a quick overnight trip to Mysore by bus. A very dear friend’s widowed mother stayed alone in her bungalow. I had not met her since the marriage of her daughter, my friend ,Rajani nearly a year and a half ago in Mysore. At that time Rajani’s father was alive, but already in a very advanced state of Alzheimer’s. As we had only two nights in Bangalore, I wanted to utilise the first night by dropping in on Jaya Viswamurthy, whom I called Durga aunty after Durga the martial and ferocious form of shakti in the Hindu pantheon. She could summon a false ferocity so real, whenever she was unwilling to be resisted on any issue. Usually, an issue of cleanliness, good habits or plain good behavior.

Having announced the unusual time of my arrival, I landed at the gate of ‘Shagufta’at one o’clock in the morning, in Mysore’s Brindavan Extension. ‘Shagufta’, Urdu for a bouquet, was the name Durga aunty had chosen for their modest home in Mysore. A home they moved into after her husband, an engineer, retired as a General Manager at car makers Fiat India in Bombay. It was dark, and the night was warming up to a steady chill.