By: Ganesh Saili
‘Bring that one!’ Mr Jain, the cloth merchant in Landour said to his wife. ‘Oh ho! The one that we are using upstairs in our own bed!’ To this day I believe that the fault, if there be one, was ours. We stood there, my wife Abha and I, looking for a warm blanket on a cold winter’s evening in the tiny shop where stacks of assorted fabrics rose in mounds in tribute to our nitpicking skills. Maybe we had set our hopes too high.
It reminded me of one of my schoolmates, a much-harassed man, who wound up selling his house – all because of a wretched quilt. And lest this story get too long in the telling, I will put it simply: his wife could not stand winters in our hills.
‘When my teeth started chattering,’ she confided in me, ‘I told him to go to the bazaar and get a quilt. You should have seen the ten-kilo monstrosity he came back with! It was so heavy that to turn over in bed, one had to wrestle with both hands to get it off one’s chest. In the morning you had the feeling of someone who had been well pressed!’
She didn’t need to explain. I knew what it was like to awaken with your limbs pressed flat, like a flower in a child’s notebook. Small wonder that very soon after, he got rid of their home in the hills to move to warm Goa.
While making small talk with the cotton fluffer – our ping-pingwala – I asked: ‘Will this razai be large enough for us?’
‘Big enough? You could invite the whole neighbourhood for a sleepover!’ His eyebrows waggled suggestively.
‘If you ask a dumb question, you get a dumb answer!’ I consoled myself.
Last summer, at an exhibition hosted on the lawns of a hotel, I chanced upon the exquisite patchwork quilts of a self-help group from Dehradun. I fell in love with the kaleidoscope colours of their products. The price tag made me gasp. It felt like the moment when the iceberg began to scrape the hull of the Titanic. And to save face I had to buy something, and all I could afford was a tea cozy. Now how on earth can you stay warm with a teapot that is clad in a woollen jacket?
Which reminds me of another time when, fresh out of college, I was wading through a pile of manuscripts submitted for publication, and chanced upon Jai Ratan’s excellent translation of Ismat Chughtai’s story Lihaaf. It had originally been published in Urdu in the Lahore of 1942 and stirred much controversy. The quivering shadow of Begum Jaan moving under her quilt created quite a stir.
Steadfastly, she refused to apologize and in court not one prosecution witness could find a single offensive word.
Result? Acquitted.
Come to think of it, it was a brave tale to print in the 1970s. It would be nearly four decades before Delhi’s rainbow parade marched down from Jantar Mantar.
She had recommended Ruskin’s A Flight of Pigeons to Shyam Benegal to make a film in which she had an innocuous cameo role. When her story Lihaaf was reprinted in Imprint magazine, it did not cause the faintest ripple.
Can you imagine the (over)reaction if this were to happen today? I see a tsunami of protestors carrying buntings, flags and other accoutrements of our times, blocking traffic, running riot. They would demand the immediate arrest of the Editor and the shutting down of the magazine.
Are you wondering where my blanket story went? There lay the blanket before us. The grunge of time over the frayed edges was glaringly obvious. Its magic carpet days were definitely over. Feeling guilty for turning his shop upside down, we accepted Mr Jain’s generous offer by way of compensation.
‘It’ll make a perfect cover for the dog’s bed!’ I whispered to Abha. Back home, Damru, our faithful Gaddi-hound, gave it a perfunctory once over, then turned his back in disgust and returned to his perch upon the sofa.
‘You can’t win them all!’ I said, to no one in particular.
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition world-wide.
