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Journalism of Courage
It is never easy to write about one’s parents. One becomes aware of much that might have remained submerged. Uncover their strengths and find their frailty; look beyond childhood and discover their mortality; and in their mortality, hints of one’s own.
In Diddi, Ira Pande takes on the task of writing about her mother, a difficult task made harder by the fact that her mother, whom she and her siblings have known as Diddi or elder sister, is no ordinary person. She is Shivani the writer, known in every household as the most popular Hindi novelist, short story writer and columnist of her time. But to Pande, Diddi is also one half of the difficult marriage of her parents; she is the mother of a large family; she is a Lear-figure, with a host of odd friends, and disorganised kitchen habits; she is, uniquely, Diddi.
But Pande’s task in this volume is made easier by the inclusion of Diddi’s own voice, in the form of some of her reminiscences and short stories, from the early years to the nineties. So, as Pande begins to tell us of Almora, with its deodars and the smell of crushed pine needles, she takes us to Diddi’s Kasoon, where the young girl learns a truth about life: “That there is no jail on earth that can shackle a free spirit and no spirit so free that its feet cannot be bound in chains we cannot see.”
Daughter of a Diwan and grand-daughter of one of the founders of the Banaras Hindu University, Diddi was sent with her siblings to Santiniketan, where she spent twelve happy years. Indeed, as Pande reminds us, her first story was written in Bengali, and her memoir of her days there, Amader Santiniketan, is one of her finest works.
Life was not always comfortable: there were long periods of hardship and loneliness in her growing years, her marriage, and her widowhood. But for the children, Diddi was a queen: Queen Lear, as her daughter Mrinal had christened her, with the absurd maid Ramrati as her personal Fool. The retinue of eccentric characters that she had befriended along the way, in the course of her life, from monkey to dhobi, formed not only her court, but also the characters who filled the pages of her writing. These were the characters who brought to life the tremendous literary oeuvre that included short stories, serials, columns, interviews, travelogues, and memoirs. “Diddi bled into her plots,” Pande tells us, “often without knowing that she was doing so… she left bits of herself in every piece she wrote.”
There is a deep sadness in the stories, too: in one, a married woman looks yearningly at the haveli she left behind when her future took her elsewhere, even to another country; in another, a married man discovers a love he had left for dead years ago; in yet another, an aging couple discover the love they never lavished on each other in their youth.
And thus it is that Pande, herself an editor with a deep understanding of the creative process, puts together a deeply affecting record of a remarkable life.
