सारा आकाश

“When you come down to brass tacks the value of a work of art depends on the artist’s personality.” W. Somerset Maugham

 

A book is not an inert squiggle of ink on paper. Every book has a soul that reflects, to varying extent, the writer's personality.

Thus, reading a book, especially fiction, is an interaction between two personalities – reader’s and that of the book. Reader's past, present, failings, triumphs, fears, dreams, all colour the world that words of the story evoke in his mind. No person is a mirror-image of another. Perhaps, this is why a story elicits widely different reactions among various readers.

Outer world incessantly impacts and shapes the inner world of an individual, writer and reader, alike. No story can be read sans its geographic, cultural, and temporal context.

These worlds, the inner and the outer, of the writer and the reader, come together in the act of reading. If they share some features, a powerful resonance oscillates the heart of the reader.

 

Saara Aakash, a novel by Rajendra Yadav, is set in Agra, in the immediate years following independence. Rajendra Yadav spent his childhood and early youth in Agra. Novel narrates the saga of a lower-class household in the grip of a humiliating poverty, lives of protagonists shackled by dogmatic and regressive views, in an old, hypocritical society that abhors change.

I spent considerable part of my childhood in mofussil towns. My parents came from this India. Most of their relatives lived there. These towns had shaped their personalities. I imbibed this unconsciously as I absorbed the flavours of food cooked by my mother and the ways of living they arranged for me.

Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar, and Rakesh Mohan were the pillars of modern Hindi story – the नयी कहानी. They dominated the world of Hindi literature in the second half of the twentieth century. नयी कहानी dealt with the disillusionment of the middle-class Indian with the idealism of the early post-independence years, battered by the harsh realities of life in an over-populated, poor country. It was characterised by a realistic, matter-of-factly prose that forsook the highly ornate and refined language for the Hindi spoken by the people it wrote about. Writers wrote what they had experienced and not what they imagined.

I read the novel about a quarter of a century ago. The book moved me to my depths.

I was reminded of it a few weeks back, while reading the memoir of Rajendra Yadav’s estranged wife, Mannu Bhandari, another peerless writer of those years. I had picked up a Hindi book after, perhaps, decades. Memory of सारा आकाश resurrected the churn of thoughts the book had spurred when I had read it first. I was impatient to experience those intense and moving emotions, once again. I read it again a few days ago.

 

Novel is written in first-person-singular. Samar, second child in a family of four brothers and a sister, is the narrator. Father is retired, earning a measly pension. Eldest brother is married, a lowly-paid clerk, in a life-wilting job. Sister Munni, married and later abandoned by a drunkard, philandering man, also lives with them. Two younger brothers are in school. Large household plods on groaningly, scarcely able to afford the bare needs of sustenance, on the paltry money that father’s pension and brother’s abominable salary bring.

Novel opens with the scene of Samar’s marriage. Soon after the rituals, he escapes the house amid the cacophony of celebrations.  His parents have forced him into a marriage he does not want. Now, when he finds himself tied to Prabha, his bride, the enormity of his predicament dawns on him.

Samar attends shakha. He has been tutored on India’s glorious past. His mind is inflamed by the ideals of great Indians like Vivekanand, Shivaji, and lord Ram. When he returns home, he witnesses the constant bickering, pettifogging, and captious behaviour of elders. This is far from the great culture that he is told - at the shakha - is his legacy. Nevertheless, he wants to let the flame of ideals burn bright in his heart.

He is appearing for the class 12^th exam this year. In the dreams of a secure future, he has found escape from the suffocating life of a lower-class existence. He plans to work hard for the exams, join a college for further studies, and then look for a respectable middle-class job. Now, all seems to have come to naught. He cannot think of a way out and resolves that though he has been forced into a marriage he cannot be forced to have any relation with Prabha. He will behave as if Prabha doesn’t exist and is not his responsibility. He will only work to see his dreams fructify.

He returns home and decides not to speak with Prabha, although it is their wedding night. Prabha, seeing humiliation in Samar’s behaviour, withdraws within herself.

The rift between them widens. Samar, encouraged by his mother and brother’s wife, starts believing that Prabha, who has studied till class tenth, in a house where none of the women are educated, is proud and doesn’t consider Samar a good match for her.

Celebrations of marriage are over; and also, the illusory sufficiency of means for the daily needs of a large household. Soon the house descends to its perpetual tinderbox status. Wants are infinite and resources meagre. A ceaseless struggle for the barest of the necessities of living perpetually keeps every member tense - going to snap any moment. Samar assiduously avoids any contact with his parents. Even if they catch a fleeting glimpse of his visage, a litany of acidic barb flies his way. Prabha’s needs are added to his now. He is repeatedly reminded of the sacrifice of his brother and father for his education. His hesitant and embarrassed pleas for smallest of need, like examination fees, bring a harangue, labelling him a thankless good-for-nothing squanderer.

Prabha, the younger daughter-in-law in a joint-family, belittled by her husband, becomes the butt of ridicule and abuse of every member in the household – her education, her refusal to veil her face in front of elders, inability of her father to provide adequate dowry, all become grist in the mill in this sordid affair. She does the house chorus, without help from any other family member, the whole day. She doesn’t answer the jibes of any, doesn’t demand any comfort, doesn’t complain. Her refusal to acknowledge the insults further angers the perpetrators.

Samar watches the pathetic life of Prabha in his house, but keeps mum. ‘I did not ask to be married to her. I am not responsible for her predicament’, is his refrain, whenever his conscience attempts to condemn his cruel indifference. But this affected apathy towards Prabha, does not bring him peace to read for his exams. Rather, she is always on his mind. The more he pushes her thoughts away, they invade his mind more vigorously. He goes about daily routine like an automaton, his mind either numb, or heavy with premonitions about future.

He begins to spend more time with Diwakar, his friend. They prepare for exams together. Diwakar too is married. His father is in a comfortable government job. On occasions he goes to watch a movie with Diwakar and his wife Kiran. He wonders at Diwakar’s fortune. He seems like a creature from another planet. Movie? That too with his wife? Such transgressions of etiquettes are unheard of in his family. In these moments, memory of Prabha, in the kitchen, in her tattered sari, bent over the choolah or silently cleaning the house while being rebuked by his mother, lashes at his conscience. Prabha is the same age as Kiran. She, too, would have dreamed of some joys from her marriage.

In Diwakar’s house Samar meets his uncle, Shirish. Shirish is a great conversationalist and a progressive iconoclast. He prods Samar to think about the futility of ritualistic religion and traditions. He does not believe in the great past that is a source of pride for Samar and a balm for his unbearable straitened circumstances.

A year goes by; Samar and Prabha have not spoken a word with each other.

One night, as Samar wakes up to fetch water, he sees an indistinct figure in the dark, clinging to the parapet of the terrace. As he passes by it, he realises it is Prabha, squatting on her haunches, and it appears she is crying. Why should she be crying? And so late in the night? He goes back to bed, but cannot sleep. He approaches her and says, awkwardly and meekly, ‘What are you doing here at this hour? Cry in the morning. You will get ill in this cold dew. It is late at night.’ Floodgates are torn apart. Emotions that lay throttled behind a foolishly constructed dam inundate both. Samar and Prabha lie awake the whole night, crying or trying to sooth the other.

Samar finds a new lightness in his life the next day. As he watches the rising sun from his terrace, one leg resting on the low parapet, he feels, he is witnessing the dawn for the first time in his life: How the sky lightens in the east, how the globe peeps out hesitatingly, how the breeze becomes cooler for a while, how the leaves of the trees near his house start trembling, and the town gradually wakes up.

In their newfound conjugal joys, Prabha and Samar, dream about the happy life that lies ahead. Samar passes the inter exam, though only in second division. He, and Prabha too, want him to join college for graduation. But his family members are eagerly waiting for him to take up a job, however menial, to share the household expenditure. His firmness to continue education becomes a cause of many ugly scuffles in the house.

Samar finds work of proof-reading at a press. He attends it in the mornings, five to eleven, and then proceeds to college. It is a back-breaking tedium. He endures it in hope of the better life that awaits them.

Couple's newly discovered happiness, although only in the freedom to dream about a golden future, does not last long.

Samar returns home one day to find that preparations have begun for the marriage of his younger brother, who has recently failed the board-exams for high-school. When he questions the wisdom of marrying a boy who is yet to pass the school, he is severely reprimanded by his father, ‘Do not interfere in a matter you do not understand. It's just a few days since you learned to speak with your wife and already you want to advise me'.

He and Prabha – and it appears his parents, more eagerly – await the end of month when he would receive his first salary at the press. The day arrives and ends like any other. When Samar asks the owner, after a few days, for the pay, he is told about the weeks he did nothing as he was learning the job. He would be paid only half the amount he was promised, that too only after a month. At home, his father excitedly prods him to reveal what he has done with the money. A dispirited reply that he has quit the job, spurs a torrent of abuse, with liberal blows.

Amid this scuffle, a telegram is delivered, informing that Samar’s sister Munni has died - her husband had fetched her some time ago.

Novel ends in an impenetrable gloom. For the poor, there is no escape from the yoke of existence. Ideals are for cherishing.

Futility of Samar's life stares the reader in his face. David Hume’s words rang in my ears, ‘I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping’.

 

I recognised every aspect of the country and its people that Rajendra Yadav has immortalized in the book. Poverty that blights every joy of life. The ignominy it brings and the cost it extracts in maintaining false pretences. Suffering that only makes elders in the family petty. Marriage forced as a panacea – though, it was often the cause – of the ills that are progeny of socio-economic stagnation. Young people forced into marriage for which they are little prepared and to a person they have not chosen. Marriage that becomes another anguish to be suffered like innumerable others. Ever unfulfilled wants that wilt the idealistic dreams. In essence, a life that is endured; not lived.

There are many exceedingly well written scenes in the book. Description of the night when Samar and Prabha talk with each other for the first time, one year after their marriage, is throbbingly tender and soaked in poignance. Another is the occasion when Munni’s wayward husband comes to fetch her. None in the family wants her to leave. Everyone knows that sending her would be like condemning her to death. But parents also see one less mouth to feed. It is a gut-wrenching scene. I could clearly watch the family goat being dragged away from its owners for the sacrifice. Reading about the daily quibbles in the family, imagined indignations, carelessly hurled abuses, meanness uncovered and goodness smothered, all because the house is groaning under the burden of unbearable penury, feels like eavesdropping on a skirmish in the neighbour’s family.

Dialogues are written in an amazingly real vernacular. I was instantly transported to the towns where lived many of our relatives and I heard them, once again, converse, taunt, or hector their children and their spouses.

 

In the foreword Rajendra Yadav explained that inspiration for the title came from a poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar.

सेनानी, करो प्रयाण अभय, भावी इतिहास तुम्हारा है,

ये नखत अमा के बुझते हैं, सारा आकाश तुम्हारा है!

Fighter fearlessly move ahead, the future history belongs to you,

Night-stars are now dying; the entire sky belongs to you.

सारा आकाश is a staggeringly beautiful story of a generation of youth that was disillusioned with the lofty visions of a new India, the hollow claims of a glorious past, the charade of a superior ancient civilisation while living an abominable life of constant struggles to afford food and shelter and awaiting a bleak future.

More tragic is the realization that this is still the story of millions in our country. I have not visited for decades the small-town India described in the book, which was an inseparable arena of my summer holidays when I was young. But when I interact with my domestic helps, my paramedics at hospital, the ubiquitous ten-minute-delivery boys, I see the shadow of a similar fate staring them in the face. When I read about 2.8 million boys applying for 28 thousand vacancies in police, I effortlessly picture their lives that must be as traumatic, as agonising, and as vacant as that of Samar.

In foreword  Rajendra Yadav demanded from the poet the meaning of his above-quoted lines. More than half a century after the book was first published, meaning of the poem is still obscure.

Lines of another poet of this era, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, albeit of a pragmatic bent of mind, perhaps, capture this destitution and despondency, more realistically, although more plaintively.

ये दाग़ दाग़ उजाला ये शब-गज़ीदा सहर                  

वो इंतिज़ार था जिस का ये वो सहर तो नहीं

This spot-ridden light, this night-bitten dawn,

This is not the dawn, for which we waited long.