by A. J. PHILIP
Author Visharda Hoon
To describe her as a feisty lady is an understatement. Who else could have dodged school for a few years on the plea that every school she was admitted to was bad? She grew up in Model Town in Lahore, the seat of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire that jutted into what is China now and included much of Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan and the Indian states of Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. She was amused to see actor Kabir Bedi riding in the bucket of his father’s bicycle.
Her father was an engineer, who also dabbled as an architect. It must have been tough for him to bring her up, as she had a Leftist disposition. It would not have been a pleasant experience for him to bring her home from the jail in Lahore where she and her friends were detained for breaking the law.
She had a pro-British teacher who would often say, “we English”. One day she stood up in the class and said, “Miss Sarcar, you are not English, but an Indian like us”. That deflated her and she never uttered “we English” again. No, the principal did not nurse a grade against her. She provides a pen portrait of Lahore those days where Hindus believed that the city would remain with India.
The family which Hoon describes as “upper middle class” owned a hosiery factory but when they reached Delhi, they were in penurious conditions. The accommodation they managed to get was in the GB Road area where, as anyone familiar with Delhi knows only too well, prostitution thrived. The flat they occupied was comparatively large as it, perhaps, belonged to a prosperous prostitute, who migrated to Pakistan, “the land of the pure”.
It was difficult to live there as it was not uncommon for inebriated men to knock on the door to ask what the going rate was. The Hoons had a servant who enjoyed handling such customers, though he himself turned out to be no better than those whom he shooed away when he was caught with his pants down and an angry woman accusing him of not paying up.
Hoon was an Ahluwalia, which means a kshatriya, and a Manglik (those born with Mangal (Mars) dosha) to boot. I learnt about the problems of a Manglik when I read Manju Kapoor’s novel “Home”. A Manglik could marry only a Manglik, otherwise the spouse would die. It so happened that the person she chose as her partner was also a Manglik.
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