Prison and Chocolate Cake

INTRODUCTION

Home and the World

Iwrote Prison and Chocolate Cake during the autumn and winter of 1952-53 in a bedroom adjoining a small garden in New Delhi. The house at 30 Aurangzeb Road had been allotted to my mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, when she took her place as a Member of India’s first elected Parliament. She was also leader of the Indian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, so for much of the time my sister Rita, who was working for the Red Cross, and I had the house to ourselves.

My husband had just joined a Swiss firm and been posted to Bombay where I could not accompany him. I had to wait with our two children, aged one and two, until he found a flat, of which there was no immediate prospect.

New Delhi was as tidy, compact and contained as Lutyens had planned it, though buildings had come up to meet wartime requirements and pressures, and others to cope with the human flood and fallout of the Partition. It had no trace of the deadly fumes and varieties of pollution that consume it today. There was still about it the tempo and provincial grace of the small town I had grown up in, which had served as my model for civilized living. There could have been no pleasanter city, or season, for a spell of introspection.

I had enjoyed holidays in Bombay as a child and remembered it as being far away—all distances being measured from Allahabad, the hub of my universe—and excitingly foreign. This reaction I retained, for everything outside the context and concerns of the environment of my childhood still had, for me, a foreign exotic dimension. By this curious reckoning Madrid and Barcelona, cities halfway across the world, had an intimate ring to them, and the Spanish Republican cry, ‘No pasaran!’ could have been a cry from my own heart, so anxiously had talk of the Spanish Civil War and other international events figured in talk at home. Home, in this sense, was wide open to the world and there was no clear dividing line between the two. A typical example was a letter from my father written from Almora saying he did his daily quota of spinning at the hour of the Moscow broadcast in English ‘so that I can hear of the collective farming of the Soviets while I ply the charkha of Gandhi Baba.’ Likewise, the Chinese, European, English and American visitors who came to Anand Bhawan did not seem in the least foreign or different from ourselves in any way that mattered, joined as they were to us by a common view and vision of the world.

I had recently spent four years at college in the United States but that interlude, undeniably foreign, had been a complete and separate experience, set apart from before and after. Bombay was another matter. It was going to be a continuation of my life, yet it would be unfamiliar territory because it would have no links with my past. Bombay was going to be my introduction to what is known as ‘normal’ life, one in which people went to offices to pursue their careers instead of to jail; one where they lived by predictable schedules and made plans, woke up and went to bed knowing what that day and the next would bring. The change, for me, would be total.

I had never known people outside the arena of the struggle for freedom, or who had not in some way been connected with it. In Allahabad the shopkeepers in the Civil Lines and the bazaar, certainly the students and teachers at the university, even the tonga and ekkavalas seemed caught up in the ebullience of going toward freedom. It was the air people breathed and what life was all about. There was no other agenda. I could not imagine what people in normal life would talk about. The men would dress in suits and ties unlike the men I had known who wore pyjama-kurta, dhotikurta and Gandhi caps made of khaddar. The women would go shopping instead of organizing the women of the town’s mohallas for political action. I was looking forward to Bombay as to a new country, but I was very aware there might be no coming back from it. The fabric of a whole past—my personal past along with India’s—had vanished with the coming of independence, and there might well be nothing but ‘normal’ life ahead. It was a sobering thought.

The past I had known would, of course, reappear when its history was written, but I wondered if it would in informal recollection. We, as a people, don’t seem much given to keeping records for the pleasure of keeping them, the stuff of which diaries and letters are made that capture the texture of a time, or the froth and bubble of a mood or a moment, simply because they are spontaneously written and not meant for public consumption. An account of this sort has little in common with the manufactured effort that a work of writing otherwise is, and has lately tended more and more to become. Prison and Chocolate Cake was intended for myself and my family, and for the circle of friends who had been part and parcel of the atmosphere it described. I did not have publication in mind, but when a friend who read the manuscript showed it to an agent, it immediately found a publisher in America. I then added the last chapter at the request of my editor at Knopf. The title suggested itself, though Adlai Stevenson, who was head of the American delegation at the United Nations, told my mother he favoured Cakes and Jail, after Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale.

India at the time was not quite a blank on the map but many Americans would not have known precisely where it was. As the book was being published in America, it was thought necessary to include a glossary, occasional explanatory footnotes and occasional explanations in the text, burdens that books about India no longer have to carry. All these could have been edited out of the present edition but it never occurred to me to suggest it. I don’t understand the enthusiasm for ‘updating’ to suit a current taste or span of attention, or to serve a new market, if it means carefully wiping out all signs of what went before. The updaters have done this with history. Road names and town names have been changed and go on changing. Statues are demolished and other statues are put up in their place. To establish what? That no one was here before us? That our history began today? Or that it started five thousand years ago, so we must return to that starting point by erasing the centuries between? Presenting every generation with a censored version of events can only spare it the knowledge of what we once were and what we went through to arrive at the selves we are today.

Little could be more revealing of the non-status that two hundred years of imperial rule reduced huge areas of the world to, than the glossaries, footnotes and explanations that books from these areas had to carry. The world of my childhood revolved on a European/Greek/Christian axis. From art and religion to scientific enquiry, everything proceeded from the laws laid down by this axis. All interpretation and all judgements were made within its terms. A lot of explaining was required of the vast mass of humanity outside the axis. My book was written and published after independence but the tides that had shaped the world for so long were slow to change. To wipe out their traces would be to pretend they never existed. It seemed apt to leave the text and the format as they originally were, if only to convey how little was known about India.

The country I was writing about was, humiliatingly, a colony, where independence was a figment of radical and courageous imaginations. Transforming it into a reality was a lifelong commitment, and the way those nearest to me went about it impressed even the child I was as being evenly balanced between an iron determination and a rollicking sense of adventure. It was that tread and aura I wanted to convey in this portrait of my family. It was what characterized the three people I thought of as my parents—Ranjit Sitaram and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Jawaharlal Nehru—who seemed in perpetual bloom in spite of jail conditions, health breakdowns and the lung-choking dust of the countryside where their work took them. Within the family circle they were ardent communicators, prolific letter writers and natural sharers, all of which made family life a closely bonded and loving affair where the generation gap was conspicuous by its absence and decisions were democratically discussed and arrived at. Too good to be true? When I reread Prison and Chocolate Cake last week for the first time since its publication I was prepared to disown some shades and nuances of it. But I found I didn’t want to. It would have made no more sense than renaming a road. I told myself the young woman who wrote it must have been impossibly starry-eyed. She sounded annoyingly smug in her certainties. Her romantic belief in an idea called ‘India’ had an unvarnished innocence about it. But that is quite accurately the way she was, and how she saw one household, in a time that seemed to her cut out of surrounding time.

It was a picture that appealed to more people than I had taken into account. After the American edition there were British, French, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil and Sinhalese editions. Some schools in India put it on their syllabus. It was used as teaching material by San Francisco State College and other colleges under the San Francisco International Studies Project.

Family relationships tend to change, slacken, fade. The years and other interests take their toll. My own, with my two sisters Chandralekha and Rita, and my three parents, stayed astonishingly intact. We were a family who used endearments, held hands, kissed and embraced at meeting and parting, delighted in each other’s company and remained intensely emotionally involved. A few days ago I came across a letter that, in tone and feeling, could have been a parent-to-child letter lifted from the pages of Prison and Chocolate Cake, when in fact it was written much time and experience later, just three years before Nehru died:

Prime Minister’s House,

New Delhi

Feb. 2, 1961

Darling Tara,

It was sweet of you to come to the Vice President’s house yesterday to say goodbye to me. I knew you were leaving but I was vague about your time of departure. If you had not come to say goodbye and I had returned to the house to find you gone, I would have been unhappy. Even as it was, I missed you greatly. During these past few days your presence here and Rita’s was a joy, and now there is a certain emptiness. Tomorrow the remaining members of the family will go off to Lucknow and I shall be left all alone here— All my love to you, darling—

Mamu

PRISON

AND

CHOCOLATE CAKE

1

EN ROUTE TO AMERICA

Some things will always remain a mystery to me. One of these is the perpetually baffling question: how did Mummie and Papu have the courage to send us to America in 1943? Many people had journeyed abroad before the war, and many more were to go after, but few went as we did, at our age, from a peaceful country on a troop ship at the height of the war. I have grown up since then, married, and had children of my own; yet the older I grow, the less able I am to answer that question. I am quite certain that I could never send my children away from home so confidently and fearlessly in such circumstances. Perhaps it is because I have not had the training in courage and discipline that my parents had. At any rate, there we were on board ship in Bombay harbour, waiting for the voyage to begin.

Masi, Mummie’s only sister, Krishna Hutheesingh, who lived in Bombay, had rushed us through our last-minute shopping and the numerous other arrangements that travelling during wartime entailed. She had seen us off at the dock with garlands of flowers, had put a red tika on our foreheads, and had given us each a coconut for good luck and a little box of carved wood containing a handful of Indian earth, ‘in case you get homesick.’ She was clearly apprehensive about our journey, though she did her best to hide her fears, and told us stories about her own first, exciting trip abroad.

‘The thing to remember,’ she said, ‘is to look helpless, but be efficient. That way everybody gives you a helping hand, and if everybody doesn’t, you can take care of yourself anyway.’

We found it was sage advice, though Lekha afterwards complained that it did not work out so well. As I always looked helpless, she was forced to be efficient.

Although we had come on board on the appointed day, the ship did not sail till several days later because at that time the dates of arrival and departure of ships were not announced. We had not been told what route we would take or where we would land. Everything concerning the voyage was shrouded in an air of secrecy. The man in the shipping office in Bombay had warned us dramatically: ‘Loose lips sink ships!’ And all around us, even on the ship, posters graphically warned that walls had ears.

The only thing we knew was that we were among the fifty regular passengers, that on board were also seven hundred Polish refugees who had escaped to India through Russia and were bound for Mexico, and, of course, a great many servicemen. We also discovered that the ship had been one of the famous and beautiful Conte liners. It had been converted into a troop ship by the United States Navy, and no trace of its former elegance survived. It was painted the regulation dull grey that wartime required, and what must once have been comfortable, spacious staterooms were crowded with extra bunks. We later found that we were to be wakened by cries of ‘Reveille’ and called to meals by the cryptic announcement of ‘Chow.’ For all practical purposes we had joined the United States Navy!

The ship offered no facilities for recreation. There were no deck tennis, swimming, dancing, cinema shows, or any of the other amenities of travel by sea. According to our dispirited fellow passengers, the voyage augured nothing but drabness, dullness, and seasickness. And, of course, there was always the possibility of attack by an enemy submarine, we were cheerfully informed by the captain.

Lekha and I were totally unconcerned about these warnings. We had never been on a ship before, so we did not miss peacetime comfort and amenities. It was recreation enough to lean over the railings on deck and feel the salt spray on our faces, to watch the changing panorama of the ocean, and to talk to the other passengers. As for the submarine scare, it only added to the excitement of our first voyage. To us the war was merely theoretical, so we did not know any fear toward it. And as we had long since taught ourselves to coax the greatest possible enjoyment out of every situation, we were exhilarated at the thought of the adventure that lay ahead.

When all the passengers had assembled on board, the captain held a meeting at which he briskly informed us that for the duration of the voyage we would be under the jurisdiction of the United States Navy. ‘You will obey my orders,’ he explained curtly. ‘I have the authority to put you off the ship at my discretion and to exercise my judgment in all matters.’

Lekha and I exchanged happy grins. It was adventure-to-order, with all the ingredients of a wartime drama. The captain then showed us how to don and use our lifebelts, and said that we must either wear or carry them all the time. This was a trial for me, for my lifebelt would not stay up around my middle. I had to keep it slung bulkily across one shoulder like an unattractive accessory. Still, I consoled myself, that was better than carting it about like a piece of luggage.

There were only two classes of passengers, officer and troop. The Polish refugees belonged to the troop class. They lived on the lower deck and slept on camp cots closely packed, row upon row. The rest of the passengers were assigned to the officer class and lived in cabins on the upper deck. The messroom was common to all the passengers, and we mingled freely with one another.

After the meeting dispersed, we went to our cabin and found that we were to share it with two elderly missionary ladies going home on furlough. Sharing it would not have mattered if it had not been a miniature cabin originally meant for two. It could scarcely accommodate the four bunks that had been crowded into it, let alone the two extra people. We later discovered that not more than two of us could dress or undress in it at the same time unless we all did so in our bunks. This meant dressing in a crouching position, which was highly uncomfortable, so two of us would wait outside while two dressed. The bathroom was much tinier than the cabin, and the water was a rusty yellow.

In circumstances of such alarming intimacy the romance of the voyage began to fade, and we eyed one another with suspicion. Then one day Lekha decided to call our cabinmates Cotopaxi and Chimborazo after the poem by W. J. Turner, and automatically our spirits lifted. Cotopaxi took a motherly interest in my welfare and insisted that I accompany her to the church service on Sundays. She was so kind and concerned that I could not refuse; so while Lekha played gin rummy or read a detective novel, I sang hymns and joined in prayers for the salvation of my soul. Lekha was never invited to accompany us. Somehow, I am always being taken for a religiously inclined person, and noble thoughts and lofty motives are attributed to me. It was very amusing for Lekha, who knew me better and regarded my Sunday-morning activities with a complete lack of reverence.

In the beginning I could not get used to the motion of the ship, and felt sick and dizzy. The one tiny porthole in our cabin framed a grey, tossing sea, and I rolled from side to side on my bunk, powerless against the ship’s heaving rhythm. One night I rolled right off the bunk on to the floor, much to my annoyance and Lekha’s uncontrolled hilarity. Luckily, Cotopaxi and Chimborazo were sound asleep and, both being buxom, firmly geared to their bunks. The airless cabin reeked of a stale odour. Yet if I went to the deck for fresh air, there was the zigzag ocean in full view to taunt me. When I did go on deck, I had to muster all my self-control and try to think of the ocean in poetical terms instead of as the unleashed monster it appeared to be.

‘Don’t you dare get sick,’ threatened Lekha. ‘Once you start, you’ll be sick all the way, and we have a long way to go. Besides, it’s all a matter of willpower. Look at me.’

Looking at her was no consolation. Weakly I watched the evil ballet of the waves. Crazily they danced higher, higher, higher, and then thundered down heavily into the sea with a motion that rocked the ship and sent me spinning to clutch the railing of the deck.