Smita Patil: A Brief Incandescence

To Raashi and Rohan

for bringing so much joy and love to their Ammama

Contents

     Title Page

     Dedication

     Foreword

     Introduction

1. Anchored to Her Puneri Roots

2. Reluctant Move to Beckoning Bombay

3. The Seminal Seventies

4. Smita Patil and Her Dasavatars

5. Ensemble Excellence

6. The Ambivalent Eighties

7. The Woman Behind the Image

8. The Way We Remember Her

     Afterword

     Filmography

     Acknowledgements

     Photographs

     Talk to Us

     About the Author

     Copyright

Foreword

Smita was the proverbial girl next door. You hardly noticed her. She could easily get lost in a group of young people and become quite simply an anonymous presence.

She was dark complexioned, in a profession that worships fair-skinned women. None of the stereotypical definitions of feminine beauty prevalent in the Indian film industry could define her. It was when she faced the camera that she was transformed into an irresistible magnetic presence that every actor strives hard for, but rarely if ever manages to achieve to the extent she did.

In her short career that spanned all of twelve years, Smita Patil’s incredibly riveting and memorable performances in practically all the films she acted in, have remained the envy of most actors in Indian cinema. Anyone who knew Smita as an acquaintance, a friend or a professional colleague remembers her as a guileless, spontaneous young woman given to great enthusiasm.

She had an incredibly wide range of interests, to the extent that her film directors (I speak  from experience) would constantly worry that these would come in the way and distract her from the role she was playing in the film she was doing at the time. This never happened because she had that rare ability to switch on and off at will. The moment she stepped in front of the camera lens, she was totally focused. Equally and exasperatingly, she could be completely divorced from the film the moment she moved away from the film set. Smita was not a trained actor. Instinct and intuitiveness played an extremely important part in her performance. Perhaps, this was the single most important reason that made her performances irresistibly attractive and credible.

Maithili Rao’s well-researched book is an extremely perceptive introduction to Smita’s life and her exceptional work as an actor in Indian cinema.

Introduction

She was Indian cinema’s Everywoman. Her genius shone through in rendering the everywoman extraordinaire with a signature hypnotic allure, a depth charged with intensity that exploded into emotions on celluloid, grand and subtle, dramatic and nuanced all at once. What is the key to unlocking Smita Patil’s haunting presence on the silver screen? Is it her finely sculpted face that can be so expressively mobile? Or those wide and deeply set eyes – when they accuse, you feel a twinge of uneasy guilt; when they are mute with agony, you suffer with her. What about that wilful and generous mouth full of passion – love and hate, rage and the promise of husky laughter? A voice vibrating with emotion, seemingly capable of  infinite inflections, sometimes surprising you with girlish trills of gaiety. Her silence spoke as eloquently as her full-bodied voice, setting off tremors of complexities. The least flamboyant of gestures and the suggestion of a half-smile expressed a range of meanings. With the proud carriage of a born fighter, valiant as she is vulnerable, Smita created a new grammar of intensity and complexity. She subsumed her self and mannerisms to the demands of the role. Her body had the tensile strength of steel balanced with the suppleness of a reed. These are marvellous assets and a good actor is one who uses these inherent gifts wisely to bring out the familiarity of common experience, and yet portray the particular idiosyncrasies of the screen character.

Smita’s face fascinates; she has an earthy Indian look that could belong to any part of India. So many of her brilliant portrayals come to mind: a fiery Gujarati Dalit (Manthan), a free-spirited gypsy (Bhavni Bhavai), the migrant Bihari peasant who transforms from nurturing earth mother into avenging Kali (Debshishu), the vivacious Tamil wife ripe for extramarital amour in lush Kerala highlands (Chidambaram), an older widow navigating the crime and grime of a Bombay slum, coping with her young son’s drug habit even as she unravels her own love life (Chakra), a genteel housewife of  Calcutta (a gem of a performance in Abhinetri, in the TV series  Satyajit Ray Presents…), the Deccani Muslim woman who sells a young impoverished bride to an older Gulf-based man to cement her own uncertain status with a lover who will not commit to marriage (Bazaar), the uninhibited tribal woman giving her all to the love of her life (Jait Re Jait), a Maharashtrian upper-class woman with a conscience, who finally finds her vocation (Umbartha), the lonely writer wrenched from her daughter (Aakhir Kyon) and the traditional wife caught in marital misunderstanding (Bheegi Palkein). All these roles, albeit not as famous as her work in the more celebrated Bhumika and Tarang, depict a vibrant inner life apart from the external portrayal, convincing body language and bearing that bring the on-screen character alive.

Mrinal Sen endorses this unique talent to be everywoman. ‘Smita’s is an eventful story built in an incredibly short span of time, walking from one film to another, growing from strength to strength. Her versatility is a delicious feat, her range beyond easy measure. And true, she always makes herself spectacular by her natural qualities, by remaining exceptionally ordinary [the emphasis is mine], by her elegance and poise, and topping it all, by the intensity which surfaces irresistibly from within.’ Sen goes on,‘India is a country where people speak diverse languages, wear different outfits and where the people are easily identifiable by their different physiognomies. But pull Smita out from anywhere and throw her into any milieu in any part of the country and, surprisingly, she looks deeply rooted in it.’

Of course she made inexplicable choices in her personal life and career, something that confounded and disappointed her fans. That makes her human, not a devi to be put on a pedestal. Vulnerability is essential for a person to experience a range of emotions and even more so for an actor; it enables her to convey the tumult of the screen woman she portrays. Career choices need to be examined in their context and the personal must be respected – especially when she is not here to defend herself.

A veteran journalist, now based abroad, asked me amid the chatter of many simultaneous conversations endemic to a film festival: ‘Do you think she deserves a book?’ This book is my answer. Smita Patil is a living memory to many of us. Her contribution to Indian cinema, in redefining the Indian woman and interpreting her complexity in memorable films, is immense.

17 October 2014, Nehru Centre auditorium, Worli, Mumbai: Jhelum Paranjape’s students from Smitalay, the Odissi school run by this childhood friend of Smita, perform an innovative ballet Leelavati. With a cast of over a hundred dancers, the ballet asks and solves mathematical problems using Sanskrit shlokas, with imaginative choreography and inventive storytelling. In the audience are Shivajirao Patil and Dr Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Smita’s father and older sister. On the stage is a black-and-white portrait of Smita placed beside a brass diya. After the rousing performance, in an atmosphere of loving remembrance, Jhelum invites Prateik to the stage.

Overwhelmed by emotion even after all these years, Prateik goes up and sings ‘Happy birthday angel’, echoing the emotion that pulses gently through the crowd. Time has blunted the edge of grief but not our mourning; our poignant memories of her excellence linger in the air that envelops us. It is almost palpable, the mesmerizing memory of her, the warmth in our hearts.

Such abiding emotions, such collective memory, are not created in a vacuum. Smita was born in the dawn of our new cinema and grew to maturity in that creatively rich milieu. Destiny brings the right people together at the right time in history. What eminent critic James Monaco wrote of the French New Wave in 1979 is as true of the Indian New Wave:‘The metaphor of the New Wave was surprisingly apt: the wave had been building up for a long time before it burst on cinematic shores.’*

The  1970s  were  a  time  when  the  calcified  mould  of mainstream cinema began to break up, and amidst its splinters, shoots of  vibrant, personal perceptions of film aesthetics struggled to find audience acceptance. All through the post- Emergency years when the Angry Young Man ruled the screen, there was a sense of fatigue with the formula building up. There was slickness of narrative and smart technology-aided gloss, but the themes were confined within narrow limits. Melodrama and romance, vengeance and violence were the bricks that built the box office pyramid. The reality of Indian life, its endless struggles, challenges and frustrations, little joys and great sorrows, the sheer variety of a multi-cultural pluralistic society were not being portrayed, neither by mainstream Mughals nor by slavish followers of a successful new formula.

Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen had shown that a different kind of cinema was possible. A cinema of personal vision that came from deep within a cultivated sensibility and educated intellect. One that was alive to the ferment at home and yet open to the winds of change wafting in from the world outside. Bengal acted like a beacon – as it had so many times in the past – to film-makers in other regions who forged a cinema that was rooted in their ethnicity and culture. It was a reassertion of the authentically local against the conformism demanded by mainstream cinema, not just Hindi but its regional counterparts too.

Auteurs of the new cinema flourished when the government stepped in – the Film Finance Corporation offered funding to a host of film-makers – many were often anti-establishment, a few espoused avant-garde experimentation, most were neo- realists who wanted to tell the truth without the embellishment of song and dance that is so inherent to our narrative traditions, and a minority of adherents pursued purist non-linear cinema. Wavelets of change were acting cumulatively to build up the surge that changed our cinema in the 1970s, through to the 1980s, until it petered out as any unstructured movement does in the course of time. New Cinema as a movement ran out of steam. Auteurs remained, ploughing their lonely way with admirable conviction even though they could not build up an alternate distribution system. Only the film festival circuit and Doordarshan were available. It is interesting to speculate whether parallel cinema could have thrived if multiplexes had arrived in the 1980s and catered to what was always a niche audience.

At its zenith, parallel cinema – the consensual term for what was variously described as art or the other cinema – minted new stars along with star auteurs. The climate was just right for the arrival, almost en masse, of gifted actors like Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Deepti Naval and a host of talent trained at the National School of Drama (NSD) and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. The iconic quartet of Smita, Shabana, Naseer and Om (the familiarity of affection dispensing with surnames persists to this day) ruled Hindi cinema’s parallel world. It was a felicitous combination of the right time and climate for a different kind of film-making by directors looking for new faces to break the stereotype of the film heroine – a long-suffering Sati Savitri or the frilled, flouncy and bouncy modern miss of romance. It was time for a new film sensibility and ‘real’ faces. These new actors made forays into other languages too, and this gave a cachet to regional films.

This new credo of film-making that stressed on the truthfulness of reality demanded fresh faces to make their stories authentic and  rooted. Women  came into their own in  this conducive climate. Film-makers like Shyam Benegal often made women the central character, as a metaphor for societal and sexual oppression while they were depicted as strongly etched individuals. And thus were born landmark films like Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Mandi, Jait Re Jait, Chakra, Umbartha, Tarang, Bazaar, to name the most prominent. The Smita–Shabana success story spilled over into mainstream cinema as well. So followed Arth, Aakhir Kyon, Amrit, where the woman took centre stage even in the company of a superstar like Rajesh Khanna. Smita figures in almost all seminal films of that period. The change that Smita and Shabana wrought is nothing less than revolutionary because the ruling female stars of that time were Rekha, Hema Malini and Jaya Bhaduri who had voluntarily retreated into domesticity. Formulaic cinema of the 1970s and 1980s was unwilling to place a woman at the heart of the story. She was a decorative appendage, a victim to be avenged by a male hero, or the lachrymose mother making enormous sacrifices for the laadla beta. It was not always so in Indian cinema, as the best of the 1950s and 1960s show.

Mainstream cinema works on the association of images with mythologies old and new. In fact, it is the magic of cinema that mints mythologies for our times, dredging memories of historic archetypes and imbuing them with new, accessible meanings. Archetypes dwindle into stereotypes, for easy, undemanding consumption through overuse.

The distinguishing quality of parallel cinema is that it is more personal – in the director’s vision, in the actors’ ability to relate to us at a realistic level of emotional resonance and amplified context. Here too, new mythologies are being forged in the flux of change. It challenges a society living simultaneously in centuries, in their mind-sets and perceptions. So you have an archetype that is not a historical memory, honed or attenuated over time, but one that has immediate connect and resonance. More than any of her immensely talented colleagues who enriched this new cinema, Smita became a symbol of this new, living archetype. This translates into images through which cinema leaves its imprint. Smita’s Sonbai, crouching against the background of red chillies, or pouring water from a brass pot into the cupped hands of a kneeling, luxuriantly moustachioed Naseer in Mirch Masala, is a new archetypal image of the earth woman who leads a rebellion against injustice. It is a counterpart to the hallowed silhouette of Nargis stoically carrying the plough on her shoulders in Mother India. It wasn’t just about Smita’s enormous fund of natural talent. There was this raw urgency in her, an urgency that leaped out of the frame and grabbed you. Thankfully, the time was ripe for its efflorescence in the nurturing milieu of parallel cinema.

The artistic success of this cinema facilitated the entry of these actor–stars into the mainstream, much before the directors found wider acceptance. Smita broke the barrier between art and commerce almost at the outset in her glittering career – acting with Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri as well as megastar Amitabh Bachchan and the ex-phenomenon Rajesh Khanna. It is gratifying that accolades came to her so early in life – she was only twenty-two when she got the National Award for Best Actress for Bhumika. This seems to have had an extraordinarily liberating effect on her. Her commitment to serious cinema, to organizations that worked for women and liberal values grew strong, even as she succumbed to the lures and blandishments of mainstream cinema. It is a paradox that many find difficult to understand or even sympathize with. Raj Babbar’s influence notwithstanding, Smita had the same hunger for wider communication that many actors have felt before and continue to feel. Rewards for artistic excellence were assured. The need to communicate with a mass audience, not just the adulatory closed circle of festival habitués, resulted in good, bad and indifferent films. But even here, she continued to experiment and chose roles most glamorous actresses would not touch with a ten-foot bargepole.

It is natural that Smita’s life and career are inextricably bound together. It is a fascinating journey of rediscovery to go back to her films, to be seared by her intensity, marvel at her astonishing maturity, and to be moved by the poignancy she bequeathed us in a span of barely eleven years.

What is amazing is how in the brief incandescent life given to her, Smita shone so bright and steady. She was indubitably the pole star of parallel cinema. She also left an indelible mark in some of the mainstream films she chose to do. An astonishingly substantial body of work – over seventy films in a little over a decade – that needs to be celebrated. And critically examined from the hindsight of posterity.

This book then is not a conventional biography. Nor a collection of anecdotes. It charts her life in cinema and examines her significant films in their context and from the perspective of distance that time has given us.

As for her personal life and controversial marriage to an already married Raj Babbar, I have consciously decided not to delve into it for a variety of reasons. Years ago, when the germ of this book was conceived, I had met Smita’s mother who was open, generous and surprisingly forthcoming. I made repeated attempts to get in touch with Raj Babbar but without success. Thick in the process of writing this book, I once again tried to contact him through his daughter Juhi. An impasse, yet again. It was time to decide that I would neither use confidences shared by Smita’s friends, nor give credence to second-hand gossip and lurid speculation that are so freely available even today. Smita is not here to give her version of what happened and why. Hence, mention of her involvement with Raj Babbar, if any, is in the context of the larger point being made.

Time heals the most bitter controversies and ugly rancours. Things have the habit of returning to an even, civilized keel. Vidyatai Patil died on 7 March 2015. At the condolence meeting held at Rock Cliff, the sea-facing Bandra building where Smita’s parents live (Prateik moved out a couple of years ago), a grave- faced Raj Babbar was very much present and was later joined by Nadira Babbar, Juhi and her husband, the well-known TV actor Anup Soni. They were there to offer solace to Prateik, Anita and Shivajirao Patil. Another chapter comes to a close.

*New Wave, OUP, New York, p.11.

1

Anchored to Her Puneri Roots

It is only the truly local that can be truly universal. So goes the adage to validate the unvarnished reality of art cinema. Only the truly rooted actor can grow into the versatility demanded of a performer who must often be a chameleon. Rootedness negates the cultural deracination that sometimes follows an actor’s journey in essaying so many roles, getting under so many skins. Being aware of her roots gave an actor like Smita Patil intuitive strength to blossom with such passionate spontaneity that you cannot quite imagine any other actor in the role she played. She owned the role. You cannot say this of many actors. Art was inborn, the craft she learnt. Together, art and craft melded into the magic of Smitaness.

How does one trace this journey, this phenomenon of being Smita?

Life is not a series of easy transitions. From happy childhood through the usual turbulence of adolescence to the confident maturity of adulthood. Most people have decades at their disposal to reach the assurance of adulthood and grow along with the years, garnering experience to smoothen the passage of life. In hindsight, it seems as if Smita’s all-too-brief journey was a compression of varied experiences, a telescoping of events that seeped into her sensibility. The Smita we remember is an astonishingly well-rounded person with so many dimensions to discover. And cherish. Strong and sensitive, independent and vulnerable, confident and insecure, she had an innate courage to live with contradictions even as she tried to reconcile them. Branded in memory is her searing sincerity and lust for living life to its limits. A childlike trust and curiosity, thoughtful and at the same time playful, as if the child in her lingered into adulthood. Yet, underneath it all was an endearing simplicity, the rootedness of a supple sapling that could bend and sway with every passing breeze but not break. The legacy of her work leaves its mark on our minds, finds us grappling, as if in the dark, to capture the essence of her being. This core essence one can trace back to her childhood and a remarkable family.

It is not surprising that Smita was born in a city that was a bastion of Maratha power and custodian of Maharashtrian culture at its authentic, representative best. This culture’s outstanding qualities are those that endure: intellectual rigour, robust rationality that kept alive a reformist tradition, an almost puritanical restraint and lack of ostentation. Here, the grace of cultivated austerity was the perfect match for sturdy pragmatism. Smita’s parents, Vidya and Shivajirao Patil, are heirs to these essential virtues.

Pune of the 1940s and 1950s was not the wannabe clone of Bombay and Bangalore that it has morphed into today. Bombay had not yet spread its omnivorous tentacles so far out into the hinterland – physically and culturally – as to swallow a proud Peshwa outpost, and in the process, diminish it to a distant suburb infected with its own chaos. Pune is the Spartan city of reformers, educationists, nationalists, and in a strange way, it is the Indian counterpart of the puritan work ethic that built the new nation of America. Smita’s parents symbolize this work ethic and its reformist ethos. As the middle child among three sisters, Smita absorbed the lessons of hardship and self-reliance, the need for family support and a contrarian streak of independence.

Life was hard for Vidya and Shivajirao who made Pune their home after an unconventional marriage. Their struggle makes for a fascinating story that had a deep impact on their children. They are similar in essence – of shared values – but very much their own person. The way they remember and recall their life, of themselves as parents and the small details of family life after all these years, says a lot about Vidyatai and Shivarjirao as two strong individuals.

Regret and unspoken guilt lace Vidyatai’s firm tone as she receives yet another enquiring journalist in pursuit of her famous daughter. (The first encounter took place more than ten years ago. At the time of writing, she was too ill to receive visitors.) She is formidable, forthright and sure of her fundamentals. There is sincere warmth that lights up the steady voice of a small, bustling woman with steel in her backbone and principled idealism in her heart. Vidyatai has tremendous empathy for working mothers and the cruel choice they have to make between spending time with children and the compulsion to go out and earn their livelihood. She has gone through it all, when Anita (the oldest), Smita  and Manya  were young  children. The unvoiced guilt surfaces in the eagerness with which she talks of Smita’s innate nurturing nature. Is there an element of idealizing the lost child who died after giving birth to her own child in the lingering penumbra of her mother’s disapproval? The occasional vulnerability that peeps through the brisk, frank tone is touching.

Shivajirao is an impressive figure – tall, dark and upright – who speaks with the deliberation of a seasoned statesman. The clarity with which he recollects a long life in public service is reassuringly rational. He talks of early struggles and achievements with a calm restraint, unlike Vidyatai’s ebullient, often emotional reminiscences of what is an old, familiar story.

Smita received the Padma Shri in 1986 when she was thirty- one. Her father Shivajirao received the Padma Bhushan after seventy years in public life. His equanimity is unruffled in tacitly acknowledging that most people know him as Smita’s father. This pride in his children is not new. Anita recalls her father telling her of a public felicitation of Smita at Chowpatty after she won her first National Award. ‘All these days, she was known as my daughter. Today, I am proud to be known as Smi’s father.’ He goes on to add, ‘I never missed having a son. My daughters are better than most sons.’ He has plenty of reason to happily wear his pride.

Shivajirao is a man of few words who exudes calmness and strength, with an easy-going tolerance that lets people just be. His progressive ideas were shaped by active participation in student politics at the grass-root level. He was elected general secretary of the All India Students Federation of Jalgaon and Dhulia districts in 1939 when he was barely seventeen. Shivajirao was a freedom fighter first and foremost. Jailed at fifteen, he ran away from Dhulia jail. He was shackled in a dark cell during the Independence movement. Sane Guruji and his elder brother Dr Uttamrao Patil were major influences that shaped his progressive thinking. His landowner father was disappointed by the son’s giving up of formal education but never stopped him from passionate involvement in the freedom struggle. The ironies of life never cease. Shivajirao remembers that his grandfather wanted him to be a police officer and here was the freedom fighter, a repeat offender, ending up in jail! Shivajirao was a committed worker of the Praja Socialist Party (PSP), the socialist wing that broke off from the Congress in 1947. This cost him the support of a family that was staunchly pro-Congress over generations. He rejoined the Congress in 1964 and served as the state general secretary, then got elected to the legislative council, and later served as the state’s Cabinet minister for irrigation, power and legislative affairs.

The rewards for committed political work came late but this did not change the basic adherence to simplicity. The early years were dauntingly difficult. They were also limned with romance of the radical kind, so redolent of the heady air of idealism of those days. Vidya was engaged to another man of her family’s choice when she first heard Shivajirao’s stirring speech in Shirpur town (Khandesh district). She was emboldened to write him a note, expressing her desire to work with him. Their marriage was blessed by Sane Guruji. It took them through a tough but shared journey of party work. Even now, it is easy to detect a note of youthful adventure in Vidyatai’s voice as she talks of the days spent in Bombay, where the young couple lived in a huge hall hired by labour leader Ashok Mehta for party workers and textile trade unionists. She was the only woman in that commune.

Time for an aside that delights journalists seeking parallels in the life of two parallel cinema icons and rivals. Similarities in the parental lives of both Smita and Shabana Azmi are uncanny. Shabana remembers the communal life she and her parents shared in a huge hall in central Bombay with leftist friends and ideologues. She recalls how she was a drama queen even in those early days while Smita seemed to have reserved her theatrics for adolescence. Shabana has often spoken of how Javed Akhtar sees the similarities in their lives. ‘You could have been sisters,’ is his succinct summation. It is ironical that two extraordinary women who defined the image of the new Indian woman were caught in the cycle of rivalry that never allowed them to be friends.

The Patils’ life in Bombay was a peripatetic one. Grief came early. Vidyatai lost her first child, a boy, in infancy. After the stint in Bombay, the Patils came back to Pune even though her father-in-law asked Vidyatai to stay back in Khandesh while Shivajirao went about his party work. The family that originally came from Rajasthan and were Sisodias ended up owning land in Dhulia district. They are as Maharashtrian as varan bhat, the Puneri pagdi and nine-yard kashta sari can be. Anita asserts that many of her cousins still use Sisodia as their surname.

Despite the father-in-law’s diktat, Vidyatai and Shivajirao just could not stay apart. Till Anita, the first child, was born, they lived with friends who were all party members. Shivajirao’s monthly salary (it was paid intermittently) was a princely thirty rupees that rose steeply to seventy-five some time later. Vidyatai tells of her life as a harried homemaker, coping with a young daughter, working at the Corporation and keeping an open house where party workers dropped in anytime.

It was Vidyatai, the stern matriarch of the family, who brought up the girls when her husband was busy with his political work that took him away from home for long periods. Shivajirao acknowledges that he was away from the everyday life of the family but that did not come in the way of closeness with the girls. He insists, ‘Though I was immersed in my work and was not available for the daily routine of family duties, I was still very close to my daughters as anyone could be. I was conscious of my responsibility and did my best to be with them.’ Some tough decisions and hard choices had to be made, for practical reasons.

A doctor-friend advised Vidyatai to give up party work and train as a nurse to supplement the family income. She had dreamed of being a doctor but nursing came close enough. This meant she lived in the hostel for three years, while Shivajirao and Anita lived in a room of the PSP office. The first child in a family is often pampered and showered with attention. Anita was inducted into independence very young because of the unusual circumstances of working parents with unpredictable schedules. The parents recall an incident when Shivajirao was away for three days. Each assumed the other was taking care of Anita. They panicked when they could not find her. Finally, they had to thank the neighbourhood istriwala who found the little girl playing alone and took her home with him. Vidyatai has not let her husband forget this parental lapse and he still remembers the scolding of his life! Anita laughs off the incident. ‘I felt very secure in my father’s love. I was a very obedient child,’ claims this elegant neonatologist who trained and worked in the US for years. She has now come back to help set up an NGO, Pukar.

If Anita was pushed into independence from childhood, Smita was just the opposite as a young girl. Smita was born in 1955 (17 October) when Vidyatai was finishing her nursing course. Vidyatai cycled to her hospital when six months’ pregnant, in order to be on time, until one of the doctors scolded her. Smita’s birth was nothing short of dramatic, avoidably traumatic for the hard-pressed mother. In the morning, rushing through her chores, Vidyatai slipped while cleaning and her waters broke. Even so, soaking and weak, she went to report for duty because she didn’t want to lose a working day. To add to her problems, Vidyatai had not even registered for delivery at any hospital or clinic. Reprimanded by colleagues at the municipal clinic, she got into a rickshaw in the afternoon and asked the man to stop at Saraswati Lakshmi Maternity Home which she vaguely remembered passing by on the way. Luckily, the doctor there turned out to be someone under whom she had trained as a nurse. And Smita was born at around 5 p.m., three weeks early – a dark, underweight baby. She was named Smita because she was such a smiling baby.

Vidyatai was finally able to get quarters in the hospital where she worked and life eased somewhat. Only a little though, because it was a wrench for both the mother and the new baby who cried inconsolably when she had to be weaned. You can hear the pain in Vidyatai’s mellow voice after all these years. Women need to work but how she wishes they could take time off when the children are little. Vidyatai’s regret is evident as she talks of those days when tough love was something that needed to be practised every day. It was not just a catch phrase bandied about by the tabloid brand of popular psychology.

Whether it was the middle-child syndrome or her innate craving for physical closeness, Smita was the most clingy of the three sisters. She knew Maa would be away when she saw her in uniform and clung to her knees, to delay the inevitable departure. Before her third daughter Manya was born, Vidyatai wanted to enrol Smita in a kindergarten class run by a woman she knew. A sobbing Smita clutched her mother and stuttered, ‘May both your clinic and my school fall down!’ But for