Stories About My Family 1: My great grand aunt

My great-grand Aunt Sita's name is written, in an elegant, firm hand on the fly-leaf of each of the gold-embossed, leather-bound volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica that occupy the lower two shelves of the book shelf in my grandmother's living room. Underneath Sita's name, I can decipher the remains of another name, carefully, precisely, scratched out. When I was young this perturbed me. Whose name was it? Why was it scratched out? Who had scratched it out?

There's a picture of my great grand aunt, tucked away in a moth-eaten photograph album in my grandmother's antique side-board. At a first glance, Sita doesn't deserve notice. She is featureless, indistinct - could be any one of the hordes of blank-faced young girls, wearing silk saris with elaborate folds, hair dressed in a demure, boring style that was popular in the early decades of the last century. But then, with a closer look, one can distinguish a pair of distant, dreamy eyes. Sly eyes, that belie the innocence of that otherwise unremarkable face.

Sita was also brilliant, which was a difficult thing to be for a girl born in 1910. Her birth was good. Her parents, themselves, were nothing more than middle-class, but they counted amongst their blood relations members of the most influential patrician families. They enjoyed a comfortable, respected place in society. A middling place, a suffocating place for Sita, who was brought up amidst a tribe of other girl-children (there were no boys), gently reared and bred for marriage. But even then, that seemed a state Sita was ill-suited for. No one could deny there was something - something a little different about Sita. Was it the strange dreamy eyes? The gawky gestures? The glasses perched on the end of her snub nose? Her mother, my grandmother tells me, despaired. Her fortune wasn't good enough to attract suitors, and her studious, dreamy air repellent to those who wanted a housekeeper for a wife.

When a suitor finally came calling, Sita, for the first time, asserted herself.

He was an ambitious young man, from an impoverished family, who hankered after a post in the civil services and thought that marriage to Sita, a daughter of a respectable but well-connected family, would improve his chances.

The conclusion was already foregone, by her mother. There were two other daughters to dispose off, a heavy burden in that time. And Sita's father, a tired, mild-mannered man, lacked the strength and will to oppose his domineering wife, and often disappeared into his well-stocked library.

I hold one of his books in my hands. It is over a hundred years old, published in 1908, but the binding is still in good condition. It has a red cloth cover, and I dimly discern the book's title, in faded gold letters. The second Volume of Plutarch's lives. There are holes in the pages - tiny black holes. I see my great-great grand father's name inscribed in slanting, cursive handwriting on the fly leaf in watery blue ink. I have other books of his - a copy of Cicero's orations - with curious pencil markings in the text - words heavily underlined, a few annotations in the margins - and a threadbare set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A curious man my grandfather must have been - a timid Indian tax official, a strictly orthodox brahmin, with a taste for Roman history and oratory.

These same books adorned the shelves of my great-grand father's sanctum sanctorum, his library. It was to this same room, that his wife descended, to demand that her husband assert his paternal rights over his recalcitrant daughter.

And so, Sita was summoned.

Under the sternorian scrutiny of her mother, and the weak, bespectacled gaze of her father - Sita blurted out "I want to study."

Her mother stared, goggled. Who ever heard of a girl studying? Studying? What use was this to a girl? No! It was her duty to get married!

But it was the myopic tax official who turned to his wife and, in his mild fashion, inquired "Why not?"

This isn't the end of the story. It's quite long, so I refrained from posting it all here. If you'd like to read the rest of it, let me know, and I will send it to you.