A woman of talent and guts

THERE is something about the Kumaon hills embracing Nainital, Almora and Ranikhet which breeds good soldiers, scholars, politicians and litterateurs. You have Pants, Pandeys and Joshis. There was Govind Vallabh Pant and now his son K.C. Pant and his wife Ila. And there is Murli Manohar Joshi. There is Shivani, a Hindi novelist, and her daughter Mrinal Pande, a journalist and TV personality who writes both in Hindi and English. And there is Namita Gokhale (nee Pant) who lost her husband before she was 40, is the author of four books in English, writes a regular agony aunt column for newspapers and has had many close encounters with death. She remains as attractive and vivacious as she was when I first met her over 15 years ago. And the gutsiest of women I have met.

Namita Pant (b. 1956) was only 17 when in college in Delhi she met the Maharashtrian Rajiv Gokhale, son of Law Minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. Rajiv was a mere two years older than her. They fell in love, as they say, madly. Namita wasn’t the one to waste too much time being courted; she proposed to him, he accepted. And six months later they were married. As Indira Gandhi remarked at the wedding ceremony, it was like a marriage of two dolls. It was a stormy relationship, a roller-coaster relationship which rose to ecstatic heights and descended to depths of despair. It was much the same in their joint ventures. For a couple of years they tried to run a film magazine Super in Bombay. It flopped. The two years in Bombay gave Namita a new dimension in life. She ran into H.R.F. Keating whose detective novels were based on Inspector Ghote. He impressed on her the need for a writer to keep making notes for stories and novels.Namita did precisely that. Back in Delhi Rajiv tried his hand at business. He made his lakhs as quickly as he lost them. They entertained lavishly in the most expensive restaurants in town, blowing up large sums of money. They were often in financial trouble. Rajiv began to drink heavily. Namita had enough material to start writing a novel. In 1984 her first novel Paro: Dreams of Passion was published. It was an instant success in India and abroad. It was a love story with erotic overtones. With this novel Namita was well and truly launched. She began to collect material for her second book The Himalayan Love Story. While she was putting it into shape, she was stricken with cancer of the uterus. Rajiv rushed her to Bombay. For weeks her life hung by a single thread. I, who was among the people she kept in close contact with, knew nothing about it till a month ago. Namita never looked for sympathy: it was only her inner resources, her ‘‘survival strategy’’ that helped her pull through the ordeal. However, this brush with death took deep roots in her psyche. She had more experience of death. Her mother-in-law died in her arms; her sister-in-law Sunanda Bhandare, Judge of the Delhi High Court succumbed to cancer, and finally her husband Rajiv died in Singapore of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving Namita to take care of their two teenage daughters.

It was understandable that after love death became Namita’s obsession. Obsession with love and death resulted in two books: Gods, Graves and Grandmother written after she beat cancer and the non-fiction Mountain Echos. They did not do as well as she hoped but her latest The Book of Shadows (Viking Penguin) made the top of the Indian bestsellers list. In some ways her last novel sums up Namita’s mental pre-occupation. It has love, death and lust in equal proportions. It is set in an isolated bungalow in the midst of a forest in the Kumaon hills. Ghosts of people who lived in it, some murdered, some eaten up by wild animals, continue to haunt it. They make love, get drunk, get inebriated with curry laced with bhang (marijuana) and indulge in sexual orgies. Seeing Namita’s ever-smiling face and listening to her animated, machine-gun speed chatter one would not suspect the tortured soul within. Despite tragedies in her personal life, she finds ‘‘a lot of magic in everyday life which is to be discovered,’’ she asserts. ‘‘Failure is more important than success’’ and ‘‘suffering is a great incentive to growth. It reveals and re-defines character.Happiness makes us lazy and flabby.’’ You ponder over these statements and understand why Namita Gokhale loves life as much as she loves death and what has made her so gutsy.

Gentlemanly tigers

"If only a tiger could sue for defamation, he would win hands down; there would be hundreds of eye-witnesses to vouchsafe his gentlemanliness and eagerness to avoid all conflict with man. All he wants is to be left alone to pursue the role allotted to him by nature — that of maintaining the ecological balance in the forest — which he does with great efficiency and unobstrusiveness," so writes Vivek Sinha in his latest book: The Tiger is a Gentleman: Leaves from a wild-life photographer’s Diary (Wildlife, Bangalore).

According to Sinha, the tigress does not merit the same status; she can be, and when with her cubs usually is, a nasty, snarling bitch. These observations are based on a life-time spent in dense jungles, watching and photographing wildlife: elephants, bears, bison, phythons, peacocks — whatever. When Sinha retired as Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Defence he decided to settle down in Bangalore primarily because it is close to some wildlife sanctuaries. Our paths crossed once late at night in the forest of Nagarhole. I had seen a herd of elephants coming to bathe in a large pond, scores of cheetal, bison and a couple of bears scamper across our path. I had no desire of getting off my jeep and wanted to get to the tourist bungalow as fast as I could. Sinha and his soul-mate Arti spent the whole night taking pictures and only returned in the early hours of the morning.

In his book besides some spectacular colour photographs of fauna, are true stories of his near-fatal encounters with tigers, elephants and bears. They make fascinating reading. Sinha has published this book at his own expense and still not found a distributor.

Festival of votes

We Indians are fond of festivals

Hustle and bustle is our cup of tea.

Baisakhi, Onam, Holi or Diwali

Each mela we flock to see!

Lo! a new expensive fair

Has now become our centre of attraction

It eats up crores of rupees

The festival of votes called Election!

Millions come out to mark the ballot

Men and women of every kind

Young and old, rich and poor

Educated and unread, with and without mind.

Immersed in caste and creed, we waver

To choose between the crocodile and the whale

Even if we make a clear choice

We do not know when we will fail!

(Contributed by G.C. Bhandari, Meerut)