Delhi As It Was

The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set — Dilli in the 1920s — but shops still sell “muslin-soft” rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.

Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two — real writer and imaginary writer — in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes “bisexually”, with access to both genders, sets up an intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish. Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak — a perk natural to a man of a certain status.

“He himself has two women — one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this — though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you’ll never understand.”

Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband’s life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not a choice open to her. Mehak’s mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation — for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, “People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own sake.” But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not caricatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.

One of the pleasures of Sobti’s writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan’s dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi.

This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti’s other work, but no less satisfying. Austen’s England and Sobti’s Dilli have much in common: what drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen’s world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was lttle more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn’t reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama, but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.