Love Is Like A Moonbeam

by Subroto Mukerji

Centuries ago, the Sena rajas of Bengal decided to import men of

learning, Brahmin priest-scholars from Kannauj, which lies in what
came to be known as the United Provinces in British times, today the
North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Well-versed in the shastras and
other Vedic lore, these Upadhyayas, coming as they did from the
heartland of Oudh (Awadh), were equally knowledgeable in court-craft
and were reputed to be Persian scholars of some stature.
Going beyond the ambit of priestly duties, they rapidly gained the
favor of their sponsors. In time, they integrated with the local populace
even to the extent of changing their food habits, for they abandoned
the strict vegetarianism of their ancestors and became as fond of fish
and rice, the staple diet of their adoptive land, as any other Bengali.
The Upadhyayas split into clans, some coming to be known as
'Mukyha' Upadhyayas, some as 'Chath' Upadhyayas, and some as
'Bandh' Upadhyayas, which titles later metamorphosed into the
surnames we know as Mukerji (also 'Mukherjee,' 'Mookerjie,'
'Mukerjea,' and Mukherjea), Chatterji, and Banerji. Reliable scholarship
has traced the Mukhya Upadhyayas to their homeland in Ayodhya,
Ram Janma Bhoomi itself, that strife-torn area that will always be
known to history as the site of the infamous Babri Masjid imbroglio.

My father's maternal uncle Gangan, a chronic bachelor, was known for

two things: he was a master carpenter―he made such a beautiful roll-
top desk for his brother-in-law that it was the talk of Allahabad. I have
scoured the best of furniture shops in Delhi, but nowhere have I seen a
specimen that comes remotely close to the grandeur of that majestic
roll-top, now the proud possession of Anil Bordia, IAS (Retd.).
His second claim to fame was that he had compiled a family tree. I
remember glancing at it once - it ran into several pages - and
remarking that I had no idea that he and Sir Lal Gopal Mukherjee were
so closely related. His sister, my paternal grandmother, Smt. Mrilalini
Devi, was a lady of immense erudition and personality, ruling her
household of Madhu Mandir with a rod of iron.
There was a time when about four of her six sons, all her five
daughters, at least three daughters-in-law, and many other
dependants lived under the same roof, but such was her charisma that
even the most recalcitrant truant would never dare to disobey her
wishes.
I frankly admit that I was terrified of her. Whereas my Didu (maternal
grandmother) would play with me like a child and read out to me
stories from a Bengali book called Bonay Jongolay (In Jungles and
Forests - was this the cause, in later years, for my fascination with the
wild?), my Thakurma (paternal granny) was an aloof, commanding
figure surrounded by scurrying maidservants and other visitors.
She spent the day on her chaise longue, which was her battle
command-center, giving orders, summoning servants by ringing a
hand-bell, and receiving visitors. Each visitor got a stool, was allowed
to select a paan from a platter presented by a maid-servant, and was
apportioned a silver spittoon for her exclusive use, as the punkah
swished to and fro overhead, activated by a 'punkah boy' outside on
the verandah.
Whatever spare time she could get, she spent in reading. I do not think
she knew English, no doubt of the opinion that her husband, Abhay
Charan, made up for that deficiency. All I ever saw her reading were
Bengali books, but she read on all subjects, and it was plain for all to
see that she was real smart, practically self-educated as she was.

I saw a different side of her nature in 1971, when I went to Allahabad

to attend the last rites for her eldest son, Basu Deva Mukerji. The
'pardner' (my cousin, Subhash, and partner in a thousand escapades)
was in England, and I had no company of my own age on this solemn
occasion. But there were the books of Madhu Mandir, corridors and
rooms overflowing with thousands of them, and I would steal off to a
quiet room adjoining hers, for a few hours of undisturbed reading.
One day, she happened to glance in, saw me with my nose in a
paperback, and silently withdrew. Ten minutes later, she came
shuffling up to me, bent with age, holding a plate containing some
Bengali sweets in her hand.
This huge, empty house had once echoed to the conversation of many
scholarly men - it was a temple of learning - and I think her heart
overflowed with the memories of days gone by when they read, and
read and read!
In wordless approbation, expressionless, she handed me the delicacies
as I sat there on the bed, and wordlessly did she leave. I took me a
minute to recover. Her gesture, I realized, bespoke of a deep love that
needed no words. Those who love seldom speak of it.

In time, the fortunes of the Sena kings, and after them the Mughals,
declined and they were swept into obscurity. Local chieftains grabbed
suzerainty over vast areas and became feudal overlords. One such up-
and-coming dynasty, the Nawabs of Oudh (Awadh), gave employment
to a remote ancestor.
Ram Kanhai Mukhopadhyay, like many other Bengalis, had struck out
west in search of better prospects. He was said to be extraordinarily
proficient in Persian, the language of the court. His eldest son, Raj
Narain, carried on the tradition of Persian scholarship, and so did his
grandson, Madhusudan. But Madhusudan Mookerjee exhibited another
talent, which brought him to the notice of the British masters: he was
something of a scholar of the English language as well.
Appointed as a teacher, he rose to become the Headmaster of
Sultanpur Boy's High School through sheer merit alone, for he had
reverted to the Vedic religion of his ancestors and refused to
compromise with the British in either dress, eating habits, or cultural
preferences.
A yogi, he had the power, siddha-acquired, of bringing back to life
anyone who died of snakebite. My father told me that his mother had
seen with her own eyes the saucer of milk that was kept in one corner
of the bhandar ghar (where provisions were stored) at Sultanpur, and
every evening, a pair of cobras used to come from somewhere, drink
the milk, and slither away, never harming anyone.
Madhusudan's wife, my great-grandmother, known simply a 'Maa-ji' to
all, was said to be a lady of deep learning in the shastras, meditating
for hours daily. She kept a kumundali, an indigenous vessel with a
built-in handle, made from a gourd, of the sort much favored by
renunciants in India for ages. Whenever she was disturbed in her
prayers by her naughty grandchildren - and Father claimed to have
been one of the main culprits - she would fling them a few copper coins
from the kumundali, which always had a plentiful supply of them.

In 21st century India, there would be many city-dwellers who have

never seen a wild snake in their lives. Even in rural areas, snakes,
hunted for medicinal and other properties, and for the (illegal)
snakeskin trade, are fast becoming entitled to 'protected category'
status. But in 19th century India, vast forests still covered the land.
Even big cities had large parks, orchards, and wild tracts overgrown
with vegetation.
Chemical weedicides and pesticides had not sullied the habitat, and
snakes proliferated in a country where the nag, the cobra, was a
symbol of Lord Siva. Death by snakebite was by no means uncommon
(and the GIC - the General Insurance Corporation of India, perhaps
anachronistically, remains willing to cover this risk even today).
Madhusudan was often called upon to render service at any hour of
day and night, free of charge as enjoined by the siddhi he had
acquired.

Shortly after reporting for duty at Solan, Shimla Hills, I had been
invited to join the Durga Club as a temporary member, having dropped
a hint to Dr. Day, the Bengali CMO (Chief Medical Officer) of the Solan
Government Hospital, who had an account in the bank, that I was keen
on some tennis and billiards.
We were a merry quartet at tennis, Dr. Batra, the bachelor Dental
Surgeon of the district (a Doon School product who had a 2.5 H.P. BSA
motorbike which he had mothballed away and which I helped to put
back on the road), the local princeling known simply as 'Kunwar
Sahab,' extremely fit and athletic, and I. Every day at 5.30 p.m. sharp,
I'd drive up to my cottage, change into tennis kit, and run up the next
hill to the club, anxious to grab a couple of sets of doubles before the
sun went down behind the mountains.

One day, when Dr. Day accompanied me to my place after tennis,

when my parents were visiting, I happened to recount a story my
father had told me about his grandfather. It seems a gardener in the
municipal park had expired after being bitten by a cobra, and his
anxious relatives, instead of preparing the body for cremation, had
rushed to Mahusudan Mookerjee's house late in the afternoon for his
intervention.
On examining the unfortunate man and finding him stone dead, the
local (English) Civil Surgeon who had been riding past ordered that the
body be removed for autopsy, but he was surprised to find that the
large crowd refused to disperse. It apparently awaited the arrival of
some sort of faith-healer who was to bring the deceased to life.
Skeptical, but curious at the antics of the natives, he watched as the
old man who arrived took pinches of dust and, after incantations, blew
the dust onto the blue and rigid body which had, by then, been claimed
by rigor mortis. He observed, amused, as the old gentleman proceeded
to stroke the supine form from head to foot with a freshly washed and
starched dhoti folded and corded into a short stave.
But his amusement turned to amazement when the prostrate figure
opened its eyes, sat up and was able to walk home accompanied by his
rejoicing relatives. In vain did the Englishman beg for the secret from
the yogi, who told him with deep compassion that several lifetimes
were not enough for acquiring the requisite knowledge, involving as it
did unflinching devotion, punishing disciplines, and study of things
beyond his grasp.

I leaned back, prepared to face the ridicule of Dr. Day, a modern

medicine-man―brusque, practical, and scathingly outspoken about
religion and superstition. But he was strangely silent, brooding. On my
questioning him, with a provocative twinkle in my eye, whether he
believed the story, he replied heavily, "You know, Subroto, I would
never have swallowed it but for the fact that my own father had died of
snakebite.
"As his body lay on the ground, surrounded by wailing relatives, a man
came in, performed the very same rites described by you, and, after
reviving Father, stole away into the crowd. To this day I have no idea
who he was or how he did what he did; I was only about six years old
then."
A few days after this conversation, we received a telegram that my
grandmother had passed away. I grieved even more than her own son.
An era had ended.

Dr. Day recounted an experience from his early days as a government

doctor, when he'd been posted in a remote little place in Himachal.
Two young men, hardly nineteen, came to him with a problem. They
were in the army and, on furlough,were trekking to their native village
deep in the hills. Having loitered on the way, nightfall caught them on
a hilly crest.
After a frugal meal, they had bundled up in their blankets and gone to
sleep. The next morning, they had started a fire and boiled water in a
kettle, but having forgotten to bring tea leaves with them they had
decided, on the spur of the moment, to use in lieu thereof the aromatic
leaves of a shrub they had found growing close by.
After munching their biscuits and finishing the last of their 'tea,' they
had descended to a little stream that came cascading down the
mountainside, to rinse their mouths and wash-up before undertaking
the last part of the trek to their little village. To their amazement, as
they spat out the water they rinsed their mouths with, they noticed
small white objects go tinkling down the slope. They had lost their
teeth! Painlessly, unnoticed, nature had extracted their choppers
without the intervention of a dentist or a boxer!
There was, of course, little Dr. Day could do except to advise them to
get dentures for themselves. Trying his best to get the devastated
boys to speak coherently enough to reveal details of the location of
their impromptu campsite, he had scoured the hills for weeks, but in
vain. He never managed to locate the mysterious shrub, the extract of
whose leaves might have revolutionized dental surgery. Such is the
potential of the medicinal herbs that still exist in our mountains and
jungles. In saving our vanishing forests, we save a huge, untapped
reservoir of medicines still unknown to man, but is anyone out there
listening?

Madhusudan Mookerjee was a kind-hearted man, stealing off in the

dead of night, laden with blankets, which he surreptitiously draped
over the poor as they slept, shivering, on the ghats of the Ganges. He
left his property in trust for some purpose useful to education. And
thus came into being the M.M. Memorial Degree College at Sultanpur,
now well over a hundred years old.
His son, Abhay Charan, had to fend for himself, following in his father's
footsteps to become a teacher. Brilliant, he never came second in any
examination he sat for (a record subsequent generations have been
able to equal only collectively but never individually).

Biswanath Lahiri, IP, was approaching ninety when I last met him in
1986 at Allahabad. He was still hale and hearty, though his eyesight
wasn't all that good; this former IP (the Indian Police of British times,
precursor of the IPS) officer clearly remembered Professor Abhay
Charan Mukerji who had taught English literature at Muir College,
which institution went on to become the nucleus of what later became
Allahabad University. It was (and many claim still is), a premier
university right into the 1960's, producing a large number of ICS, IP,
IAS, and IPS officers, so much so that the media of the 80's and early
90's routinely railed against what it called 'the Allahabad University
caucus' that ran the country.

"Two things about your grandfather fascinated me," confessed

Biswanath Lahiri: "Firstly, he never carried notes to a lecture. He spoke
ex tempore, having memorized the entire works of Shakespeare,
Milton, Bacon, Pope, and so much else. Each lecture, therefore, was
unique, a collector's item; what a pity there were no tape-recorders in
those days. And secondly, his shoes shone like mirrors: he always said
he polished his own shoes." He looked down at my scuffed moccasins
that hadn't seen polish for days and looked away hastily.
"I remember that January day in 1915, when he distributed sweets in
the class. Your father had been born!" he added, with a grin, as he
visualized that long-ago scene of celebration.
Forty years from that date, Biswanath Lahiri's beautiful and talented
niece, Ranu, would wed a boy from Madhu Mandir, A.C. Mukerji's eldest
grandson, Sushital Banerjee (later Defence Secretary, GOI).

A.C. Mukerji seems to have had premonitions of an early death. He

toiled ceaselessly from sunrise to sunset. He gave tuitions to Nepalese
royalty from then ruling House of Ranas, and received payment in gold
sovereigns. He wrote many books on grammar, published by
Macmillans, which brought him handsome royalties, for his fame had
spread and his books were much in demand. As an undergraduate
student of eighteen, he had written an epic poem called The Nawabs
of Oudh that won him a Gold Medal and much critical acclaim, and he
wrote several general books, two of which I remember reading, Hindu
Fasts and Feasts, and Sages of Ancient India.
I had mentally braced myself for heavy phrases and long words when I
had opened the first book. It was with some amazement that I found
the language to be direct and deliciously elegant in its simplicity. The
tone was modern and contemporary, with a lightness and delicacy
rarely found in the works of Bengali authors of the time, addicted as
they were to the flowery prose typical of the literature of their mother
tongue.
Newspaper editors feared two Allahabad men mightily: Sir Ganganath
Jha, and A.C. Mukerji, for they knew that just one grammatical slip
would have these two pundits baying at their heels! I wish I'd inherited
just a small fraction of his enormous talent.

In the early 1930s, the British decided to develop an area just beyond
the point where the GT road leveled off after it had tumbled down
Thornhill Road, off Lowther Road (today's Deen Dayal Upadhyaya
Marg). George Town was to have large plots of about 12,500 square
yards each, to be given on 99-year leases to senior civil servants. A.C.
Mukerji, now a 'Rai Bahadur' (a title given by the British for meritorious
services to the State - education, in A.C. Mukerji's case), was allotted
plot number 24, and in 1935, Madhu Mandir stood complete.
Over three acres of land is enough for a dwelling, even one this big,
and so a large orchard came up behind the house, where a well was
dug for watering it. There were, I remember, over fifty trees, mostly
mango, jamun, khirni, jackfruit, and bel, besides neem, eucalyptus,
lime and guava.
The sagar pesha, as the domestic staff quarters were called, came up
along the left margin while at the rear, where the Munshi ji had his
sprawling cottage, stood the horse stables and garages for the phaeton
and buggy. There was enough space left over for a cricket pitch, a
tennis court, a putting green, and a clump of guava and lime trees
(next to which a ramp for washing cars came up in later years), while
eucalyptus and neem trees spread their fragrance from a point not far
from the massive portico at the front of the house. For eleven children,
it must have been just about perfect.
Coming in through the gate was a driveway that encircled a round
lawn with its fringe of flowerbeds. Fruits, not flowers, were A.C.
Mukerji's passion, and it was said that when the gardener grew a
bunch of grapes that won first prize at the local horticultural exhibition,
he received a gold chain as a reward. In an age of plenty, Madhu
Mandir always had plenty more, hallowed ground that Madhusudan
Mookerjee blessed in absentia, and very lucky for its occupants, too,
even for the tenants who came to stay when almost all the original
inhabitants had moved away or had died off.
But for us kids, it was a wondrous place: the trophies of the hunt that
looked down at us stonily from the walls, the guns, the huge display
cases of pens and pencils, neatly arranged alphabetically as per
country of origin, the endless book racks with sliding doors full of books
on every subject under the sun (donated to Allahabad University
library), the ancient fans that ran on DC – Direct Current – there was no
AC in those days. When AC did come, everything needed a little
rectifier in the circuit to convert AC to DC and stay in business.

There was a massive Philips twelve-valve radio with band-spread on

ten bands, a small red light glowing when tuning was off and a green
one that came on when the station was correctly tuned. Despite the
huge band-spread, there was a separate knob for fine tuning, and the
set, assisted by the long aerial on the roof, well over a hundred feet
high, could catch the weakest of stations broadcasting from anywhere
in the world.
Father used to relate how, during World War II, he heard the BBC
convey the news of the disastrous loss of the Royal Navy's flagship, the
battleship 'HMS Hood,' caused by the very first salvo fired by the
formidable German battleship, the Bismarck, from her fearsome 16"
guns:
 "His Majesty's Admiralty regrets to announce the unfortunate loss of
the 'HMS Hood.' She received a direct hit on her magazine – a shell
from the enemy battleship 'Bismarck' – the explosion breaking her keel
and sending her to the bottom with all hands on deck."

Houses crumble to dust, and land never belongs to anyone, constantly

changing hands down the ages as the earth, and its solar system, lazily
circles the galactic core once in every 250 million years. The Wheel of
Time turns and draws everything back to itself, for it is all a play of
duality, of maya.
Only one thing lasts forever, and that's Love. Love is like a moonbeam:
ethereal, yet eternal, and, being light, from which all things are made,
more substantial than any corporeal human. Look for me in
moonbeams…

 Subroto
Mukerji 