SOMEWHERE BEYOND RIGHT AND WRONG

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an unpublished extract from the novel

Kishore Thukral is a writer-photographer residing in Goa. His published works include The Chronicler’s Daughter (Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2002), a political satire, Spiti through Legend and Lore (Mosaic Books, 2006 – first edition; Dolphin Press, 2025 – second edition), a travelogue that documents the legends and folklore of a remote Indian valley both in picture and text, Sharanam Gachhami: An Album of Awakening (Full Circle, 2011), a coffee-table book that portrays Buddhist principles through the lens, and Ephemera… (Mosaic Books, 2015), a book of photographs and quintains. He is presently working on a handbook on Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist iconography. In Hindi, Kishore has written short stories and libretti for musicals performed by intellectually challenged children and young adults. He has also translated and written songs, including one for the award-winning film, I am Kalam.

Kishore has to his credit a number of photo exhibitions and illustrated lectures on Spiti, Dangkhar, and Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist art.  He is a former executive director of the International Buddhist Confederation, New Delhi, and is presently a member of the advisory committee of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, headquartered in Bangkok.  Today Kishore splits his time between friends, family, the beach, the riverbank, his photography and his writing.

Sudeep Sen

Synopsis

Who would have dreamt, when they first met in December 1971 – when Kranti Ahmed Tarar accompanied his fledgling journalist wife, Hema Seksaria, to Simla for a piece on the country’s first army officer taken prisoner in the war, when all of Simla had gathered to pray for Tapasi Thakur’s POW sibling, when Tapasi was already engaged to be married to the persistent Satish Kumar Dhingra, when she and her mother had only recently risen out of near indigence to reasonable comfort – that Kranti and Tapasi would embed themselves subliminally in each other’s conscious. That a saga would be born.

Many years go by before they meet again, and fall in love. And an equal number pass before they are discovered and torn apart. And even more before she – browbeaten by the moralistic shenanigans of her hubristic brother and five lamebrained sisters, the choler of her palsied husband, and the pious utterances of her fellow acolytes of the Sarvabhoot Guru, the Omnipresent Master – finally sheds her guilt.

Meantime the country witnesses its fair share of historical occurrences – a first atomic blast in the desert, an Emergency, a military operation that desecrates a most revered religious shrine, a Prime Minister’s assassination, the resultant riots in the capital, a provocative chariot journey gashing open the country’s bosom, the felling of a medieval mosque, a second nuclear test explosion, an ill-advised train incineration, the insane backlash aimed at annihilating an entire community, the rise of a leader whose every word is construed by millions as gospel and other millions as libellous, fictitious and provocative…

Set against the backdrop of these climacterics, indeed woven into them, the story of Kranti Ahmed Tarar and Tapasi Thakur, whether together or apart, spans five decades, ably aided by sundry characters, mainly their respective spouses, Hema and Satish, and children Ishita and Sudhir. Other than them, perhaps the greatest space is occupied by Tapasi’s younger brother, Shyam Thakur, first a soldier, then a businessman, and equally devious and overbearing as both. And Kranti’s childhood friend, Jaggu, a cheery Sardar, who is more brother to him than a brother can ever be. There are the parents too – Kranti’s foster ones, Air Vice Marshal Faqir Ahmed Tarar and his two-generations younger British wife, Mildred, both of whom love him as they would have their own flesh and blood, and Tapasi’s natural ones, the errant and feckless Durga Das Thakur and his beautiful, abandoned wife, Rani, who dons silence because she believes her speech is the only libation she can offer to her gods to ensure that her five older daughters, whom she has given up in adoption, are safe and happy wherever they are. And finally, there is the irrepressible Tuni, half-sister to Tapasi and her siblings, but born, raised and practicing her trade in the seedy environs of Sonagachi, Calcutta’s infamous redlight district.

Enveloped within this broader tale of love, lust, avarice, envy, intrigue and apoplexy are the sub-stories of the desertion of Rani by Durga Das, the unending ego clash between Satish and Shyam, Satish’s paid escapades with Tuni, and more.

In the end, though, most of all this is the enduring saga of Kranti and Tapasi, of truth and deception, of exhilarating highs and devastating lows, of love, vows, heartbreak, and reunion. A story that will, forever, dwell in a realm that lies Somewhere beyond Right and Wrong.

Chapter 1: Introducing Kranti Ahmed Tarar

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In the year of the Lord 1947, a little over three months after the barbaric breakup of the subcontinent into one India and two Pakistans, Shanta, a Punjabi Hindu woman married to Fardeen Ahmed Tarar, a Dilliwala Muslim, bore them their only child, a boy. They named him Kranti, hoping that like his name, he would be the light, the revolution, wherever he went.

In that era of the grisly geographical split, united by their abhorrence of the religious divide, Shanta and Fardeen’s was a match made in heaven. Until, one day, heaven itself consumed them both, along with forty others, when the bus in which they were travelling to Simla tumbled down a gorge while negotiating a sharp bend of the narrow mountain road.

After the bodies of the couple were extricated from the mangled remains of the vehicle, and after they had been respectfully cremated and buried by their respective families, the responsibility of their two-year-old had fallen into the lap of the infant’s fifty-year-old uncle. Faqir Ahmed Tarar, affectionately called FAT by his fellow Air Force officers, was a quarter century older than his deceased brother, and living testimony to their dead father’s virility that had spanned four wives and twenty-two offspring. Collectively, the begums had engineered a perfect sex ratio among their brood – eleven males to eleven females. Faqir, Kranti’s foster father, was the oldest of the Tarar children; Fardeen, Kranti’s natural father, the youngest.

At fifty, Faqir was a confirmed bachelor. The grapevine had it that he had been in love with his father’s fourth wife, Fardeen’s mother, and that Fardeen was in fact their love child. That explained the special affection he had for his youngest sibling, and why he had unprotestingly, indeed most willingly, taken upon himself the nurturing of the orphaned toddler. Kranti was to Faqir, after all, as much grandson as he was nephew. But in those days, when there were no DNA tests to prove or dispel doubts or allegations about paternity, this bit of the Tarar chronicles remained but a rumour.

Some two decades later, at about the time that young Kranti Ahmed Tarar, having discovered the joie de vivre that comes with falling in love, was contemplating wedlock, his septuagenarian foster father, Air Vice Marshal Faqir Ahmed Tarar decided to abandon bachelorhood for a nubile British lass of forty. In the two blissful years of marriage that he survived, he prepared a meticulous will, apportioning everything he owned equally between his wife and his foster son.

Young as he was, Kranti understood the old man’s need for companionship, and never grudged him his marriage. Nor did he envy Mildred Davis Tarar her share of the inheritance. From the day she entered their home as Mrs Tarar, to the day she departed for her final abode some three decades later, she remained to him both ‘Mildred’ and ‘Mom’, equally friend and mother.

Chapter 2: Introducing Tapasi Thakur

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Tapasi Thakur’s entry into the world preceded Kranti’s by thirty-two days.

She was born in Himachal Pradesh, then still a part of the state of Punjab; to be more specific, in her sprawling ancestral house in Palchan, a village of middling size a few kilometres beyond Manali, enroute to the blustery Rohtang Pass and the frigid wilderness beyond. But she spent her growing-up years in Simla, now Shimla, where for years before finally quitting India, its erstwhile British masters had set up summer camp and established convent schools for their own progeny.

The high-born Thakur genus of Palchan, after a score of daughters born to three brothers, was still heirless. It was now feared that, courtesy all the alcohol he had pumped down his gullet over the years, the sperm of the youngest of the Thakur boys, Durga Das, had withered, and that no matter how often and how fiercely he made love to Rani, his wife of a decade and a half, his seed was no longer strong enough to germinate into a male child inside her womb.

Even so, in the undying hope that their next born would be a son, on the advice of their family astrologer, Durga Das Thakur and Rani had bestowed upon each of their first five daughters names beginning with U – Urmila, Ujjwala, Upasana, Usha and Uma. By the time they had their sixth, the astrologer had fallen to old age, leaving his legacy and patrons to his son. After a thorough re-evaluation of the couple’s horoscopes, the young man had opined that a name beginning with T, and not U, for their sixth daughter would ensure a male foetus in Rani Thakur’s womb the next time she was with child.

Fifty mountain villages, far removed from the tectonic happenings of the time in the plains of north India, and with a total headcount pushing three thousand, had come together to mourn the birth of the baby girl.

Thus was Tapasi welcomed into this clan of political achievers, one of whom had been imprisoned by the British in 1928, after being felled by lathi blows rained upon a procession led by Lala Lajpat Rai to protest against the Simon Commission in far-away Lahore. Another Thakur scion was later to become a minister in the state’s government after it was accorded full statehood in 1971, and yet another a senior leader of the ruling party and minister in the Union cabinet of Indira Gandhi. But those three gentlemen apart, the rest of the Thakur men, if not frittering away their forefathers’ hard-earned wealth, had done nothing to add to it. They reckoned that their lands, spread over the fifty villages between Manali and Mandi, would yield enough in perpetuity to feed endless generations of Thakurs.

Nevertheless, by no estimation were the Thakur men misogynists. They loved their women, sent the current generation of them to the best schools and colleges, and even allowed some their own choice of marriage partner. They garnished them with expensive sarees and gold, showered them with complete charge of the kitchen, and relished the chorus of their voices in prayer, chant or song, both on festive occasion and festival.

It was in this milieu that, two years after the birth of Tapasi, Durga Das Thakur, given to wine and song, finally succeeded in bequeathing to his family a male heir.

In untold ways, the birth of her brother, Shyam, changed little Tapasi’s life forever. Her father, having registered his greatest accomplishment to date, added woman to wine and song, and insisted on partition of the family’s ancestral assets. That done, his daily consumption of the beverage increased by the gallon, and the time he accorded his family plummeted from an hour a day to scarcely an hour a month, until one day he abandoned it altogether for the lust of a young woman just a tad older than his eldest daughter.

Heartbroken, his beautiful wife, the first published woman writer in English from the Punjab, gathered her brood, ranging from half a year to fifteen, and shifted house to Simla, where she found herself employment as a teacher of English at St. Mary’s College. There, seven children since she had penned her last published word, she took up her pen again, and started to write with a vengeance. However, saddled as she was with a debilitating heartache and the sole responsibility of her juveniles, the exercise proved only somewhat cathartic. So a full year after relocating from her errant husband’s home, Rani Thakur decided to borrow a leaf from his book, and drown her sorrows in the bottle.

The solace the alcohol lent her was compelling; in no time Rani graduated from just one drink to several, and then many, every evening. Mercifully the college principal, a compassionate Catholic nun, realized both her need and compulsion, and instead of dismissing her, advised her to find foster homes within the Thakur clan for her children – all except the two infants, because they were both still too young to be without their mother.

That was the setting in which Tapasi grew from toddler to teenager, walking two miles daily to and from school, and watching her elegant mother wilt from guilt and intoxication. Often, it fell upon the little girl to procure her mother’s daily panacea, because it pained her no end to see her suffer without it.

Her brother too inhabited the same world. But being the legatee of his forebears’ genes, Shyam was the quintessential Thakur male – one who, even at fifteen, would instruct but not assist, commiserate but not share in the misery, who regarded every word issuing from his own lips laden with wisdom, to whom every woman, be it mother or sister, was precious, but not sagacious.

At sixteen, when Shyam Thakur gained admission to the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla, their mother’s limited resources were found to be just enough to give him the mandatory half-yearly pocket money of three hundred rupees. In the army Shyam hoped to win both rank and laurels, enough to ensure that his name would forever be mentioned in gold in the Thakur annals. As for his sister, it was a foregone conclusion that she would stay back in Simla to look after their mother, and that any further education for her would be through private tuition and open college.

But Tapasi Thakur, daughter of Durga Das and Rani Thakur, bore it all with a smile. To the beautiful, afflicted mother, racked with both remorse and despondency, her youngest daughter was simply living up to her name – Tapasi, the female ascetic.

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Sudeep Sen is a widely recognised contemporary poet, described by the BBC as “one of the finest English-language poets in the international literary scene.” His prize-winning books include Postmarked India, Rain, Aria, Fractals, EroText, Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms, Anthropocene (2021-22 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize winner), and Red (2023), with Blue Nude and The Whispering Anklets forthcoming. He has edited several influential anthologies, and his work has been translated into over 25 languages and appeared in major publications worldwide. He is editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and has held residencies at the Nirox Foundation and Museo Camera. The Government of India awarded him a senior fellowship for outstanding contributions to culture/literature, and he was the first Asian to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture. Red is available at all good bookshops.