Veda Shakuntala Das was the eldest of the five children of the Reverend and Mrs. P. I. Das of Sialkot, Pakistan. And being a “Das” was a fact that she would proudly own till her dying day; indeed pride of bearing that name may just be somewhat of a besetting sin of some us Dases. Under her married name, she was Veda Samuel, the very respected English teacher at the Lahore Convent of Jesus and Mary School and the wife of kind and gentle Uncle Samuel. She was mother of Ansel and Emile Unjom, our elder cousins who we so looked up to and who would show us the sites of the great metropolis of Lahore. And she was “Phupo” Veda to my brothers and me.
I think that you can learn at least a little about what a people hold dear by the degree of linguistic specificity that they develop for similar but slightly different things, though it is likely hyperbole that Eskimos have 100 words for snow. “Phupo” is the name used for an aunt who is the sister of one’s father. And there are at least three other words for “aunt” depending on her relation to one’s mother or father. For Pakistanis family is important and each use of Aunt very quickly gives the listener important social information. Whatever we might have called Phupo Veda, though, she certainly was important to us, and a great and special lady.
As a teacher of English she loved to teach Shakespeare, and would always remind us that King Lear was the greatest and darkest of the tragedies and of the faithfulness of the truthful but loving Cordelia. And when she was at our home, my brothers would play her another classic from English literature, a recording of Tennyson’s famous poem “Charge of the Light Brigade” set to music by Manfred Mann on our 3-in-1 record player until she would begin crying, which was their aim all along, and ask them to turn it off. “Noble six hundred!” indeed.
When I grew up in Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s, for better or for worse, many missionary families spent their summers in the hill station of Murree, as the British had done before them during the days of the Raj to escape the unbearable heat of the plains and to experience the joys of a temporary community. Many of us children would come out of the boarding school which was also in Murree and live with our parents in houses dotted all around the mountain, houses which had very foreign names such as Rosenheim and Forest Dell and Bexley and Ospring. And each Sunday we would fill the old Holy Trinity Church on the Mall Road to worship together.
It is not the aim of this essay to discuss the baggage that was almost certainly created by Christian missionaries taking on the habits, yea sometimes even the very houses of the previous colonists. It is especially hard to discuss since some of those times in the mountains with my parents present with us in a place of such idyllic beauty were some of the most lovely and formative of my lifetime and inform so many of my deeply seated notions of beauty and safety, of comfort and joy. Please just know that I acknowledge the vexed nature of it all.
And to the mountains would come Phupo Veda and Uncle Samuel to stay with us for extended visits. It was absolutely lovely to have them there, and I think they especially enjoyed their time together there as a couple off on their own. And sometimes when we were driving some place, Phupo Veda would point to a tiny house far up on an opposing mountainside with seemingly no path to reach it and she would ask us in Punjabi in amazement, “Oh kitho apna loon lanthe nai?” or “where do they get their salt from?” It became kind of a joke after a while and she would smile her broad smile that would spread all the way up to her taut cheekbones, set high up on her round face.
I was prompted to write this essay, though, because I recently found some haiku about Phupo Veda from the times when we would visit her family in Lahore. In those days it did not seem to matter when we would arrive, day or night, or whether we had even announced our arrival from our home several hours away via a letter or a phone call ahead of time. Tea would be made or dinner would be expanded and beds added into the living room and sleeping arrangements shifted to accommodate us all. I perhaps do not talk about my Pakistani heritage nearly enough, but I am eternally gratefully for the lessons of hospitality that are imbued in every aspect of that culture.
In Lahore, while my father was in meetings or in the evenings when he was free, Ansel and Emile would take us to the market for treats or perhaps to the zoo or the movies for a war movie or the latest James Bond or best of all, to my mind at least, just up to their postage stamp sized roof to fly kites, in the crowed airspace of one of the great kite flying cities of the world, where the kite strings are coated in a paste laced with crushed glass in order to try to cut the string of other kites, to let them float on the hot winds to be caught by whomever fortune might lead to catch the dragging the string. And some of the battles were epic, with kites several feet wide battling each other far up in the sky. I remember sometimes seeing cut kites flying so high that they were only tiny undulating flecks caught in some upper level of winds, barely visible in the light of a dying day. Somehow to me that sight created such a feeling of loneliness.
I also remember quiet little vignettes from that small house in the Bibi Pak Daman neighborhood of Lahore. In one of the dressers there was a small junk drawer with all sorts of bits and baubles in it and which was endlessly fascinating for a child to look through. And on the wall above that dresser was fixed a tiny circular mirror. These days when I am shaving with my hipster Merkur safety razor, I remember my gregarious cousin Ansel, his barrel chest in an undershirt backlit by the morning light in the courtyard, first using a brush to apply shaving cream, catching tiny bits on his ears, and then stretching and contorting face and lip and nose to shave.
It is another vignette involving my Phupo Veda, though, that I remember most vividly as an emblem of generosity and whimsy. Phupo Veda was generous in all things, creating wonderful meals for us all and having treats with tea, but when mangoes were in season dessert generally involved several plates of them with the mangoes sliced in thin pieces so that everyone could have a share in them. But in some special quiet moments, perhaps when we had just come home from the market, and generally when there was only one of us with her, Phupo Veda would put a plate of whole mangoes, two maybe even three, down between us and say, “OK, now you and I are going to eat all of these together, just the two of us.” Then she would slice the green “langaras” or the huge yellow “Sindhri” mangoes and we would have a secret feast. Truly, it was a taste of Eden.
profligate goodness,
wild holiness of eden;
the scent of mangoes
with aunty veda,
the mangoes piled before us;
summer in lahore
