JOIN USTanya Tania
Antara Ganguli
Bloomsbury
2016, pp 208, Rs 299
History is geography, it could be said, in the sense that each individual’s collective, national past is determined by which side of the international border she or he is born in. Views and attitudes are, as we know, conditioned not just by heredity, but by the environment.
In Tanya Tania, Antara Ganguli explores the relationship between two high-school girls with similar names but born on different sides of the border. It’s 1991, and the schoolgirl Tanya lives in the commercial capital of Pakistan, Karachi, and Tania in its Indian equivalent of Mumbai (then known as Bombay), two cities linked together by the Arabian Sea.
What the teenagers have in common, apart from being educated in elite English-medium schools, is that their mothers studied together at Wellesley College in America. And so, after breaking her leg playing hockey and being laid up at home for three months, Tanya Talati starts corresponding with Tania Ghosh. Tanya’s mother Lisa is an American who fell in love with a Pakistani neurosurgeon and married him. Tania’s mother Sraboni is a business executive who earns much more than her accountant husband.
This being well before the era of emails and Facebook, the correspondence is by snail mail. Tanya’s letters to Tania are all about filling up application forms and ensuring that her profile guarantees her admission to an American Ivy League college. Tanya even wants to encourage her house-maid Chhoti Bibi to pass the correspondence course equivalent of a high-school degree so that the Admissions Officer at Harvard can be impressed by the fact that her application letter mentions her commitment to teaching someone who belongs to the socio-economically disadvantaged strata. And so what if Chhoti Bibi, when asked whether she wants to be a bank-teller, shop-clerk or teacher, replies that she would like to be a servant with seven varying outfits so that she can wear a different dress every day of the week.
Tania would much rather study in a Bombay college and marry her boyfriend. In her reply, she writes, “I want to run away to an island and live there alone or maybe with Nusrat. I don’t even want to mention Nusrat to you because of the way you talked about Chhoti Bibi, which clearly shows that you have no class. Nusrat is not a servant,” says Tania about the maid who washes dishes at her Mumbai home and who cannot speak but is a topper in every class in her not-so-elite school and who is the one person whom Tania is totally at peace with.
At some stage, her American mother goes into a state of acute depression and refuses to leave the bedroom and Tanya feels that the only person she can reach out to is Tanya in Mumbai. Meanwhile, following the demolition of Babri Masjid, when riots break out around Nusrat’s home in Bombay’s Bhendi Bazaar, Tania’s parents insist the maid stay with them until the trouble stops. However, one day, when Tania returns from school, she finds that Nusrat has gone, leaving a letter which says, “I thought we were best friends. I can see now that you were just being kind. I will always love you. Yours, Nusrat.” Tania rushes to Nusrat’s school and finds that her friend is among those who have been killed.
Days later, she discovers a letter at her home, addressed to Nusrat, where Tanya has written, “Tania doesn’t think of you the way you think of her. She is worried that you have perhaps misinterpreted her kindness to you. She has to make new friends now that she is going to college, friends she can go to real public places with.”
And Tania of Bombay rings up Tanya in Karachi and tells her that “If it hadn’t been for that letter, Nusrat would not have left the house”, and returns all the other letters, cut up in pieces.
Which is a rather dramatic ending to a relationship by correspondence and Antara Ganguli’s book. Why Tanya wrote the letter to Nusrat is not really clear. Was Tanya trying to manipulate things so that Tania would only be her BFF? And how real is any relationship which is based purely on correspondence? In 1940s Holland, the adolescent Anne Frank poured out her feelings in and to a diary which she nicknamed Kitty.
The blurbs on the front and back covers of Tanya Tania seem to be bilaterally balanced, with Shobhaa De’s appreciation being matched with comments from Fatima Bhutto and Bapsi Sidhwa. All that is missing is a blurb by Shabana Azmi to make it two-all in terms of Indo-Pakistani appreciation for a book which did not have to end so dramatically in what is otherwise a beautifully-told tale of twin-city schoolgirls growing up in a turbulent decade.