By Shishir Prashant 
By Avijit Ghosh
Her husband was out of town. Her two sons were out for a Friday movie. Mridula Garg, then 42, was alone at her home in Safdarjung Development Area cooking aloo-matar for dinner when she heard a knock at the door.
Two male cops stood outside waving a copy of her novel, “Chittakobra”. They asked her if she was the author. “I was very happy. I thought they were readers,” recalls the writer. What the cops said next both appalled and angered her. “They said two pages in the novel are obscene and legally actionable. And that they had come to arrest me,” says Garg.
Chittakobra, an unapologetic love affair between a married Indian woman and a gypsy Scottish missionary, had been published a year ago in 1979 and was flying off the shelves. The pages that had outraged the Delhi administration’s puritan soul featured the protagonist’s erotic imaginings with her husband. A case was filed against her. “Aapko hawalat le jayenge,” the senior cop said.
But Garg, who had taught economics in the capital’s Janki Devi Memorial College, maintained her emotional equilibrium. She was aware that the police could give her bail on the spot, if a witness provided surety. The landlord was called upon and the bail furnished.
But the ordeal wasn’t over. For the next year or so, the Tis Hazari court kept issuing summons. “It was Kafka-ish,” she says. It was only after jurist-scholar LM Singhvi intervened that the case was withdrawn by Delhi Lt Governor Jagmohan. “I still don’t know who had coaxed the administration to file the case. I suspect it was at the behest of literary rivals envious of the book’s success,” says Garg, whose novel, “Miljul Mann”, received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2013.
Now 87, Garg doesn’t write regularly anymore. “For the first time in my career, I have a writer’s block,” says the Kolkata-born writer. But the reed-slim author remembers well. She talks of pre-independence Delhi, where her parents moved when she was 3, with a fondness reserved for old family photograph albums. She talks about the ‘bantawallah’ near Dena Bank in Chandni Chowk and the time when Bengali Market had only one sweet shop. “And it was famous for Dilbahar, a cross between ‘chamcham’ and ‘sandesh’ with cream on top,” she says.
Garg’s father was a senior executive with DCM, then primarily a textile company, and the family lived on Babur Road. “The houses were next to each other. When we celebrated Diwali, you couldn’t tell one from another,” she recollects.
The writer is also an eye witness to Delhi’s metamorphosis. “Everything changed after Partition. The influx of refugees brought major changes. They were gritty, determined traders who replaced the laidback businessmen of the city. The language too was transformed. Hindustani was replaced by Punjabi-Hindi. Dariyaganj was now Daryaganj. The ‘I” vanished from the pronunciation.”
She went to Lady Irwin School, then a private school, where students learnt to operate the takli (hand spindle) and train at a fully-equipped gym. She recalls an interaction with a British Council delegation, where one of the girls said, “People who have no history have no future.” The line got hardwired in her brain, lingered in her writings.
College life was equally exciting in 1950s Delhi. Garg remembers fellow students at Miranda House playing netball, throwball and basketball, doing theatre and participating in college mushairas. “We spent a lot of time in university coffee houses interacting with boys from St Stephen’s and Hindu colleges,” she reminisces. Among her classmates was Anita Mazumdar, who later became the Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai.
One incident from her post-graduate days in Delhi School of Economics, then headed by renowned economist KN Raj, is embossed in her memory. Some miscreants wanted to set fire to the library when Raj came out and stood outside the gate. “He was a small, slightly-built person, but of immense courage. He said, you can do what you want only after physically removing me. Nobody dared touch him. The miscreants eventually left,” she recalls.
Marriage took her outside Delhi. Her husband, an industrial engineer, was posted to far off-places like Dalmiyanagar in Bihar and Bagalkot in Karnataka. Interactions with common people in these small towns made Garg realise that the economics she had learnt had little to do with real life. “I thought if economics is fictional, why not write honest fiction,” she says.
She started writing short stories before adding novels to her repertoire. Her first story, “Rukawat”, was published in the reputed literary magazine, Sarika, in 1972. Literature gave her wings. Many of her protagonists were ahead of their time. Garg’s women sought control of their lives, were unapologetic about their desires, free from guilt about their choices.
“Hari Bindi”’s protagonist self-celebrates a carefree day out. “Saath Saal Ki Aurat” follows her heart at 60. “Mere”’s heroine decides to become pregnant against her husband’s wishes. But Garg refuses to be bracketed into an “ism”. “Every woman writes differently from another woman,” she says. Her last book, “Ve Nayaab Auratein”, profiled rare and special nonconformist women. Garg too is one.
About author: Avijit Ghosh is a Delhi-based senior journalist and author