A childhood memory of Emergency in our ancestral home in Kannur

The first vivid memory I have of that period is of my father returning home without his thick moustache. He had been underground (or olivil, as they say in Malayalam) with an arrest warrant hanging over him. His sudden appearance at our doorstep startled us children. He walked towards the house smiling, his arms held behind his back in a relaxed posture, as though he’d just thrown off a heavy sack of rice from his shoulders. That’s how it looks in hindsight.

While my twin sister ran away despite her initial reflex to greet him, just as we often did when unfamiliar or scary-looking visitors showed up at our ancestral home in Kannur, I, foolishly, ran toward him. My sister, always more cautious, warned me to stay away. She herself didn’t run into a dark room, as we normally would when strangers came, but instead ran to my mother in the kitchen to report what she had just witnessed.

It was only when she realised that my mother was in no mood to react, laughing instead of helping, that my sister retreated beneath a bed in one of the interior rooms of my mother’s joint-family home. She stayed hidden until her sense of danger faded, her composure stiff with sulking.

Only much later, perhaps months, maybe a year, did I learn that Emergency had ended on the very day of my father’s visit without a moustache, in early 1977. Indira Gandhi, the Congress Prime Minister, who had imposed it on June 25, 1975 though the President of India, had suspended civil liberties, jailed political thousands of political opponents and driven many underground. Now she was preparing for elections, hoping to return to power, and expecting a victory after having put democracy on pause in India.

But in truth, my father’s return from underground (he had successfully evaded arrest) was not my first memory of the Emergency. That period, as we now know, was imposed by the Congress regime on dubious pretexts, just as we would later see similar pretexts invoked elsewhere in the world in the name of national security, only to justify wars for power, control and resources. Empires old and new have always cloaked greed in the language of law and misplaced patriotism.

For us children, Indira Gandhi was a dirty word, even though we hadn’t yet begun school. A tutor used to visit to teach three of us the Malayalam alphabet, but we resisted with full vigour. Our knowledge of Mrs Gandhi came mainly from her photos on the street. I remember mispronouncing her name as inraanthi, mimicking my older cousins.

Another fleeting memory of the time (I am told it was late 1976) is of my younger brother, just over one year old, crying irrationally when someone placed a newspaper with Mrs Gandhi’s photo on a chair I liked to sit in. Spurred by sibling rivalry, he staggered over and dropped into the chair. But once seated, he grew uneasy, wriggling and eventually howling, after I teased him in a Kannur accent: “Inraanthi ninna kadikkum (Indira Gandhi will bite your bum).” Although he had just started speaking, that comment sent him into hysterics, inconsolable and afraid and I was scolded by my mother and just about every adult in the house.

Now, nearly five decades later, it’s not just my father’s clean-shaven face that reminds me of those times. It’s the shroud of secrecy that enveloped our home whenever he visited. Such occasions were rare, and when he came, he ate lunch in the bedroom, a break from tradition so jarring that it etched itself into my memory even though I hadn’t yet turned four.

No one ate in the bedroom. Men ate at the dining table; some of us children had our meals in the kitchen, seated on small “plastic wire chairs” with a stool placed in front. When I saw my father eating lunch, I called out, “Achchan!” (Father!), not too loudly, but with excitement. My mother silenced me immediately, whispering something about people keeping watch. I didn’t understand her warning, but I glanced out the windows, looking for strange men spying on us.

At that age, my understanding of adiyanthiravastha (Emergency) was simply this: my father should not be seen eating lunch in the bedroom. I even ran to tell a cousin almost my age. He believed me. We peeked in through the half-open door and saw him eating. When he smiled at us, we didn’t smile back. Perhaps we didn’t want to acknowledge we had seen him at all or that we saw him eat lunch in the bedroom.

It was only many months after Emergency was lifted that my mother angrily told me about the persecution he had faced. I don’t remember the exact words, but she made it clear that inraanthi was not a good woman, and that the police had visited our home the night of June 25. That night, my father had arrived home an hour after calling the district police station from the CPM party office in Kannur, inquiring why some of his comrades had been arrested. The police had falsely assured him they would be released. They had already begun looking for him.

Someone misled the police when they asked for directions to my mother’s home where we were, including my father. They all had heard the sound of the police jeep passing by. Later, someone else gave the police the exact location of our home. By then, my father, who had faced several arrests and jail terms and knew the way police operated, was gone.

They knocked on the door and asked my maternal uncle whether “Pattiam Gopalan was in there”. He said no, and yet they searched the rooms, including the one I and my siblings were sleeping in – obviously we didn’t know it then. That same night, the police raided his family home 22 km away, forced the door open, searched every room and created a scene. My father knew they had come for him although he knew of the law under which he was being chased by police, the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), only later.

My mother’s stories later filled in the rest: of thousands arrested, tortured and many killed, of informers and complicit local leaders of the Congress party. Stories I would devour years later in newspapers, books and political journals. I continue to read them to remind myself what totalitarian regimes do to their political opponents out of fear and their insatiable lust for power.

My father eating lunch in the stillness of our bedroom, while my mother (as though caught by paranoia) silenced my innocent joy at seeing him, that moment now feels like the essence of Emergency. The gravity of that image still rattles me, a child of pre-Emergency India.

1975 EmergencyA Personal HistoryCongressIndira GandhiKannurpoliticsWeb Exclusive