And Life Goes On

After the trauma of Amrita's tragic death, Victor began to pick up the broken threads of his existence in Saraya. He lived very comfortably in a palatial bungalow surrounded by a sprawling garden. He had a cook and bearer who looked after his everyday needs and a "maali" to tend to the grounds. The staff  got a handsome salary of four annas a month and Victor was told he was spoiling them by paying too much!

His work at the clinic completely absorbed him. He had to face an outbreak of plague, closely followed by an epidemic of cholera.Tropical disease and medicine, which had so far only been book knowledge, learnt in medical school, became a harsh reality with which he had to quickly familiarise himself.

Unfortunately, circumstances back in Hungary were not so good. World War II was raging on and Victor's mother Blanca and sister Viola were living in abominable conditions. He never wrote letters, but would sometimes furiously pound out a  few lines on his old type-writer using just two fingers, unmindful of grammatical or spelling mistakes. This letter written to Anna in 1946 tells how harrowing the situation really was.

Victor eventually sent for Blanca after the war and she arrived in India in 1948. She was quite content living with him in Saraya, pottering about the house, cooking Hungarian meals and overseeing the upkeep of the garden. At one point of time the household included Nina, her mother Anna, her half sister Kiran,  me, and a dog. Blanca was overheard sorrowfully telling the neighbour " My poor son is living surrounded by women.....even the dog is a bitch"! Her command over the English language was not very good and she had to tactfully be told that this was not a very complimentary thing to say. 

Regrettably, over the years irreconcilable problems arose between Nina and Blanca and she chose to return to Hungary in 1963. It broke Victor's heart to say goodbye to her because he knew it was unlikely that they would meet again.

Viola, Victor's older sister, whom he had last seen in 1939 decided to visit in October 1982. He travelled to Delhi to receive her, and found much to his embarrassment, that after forty three years he could not recognise her. He had to actually ask a number of old women at the airport who they were before he finally spotted a doddery old lady, standing in the wrong queue, who turned out to be his sister.

Viola had planned to stay three months but  found the Indian climate unbearably hot, the food too exotic and the environment extremely dusty and dirty.When she developed a stomach ailment, it terrified her to think she would die in this strange country far from her own loved ones. She returned to Hungary after just three weeks.

Victor felt a mixture of relief  and sadness after she left.Their conversations had been difficult - his Hungarian was rusty and  her English was not very good. All the friends he inquired about were dead and all the remembered places of his youth did not exist any more. It was depressing for the siblings who had once been close, to find that they had nothing in common anymore.