The extraordinary Champa

We store memory in multiple layers. Some may become a burden, some are uplifting, and some are just there — parked in a corner to be pried out when the moment comes. Many are connected with the people one has known and who have impacted one’s life. Recently, writing about Nek Chand, Amitabh Pande, a former civil servant, mentioned another extraordinary person of Chandigarh of that era, Champa Mangat Rai. This triggered yet another memory and the close friendship that my parents, especially my father, had with the Mangat Rais. Some distance came after they separated and when Mangat Rai married the writer Nayantara Sahgal. The close ties with Champa Mangat Rai remained till her death on March 7, 1999, at the age of 79. When we heard of her passing, my father and I drove down from Shimla to Chandigarh and were just in time for the burial. All the way down and on most of the way up, he hardly spoke. When he did, all he said was: “The world has lost a very fine person.”

While this is something unclear, the connection with Champa Mangat Rai, if any — and certainly tenuous — may have gone back to Lahore where my grandfather was teaching both at the university and at Kinnaird College. Her father, Satya Prakash Singha, an Indian Christian, was the university’s Registrar and went on to become the Speaker of the British-Indian Punjab Assembly; he stayed on in Pakistan after Partition. Champa’s future husband, Edward Nirmal Mangat Rai, ‘Bunchi’ to his friends, was a member of the ‘Heaven Born’, the moniker given to members of the Indian Civil Service. They got married in 1944 after they literally crashed into one another while cycling down Lahore’s Mall. Mangat Rai wrote in his autobiography: “I collided with a young lady, also on a bicycle, who had an umbrella for the protection of her complexion, in one hand, and dexterously supported a book for the edification of her mind, in the other.” This could well be her for the rest of her life.

After Partition, Mangat Rai opted to come to India. It was in Shimla, a small town with a smaller circle, that my still-bachelor father and the Mangat Rais became close friends. This was in the the early 1950s when most of Chandigarh was still a twinkle in Le Corbusier’s eye. Along with Partap Singh Kairon and MS Randhawa, EN Mangat Rai was responsible for the administrative structure that was to create much of the city as we see it today. And much of this was planned and discussed in Shimla at the residence of the Mangat Rais located in the former United Service Club.

Much later, when I was studying in Chandigarh and was the student editor of the college magazine, we got into our heads to seek the linkages between Lahore’s Government College and the one in Chandigarh. Champa Mangat Rai’s extraordinary connections and warm sociability came to our help. She re-established the connection between my father’s tutorial group head from Lahore’s Government College, IM Verma (‘IMV’, as he was fondly called) and subsequently, arranged an interview with one of The Tribune’s legendary editors, Prem Bhatia, who was also an alumnus of that college. In the years that I was in college, on paper, she was my local guardian and every summer, when I had to empty my hostel room, my cycle and bedding would be stored in one of the outhouses of her Sector 9 residence. Later still, when I was researching something, she put me in touch with one of her close friends, Dr Mamgain, who had edited several of Himachal’s gazetteers. Along with her friends, her contribution to theatre and to Chandigarh’s cultural life is remembered to the present day.

While sorting out papers, one has come across numerous letters and other documents. There are several meticulously indexed files of my father. Many of these hold letters — from his friend whose good offices led to my parents getting married, or letters from my grandfather. One file has letters sent over the course of several years by ‘Bunchi’ Mangat Rai. They are written in a tight and extraordinarily neat and legible hand. Some are the fairly personal notes that one would expect friends to share. There is one that has a gentle admonishment, where he tells my father that he gives too much attention to me and not enough to my sister! Here, to set a family record straight, that was only because she is substantially younger and if anything, my father’s sun rose and set with her.

In comparison, one may well say that we were ordinary people with ordinary lives, but whose friends and whose social circle was exceptional. In this piece packed with memory and blatant name-dropping, one may as well go the ‘whole hog’. Exactly 60 years back, my mother was finalising her doctoral thesis in Hindi at Panjab University. ‘Bunchi’ and Champa Mangat Rai were travelling and had very kindly lent use of their house to my parents. A year later, in 1965, my mother received her PhD from the Chancellor and Governor of Punjab, Ujjal Singh.

—The writer is an author based in Shimla