‘I’d say it was cosmic; we were meant to be together’

In a sense, their love story began in 1926, the year Kamala Laxman was born. Just a couple of hours old, she was being carried out of the maternity room to be shown to her grandfather when R K Laxman, then all of five, crossed her path. “He stopped, looked at me and said something like, ‘This is the one.’ He then told my grandfather, ‘She’s mine.’ My grandfather replied, ‘Okay boy, no one is going to compete with you.’”
Mrs Laxman laughed as she recollected the many times she had heard this story from the elders in her family.“He was the first person in the family to see me, even before my mother did,” she told me. “There was a cosmic ring to our relationship. It was meant to be.”
Laxman was Kamala’s maternal uncle, and although marriages between uncles and nieces are not uncommon down South, the alliance between the two wasn’t an arranged one. “We chose each other,” she reiterated, adding that the friendship bloomed over many summer holidays in her grandfather’s Mysore home, where Laxman lived. They married when the cartoonist had just set out on the path to big-time fame.
The years that followed were an exhilarating, if often exhausting, rollercoaster ride. While Laxman was strictly a loner when cartooning, zealously guarding the privacy of his workspace, the afterhours were suffused with social engagements.
“I was fascinated by her lifestyle,” recalls a relative of the Laxmans. “Often, she would need to keep four or five fancy saris ready for one day, given that she’d be at, say, the Tatas’ house for lunch, a consulate party in the evening, dinner at some celebrity’s house later and so on.”
The Laxmans also globe-trotted at a frenetic pace. “My life was often so demanding that I used to go crazy trying to keep pace,” admitted Mrs Laxman. “It was one hectic whirligig of events. But it was colourful and fulfilling ... thanks to my husband, I met so many celebrities and dignitaries, from prime ministers to artists and sportspersons, from the Shah of Iran to Khrushchev to David Low. Of course my husband was a huge celebrity himself.”
Mrs Laxman smiled as she recalled one particular incident that reflected that celebrityhood. “We were travelling back to Bombay from Bangkok where we were guests of the Thai government,” she said. “En route to the airport, my slipper happened to break. Seeing me limping with one slipper in my hand, the entire airport wanted to come to my rescue but I somehow made my way into the aircraft, where the crew, horrified to see me in this state, presented me with six pairs of slippers! Not one fitted me but I kept them as mementoes. By then the news had spread far and wide, and at Bombay airport they had kept slippers ready for me as well! Those fitted!”
What was her insider view on the cartoonist who was viewed by those who didn’t know him as a rather stern and aloof man? “Well, it’s not so easy being his wife — he is demanding and a tough nut to crack,” she said honestly.
“But that said, he is an extremely caring human being where I am concerned. I also admire two things about him: one, that he is democratic, interacting with common people the same way that he does with celebrities; and two, that he is not a man of moods. Even in the long years of illness, despite all the suffering, he has remained cheerful; yes, he often gets emotional but that is when he meets old friends — the past comes flooding back and he is unable to control his tears.”
The stroke in 2003 that signalled the beginning of the end naturally came as a terrible shock. “But there was no point wailing about it,” averred Mrs Laxman. “I rallied around. I had to give him the strength to go on.” Which she did with amazing calm and fortitude for 12 long years, setting aside everything to become Laxman’s caregiver and pillar of strength. “Though I don’t know if I’m like a pillar,” she smiled. “I would say I am part of him, part of his suffering. Yes, he is dependent on me but I am also dependent on him — it’s mutual.”
In 2010, when Laxman suffered another stroke and lost his power of speech (Mrs Laxman said it was because of a faulty MRI dye administered to him at a Pune hospital), the going got even tougher. It was she who saw him through his long days and nights, his medical and therapy routines, cajoling, scolding, doing whatever it took to keep him from sinking into the quagmire of depression. And it was she who insisted that he keep drawing. “I make him draw every day as a matter of exercise,” she said. “He shows me his drawings and I correct them.” Notebooks in the Laxman household filled with sketches of the cartoonist’s three favourite subjects — crows, Ganpati and the Common Man — stood testimony to this perseverance.
In the autumn of her own life and after decades of a rich journey with the icon of Indian cartooning, the past was more like a beautiful haze, said Mrs Laxman a trifle emotionally. “There are a million memories but at this age, everything becomes cloudy — it’s difficult to pinpoint anything,” she averred. The overwhelming emotion then? “The overwhelming emotion is I am grateful to God for what he has given me,” she said. “Not because of my husband’s fame but because of the kind of human being he is. I am truly privileged to be his wife.”