A former lover differs with Habib Tanvir’s telling of their relationship

Habib Tanvir began writing his memoirs in 2004, at the age of 81. They span 31 years, concluding in 1954 when Tanvir moved to Delhi permanently. In addition to talking about the wealth of characters he came in contact with in that period, his poetry and his political and gustatory inclinations, his notes contain remembrances of the love he shared with the different women that came into his life. One of these women was the theatre director Moneeka Misra, who eventually became his wife and the mother of their daughter Nageen. However, another woman who receives almost passing mention in the memoirs, was perhaps just as significant. This was Jill MacDonald, whom Tanvir simply describes as someone “who was going to come to India with my child in her womb,” and who, in 1964, became the mother of Tanvir’s older child, Anna.

Tanvir’s memoirs were written in Hindustani, and were published in 2013 in an English translation by Mahmood Farooqi. When the book came to MacDonald’s attention, she was dismayed at his account of the close relationship they had shared. She collected the letters they had sent each other in the nine years that their relationship had lasted and composed her own brief memoir, which we are publishing today on the occasion of his birth anniversary.

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Habib Tanvir and Jill MacDonald’s story begins in September of 1955 when they lodged at the same guest house in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival. She was 16 at the time, and he was 32. “There was an instant rapport between us … an intensity that continued for the rest of the week,” she says in her memoir.

When the festival was over, they spent a significant amount of time together in London and often attended the theatre. But then, after some months together, MacDonald was sad to report that Tanvir’s dream to experience theatre all across Europe took shape, and he set off on his travels in June 1956. “There followed more than two years of Habib being away, sending letters from various countries; all sorts of news arrived, contained in wonderful looking envelopes decorated with ever more exotic stamps.”

When he returned briefly to England, MacDonald remembers that they

went on to Bristol, which Habib knew well and after a lengthy search, found a small guesthouse with an amiable landlady (who wasn’t racist, which was unusual in those days), where we could at last be together.

In his memoirs, Tanvir focuses on how, in 1958, he made his return to India and took up work at Begum Qudsia Zaidi’s Hindustani Theatre in Delhi. It was here that he met Moneeka Misra, whose job he had unknowingly usurped. The two began meeting for tea, ostensibly to fight about this development, but according to Tanvir, by the end of four or five days, “Moneeka had fallen hopelessly in love with me.”

And this created a new problem for me. In fact, there were not one, but two problems. First, there was a German girl whom I had fallen for, then there was an English girl who had fallen for me.

This is the first mention of MacDonald in Tanvir’s memoirs. In the meanwhile, according to her, “Many heart-rending letters subsequently arrived from Delhi describing the huge difficulties he endured trying to adapt, looking for work, having no money and missing the love we had shared. They are very touching to read even today.” Towards the end of 1958 and the beginning of 1959, when she was around 21 years old, she made up her mind to join him, “but was thwarted each time mostly by lack of funds and my parents’ lack of approval, which meant I had no support.” Finally, in 1960, she says, “my Granny, a deeply loved and respected person to whom I was very close, handed me the fare saying, ‘You need to sort this love affair out, otherwise it will never leave you in peace.”

A few lines after he first mentions MacDonald in his writing, Tanvir alludes to her decision, but did not seem thrilled by it at all.

I liked Moneeka but there was no way I was going to get married to her. There was Moneeka on one side and there was Jill on the other, who was going to come to India with my child in her womb, and there was my production of Mitti ki Gadi or Mrichchakatikam, the Sanskrit classic. It was our conversations about the play that had brought us to that state. I had lost interest in work, I was conducting rehearsals disinterestedly. I was surrounded by problems on all fronts. The situation was bad enough when Jill arrived on the scene to further aggravate it.

Tanvir and Misra were living in Karol Bagh at the time, and MacDonald was sent to stay in Balwant Gargi’s house on Curzon Road. This was where a pivotal scene in their relationship played out. When Tanvir dropped by for tea one day, he was invited to stay for dinner and then the night. At 2 or 3 am, Misra stormed onto the premises and created a ruckus. MacDonald recalls that “much drama ensued outside in the courtyard, but she did not enter the house,” while Tanvir reported that “I wrapped myself in a chaadar and opened the door and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She ignored me and walked past me into the room where Jill was lying in a state of shock and where I had slept with Moneeka a few months before.”

The event turned out to be doubly traumatic for MacDonald because Misra returned the next day: “She brought my attention to her handbag which was stuffed with sleeping pills, saying she would take the lot if she lost Habib.” MacDonald moved to Chandigarh, where she stayed with a friend of Gargi’s, Tarachand Gupta. Tanvir had it that she was in an advanced state of pregnancy at the time. He says, “When it was time for delivery [Gupta] took her to his home in Chandigarh. ... He took great care of Jill but in all this disturbance, she lost the baby.” MacDonald, however, states that she suffered “a very early miscarriage, brought about by the bumpiness of the six-hour bus journey or the intense turmoil of the household. Perhaps both. There was no 'delivery' as described in the Memoirs.”

It is at MacDonald’s departure from India that we see Tanvir display some emotion about their relationship. He says:

I remember that moment, and am unlikely to ever forget it, when Jill sat in the bus to go to the airport and kept looking at me in silence. All I remember is her eyes, which had somehow expanded to take on a larger shape. The desolation and the loneliness of those eyes, my God, I am still haunted by them. The bus left, I returned home under the angry spell of those eyes.

MacDonald says that leaving India “was without doubt the saddest event of my life so far.” She didn’t want Tanvir to contact her and also remembers her departure as a “haunting and utterly miserable experience.”

Two years passed. It was 1962 and Tanvir was the Indian representative of a Ford Foundation educational programme called the Theatre Observation Tour. He was touring the US and mentions another encounter with MacDonald. “Somehow, Jill managed to trace me in Dallas, Texas, and landed there. From there she accompanied me to New Orleans, East Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and stuck to me like a shadow.” He again paints her as an annoyance, “Jill wanted a child; I was obsessed by my poems.”

MacDonald, however, recalls settling into her new life in London in the two years that had passed and one day receiving “a pale blue airmail letter” with familiar writing. It was from Tanvir, telling her that he needed a break from India and was arriving in London on his way to America. After some deliberation, she agreed to meet him.

Habib left for America after a couple of weeks of staying with me, giving me full instructions as to where we should meet, if I could join him. It was not Dallas, but New York, where I had a friend with whom I could stay until he reached there. Far from sticking to him “like a shadow” I had a job keeping up with him as he travelled by train and I by bus. …

The Memoirs read very strangely at this point with the bald statement, “Jill wanted a child,” as if I were there in America expressly for that purpose. This is not so. I was there to be with him, who by this time I had known for nine years, and who I had hoped to marry. And God knows, we had missed each other enough during those many long separations.

After his tour of America was through, Tanvir went to Edinburgh via London. “Jill’s dream eventually bore fruit,” he says. “Anna was born on 6 May 1964.”

This is the last mention of MacDonald in Tanvir’s memoirs, but her story goes on. She says that when Tanvir returned to England, he stayed with her for several months and it is during this time that Anna was conceived.

It was at the time of her birth that Habib gave up even trying to get his complicated personal life together, and as a result, I did not hear from him for two years; a shattering experience—total silence after total involvement.

Tanvir and MacDonald met sporadically through the coming years and things became much easier between them. He married Misra and MacDonald married Jim Christie, with whom she had one daughter. MacDonald says that “from time to time Habib made real efforts to repair the various hurts and confusions he had contributed to, but without lasting success. In later years he was awash with guilt concerning the people he had let down.”

Read Jill MacDonald's complete account of her relationship with Habib Tanvir.

Read The Caravan's July 2013 piece by Sudhanva Deshpande on Habib Tanvir's memoirs.