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I
was hungry that evening but the questions I asked my brother had
nothing to do with food. It felt strange to be famished in an
environment where food had been a constant reality. My brother
must have been hungry too, perhaps even more than I was, but he
buried it under his characteristic calmness. I asked him, “Where
are so many tears coming from? How is it that they are not
stopping? Do you know?” He shook his fourteen-year-old head
at me, his twenty-two-year-old sister, and reached out to hold my
hand.
We
were lying side by side in one of the bedrooms of the house in
which Dida, our maternal grandmother, had died only a day before.
Primary and secondary sounds reached us every now and then from
the world that lay outside the bedroom’s walls. A concerned
voice wanted to cook something and feed the children in the
house, a tired-with-all-the-surrounding-despair voice wanted to
make a list of things to buy for the worship ceremonies starting
from the next day, and a third voice, obviously ignorant about
Hindu cremation rites wanted to know if all the men of the family
would have to shave their heads. I gripped my brother’s
fingers even more tightly. Our entwined hands were clammy, and
the ceiling above us was black. It was a dark evening of March
but switching on the lights wouldn’t have made a
difference.
My
brother and I and our parents had flown in to Calcutta from New
Delhi that very morning. Sundry relatives had picked us from the
airport, and driven us to the death house. There, Dida’s
already cold body was being frozen and preserved before it could
be offered to holy Hindu flames and reduced to ashes. In that one
smoky process where our primordial fire-worshipping souls were
going to come together and function as a community, we were going
to burn all tangible evidence of a life that had once existed.
That
had once breathed.
Laughed
loudly.
Made
inappropriate jokes – at all times and at everyone’s
expense. Even in front of children. I owe my stock of Bengali
slangs to her.
Knitted
the most disproportionate clothes for my dolls from scraps left
over from bigger, more important stitching and sewing projects.
All the clothes, thus, had mismatched sleeves.
Told
the most unimaginative yet completely original fairy tales. There
was once a story about an old man, his confused wife, and the
ghost that lived in their house. It was awful, more so because
Dida fell asleep in the middle of telling it.
Insisted
on telling the whole neighborhood about her granddaughter’s
real and imagined achievements.
Possessed
able, slightly dry, yellow-stained hands from a lifetime of
turmeric usage. Even her square-shaped nails were stained yellow.
There was a game that Dida and I used to play. I would grab her
hands playfully, look at her palms, turn them and study her
nails, and then wrinkle my nose and say, “Dida, you have
dirty hands!” And her response would be, “Fine, you
will make your own fish curry from now on.” Then I would
launch a long stream of protests, and we would both collapse into
a pile of laughter.
Dida’s
was also a life that adhered to its own, sometimes bizarre,
composition of colors and conditions, and she could
single-handedly have modeled for an exhibition based around the
theme “it’s my way or the highway.” In spite of
finding fault with it, I would have attended it. Unputdownable
women are pure magic and hard to find.
*****
My
grandmother was born on April 8, 1928, in Dhaka, present day
Bangladesh. The daughter of a physician, and the youngest of
eight siblings, she was married off as soon as a “good boy”
was found for her. She was fifteen, he was thirty, but good he
certainly was. He had been unmarried all this while because as
the eldest son of his traditional family, he had to first marry
off all his younger sisters and settle his brothers. Only after
that could he begin to think about his own personal life. In
1947, British India got partitioned into two—India and
Pakistan—and that’s when they moved to Calcutta for
good. That’s where Dida lived, had two of her three
children and all her grandchildren, and that’s where she
died, in the year 2002.
The
story of our joint lives began in 1979, and I am yet to find all
the ways in which it continues to live on.
*****
For
the longest time that evening, as my brother and I lay side by
side, no one came to interrupt our silence. The sounds from
outside continued to reach us every now and then. Someone was
making tea again. A tap opened somewhere. A spoon fell and
clattered on the mosaic floor. Why did Bengalis drink so much
tea? At some point, my mind vaporized those interruptions away,
and instead, asked my brother more questions, “If it hurts
so much now, how much will it hurt when it’s Ma or Baba? Or
one of us?” Again, he didn’t answer. He just held my
hand tighter. He was being his usual, stoic self. “Do all
fourteen-year-old boys know how to deal with grief?” I
asked him silently, “Do they know when to just keep quiet,
listen to the questions, and not offer any answers because I am
not really seeking them?”
*****
When
my brother and I were younger, summer vacations meant going to
Calcutta, to visit everyone in the “hometown”. Our
parents assiduously drummed it into our heads that New Delhi, our
current place of residence was only a temporary home. Calcutta
had been their hometown and so it was ours as well. I don’t
think we protested much, simply because neither of us understood
the fine differences between the two cities. In fact, both of us
probably liked the idea because Calcutta equaled grandparents,
aunts and uncles, new books, indulgence and affection, monsoons,
mangoes, coconut and sugarcane juice, maybe weekend trips to the
coast, with its accompanying boat rides and fried fish. So every
year, when schools closed mid-May, Ma would bundle her two
children and leave New Delhi, only to return sometime in the
first week of July, just a few days before the schools reopened.
Sometimes, our father would accompany us as well but only for a
short period because offices of course don’t feel the need
for two-month long vacations. So he stayed on in New Delhi, while
the three of us embraced Calcutta and its peculiarities.
My
earliest and fondest memories of Dida start from about this time,
and most of them revolve around food. Before we landed up at her
house every summer vacation, Dida stocked up the fridge.
Temptations ranged from fruits to fish and everything in between.
There was pataligurer payesh, a rice-based pudding whose
main flavoring came from jaggery, which lent it that typical
shade of light brown. Then there was malpoa – rich,
brown, flour dumplings in sugar syrup – and patishapta,
slightly moist rice-milk cakes stuffed with jaggery and coconut.
Dida also cooked some of the best fish curries. They were light
because they had minimal oil, they were yellow because their main
spice was turmeric, and they were sprinkled with black dots
because of the asafetida seeds that swam in the gravy. But her
grandest conconction was something she called titar dal,
which translated means “bitter lentils”. It was far
from being bitter though. Soup-like in consistency, titar
dal’s main ingredients were yellow lentils, vegetables
such as bitter gourd and green gourd, and the seasonings included
ginger paste, clarified butter, mustard seeds, green chillies,
sugar, and salt. Dida insisted that it was the best thing to eat
in a hot country. The “cool” vegetables and minimal
spices kept the body free from toxins. I couldn’t have
cared. It tasted great like everything else in her house, and
that’s all that mattered.
Food
also provided the background for showcasing Dida’s
remarkable and often loud, sense of humor. She belonged to the
generation where demureness was expected of a woman. But that
wasn’t her. She loved passionately, loyally, and
ferociously, but that didn’t mean that if you were wrong,
you weren’t set straight. Affection, kindness, and
generosity of spirit were not going to come in the way of the
punishment. One time when she was visiting us in New Delhi, I
happened to make fun of the senility that was going to set in her
any day now owing to her old age. She laughed along with me, but
also made up her mind about teaching me a lesson.
That
very evening, Dida set about making patishapta. The
initial batch was wonderful as expected. When she made the second
batch, she set aside one from it and called me specially. “Eat
it, Didun, this one is specially for you.” Greedily, I bit
into it and found nothing. I looked at her quizzically and asked,
“Are you sure this has some stuffing? I didn’t taste
any.”
“Of
course there is. You just have to bite deeper and bigger. I have
crammed this one with raisins.” I took another bite, and
then another. Nothing. Not a bite of stuffing anywhere. I looked
at her again, absolutely puzzled. This time she started laughing.
“Now who is senile, huh?” she asked.
Food
defined Dida’s relationships, and right up to her last
days, Dida believed that people who enjoy food and its aspects—be
it cooking, eating, or feeding others—are essentially good
people. In other words, a person’s worth and
large-heartedness are both directly proportionate to the
well-stockedness of her fridge, larder, kitchen counter, etc. I
always knew my mother had inherited this peculiar belief system.
Today, while maintaining an independent life and kitchen of my
own I know that so have I.
*****
Over
the period of time, as one summer vacation merged into another,
my brother and I grew up. Grandparents and indulgence stopped
being enough. Life needed to be faster, quicker, smarter.
Calcutta seemed decaying, dying, in fact, almost dead. New Delhi
was comfortable, and summer vacations could be spent here with
friends. Or we could go somewhere completely new. India was a big
country after all. Where was the need to go to Calcutta every
year? Why did we have to go every time? Why couldn’t
they come instead? And so we began to protest: Calcutta
was boring. It had fewer entertainment options as compared to New
Delhi. All we did there was eat, and visit various relatives.
Calcutta was hot, wet, and sweaty. My brother decided to start
calling it “Ghaam-land”, or the Land of Sweat. And he
and I both began to take offence every time our parents told
others that our stay in New Delhi was temporary and some day, we
were going to go back to Calcutta for sure. No, we protested,
this was our home.
I
think Dida was one person who knew instinctively when the change
started. I wonder what gave it away. A disinterested voice on the
telephone? Lackluster enthusiasm even at the sight of all the
food? Or delayed response to her letters? Whatever it was, I know
she understood, and tried to fit in.
One
year, Dida decided to start writing her letters to me in English.
While previously she had always written to me in Bengali, Dida
decided it was time for a switch when she understood that Bengali
had started to lose its appeal in favor of English. Her standard
postcard arrived but with a difference. The handwriting was
untidy as usual, but this time it was shakier and seemed far
unsure. I did not see the effort that had gone into writing it. I
did not understand the despair of an old woman, frustrated by the
growing distance between her and her oldest grandchild, and
worried that the paternal grandparents —with their
exemplary writing skills in English—might score higher
points. All I remember is laughing unkindly at the effort.
Another
time, I decided to check Dida’s general knowledge.
Therefore, one day completely out of the blue, I asked her, “You
watch the news AND read the newspaper everyday, don’t you,
Dida?”
“Yes,”
she replied, unsure of where this conversation was going.
“Can
you answer a quick question?”
“Sure.”
“Who
is the president of America?”
“Isn’t
it Kennedy?”
The
year was 1998. It was Bill Clinton’s second term.
That
time Dida had been visiting us in New Delhi. She was a guest, but
after hearing her answer I had marched off to find my mother and
complain, “Why didn’t your mother just say ‘I
don’t know?’ Why did she have to lie, Ma? How could
she not know something this simple? It’s downright
embarrassing!”
Today
when I remember that episode, I see the futility of that
misplaced indignation. Why did she have to know the
details of a president whose presence or absence really did not
touch her existence in any which way? When John F. Kennedy
became president in 1961, Dida was thirty-three-years old. Maybe
some part of her responded to whatever Kennedy charm, good looks,
or something else equally transient she saw on television,
newspaper, magazines, etc. It captured a photograph of the
frozen-in-time, forever-young Kennedy, and stayed with her
forever.
*****
Calcutta’s
cremation grounds smell of death, chaos, rituals, and long lines
of sweaty Hindus. They lack the sophistication that Hindu
philosophy centers around: that Atman or our Individual Soul is
never really ours. It is part of the Brahman or the Universal
Soul. Atman never dies, it is only the body that does. Atman is a
permanent participant in the crazy, Ferris wheel like-circle of
birth, death, and rebirth based on the cumulative karma the
person has gathered in this life. The Ferris wheel goes on and on
until the time Atman reaches a stage of perfection, and then, it
is emancipated. It attains moksha.
When
we had reached the cremation grounds that afternoon, some of my
family members had set about negotiating the price of cremation
rites and its necessary articles. There were identical
conversations and negotiations going on in lines parallel to our
own. In an overcrowded country, even death is not a private
affair. The air was thick and obtuse with sacred Sanskrit chants,
fresh and wilted flowers, the aroma of incense sticks of various
kinds—sandalwood, rose, jasmine—the heat of Calcutta
in March, smug bargains and deals, and the salty smell of old
age, sweat, and tears.
While
watching the myriad proceedings, for a minute I had let my mind
wander. I did not want my grandmother’s soul to be judged
by some abstract reality up above and beyond my realm of
understanding. I wanted something more tangible. I think left to
me, I would have far more readily sanctioned an alien abduction
of her soul than this karma judgment politburo. As I began to
think about it even more, I grew convinced that surely not all
alien encounters have to do with medical testing or sexual
procedures. I remember at least one X-Files episode when the
abductee came back looking quite refreshed and pleased with
herself. The judgment of karma sounds harsh, cruel, unkind, and
enormously subjective. Alien abduction on the other hand, has a
ring of excitement, adventure, perhaps, even coolness to it. It
seems like something Dida herself would choose for herself. If
John Edward Mack, a professor at Harvard Medical School, could
publicly investigate and publish his findings after a study of
over 200 test cases of men and women who claimed to have been
abducted by aliens, then why couldn’t I hold on to this
theory? If some of Mack’s subjects could insist that they
came back with heightened spiritual awareness and concern for the
environment then why was it wrong for me to imagine that at this
point of time, Dida’s soul was right outside the window
alternating between certain dichotomous truths?
The
first wanted her to get inside a body, either the old, wrinkled
one that she had used all her life, or a new, tight thing that
she picked up just few moments ago from the wardrobe section of
the spacecraft. Once the body had been finalized, she would need
body-appropriate clothing. What colors would she choose? I know
she liked all shades of red, the color that Hinduism recognizes
as representative of marriage, and therefore not permitted to
widows. Dida’s husband, my grandfather, died a year before
my birth, so I never saw her wear anything even remotely similar
to red. She spent her life with whites, creams, and pastels, and
occasional browns, blues, and purples, but I know her heart lay
in red because she encouraged and indulged my own love for that
color.
Dida’s
new body, now draped in red, might ask her to let go of all the
benefits that afterlife was dangling in front of her—eternal
youth, freedom from pain and sickness, constant mobility and
everything else that the last few years of her life in this world
had managed to take away from her, although only after much
negotiation—and instead be with her grandchildren one more
time. Just for the joy of hearing their laughter, of watching
them eat a meal in whose preparation she had slaved for hours.
But
the second version of this reality could be Dida moving on and
enjoying the benefits of this brand new adventure, most of which
would revolve around food, family, and laughter, the three
components I think of when I see Dida in my mind’s eye. It
could be that right now, this very moment, Dida was with her new
friends. Those aliens with tall, skinny frames, big, globular
heads, tightly-pinched, waxy cheeks, sunken but sparkly, big
eyes, and tiny rosebud-pink mouths. Will they wear any clothing?
Maybe robes in opulent blues, blacks, silvers, and indigos—all
colors of the universe. Maybe they will be sitting together in a
circle, with Dida holding forth on a multitude of topics, most of
which would have something to do with her family. Often, while
recounting a joke or favorite memory or describing a grandchild’s
cherished toy, Dida will laugh, her usual loud, boisterous
laughter. The aliens would be forced to join in, either out of
respect for their guest, or because they would be too intimidated
to say “no”. I see them as being captivated by her
quick efficiency, and being scared into submission by her
no-nonsense dictatorship. But soon they would also discover the
generosity of her spirit and see through her charade of
aggressiveness.
Sometime
towards the evening, Dida would proceed to win them over with her
perfect pot of chai made with the right tea leaves and the right
amount of milk, sugar, and brewing. Then Dida would teach them
how to hold tea cups in their two-digit hands. Maybe they will
also have to learn how to nibble on biscuits and acquire a taste
for them. Not too many at a time. Just one for every cup.
Once
done with tea—the good Bengali staple—Dida would move
on to the next stage of their education. She would instruct them
to land at the Gangetic Delta and pick up some of the choicest
hilsas because, as everyone knows, life without good fish is
simply unfortunate and not worth living. Even if it is
extra-terrestrial.
So
she would look around carefully, pick the one alien that could be
bullied the most easily, and tell him to go and get some fish for
her. Meekly, gathering up his robes, he would do so, and then he
would come back to assist her in the spaceship’s kitchen
where he would have to spend the next few hours mastering the
finest aspects of culinary sciences: how to distinguish between
good and perfect turmeric, the right amount of salt needed for
frying hilsa, and why mustard oil was the only kind that best
brought out the flavor of this particular union of spices.
Throughout
this entire exercise, Dida, I know, would make loud, dirty,
inappropriate jokes, usually at the aliens’ expense and
right in front of them. Some of them would be filled with
choicest Bengali slangs, yet others would be plain bawdy. She
will thus safeguard her reputation of being extremely politically
incorrect. Or should the term now be “Astronomically
Incorrect?”
*****
I
come back to the only reality I know. The black room, the double
bed, the cotton bedspread, and my brother’s fingers
entwined around mine. Our hands have taken on a unity of their
own. It’s as if one doesn’t want to let go of the
other, they have dealt with enough loss for one day. I toy with
the idea of telling my brother what I am thinking. Aliens,
spacecrafts, chais, hilsas…what will he say? Worse, what
if in the midst of my monologue, one of our myriad family members
walks in and hears this conversation? The house is right now
stacked and shelved with relatives and cousins, most of whom I
think of as inferior either because of their matchbox sized
hearts, or severely compartmentalized brains. For my wonderful
theories, will they not think of me as delusional? Will they not
try and explain to me that the theory of alien abduction has no
credibility?
But
then, how will they tackle my counter claim, “Fine. There
are no aliens. Let’s talk again about karma, nirvana,
moksha, shall we? Lend them your hundred per cent credibility.
Make me believe that these things exist. That you know for sure
that this is what we will all go through. Can you do that?”
My
mind goes back to the other reality I saw today. The fire that
consumed my grandmother’s once beautiful hands, her steel
and silver hair, the tired body where diseases had made permanent
homes, and the feet that had stopped supporting the rest of her
body. The same fire that has been considered a form of Divinity
and been worshipped in India since 1500 B.C.E. because of
multiple reasons: it is a piece of the Sun God, its upward
shooting flames have the power of taking the devotee’s
prayers straight to the heavens, and its heat and light can
dispel ignorance, darkness, and evil. But today, the holy flames
did none of that. They did not make any allowance for Dida, in
spite of all her cooking, all the large-heartedness, all the
spunky humor, and all the negotiation that my brother and I would
have gladly and persistently done with the powers that be on her
behalf. Instead, the flames just devoured. Perhaps they
themselves were hungry.
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