My mother's hostel mates at the Post-Graduate Hostel on Harrison Road, Kolkata:



What a heroine she must have been. So smart! Just to come like that from the hills at start studying in Kolkata. Kolkata in the 50's was fashionable and elegant.

Ma's hostel mates included Karuna Bhattacharya who later became Pro Vicechancellor, Finance. Ma could have risen equally high. She was First Class IInd in Philosophy in 1955, from C.U. But she had no faith in herself. She gave herself over entirely to be constructed and overdetermined by others. Why? I too have the same qualities. So dependent on the world's opinion, love, acceptance. One has to look within, one has to look within for self'-validation. 'Bhromor jetha hoi bibagi nibhrita neel padma laagi ( you are there where the bee goes in a mad quest for the blue lotus)--that is the soul, the Holy Grail that Parsifal went in search of.

Studied this when I was  a T.A. for Professor Wilhelm's Arthurian Romance course. He once behaved so badly. I guess racism is true.

The minute I talk about dark things my soul starts drooping and is pulled down by a negative force.

She used to lie awake at night, listening to the pavement dwellers talk of their day's activities. The tram would grind out its wheels till 12.30 at night.

Another hostel mate was Santwana Mukherjee (nee??) who later taught Political Science at Jogomaya Devi College, was married to Mr Mukherjee of Golpark who did all their announcements and had this amazing voice. Santwana Mashi also wrote the first book on Nivedita in India. That had been her PhD thesis.

Ma used to love Santwana Mashi, wildly. Once, in order to make someting up (some misunderstanding ortheother ) she went and met Santwana Mashi at Kanpur (where the latter was from)

But once they had a misunderstanding over something. Santwana Mashi was of a slightly suspicious nature. I don't quite know what it was over. But once it broke, Ma never tried to patch it up with her. She once told me, 'if a relationship breaks for me, it breaks irrevocably'. 

Ma's complex nature:

Today my focus has shifted. I can't remember why I wanted to speak of her complex nature, yesterday, and I can't remember what exactly I wanted to say. Of course, she is complex. So are we all. That is what makes us human. My mother was someone I adored for many years. I listened to everything she said, way past even mid adulthood. She was still trying to control me even when I was in my mid forties. I think it is from that point that a certain resentment started building up within me that has only got stronger by the day.

I feel bad about this. And writing about her is my way of redeeming part of this anger and resentment.

I am what i am today because of my mother. When I came back from America in a state of terrible shamble in March 1994, my mother really took care of me. She really did. She took on tuitions to pay for certain costs that had to be made for me. I had no money. D would only give 2000 per month, 1000 for each kid. Babu's ayah and milk cost close to 4000-5000. She did it out of complete love. There was no holding back on her part.

I have mentioned this before. My mother is capable of total sacrifice. She never asked my father for extra money because he didn't have much either for many years into their marriage. They also performed many family responsibilities. I guess because my Jethu was so much better off , Baba wanted to pay for Kaku's engineering school, but he really did not have the wherewithal to do it. He did it because his pride demanded it. I understand that. Tears come into my eyes when I think of it. I am like that myself. Lots of pride. I believe there wasn't enough money for me to have enough milk. Well, I don't mind. I fed my kids really well.

Anyway, Ma took Babu to sleep with her when he was 7.5 months old. The doctor said I needed more sleep.

I could do my Ph.D because I came back home. Because I felt free enough from domestic responsibilities to pursue my studies. My dreams. My love, my lekahpoda (studies). Out there in New Jersey, I always felt guilty taking time out from housework to study.

People don't know about my struggles. They don't know how hard I had to workto get my degrees after marriage and after childbirth and how difficult the entire process was.

Ma supported all that. She really wanted me to study. She went and got notes for me from a girl who lived in the girls' hostel at Jadavpur the day before the 7th paper for my M.A examination at Jadavpur in January 1989, when Priya was 2+. I had come down to do the exam and my brain would blank out every day after writing the third question. That day she had remonstrated with me, 'amai ektu aage keno bolle na?'. She was just about to go out to her job at Bidya Bharati School.

But she went. I did take advantage and didn't even do well in Paper VII

So capacity for great love and also the desire to control--I guess, that is the paradox of her nature and the complexity.

There is so much more to write about her life in Kolkata when she came from  Shillong to study here. That is for tomorrow.

Am glad some people read my blog. I do not want to bore them with too much information about myself. 

Ma's complex nature:

Complexity and paradox are the law of life. We all crave simplicty. I do. I like things black and white. I like things to be open and shut. Complexity stresses me out. But if there is something I've learnt from my study of Tragedy, from my study of literature, it is this. That complexity is beautiful, enthralling and also integrally related to the spinning of the plot. What do you write about a character who has no conflict, no duality, is not pulled this way and that? Now Buddha and Christ, how complex are their lives? Circumstantially may be but not spiritually or psychologically. They have no conflict.

The value of complexity and conflict was taught to me by my great guru Shakespeare. The first and the last. My anglophile nature. Very bad. In The God of Small Things, Mary Roy (Ammu) tells Chacko (her brother) that Anglophiles were all Chich Chich Ponch which literally translates into 'shit wiper', I mean, 'shit wipers' of the British (white race).

Can't say that this is entirely untrue. Aren't we Anglophiles somehow a little subservient and derivative? V.S. Naipaul calls us the breed of 'mimic men'. So what exactly is he? I hope he included himself too in the category of the mimics?

Anyway as Gauri Vishwanathan correctly points out in Masks of Conquest, the beauty of Englishliterature made the students of Hindu College fall in love with the English and become their willing servants through bureaucratic and other jobs and also by producing imitative literature. Even Derozio'sHarp of India, is derivative.

Anyway, long story short, I just loved Macbeth. His grand/excruciating conflict and redemption through knowledge. Only knowledge is the redemption, the goal, the telos. As in the case of Bimala; Rabindranath creates a very modern ending, where the goal of experience is knowledge, not the affirmation of a Karmic world. No simple piety. But the novel gives us an understanding of what it is to be human, to fall in love where we should not, suffer pain and gain knowledge about ourselves and about the world.

I just love that. It gives the writer something to write about and the teacher something to teach about. I taught Ghare Baire at Basanti Devi College, when it came in as a new text. Somehow my department always assumed that I would teach all the new texts. So, I taught 3 of the new texts in the syllabus that year: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Secret Sharer and Ghare Baire.

 I love the intensity of Macbeth's conflict.  I love the fact that he is human and not divine. Yet, he does have the 'quintessence' of the divine in him, through the way he speaks and in the superb images and metaphors that his mind/language creates.

Language is eros, culture is eros, and people like me are in love with the English language. I talk more spontaneously in English than Bangla. If i had to deliver a speech suddenly, I would prefer to do it in English which I feel is more within my access than my own mother tongue. It is simply because I learnt the Bangla alpabhet when I was almost 8. No one in my family had insisted upon learning it earlier. In St Teresa's in those days, Bangla started from class III. Shame, I think today, and still aspire to be competent in Bangla. :)

Presidency opens tomorrow:

After about two week break Presidency opens tomorrow again for a week. How do I feel? Not happy. Wish the holidays could go on. I yearn for problem free idyllic spaces. Problem free. Problems follow me whereever I go. It is excruciating. I so wish to be happy in my work place. There is nothing I have spent so much time thinking about as my work place, my entire life. And since 2016, how I could constantly 'reinvent' myself to fit the profile of my new job: Songs, videos, what have you. Sometimes I wonder how I survive it all. I believe firmly in Karma. So my Karma is wrong somewhere, in some past life or lives and this is its expiation. Just want to be happy.

Wrestling with Time, Karma, past and present, trying to get to the root cause of everything, continually, is so exhausting. That is where NetFlix helps.

Also wonder whether I should pursue music seriously. It always seems to me, that academics, scholarhsip, writing are what i need to do. Not music. I have ardently pursued music for many years, given it up and then gone back to it again. Lost some edge because of that. The voice came down one scale from B Flat to A. So the voice or the body answers back.

There is no doubt that the high I get from scholarly work doesn't come from anything else. But music is this half sister/daughter/child that i love intensely too.

Someone had told my father many many years back, 'your daughter is a siddha kanthi--she used to sing for Bijoykrishna Goswami.'

Sometimes I remember this and it gives me happiness. Only for a very brief while.

Ma (continuing)

She called me this morning and said that she wanted to say something to me. I had just come in from my walk with Radhaballabi, alu dum and sweets. God knows why I walk! Weighing about 90 Kgs now--ate icecream and sweets three weeks back when Babu came and didn't get a chance to work it off!

She told me that she had remembered an extraordinary scene. So much of literature grows from just one scene or one image. Faulkner had written that The Sound and the Fury had developed from the image of a little girl on a tree with dirty drawers. How poignant.

Poets, story-tellers, are gods. Particularly, story-tellers. How many chambers and caverns must their brain be having. So many plots, sub-plots, characters, ends, combinations of events. So many. I find narrative the most fascinating of all. Sydney had said, that nature delivers a 'silver' world but poets a 'golden'. The Natyashastra too was considered the Fifth Veda!

Ma said that once on the way to Sylhet by road from Shillong, they had stopped at a check post. On one side of this post there was an orange orchard. Khasi women sat there trying to sell their oranges. Ma said, 'I could not make up my mind whether the orange was more brilliantly coloured or their skins!'

She said, ' They were not really interested in selling their oranges. Instead they were regaling each other with gossip and other tidbits and almost rolling over each other in merriment!'

How pastoral, thought I  and thought she, too.

She said that at that point of time she found Sylhetis to be living in a 'goddalika' or closed lane or road. She said that the men were not enterprising. Having fish and rice easily at hand, they did not feel that they needed to work hard for a living.

She said that what she most disliked about them was that they would come to the house of relatives in Shillong, looking for clerical jobs there, and stay indefinitely. She said that the influx of relatives was such that the children of that house would not get enough to eat. I mean, not enough of nourishing food.

Community above all. Individual, counted for nothing. Modern day Sylhetis have distinguihsed themselves throughout the world. I have Sylheti relatives who are doing exceptionally well in the Sciences and in Technology. On an average they also have a great degree of cultural sensitivity,pride in and knowledge of Bengali culture, and innate appreciation of cultural forms. Some training of course, is called for, for these attributes to manifest themselves.

My cousin Rinku's cousins are the founder members of a group in Silchar that is devoted to Bhasha Awareness or Bangla Bhasha awareness.

And many of the leading Sadhus of the Ramakrishna Mission are/were Sylhetis. The first Swami Prabhananda and the present. Swami Gahanananda and so many others.

Swamiji used to say that because Swami Premananda went on the East Bengal mission, so many East-Bengalis were drawn to Belur Math and the Ramakrishna Mission.

I remember reading about East Bengali devotees of Sri Sarada Devi who would travel many hundreds of miles to come and see her at Kolkata at Mayer Badi.

Writing on Ma again, after a long time:

The pujas were tough. They always are. A fire broke out at one end of our garden and the local boys had to come and put it out. That was on Dashami. It was 10 o'clock at night. There was no night-help for three days and it is scary in the house with two old people. Didn't sleep till almost 3 a.m.

So this entry is not chronological. Just remember some things and I thought I would write about them like Haiku compositions, almost:

Once Ma sat in the lounge/vast waiting area of Calcutta Hospital while Priya went to a birthday party in Kidderpore. It would be too much to come home, so she just sat there. This is the stuff of legends, like Priya confronting the Principal of my previous place of employment and telling her that she was harassing her mother!

Ma, hurt her foot badly the day she left for America to come and help me have Babu. Apparently she fell down from a tool on which she was standing to clean the fan in Baba's room. I have no clue why she would want to do something like that on a day she was flying out to America. But she is a rather misguided workaholic and she did what she did.

It was not possible for her to go to the doctor that day. I mean even if she tried, my Baba would probably have killed her! So afraid have we been of the menfolk in our lives! Ma of Baba and i of my ex-husband.

She came to America( end of September, 1993; Babu, my dear Babu, was born on October 11) and not  a whimper of distress escaped her lips.  And then she wore tight shoes. May be they were my discarded ones. Possible.

She has an infinite capacity to bear pain. Infinite capacity to suffer silently. She was the ideal wife to my father. Never bothered him for money during days of struggle. Somehow managed on her own. Tears prick my eyes when I think of that. Once she had said to me, 'eto kom taka chhilo', 'eto kom taka chhilo' ( we had so little money, we had so little money). I understand what this means. I do. Sheer absence of cash. How awful! Just this awful, glaring, unbearable lack-- a  hard and painful reality to accept.

I think she sometimes resents that i have a great deal of spending money. I have spent quite freely all these years that I have worked--on many, many things. But i have not denied myself the beautiful itmes of lcothing ( saris) that caught my eye. But before I came back to India, i too mostly remained on a very tight budget. But that story another day. Wore two pants and two sweaters the entire time ( 2 years) that Priya's father went to school. He flipped out once because I spent 1.5 dollars on another student couple who wanted something for a Christmas party. He was just livid.

I think I won't write about personal things. But it is impossible if I am writing about personal history and my mother is my personal history and to talk about her, inevitably brings me into her narrative and the telling of her story. Women's stories are generational and a continuum.

Please watch this on YouTube. I sang it. It is a famous song from Rituporno Ghosh's film Raincoat, which hauntingly explores the Radha bhava of endless yearning and pain from endless separation. Yet, this Radha ontology is one of the most revered in the world; to the extent that there is a saying in Bengali which goes, 'Koti Krishna ashe jai/Ananta Radha r katha kahane na jai'. This means that 'Krishnas may come and go, but the Eternal Radha can hardly be spoken of in words'...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPKzF_zf7A

Bonedi (aristocratic) houses of Kolkata: Mahanavami, 18.10.18

What an unbelievable experience!

If you do not know the North of Kolkata, then you do not know Kolkata at all. All the history is there. The nouveau riche, kayasthas, of the early to mid, to late 19th century all lived there.

I am doing this documentary on Durga Puja.

So I decided to visit the pujas of the North of Kolkata that are linked to aristocratic houses.

My quest took me to Muktaram Babu Street, Nimtala Ghat Street and to Pathuriaghata.

Pathuriaghata blew my mind principally because I chanced upon the house of Jadunath Mallik, very rich landowner of the late 19th century and something of a patron to Sri Ramakrishna. Although, Thakur has made disparaging remarks about him in the Kathamrita. Like, 'Jadhunath Mallik reads novels' or that he is not much given to generosity.

This house was not on my itinerary. But as I entered the narrow lane that is Pathuriaghata, I saw this looming palace, moss ridden, gloomy and huge. The house had a tattered elegance, but nonetheless a bygone splendour that could not be ignored.

Was it chance, destiny that I turned to ask a pleasant looking older man, whose house it was? He said, he was the 'Gurudeva ' of the house, that it was Jadnunath Mallik's house and that he would take me inside.

Inside this splendid Victorian ghostly house, emerged a beautiful elderly lady whose elegance was really the last word in elegance. Lovely smile. So unspoilt. Head covered.

She said I couldn't go in. It was the 'andarmahal' or zenana, the inner quarters. We were in the 'bahir mahal' or outer quarters which were where outsiders were entertained.

She said she liked keeping her head covered. She revered the ways of the past. She stood for the 5th generation from Jadhunath Mallik's father. She is ardently devoted to Mother Simhavahini, the presiding deity of the house.

The Thakurdalan is empty though. Ma Simhavahini's temple, I think she said, has shifted. Didn't quite catch that. Empty Thakur dalan. Memories of the past. Ghostly thakurdalan. A picture of Sri Ramakrishna on one side and Jadhunath Mallik on the other.

She said, she spent her time reading spiritual texts and Vaishnava literature (more on this)

She said that it was in this thakurdalan that Thakur had bhava samadhi on seeing the bigraha (image) of Simhavahini, so many years back.

She said it was in Jadunath Mallik's garden house in Dakshineshwar, that Thakur had a vision of Christ.

Puja and I

Don't know why but nowadays my mind often reaches back to the past when I was a young woman in America, married, a student's wife and anxious, most of the time. Once Reena-boudi had said in her house, 'Sreemati has such a sad face'.

Today, when I have comparatively so much more, enough academic standing even if not deliriously happy, when I can look at such and such article and say to someone, 'Guess what? I wrote that', those days strike a poignant chord--not so much, 'those days', but that being, Sreemati Mukherjee, aged 22, 23 or 24.

Young, idealistic and very naive. No sense of the world except a burning desire to study. 'Want to study', said my heart all the time. I used to love my husband very much and didn't really doubt it.

At Shop Rite or Food Town, agonizing whether to buy attractive biscuits 20 cents more than the cheapest one. Once, I had paid 1.5 dollars for something someone else had wanted for Christmas and my husband had been so angry.

Lived in a kind of anxious fear all the time.

This blog entry was jogged by the actor in the Netflix series, Affair having gone into a Public Library, somewhere in a small town in America. Because D's grades had been bad in the Fall of 1982, I had sworn not to touch a book for a year. Some sort of Karmic reparation for wanting to know whether my marks for the Part II had increased through Review, the day of his Probability examination.

When in the Fall of 1983, I walked down Hoboken's main thoroughfare, Washington Street, with a spring in my step and eagerness coursing through my entire being. I remember the joy in each step I took, the happy anticipation I felt as I made my way to Hoboken's Public Library.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFsDj8_W_ec&feature=share

I do hope you will watch it. It carries the story of how nature changes to culture: how natural materials are transformed into dazzling works of art. From the workshop of Gauranga Kuila and Debaprasad Hazra (artists of Tridhara, Mudiali and Barisha Sarvajanin) to the pandals of Tridhara, Mudiali and Barisha Sarvajanin. 

It will make me very happy if you watch. There are some obvious lacunae. Apostrophe 's's' have been left out in certain cases (Bengals instead of Bengal's), but it was a software failure of the editor's machine. Also,  the last minute hurry to get the project finished so that it could be published within the Pujas, led to the omission of the names of Tridhara, Mudiali and Barisha Sarvajanin at the very end when the pandals are shown

Chinmoyee Roop Dhore Ai: Durga Puja,2018, Part II

Ma's artistic nature:

Hers is a nature that is intensely artistic. I believe that all my artistic inclinations that surfaced much later in my life, I get from my mother.

She used to say,'Oh, i love leaves', much more than I love flowers. I couldn't agree more. The variety of green, the symphony of green, the plenitude and promise of green, the redemption of green, pull and tug at my heart and fill it with ecstasy.

And bamboo? During Priya's wedding I saw what a symphony of bamboo was. It was Ma who used to say to me,'Mou, pandal gulo dekhe amar taak lege jai at the profound and deep artistry of the structures' (Mou, the pandals amaze me..)

So now that I have the impersonal joy out of such things, I think it all comes from my mother. 

Ma's negotiations with life:

Always a firm rationalist. According to Jungian typology that my friends of one time, Janet and Steve Walker, were very good at, she is a 'thinking/intuitive' kind. 'Intuition' is our common function, I being 'feeling/intuitive'.

'Thinking' and 'Feeling' types don't really get each other. One thinks rationally, reasonably and the other 'thinks' through 'feeling'. Some of the greatest artists and musicians have been the 'feeling/sensation' kind of person. Wordsworth was and so was Eliot. Once again, Janet who confirmed it through discussion.

Ma was an intense devotee of Rabindranath. Scoffed at any other person or divine agent or whatever. No interest in Sri Ramakrishna or Belur or any kind of ritual puja.

She believed in the freedom of the Upanasadic view of Brahman; Brahman inhered in everything. She is singularly free of superstition. You will never be able to convince her that 'sneezing' before one leaves the house is inauspicious.

But I think that also makes her insensitive to very subtle and fine gradations of feeling.

She would never have understood or appreciated Coleridge for instance, and his evocation of the supernatural in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Christabel. She would never have understood what the 'willing suspension of disbelief' was.  

Tobo Achinta Roop Charita Mahima: Sreemati Mukherjee.

Ma's first moments at the University of Calcutta in 1953:

In her words (obviously told in Bangla) :

My observations, interventions are included in brackets: 

I wasn't fazed or anything by the fact that I had to go to the university. Or by Kolkata, as a matter of fact. I was from Shillong [with pride] and hence smart. In Shillong I studied with Garo, Khasi, Nepali, Assamese and Bengali girls. Everyone spoke English.

[ what a fascinating picture we get of Shillong which is  pretty decrepit and forgotten, now. I went in the summer of  2006. Dull and faded with memories and nostalgia of past vibrancy and vitality. I have Ma's and mine too of course, relatives ( all Sylheti) living there. Sylhetis also have a particular accent that they speak which in a way seems to shut out outsiders to the community. But people of my mother's family? I have the greatest respect for them. Kind, gentle, moderate, well behaved, which my father's family very definitely are not. Descendants of Sri Chaitanya, is what they proudly claim. I don't really know about this. Moved to Shillong during the 1905 Partition of Bengal. My Sylheti Mama, Salil Mama, who was Ma's cousin brother, had given me away in marriage because I was getting married within the same Mukhopadhyay gotra. They always seemed a little ill at ease in my family in Kolkata. Wonder why? Oh, my father's family were so full of themselves. Intolerable, really. I think my Mama felt a little out of place].

Ma continues;

So I went alone to the university. Nobody would talk to me. The Bethune girls clustered together. The Brabourne girls clustered together. They shut out anyone  who was not one of them.

Me: Did you feel like the outsider? Did you feel bad, Ma ?[ I felt bad to hear this because I know that like me she is full of a childish kind of enthusiasm. I would hate for her to feel slighted and unwanted. I would hate that].

Ma: No, not at all. I didn't care for people's opinions in those days. I ignored them too. And scoffed at them within [ new picture of my mother]. The guys all sat at the furthest end of the room. Girls and boys never talked. Dadi was there. Dadi later became professor at Shantiniketan [ more on this later]. [Dadi 'beard' was so called because he had a beard].

Ma; But all this changed when Dr Gopeshwar Pal came to teach us. Gopeshwar Babu had checked my scripts when I took my undergraduate examination at Guwahati.

Me: Really, Ma?? This is a revelation to me. So scripts from Guwahati travelled to Kolkata to be checked. Then your degree from Guwahati has great value?

[First in the university she was. I know I am showing off, but I feel this very important worldly detail needs to be incorporated out of respect for her achievements which she later destroyed  by thinking so poorly of herself. This is  when my father's family discounted her achievements or turned a blind eye to them and kept emphasizing all that she couldn't do--cook and sew and boil a perfect egg. I feel outraged when I remember all this]

Ma: Yes. Gopeshwar Babu said to the other students ( he knew my name, Bharati Bhattacharya, from the attendance register. In those days attendance was always called out. I don't know if it still is), 'ami lakkhya korechhi tomra or shonge katha bolo na. O tomader sakaler theke bhalo. Ami or khhata dekhechhi. ' This translates into, "Oh, so you guys don't talk to her? I've noticed that you don't . Let me tell you one thing. She is better than all of you. I have evaluated her scripts' .

[ In all these years that I have known my mother, I didn't know this very wonderful detail about her life. Today when I feel that I haven't given her enough attention or have drifted away from her and writing about her is one way of honouring her, I come to know this warm, radiant,  invaluable moment of her life. Like a priceless ray of golden light , this moment is. Rich in validation ].

Ma:  Gopeshwar Babu was very kind and affectionate to me. It made a world of difference.

My mother as writer:

She writes on July 8th, 2005:

'My mind is like a road in a mountainous area. Even after severe rains, water does not gather even on those roads of mountainous regions that are on more plane surface. The water always cascades away. Was born in Shillong and grew up in Shillong. My mind is like a road in Shillong. It does not remain burdened by insults and humiliations. Somewhere along the way they just drop off. My mind becomes free again.'

And then she writes about a woman who indulged her husband's libidinal appetites. Wished him well and said 'bye' to him with grace. 

Ma's life as a postgraduate student at Kolkata in the early 50's

Was interesting getting a face of the postgraduate hostel on Harrison Road that my mother stayed in during her studying of the M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Calcutta.

There was no electricity in the building. No fans at night. And she was from Shillong which was cool even in the summer. Even today one sometimes  needs a cardigan in May. But my mother was a great one for acceptance and tolerance. She still continues to have it. She had a femur bone transplant in 2014, after a great fall and she was 80, then. Not a word of complaint. She had a gall bladder operation in 2015. That too, she bore quietly. Really, quite extraordinary.

I mean she is aggressive. With me. Minding me even in the minutest of ways that I have truly found suffocating. Which has led to vast distances between us. However, it is also true that throughout her life she has displayed remarkable powers of acceptance of pain (physical and mental), and the ability to endure it. I have some of that. This ability helped me get through the years 1982-1994. I always felt ('sometimes' felt, because i was not really contextualizing my situation) that I was my mother's daughter, especially in this regard.

So, she stayed awake in that heat. In the heat of Kolkata in May. Girl from the hills. No complains. Yesterday, I asked her about this. She said, not only did the heat keep her alive, but also the sound of  the trams that plied Harrison Road. They plied till 12 midnight, each day.

And then after the noise of the trams died down, the street dwellers right below her window, would start chatting. About their daily woes. Some beggars. Some people who were too poor to rent a place to stay in the city. So they stayed on the pavements.

What a life!!

Ma:

Disclaimer: Social observations on my part, especially those pertaining to other communities, may be arbitrary and not totally informed. However, I am going by observations of peoples in different settings.

She had/has extraordinary courage and heroism. She spoke the Kolkata Bangla even before she came to Kolkata/Calcutta. Calcutta in the 50's must have been so elegant. Not like it is today, full of noise and impossible bustle. I strain and strain and strain to look for beauty, elegance, redemption. I find very little. Except the old architectural remnants. Oh, they give me a thrill. Middle class and upper middle  class households (upper middle class). Houses with poignant, sad, wistful expressions. Some of them like Subrata Mitra's house, which bravely boasts the Subrata Mitra Archvies, is almost in a state of desuetude. Pitiable, even ugly.  I remember going to that house in my very late teens. Dada (cousin) was close to Subrata Mitra.

Many on Sarat Bose Road, still. Old elegant houses, with so many stories beneath their facades. So many. Of lives lived, of sacrifices made. Especially by women whose husbands may have taken mistresses, who groomed and governed their children to become leaders of society. Old world, faded elegance, often. Succeeding generations have not been able to keep up the social and economic elevation of former times, achieved (attained) by grandfathers and great grand fathers. Perhaps they were doctors, public sector engineers, lawyers, advocates, judges. Lot of law in upper middle class Bengali families.

 On Sarat Bose Road,where it starts from opposite Minto Park, there is an interesting melange of new, commercial , non Bengali, business and enterprise. Lots of it. One can take the SAT and TOEFL exams there. Laser optical surgery.

Gujarati/Marwari clubs. Hindustan Club, I think it is called. Went there one day on the invite of a very dear friend.

One feels one is in a different world when one walks into one of these. All communities living together, but really so different. Even the smell of the food one walks into, is so different. I have no problem with vegetarian food, eating it a great deal of the time. But food is culture, ethics, life-style, philosophy. With it comes, ingrained or rigid or  open--minded or inclusive or exclusive, experimental or conservative mind sets.

I wonder how the different communites of Kolkata feel towards each other. Gujarati/ Marwari/ Parsi/ Bengali/ Punjabi/ Bihari peoples, who are all the peoples of Kolkata. Some foreigners, too. From the consulates, the multinatinal corporations, and the multinational hotel top management, such as the Hyatt.

 The Gujaratis and Marwaris have a great deal of money. Lots and lots of it. Their women folk wear diamonds. But many of them (say, above 60, range) are still not part of the 21st century in terms of thinking along 'modern' (open-minded, acceptance of plural and multiple possibilities) lines. They seem to live in narrow worlds. Where nothing but cooking and clothing and children and other people's lives matter. Not my generation, though. Although, I am close to sixty myself. Will be 58 in November. But I will still keep to the age bar that i have mentioned.

And young, highly educated, enterprising Marwari, Gujarati and Punjabi women, are often into business, their own firms and shops. Not as much as Bengali women in the professions. 

Ma:

Must have had  great deal of optimism,too. To not be afraid. A certain innocence and trust. Says something about Kolkata in those days, too. Not a city that seemed dangerous to a young girl coming to study from many miles away.

She had the capacity to endure a great deal. Her hostel on Harrison Road,  had no fan. She endured it without complaint. There used to be no fish, on most days. That too, she didn't mind.

In those days her father sent her a lot of money. 100 rupees per month. But she had no luxurious ways.

She still refers to that time as the best time of her life. Free, she says, I was free.

And after marriage, a life of being caged and imprisoned. 

MA

A small town girl who came to Kolkata to study for her M.A degree. Brilliant. Alert. Open. Curious. Always an outsider to the West Bengali family she married into.

Always referred her father as having given her life. Of having nurtured her intellectual being. Of giving her the inspiration to move further ahead. Who set to naught all the protests from other family members who said, that Dadu should not spend all that money on educating a girl. That he should spend it on educating a boy in the family. But Dadu had not listened.

He had said, but she has done so well. How can i not give her the opportunity?

I think may be he earned the curses of many because of this decision. I don't know. When I reflect upon why my mother did not have the kind of career she so easily could have with that wonderful start ( even my results are not that good), I wonder whether someone's curse worked. I am superstitious. I am not as driven by reason as my mother is.

But her Locke, Berkeley and Hume have had a great influence on her life. Reason is her God. She knows no other.

But what a traveller! So intrepid. Coming to Kolkata to study. Mahanagari. Not fazed. Extraordinary. I have never quite thought of it like that. Have been too preoccupied with mine to think so much about hers.