It's a brown coloured day, a cloudy winter day, with a Didun-coloured sky, and a misty wind that smells of nostalgia. This is not the kind of nostalgia that you feel for school, or friends, or the nice lady who used to be your classteacher a few years back. This is a deep-rooted nostalgia that pervades generations, your own childhood, mother's childhood, even grandmother's childhood.
The world doesn't give a damn about the Didun-shaped hole in my universe, it goes on in its own way uncompromisingly and so do I, but so much of myself and my childhood is going away into that hole...
To name a few, there were those afternoons of climbing her trees with kaathpipreys all over me, those dark dawns of picking shiulis while she shook the tree, their fragrance enveloping my senses and the raw coldness of dawn biting into my bones. Those pitheys, jams, jellies, and achars that always smelt of her, irrespective of how they were flavoured. Those winter afternoons spent on her lap, sunshine on our shoulders and in our eyes, me listening spellbound to her stories while she knitted woolens for everyone starting from her beloved granddaughters to the gardener's child who had caught a cold. As I grew up, those Eoshop's fables and tales of mythology were replaced by anecdotes of her own childhood, her miserable womanhood. I heard how she fought with her whole family for the right of education, how she was married against her will to someone who didn't allow her as much as a pillow on her wedding night because she hadn't brought one from her father's place. I heard how a girl of seventeen blossomed into a woman, how that woman battled life for herself and her children, unaided by the man who refused to grant her the most fundamental human rights. The in-laws in the the villages of those days made me shudder whenever I heard how they performed rituals to bring about Didun's death earlier than Dadu's, how they almost murdered her first child by making her work at the dheki when she was pregnant. I've often been envious of my mum's delightful childhood, a childhood cut out from Pather Panchali, but when I heard an account of those times from Didun, I could only gape.
"Those were the hardest times of my life", she said, "Running the home alone, trying to cultivate vegetables on the little land we had and selling them, all so that my children could have enough to live on". Her voice went hard, "Sometimes, there wouldn't be a morsel to spare at home, but I had three hungry children crying incessantly for food, their cries cutting right through me, making me want to starngle each one of them..."
I would put a loving arm around her. "But mum says you never turned a begger away. How so? Surely you'd have to go without food yourself?"
"I did go without it when they came begging, if I had any food at all, that is. They were poorer, and their pain was my own. I was a mother too, you see. Not being able to feed hungry children is the worst curse for a mother."
How charitable!, I thought to myself, but immediately amended my thoughts. It was not charity, they could not afford charity. It was a kind of unadulterated empathy that had nothing to do with pity.
"You know, there's a reason your mum scolds you when you waste food. In her childhood, we had about two eggs once in three months, and one had to be shared among all three of your ma, mama and mashi."
"And Dadu had the other egg all by himself, right?"
Didun's tone had no tinge of a complaint when she said, "Well, he was the man of the family, you know."
"You should have given him a divorce!" I exclaimed in disgust.
She laughed. "And where would I go then? There was no divorce in those days, dear. I was luckier than many women, I at least managed to earn your mother a childhood, an education."
The childhood she earned for my mother was an extremely simple one. Wading across knee-deep slush for a mile on her way to school. Shivering through the winter nights because they could not afford enough warmth. Sitting by the fire on purple winter evenings, filling the long hours with ancient stories. Looking forward to an egg for months (no wonder mum glares at me when I refuse an omelette because its precise shade of yellow is not after my heart).
Yet she can perhaps be justified in singing, "We had joy, we had fun/ We had seasons in the sun" more freely than I ever can. She went without shoes, so she didn't have to stop and think before plunging into a puddle. Pressed by the barest human needs, she didn't have the sense of properness to stop her from climbing coconut trees. Friendship, for her, was not restricted by limits of cast, creed, or even age. For her, it was a divine sense of unity, the kind of bonding you develop from slipping in the same puddle together, swinging from the hanging roots of the same banyan tree before diving into the ice-cold water of a pond for swimming races, licking the same achar stolen from a neighbour. Those were the days you could safely love your neighbour more than yourself, eat at anyone's as long as they had enough to spare, and have sleepovers at friends without a paranoid mother ringing you up on your cell every three seconds. You could buy enough mowas(the village equivalent of our sundae ice creams) to last a month with a poor girl's weekly pocket money. Happiness was a lot cheaper than it is now, and in some senses a lot purer.
Those stories of her childhood often make me wonder: Are we really progressing? Do Domino's pizzas, arguments over sms cards and expensive watches, plastic smiles and synthetic tears really count as progress? The quality of being happy with whatever little we have is one I see very rarely in the world I'm growing up in. Small joys count but little.
In my native village, little joys still count. I have another grandmother there, a woman who is remarkable in her own way. She's another fountain of wholesome love, a person who understands the worth of little drops of water, little grains of sand. So she would always let my four-year-old self feed her cows and calves, and show them my empty dish after lunch to tell them triumphantly, "Look, I ate faster than you! You're still chewing!". She's the one who defends me when I spend rainy mornings snuggled up in the branches of her aata tree, much to the fury of my mum who has remarkable lapses of memory when she forgets all about her own childhood spent climbing coconut trees, and yells at me for trying to replicate her adventures. My grandmother also accompanies me on my visits to the paddy fields, where the endless green meets the endless blue at a colourless horizon. I can bathe in ponds, cuddle the goats, chat with the village girls while I watch them at the work of "ghunte dewa". The kind of warmth you get in those kuchcha houses with naked babies crawling all over the dusty uthons, ducks and hens scarpering at your feet, young girls grinning from ear to ear while they rush about making things comfortable for you, anxious mothers who pat your head with a dirty hand half-cleaned hastily while they peer into your eyes and tell you that good health and mental freshness come before brilliant results in the Madhyamiks, and urge you to try some of their own "khejurer rosh", is something that you'll never get here in this world of sophisticated sitting rooms with fashionable paintings and crystal displays. The best thing about the khejurer rosh is that I can lick all five fingers while enjoying it, unlike some well-furnished dining room of Kolkata where I tend to worry more about how to hold the spoon and fork than enjoy the food itself.
I love my village. I love its rugged, unsophisticated charm. I love its mornings, green and grey in colour, smelling of mists and daybreak and sleeping cows. I love its yellow coloured noons, in which the taste of sunshine mingles with the smell of new mown hay. I love its golden-orange afternoons, the shapeless, endless sky, the purple curtain of twilight pricked by a few stars. I love the sight of the silver moonlight flooding the sleeping village, accentuating the silhouettes of tall trees on long wintry nights, filling me up with a strange sense of awe at so primitive a form of beauty.
However, changes are already setting in. Thamma will follow Didun soon, and our ancestral house will be sold and broken down. The sighs and whispers and gurgles of delight hidden in the bricks of that house will crumble. The red coloured pillar which is the sole keeper of so many of my childhood secrets will fall to dust. The village itself will probably make way for a highly industrialized city in the next generation. No more of moonbeam floods, only neon lights.
I want to cry for the Krishnachura my mother planted, Its flagrant redness tells me that it wants to live. But there's nothing I can do for it. I have to watch it fall, the way every red rose in our garden withers away too soon, while I watch another love of mine dying slowly.
My golden afternoons and purple twilights will get lost. My misty Decembers will fade away. My palash and krishnachura will bleed their hearts out 'cause they cannot cry. The tide of time and breeze of change will try to wash the blood away, wash away the sepia tints of my childhood.
But the dust will remember.
And so will I.
The world doesn't give a damn about the Didun-shaped hole in my universe, it goes on in its own way uncompromisingly and so do I, but so much of myself and my childhood is going away into that hole...
To name a few, there were those afternoons of climbing her trees with kaathpipreys all over me, those dark dawns of picking shiulis while she shook the tree, their fragrance enveloping my senses and the raw coldness of dawn biting into my bones. Those pitheys, jams, jellies, and achars that always smelt of her, irrespective of how they were flavoured. Those winter afternoons spent on her lap, sunshine on our shoulders and in our eyes, me listening spellbound to her stories while she knitted woolens for everyone starting from her beloved granddaughters to the gardener's child who had caught a cold. As I grew up, those Eoshop's fables and tales of mythology were replaced by anecdotes of her own childhood, her miserable womanhood. I heard how she fought with her whole family for the right of education, how she was married against her will to someone who didn't allow her as much as a pillow on her wedding night because she hadn't brought one from her father's place. I heard how a girl of seventeen blossomed into a woman, how that woman battled life for herself and her children, unaided by the man who refused to grant her the most fundamental human rights. The in-laws in the the villages of those days made me shudder whenever I heard how they performed rituals to bring about Didun's death earlier than Dadu's, how they almost murdered her first child by making her work at the dheki when she was pregnant. I've often been envious of my mum's delightful childhood, a childhood cut out from Pather Panchali, but when I heard an account of those times from Didun, I could only gape.
"Those were the hardest times of my life", she said, "Running the home alone, trying to cultivate vegetables on the little land we had and selling them, all so that my children could have enough to live on". Her voice went hard, "Sometimes, there wouldn't be a morsel to spare at home, but I had three hungry children crying incessantly for food, their cries cutting right through me, making me want to starngle each one of them..."
I would put a loving arm around her. "But mum says you never turned a begger away. How so? Surely you'd have to go without food yourself?"
"I did go without it when they came begging, if I had any food at all, that is. They were poorer, and their pain was my own. I was a mother too, you see. Not being able to feed hungry children is the worst curse for a mother."
How charitable!, I thought to myself, but immediately amended my thoughts. It was not charity, they could not afford charity. It was a kind of unadulterated empathy that had nothing to do with pity.
"You know, there's a reason your mum scolds you when you waste food. In her childhood, we had about two eggs once in three months, and one had to be shared among all three of your ma, mama and mashi."
"And Dadu had the other egg all by himself, right?"
Didun's tone had no tinge of a complaint when she said, "Well, he was the man of the family, you know."
"You should have given him a divorce!" I exclaimed in disgust.
She laughed. "And where would I go then? There was no divorce in those days, dear. I was luckier than many women, I at least managed to earn your mother a childhood, an education."
The childhood she earned for my mother was an extremely simple one. Wading across knee-deep slush for a mile on her way to school. Shivering through the winter nights because they could not afford enough warmth. Sitting by the fire on purple winter evenings, filling the long hours with ancient stories. Looking forward to an egg for months (no wonder mum glares at me when I refuse an omelette because its precise shade of yellow is not after my heart).
Yet she can perhaps be justified in singing, "We had joy, we had fun/ We had seasons in the sun" more freely than I ever can. She went without shoes, so she didn't have to stop and think before plunging into a puddle. Pressed by the barest human needs, she didn't have the sense of properness to stop her from climbing coconut trees. Friendship, for her, was not restricted by limits of cast, creed, or even age. For her, it was a divine sense of unity, the kind of bonding you develop from slipping in the same puddle together, swinging from the hanging roots of the same banyan tree before diving into the ice-cold water of a pond for swimming races, licking the same achar stolen from a neighbour. Those were the days you could safely love your neighbour more than yourself, eat at anyone's as long as they had enough to spare, and have sleepovers at friends without a paranoid mother ringing you up on your cell every three seconds. You could buy enough mowas(the village equivalent of our sundae ice creams) to last a month with a poor girl's weekly pocket money. Happiness was a lot cheaper than it is now, and in some senses a lot purer.
Those stories of her childhood often make me wonder: Are we really progressing? Do Domino's pizzas, arguments over sms cards and expensive watches, plastic smiles and synthetic tears really count as progress? The quality of being happy with whatever little we have is one I see very rarely in the world I'm growing up in. Small joys count but little.
In my native village, little joys still count. I have another grandmother there, a woman who is remarkable in her own way. She's another fountain of wholesome love, a person who understands the worth of little drops of water, little grains of sand. So she would always let my four-year-old self feed her cows and calves, and show them my empty dish after lunch to tell them triumphantly, "Look, I ate faster than you! You're still chewing!". She's the one who defends me when I spend rainy mornings snuggled up in the branches of her aata tree, much to the fury of my mum who has remarkable lapses of memory when she forgets all about her own childhood spent climbing coconut trees, and yells at me for trying to replicate her adventures. My grandmother also accompanies me on my visits to the paddy fields, where the endless green meets the endless blue at a colourless horizon. I can bathe in ponds, cuddle the goats, chat with the village girls while I watch them at the work of "ghunte dewa". The kind of warmth you get in those kuchcha houses with naked babies crawling all over the dusty uthons, ducks and hens scarpering at your feet, young girls grinning from ear to ear while they rush about making things comfortable for you, anxious mothers who pat your head with a dirty hand half-cleaned hastily while they peer into your eyes and tell you that good health and mental freshness come before brilliant results in the Madhyamiks, and urge you to try some of their own "khejurer rosh", is something that you'll never get here in this world of sophisticated sitting rooms with fashionable paintings and crystal displays. The best thing about the khejurer rosh is that I can lick all five fingers while enjoying it, unlike some well-furnished dining room of Kolkata where I tend to worry more about how to hold the spoon and fork than enjoy the food itself.
I love my village. I love its rugged, unsophisticated charm. I love its mornings, green and grey in colour, smelling of mists and daybreak and sleeping cows. I love its yellow coloured noons, in which the taste of sunshine mingles with the smell of new mown hay. I love its golden-orange afternoons, the shapeless, endless sky, the purple curtain of twilight pricked by a few stars. I love the sight of the silver moonlight flooding the sleeping village, accentuating the silhouettes of tall trees on long wintry nights, filling me up with a strange sense of awe at so primitive a form of beauty.
However, changes are already setting in. Thamma will follow Didun soon, and our ancestral house will be sold and broken down. The sighs and whispers and gurgles of delight hidden in the bricks of that house will crumble. The red coloured pillar which is the sole keeper of so many of my childhood secrets will fall to dust. The village itself will probably make way for a highly industrialized city in the next generation. No more of moonbeam floods, only neon lights.
I want to cry for the Krishnachura my mother planted, Its flagrant redness tells me that it wants to live. But there's nothing I can do for it. I have to watch it fall, the way every red rose in our garden withers away too soon, while I watch another love of mine dying slowly.
My golden afternoons and purple twilights will get lost. My misty Decembers will fade away. My palash and krishnachura will bleed their hearts out 'cause they cannot cry. The tide of time and breeze of change will try to wash the blood away, wash away the sepia tints of my childhood.
But the dust will remember.
And so will I.
