In
life nothing is constant but change, and I'm dealing with a whole slew of them. Some changes are expected, I'm okay with those - seasons, months, growth, the expected transitions...but not all. Especially discomfort-inducing are those changes which happen too fast and without reason, descend on me with a rush like a rockfall. But...thankfully, some changes are reversible. Storms in teacups, not much harm done to the cups or the tea. C'est la vie... the idea is to keep calm and carry on writing...at Write...Edit...Publish... - where I’m continuing with my photo-essay spree, and it is strangely apt that someone who taught me the definitive
lessons on navigating change, should be the subject of it.
The original is way
over word count, so my entry consists of a few sections
only. To explain the title - the person was a posthumous child, his losses
started even before birth and carried on from there.
Born into Loss
 |
| S.N. Maitra with two of his grandchildren at 18/68B Dover Lane in 1982. |
Three things
are indelibly associated with that time and place, and with him – the wall clock, the tobacco
water-pipe, and the small radio with the wooden fascia. I asked about them
years later, but they were gone by then. Sold off to the junk-dealers because
the radio and clock had both stopped working. Not sure what happened to the
water-pipe, maybe the scrap traders got it for the metal.
Unlike his
wife, he left me nothing tangible. No childhood presents, no souvenirs, not
even a book with his name signed on it. No photograph albums, fat chance! - no
such luxury. There’s just one photo I have, with him, my little cousin and me
together in one frame, the one above, I was nearly an adult then. But he did
leave me three clearly enunciated names – Meghna, Machhpara, Faridpur. And he
left me an example of how to calmly navigate change and carry immeasurable loss
without disintegrating. Intangibles all. Nothing that I can quite close my fist
around, but all worth holding on to.
He had a
cigarette-holder too, small, jet-black with a filter incorporated, in which he
occasionally smoked a brand called Capstan, one cigarette cut carefully into
pieces, for reasons of economy rather than health. The family was hard up even
then, even with his elder son working at a renowned architectural firm in the
city. A decade back, the father had sold off his last valuable - his gold
watch, in some vaguely grand, O’Henryesque gesture, to pay off the backlog of
hostel fees of his adult child, without which the said child would not have
been able to sit his final university exams. A whole cigarette in one sitting
felt too extravagant still.
Everything was
eked out, cigarettes, coal, postcards. The last item he filled with XXS size
handwriting, beautifully formed letters by a rocksteady hand, without a hint of
a tremor, even when he was 90+. But again, I get ahead of myself, I was the
recipient of those 15-p postcards in teenage, where an entire week’s worth of
family news was written on less than 50 square inches. But then Bengali is a
compact script, there are hardly any loops and flourishes below the line. There
was a singular lack of loops and flourishes below the line in our lives then,
his and mine.
The room had
several windows, green louvred with straight, black, vertical wrought-iron rods
- forbidding, cool to the touch. The ceiling was low, the floor was set a
couple of steps down from the landing, the same polished red oxide as the rest
of the house. The door frame was smaller, lower than the others in the regular rooms
on the upper or ground floor. He was a tall man, very spare, very upright, he
must have had to duck to get in. There is, of course, more to being caged than
a cramped room and straight bars on a window. And one man’s cage can be his
grandkid’s polestar.
***
I
once asked him why he didn’t show the papers of the village property and get
due compensation that the uprooted from East Pakistan were given by the Indian
government. His told me that there were other branches of the family still
living in the property, the papers were with them, naturally. Besides, where
was the chance? We didn’t really plan this move, we didn’t flee as
refugees, we came here to work, to get our children educated. We just got
trapped this side of the suddenly sprung-up border. There was no way to go
back.
I don’t really know how
that feels, I was born years after the Partition. But I can take a good
guess. From the rambling, many-roomed, haphazard homestead with four
courtyards, built over centuries a wing at a time - to a new built, two-storey,
tiny, suburban house with a courtyard the size of a hanky. From being one of
the first families in a small village where everyone knew him by name to the
huge anonymity of a city of millions. From the collective memories of
generations rooted in the same patch of land to one where there was no memory
to draw upon. No templates for living life - the old ways rapidly disappeared,
the new ways were not yet devised.
Sapta purush jethae manush
shey maati mayer baRa – where seven
generations have been brought up that land is greater than the mother.* How
to negotiate a change of citizenship in which your own birthplace, the land of
your ‘seven-generational’ ancestors becomes foreign and forbidden to you? He lived nearly half his life in Dover Lane, away from his home and birthplace,
both forever out of his reach. It must have been excruciating. Trapped
on this side of the border. We are all trapped by our respective borders
and yet we can never know the exact nature of anyone else’s struggles,
regardless of how close they are to us.
***
One Wednesday afternoon in
April 1986, my father called me at work. Come to Dover Lane. By
then my parents had moved back to Calcutta, my mother was in remission from
cancer, I lived with them in their hastily-acquired new home and worked not too
far from Dover Lane.
I found the house fuller
than usual, my father’s cousins had come by, my eldest aunt, Boropishi was
there sat by his bed. She told him I had come – he opened his eyes, looked
at me for a long moment but said nothing; and then shut them back
again. My grandfather lay perfectly still, his face calm, the eyes shut,
the bones of his jaw and chin very prominent, his lips thinned as if some
invisible internal force was sucking them in.
Shortly
after, he sighed - a long drawn out, rasping groan. The usual
rituals were observed, a drop of Gangajal was touched to the
mouth. My father checked for a heartbeat and could not find one. The
neighbours, who happened to be doctors and had treated him for years, were
called in and medically confirmed the death.
There was no last minute
rushing in and out of hospitals, no last words, no mortal agony – just a
peaceful departure. One minute he was there, the next he was not. My grandfather died
with the same quiet dignity with which he had conducted himself all his
life. The cage had finally broken and the captive had gone free.
WC 1075
FCA
*A line from a famous Tagore poem called Dui Bigha Jomi (Two Bighas of Land)
Read the other entries here -
