Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG : Caged Bird June 2019

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 -

What Absence Shapes

Rickshaw van in Taki

We are on a three wheeler, my cousin and I - three bicycle wheels with a flat wooden platform for seating, the front wheel connected to a saddle for the ‘rickshaw-van’ puller.  A common mode of transport in most of rural West Bengal, in India. The road, after a feeble attempt at being macadamised, peters out to a rich brown, wet mud track. It is mid-monsoons, the season of rains. The growth all around is so lush that the diffuse light of a cloudy day is filtered green through it. The road runs parallel to the river, the glimmer of water breaks through the dense foliage from time to time, sometimes the branches clear up to reveal the waterscape. There are small, pointy boats out, each one with the Indian tricolour flying. We are at Taki at the border - the far bank of the river is Bangladesh. Debhata, Satkhira, Khulna. The names are just as familiar as the Bengali ones this side of the river – Bashirhat, Taki, 24 Pargana.

In Too Deep - Write...Edit...Publish...February 2018

Hello WEP-ers!

Welcome to the first post for 2018 for Write...Edit...Publish... which has a groovy updated look, super awesome! I love it. 

I'm here with an excerpt from a long story called ‘A Postcard from the Village.’ Not exactly a Valentine's story, I'm afraid. Not romantic love, but it celebrates sisterhood and camaraderie between women and the triumph of the human spirit over conflicts born of narrowmindedness. (Btw, 21st Feb has a great significance in Bangladesh, and also the wider Bengali culture. The day has been recognised by the UN as the International Mother Language Day. In a way this story is also a tribute.)

The setting is September 1946, in undivided Bengal in the run up to the Partition the following year. In 1947, as India won her Independence, Bengal was divided into a Hindu majority West Bengal, and East Bengal became Muslim majority East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. That year – 1946, was a year of deep and bitter, bloody religious conflict in Bengal. Countless people from both communities were killed. The story itself is of course fictional but it's based on a terribly real history.

Sukhada, a Hindu woman living in Calcutta, West Bengal, receives a postcard from her pregnant sister-in-law, from Sukhada’s ancestral home in East Bengal.  In it is the news that all the menfolk have been killed by rioters, and her mother has died from the shock. The SIL is being sheltered by a kindhearted Muslim woman who is also at risk of being murdered if it becomes known she is helping someone of the other faith. Sukhada appeals to the head of the family to let her visit her sister-in-law. But her Uncle-in-law refuses permission. Sukhada then decides to run away, return to her parental home to her sister-in-law. This is what happens upon her arrival.

A Postcard from the Village  

The stench was overpowering.  The smell of charred earth flapped like a wet rag against her senses, suffocating, dreadful.  The paddies had only scorched stumps left.  The thatched cottages had been reduced to ruined mounds. The trees stood stripped of leaves, branches blackened and deformed, clawing the sky, strangely skeleton-like.  Sukhada suddenly came upon a half-burnt forearm stuck in the charred lower undergrowth, the flesh bloated, horribly mottled in pink and black, crawling with flies.  Battling nausea, she clapped a handful of her saree over her nose and quickened her steps. 

Her ancestral home was one of three brick and mortar buildings in the village, the others being the post office and the school.  It was a rambling residence, generations had added a wing here, a room there, modified it to suit them over the centuries. 

It was shaped loosely like an E, the three bars of the letter forming the three main wings.  The outer wing facing the main gate housed the sitting rooms, one large for the men’s use every evening, and a more intimate family room.  There was also a small schoolroom for the children and another one that served as an office. The middle wing was mostly bedrooms, a day room given over for the women’s use, the central one a small shrine.  The last wing comprised servants’ rooms and the bathrooms.  The spine of the E were the kitchens – vegetarian and non-vegetarian strictly segregated, the store rooms, another with the paddy-mill.  Tucked between the women’s wing and baths, was the small ante-room used by generations for music. The entire house had deep, wrap-around verandas, so that all rooms were accessible from the verandas as well as from each other. 

Sukhada stopped where the main gate had been, and looked at what remained.  The entry gaped open, the walls were charred black, a heap of burnt rubble.  The graceful louvered windows had been reduced to cinders along with their frames, the terrible heat had distorted the wrought iron bars before they had worked loose and fallen in a tangle of metal.  Sukhada’s head swam as she recalled the postcard.

'They were more than fifty strong, armed with machetes and torches.  They dragged the menfolk out.  Our esteemed mother protested, and was shoved back.  She fell and stayed motionless.  They went through all the rooms, helped themselves to what they wanted.  I hid behind the sitar, huddled under the dust-cloth and recited the Durganaam, thinking if the Goddess wishes my baby to be born She will let me complete the chants.  The house became quiet presently. I went to our mother and called her but she made no answer. 

I found Moga outside, she has brought me with her, I am writing from her home, but it is not a secure position.  I lit the pyre for our mother as there were no other males present, the priest said no sin would attach to me and more importantly, affect the little one.  I am much dispirited, Sister.'

Room after room lay in ruins, furniture reduced to kindling, cherished items made worthless, dust and ashes. Sukhada felt a terrifying hand squeeze her heart in a constricting grip.  What had happened after the postcard was written? Was the letter-writer safe when the burning was going on?

Her grandmother’s elegantly carved rosewood four-poster lay in a brutally burnt heap, the exquisite scrolled carving of vines against the raw grain of the split wood like an obscene wound.  She could not bear to look, yet she could not tear her eyes away from the destruction, hypnotised by the horror. 

In her brother’s bedroom, someone had brought out the old rocking horse and given it a fresh coat of paint.  The mob had decapitated it, and she stumbled over the mutilated, partly scorched head, the blackened mouth had been split open in a ghastly travesty of a grin, parts of the remaining gaily-painted red harness seemed like oozing blood. She ran along the veranda with her heart thudding.

She paused at the threshold of the music room, it too had not escaped.  The doors had been taken off their hinges with blows that had cleaved the frame, the windows looked out onto the veranda black and hollow like the empty eye sockets of a skull. Sukhada felt dizzy, all her fears heightened to a crescendo of panic.  She stepped over the doorsill.

The mindless destruction had left its evidence all around the walls here as well.  A collection of flutes that had hung in a case had been torn off and set alight.  The drums and harmonium were similarly defaced and burnt.  Sukhada walked, astonished, towards the centre where a small but exquisitely made carpet was laid.  She recalled many hours sitting on it practising, strumming the sitar.  The instrument was still there, its dustcover disturbed, bunched up over the neck.  The full, round gourd rested on the carpet exposed, but intact. 

It sat on the carpet unscathed as though on an island untouched by the ocean of wreckage around it.  She sat down beside the sitar and picked it up.  The strings came alive at her touch and she drew the few first notes of a favourite raga in unpractised fingers.  She had not played in a long time, the instrument was not tuned, but still the strings felt warm and quivery under her hand, eager to lighten the weight in her heart, to resonate with her grief.  She laid her head upon its neck and finally abandoned herself to uncontrollable weeping.

~~~

WC -924

FCA

Read the other entries here: