Another world, another time p Satya Jeet C

Another world, another time

Satya Jeet, New Jersey

When I came to the US in 1970 to attend college, my American fellow students and certain faculty members would ask me polite questions about my home in India. They were surprised by my simple answers. I imagine, they saw me as a person from another world. We have emigrated from India to the US in sufficient numbers and have become an integral part of the American mainstream. We are not strangers; I fit seamlessly into American life. There are very few questions about my background now. Patterns in living and lifestyle have changed in India at breakneck speed in the last decade. While visiting my once familiar India, people ask me polite questions about my home in the US. My simple answers would often astound them; I imagine they perceived me as a person from another time. For persons of my maturity, it is amusing to think back on the historic cycle we were born into and have lived through. Later this year, I will be traveling to Kolkata, India, to celebrate my father’s birth centenary. My mother was not much younger than my father.

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I was born quite late in my parent’s life. Their way of life reflected steadfast and traditional values, implications with which I am still grappling.

It may surprise you to know, my mother was quite un-schooled. Shortly after the turn of the century, (twentieth that is) her father, Shri Hemanta Basu, joined His Majesty’s Service in the Post and Telegraph Department. He traveled through the districts of the Raj as a postal inspector. He began his family life in Dhubri, a picturesque ‘tea estate’ town nestled among the beautiful rolling hills of eastern Assam. There were no schools in Dhubri, so my mother received home instructions. As a child, she was fond of her garden and spent most of her time there. It was said, flowers blossomed in her care if she merely called out their names. Her formal name, Usha, faded away and she became known as Aikon, ‘little wondrous girl’ in an Assamese tribal dialect. A doe came to live in the garden and stayed on as her companion. The free roaming doe waited every morning to be hand fed by Aikon with the fruits she picked.

Coming to Calcutta in the early thirties, was a rude shock to my mother. My grandfather was appointed as the postmaster of Amherst Street Post Office. The modern wonders of the imperial city impressed Hemanta Babu; he was convinced that this urban lifestyle was the call of the future. One morning, quite co-incidentally, he read in the paper that a young man from the Chemistry Department had secured record marks in the MSc examinations of Calcutta University. Hemanta Babu took note; his daughter, Usha was coming of age. There was no time to waste.

Hemanta Babu easily managed the matrimonial negotiations. The promise of a handsome dowry for the groom was the catalyst. What held back his plans temporarily were the observed proprieties. He had to ask the permission of his elder brothers from Barisal in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) before he could make a commitment to the proposed marriage of his daughter. There laid the roadblock. According to the horoscope prepared by Pandit Upendra Shastri in Madaripur, East Bengal, Usha would be an early widow. Pandit Shastri’s words carried weight in wide circles and such predictions could not dismissed, at least not knowingly.

Hemanta Babu’s forward thinking, in conjunction with my paternal grandmother, Kusum Kumari’s modern outlook, won the day. On an auspicious day in the month of Ashaar (monsoon), in the garden of her ancestral home in Barisal, my mother was married to a Bael (Marmelos) tree with full religious rites and customary feasting. In the following gloomy morning, the tree was chopped down and consecrated. The new bride performed the somber rites of a funereal. My mother wore the customary widow’s white for the day.

Late in the afternoon, the heavens let loose. The groom’s party from Calcutta was held back on the other side of the river. With minutes to spare for the lagna (auspicious hour) to expire, the wedding party arrived and my mother, bejeweled and dressed in her wedding finery wed my father.

My parent’s union was purpose driven, each staying in their own separate worlds. My father toiled humbly and diligently at the responsibilities passed on to him by his renowned teacher, Prof. Meghnath Saha. At home, my academically brilliant, college educated aunts tried to introduce my mother to the ways of the city, but she kept her distance. My mother bore my father five children, also laying out a feast every afternoon with various dishes of fish curries and vegetables from her garden. The scent of exotic flowers of her garden wafted through our house every evening.

I must confess that my father’s professional

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success had its advantages. Renowned academicians and Nobel Laureates passing through India would come to our house for dinner. My mother’s dishes more than matched the visitors’ own achievements. What irked my mother quite often was that these great men would get into involved discussions at the table, letting the food on their plates to grow cold. Their absentminded behavior was unacceptable to my mother’s sensibilities, but she bore such insults in her silence. She was equally annoyed when occasionally my father would teach his Ph. D. students at our table, ‘those poor boys from the districts who could otherwise not afford a decent meal.’

If my mother’s academic limitations bothered my father, he did not let it be known. In an attempt to learn spoken English, one of our tenants (who were an up and coming family) asked her to join the Ladies Club at the IndoAmerican Society on Park Street. Encouraged by my father, my mother did join. In short order, she could not bear to crack the books at home and soon lost interest. To amuse my brothers, sister, and I at home, she did hilarious impersonations of how upstart Punjabi, Bihari and South Indians ladies spoke English at their club meetings. The saving grace was the beautifully arranged bouquet of flowers that my mother would present to the American ladies before she said her goodbyes.

My father’s professional success had its disadvantages too. Professor Palit’s Elementary Physical Chemistry, a college textbook, was a roaring success throughout India, bringing in more money than he had anticipated or expected. He felt that the money had to be put to good use somewhere and that became a problem. My father did not have any business acumen or financial interest. Without any further consultation, in a flash of sudden wisdom, he tore down our garden and built a second fourstorey building. Now we had eight flats to our name. He proclaimed, “The city of Calcutta will become so crowded in a few decades, there will not be any land left for people to build houses for themselves. I will give each of my four sons a flat and their wives a flat too.

We did not need the rooster to crow in our garden to wake us in the morning anymore. My father had brought back a radio alarm clock from Japan. Vividth Bharati filled the airwaves. The chirping sparrows found new homes elsewhere. The splash of colors of the parrots that came to feed on our plot of maize became a memory in black and white. All his children went abroad and my father’s cherished flats remained empty.

Following his retirement from the academics in Calcutta, my father accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Science and Technology at Kumasi, in Ghana, West Africa. The climate and terrain suited both my parents. They received a sprawling colonial bungalow situated on several acres of land. A rural, multigenerational, extended family from Cote d’Ivoire was appointed as the caretaker of the bungalow in a package deal. My mother was in her elements again. Here, in equatorial West Africa, she found the Eden of her childhood.

My father spent his days in quiet study at the university. His position at the university was mostly honorary and there was no academic pressure. The caretaker family and my mother had an instant appreciation of each other’s needs. After all these years, Aikon had re-connected with the peasants she had known in her paternal and ancestral lands. The garden blossomed. My father ate well. The caretakers too felt well placed.

The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology was the educational and cultural bastion of West Africa. Here too, the government of Ghana brought in foreign scholars of note. The intrusion into my mother’s life was minimal and by this time she had become

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more tolerant. At a faculty party on campus one evening, my father saw from across the hall, my mother regaling a group of European women with an animated story. Shocked at seeing this sudden change in my mother’s personality, my father came in for a closer look, one slow step at a time. Much to his astonishment, my mother was chatting away with the ladies in fluent French.

My father could not get over the surprise at his discovery of my mother’s ability to speak French. On the way back home in the car, he broached the subject as tactfully as he could. He asked her, “Would you like to invite your friends (faculty spouses) to our bungalow? They will love your African recipes. It will be something new to them.”

My mother threw him an equally surprised look. “Why will it be something new to them? They too have been in Africa for a long time,” she responded.

“How do you know? Did they tell you,” my father asked.

“Didn’t you hear them? They speak the native language here.”

My father told me later, that was the very moment that he began to ponder the limitations of the academic method. He began to recognize that there were people who had unusual ways of learning. Books were not the know-it and learn-it-all as he had accepted all his life. My mother had learned and spoke Creole French, only because no one had intimated her into a formal education. My mother had learnt to speak French from her caretaker family just as a child learns to communicate while growing up.

I rarely saw my parents after their stay in Africa. My parents came for a brief visit to the US and met my (then) wife Helen. We enjoyed two wonderful weeks together in New Haven, Connecticut. Within a fortnight of his return to Calcutta, my father suffered a cardiac arrest and passed away. I got caught up with my professional life at CBS television in New York and stayed away from the rambling house my father had envisioned as the home for his laughing grandchildren. My mother’s health started to fail, and she did the best she could, raising hibiscus on a flowerbed in the balcony.

I needed to say my goodbyes to the past and at one point returned to the ancestral home. One evening, my mother played an adaptation of an exquisite Nocturne by Chopin on the piano. As she played, to my great surprise, she also hummed along in Bangla, “I found refuge in your shade; I found in freedom your open arms.”

I was touched. My mother had been my music teacher in my youth, but I did not know she could write songs too. Many questions about my own life were beginning to fall into place as I discovered who she was. Intrigued by her literary abilities, I asked her, “Did you sing to Baba (my father)?”

Ma was taken aback. She nodded her head, saying, “No.…he was too busy” and her eyes became moist.

I was sorry that I had asked her about such a pointed and sad inequity in her life. She had customarily remained in the shadow of an illustrious man, her husband, my father. I wished I could take back my unkind words, but it was too late. She turned away from me and picked up where she had left off on the Nocturne. “It was not his fault,” she said softly, “after all, it was I who was in love with the tree.” (Onar dosh ki bol; ami tho sai gachta monay doray chhilam.)

Theirs was another world, another time, and another love.

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