by Amitav Ghosh
I’ve got to go now, for a bit, she said, her voice light with relief. I’m going up to have a chat with Nick; he’s very upset.
I felt the warmth of her body over mine as she leant to kiss me on my chin.
Go to sleep, she said. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.
A moment later I heard her tiptoeing softly up the staircase.
I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, and as the hours passed I saw Ila again and again as she was when she stepped out of that car at Gole Park, eighteen years ago; on that morning when she wrenched me into adulthood by demonstrating for the first time, and for ever the inequality of our needs. And when she did not come back to the cellar that night, I knew she had taken my life hostage yet again; I knew that a part of my life as a human being had ceased; that I no longer existed, but as a chronicle.
Coming Home
In 1962, the year I turned ten, my grandmother retired, upon reaching the age of sixty. She had taught in a girls’ high school since 1936. When she’d first joined, the school had had only fifty pupils and the premises had consisted of two sheds with tin roofs. During the monsoons she had often had to teach standing in ankle-deep water – once, or so she claimed, it had been so bad that a girl had actually managed to spear a fish with a compass during a geometry lesson. But over the next two decades the school had grown into a successful institution and had acquired a big building near Deshapriya Park. For the last six years before she retired, my grandmother had been its headmistress.
She had been looking forward to her retirement although she’d grown very attached to the school in the twenty-seven years she had spent there. But she no longer had the stomach for staff-room intrigues and battles with the board, she would tell my parents; she was growing old, she had earned her rest. And besides, my father’s career was going well, so she had no real worries left.
There was a farewell ceremony on her last day at school, to which my parents and I were invited. It was a touching ceremony in a solemn kind of way. The Calcutta Corporation sent a representative and so did the Congress and the CPI. There were many speeches and my grandmother was garlanded by a girl from every class. Then the head girl, a particular favourite of hers, unveiled the farewell present the girls had bought for her by subscription. It was a large marble model of the Taj Mahal; it had a bulb inside and could be lit up like a table lamp. My grandmother made a speech too, but she couldn’t finish it properly, for she began to cry before she got to the end of it and had to stop to wipe away her tears. I turned away when she began dabbing at her eyes with a huge green handkerchief, and discovered, to my surprise, that many of the girls sitting around me were wiping their eyes too. I was very jealous, I remember. I had always taken it for granted that it was my own special right to love her; I did not know how to cope with the discovery that my right had been infringed by a whole school.
Later we were served a meal in the staff room. The teachers had decided to give her a surprise.
When she was headmistress my grandmother had decided once that every girl who opted for home science ought to be taught how to cook at least one dish that was a speciality of some part of the country other than her own. It would be a good way, she thought, of teaching them about the diversity and vastness of the country. As a farewell surprise, the home science department had arranged for us to sample the results of my grandmother’s initiative.
After we had been led into the staff room the girls came in, one by one, bearing dishes on trays. My grandmother was delighted; she understood at once what was in store for us. She had taken so keen an interest in this project that she knew each girl’s speciality by heart. There’s Ranjana (or Matangini), she would say, clapping her hands as they entered the room – Ranjana’s doing Kerala, so avyal is what you’ll get. Or: That’s Sunayana, she’s our Tamil for this term, wait till you taste her uppama, you’ll want to be Tamil yourself. But then, in her mounting excitement, she began to make mistakes. There’s a nice Gujarati mutton korma for you, she said, and then, leaping to her feet, she cried: Ah, there’s my dear dahi-bara, you wait and see what a plump and juicy Punjabi she is!
As it happened, the girl who had made the dahi-baras was unusually fat. She burst into tears, dropped her plate of dahi-baras with a loud splash on the Sanskrit teacher’s silk sari and ran out of the room.
We ate the rest of our meal in silence.
That was the only false note, however, and afterwards, since there would not have been room for the Taj Mahal in a taxi, the headmistress lent us one of the school’s buses to go home in. The whole school lined up to wave as we steamed out through the gates. My grandmother waved back, tears streaming down her cheeks.
I remember very well the first day of her retirement. She spent the morning clearing away all the old files and papers that had accumulated in her room over the years. In the evening, we were invited to have a look. It was transformed. The files and papers were gone and the room was bathed in the gentle white glow of the Taj Mahal. She was very happy that night. At dinner, smiling her real smile, warm and impish, not the tight-lipped headmistress’s smile that we had grown accustomed to, she told us funny stories about her early days in the school.
But her happiness did not last very long.
One afternoon, a few days later, I came home from school and found that both she and my mother had locked themselves into their rooms. That night I overheard my mother complaining tearfully to my father that she’d been nagged all day long – about her cooking, her clothes, the way she kept the house. My grandmother had never paid any attention to these matters before.
Soon she began to worry about other things too.
One afternoon my friend Montu and I were walking back together from Gole Park, where the school bus had dropped us, when he stopped dead on the street and pointed up at our flat. Look! he cried, There’s a man with a turban in your grandmother’s room!
Montu was my best friend at that time. He and his family lived in the building next to ours, but our flats were so close we could talk to each other from our respective balconies. His name wasn’t really Montu. It was Mansoor and he was from Lucknow. But he had grown up in Calcutta – his father was a teacher in the Ballygunge Science College – and when they’d moved to Gole Park from Park Circus, someone had shortened his name to Montu. There was very little we did not know about each other’s families. He knew perfectly well that it was quite unprecedented for my grandmother to let any man into her room, let alone a stranger in a turban.
Liar! I said. But when I looked up, I saw he was right: there was an unmistakably turbaned head framed in my grandmother’s window.
I sprinted down the street and up the stairs, jammed my finger into our doorbell and kept it there till my mother opened the door.
Who’s that in Tha’mma’s room? I whispered breathlessly. She raised a finger to her lips and gave me a warning tap on the shoulder, but ignoring her, I ran straight into my grandmother’s room.
She was sitting on a chair in front of the open window with her head wrapped in a wet sari.
Speechless, I withdrew backwards, step by step, and fled to look for my mother.
What’s Tha’mma doing? What’s happened to her head?
My mother made me sit down and explained carefully that my grandmother had started on a course of Ayurvedic treatment and that the doctor had given her various herbal oils, with instructions to keep her head tied up all morning.
But why? I asked. What’s happened to her head?
My mother frowned at me sternly.
Tha’mma thinks she’s going bald, she said.
Then her composure dissolved and she began to laugh. She had to hold a pillow over her face so that my grandmother would not hear her.
I did not go out to our balcony that evening; I didn’t see how I could begin to explain to Montu that my grandmother had tied up her head because she was afraid of going bald.
Fortunately she did not persist with that treatment for very long. Her vanity wa
s not really strong enough to keep her sitting in a chair for hours on end with a wet sari wrapped around her head. And in any case she had a full head of thick silver hair.
Instead she took to visiting her school again. She would leave in the afternoon and come back a couple of hours later, bursting with the horror stories she had heard in the staff room: how the new headmistress was planning to dig up the rose beds she had planted, in order, if you please, to lay down a basketball court; how the wretched woman had insulted poor Mrs So-and-so in a staff council meeting and so on. After a dozen or so of these visits the new headmistress rang my father at his office and told him that if he could not think of some way of keeping his mother away from the school she would instruct the chowkidars not to let her in the next time she came.
I do not know what my father said to her, but she did not go back again till Founder’s Day.
After that, for a few weeks, she spent all her time alone in her room. Once I pushed open her door and saw her sitting by the window staring blankly at her cupped hands. I shut the door quickly. I knew what she had in her hands. Time – great livid gouts of it; I could smell it stinking.
We left her to herself for a while and soon she began to spend more time with us. She would sit with us in the evenings with a book or a half-finished letter on her knees and talk about our relatives or my father’s work or my homework much as she used to before – but even I could tell that she was merely making an effort now; it was plain that she no longer cared.
I was puzzled and worried by the change in her and in my own way I began to make an effort to combat it. I had always resented the tyranny she had exercised over everything to do with my schoolwork, but now, of my own accord, I began to ask her for help with my homework. And on those occasions when I could persuade her to sit with me at my desk as she used to before, I found myself devising small ruses – like spilling ink on my textbooks – to keep her attention from straying. Sometimes my ploys would work and she would jerk herself out of her trance and rap me on my knuckles with the thin edge of a ruler. But then, soon, her mind would wander off again and I would sit doodling in my exercise book while she gazed out of the window. But for all that, her eyes had lost none of their glitter nor her walk its old rhythm or energy.
There’s something stirring in her head, my mother whispered to me one day, watching her with narrowed eyes. I can tell from the look on her face. We have to be careful.
1962 was an exciting year for us. A couple of months after my grandmother retired my father became General Manager of his firm. The appointment was unexpected because there were many older and more experienced executives in the firm. It was a promotion such as he had not dared dream of. But my grandmother, who had always been very quick to tell our relatives about every small sign of success in my father’s career, seemed hardly to notice this unforeseen and spectacular advancement. I heard her making a couple of calls once, but that was all. I remembered clearly how she had spent hours ringing everyone she knew when he’d been promoted from the position of Assistant Manager, Personnel, to Manager, Marketing, and I could not help noticing how brief her calls were this time.
Soon after my father’s promotion we moved to a new house on Southern Avenue, opposite the lake. To me, after our cramped little flat in Gole Park, our new house seemed immense: it seemed to have more space than we could possibly use – rooms upstairs, rooms downstairs, verandas, a garden as well as a roof big enough to play cricket on. Best of all, as far as I was concerned, I still had Montu and my other friends close at hand because our new house was only a few minutes’ walk from Gole Park.
I took it upon myself to introduce my grandmother to the house. I led her around it several times pointing out hidden lofts and unexpected doors and passageways. She made a few approbatory noises, but since they all sounded the same I knew soon enough that she was only pretending to be interested for my sake.
As we settled into our new house, it gradually became evident that the balances within our family had subtly but irrevocably shifted. In our old flat my grandmother had always been careful to maintain a titular control over the running of our household: now she didn’t seem to care any more. It was to my mother that I had to go now when I was hungry and wanted the keys to the cupboard in which the dalmuth was kept, or when I wanted money to buy peanuts at the lake.
My grandmother’s enveloping, placental presence was slowly withdrawing from the rest of the house and concentrating itself within the four walls of her room.
She had the best room in the house. It was very large and its walls were lined with tall shuttered windows. The few bits of furniture she had collected over the years seemed to be adrift in the vast spaces of that room, like leaves in a lake. I still occasionally took my homework to her. Usually when I went into her room, I would find her sitting in an armchair beside an open window – a shrunken, fragile little figure, gazing out across the lake. I would pull up a chair and sit beside her, scratching noisily in my exercise book to attract her attention.
One evening, when she seemed particularly distracted, I threw my exercise book down in frustration and cried: Tha’mma, why do you always stare out of the window like that? Don’t you like this house?
She glanced at me in surprise and patted my shoulder. It’s a nice house, she said, smiling. It’s a nice house for a child, like you.
But then a frown appeared on her forehead and she bit her lip and said: But you know, it’s very different from the house Maya and I grew up in.
How? I asked.
And so, over months of such evenings, she told me about the house she had grown up in – in Dhaka.
It was a very odd house. It had evolved slowly, growing like a honeycomb, with every generation of Boses adding layers and extensions, until it was like a huge, lop-sided step-pyramid, inhabited by so many branches of the family that even the most knowledgeable amongst them had become a little confused about their relationships.
Their own part of the house was quite large, and in my grandmother’s earliest memory it was very crowded. Theirs was a big joint family then, with everyone living and eating together: her grandparents, her parents, she and Mayadebi, her Jethamoshai – her father’s elder brother – and his family, which included three cousins of roughly her own age, as well as a couple of spinster aunts. She remembered her grandfather, although she had only been six when he died: a thin, stern-looking man with a frown etched permanently into his forehead. In his presence everyone, including her father and Jethamoshai, spoke in whispers, with their heads down and their eyes fixed firmly on the floor. But when he left the house for the district courts, where he practised as an advocate, the house would erupt with the noisy games of the five cousins. Every evening the five children would be led by their mothers into his study, where they would each have to recite their alphabets – Bengali first and then English – with their hands held out, palm downwards, and he would rap them on the knuckles with the handle of his umbrella every time they made a mistake. If they cried they were rapped on their shins.
Still, terrifying though he was, he did manage to keep the house together. After he died, Jethamoshai, as the eldest son, tried hard to step into his place, but without success. He was an odd man, Jethamoshai; in some ways he was an oddly lovable man, but in others he was even more frightening than his father. He was thinner, for one, cadaverous in fact, and he had very bright, piercing eyes, set deep in the hollows of his long, gaunt face. But he had odd ‘notions’ – he liked to eat standing up, for instance, because he thought it was better for the digestion: no animal has a better digestive system than the cow, he used to say, and look at them, they eat standing up. He was undeniably eccentric, and the children found it hard to take him altogether seriously. For example, after his father died, he insisted that the children recite the alphabet every evening to him too, while he sat exactly as his father had, with the handle of his umbrella poised over their knuckles. But although he looked every bit as stern as his father, he had an odd trick of blo
wing through his lips, exactly like a tired tonga-horse, when he was listening. So, often, either she or Mayadebi would burst into laughter, half-way through their recitation. This would infuriate him and he would begin to pound out a drum roll of raps on their knuckles, whereupon they would begin to scream their lungs out, and then he would lose his temper altogether and start kicking them in the shins. The children usually enjoyed this production hugely because Jethamoshai wasn’t really strong enough to hurt them, and besides his face became very funny when he was really angry. But of course their mother would be furious: she didn’t understand that he didn’t mean badly – it was just that he had no control over his temper at all. Often, after he had lost his temper, he would secretly buy the children halwa and shandesh as a kind of apology. But their mother didn’t know this, and within a month or so of her father-in-law’s death she was no longer on speaking terms with Jethamoshai and his wife and family.
It did not take long for the quarrels to get worse. The two women began to suspect each other of favouring their own children above the rest, of purloining the best little tid-bits of food for them from the common larder and so on. In the privacy of their rooms they would both berate their husbands, calling them unmanly and incapable of protecting the interests of their own children. Soon the two brothers were quarrelling too. And since they were both lawyers their quarrels took a peculiarly vicious, legalistic form, in which very little was actually said. Instead, they would send each other notes on legal stationery. My grandmother, since she was the elder, would always have to carry these, and she came to dread those missions for she would have to wait beside Jethamoshai’s chair while he read them over and over again until the veins in his forehead began to throb with anger.
Those were terrible days for the children – spent cowering, in the background, listening, while their mothers quarrelled in whispers behind locked doors or lay crying in their bedrooms. When the cousins played now, it had to be in secret so that their parents would not see them together.
