Tales to Tell: Nostalgia

My Grandmother. Circa – At least 35-40 years before I was born.

I have particularly always wondered about women’s clothing in my country, my city before the 70s. Did they only drape a saree? I don’t know. I hear different versions of it.

This specific picture surfaced or rather came to my knowledge at the time of my maternal grandmother’s funeral. Yes, this is my grandmother when she was probably around my age. This was the first and one of the only times she wore a salwar kameez, which she conveniently wore on a trip because “বাড়ীর বউদের শাড়ী পরলে মানায়ে” ( saanskari home makers or women who stay at home look better in sarees) and my maternal uncle clicked this picture on his newly bought camera ( he has always been quite the family photographer and the little of these pictures that exist happened only because of his enthusiasm). She was educated but definitely not as much as she’d like to be. She was married off to my grandfather who was himself a young man newly recruited to our budding banking system.

From the little I have seen (though I am not the most reliable source here because I was born at a time when she was slowly starting to lose her glory to age) and from the stories I have heard from my maternal aunt and my father, she had been the matriarch figure in her days. She didn’t quite have a world outside, but in her home, which she built from scratch, it was her territory. She was the lioness who thought she knew exactly what her children needed and she went with it. But these glorious times are not what I can vouch for. The grandmother I knew, only knew love and compassion.

Being the younger daughter of her youngest child, I have always only just been pampered by her. She was so proud of everything I did. She was proud when I laughed, cried, read a book, fell asleep on my own, anything. She was just proud of me. Of all her granddaughters in fact. When I was young, I used to spend a lot of my vacations with her, most of which were spent just sitting beside her and watching her cook things for me. She made লুচি for breakfast, and there had to be some sweets to go with it. She didn’t much care if I wanted to eat them or not because for her I always looked thinner than the last time. Then she would prepare a delicious meal for lunch. And within hours of having my lunch, she would offer me snacks to munch on or an orange (if it was winter) while we sat on the terrace and she told me stories or asked me questions. Then by the time it was 6 (which is tea-time), she would make a thick strong cup of tea with a frothy creamy layer on top. She would give me 6 biscuits because anything less is nothing at all and with that she would fry me some puff rice or some tell my uncle to get me some snacks from local stalls. Of course all my protests were but in vain and I knew I had to abide by her rules. At around dinner time, she would serve me everything and it was the only time that I wasn’t forced to overeat.

Then she would slowly go upstairs and bathe, even in winter and apply a thick layer of cream or powder depending on the weather and come and lie beside me. After which started my story time. She would tell me one fairy tale after the other. It started with নীল কমল লাল কমল, দুয়ো রানী দুয়ো রানী, and every other দৈত্য দানব tale from ঠাকুমার ঝুলি, very conveniently fitting into the marginal role which life had offered her and she accepted without protests or regrets as did most women her time.

I remember she’d slowly drift into sleep mid story and mostly, I avoided waking her up. I would either count backwards from 500 or make stories in my head moving to sleep to finally realise it is 9 a.m.

I would even sit with her in her ঠাকুর ঘর (altar) while she cleaned and decorated for hours before she finally gave her offerings and prayed. She did everything with a certain poise, with a satisfaction that I can never quite understand. It was as if, this was the best that could have happened to her. She was so satisfied in her chores, in washing, in cleaning, in cooking, in bearing and rearing, in loving, in giving. She never regretted not knowing more, not having studied more. She never expressed any grievances in not having friends, in not having a life outside. She never complained, probably hardly demanded. She was fierce in her own space. She was practical and mature in the decisions she made regarding her home. She was strict with her house help and made sure she got the job done. But she wasn’t ambitious about anything. She didn’t want a lot more than she already had. She always prayed for everybody but herself. All she wanted was good health.

But I cannot look back without wondering why this woman, who had seemingly everything anybody needs, settle. Just simply settle. Was it all her choice? Definitely not. How many women knew the word choice back then? Was it all just conditioning? Maybe. She saw her mother and probably the mother before her so seamlessly fit into these roles, she didn’t know better. Couldn’t do better.

My maternal aunt often tells me, her mother was perfect except she never taught them how to look after themselves; only how to look after others. She taught them sacrifice, sacrifice that could even cost you your dreams because dreams were meant for the males, what can women want apart from a healthy, fertile, fit life with the capacity of looking after her family? I don’t blame her, in fact I look up to her in awe of the person she was, the kindness she exuded, the love she never refused to give.

But she breaks my heart- it breaks my heart to think how she and so many women her age and time and even today go on doing what they are meant to do and not what they want to do. How even today I joke about marriage being a viable option to live my life. No, there is nothing wrong in being married, being a housewife, in wanting kids, in not wanting them, in being anything at all, but the problem is not knowing better. The problem is in how deep rooted it is in our brain. How satisfied we still are with ideas of apparent stability, with the very subtle illusion what we call choice. But is there any really? Yet? I often wonder…

Tales to Tell:- | Stuck in Reverse |

As a toddler, my father took immense pride in me learning how to write অ,আ (Bengali alphabets) without anyone having to help me through it. As the legend goes, I apparently, quite easily learnt how to imitate the alphabets straight off my Sohoj Pat.

His pride, however, was to fade very soon.

As soon as I had settled in my pseudo Victorian boarding school, which took (and still takes) immense pride in being one of the oldest establishments (1789) in the business in the country, their Anglican ways began to rub off on me. In the beginning it was quite slow and then it was all at once.

If I have to start at the beginning, the story can be very simply put – with my very little exposure at the age of 7, every other person speaking in Hindi were non-bengalis, every north-eastern was a Chinese, every person using English as their primary mode of communication was a foreigner. In my defence, I was a child and I didn’t yet know geography. As I had entered the premises of my school, I was greeted in English, expected to communicate in English, and in fact told to as it would be next to offensive otherwise. But these are things most people from convents face. However, what is a little different about my experience comes quite literally from having to live in such an atmosphere.

Every time, in every situation, when you happen to be a minority, of any kind, your first instinct is to try and fit in. Our boarding, like I said, with its anglicized culture, housed very few Bengalis at the time. Which automatically resulted in us having to mould our ways even in the slightest. Within the first week of my stay I started making sense in English, by the second week I was eating in English, by the second month I was dressing in as westernised clothes as I could afford, and hell! by my next vacation I was apparently dreaming in English.

Gradually, the girl who was growing up watching and hearing ঠাকুমার ঝুলি & চাঁদের পাহাড় and Ray’s movies on Sunday afternoons on DD বাংলা (of course I didn’t understand them) got over them pretty quickly. If I had been spending sometime in learning my Bengali poems for elocutions and trying to read short stories along with cultivating my English, now I had moved entirely to my Grimm’s fairy tales and slowly on to my Enid Blyton. This change, not very surprisingly but quite automatically made it so much easier for me to fit in. I started relating to Anne from Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter because my condition seemed to align with theirs and I hadn’t found an equivalent in Bengali. I started hearing and learning and even performing (quite terribly to Shakira’s Whenever) English songs. I started learning about Bands and actors absolutely so foreign to me. When I came home for vacations, my father encouraged me to eat with my fork and spoon to keep up the habit and it of course made eating fish increasingly difficult and so I rarely enjoyed my fish any longer ( and this definitely does say something because I had quite a reputation of a cat as child for almost chewing up all the bones effortlessly). I started asking my father to decorate for Christmas and I even said my prayers when I was asked to, like a performance artist in front of my relatives (things you ought toa do as a child).

By the time I was in class 4, I had anglicised quite a bit. I was no longer the butt of all “bangali” jokes but voila! I was making some myself.. Every Saturday, when my father used to visit he used to bring me dinner from home and having remembered my love for fish, he almost always packed some for me. Initially they were everything I waited for. Then I began to feel embarrassed because people constantly associated Bengalis with “machlis” (fishes). At first I tried avoiding taking them for dinner. I used to try and eat my fish in front of my father so that nobody else can see. My father always wondered why and I of course could never explain and then I asked him to stop getting me fish for dinner entirely. I asked him to get me Chow mein, get me chicken, get me anything, buy me dinner even but not fishes. I made up excuses like, I cannot share a piece of fish or two with many people and eating alone is selfish and my father eventually obliged.

At around this time, I met another girl, a Bengali, who happened to be from Bangladesh (we had quite a few people from there. Very loving and beautiful people indeed) She was just about my age. We were in the same class and unlike most of my boarding mates, she was the first one from the boarding to have Bengali with me as her second language. And oh! She was good. She knew her Bangla and with pride and she was brilliant and every living day I wished to be like her. But instead of doing anything noble and supportive, I did the only thing I shouldn’t have done – I made fun of her. Because it made me look cool. And also because, (now when look back in retrospect, I understand this with the little education I have) I wanted to make her give up all that she believed in and her identity and become like me; misplaced and so ridiculously a pawn of a sort of reverse racism or a reverse bangali-ism if you may call it. I am not trying to say anybody victimised me, I may have victimised myself, but of course I didn’t know better. And I wanted nobody to know better.
The more I started to grow up, the more my habits began to settle in. They became more a part of me than I was myself a part of them. I began to literally think, talk, eat in English. Quite effortlessly by then. My lifestyle, by that point, had been influenced quite wholly by what I read and wrote and wore which were all in English and I had no complaints. People often called me ট্যাঁশ (pseudo), or they told me how the Britishers left but they left me behind as some leftover sample and even though now I understand they were quite scathing insults, I didn’t mind any of them then. I still don’t really mind. Because my colonised mind does accept these criticisms to no effect.

I came back home again and I started eating my meals and taking a piece of fish with it again. I began watching some Bengali movies and listening to some songs. I began fleetingly observing and making assumptions regarding the Bengali community. I began enjoying Durga Pujo even though Christmas still remained my favourite time of the year. And even though things did begin to change, I did understand I am stuck in my reverse.

At this point, I have come to accept my misplaced identity. I have come to regret and even wish so many things otherwise. I have come to regret not reading, not learning, not singing, not embracing enough Bangla to be a part of this community. But despite it all, I do know, I don’t really belong here. I don’t truly belong anywhere. I am just a knock off of a supposed Anglican culture and a quite rejected member of the Bengali community. I am no longer the child who used to wait for her sister to read the serialised stories from শুকতারা. I neither am much of the carol singer.

I am stuck somewhere in between, a hybrid, in a space I don’t entirely belong and never will, a half-shared, half-isolated expanse for a lifetime. A mix of the Orient and the Occident. Sometimes I feel like I belong in another time, in another era, in a cross between an English countryside and the Modernism of Paris- myself being just as conflicted as these two modes of living.

But what I truly find comfort in is how I am not alone. How my space is mine and also a shared space with million others. How my identity is not in a language, in Bengali or English but in stories. How I have always and will always find myself in between, always alone in terms of a community and always surrounded in terms of experience. How my isolation isn’t mine alone but it belongs to a certain us instead.

An International Language Day week special, where I try to elucidate my relationship with language. 🙂

Picture: Like the lights fading away, my being knits disarray.