The earthy taste of hot tea from a kulhar[1] made my sweaty back tingle with excitement. I was home, in Kolkata, after seven years. The shopkeeper handed me the change.
‘I gave ten,’ I said.
‘Yes, I gave back your five,’ the vendor didi said and narrowed her eyes.
Tea for five rupees, ah!
A high-pitched staccato called out from the street behind, hawking kitchenware. Streets dotted with Durga puja pandals were in various stages of being undone. A few feet away, my mother’s rounded frame bent over a fruit cart, busy trying out little slices of muskmelons and apples before buying them for my diabetic grandmother. We were going to see my maternal grandmother, who now lived in the suburbs at the other end. I was enchanted by the long ride on the newly built metro line. Guilt crept up on me at the sight of mounds of garbage and barefoot children begging outside the swanky station. My long absence from the city had stripped me of some of the thick-skinned everyday indifference.
Breathe! You’re going to see Dida.
A short cycle rickshaw ride later, we set foot into the building. My first time in the tiny rented flat which was unilluminated even in the middle of an autumn afternoon. The spartan look of the living room with four plastic chairs and a dining table was bizarrely accentuated by the plastic cover that draped the table. It was an attempt to save the surface from the messy meals of its primary diner; something I discovered later that day. The only interesting thing I could find was a large window with grills in her bedroom, which opened up to a street filled with the din of suburban Kolkata.
When I entered my grandmother’s room, she was perched on her old bed, her already curved spine bent forward in attention. She looked smaller than how I remembered her from my last visit seven years ago, at her home in Hashinagar, which was an hour away from Kolkata. The still rosy skin around the defined lines on her face looked a bit shrivelled. Her sparse, white hair was tied in a pitiful bun at the nape of her neck, right above her shapeless, brown nightdress. She looked odd without her many gold bangles and the graceful Bengali-style unpleated drape of a Taant[2] saree. How old was she? After a certain age, I must have stopped counting.
She did not notice my presence immediately, and I savoured those seconds to observe her. Her eyes glinted as she watched a National Geographic documentary about the Serengeti Forest. A satisfactory grin worthy of a medal winner’s coach spread across her face as a lion pounced on a bison on the screen. She still had the same taste for violence in the animal world. It was reassuring.
The day nurse and my mother jostled into the room, breaking my grandmother’s reverie. She beamed with an ear-to-ear smile. Then she asked me all the important questions.
‘For how long are you visiting Kolkata?’
‘How are work and life?’
‘Aren’t you eating well? Why do you look so thin?’
She placed her misshapen fingers under my chin and held my face up.
‘What happened to your complexion?’ she gnarled.
Uff! Her obsession with skin colour!
‘I was on a beach vacation, Dida. Besides, no one cares about complexion these days.’ I rolled my eyes, wishing the billboards with fairness cream advertisements strewn across the city did not exist.
‘See what I got you,’ I said, pulling a bottle of emollient body lotion and a cream-coloured Taant saree with a purple border out of my sling bag.
‘How beautiful! I wish I had somewhere to go,’ she mumbled almost to herself as she caressed the border, appreciating its weave. She motioned towards me to place the bottle of body lotion on the tray that held her other essentials.
My mother and the day nurse were whispering in the kitchen, which hardly had any shelves or supplies. Something about the food not being sent that day from my uncle’s flat across the street as my mother was visiting. The clinking of utensils was accompanied by the aroma of my mother’s Hilsa fish paturi[3]. My mother was unboxing the special dishes she had cooked and brought for all of us. Seizing the opportunity of being alone with me, my grandmother popped the question.
‘Was the divorce hard? Are you okay?’
I gaped at her. ‘Yes, I’m f…fine,’ I stuttered.
‘Don’t worry, things will pan out well for you. I never liked that husband of yours. So dark! And hardly ever spoke to us.’
‘Did Ma tell you?’
‘No, your aunt did, last week. Your mother doesn’t know that I know.’
My grandmother shook her head, invalidating my mother’s apprehension about how the octogenarian would react to the devastating event of my life. I suppressed a smile and was tempted to ask her about the carrom board stories from her childhood in Bangladesh that I had heard innumerable times while growing up. They revolved around her teenage friends and a particular boy, the mention of whom always brought a bashful smile to her face. My grandmother had a bag full of stories and none of them ended the same way. She was a master of improvisation.
She gestured towards me to hand over the tub of thick moisturizer and dotted her face with a dollop of the cream. Her freckled, sinewy hands moved in practised motions along her lined temples, up across her cheeks, and down to her neck. Her movements were as sure as that of brushing one’s teeth.
The bedroom smelled of medicines, disinfectant, and traces of her face cream. A tray filled with her essentials and medicines sat by the TV on the tall armoire that once adorned her house in Hashinagar. Next to the tray, two rickety photo frames stood stubbornly clutching the past in their folds. One of the photos was from her thirties, with four children; two boys and two younger girls. The image of a slim, good-natured woman with full lips standing next to a tall, moustached man and their children was hard to miss when one entered the room. The other one was with all her four children and seven grandchildren, on the terrace of her house in Hashinagar. In the background, a thick canvas of coconut trees gave the photograph a vacation-like feel. The photo was taken eight years ago. That was before the house and the attached coconut groves were sold off in a hurry at a throwaway price.
As a child, I knew the coconut groves like the back of my hand. There was the corner where the bunnies dug their holes, the patch to its right where anthills came up fastest, and the long end where I played hide and seek with my cousins when the apricot sun slanted in the evening. The house was another story; it had living parts and forbidden parts. My grandparents were its only inhabitants for most of the year. The living parts held four-poster beds with ornate carvings, red cement floors, and glass jars full of grandmother’s delectable coconut-jaggery sweet treats. It housed endless stories under star-filled skies on hot summer nights with power cuts.
My mother and her sister hauled us, the children, to the house every summer to take their yearly break from full-time homemaking. The sisters would lie on my grandmother’s four-poster bed, their limbs outstretched, and chat with an abandon unseen when their husbands were around. My grandmother would pop in and out of the room between cooking speciality fish dishes and instructing her cook of twenty years to cook the vegetarian ones. We ran wild without a care in the world, disappearing in and out of the turns and taverns of the house.
At night, everyone would sleep in our grandparent’s room, some on the four-poster bed and some on mattresses on the floor. I often fought with my cousins about who got to sleep on one side of our grandmother, as her other side would be occupied by her daughters. In those days, she smelled of sandalwood soap and fish curry. I often got lost in the maze of her stories set in Bangladesh and was in love with her quaint words and Dhaka accent. I would eavesdrop on the hushed gossip the women exchanged only in the late hours of the night, assuming that the children were asleep. This was my other motivation to sleep beside my grandmother.
The forbidden parts of the house had rooms filled with dust and old ghost stories that made them formidable to enter even during the daytime. I waited every week to accompany my grandmother and her helper during their weekly cleaning routine. The air in those rooms was stuffy. Water seepage marks clung to the ceiling. I imagined the domineering matriarch who had once presided over the family, hovering around us. I relished the horror and sense of discovery I felt every time I touched the beds, the rocking chairs, and the colonial-era marble statues that occupied those rooms.
My grandmother was the mistress of that house, both living and forbidden. I traced the picture of my grandmother with her big family on the terrace and groves with my fingers. I hesitated to bring up the house with her. It had moved to the unmentionable pot, just like the sudden death of my mother’s elder sister, a decade ago.
So, I picked up her glasses that she had put down on the bed while massaging her face and held it up against the light. The frame was cracked at the right temple and shabbily held together with rubber bands.
‘Why don’t you get this fixed?’ I asked.
She looked away, pretending not to have heard me.
My mother was calling us from the kitchen. The aroma of many spicy dishes drowned the smell of medicines in my grandmother’s room.
‘Come Dida, let’s go and eat. Ma has prepared your birthday meal in advance,’ I said, as I extended my hand to lead her to the living room. Her eyes sparkled with innocence as her thick fingernails dug into my hand. I seated her at the narrow end of the six-seater dining table, a position she has been used to all her life. My mother had already laid out her centre plate with rice, saag[4], and fried brinjal. Five small bowls huddled around the plate holding her favourite dishes.
‘Get me the bottle of mustard sauce,’ she ordered the nurse.
‘We ran out last week, remember? Dada hasn’t bought another one,’ the nurse grumbled, referring to my youngest uncle’s negligence.
My grandmother looked helplessly at the saag, trying to imagine how it would taste without the mustard sauce. Her face slowly lightened as she dug her shaky fingers into the small bowls, savouring each dish with little portions of rice. Her appetite at that age was laudable. The familiar clinking of her many gold bangles when she ate in her yesteryears, was replaced by the sudden thud of bowls when her frail hands put them down.
By the time she feasted on the Hilsa fish paturi, she somewhat resembled her older self. ‘Looks like you soaked the mustard seeds and poppy seeds long enough before mashing and wrapping them in banana leaf. It tastes good,’ she commented.
After lunch, I went to use the toilet. Cobwebs sat comfortably in its cramped corners. My elbows bumped against the walls when I tried to move. Patches of plaster peeled off from the impact. My temples throbbed and not just from the stench that whiffed from the toilet. I dashed out and pulled my mother aside.
‘Why does she live here? Couldn’t they find a better place?’
My mother frowned. ‘They say this is all they could afford. Old age has its expenses.”
Shame made its way with its pinpricks on my cheeks. I had done nothing more than make a few phone calls to my grandmother over the last few years. Swept up in the drama of my life, I didn’t smell the distress that I could have helped alleviate.
‘Dida looks strange without jewellery,’ I commented.
‘Your aunts coaxed her to loan some of her bangles and necklaces to wear to a wedding. That was six months ago. They never returned the jewellery. Since then, Dida has kept the rest with me, along with a handwritten letter on who would get what when she is gone.’ My mother’s stoic resignation was surprising. She was probably the only one grandmother trusted.
My grandfather, who was a decade older than my grandmother, passed away six years ago. My grandmother had no reaction to the death for the first three days. Then the convulsions started. It seemed that my grandmother had sworn to never get up from the bed. Depression, the doctors said. Three months later when she was ready to re-join the world, everyone decided it would be better for her to move close to her youngest son in the suburbs of Kolkata. I was away in another country, busy fighting a legal battle for my divorce at the time. My mother gave me a ‘you’re absurd’ look over a video call when I asked her if she wanted my grandmother to move in with her. In my mother’s side of the family, till her generation, daughters were like ether. They might permeate spaces but were rarely a part of the transactions of the world.
My grandmother moved into my youngest uncle’s household, the one across the street. I had heard she and my uncle were happy with the living arrangement. They probably were. The certitude of my grandfather’s death and the nobility of dutiful benevolence were reasons enough to be convinced of the appropriateness of the decision. Righteousness is a drug that my uncle must have loved. They hastily sold the house at half of the market price, to the first buyer who came asking.
I dug further and my mother revealed the details of what had unfurled since the move. Trouble started a few months later. My grandmother needed attention at all kinds of hours.
‘I have fallen in the bathroom.’
‘My clothes got soiled, I can’t always hold.’
‘My head is swimming.’
The degeneration had started. A caretaker was hired. Doctor visits, hospital stays, a cupboard full of additional medicines, and physiotherapy inundated the days. To reduce the interruptions in my uncle’s family, they rented a flat across the street. The bills heaped. The sorry excuse called insurance covered only a minuscule of it. The little fortune from the sale of the house slipped away through their fingers like sand. Arguments broke out between the two brothers over the expenses. The benevolent indulgences of her youngest son chipped away at the hackneyed realities of everyday life.
Every fortnight, my grandmother waited for her daughter’s overnight visit, to bemoan the details of her sordid existence to her only confidante. At night she talked, complained, and lamented about the daily injustices she battled till she fell asleep.
‘No fish for lunch last Friday.’
‘They didn’t replace my medicines on time.’
‘Your brother’s wife was complaining about the high doctor fees.’
The daughter did what she thought she could do. She listened and mothered.
The next day I bade goodbye to my grandmother and headed back to the comfort of my home in Bangalore. The peace of my clandestine household with my boyfriend helped me bear the unsavoury details of my grandmother’s living quarters a little better. I found myself caught up with work, surviving on coffee, and living from weekend to weekend. My thoughts often hovered around her, coming to different solutions. The obvious route was easy, and deep down I knew I had to take it. In a month’s time, I told myself, when I call my uncle on his birthday. Yet, I liked to imagine scenarios of a utopian world. When nostalgia got the better of me, I fantasized about bringing her to my home to live with my boyfriend and me. I was aware of how ludicrous the plan would sound to my family but it did not prevent me from replaying it in my head. Perhaps for the sheer thrill of its outlandishness.
Three Sundays later, my mother called before my first cup of morning coffee. It was never a good sign. The ordeal was over. It was her third heart attack.
‘The nurse said your uncle visited with his family last evening. She had urged them to come. They fought over something and he said no one would take care of her if not for them. She could as well live under a tree. She kept banging her head on the bed’s headrest after they left, blabbering incoherent syllables. My mother paused to sob. Then she proceeded to speak of the last time she met my grandmother, her last meal, her last words. I hoped that through the telling and retelling of every detail of my grandmother’s lasts, she would come to terms with reality. The predictable end, yet the indignity of it triggered a thunderclap of pain up the back of my head. My innards felt empty as the waves of grief crashed through my body. I felt like hurling my black coffee mug across the table.
It can’t be reversed. She had a long, fulfilling life, for the most part.
How long is too long? How close is too close?
Anxiety and grief gripped my mind for weeks. They routinely hounded me when I woke up in the middle of the night and chased sleep away. I paced around on the running tracks around my apartment, tired and bleary-eyed. Counting the years of all my grandparents’ lives, I ran the probabilities of me and my mother living to see a century. I couldn’t decide how I felt about the constant advances in medical science and the increasing life expectancy of our race. The future mortified me.
When my bank’s relationship manager called, I took his offer to plan my finances. Sleep-deprived and groggy, I sat in his office cabin on a Saturday morning. The room was eerily quiet despite his well-rehearsed pitch in a country song baritone. The oscillating shadow on the whiteboard opposite the shaded window distracted me. It looked like my grandmother’s, banging her head on the wall.
The relationship manager moved methodically, illuminating my scarcely informed mind with investment strategies and savings plans to set up a perpetual fund. One that could sustain me throughout my life after I stopped working. He did not ask for my opinion when he assumed a husband and two children in my future. I told him of my ambition for early retirement to find my ikigai[5], my purpose in life; that is what I told people. I had reached a contradictory crossroads. The guy worked out some complex math on his laptop and slowly unfolded the plan, punctuated with appropriate pauses to etch its details into my brain.
Mutual funds, government bonds, index funds, fixed deposits, insurance.
My grandmother’s shadow flung itself from side to side.
Not enough! Not enough! Not enough!
I listened to my options while my mind jumped between the shadow on the wall and his deep voice. An hour later he was done going through my portfolio. The sceptic in me was restless to get a second opinion.
‘So, madam, if you plan this way and keep working till forty-eight, you can plan for another fund. Maybe buy a small flat to rent out?’
I thought of my mother. The shadow on the wall stood still. The void of the cabin crept into my extremities.
***
[1] Kulhar – A disposable earthen cup to serve tea and coffee (mostly in the Indian Sub-continent)
[2] Taant – A specialty cotton weave of Bengal which renders the fabric light and transparent.
[3] Hilsa fish paturi- An aromatic dish in which Hilsa fish is coated with mustard seed and poppy seed paste
[4] Saag – Cooked greens like spinach, mustard leaves
[5] Ikigai- One’s personal meaning of life in relation to one’s passion, talent, profession and one’s ability to contribute to the world.
