Park bench
My parents lived in hospital quarters or rented houses all their lives. It was only late in life that they accumulated enough money to buy a small flat in a newly developed housing complex in Salt Lake, an up and coming, mostly residential suburb of Kolkata. My mother, with commendable foresight, chose a ground floor flat, although the upper floors were considered more desirable. "I'm not going to be able to climb stairs all my life," she would say, "besides, I have an extra living room just outside my door."
Outside my mother's door was (and is) a raised square patch of grass, not more than 25 ft x 25 ft. The kind hearted designers of the complex had provided this play area for children with two swings, a metal slide and a merry-go-round. The people in the neighbourhood optimistically called it a "park". What turned it into a living room were the four concrete benches placed at the four corners of the square. About four people can sit comfortably side by side on each bench. Alternatively, one person can stretch out horizontally, gazing skywards in the cool evening breeze. (I know this because my dad, who had a tendency to lie down and fall asleep in various places, occasionally laid his immense bulk on the bench right in front of their flat. My cousin Kittu, whose verbal sallies could sometimes be devastatingly accurate, once described my father, thus placed, as a "beached whale".)
This flat was never really my home - my parents moved into it when I was away in college. But I did live there for a couple of years, before I came to the U.S. It was a very low point for me. I was working on a random research project that I wasn't interested in while trying to decide what to do with my life. Many evenings, after the swings and slides had been abandoned by tired out children and the benches by their gossiping moms taking them home to dinner, I would creep out to the park and swing as hard and as high as I could. Other times, I would be sitting on one of those benches chatting with my neighborhood cohort - what differentiated us from the moms was not age (some of them were quite young) but our single status. We were still girls while they were responsible citizens with in-laws, homes, kids. Sometimes it was just fun to sit and marvel at the children and their antics, particularly the toddler Jhimli who lived above us. Her incessant chatter with her grandfather upstairs was the soothing soundtrack to my otherwise dismal life. Once I was coming home, holding a notebook in my hand and Jhimli called out from the swing, "cool? aa-bee-chee-dee?" I remember being struck by the genius of this little being who had deduced that I was coming from school where I had been studying ABCD.
My saddest day in the park was the day I sat on one of those benches with a friend, waiting for her mom to come home from a visit to her grandparents. I was twenty four then, she was only seventeen. She kept looking at the road, expecting her mother to show up any moment, commenting on how late she was. I kept looking at the road too, but not for her mother ...I was waiting with dread for her aunt, who had called us earlier with terrible news and asked us not to say anything. She was coming to tell my friend, in person, that her mother was dead. A week or two after that, the neighbours had a memorial gathering in the park, in the space between the benches and the play equipment. People expressed sorrow, some songs were sung. Then everyone else moved on with their lives; my friend is still grappling with the fallout from the day that upended her life.
Moving on to happier times...often when I call my mother these days, she's sitting on a park bench enjoying the outdoors, sometimes sharing ice cream or Thums up. Her friends are the young mothers that I remember from the 80s; they are mothers-in-law and grandmothers now. Over the years, the casual friendships (that began while they sat side by side on a park bench watching their children play) have firmed up into something much stronger, a sisterly bond that has sustained them through shared celebrations and inevitable challenges. The men, mostly retired now, have their ties of friendship too.The inhabitants of this neighbourhood are no strangers to hardship and loss; they have faced illness and death, job and marital problems, children's struggles and, recently, the pandemic. And yet, discussing politics and gossip over morning coffee; taking turns treating each other to an endless stream of fish fry, ghugni, dosa, chop; organizing picnics and pujas together, they have weathered everything ... all in this charmed space of the 25 ft x 25 ft park and its environs.
Peripheral reference: For Thriving Public Spaces, Just Add Seating
Outside my mother's door was (and is) a raised square patch of grass, not more than 25 ft x 25 ft. The kind hearted designers of the complex had provided this play area for children with two swings, a metal slide and a merry-go-round. The people in the neighbourhood optimistically called it a "park". What turned it into a living room were the four concrete benches placed at the four corners of the square. About four people can sit comfortably side by side on each bench. Alternatively, one person can stretch out horizontally, gazing skywards in the cool evening breeze. (I know this because my dad, who had a tendency to lie down and fall asleep in various places, occasionally laid his immense bulk on the bench right in front of their flat. My cousin Kittu, whose verbal sallies could sometimes be devastatingly accurate, once described my father, thus placed, as a "beached whale".)
This flat was never really my home - my parents moved into it when I was away in college. But I did live there for a couple of years, before I came to the U.S. It was a very low point for me. I was working on a random research project that I wasn't interested in while trying to decide what to do with my life. Many evenings, after the swings and slides had been abandoned by tired out children and the benches by their gossiping moms taking them home to dinner, I would creep out to the park and swing as hard and as high as I could. Other times, I would be sitting on one of those benches chatting with my neighborhood cohort - what differentiated us from the moms was not age (some of them were quite young) but our single status. We were still girls while they were responsible citizens with in-laws, homes, kids. Sometimes it was just fun to sit and marvel at the children and their antics, particularly the toddler Jhimli who lived above us. Her incessant chatter with her grandfather upstairs was the soothing soundtrack to my otherwise dismal life. Once I was coming home, holding a notebook in my hand and Jhimli called out from the swing, "cool? aa-bee-chee-dee?" I remember being struck by the genius of this little being who had deduced that I was coming from school where I had been studying ABCD.
My saddest day in the park was the day I sat on one of those benches with a friend, waiting for her mom to come home from a visit to her grandparents. I was twenty four then, she was only seventeen. She kept looking at the road, expecting her mother to show up any moment, commenting on how late she was. I kept looking at the road too, but not for her mother ...I was waiting with dread for her aunt, who had called us earlier with terrible news and asked us not to say anything. She was coming to tell my friend, in person, that her mother was dead. A week or two after that, the neighbours had a memorial gathering in the park, in the space between the benches and the play equipment. People expressed sorrow, some songs were sung. Then everyone else moved on with their lives; my friend is still grappling with the fallout from the day that upended her life.
Moving on to happier times...often when I call my mother these days, she's sitting on a park bench enjoying the outdoors, sometimes sharing ice cream or Thums up. Her friends are the young mothers that I remember from the 80s; they are mothers-in-law and grandmothers now. Over the years, the casual friendships (that began while they sat side by side on a park bench watching their children play) have firmed up into something much stronger, a sisterly bond that has sustained them through shared celebrations and inevitable challenges. The men, mostly retired now, have their ties of friendship too.The inhabitants of this neighbourhood are no strangers to hardship and loss; they have faced illness and death, job and marital problems, children's struggles and, recently, the pandemic. And yet, discussing politics and gossip over morning coffee; taking turns treating each other to an endless stream of fish fry, ghugni, dosa, chop; organizing picnics and pujas together, they have weathered everything ... all in this charmed space of the 25 ft x 25 ft park and its environs.
Peripheral reference: For Thriving Public Spaces, Just Add Seating
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