My family and other people

Nowadays the train journey from Chennai (Madras) to Kolkata (Calcutta) along the east coast of India takes about a day. In my childhood (sixties, early seventies), it used to take close to 48 hours by the Madras-Howrah Mail. If we boarded the train late Friday evening, we would spend two whole nights plus most of a day and reach Kolkata only early Sunday evening. That's how far away my mom, dad and I lived from the rest of our extended family. Rarely did anyone visit us. We were the ones that made the long trip to Kolkata every year or two for about a month. To catch the long distance (broad gauge) night train from Madras, we had to leave home after an early lunch (because we lived near Bangalore, now Bengaluru) to take a smaller, metre gauge train from the railway station near our town. Our luggage consisted of two large steel trunks and a holdall (it held sheets, blankets and small pillows and, to live up to its name, any last moment thing that we had forgotten to put in ...

When my mama was 21 years old, he lost his father. When he rushed home from the small college where he had just taken up a post as a lecturer, his littlest brother and sister, three and four years old, ran up to him crying "what will happen to us?" He put his arms around them and said, "I am here". That assurance became a lifelong promise that he upheld with everything he had. When I first knew mama, my mother's eldest brother, those difficult times were in the past. All six of his younger siblings had been educated and settled well in life. Mama himself was left behind, with his old mother, in their portion of the ancient, crumbling joint family home; working odd hours at his job as a newspaper reporter, returning late at night to a cold meal kept covered for him after everyone else had eaten. He never married, never found a more prestigious job, never moved to a nicer house. My mother, who is now old beyond caring about most things, still cannot repress a si...

Nowadays in India, at least in middle class families, arranged marriages begin with an introduction betweeen the families and the prospective bride and groom. Both individuals and their families are more or less on an equal footing. In the old days, the groom's family clearly had the upper hand. They would go to the bride's house to "see" the girl and give her a sort of oral exam to assess her education and household skills. If she claimed to have musical talent, they might ask her to sing. Her mother might proudly show off her needlework and swear, sometimes mendaciously, that the delectable snacks the examiners were biting into were made entirely by the expert hands of the bride-to-be. In even older times, they would ask the girl to walk around to make sure she was not hiding some kind of deformity. But by the time my mimi (the name I called my mother's youngest sister) was ready to be "seen", things had improved to the point that, instead of being reg...

For most people of Bengali descent, Durga pujo is the yearly event that they wait for eagerly. It's four days of sheer magic with new clothes, food, music and theatrical performances and all round fun. People from far away come home if they can. So does the goddess Durga. On the one hand she is the fierce divine mother slaying the evil demon; on the other, she is the married daughter visiting her parents' home with her four children for the four days of the festival. (Durga strikes many different emotional chords in the heart of a Bengali.) So the fifth day is tinged with sadness because Durga is leaving. Some people actually cry as they say goodbye to her. Then they comfort themselves by going off to visit friends, neighbours and senior members of the family, stuffing themselves with goodies, particularly sweets, in each house. That phase can go on for days - there are a lot of people to visit. I didn't get to enjoy Durga pujo until I went to live in Kolkata in sixth grad...