Santiniketan
I thought of it as the place where the air smelled different. Santiniketan, where my paternal grandfather built a house after retiring, was my only green childhood place. Kolkata was a crowded city. Kolar, my small town southern birthplace, had wide open spaces, vast silences and low hills visible on the horizon from every location; but it was relatively dusty and barren (like R.K. Narayan's Malgudi - in fact it's in the same geographical area on India's Deccan plateau). Santiniketan was the only place where I spent time in friendly proximity to trees, flowers, leaf-scents and bird-sounds. You could run around bare feet all day and your feet would never turn black, only red, the colour of the local soil.
I had this mental game that I played on the way there. I would have an imaginary friend traveling with me. When we alighted from the train at Bolpur station, my friend would look around with dismay at the crowded town and say "this is Santiniketan?" I would say "just wait...". The rickshaw would slowly leave behind the narrow lanes with the tea shops and hardware stores and, just as hubbub of the marketplace faded and the air began to smell of earth and leaves, I would turn to my friend with a triumphant smile.
In my mamar badi I was usually an only child, cousins rarely visited at the same time. Santiniketan, on the other hand, was a summer destination for most of my paternal cousins. At least four of my grandparents' seven children and their families would be visiting at any one time (there had been nine, but one died in his youth and a daughter had been disowned). For a few weeks, I would be part of an extended family that seemingly cooked and ate all day. First, the children ate breakfast, then the men, followed by the women. By then it was almost time for the children's lunch...and there were four meals a day. With so many adults in one place, there must have been family politics and friction, but I was blissfully unaware of all that. As far as I was concerned, I had multiple dads and moms and lapped up the attention. Once, when I was two or three, my parents left me there and went somewhere for a couple of days. The story goes that, as soon as they left, I put my arms around one of my aunts and said to her son "from today, your mom is also my mom" and never once mentioned my mother the whole time.
The house sat in the middle of the plot with a flower garden in the front and fruit trees behind. All of it was encircled by a hedge of pinwheel / crepe jasmine (togor). Among the flowering trees, there were bokul (tiny and fragrant), white-yellow kath chapa, karabi and many others. By the kitchen there were banana plants and in the back all the traditional summer fruit trees, mangoes (with flat branches good for sitting and reading or eating a fresh mango picked from the tree), jackfruit (laden from top to bottom with the large, spiky fruit), kalo jam (a single tree that bore so much of the tart, tongue-purpling fruit that even after giving away bags of it and eating it for snack every evening, we had a bounty left over). And of course there was gondhoraj lebu! Just like boroline is the signature aroma of my mamar badi, for my paternal grandparents' house it's the gondhoraj lebu, squeezed on some daal and bhat for lunch .. aah, the scent of comfort, lazy afternoons, childhood summers.
An open veranda, bordered by a flat-topped concrete bench ran the whole length of the house. First thing in the morning I would be out sitting on one end of that bench, pristine notebook or a new book to read in hand, feeling the sunshine on my arms and cool concrete under my legs, watching ants crawl along the cracks and savoring the feeling of a whole vacation, full of possibility, lying ahead. The only sounds would come from a buzzing bee, a chirping bird or a squeaking rickshaw horn in the distance. Late evenings would find me stretched out on another part of this same bench, gazing up at the stars and down below at the tall shadowy trees, not a leaf stirring in the warm air heavy with a mingling of floral fragrances. The soft voices of visitors or my aunts talking on another part of the veranda would float across on the occasional breeze.
Eating and sitting around weren't the only things we did, although, in our childhood before TV, it was okay to just be. One didn't have to get permission to just exist in the present moment by giving it a fancy name like "mindfulness". My single, school teacher aunt made sure we got some lessons done every evening. Sometimes we would pull out the few tattered board games in the house. We would go visiting (usually bearing fruit from our garden and coming back with other fruit from the visited person's garden). Just before lunch there would be a scramble to get everyone showered. Two people would use the bathrooms in the house, two kids would go out to the taps, used for watering flowers, in the front garden and a couple of people would go to the well in the back. There was an open-top bathroom right next to the well; you could also just stand next to the well, soap yourself and pour water from the bucket straight from the well.
As the only girl among the kids, I sometimes got teased by the boys. But things got a lot better when I took my mother's advice to heart - "the more you react, the more fun they'll have teasing you, act like you don't care." In general we were good friends, although arguments and rivalries did crop up at points. One year, a cousin and I got invited to the birthday of the little girl next door. My dad took us both to the store to pick out presents. The store offered gift wrapping. Unfortunately, they wrapped both gifts together. So now we had to decide who was going to carry the gift and hand it over to the birthday girl. My grandfather had an idea, "why don't you make a garland of flowers, then one of you can take the garland and put it around her neck and the other one can give her the gift." My cousin was very enthusiastic about the idea, he wanted to take the garland. But that created another problem. Putting a garland around someone's neck, especially of the opposite gender, is symbolic of marriage and my grandfather would not have it. My cousin was finally convinced that the gift was more important and the party went off peacefully. The next day my grandfather asked us to write essays about the birthday party (it was a standard adjunct to any new experience - write an essay about it). I wrote all about how my cousin had made a fuss about the gift and garland. He wrote that I had needed my mom's help to make a card while he had made his all by himself.
Eventually, we stopped going to Santiniketan. We didn't plan to stop - it just happened. One of my last memories of going to that house as a child was when no one lived there anymore. My grandfather had passed away and my grandmother was too old to live there by herself. There was something that needed to be done, so my mom and I and another aunt and her son took the train there. For me the trip is marked by the memory of how free the mothers were. With no husbands to boss them or needing to be looked after, no in-laws potentially casting critical eyes on them, they were like young girls - they laughed loudly, talked nineteen to dozen, ate a fallen and cracked open jackfruit right where it lay, cooked nothing but dal and rice for dinner. Every time I hear about women's liberation, the image that arises in my mind is of my two joyous mothers on that trip to Santiniketan.
I had this mental game that I played on the way there. I would have an imaginary friend traveling with me. When we alighted from the train at Bolpur station, my friend would look around with dismay at the crowded town and say "this is Santiniketan?" I would say "just wait...". The rickshaw would slowly leave behind the narrow lanes with the tea shops and hardware stores and, just as hubbub of the marketplace faded and the air began to smell of earth and leaves, I would turn to my friend with a triumphant smile.
In my mamar badi I was usually an only child, cousins rarely visited at the same time. Santiniketan, on the other hand, was a summer destination for most of my paternal cousins. At least four of my grandparents' seven children and their families would be visiting at any one time (there had been nine, but one died in his youth and a daughter had been disowned). For a few weeks, I would be part of an extended family that seemingly cooked and ate all day. First, the children ate breakfast, then the men, followed by the women. By then it was almost time for the children's lunch...and there were four meals a day. With so many adults in one place, there must have been family politics and friction, but I was blissfully unaware of all that. As far as I was concerned, I had multiple dads and moms and lapped up the attention. Once, when I was two or three, my parents left me there and went somewhere for a couple of days. The story goes that, as soon as they left, I put my arms around one of my aunts and said to her son "from today, your mom is also my mom" and never once mentioned my mother the whole time.
The house sat in the middle of the plot with a flower garden in the front and fruit trees behind. All of it was encircled by a hedge of pinwheel / crepe jasmine (togor). Among the flowering trees, there were bokul (tiny and fragrant), white-yellow kath chapa, karabi and many others. By the kitchen there were banana plants and in the back all the traditional summer fruit trees, mangoes (with flat branches good for sitting and reading or eating a fresh mango picked from the tree), jackfruit (laden from top to bottom with the large, spiky fruit), kalo jam (a single tree that bore so much of the tart, tongue-purpling fruit that even after giving away bags of it and eating it for snack every evening, we had a bounty left over). And of course there was gondhoraj lebu! Just like boroline is the signature aroma of my mamar badi, for my paternal grandparents' house it's the gondhoraj lebu, squeezed on some daal and bhat for lunch .. aah, the scent of comfort, lazy afternoons, childhood summers.
An open veranda, bordered by a flat-topped concrete bench ran the whole length of the house. First thing in the morning I would be out sitting on one end of that bench, pristine notebook or a new book to read in hand, feeling the sunshine on my arms and cool concrete under my legs, watching ants crawl along the cracks and savoring the feeling of a whole vacation, full of possibility, lying ahead. The only sounds would come from a buzzing bee, a chirping bird or a squeaking rickshaw horn in the distance. Late evenings would find me stretched out on another part of this same bench, gazing up at the stars and down below at the tall shadowy trees, not a leaf stirring in the warm air heavy with a mingling of floral fragrances. The soft voices of visitors or my aunts talking on another part of the veranda would float across on the occasional breeze.
Eating and sitting around weren't the only things we did, although, in our childhood before TV, it was okay to just be. One didn't have to get permission to just exist in the present moment by giving it a fancy name like "mindfulness". My single, school teacher aunt made sure we got some lessons done every evening. Sometimes we would pull out the few tattered board games in the house. We would go visiting (usually bearing fruit from our garden and coming back with other fruit from the visited person's garden). Just before lunch there would be a scramble to get everyone showered. Two people would use the bathrooms in the house, two kids would go out to the taps, used for watering flowers, in the front garden and a couple of people would go to the well in the back. There was an open-top bathroom right next to the well; you could also just stand next to the well, soap yourself and pour water from the bucket straight from the well.
As the only girl among the kids, I sometimes got teased by the boys. But things got a lot better when I took my mother's advice to heart - "the more you react, the more fun they'll have teasing you, act like you don't care." In general we were good friends, although arguments and rivalries did crop up at points. One year, a cousin and I got invited to the birthday of the little girl next door. My dad took us both to the store to pick out presents. The store offered gift wrapping. Unfortunately, they wrapped both gifts together. So now we had to decide who was going to carry the gift and hand it over to the birthday girl. My grandfather had an idea, "why don't you make a garland of flowers, then one of you can take the garland and put it around her neck and the other one can give her the gift." My cousin was very enthusiastic about the idea, he wanted to take the garland. But that created another problem. Putting a garland around someone's neck, especially of the opposite gender, is symbolic of marriage and my grandfather would not have it. My cousin was finally convinced that the gift was more important and the party went off peacefully. The next day my grandfather asked us to write essays about the birthday party (it was a standard adjunct to any new experience - write an essay about it). I wrote all about how my cousin had made a fuss about the gift and garland. He wrote that I had needed my mom's help to make a card while he had made his all by himself.
Eventually, we stopped going to Santiniketan. We didn't plan to stop - it just happened. One of my last memories of going to that house as a child was when no one lived there anymore. My grandfather had passed away and my grandmother was too old to live there by herself. There was something that needed to be done, so my mom and I and another aunt and her son took the train there. For me the trip is marked by the memory of how free the mothers were. With no husbands to boss them or needing to be looked after, no in-laws potentially casting critical eyes on them, they were like young girls - they laughed loudly, talked nineteen to dozen, ate a fallen and cracked open jackfruit right where it lay, cooked nothing but dal and rice for dinner. Every time I hear about women's liberation, the image that arises in my mind is of my two joyous mothers on that trip to Santiniketan.
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