My family and other people

G dadu was a sweet-faced gentleman - tall, thin, with a careworn appearance. They were our neighbours in the place where we rented an apartment when I was in high school. In a locality with large prosperous-looking two or three story houses, theirs stood out as an oddly-shaped (to maximize the area within the scrap of trapezoidal land) little single story building (two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen area) that housed G dadu, his wife, mother and two children. G dadu's job was not very higly paid but - my mother would point out while talking about how much he valued education - his children always had new books for school and he never skimped on school supplies. Soon after we met them, conversation revealed that G dadu was related to my mother - he was a distant uncle. So although he wasn't that much older than my mother and his daughter was just two years ahead of me at school, he became "dadu". In those days, dropping into a neighbour's house for an e...

Our college hostel dining hall in India was called the mess, a term that is probably only used in the army in America. When I first started eating there, I liked the food more or less. ("Don't tell anyone that you like hostel food!" my mom would say, "people will think your mother is a terrible cook.") Other than the vegetarian curries (every one an unidentifiable blob) the thought of which took away my hunger at dinner time, everything else was passable. Lunch would have a decent fish, meat or egg curry along with a blob. For tea, we had 2 samosas and a sweet for the longest time - not exciting but acceptable. Only in our fifth and final year, more substantial and appetizing fare such as alu paratha, chana-bhatura and dosa was introduced for tea. My most favourite meal by far, though, was breakfast with toast and eggs. We would line up with our eggs (and chopped onions, tomatoes etc. if we wanted them) in the kitchen while the only male cook fried, scrambled ...

Aunty J was our upstairs neighbour in the apartment building I lived in during high school. She was about a decade younger than my mother and would often come to her for advice and consolation, speaking in her broken Bengali. "Mrs. D was so rude to me. She said that I was tipke (stingy) and didn't feed my kids well, that's why they are so skinny." "The word is kipte amma, not tipke", her son, with his superior Bengali knowledge, would interject. "Be quiet, aunty knows what I mean!" Aunty J was the sweetest neighbour I ever had. Once I fell fast asleep after school and my mother, who had been shopping, came back and knocked and knocked and couldn't wake me up. A neighbourhood kid had to climb up to our balcony to make sure I was okay. Aunty J was in tears, she was so worried. The time I got into trouble with other neighbours by attempting humorous writing at the expense of the goddess Saraswati, it was aunty J who stood up for me staunchly. ...