Category: Kolkata

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Kaka

Kaka, standing on the balcony of the house
in New Alipur in the 1950s.

When I was a little girl, we lived in a house my grandfatherbuilt. It was common then for sons to remain in the house with their parentseven after they were married and had children. It was an extended family systemthat is dying out fast now in urban India.
I grew up rich with memories of relatives, close anddistant. I was privy to my father’s family history, told in most vivid detailby my uncle, Samir Kumar Basu. I always knew him as Kaka, the Bengali moniker for a father’s younger brother.
Kaka was only a year and half younger than Baba. The twowere extremely close growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, united perhaps in theireye problems that took root at a very early age. Both had macular degeneration.Both wore glasses so thick that I substituted them for magnifiers to look atflower parts for biology class.
Kaka lived on the third floor of my grandfather’s house inNew Alipur, then a fairly new development in Kolkata. He was a brilliant manand soon rose to the top of the companies where he worked. Eventually, hebecame director of Chloride India.
We ate breakfast together every morning. I sat with my roti,potatoes and cauliflower. He, with his half-boiled egg on a porcelain Englishstand and two pieces of white toast with butter.
Playing chess with my father in Florida, late 1970s

Afterwards, I climbed into the back of his Ambassador for alift to Gokhale Memorial, the school I attended  in those days. On the way, we would talk about everything.It must have been irritating for him to have a five-year-old chatterbox gononstop before a hard days work was about to begin. 
“Boddo kotha bolish,” he would say sometimes. You talk toomuch.
In the evenings, after homework, after an evening bath, Iwaited anxiously for my Baba and Kaka to return home. Both had a habit ofpacing from verandah to verandah. Kaka would whistle popular Rabindrasangeet. Itried to imitate him. How was he able to get tunes out with such precision?
We sat down to dinner together and Kaka always made sure togrill me on what I had learned that day. He’d quiz me with a geographyquestion. And when I wandered off point, he’d tell me I was talking too muchagain.
Kaka and me at a family wedding, 2009

In later years, Kaka moved out into a posh company flat. Iwanted to go spend days there not just because of the air-conditioning but tomonopolize Kaka’s time.

He never married or had children. Over the years, he grewaccustomed to life alone, though he was always generous to open up his home forothers. After my parents died in 2001, I often stayed in one of Kaka’s guestrooms.
Evening conversations were never dull with Kaka. We arguedsometimes but he always treated me with respect; asked me about things inAmerica that he did not know well. He was one of the few members of my familywho took a keen interest in my journalism. Even introduced me to his friends totalk about the Iraq war.
Kaka at Calcutta Club.

He especially liked to gab with his peers at Calcutta Club,a social club that was started in 1907 when Indians were not allowed into thewhites-only Bengal Club. Later in life, when Kaka became frail and his eyesfailed him completely, he held onto his trek to the club as salvation from loneliness.He left exactly at a certain time and was rarely late coming home. He nappedfor three hours, limited his cocktail hour before dinner and ate with extremediscipline. I admired that about him. How he kept to routine. How he neverindulged.
The last time I saw Kaka was in early December. I had stayedwith him for almost two weeks during a visit home. He liked to listen toBengali songs on my iPod. The noise-cancelling headphones, he said, made itfeel as though he were in a concert hall. He marveled at the technology thathis poor eyesight prevented him from enjoying.
Some nights, we watched Bengali soap operas on television.He listened intently to the dialog and when the screen was silent, I describedfor him what was unfolding.  Ithought it was grossly unfair that a man who lived by himself should not havethe benefit of sight – without being able to read or enjoy television.
But Kaka never felt sorry for himself or allowed pity. Iwill always think of him as the most fiercely independent person in my family.
Several years ago, the night of my departure from Kolkata,Kaka sat me down at his dining table. 
“Wait,” he said, shuffling off to his bedroom, counting hissteps as he always did and feeling his way to his closet.
He returned a few minutes later with an old jewelry box. Ithad once been a rich blue velvet. Now it was worn, the cardboard peekingthrough.
“Toke ar ki debo?” he said. What else can I give you?
I took that to mean that he thought I had all that I needed.True. Or that I wasn’t one for ornate ornaments that most Bengali women ogle.Also true.
He began telling me a tale of a trip he made to Hyderabad,years before my birth. The southern Indian city is famous for two things:Biryani, the Mughlai rice dish, and fresh water pearls, he said.
My cousin Sudip took all of us out to eat in 2005.
Kaka loved food and enjoyed it throughly.

“I bought this in Hyderabad. It’s not biryani,” he laughed.

A string of iridescent pearls glowed under the light of hischandelier.
“Kaka,” I said. “You don’t have to give me these.”
I wondered why he had bought them. Had they been meant for someone?Or had he just picked them up because it was the thing to do in Hyderabad?
“It’s a very small thing,” he said. “Wear them and think ofme.”
Last November, he’d called me in Atlanta to ask that I bringhim good Belgian chocolates. He loved the taste of cocoa on his tongue justbefore he went to sleep every night.
Kaka at a wedding in 2009. 

My aunt, Pishi, told me that Monday night, Kaka had askedfor chocolate. She took that to mean that he was recovering from a recent boutof illness. But Wednesday, he was gone.

He died in his sleep, peacefully.
In 2010, when I visited Kaka, I had recorded some of ourconversations. Kaka loved to tell me stories about my father’s childhood. I hadplanned to finish those conversations. Ask him questions about a time with few records, save a few old black and white photographs. Kaka was awonderful storyteller and now an important part of my family’s oral history hasbeen silenced.
He was the eldest living of my father’s siblings. Manythought him as the family anchor. I simply thought of him as Kaka, the man whobecame my father after my own died, the man who stood by me always.
I will miss you terribly.
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Kolkata Hipstamatic

Life on the streets of Kolkata can be an assault to the senses for someone unaccustomed. For me, it’s home. The vendors, the noise, the traffic, the smells, the sounds. Everything. I snapped photos with my iPhone when I was home in November and December. Of rickshaw wallahs, sweet shops, jewelry stalls, tea vendors and grand dame buildings about to fall flat on their faces. And so much more.

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I am born

To borrow from Charles Dickens:

WhetherI shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will beheld by anyone else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning ofmy life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) onthe thirteenth day of October. It was remarked that soon after my mother brought me home, a white owl appeared before her on the terrace, glistening in moonlight. 
 
It was Lakshmi Puja day, when Hindus worship the goddess of prosperity, grace, and charm. Lakshmi has a white owl by her side and the bird has come to be known as a sign of good luck. 
 
My mother was then convinced she had done the right thing.
 
By thatI mean that she had picked me up only days earlier at an orphanage in the Maniktola neighborhood of Kolkata. I had been left there, on the doorstep,hours after my birth.
 
Many people I have known in the course of my life have asked me why my natural parents abandoned me. I do not fully know the answer to that. If and when I do,perhaps I shall write more.
 
But what I do know is how lucky I was to have been left at that particular orphanage, run by American missionary Helen Benedict.
 
Mymother had just met Benedict at a luncheon at the Indo-American Society, whereshe was hoping to improve her spoken English. She told me she was attending afashion show. I never quite figured out what a missionary was doing at afashion show, but I am glad that Benedict went that day. 
 
She happened to be seated next to my mother, who lamented that she had not had success in having children. My parents had been married 10 years by then.
 
Benedict perked up.
 
A child was left on her doorstep, she told my mother. Would she like to come and look?
 
My mother went the next day with my grandmother. Many years later, I would see the gate through which she entered the day and meet the caretaker who greeted her.
 
I was only a few days old. Apparently, my mother agreed to take me home the moment she saw me. 
 
Benedict advised her that she ought to first consult my father. I suppose there was a chance that he might not have agreed — as much chance as there is of  snow falling in Kolkata.
 
He had already picked out a name. Monimala. Garland of pearls.
 
At seven days old, I was taken home. To an old house at 206 Barrackpur TrunkRoad on the campus of the Indian Statistical Institute. The banisters were wrought iron, the floors, marble. The courtyard was shaded by tall coconut palms.
 
My mother told me when I was much older that she had gone up the narrow stairs, up to the roof and seen the white owl. She felt unfiltered joy and relief, like monsoons after a searing May.
 
Many pages of my life are yet to be written.
 
But the first chapter begins with my great fortune — a child left at an orphanage who came into the home of a brilliant mathematician and his beautiful wife. That child might have grown up in slums, might not have been educated.Instead, she traveled the world and grew up to write about it.
I tell you this story on my 49th birthday.
 
Many people still ask me about my natural mother and father. But I tell them I had only one set of parents. They are long gone now but they gave me a life for which I will be eternally grateful. Yes, I an adopted child. Their blood does not run through my veins. 
 
But I have something much more potent — their love.
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Balaka




It’s done.

The flat in the building called Balaka (which means swan in Bengali) at 68 B Ballygunj Circular Road is no longer my home. After nine-and-a half years of caring for it from across the globe, I completed the final act of an arduous sales process in Kolkata.

I’ve posted a photo taken out front this week. With me are Kalu and Bimal, two men who have done menial jobs at the building for most of the years my parents lived there.

In that flat, simple and not so large by American standards, I laughed, loved and lost. It was home for so many years.

It was there that my mother regained her verve for life after a massive stroke nearly took her life in 1982. She gained freedom in her small way, learning to wheel herself around the rooms and hallways with ease, poking her head into the kitchen and instructing the housekeeper how to make perfect Bengali fish curry.

Some evenings, she arranged for musicians to come to the flat. We’d sit on rugs on the floor and sing the songs of Tagore. My mother’s voice was gone when she was left half paralyzed, but she belted it out anyway. I sometimes caught her eyes watering. She lamented little after the stroke but I knew she yearned to play again the harmonium and sing the songs she loved most.

In the morning, after she had her third round of Darjeeling tea, she picked up the phone and called our relatives and friends to learn news of their lives. My mother was the glue that held our family together. When she died, I stopped knowing details about my aunts and uncles, cousins and friends.

It was there in that flat that my father sat at the dining room table for hours pruning his bansai plants. He filled the verandahs with greenery. The dahlias bloomed with fierce, spreading hues of reds, pinks and oranges across the view.

Or he sat with his magnifying glass struggling to read newspapers when the macular degeneration in his eyes began to blur his world. He often worked out his mathematical and statistical theories in his head, his hands moving in the air as though there was a chalkboard before him. He had made a name for himself in probability theory. Later in life, when Alzheimer’s began winning the battle, my father could not add two plus two.

Everything changed today when I signed over the final documents to the man who purchased our flat earlier this year. I waited in the West Bengal registration office for a long time, sandwiched between a zillion people in a British-era building now filled with cobwebs and dust.

My friend Vijay (on the right in the registration office photo) made it all happen for us. Without him, my brother and I might have still be mired in West Bengal bureaucracy. I really don’t know how to ever thank him.

But for a moment, after I signed the final document, I felt as though I had wronged my parents somehow. As though I had given away the place where they had found solace. I asked the new owner if I could take the brass nameplate on the door that carried my father’s name. (photo)

Then I descended down the long British Raj era staircase, its terrazo warped by footsteps from many decades. I turned back only once. And left with my memories, brilliant like diamonds.

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Coming home


The taxi refused to take the Eastern Bypass — too dangerous in the wee hours of the morning before the sun comes up and lights up the despair of Kolkata. Instead, we took the old route from the airport in the northeastern part of the city to the south.

I had not taken these old roads in a while. But as a little girl, when life was harder, but oh, so much simpler, we traveled to the airport this way and stood on the “viewing deck” to see planes take off and land. It was a rarity then. Flying seemed so exotic, so other-worldly. Now, all I do is complain about sitting in cramped seats as we pass over oceans and continents.

At 3 in the morning, the city is finally quiet.

The thousands and thousands of street stalls and stores (like the ones in this photo of a shopping area near my house) are shuttered. Those who can afford it are sleeping soundly in the comfort of air-conditioning. Most are under whirring ceiling fans that bandy the humidity about — or nothing at all.

The heat has fallen after months of the monsoon, but after the glorious autumn weather in Atlanta, I feel hot. Restless.

I had not expected to pass by the flat my parents called home for so many years. I have returned to Kolkata this time to finalize its sale.I thought I would not have to see it until later.

But instead, we pass by the front gate, the taxi driver unknowing of the burst of emotions within me. I try hard to hold back the tears. I feel them welling. I don’t know whether to look or not. But I cannot control my glance.

I peer at the gate through which the taxi might have driven had Ma and Baba still been here. Ma always stayed up for me, no matter how late. I’d walk in through the front door and see her in her wheelchair, her eyes heavy with sleep would light up instantly at the sight of her only daughter.

She’d have tea ready for me. Maybe a snack. My bed would be made up with fresh sheets, a clean towel hanging in the bathroom.

There is no one waiting for me now.

The taxi driver carries me away from that moment of intimate familiarity to another place. A friend’s flat, perfectly comfortable but with the sting of loneliness. Daylight breaks early here; by 5:30 the city is springing to life again. But for me, today, everything is dark.

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Bangla kobita (poetry)


This poem is written by one of my favourite Bengali poets, Joy Goswami. It loses in the translation, of course. And yet…

In the evening sadness comes and stands by the door, his face
Is hidden, from the dying sun he took some colors and painted his body
The sadness comes in the evening,
I stretched my hand and he caught my wrist, in an iron-hard clasp
He caught me out from my room, his face
Is black, he is ahead of me and I follow him
I crossed from the evening to the night, from the night to the dawn, then the morning, the noon, the day, the month
Crossing water, tree, boat, city, hill
Crossing blows, stumbling, poison, suspicions, jealousy, graves, genocide, the bones and ribs of civilization, swamp and grass
Then crossing my own death, death after death, going on and on
The bony fingers holding nothing but a pen
Nothing…

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Loadshedding


India has come a long way since my childhood.

And not.

This week’s headlines: Celsius rises, so does loadshedding. In American English, this means temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and no electricity for hours and hours and hours.

That’s the way it was when I was growing up in Kolkata. The only relief was to take a plunge in the rather polluted Ganges (see photo).

At school, it was difficult to concentrate. Instead, I’d be busy wiping dry the droplets of sweat on my textbook. One time, I’d obliterated the face of Shah Jahan (the Mogul emperor who built the Tak Mahal) in my history book with a good dousing. I watched the black ink run down the innards of the cheaply printed text. Too bad his son Aurangzeb could not dispose of him that easily.

Going home on a searing summer day was no comfort either. No bath because there was no power to pump the water to the roof. No fan. No respite. At night, we wet our bed sheets and put slabs of ice on our mattresses to stay cool inside the thick cotton mosquito nets and watched flying cockroaches and creepy insects crawl up the sides.

We’d wait for the monsoons to begin– usually the first or second week of June. My brother and I would stand in the courtyard fully clothed and let the rain soak us through. There was nothing that felt more soothing.

And now, in 2010, despite all of India’s economic gains, my friends and family in Kolkata are doing the same as we did 40 years ago.

The problem, says the Telegraph newspaper: Snags in the coal-supply chain are causing power generation units to perform below capacity.

While government agencies played the blame game, almost every Kolkata resident suffered power cuts this week for at least six ours. Worse still, the monsoonal rains are still far from the congested city — the weather forecast calls for hot and humid days.

Still feel like complaining about the pollen?

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My Christmas gift



This is the season when we feel compelled to give. We give our time at homeless shelters, buy bags of food for the hungry and write checks out to charities that help people in far-flung places. Sometimes, it’s difficult to choose an agency. Many of us are cynical about how effectively the money will be spent. Or we question whether it will do any good at all.

I do not pretend to know the answers to solving global poverty, but I will share with you a story about one family whose life is about to change radically.

Ibrahim Gulam lives in a part of central Kolkata that is usually not seen by visitors to the city. I would guess that many of my friends and relatives have never even been to this part of town. The main road still bears its British name — Colin Road.

the streets are overflowing with workshops and warehouses. Gulam lives in an area where plaster molding is manufactured. Some of the men and women look like aliens, their dark faces perpetually smeared with white dust.

Crime and drug addiction is rampant in this part of town. So, too, are broken hearts. Broken dreams.

You have to snake through tiny lanes bursting with humanity to get to the room that Ibrahim shares with his parents and three siblings. He and his brother sleep atop the hard bed, his mother and sisters share the floor and his father, an asthmatic who has not been able to hold down a full time job because of his respiratory ailments, lies under the bed.

In the summer, the heat and humidity are so intense that the whitewash on the walls peels off. Little adorns the dark, cramped room save scripture from the Quran. Ibrahim’s mother cooks on a coal-burning stove on the floor outside, where shoes heap up and the cement is incessantly wet from household use.

The family shares a latrine with countless other people. Often, bathing is done is public at the local tubewell.

The smells here are like nothing found in America — a mixture of life and waste and human misery.

Westerners dubbed this “the city of joy.” I heard a businessman on my flight back telling the flight attendant that he had taken his young son for a tour of Kolkata slums. He leaned back in his $4,000 business class seat and talked of how “fascinating” the lives of the poor were.

He should talk to Ibrahim.

To say that his life has been a struggle is an understatement.

I met him when he was in grade school. He was one of several children my brother and I sponsored. We paid for their schooling so that they would have a chance in life.

No one in Ibrahim’s neighborhood has finished high school. His father, Gulam Siddiq, studied in a Bengali medium school but dropped out in the second grade, later learning how to be an electrician. His mother, Rabyia Sultana, stopped in the fifth grade in her native Bihar.

I wanted Ibrahim and his siblings not to live the life of his parents. I wanted to do everything in power to preserve his joie de vivre.

I watched him grow, visited him when I went home every year. He did well in Navjjyoti, a school for poor children that my friend Vijay helped establish. He was admitted to the reputable Assembly of God Church school. So was his brother Zahid and sisters Anjum and Zahida.

Ibrahim is now 24 and will soon earn a degree from Seacom Engineering College. I visited him in early December and his latest report card showed him excelling in almost every subject.

His brother and sister followed in his footsteps and are also in college. His youngest sister will enroll in college next year. She wants to study microbiology.

Ibrahim’s mother beamed with pride as she talked about her children. She knows that one day soon, the family will leave that dismal room. On Ibrahim’s salary, they will be able to afford a flat in a nicer part of the city, put better food in their bellies.

Ibrahim had the fortitude to win against all odds — to study in dim light, distracted by the hub-bub of the slum. He persisted when I had half expected him to give up. Yet, year after year, he delighted me with his report cards. A few years ago, he came to visit me with his grades in hand. That’s when he told me: “I want to be an engineer. I want life to be different.”

In India, a nation of 1.1 billion people, sometimes, not even an education is a ticket out of poverty. But without it, a young man or woman stands no chance of success. There, vocations do not pay as well as they do in America. Labour is cheap and the life of an electrician like Ibrahim’s father is far from comfort.

I sponsor other children in Kolkata as well. I talk to their parents, who want to pull them out of classrooms and put them to work instead. Many of them are not supportive of their children and even punish them for wanting to sit down with their books. But it’s not easy persuading a poor person to give up another source of income.

Not all my kids have been as successful as Ibrahim. Ranjeet Shaw is struggling to pass his high school board exams, though he told me when I saw him a few weeks ago that he was not giving up. He has seen hope and he is not going to let it go without a fight.

I don’t have children of my own, but my Kolkata kids have filled that void in my life. And then some.

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Mehndi

I met my dear friend Vijay Chowdhary when I was in the fifth grade. My brother and I went to school with Vijay and his sister Renu. They were Marwaris originally from Rajasthan who had settled in Bengal and I quickly became fascinated with facets of their culture that were, up until then, unknown to me.
Like mehndi.
Bengali women in my family lined their heels with alta, a red dye that matched the traditional red bordered white saris they wore. But the women in Renu’s family adorned themselves with mehndi or henna.
On occasion, Renu’s mother would call upon mehndi artisans for a visit and I would tear away from home, running down the streets of New Alipur’s Block N to make sure I was included. The mehndi artisans were old Marwari women, their hands so crinkled and worn that the liquids involved in the process would trickle down the crevices of their skin like ancient rivers snaking from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.
The women needed no tools. No brushes or tubes or pens or instruments used in modern-day beauty salons. They worked quickly and deftly with their fingers, applying the thicky, goopy paste made from a powder of dried henna leaves, lemon, tea, eucalyptus or nilgiri oil. It smelled heavenly.
The paste went on dark as they worked their magic on my hands. Intricate designs with paisleys, flowers, geometrics. I was mesmerized.
Renu and I hardly had the patience to sit for three hours for the mehndi to work its magic. But somehow we managed to keep still, applying a sugary concoction to make sure it didn’t dry and fall off our hands prematurely.
And then came the fun part. We scraped off the dried paste with butter knives and marveled at the burnt orange stains on our skin. My mother would get after me for not washing my hands properly for days after that — I wanted to preserve the henna as long as I possibly could.
These days, mehndi is everywhere in India. Everywhere here. You can find mehndi artists at craft fairs and salons. Was it Madonna who made the ancient Eastern practice trendy here? Or Gwen Stefani?
It’s so popular that you can get it done on the streets of Calcutta by village men who have decided to make a penny off the trend. So here I am in this photo, on the streets of Gariahat, Kolkata’s busiest Bengali shopping area, sitting on a cheap plastic stool on Rash Behari Avenue, getting my arms adorned.
I told Mr. Pal I had little time. “Ten minutes,” he said. “And one hundred rupees.”
He wanted extra for making it speedy. So I paid him what amounted to about $2, watched the world around me — and a whole new one emerging on my arms.
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Kolkata

On my way home.

It has been more than a year that I was in my beloved Kolkata. A feast and sore for the eyes all at once. An assault on all the senses.

I feel the excitement of a bride to be. And of someone who, near death, fulfills every dream.

I am minutes away now from Lufthansa Flight 445 that will carry me across the Atlantic. Then, another jet that will sail over the gentle landscapes of Europe and the rugged terrain of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. My heart will beat faster as the flight trackers shows names like Varanasi, Patna, Dhaka. It will pound as the plane descends into Kolkata.

Below me I will see the dim twinkling lights of a city that operates on 25 watts, save the glaring fluorescent tubes that are off at this late hour.

It’s a feeling I have known for many years. Familiar and comfortable like an old pair of shoes that no longer suit me but stay in my closet year after year.

I used to think of my mother’s smile as the plane touched Kolkata soil. My father used to be waiting for me among the throngs of people. That stopped when my father became incapacitated with Alzheimers. I began taking a taxi in the dead of night, smelling the cow dung and the acrid smell of the Chinese tanneries as we raced our way to Ballygung on the Eastern Bypass.

Ma would always be waiting for me. At 3 in the morning, she was waiting. In her wheelchair. Her eyes battling the kind of deep sleep awoman in her 60s needs at that hour.

But she was waiting.

No one waits for me anymore. I pay the $300 for a rickety Ambassador taxi that takes its time meandering in the dead of night.

I rest my head on an unfamiliar pillow, in an unfamiliar room, sadness and excitement gelling inside to keep me awake. Sleep finally comes when the sun begins to rise and the horns of the Tatas and Marutis begin the city’s symphony of sounds.

It is still my city, I think. But not.

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