My grandparents were quite unusual people for their time, I think. I am not entirely sure, because they were young at a time when a lot of uncommon things were happening and in their milieu, it might have been a fairly usual thing to do.
They met at while studying at one of the premier medical colleges in Calcutta, a decade or so before independence, I suppose. They fell in love, and decided to marry in the face of some family opposition. My grandfather was a penniless idealist. His father had been a railway official in pre-independence Bangladesh, in, my mother says, Akhaura district in Kumilla. They called him kanababu because he was deaf, which deeply hurt my Dadu as a child, but they were poor and his father was a quiet man, I suppose, and so, there was nothing much he could do about it except bottle his rage. He had an elder sister he rather loved and a younger brother, both of whom died. And young Goura was left alone, with, I fancy, his ambitions and his love for his parents, cut by resentment, I suppose, for his authoritarian mother and a father who did not have the resources to provide what he wanted.
My grandfather is a natural storyteller. I always spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents and his stories of his life, which he would never tire of narrating again and again, are a part of the fabric of my mind. I looked at them differently at different times as I grew up. Unquestioningly, when I was little; with indifference, coupled with resentment, as I discovered Dadu's flaws; and with tedium, when I was grown up: by then, I had heard them so many times that I didn't care anymore. Now, he is in Calcutta, growing older and older, often complaining like a weary Tiresias, asking to be gone. I hardly speak to him anymore. His problems are too many and there is not much I can do without taking charge. And I am a master shirker. I take on as little as I can. But I do love the man he was. His life was an enormous act of self-fashioning, the credit for which is no less for it being so common.
One of the many tales I grew up listening was about the Durga Puja bhog. Goura was a most enthusiastic participant in all village festivals. He wanted to be in the thick of things, he loved running errands and generally, being where the action was. During one Durga Puja, a dada asked him to distribute the pujor bhog among those in the pandal. Now, they (and we, by extension) belonged to the lower castes. And when he went to pick up the bhog er thala, the cantankerous mashima in charge screamed at him: 'Tui chhoto jaater, abar bhog dibi ki! Pala!' The youngster's face reddened with rage and embarrassment and though a kind person asked him to never mind the lady and to go ahead and distribute the bhog, he did not shake off the incident.
This story was often followed by another of his college days. As a poor medical student from a distant village, Dadu could only afford the most basic lodgings. He stayed in the college hostel. As a low caste boy, he said, Dadu was required to eat separately from the other boarders. The thakur would prepare his food separately and keep it aside in a corner, where he had to sit and eat.
That, and perhaps a certain amount of idealism was the reason he believed, still does, so strongly in Mahatma Gandhi. Maybe he, like so many others, at the time, found in Gandhi a kindness, a recognition of basic humanity that others didn't show.
I have a lot of rage for Dadu, a lot of anger for the way he lived his family life, the differential treatment he always did, and still has meted out to his daughters, for my Didu's sadness, for her disappointments. But he also did so much, lived with such courage and such fullness. And as time passes, and those I hold dear grow older and fade away, the heart fills with such emptiness and sorrow that nothing can fill.
I haven't known many men closely. The other two are my father and my boyfriend. Baba's trajectory was much the same, starting out with very little and ending with enough and more. I think part of the reason he died so early was because of a certain nihilism, of believing that nothing mattered beyond a point. He wouldn't fight tooth and nail for himself, maybe for one he loved, but not for him. Which I know Dadu would and did. My boyfriend, I think I chose him because I could recognized the mould. And disappointing and often intolerable as such people are often to live with, it is the only one I can, and probably, wanted to navigate. So, there's him. I find much to admire in him, the grittiness, the tenacity, the hard work, the fearlessness and being able to conceive a state where one has nothing.
I will write more about Dadu. But so many emotions well up when I talk of him, or of any of the other people who have been such ever-present characters in the family tableau that you forget to question their being. My paternal grandfather, who I know far far less of, was also quite a remarkable person. He completed his Masters in jail, he was a freedom fighter. He was not a family man and married at 42 (I think) and had six children. He was one of the founding members of the Socialist Party and a very bad businessman whose chemical factory was in a very bad state and his family was perpetually poor. My father and mejo kaku would have to give part of their monthly scholarship for family expenses. It is remarkable at first thought, but then not, that his family took his achievements for granted. They bore the brunt of his financial unsavviness.
My thakurda was much derided and neglected in his old age and the only person I have found taking any interest in him as a person is my chhoto kaku, a rather strange person himself. I will find out more about my thakurda too, from him.
So, I will write slowly. Maybe I won't, ever. Maybe they will recede to their fixed places again in the picture. But I would like to write. I think they will make fine stories.
