HEARTBREAK HOUSE

It began life as a piece of land sold to my grandparents. It was the 1940s, that turbulent decade when India was pulling free from the British yoke. Bengal had already been ripped into two. Many Hindu families, originally from East Bengal (later East Pakistan; now Bangladesh), were fleeing to the West (West Bengal, which remained part of Indian territory). [The opposite – Muslim families moving to East Bengal – was also happening.]

Dadu and Dida (my father’s father and mother) were part of the thousands of families that came, looking to build a new life. They came to Barrackpore, a small town near Kolkata, because my Dida’s father lived here (he was a District Magistrate). They bought middling plot of land by selling off some of Dida’s gold ornaments. [The ornaments would stand our family in good stead through hard times – right down to paying for my father’s engineering college fees.].

Some more sold-off-gold helped to build a small two-bedroom house with a red cement balcony. There was a haphazard garden with a well at one end. My grandparents moved in with their four children – my Jethun (uncle), Pishis (aunts) and Baba (my father, the youngest).

Over the decades, the house changed shape many a time, swelling to suit the needs of its inhabitants. When my father got married a room was added on top, and the house officially became a do-tala baari (two-storey house), enhancing its status in the para (neighbourhood). One of Baba’s promotions resulted in the creation of a proper drawing room and an attic.

Dadabhai’s marriage meant another bedroom. The red-tiled kitchen at the back got a change of roof; new bathrooms were added, as were balconies. Gradually, brick by brick, the house metamorphosed into a sprawling seven-roomed house. What it continued to be, for over six decades, was a HOME to all of us living there. My home.

But, the residents also changed. Some grew old and died – my grandparents – some died before their time – my aunt, father, uncle. Some grew up and left – my cousins. Finally, my mother, brother and I, too, shifted to a new apartment, near the railway station, for convenience and easy conveyance to the city. The lure of the city won over our loyalty to the home.

The house, lonely and left behind, brooded into decrepitude. A family of distant relations stayed for some years while we followed our destinies elsewhere. The termites had an uninterrupted banquet. The memory- heavy rooms, once witness to our evolving histories, remained dark and shut. Cracks grew in the walls and weeds grew in the cracks. Creepers, intertwined with echoes of our laughter and quarrels, grew over the vacant balconies. The trees in the garden cast longer and longer shadows and began to hide the house like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

My grandfather had left behind a lot of memories, but no legal will. So, the amicable and consensual transfer of the rights of the house to Dadabhai, my cousin, took a long time – more than a decade – and endless visits to the court.

Now the knots of legalese have been unraveled. Dadabhai, who stays in Bangalore, told us last week that the house has been handed over to some promoters, who will break down the old structure and build a multi-storeyed apartment (what else?) in its place. My daughters will never be able to visit it and see for themselves the rooms and garden that shaded and shaped me.

Ironically, each flat in the new building will have two bedrooms - which are what the house originally had, to begin with.

Maybe the happiness I felt there will be transferred to the new owners, multiplying as the rooms have multiplied in the flats, making the residents cherish their homes, just as I did, so long ago.

ANY MEMORIES OF LOSING A HOME?

BARBER - NAMA

When I was very young, my father’s barber used to cut my hair. He, or rather they, were local barbers who made housecalls. They were a pair of brothers, one short and slight, called Shanti, and the other burlier and taller, whom Baba (my father) called Ashanti (the opposite of Shanti/ peace) for the sake of rhyme and rhetoric. Shanti, true to his name, was more timid and patient, and I preferred him.

He would usually come on Sundays, carrying his small wooden box with a top handle, and one of the straight-backed dining chairs would be brought out in the open cemented courtyard, ready for all the family members (men or children) who wanted a shave or a haircut or theirs nails trimmed (for the stubborn male-nails, not for our tender-tips-and-toes, which were cut by Maa)

My Dadu (granddad) would sit first, and Shanti would carefully trim his scanty white hairs (on head, ears and nostrils – which fascinated us) and shave his wrinkled-wobbling cheeks tenderly and reverentially. Then Baba and Jethun (father and uncle) would come, and Shanti (or Ashanti) would be more robust and talkative, swiftly stroking the sharp blade down their cheeks and chin and briskly wiping the lather on a flat piece of leather, neatly paring their stubborn nails and giving them a joint-hand, chop-chop-chop head-banging massage.

Bhai and I would be the last, and we would sit under the sun, with the sparrows and magpies watching us warily from the trees in the garden surrounding the open courtyard. We would be wrapped in a huge white cloth tucked around our scrawny necks and Shanti (but never his brother) would chop away merrily with his scissors, giving us a brain-rattling massage at the end, and we would look down ruefully at the shiny black locks of hair fallen on the ground, and then up at our reflections in Shanti’s small spotted mirror.

These reflections would be unvarying – Bhai was always getting a crew-cut (which meant that merely a millimeter of his curly hair would remain on his head) and I would get a “boy’s cut” (inch-long curls all over my head).

I had to wait till almost my teens to enter a proper parlour, but that’s another story.

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR HAIRCUT-EXPERIENCES AS A CHILD?

SOWING, REAPING, REMEMBERING...

My growing-up garden was also a hub of human (and other animal) activity.

Every morning in the holidays, I and my brother would take the phuler saji (flower-basket) and gather flowers for my mother and aunt, who would use them for the daily pujo (worship) of the thakurer-ashon (the seat of the gods).

We were strictly instructed to collect the more plentiful flowers (shiuli, jaba, tagar), and leave the roses and the lilies alone. I remember my mother and Baroma (aunt) diligently emptying the discarded tea-leaves from the tea-strainer at the foot of the rose-bush, trying to coax the sullen plant to bloom more often.

The coconut trees needed no coaxing – every year dozens of heavy green coconuts would grow at the top, and dadu (granddad) would caution us not to play under the coconut trees lest the nuts fall on us and crack our skulls. Every year, dida (grandmother) would call the coconut-tree-climber : the dark, lithe man who would tie a piece of rope around his ankles and skim swiftly up the coconut trees to chop off the nuts with his scythe. Two coconuts were part of his fees for the job, and then my dida would distribute the rest of the hoard among various aunts and uncles and their families. The coconut leaves would be dried on the roof to make brooms for the house (sadly, gifting brooms was not socially acceptable).

In summer, whenever there would be a kalboisakhi (tropical summer storm), we would rush to the garden to collect unripe green mangoes falling from the trees (from our tree and from the neighbour’s tree which peered into our garden), getting wet and then relishing the storm-scarred, sour fruits with salt and red chilli powder.

Not all was rush and bustle, however. I loved to wander about in the garden, watching the slow movement of the snails on the lichen-y brick walls. I also liked to see the earthworms wriggling about, forming curly soil-mounds after the rains.

I remember taking the dry brown betelnuts, scraping off part of the outer covering and drawing faces (the remaining cover looked like a shaggy fringe) on them to make heads for home-made dolls (medicine-bottles made the bodies). Baba (father) showed us how to blow bubbles with papaya-stems and soapy water, and to boil the orange shiuli-stems to make yellow-dye for dolls-clothes.

I had always wanted a swing in the garden (who doesn’t?), but there was no tree suitably-branched or sturdy enough, so my father made one with jute rope on our staircase-landing, perched on which I could glimpse a part of the garden. If I tried hard enough, I could imagine I was in the garden, swinging under the sky.

WHAT DID YOU LIKE TO DO IN YOUR GROWING-UP GARDEN?

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

The garden alongside my childhood home,
Not properly-kempt, no ordered flower-beds,
But straggly-sweet, trod upon by my growing feet,
Like Alice, I can drink the memory-potion, shrink, and with the golden key, enter it still....

I can see the five green coconut trees, all in a row,
One was cut down to garage the car, and then there were four.
I can see the orange betelnuts fallen on the ground,
Gather them in my skirt and dry them brown on the roof.
I can see the guava tree by the pond,
Crows pecking at the hidden red heart of the pale green fruit.
I can see the miserly mango tree,
Sharing its fruit only once every two years.
I can see the barren jackfruit tree, gaunt against the pond-horizon,
Its bare branches mocked by the flourishing flame-cannas at its feet.

I can smell the shy white petals of the dolanchampa,
And the orange-stemmed, white-starred shiuli;
Gather them carefully, the autumn grass is wet with dew,
And green caterpillars crowd under the shiuli leaves.
I can smell the secret tang of the lemon-leaves
And the green chilli's punch-you-in-the-nose spice.

I can almost-touch the nayantara's magenta-softness,
Caress the tiny jasmine with fragrant-fingertips,
Or prick them on the spoilt, sickly rose - more thorns than flowers.
Neglecting the tagar's scattered white bounty,
I can reach up to pick the sprawling hibiscus-cousins -
Pink unfurled five-petalled panchamukhi and blood-red furled lankajaba;
Or the malatilata bending under the overburden of pink-and-white blooms
Weeping near the well in the garden.

I do not know what flowers grow there now.
I tend to the memory-weeds which grow within me,
And, sometimes, water them with tears.


PLEASE DO UNLOCK A GARDEN-MEMORY WITH YOUR GOLDEN KEY AND SHARE IT WITH US.