A BAG FULL OF MEMORIES

As a young girl, rummaging through my Dida's (maternal grandmother) almari (cupboard) on a summer noon, I came across a stiff, boxy, bronze-coloured 'ladies' bag' with a short shoulder-strap, the kind carried by yesteryear heroines like Nanda and Asha Parekh, swinging it along with their hair and hips when the handsome hero serenaded them.

I was completely unable to visualize my rotund and grey-haired Dida looking even remotely like those buxom heroines. Why is it always so difficult for children to imagine old people to have ever been young? Now, at my age, it is so much easier!

Much later, I saw some faded sepia photographs of my Dida in fancy winged glasses and back-combed bun of hair, wearing a nice sari and posing beside my dashing Dadu (in a formal suit and tie) before some party. It was only then that I was able to connect that bag with my Dida, who otherwise had always seemed to be a cloth batua (hand-made bag) kind of a person.

To my great delight, the twist-to-open knob of the bag twisted open to reveal, apart from some old coins, a fancy hair pin (the kind you plunge into a really big bun or a really evil villain's heart) and a defunct gold-plated watch (Swiss made, with real gold) with a tiny rectangular dial and, sadly, one hand only.

The watch and the pin became useful accessories in all kinds of role-play, including espionage dramas.

And that bag became my faithful companion in countless hours of playing teacher-teacher, being boxy enough to hold all my old notebooks and ink-less pens, and also sturdy enough to last through the temper tantrums of a very ill-mannered teacher prone to throwing down her bag at the slightest provocation of her imaginary students.

It might have been a big comedown from the ball room to the class room, but the bag adjusted with the grace of a true lady.

WHAT WAS THE BAG YOU COVETED AS A CHILD?

IN THE WINK OF AN EYE

I was eleven years old, and studying in Class VI, when I took a daring decision.

I decided that it was time I grew from a girl to a woman, with all the accompanying wiles and guiles that went with womanhood. And one of the indispensable weapons in a woman's formidable armoury, was her undisputed skill in attracting men with the mesmeric power of her eyes.

To cut a long story short, I decided to pick up the art of winking.

Because to wink successfully, delicately, without scrunching up your eyes, or squeezing your eyelids tortuously, or hamming up the whole thing like a lascivious Johnny Walker (the comedian, not the whiskey), seemed to my 11-year-old mind the epitome of the femme fatale.

But the mirror was not enough, I needed a guinea pig to practise upon.

Being essentially timid by nature, I chose a safe venue. The top deck of the red double-decker bus - L20 - that took us from safe, suburban Barrackpore to big-city Calcutta and all its dangerous fascinations. A window-seat gave me a good view of the people down below.

I chose a safe victim. I decided to bestow my virgin wink at any old man who would look up at my window, but would not be strong enough or fast enough to follow it up with any other action.

So, in one of the innumerable bus-stops on the way to Esplanade, I winked at a doddery old man who was gazing bemusedly up at the bus. Most probably he had cataract, or short-sight, but I fondly imagined him to be gazing straight at me when I WINKED - not a sly, barely-there wink, BUT A BOLD, LASTING-FOR-QUITE-SOME-TIME, EYE-PROPERLY-SHUT, MAKE-NO-MISTAKE-ABOUT-IT WINK.

The poor man hardly noticed a thing.

Now that was a wink gone with the wind.

TELL ME, WHEN DID YOU FIRST WINK A WINSOME WINK?

RED FEET, PAINTED FEET

This summer vacation, my elder daughter and I have been reading a lot of Bengali poems (in our annual attempt to teach her to read her mother-tongue). Many of the poems mention alta (a red liquid used to paint the borders of the soles/feet):

“Elo chuley beney bou
Alta diye paye
Nolok naake, kolshi kanke
Jol aantey jaye”

(The gold-smith’s wife is open-tressed
Her feet have an alta-border
Gold nose-ring flashing, the pot at her waist,
She goes to get water).

Sukumar Ray, that inimitable genius of nonsense, of course turns everything familiar upside-down, and writes about Kumropotash (a fantastistical fierce pumpkin-shaped creature):

“Jadi Kumropotash chhotey –
Shabai jeno torboriye jaanla beye othey;
Hunkor jaley alta guley lagaye gaaley thontey,
Bhuleo jeno aakaash paaney takaye na keo motey.”

(If the Kumropotash runs fast –
Everybody must climb up their windows in a hurry
Mix alta with hookah-water and put it on the cheeks and lips
And never look up at the sky, or you’ll be sorry.)

The hilarity of these nonsensical instructions lie partly in their sheer implausibility – alta is never applied to the face, only to the feet. But my daughters, never having heard about alta, let alone seen it, did not know that.

When we were young, there was always a bottle of alta somewhere in the house. These glass-bottles full of deep blood-red liquid used to come with a tiny aluminium bowl and a long stiff wire ending in a small piece of sponge/cottonwool. The alta would be poured out in careful measure into the bowl, the wire would be dipped into it, and then a line would be drawn all around the foot, circling the heel and dipping in and out of the toes.

This was done during all religious ceremonies. And alta had a pride of place in Bengali marriage rituals – along with sindoor (the red vermilion powder applied in a dot on the forehead and in the parting of the hair), it symbolized the married-status of a woman.

My Dida (grandmother) used to say that alta would be regularly used when she was a young bride; apparently it helped to prevent/cure cracked heels. But during our childhood, my mother and aunts would use alta only on special days, although they used to put sindoor on their foreheads everyday after bathing. For cracked feet, they used Boroline.

Though we were not allowed to play with sindoor (being the exclusive preserve of married women), we were allowed to fiddle about with the alta bottle, maybe because it was no longer part of the daily routine of married women.

And all of us young cousins would sit down sometimes and inexpertly apply uneven alta-lines around our feet, painting all over our toes and leaving red footprints all over the place. Alta-paint would wash off after a few days, so the damage (to the floor and to the feet) was never too much.

When we entered our teens, we began to regard alta as terribly old-fashioned. With cheerful disregard for tradition, we neglected it totally in favour of the more permanent and more modern nail-polish to decorate our toes.

DO YOU HAVE A MEMORY OF ANY COSMETIC PRODUCT WHICH IS NO LONGER USED?

THEY ALSO SERVE…

West Bengal, the state in India where I come from, has a long and unfortunate history of de-industrialization. Of mills and factories closing down, of sole breadwinners suddenly becoming jobless. Of the small dreams and security that a regular salary brings changing suddenly to a bleak-black-uncertain future. Of people trying desperately to cling to ‘respectability’ and not topple over into utter ‘poverty’.

We met such men on local trains, hawking plastic hairclips and handkerchiefs. We met the women behind these men going from door to door, selling small articles of daily use, depending as much on the buyer’s sympathy as on their own selling skills.

They were not the smartly dressed marketing professionals we see today. They were women who had never thought they would have to ‘step out of their house to work’. They had been content to toil within the bounds of domesticity and always blamed their “kapal” (forehead – where the inscrutable lines of destiny are supposedly etched) for pushing them out of doors.

When we were young, I remember three such women who were regulars at our house (and at the houses of all our neighbours, friends and relations – all part of a large network of ‘references’). With the intrinsic callousness of children, we regarded them more with curiosity than with sympathy, wondering why their eyes watered ever-so-often, wondering why our mothers ended up buying more than we needed (or more often than we needed).

I am sorry to confess that I have forgotten the names of two of these brave and gutsy ladies.

One lady sold ghee (‘clarified butter’, as they say), coming to our home once a month to fill up a jar of golden, rich-smelling ghee made from creamy cow milk. She was plump and smiling, with smooth dark skin that looked as if she had polished it with ghee. She would put down her heavy jars and sit in bedroom (all these women would come straight to our bedroom where they would chat with ma and barama over tea and biscuits; the drawing room was for strangers and male visitors), pour out ladlefuls of ghee into the ghee-er-shishi (bottle demarcated for ghee) and deliberately spill a little on the plate beneath so that we could lick the yummy ghee. When she left, the gheewali (as we called her) left behind the warm aroma of pure ghee.

Another lady sold us dhoopkathi (incense sticks) – indispensable in every household and used for the daily morning and evening puja of the household gods and goddesses arranged carefully on the thakurer aashon (altar). Maybe the close association with religious objects made her blame the Gods for her cruel fate. And blame she would, in a loud and continuous lament, pausing only to sip from her tea-cup or to count the change. She was usually disheveled and distraught, with faded sarees and straggly hair, and we (rather cruelly, I feel in retrospect) called her ‘Ghargheri’ (Hoarse-voiced).

In complete contrast was Rashmonidi. Thin, dark, neat as a pin, not a fold of her inexpensive saree out of place, she was more interested in hushed gossip than loud lament. She was an amazing job-hopper – she began by selling cotton chhapa (printed) sarees, then temporarily trespassed into Ghargheri’s territory by selling dhoop-kathis on the side. She could give new-born babies their daily maalish (oil-massage) and bath (a daunting task), she could help out when large numbers of guests came for weddings or pujas in the family. She was dynamic – doing whatever she could to earn enough money to put her son through college. And when this son’s wife and she did not get along, she opted out, willing even to accompany families moving out of Kolkata as their cook/maid/governess. I met her some years ago, still as thin, but with her hair cut short in a ‘boy’s cut’ for convenience, as gossipy and gregarious as ever. Fate has dealt her plenty of blows, but has not managed to blow out her spirit.

DO YOU REMEMBER ANY SUCH BRAVE AND GRITTY PERSON FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD?