My grandmother passed away on June 14, 2021. She had turned eighty-seven on September of the previous year. She was at the helm of our large family where our familial bonds continue to surpass the spaces between us. Before my aunt’s family shifted to Ahmedabad, our family, hers and my grandmother’s lived within a square inch of each other. The narrow streets were propertied by our regular movements to and fro between the three houses and the clamour of our lives and loves mingled with and resounded across the spaces. I spent most of my childhood at her house, and our families were knit together with her cooking, her stories, and her abundant care. After our families started to move apart from each other, necessitated by requirements of professions, my grandmother continued to pull us together towards her, her house, and the city. There was something undeniably commanding about her presence which gave me a safe anchor in my childhood, spent in a perpetual state of psychological drift. My mother shifted to a different town due to her work. Not having my mother around from a young age led to an early disassociation from the self, leading me to harbor myself in imagined landscapes; and, my grandmother remained the person to whom I could return.
Returns are always masked by assumed certainties: we never truly meet the earlier self that had left the door when we return back to the threshold or even the mirror. Returning from school, I would always meet alter egos of my grandmother. Her wispy dyed hair was pulled away from her face in a bun, a braid, or a high-pinned knot and the manner in which she talked and carried herself would change with the cycles of the moon. My grandmother believed her right rheumatic knee became worse every month with the full moon, and I felt a lot of her other qualities followed the moon’s changing self, as it waxed and waned with the days of the month. One could tell her state of mind from the stories she narrated: tales of being taught by her Maths teacher on the steps of the Ganga ghat near Ariadaha, watching the Radha Krishna festivals at Belur Rashbari, and picking up fruits with her sisters after storms. There was a particularly harrowing tale that she would narrate of surviving the tide in the Ganga on her regular journeys from Ariadaha to her college in Uttarpara in a boat. The water had risen suddenly and the boatmen thought it was unsafe to steer the boat to the river banks, and instead, they decided to row the boat to the middle of the river where the current was more stable. My grandmother was let off near a thin strip of land that was loosely connected to the banks. The rising waters prevented her from finding a proper hold as she climbed the steep slope of the bank, and her feet slipped repeatedly. It was only then a hand was extended towards her from the top of the cliff and gradually pulled her up. My grandmother never forgot the boy from the community of fishermen who saved her life or the kindness she received at their home. Returning to the stories now feels like a re-visiting of her life in my mind. My grandmother’s past feels nearer — a point around which I can wind myself — no longer an empty past, never really an available repository.
Manindra Gupta begins his autobiography by marking out the mulberry tree of known histories growing in a familiar province:
Peace descends on all the surfaces — the peace of time passing, of time rotting. Circling around the evergreen mulberry tree, one forgets when friends slip past the clasp of fingers. Somewhere between youth and old age, the light falls on the face. One slinks away from the human — only the breath to identify the living.
The radius of the tree’s spreading canopy promises linking together lives, even as one journeys through the many-rummaged and unfailingly-trudged regions of a life lived within the borders of frequented surroundings. My grandmother’s evergreen tree was planted far away from the place where we lived in Kolkata — in the river-mist clad regions of Salkia and Belur. And for that reason, her heart always remained populated with the friends and people of her past, as they held hands and circled the living memories, growing each day in their recounting.
Joyce proposes his metaphoric relation between life and the mulberry as slightly different —
He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberry tree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended.
The finality with which Joyce presents the death of the subject is not how one experiences death in a culture that cremates their dead. My grandmother’s presence lingered over us the evening we took her to the crematorium, even as she left us in her physical form. A movie that spoke to me when I was a child was Simon Birch; it was the story of a friendship between a child with dwarfism, Simon and his friend Joe Wentworth and the trials and challenges they faced while growing up, which, in the end, led to Simon’s untimely death. I lived in perpetual fear of never seeing my mother again, brought about by her hazardous journeys on local trains, and the moment in the movie when Joe’s mother passes away, abruptly, in a sudden freezing of time, upon being struck by a baseball ball, left me horrified. The son’s narration of how he lost his mother gradually, as the smell faded from her clothes, as he began to forget the things she did, haunted me. My grandmother lives with us, every time we cook rice in cardamom-flavoured milk, light incense sticks and speak emphatically about politics, a thing she cherished doing throughout her life. The motion of her life with us never ends but is transformed in the ways in which we revisit her memories. Adored in life and eulogized through our everyday actions, she enmeshes our material world without the casings of the earth and the word.
The battles my grandmother faced were ordinary ones: running a household with three children with limited means, finishing her B.A. exam while looking after the family, building a house together with my grandfather late in her years, which became the place where most of the happy memories of my childhood grow and are walked amongst.
My mother often tells us of my grandmother’s physical labour that helped to hold the pieces of the household together. While living in Katrasgarh, my grandmother had to hit coal and break it into smaller pieces for lighting the fire for cooking: the activity itself required inhuman strength on her part to perform. Listening to my mother speak of my grandmother in such a way, I had the sense of her being an indomitable woman, exceeding us all by her strength of will. The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur writes:
Everyone needs a story to live by in order to make sense of the pastiche of one’s life. Without a narrative a person’s life is merely a random sequence of unrelated events: birth and death are inscrutable, temporality is a terror and a burden, and suffering and loss remain mute and unintelligible.
The stories told about my grandmother split the memory of her vigorous self from the frozen body that lay before us in the crematorium. Her life sped in different directions, in the many events that we remembered of her life, varying in their combinations and stretching the narrative away from the individual to include a host of half-remembered shadowy figures and misheard voices.
Over the many conversations that I have had with her, I have tried to take note of the members in her many canopied family — the men who had run an apiary business when the Belur lake was given on lease to the family for nothing short of a hundred years, the men who settled in then Burma to trade Burmese teak, the men who sold the business to return to the rapidly changing landscape of Bengal, and the men who had to cope with the economic losses of the previous generations. My grandmother would narrate the events in good humour, laughing at the follies of the past, without any of the nostalgia for her family’s status and all the comforts they had shared, for a while. From what my grandmother narrated to us, her eccentric willfulness was the result of belonging to a family where the members had a strong reverence for female education even with some of the decadent vestiges of a zamindari life.
When I returned to Kolkata after having stayed away from home for eight years, the emotional spaces between me and my grandmother were filled in with the tales of her life, the ones I had listened to and the few ones that I had not. My own narratives of a life spent shifting between despair and frantic grasps towards some form of solace, no matter how short-lived and temporary, were either mumbled or uttered to claim justification. I was afraid to lose her, but at the same time, I could not allow myself to become the vulnerable child who wanted to flee from home because it was too difficult to reconcile herself with her emotions. With my grandmother, there was always a feeling of stable turf. The tradition that had held her life together gave her the strength and courage to have humble but loving hopes for mine. She had not been very enthusiastic when I travelled outside of the city for studies and she was not too keen on me finding a job outside of the city, now that I had returned to stay with her. For a reason known to her and no one else, she believed her love was enough to give me a happy life. She had no idea of and could not bring herself to measure how wrecked I felt from within.
While working in Kolkata, I was briefly in a relationship with a Bengali man, and he would visit me in the place I shared with her. My grandmother never really warmed up to his visits and that led to bitterness and sadness between us. When we spoke, we could only offer each other brief remarks and criticism; on other times, there would only be silence. There are ways in which silences are written about. In Tractatus, silence is a willful omission: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Silence is experienced as the result of the intention to hold back, withdraw and not seek the beguiling casings of words. But in a letter to one of his friends and long-term correspondent, the philosopher goes back on his statement to justify the long absences in his writing: “Silence is not empty.” There are, then, different means by which silences are understood and made plural. The silence between me and my grandmother hurt us both equally, but at that bend in time, I had no verbal means of letting her know the reasons behind me wanting to remove myself from what was home and find temporary shelter in one person. The silences multiplied, filled with the echoes of cherished words shared and present wordless glances. My grandmother’s long stay at the hospital and the abruptness of her life ending away from us, within the detached confines of a hospital ward, brought grief without the finality of sounding goodbyes: a grief that felt as an individual despair rather than a shared burden, much like the silences that were filled with emotions, un-translated and unspoken.
In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag quotes from Auden’s poem that characterizes cancer as the “failure of expressiveness:”
Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It’s like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
‘Childless women get it,
And men when they retire;
It’s as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”
There is triteness to the act of reading metaphorical associations into a disease as debilitating as cancer and Sontag acknowledges this. An uncle, who was a close friend of our family, died at an early age from cancer — he had spent most of his life opting in and photographing the rhythmic dance of the Himalayan mountain range. In the same chapter, Sontag characterizes tuberculosis as signifying both “apotheosis” and “failure.” Knowing the ills metaphors perform in equating struggles with creative action with the travails of the body, Sontag writes, “[M]etaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.” Regardless, no one can deny the hold that metaphors have over us. My grandmother seldom spoke in metaphors — the past was intricately patterned out of facts: the day Subhash Chandra Bose visited the family home, the day she escaped the tide, the day her birth date was carved out on the certificate by her school headmaster since there was no documentation of her actual birth date. If one is to read a metaphor into my grandmother’s life, it is one of the permanence and the ever-changing mutability of the letter — her life began with the ink that marked her date of birth and ended with the final words on her death certificate stating her cause of death as heart failure. Her heart ceasing to beat was the ink stopping to flow, over the pages she wrote and over the mind that pored over papers which she read even with her failing eyesight.
I read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in one of those gruesomely tasking years at school, where choice between the study of science and the humanities equaled one between living and not-living. I had taken up the study of the science subjects, being only too aware of my utter bewilderment at numbers. Satrapi’s struggles resonated very strongly with me and so did her relationship with her grandmother. The tales of political turmoil narrated to her by her grandmother echoed the ones that were told to me by my grandmother. My grandmother’s memory of the famine of 1943, the bombings of then Calcutta by the Japanese, her participation in the Food Movement of Calcutta, all of them conjured images of a cultural past ablaze and in disorder, and yet, accessible through her words. Listening to the events, brought together by her memory, quilted together a past that was violent and torn-apart and yet, made familiar and unassuming through her narration. In the graphic novel, however, Satrapi’s grandmother did not have to witness the disruptive actions that took a heavy emotional and physical toll on her granddaughter. I could not provide my grandmother such a psychological respite.
Our inability to communicate with each other stemmed from an inability to speak the same language — both literally and metaphorically. My grandmother had a curious relationship with the revered deities, mostly goddesses, of the Hindu pantheon. My grandfather was an atheist and did not encourage the practice of religion in the family, but growing up, I had seen her murmuring prayers in front of the images of goddesses — her face seemed almost content while doing so. Living in Kolkata, I found myself changed irrevocably. Some of my life’s experiences were difficult to translate to her, and indeed, she found them completely out of order with actions and practices she had grown up to value. I longed to find a makeshift equivalent for a spiritual experience that could move me into positive action towards my own life. I thought my grandmother would value something similar, given that her dissatisfactions seemed to grow, enticed by my actions. One day, while working alone at a café, I bought a few bookmarks. One of them had the statement, “একদিন সমস্ত বৃদ্ধ দুঃখহীন বলতে পারবে, যাই|/ “One day, the elderly can state without fear, onwards!” In Bengali, “যাই” can be translated both as “farewell” and as the imperative, “Let us go.” I chose the latter meaning for the word and the sentence in Bengali appeared as a balm against the cruel suddenness of death. Writing on the nature of religious experience, Ricoeur writes:
[W]hatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression.
My interpretation of the expression came from a desire to supplant my difficulties in finding the religious within the boundaries of the English language for an eager dispersal of the need within a slippery grasp of the Bengali language. The detachment that I read as empowering came across to my grandmother as utterly incoherent, as her whispered prayers had appeared to me in the past. She struck the statement off and wrote a quote from Shakti Chattopadhyay’s poem: “যেতে পারি […]কিন্তু, কেন যাবো?”/ “I can depart […] but is there enough reason to?” My translation of the poem, here, is an attempt to find the religious in the recurrent and reinforcing act of translating thought across languages —
ভাবছি, ঘুরে দাঁড়ানোই ভালো।
এতো কালো মেখেছি দু হাতে
এতোকাল ধরে!
কখনো তোমার ক’রে, তোমাকে ভাবিনি।
এখন খাদের পাশে রাত্তিরে দাঁড়ালে
চাঁদ ডাকে : আয় আয় আয়
এখন গঙ্গার তীরে ঘুমন্ত দাঁড়ালে
চিতাকাঠ ডাকে : আয় আয়
যেতে পারি
যে-কোন দিকেই আমি চলে যেতে পারি
কিন্তু, কেন যাবো?
সন্তানের মুখ ধরে একটি চুমো খাবো
যাবো
কিন্তু, এখনি যাবো না
তোমাদেরও সঙ্গে নিয়ে যাবো
একাকী যাবো না, অসময়ে।।
I think, perhaps, to turn back is best.
I have smeared so much dark paint in both hands
across the years.
Never thought of your self to belong to you separately.
Now, standing here near the edge of the cliff at night
the moon beckons: come, come, come.
Now, standing near the banks of the Ganga, full of sleep
the pyre beckons: come come.
I can depart,
depart in any direction that appeals to me,
but, is there enough reason to?
Hold the face of my offspring and kiss it.
I will depart
but not yet
not without taking each one of you with me
I will not depart alone, in an unlikely hour.
During her last days, my grandmother describes her dreams: she is a child again, picking up numerous dungcakes, loads of them, and finally, she has so many, she doesn’t know where to place them. Her dreams have a seeming quality of endlessness, in the ways in which people remain around her as she watches them from her bed. Her mother lies down next to her and does not wake up even when my grandmother nudges her to wake up. My grandfather comes to visit her and does not enter the doorway and remains at the threshold, asking her to come and travel with him. The people and the memories remain disjointedly sutured to a body of time — inked linguistic sequences disparately held within a line. William Bronk’s cross-section of a poem presents the need to hold on to permanence whether in the image of a short poem or the repetition of the word, “world.”
I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
My grandmother comes with us in the drift of our lives, no more an anchor or the shaped letter, but the limitless promise of moulding ink with time. The need for an anchor gradually morphs into a willingness to set sail, with the shifting ligatures between waters and words.
