Perched on the Periphery

By Jharna Banerji

Nandita is a middle-aged Hindu widow who has always derived her identity from her roles as mother and grandmother. So when her son asks her to move from India to Illinois to help settle his young family in a new country, Nandita is certain where her duty lies and willingly leaves everything she knows behind. Unfortunately she never considers how she will build a life of her own once her usefulness to her sons family declines.

While Nandita attempts to redefine herself and find meaning in a new culture devoid of familiar traditions, her lifes path eventually leads her to Bill Brady, a widower, heartbroken over the recent death of his wife. As Bill and Nandita form a friendship over their commonalities related to grief, she is left to decide whether she wants him as a friendor something much more.

Perched on the Periphery paints an intimate portrait of a Hindu widows journey to find her identity, search for meaning within a new culture, and contemplate loving again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Feb 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781482888201

Jharna Banerji

Jharna Banerji was born in 1936 in pre-partition Karachi, married soon after independence and raised her sons in India and France. Now she travels the world from her home in India and writes tales known for their keenly observed characters and often surprising interpersonal dynamics.

Book preview

1

BEING NEEDED IS SUCH HEADY WINE

H er heart taking a couple of somersaults then settling down to a series of thudding beats had floundered along with her faltering feet. Peering into the gloom, she had looked intensely in the direction from where the sound of his coming had fallen upon her ears. She knew he was there, but where? And then joy flooding through her entire being, she had spied his familiar figure standing across the chasm of their separating rooftops. But why, she wondered, was he looking at her with such an enquiring, mischief-laden look?

What was he up to, she thought, as eyes a-twinkle below a set of eyebrows quirking upwards, he asked, ‘Where are your props today?’

Eyes flying wide open with consternation, she exclaimed, ‘Props! Which? What props?’

‘Your book of poems and … all those … all those other tomes that you carry around, what else?’ Before she could so much as open her mouth to give a fitting rejoinder, he had veered away from her so-called props and abruptly stated, ‘I’m coming over.’

Alarmed, she had croaked, ‘But you can’t.’

‘How you prattle on, of course I—’

‘No, you can’t, because this roof is not mine and they may not allow you on their roof.’

‘Now let me ask, however have you managed to get us into such a ridiculous spot? Do you really want me to believe that we have to get permission, from some sundry creatures that you vaguely call they?’

‘It happened because of you.’

‘Because of me? ‘I can see that you are living in a house and the house has a roof. So …’

‘The house is not mine, so how can the roof be mine? Tell me.’ ‘That’s logical enough.’ And as if losing interest in the exchange, he had turned around and started walking away.

Seeing him leave, bereft, she had stretched out a hand to hold him back. And then out of a cloudless sky, water had come cascading down upon her. Oh! How piercing the raindrops were, invasive and icy-cold, and she had cried out a strangled ‘Please don’t go, Dipto … it’s raining … you’ll get wet.’

A rivulet of cold water running along her thighs had forced her to open her eyes. She must have fallen asleep in the chair where she had sat down, a book in hand. Her back was aching and her mouth had gone dry. What was Prodipto doing here with her today? Yes, what was Pilot Officer Prodipto Kumar Roy doing here today? A tremor of something like apprehension had coursed through the pit of her stomach and moved into her heart.

She had risen, picked up the fallen glass, and gone in search of some water. Thirst quenched, she had purposefully moved to a chest of drawers placed directly across the room. Bringing out a photograph nestling there within the folds of her clothing, she had passed a questioning look upon it, then, holding it close to her heart, had moved to a window that overlooked the yard.

The moon was up in a sparkling clean sky! She had stood there and looked down upon the white of the yard now turned to silver. Squat somnolent shadows of the snow-shrouded trees dotted the terrain. Each blob of darkness staining the silvered surrounding was like a negative of the imprint of some ghost out of her past. It had given her an eerie feeling, and turning away from the window, she had quickly drawn the curtain across the windowpane. Even so, piercing the frail armour of the curtaining, a voice calling out persistently had fallen upon her ears. She heard the voice call out, ‘Nandita, Nandita, Nandita.’

It was the quiet and subdued yet unforgettable voice of a very dominant mainstay of her young days. She recognised it instantly. The voice was that of Dadu. Startled, she stood transfixed; the voice of her grandfather, how could that be? She had heard that voice all through her childhood and growing years. It was an intrinsic part of her, not separable from that which made up her whole.

And once again, she had sensed rather than heard her name being called. Placing the photograph atop the dresser, she had pushed the drapes aside and peered out. How ridiculous, how could Dadu be out there in the cold? It was just not possible, yet defying reason and logic, she wanted to believe that the surrounding was imbued with his warming presence. She stood enthralled, captivated! It was such a long time since anyone had called out to her by her given name! So long that the unfamiliar sounds that made up her name reverberated within the confines of her brain like a long-forgotten tune that had been brought alive by the alchemy of aloneness and the magic of the moon’s rays. And the tune, once wrought, escaping from her head, where it had been born, now ricocheted around like an echo within the four walls of her room. Catching hold of that echo, latching on to the trailing anchal of that tune, she had travelled ageless and unfettered through time and space. Inveigled by the magical illusory dimensions that had been created by her mind, once again a child, she had murmured, ‘Dadu.’

But if fantasies are to hold sway, then no mirrors should come in their way. Nandita’s eyes, alas, had proven far too restless. While ranging across the spheres, they had inadvertently flown open and stumbled upon as mundane a thing as the mirror that hung above the dresser in the room that was now her earthbound domain. One glance at the image reflected therein had shattered all her dreams and brought her tumbling down to earth. She had raised a tentative finger to her face and passed it across her forehead where a not so freshly ploughed furrow ran for the world at large to see. Her eyes, at one time large and luminous and alive, had looked back at her with a lacklustre stare. There was a time when those eyes alone had been enough to ensnare the one who had stood staring at her mischievously from across the next-door terrace at Bhabanipore. Time and tragedy had taken their toll and left their mark upon that pair of enticing eyes. And seated atop the dresser, his photograph, endowed with eternal youth, smiled on!

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Shaking herself out of the past, she was drawn towards the compelling presence of the small clock by which she measured her life these days. Lost to the world, she had not realised that the world had moved on towards another day since she had last paid attention to it. She did not remember when, but it was somewhere along the way, in the not-too-distant past of this the journey of her life, that she had ceded her right to decision-making. She did not have the option open to her today to make a random telephone call of inquiry. She had stood a long while at a window fronting the tree-lined drive and had stared out into the hostile blackness that shrouded the entrance.

Her past had called out to her today but where was her present? Out somewhere on those frosty roads, but where? Eyes squeezed tight, palms folded together, she had faced the congregation of all her gods and goddesses.

She had no yardstick by which she could gauge whether her long-distance prayers from Saisborough, this township in faraway Illinois, had wings sturdy enough to fly across the vast tracts of land and endless stretches of turbulent waters that separated the two locations. Did they indeed arrive at the revered feet and reach into the ears of the one whose favours she sought?

Only when she had heard a mixed babble of muffled voices followed by the recognisable footsteps of her grandchildren charging past her door had she let her tensed-up body uncoil. Sagging from the released hold of anxiety, she had lain back as one drained of a soaring, searing fever. She had wanted to run out of her room to see them in the flesh, ask them how they were, but had not done so. Had she emerged from her room, she believed it would have been construed as fussing and interfering on her part. She remembered a jumble of past dialogues that had stayed her feet and sealed her lips forever. They took a near-fixed pattern.

‘Thank God, you are home at last,’ or something close enough to that, would have surely come spilling from her lips.

And her son facing her, wearing an indecipherable expression, a frown creasing his brow, would just as predictably ask, ‘You’re still awake, Ma … but why?’

‘I was too worried to—’

‘Worried? What was there to worry about?’

His reply so terse, so cut and dried, had hurt.

And a reluctant dialogue would have petered out into a dead end!

But the unsaid words ‘You were never like this, my son, were you?’ had sat as heavy as a stone upon her heart.

She had learned from many such failed encounters that for the sake of peace, a charade of sound sleep had best be kept up. The pretence had soon turned to reality, for genuine sleep had thankfully come in and blotted out all the dialogues, all the debates, and all the disputes that lay seething, surging, suffocating, within her mind.

And while she slept, on the prowl up in the skies, a warm, living, growling dark cloud had turned itself into a noiseless sheet of rain and had come down upon the earth. So soft and sibilant and secretive was its advent that she had not heard it arrive, and having marked the territory, soft-pawed it had gone away again without so much as a whisper having been heard. To her dismay, when Nandita awoke, she found that its short and unannounced stay had mauled the unblemished beauty of the landscape and left it looking unkempt, bedraggled, and wounded. The sparkling whiteness of yesterday had turned into a dull and drab, unlaundered and unbleached white, a mere apology of the colour that was. The huge Christmas card that the yard had been just a few hours ago had turned into an abject Cinderella back from the ball.

With the sudden passing away of her young and personable husband, Nandita had been cashiered and all her colours had been snatched away from her. And it was then that Nandita had understood the real meaning of the colour white.

Thakuma, her paternal grandmother, showing an immense degree of leniency, considering the rigidity of her outlook in matters of societal observances, overlooking the dress code for widows of pure white, had ordered one of the reluctant male members of the family to go and buy ak dojon inchi paad saris for Nandita. Nandita had looked upon her new wardrobe of a dozen saris with inch-wide black borders with a surge of overwhelming rage. Sorrow and anguish set aside, eyes burning bright with anger and unshed tears, she had bundled together the lot and thrust them back into the hands of the courier of this bounty.

‘Pherot neeye jaao,’ she said firmly, ‘and bring back just half a dozen of the starkest of white thaan saris for me.’ With a short laugh bordering on hysteria, she had whirled around and left the room. And from thereon, having attired herself in a swath of white as a mark of protest against the pernicious ways of society, she had gone her own way. And today, she, the selfsame person, had not had courage enough to pick up a phone to ask her son where he and his family were. She was getting very tired of this timorous Nandita, but what was she to do? ‘Something, anything,’ she told herself as she walked into the bathroom, clothes in hand. She was running late, she knew, but …

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Nandita knew that she had woken at much the same time as she normally did, yet here she was, looking around for the shortfall in time as if it was a householder’s bunch of keys. With a grimace, she conceded that once lost, time, unlike misplaced keys, was not retrievable.

An individual as time-bound as she had made herself was none too pleased with her tardiness, for among the few luxuries she allowed herself was her first cup of perfectly brewed tea. But this tea was very severely time-linked as it had to be made at a location that was as yet bereft of other unwelcome overwhelming aromas. And to meet that end, she had to make sure that come morning she was the first to make use of the kitchen. The clock told her that either Meeta or Tukun would have already come and gone from there. She would now have to confront the all-encompassing smell of coffee, which would surely be found percolating in a pot on the counter, a smell that her nostrils put on par with an alien takeover of a cultural unit whose mainstay for several centuries had been tied to the drinking of tea. She believed that a Bengali family’s early hours of waking should be imbued in the fragrant aroma of Darjeeling, Nilgiri, or Lopchu tea. Any change in this habit was tantamount to an act of treason! But then, the younger generation … She had shrugged, crinkling her nose.

And as to how she felt regarding this matter of tea versus coffee that, over a period of time, had come to be one of the better-kept open secrets of the family, to be taken out, mulled over, laughed at, and to be put away out of sight once again.

‘How finicky your mom has become, Tukun,’ Meeta had laughingly commented one day.

‘Mom?’

‘Theek aachey, theek aachey baba! Fine! Mother, Ma, or whatever, happy?’

‘She doesn’t like coffee, that’s all.’

‘Big deal, tea is Bangali, and coffee is …’

‘You and your assumptions.’

But, an assumption or whatever her son thought it was, it definitely was a fixation with Nandita. On descending to the lower floor, she had entered the kitchen. Though she found the place empty, there were yet sights and signs and smells everywhere that someone had visited the place ahead of her: the dishwasher stood door-ajar, gap-toothed from where a pair of mugs had been removed, news by the kilos spilled out of the heavyweight presence of the day’s newspaper that lay in disarray alongside the remains of coffee making. The smell of freshly made coffee hung heavily in the air, and the aroma overwhelmed her senses. It would be a waste of effort on her part to go through the ordained ritual of tea making today. She could tread the entire path, but brewed heaven had gone out of her grasp this morning. Against all civilised norms of tea drinking, she made herself a cup with a teabag dipped in water on the boil for who knows how long.

As she sat sipping the tasteless turbid brew, spewing words, the little transistor seated atop the dishwasher fussily informed, warned, and advised. A splash of rainwater, it said, arriving in tandem with a sudden warm front had caused a thaw to set in sometime in the very small hours of the morning. The big voice within the little radio, continuing ponderously, stated that the vehicles out upon the streets were now skittering around like novice skaters out for the first time upon an ice rink. The populace was being warned of the treacherous intent of the snow that had, on being touched, turned to ice upon the roads. Like the snow, she too had turned to ice; frozen in time, she was trapped within this cold and eerie and lonesome zone from which she could not perceive any possibility of escape. What was the catalyst that had brought about this major change within her that had put her into this quandary? And she had remembered the genesis of this change: a letter.

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How could she forget that afternoon when that life-changing missive had arrived? It was a gusty, feisty, grumbling, rumbling, thundering, blundering pre-monsoon day tearing its hair out in its haste to grow into a full-blown monsoon day. Tripping upon its own feet, it had lunged into a sari she had put out to dry in her little balcony. Buffeted around by the gusting moisture-laden wind, it had ballooned out in readiness for taking to its wings.

Faced with the spectacle of all her doors and windows banging their heads out frenetically, the sheets of the day’s newspaper chasing one another around the ceiling, the curtains frenziedly flapping around and tying themselves into knots, Nandita had come out on the run onto the balcony and had grabbed the sari all set for flight with not a moment to spare, as her little tulsi plant in its tiny plastic planter accompanied by a palm-leaf haath-pakha and sundry other small objects had flown past her head and soon gone out of sight. She had tried to see where they had disappeared and had instead seen the postman struggling along the long and narrow strip of land pretending to be a garden that fronted the little set of lower-income-group flats where she had a place of her own. An uprooted tree just about missed him as he ploughed his way across, hanging onto his khaki cap with one hand and the precious cargo of mail in a canvas bag with the other. And while he was still a good distance away from a sheltered spot, the rain had come.

A smattering of small drops had been followed by huge plopping ones, which had soon turned into a deluge. And on coming in contact with the dry earth, the drops of rainwater had released the beautiful scent that the earth holds within its bosom to let go of when the rains first come. Nandita took in a lungful and then another and then another of the perfumed air as she contemplated upon the advent of kal boishakhi. How pretentious, how over-reaching was its arrival; even so, how one looked forward to coming face to face with it over and over again each year. A bolt of lightning ran zigzag across the darkened sky as the doorbell rang in consonance with the peal of thunder that had inevitably followed after.

A damp letter in hand, soaked from head to toe, stood Ponkoj the postman, wearing a querulous look upon his face. ‘Here you are, Boudi, a letter from America for you. Must be from your son, but see how wet I’ve got bringing it to you.’

‘Come in, Ponkoj, I’ll get a towel, and while you dry yourself, I’ll make a nice hot cup of tea for you.’

‘Na, na, thaak, let it be, there’s no need.’

‘Who said so? A hot cup will do you a lot of good.’ A peeved postman when you had your one and only child connected to you via the letters he regularly brought home to you? That would never do. ‘Let me put on the fan, it will help dry you out.’ And she had left the room, leaving him no space for any further protest. Niceties over the young postman had left and Nandita had at last been able to turn her attention towards the letter reading that she had been compelled to keep in abeyance.

Please, Ma, Tukun had written, why don’t you come and join us here? I think it’s time you made some changes. Tomal is a handful at one and Meeta is getting very tired chasing him all over the place, you see, she is expecting our second baby in some six months from now. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to get this good news!

She had been none too pleased to hear about the forthcoming baby. Having two babies in such quick succession wasn’t good for either of the infants or for the parents, she felt. And how old was Tukun himself that he was getting so embroiled? However, she had expressed none of this and had congratulated them prettily but had not committed herself on the matter of making a move to join them in the US.

Her son knew her better than she realised and, reading between the lines, had written back to tell her: Ma, it’s the done thing these days! Have all the babies you want in quick succession and bring them up together. And then after having written on sundry irrelevant matters, he had come back to his original request once again. Won’t you please help out? I know you will. She was being manipulated, she knew, but it felt so good to be manipulated! And then in total sincerity, he had added, Besides, I don’t like to think of you being there all alone so far away in Kolkata, working as hard as you do. I have already begun processing the necessary papers, just say yes, and as soon as they are done, I’ll mail them to you. Please, Ma, please say yes!

How can I, Tukun? After years of hard work, I have just become headmistress, she had wanted to protest but had not written back to say so. Being needed so desperately was indeed heady wine, and the fumes had risen to her head and robbed her of reason. Letting go of her hard-won position at her workplace had been perhaps the most painful part of her uprooting, and having resigned with regret, she had numbly stumbled on with the closure of the rest of the life that she had put together little by little, bit by bit. The flat had been sold, and fitting her life into a couple of suitcases, she had caught a flight to Chicago.

But Tukun, when she emerged from the clutches of the Customs at O’Hare, had so clearly expressed his pleasure at seeing her that all her doubts had been immediately wiped away from her mind. Bodily lifting her off the ground, he had twirled her around and set her down only when she had pleaded for mercy. Looking down with love upon her, breathing hard from the exertion, he had said, ‘Oh, Ma, how glad I am to see you here.’ And her heart had filled up with light.

Reluctantly at first and then with enthusiasm, she had stepped into the breach. Without any element of doubt in those early years, she had become the centre point of that little universe that Tukun and Meeta were building up together.

‘Oh, Ma, how the babies love you,’ Meeta would chortle. And Tukun, not to be outdone in the popularity stakes, would add, ‘Not more than I do.’ And a very pleased Nandita went husky. ‘Grow up. Tukun, your father went and named you Tukun …’

‘And so he wants to remain a little guy forever.’

‘Meeta my girl, he had no idea then that I’d grow to be so large.’ And they had laughed together.

‘Ma, stop cooking all this delish grub, I’m growing a paunch.’

And Meeta would add, ‘Please, Ma, don’t stop cooking nice things. We’ll make Tukun run around the block instead.’ And then, almost making her blush, ‘Ma, you really are a superb cook.’

She was feted and fawned upon, and slowly she had allowed herself to let go of that part of her that spelt Nandita the individual. The kids still loved her and so did her son, perhaps, but they did not need her as they had at one time. She still cooked as she did earlier, but …

Time, alas, has a way of making the most valuable of persons, places, and commodities redundant. And so she too had become redundant. Ten years was a long time, and she had ceded her position in the hierarchy of this household, little by little by little. In little bits and pieces, in little shreds and tatters, till today she did not know who she really was! So much so that in her dream today, she had gone to the extent of telling her Dipto that she had no roof of her own!

She was tired of being a mere bystander; today she would make some decisions, however unimportant or obscure they might be. She would cook the young family a hot meal. Cornflakes and cold milk, what a start to a cold and wintry day! She fried some eggs, buttered some hot toast, and made a steaming hot cup of cocoa each for all three of them. Placing the food upon the table, she stepped back.

Her granddaughter Tanmayee was the first to make an entry. ‘Hi, Thamma,’ she said in passing, going to the rear glass door of the kitchen. Then face falling, ‘Oh, no! Where has all that lovely whitey, whitey fluffy snow gone? We had such a groovy time playing in the snow yesterday,’ she added wistfully. ‘It was real cool out there. You should have come with us,’ She was cut short in midsentence by an admonishing voice. Meeta had made her entry onto the scene.

‘Stop wasting your time, Tammy, have your breakfast. Want to be late for school?’

‘Tammy?’ Nandita had winced at the Americanisation of a perfectly beautiful Indian name.

‘I was telling Thamma what fun we had yesterday.’

‘You should have better sense than to do that now.’ The tone ominous, giving a pause between each word, she had spelt out ‘Have … your … breakfast … immediately.’ The eyes of her mother-in-law trained upon her always made her edgy. And that never did bode well for the children.

‘I don’t want all this egg ’n stuff.’

‘Who’s asking you to have that? Get yourself some cereal and get on with it.’ Looking at her watch, she fumed. ‘Where has that boy gone? He should’ve been down and done with eating.’ Looking upwards, she shouted in a voice gone harsh with annoyance, ‘Tom … Tom, come down immediately.’ And from the corner of her eye, she had seen her mother-in-law standing there stiff-lipped. She rarely said anything these days but those silences spoke volumes, for the look in her eyes as she stood brooding on the sidelines was so sharp and critical that it managed to make her stomach curl with resentment. Why had she changed so much, she asked of herself, as turning her attention back to her daughter, the flustered mother snapped, ‘Not done yet?’

‘Aw, Mom, I’m eating as fast as I can.’

Oh, how she nags, Nandita thought. And ‘Tom’? She resented the name Tom. Why and how had his given name Tomal become Tom? To please whom had it become Tom? This great rush towards effacing the children’s identity, she hated that with a fierce intensity. She knew they would come face to face with a major identity crisis one day. Only then would the parents understand how they had engineered this hurt upon their own children.

‘OK, OK, but I’m going to leave that boy behind some day. I refuse to be late at work because of his lazy ways,’ she said between gritted teeth, as she bit down into an apple. Her breakfast!

An apple to sustain a full-grown woman, Nandita looked at the cooked meal lying untouched upon the table, and then looked her daughter-in-law up and down from the corners of her eyes. She was certainly thinner now than she had been a few months from today, but the loss of weight, she assessed critically, had brought a certain gauntness to her face that was making her look haggard. Scrutiny over, she concluded that all this dieting was doing her no good, just as this constant nagging was doing no good to either of her children.

Having stepped out of her limits, breaking away from her self-imposed vow of silence, Nandita spoke softly yet firmly in defence of her tardy grandson. ‘Young people need a lot of sleep Meeta, it was very late when—’

Breaking in midway into her observation, Meeta had stated in an ominously soft tone, ‘I know when we came in. If the rest of us can get dressed in time, so can Tom. He’s getting very spoilt and irresponsible with all this mollycoddling.’ The snow might have melted in the yard but there was frost in the air. ‘Please don’t encourage him to be lazy as well, Ma.’ The little girl Tammy, though young, could sense the build-up of tension between the two women and looked fearfully from one face to the other. Her grandmother’s face had gone chalk white, while her mother’s had in contrast become flushed with heightened colour. And it was at this crucial juncture that young Tomal, renamed Tom, had entered, all smiles, upon the scene.

‘There you are at last,’ said the young mother, turning to the cause of all her immediate frustration.

‘Wow, Ma, that’s a nice breakfast you’ve cooked us.’

‘Oh, that? Are you planning to eat that now? Pass the cereal, Tammy.’

Heart afire, Nandita had stood on the sidelines and watched the early morning drama unwind, and the three breakfasts she had cooked had gone from hot to cool, and from cool, on to cold.

‘Get the car keys. Where on earth are your jackets?’

‘Only weaklings wear jackets on a warm day like this.’

‘I won’t wear a jacket if Tom doesn’t.’

‘Yes, you will and so will your brother. Come on, we are getting late, stop dawdling.’

‘I’m not dawdling.’

‘Yes, you are,’ this from the brother.

‘Aw, shut up, Tom. No one asked you.’

‘Just shut up.’

Poking her tongue at her brother, she had emphatically added, ‘No, you shut up.’

‘Stop fighting and, that too, immediately, or I’m leaving. Where’s your bag, Tammy?’

The bickering of the children and the nagging efforts of the mother to discipline them continued to be heard by Nandita as they walked out of the kitchen and out of the front door, and even till they had got into the car. The voices were stilled only when the car had been driven away. Their departure was like the exiting of a tornado. The silenced kitchen lay reeling under its assault. Nandita sighed deeply, wondering about the upbringing of her grandchildren.

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So much! So much of difference had come about in this world! She had harked back to the days of her childhood when the word of her grandmother had been absolute law. Would anyone among them have dared spurn a plate of food placed before them by her?

Dadu and Thakuma had only one son, and he had fathered but a single child and that was their granddaughter Nandita. Nandita, who now lived in distant Saisborough, Illinois, in faraway America! They had three daughters as well with several children each. Dadu had a brother, and several sisters. But sisters and daughters did not count seriously, as they no longer belonged to the family after they had married and moved away. And of course Dadu had many, many cousins, Gangulys all, who lived in different nooks and crannies of the same home.

The joints that kept the joint family together had been showing signs of giving way. And, Nandita recalled how, over this barely held-together empire, battened by the hierarchical powers vested in her by her positioning in the family and by the force of her personality, her grandmother had ruled supreme!

And what to speak of an empire, she herself was hard-pressed to have even a modicum of any kind of control over this little family in which she was ensconced!

She stood wondering what made her so pallid and powerless in comparison to her grandmother. Was it the fact that she had been widowed so soon after her marriage or was it something that she had inherited from her mother? For though her mother had been awarded colour aplenty by her mother-in-law, she was yet a drab and colourless person with no individual will of her own.

But Nandita just could not accept that she was anything like her. Though devoid of colour by custom and her own choice, she had never been a colourless person. Had she not dared to fall in love while living within a milieu where falling in love was a cognisable offence to be dealt with in the harshest of terms? Had she not dared to walk out from within the stays of restraining authority to make a life of her own? Had not power flown from her as she had walked through the corridors of the school where she had taught?

By the rules of the game she had seen being played in her young days, she was the matriarch now. Why then had she come to this powerless, positionless position? Was there some fatal flaw in her, or was it the changing times that had brought her to this positionless position where she stood, not quite in the inner circle, yet not quite out of it. Perched precariously on the periphery of her son and his family’s bustling, jostling, full-of-life lives.

She had obstinately moved towards the gas range.

Positioning the cooked food upon the table, she had turned expectantly towards the door as her son entered. When he was growing, people used to say that he was the spitting image of his father. She looked closely as he entered, and wondered why so many had said so. His hair waved as did hers, black and unruly at times. And he was of a different build, more like his grandfather the major general had been, rather than what his father was. And then he had turned swiftly towards her and she had seen her husband Prodipto in that one little movement, in that angle of the face, as he asked, ‘Where’s the paper, Ma?’

With a catch rising to her throat, she had picked up the pile of sheets of newsprint in disarray and handed them without a word to him.

With a short ‘Thanks,’ he had taken the dishevelled sheaf of papers from her. ‘Look what a mess this lot’s in, why must Meeta …’ he grumbled as he grabbed a bowl. Having shaken some cereal into it, he had splashed some milk onto it and, plucking a spoon out of the dishwasher, had sat down to eat, paper in hand. Eyes upon the day’s headlines, he had not even cast a glance towards the plate of food that was waiting expectantly for him upon the table. The mother had looked on in silence.

She sighed softly as she heard the front door shut. She and this house, her companion, were back together again in their aloneness. The sky had gone darker still; was it going to rain again?

Leaving everything exactly where it was, putting aside the devastation wrought upon her heart, she had gone back up to her room and turned back her gaze upon the devastation that had been wrought upon the yard by the storm. It was indeed a bleak sight, saddening beyond compare. Why did she feel so alone, so abjectly alone? She had never felt that she was alone in that little flat of hers in Kolkata even after Tukun had left home. But there were other times hidden away in her memory when she had felt much the same way. Along the path of life’s long journey, she had somewhere along the way taken a turn that had brought her back full circle to a familiar well-known spot, a site where she stood alone, hovering unnoticed upon the periphery of other people’s preoccupations.

Nandita had been a child who had felt forever marginalised. But then, she had been burdened with the questionable greatness of her father, and her own doubtful usefulness in being a link to posterity for that (questionable albeit) greatness of her progenitor. Had Nandita been a son, matters might have been different. But then, she was a daughter, and not a son.

It was Mejo Thakuma, Nandita’s grand-aunt, who always managed to leave a hollow and empty space within the little girl Nandita’s heart. Montu, Jhontu, and Rintu, the three sons of her son were the trio upon whose shoulders the future continuance of this segment of the Ganguly lineage now rested. They were her grandsons! Her trump cards three while her imperious sister-in-law had none, so should she not be the one with the upper hand? Thakuma did have grandsons, but as they were the sons of her daughters, they, to her chagrin, did not show up in the credit column of her personal bank account!

And while giving battle, the grandmother of these three lads used a high-pitched voice that carried through the corridors of that mansion built by Nandita’s forefathers. ‘My son may not be barrister …’

She was cut short with a dignified and subdued ‘Mejo Bou, you know very well no one denied anyone the opportunity.’

Poor lady, she was no match for her superior adversary! But one day, having lost innumerable rounds in this verbal dual, Mejo Thakuma had pulled out the ultimate ace of her pack and thrown it open for the entire world to see. ‘You talk of greatness as if it were synonymous with the name of your son. In truth, it is my son who has saved this prestigious family from being written off from the face of this earth. He has three sons; each one of them will carry on the illustrious name of the Gangulys into posterity. Your Nandita, your son’s only child, is nothing but the living proof of the dead end of your husband’s line. Daughters, as everyone knows, are born to help carry on the line of other people’s families.’

‘Great men do not need sons to commemorate their passage through this earth.’ Imperious she was, and majestically she had closed the subject. But for the little girl who had been used as ammunition in this battle royal, it was quite another matter, for her great-aunt’s final salvo aimed at Thakuma’s door had come hurtling at her instead and had left Nandita wounded. Lacerated by the cutting edge of the brutal words, she had looked down upon herself with disgust and wondered with tears in her eyes how she, a living creature, could be so cursed as to be the dead end of all hopes.

But with courage culled from who knows where, she had slowly shaken off all her inherited encumbrances and had urged herself to stand tall. She had not been willing to accept that she, a living, breathing full-of-life creature, could possibly be the dead end of anyone’s hopes, and her faith had been further cemented once she had fallen into the magnetic field of a magical entity, her Dipto, who had dared to, cared to love her!

Travelling between time zones, she had returned, back from her one-time lonely days, into her yet lonelier present. Like the sea at low tide, the clamouring voices from Nandita’s childhood home had crept away from the shore of her life, leaving behind only the debris of her memories. She would have to tread carefully or the shards would make her bleed.

Her legs were aching. She had no idea how long she had been standing at that bedroom window. She turned her gaze inwards and went and sat down in a chair. Her unmade, unkempt bed sprawled untidily in a slouch in the middle of the room testimony to the disarray in which the entire home now lay. The tedium of the repetitive and boring tasks lying ahead of her made her hold back awhile.

The rhythm of her daily rounds had been disrupted by the unscheduled visit of her dead and distanced relatives. This was America where she lived; one did not call on people without prior intimation. Did they not know it disrupted the flow of one’s life? But how were they to? The time and emotional zone from where they came, a guest walked in when his heart so desired.

The turmoil and upheaval of the long and arduous journey she had just undertaken had fatigued her. Disheartened at the recollection of the morning’s events, she had dispiritedly gone towards the rooms the children occupied. Very often she reminded herself of Damini. Damini marooned by circumstances in the household of the Gangulys of Bhabanipore, Damini, devoid of all will or volition of her own.

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Yes, Damini, who had arrived at the door of the Ganguly family when she had just turned eighteen. A widow with no prospects other than the worst, she had been positioned as maid of all menial jobs in the Ganguly household by her maternal uncle who had no desire to feed and clothe her for the rest of his life.

Clutching onto her mother’s sari and peering out from behind her, Nandita had looked on with interest at the advent of Damini. Like a jatra being staged, the entire episode had come to pass in the centre of their courtyard.

The duo of uncle and niece had been waiting long hours for an audience. The uncle, an emaciated unpleasant-looking individual, stood a few steps ahead of the dark-as-ebony, buxom lass who trailed behind, clutching a small bundle.

And then she had heard her say, ‘She looks quite old to me.’

No, she does not look old to me, the little Nandita had thought. But why is she so big in the front, she had asked herself, looking at the full-breasted form of Damini with care. And then, what a pretty face she has, I think I would like to have her as a friend.

Falling upon Thakuma’s feet, the uncle had wailed, ‘She is quite young, Ma, she really is.’ Then, afraid of doing damage to his own prospects of getting rid of a burden, he had added a corrigendum. ‘But she is old enough to work very hard.’ Turning to his niece, he had threatened, ‘Let me not hear any complaints about you, my girl, or …’

And that was how Damini had come to be installed forever in the household of the Gangulys, a part of the whole, yet never quite a part of anything.

Picking up the empty coffee mugs, Nandita had hesitated a moment before negotiating the stairs. Instead of stepping downwards, she slumped down instead upon the topmost step of the staircase. Why did she feel as if she was fast becoming Damini herself? She was fast becoming a Damini, but certainly not Thakuma! She would have to do something about that, but what?

Today, her heart was not in the mundane, moribund tasks she performed every single day.

Never would she abdicate her independence, she had told herself in a spurt of anger that had been born out of the total insensitivity of her near and dear ones. And when she was not yet twenty, she had declared her very own war of independence. But caught in the snare of emotions, she, at a much later date, had gone and succumbed to circumstances and ceded ground.

What was she doing here, why was she killing herself, what was her future? For the first time perhaps, she clearly asked herself what reason she had to have made herself into a Damini. She walked down the stairs without picking up the cups from where she had put them. An unfamiliar strain of resentment surged through her heart as she entered the kitchen and encountered the sight of the table loaded with stale, shrivelled-up food.

The transistor was still at its task of terrifying the humans holed up at home. It spoke with relish of the accidents, the near accidents, and the possible accidents that the iced-up roads had conjured up. The voice within the small radio was insistent, persistent, and very frightening to have as a sole companion in a home void of the people out of her past and of her present. Nandita quickly stepped across the room and stilled that voice of doom.

She moved towards the centre of the kitchen and her nose curled with distaste. The dining table lay cluttered up with an array of plates, glasses, bowls, cups, mugs, spoons, still more spoons, forks and paper napkins, four differently decorated cartons of cereals, a gallon can of milk, a carton of orange juice, and a bowl full of fruits. And adding to the clutter sat four incongruous plates of cooked food.

She picked up the plates one at a time and scraped the contents into the garbage bin, then she poured the glass of cocoa with its thin skin of cream into the sink and moved to the next plate and its accompanying glass. She had become American enough to be able to throw away good wholesome fresh food into a dustbin. In her other incarnation, she would have been tied up in knots with guilt, had she but thought of performing any such deed. The last plate was the one she had placed in readiness for her son. Picking up the plate deliberately from the table, she had furiously scraped off the congealing mess into the garbage can. And it was then that she had heard the distinct thud of the arrival of the day’s mail.

2

A LETTER THAT DID NOT QUITE GET WRITTEN

T he garbage bin had soon swallowed up the physical evidence of Nandita’s disappointing debacle. But the foetid after-smell of failure, frustration, and leaking egg-yolks had lingered on, somewhere deep down within her psyche. Standing at the threshold of the kitchen, she had wondered a moment what next to do. The recently arrived mail was still sitting upon their doorstep! There was a time when it would not have lain thus neglected, for then a gem in the form of a letter from home had nearly always emerged out of its bulky bosom. And what a celebration they had made of those arrivals.

Like trophies, the letters would sit atop their newly acquired sideboard for a couple of days at least. ‘How many for me?’ Without fail, Tukun would ask on seeing the display as he returned home from work.

‘Expecting some letters, dear husband?’ asked his young wife mischievously. ‘Who will write to you?’

‘My mum-in-law perhaps, she loves me a little bit more than she loves you.’

‘More than she loves me! Not possible.’ A trifle perturbed ‘Don’t be silly …’

‘Have you written a single letter to her, Tukun?’ his mother had asked with a smile.

‘Must one write to expect a reply, Ma, what of her love for her one and only son-in-law?’

‘Bandor,’ what a monkey he was, she had affectionately admonished.

‘Look, Ma, has received a pile of them.’ Turning to her mother-in-law, Meeta said, ‘How lucky you are, Ma, to have so many people who love you so much.’

‘Don’t even try to compete with her, Meetu, like a film star, Ma has a regular fan following back there in Cal.’

Yes, she thought, a star status conferred upon her by the aura that hung around that little piquant something about being in that unattainable far-off land of milk and honey called the United States of America, to which so many hankered to be linked, but for how long would it last?

Letters had never littered her life with the abandoned abundance of fan mail, for she had never been a star. No, that would be an untruth, for she had been a star to someone, though it was for just a fleeting moment in time. The one for whom she had been a star, a prima donna, and the prime moving force of his life had written but a handful of letters to her. The letters he had carried around in the pocket of his winter uniform before posting them carried a whiff of the scent of naphthalene balls in which they had been stored through the summer months, embroiled with the distinctive perfume of the aftershave he always used!

And the starched stiff summertime khakis with their mixed set of inputs of starch and sweat and steam, from the hot and heavy iron that had passed over its surface. A potpourri of all these scents had been left upon one of the last letters he had written her. In that, he had exhorted her to come and join him: Must you go on trying to please my parents? he had asked of her. If you don’t come back immediately to me with that little rascal of ours, I will resign my commission and come and stay beside you at home. And may God help us if Daddy drives us out of his regal government lodgings. She had not taken his threat any too seriously; it just did not do to displease one’s seniors, she had told herself, and had laughed it off. It was a pity that letter writing was fast becoming a thing of the past. How delightfully alluring was the telltale perfume each of those missives carried, if only you would expend a few moments in trying to guess from whence it came. She should have heeded that call. For only a few letters later he had cut short his sojourn upon this earth and gone out of the reach of pen and paper.

That short-lived stardom, alas, had indeed been short-lived, and her recently acquired star status had soon begun to change as well; you have to remain centre stage to hold on to the allegiance of your fan club. As for Meeta, she had promoted herself from letter writing to the joys of telephoning. Her brothers had moved America-wards and her parents had also joined the bandwagon soon after. The grandbabies needed some caring hands! Tukun had continued to remain letter unfriendly. So the only recipient of letters was Nandita now. On very rare occasions, a letter did stray her way but those missives conveyed nothing more than some random words written down in ink. The heartbeats underlying those words were no longer audible. The nourishing kernel of caring that had linked those earlier communications had slowly but steadily dried up, and now only the chaff of near-forgotten relationships had remained. And so, over the years, the arrival of the mail had ceased to excite her curiosity. She had tried to turn her back upon its boring repetitive inroad, but it had such a big and bulky and boisterously invasive persona that if you were a trapped-at-home individual, it managed craftily to draw you into its orbit.

‘Had we been in Kolkata, we could have made a lot of money selling raddi,’ Meeta had opined in one of those early days.

‘A brilliant idea, we can carry the lot back when we manage to go home some day. Do you think it would cover the cost of our tickets, Ma?’

And Nandita, moving away from the banter, had asked, ‘Why do they waste so much paper?’

Emerging from the kitchen, she had stood uncertain of her next move. Then she had moved forward and opened the front entrance door that led into their home. Grudgingly she had bent and picked up the lot to place it upon a small table. The days of plenty have come to us, Nandita thought as she looked down upon an array of fliers brandishing an array of enticing offers, we don’t have time for you now.

It was from Meeta that she had learnt that there were treasures aplenty hidden away within these voluminous sheaves of printed matter. ‘Ma,’ her daughter-in-law had warned, ‘you must keep a close watch on the coupons and offers that