I was born and brought up in Jadavpur, South Calcutta, in a joint family of twenty-two people living under one roof. Twenty-two people in one house may sound almost impossible today, but to me it was simply home. There was always someone around, someone talking, laughing, arguing, giving advice, asking questions, or quietly keeping track of what everyone else was doing. Privacy was certainly not one of the privileges of childhood, but neither was loneliness. The house was full of people and therefore full of life. Looking back, I realise how fortunate I was to grow up in that kind of warmth and togetherness, even though, as a child, I naturally took it all for granted.
The story of our family, however, begins much before I was born. My Dadu was a doctor in Faridpur, which is now in Bangladesh. During Partition, he had to leave behind the life he had built there and come to India with his two brothers, one a barrister and the other a doctor. My Baba was only two years old at the time. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like to leave behind an established home, a medical practice, possessions and an entire familiar world, and to arrive somewhere else knowing that life had to be started all over again. There was no gradual transition from one life to another. There was simply the necessity of beginning again.
Dadu rebuilt his medical practice in Calcutta, but medicine was only one part of his life. He was deeply committed to education and was an educationalist at heart. He himself had been a gold medallist in Sanskrit, and he believed very strongly in the power of education. Baba grew up in poverty, but Dadu's faith in education never wavered. With his encouragement, Baba continued his studies and eventually completed his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Calcutta under the guidance of Professor Shyama Prasad Banerjee. He went on to become a professor of Mathematics. Also, he received an opportunity to go to Moscow State University for his postdoctoral work. It was a wonderful opportunity, and perhaps the beginning of a very different life, but once again, life had its own plans. My uncle passed away when he was only forty, and the circumstances of the family changed. Baba gave up the opportunity to go to Moscow.
Sometimes I think about that lost possibility. If Baba had gone to Moscow, perhaps my brother and I would have been born in Russia. So somewhere there may be another version of our family story in which my brother and I grew up speaking Russian. It is a funny thought, but it also reminds me of how much of life is determined by circumstances we have no control over.
Baba has been one of the most important influences on my life. More than anything, he has helped me discover myself. He has given me the freedom to look inward and the courage to look beyond what is familiar. He taught me to think openly, to question what I was told, and not to accept the boundaries of the world around me simply because they were there. He made me feel that there was a larger world waiting to be explored and, more importantly, that I had the right to find my own place in it. I did not understand all of this when I was young. At that time, he was simply my Baba. It is only with age that I have begun to understand how much his quiet faith in me has shaped the person I have become.
My Ma has influenced me in a very different way. She was the headmistress of a girls' school, and as a child, I was scared of her. Quite genuinely scared. In our large family, almost everyone spoiled me. My aunts spoiled me, my uncles spoiled me, my cousins spoiled me, and Baba certainly spoiled me. Ma, however, seemed to have decided that someone had to maintain standards. She was strict, disciplined and not particularly impressed by my ability to charm my way out of things. For a long time, I thought I was very different from her. As I grew older, however, I discovered something rather inconvenient: I am actually a great deal like my Ma. Her discipline, her sense of responsibility, her ability to manage people and her determination to keep going even when circumstances are difficult have all found their way into me. I spent my childhood trying not to become like her and, somewhere along the way, became her shadow.
Then there is my Dada. If I was the relaxed child in the family, Dada was the academically serious one. He always stood first in school, stood second in the Higher Secondary examination in West Bengal, did exceptionally well in the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination, cracked the ISI entrance examination, stood 72nd in the All India JEE and secured Computer Science at IIT Kanpur. My Ma, however, did not want to send him that far away, so he eventually studied at IIT Kharagpur. While Dada was collecting academic achievements, I was doing something rather different. I was playing, having fun and generally enjoying myself. I had no particular intention of studying seriously. In fact, my childhood ambition was to become a guard at the Taj Hotel. Not because I had any interest in security, I simply liked the uniform. That was the entire career plan.
Dada later went to Cornell University for his PhD, and in many ways, his going away was the beginning of my own curiosity about the world beyond Calcutta. He was my brilliant elder brother, always several steps ahead of me academically, and I watched him leave for a place that, to me at that age, existed somewhere between imagination and geography. Through him, I was introduced to Western classical music, classic Western literature and a world of ideas very different from the one I had grown up in. He took me to places I might never have discovered on my own and, without perhaps ever intending to, made the world outside our familiar surroundings seem accessible. I don't think I understood the significance of it then. He was simply my Dada, the brilliant elder brother whom I admired, occasionally envied, and watched with the slightly irritating awareness that he seemed to be doing all the things the brilliant elder brother was supposed to do.
I still remember going to see him off when he first left for America. That was when I saw a British Airways aeroplane up close, and I was fascinated. I wanted to ride one. It is funny to think that such a small moment stayed with me. Until then, my ambitions had been considerably less academic. But somewhere between watching Dada leave for Cornell and seeing that aeroplane, the world beyond Calcutta began to seem a little more real. Perhaps that was the beginning of my own desire to travel. Somehow, the girl who had wanted to become a guard at the Taj Hotel because she liked the uniform eventually found herself going to Toronto for her PhD.
Dada later became a scientist at Yahoo Labs, which brought with it another, rather more tangible benefit to the family, a wonderful collection of Yahoo T-shirts and jackets.
But going to Canada was very different from watching Dada leave for America. I was twenty-three, and this time I was the one leaving home. I had grown up surrounded by twenty-two people, and suddenly I was alone in a completely unfamiliar country. I was frightened. I remember that feeling very clearly. I had never been that far away from everything familiar, and the idea of building a life in a new country was daunting. Then Dada came from Ithaca to receive me. I still remember seeing him in Toronto airport. It was as though the entire house in Calcutta, the people, the familiarity, the sense of belonging, had somehow travelled across the ocean and arrived in the form of one person. The country was still unfamiliar, but it no longer felt quite so foreign. Seeing Dada there made the distance between home and this new life seem suddenly much smaller. Looking back, I realise how much Dada influenced my sense of what was possible, long before I was conscious of it. He had shown me, simply by living his own life, that the world beyond Calcutta was not some distant, inaccessible place.
Baba's influence on me was different, but equally profound. Dada made the world beyond home visible to me, Baba gave me the confidence to find myself within it. He never made me feel that I had to become a particular person simply because circumstances or expectations had decided it for me. He allowed me to discover who I was. That freedom has probably been one of the greatest gifts of my life.
Marriage was another chapter I had not particularly planned. In fact, I was not eager to get married at all to an unknown person. I used to threaten my ma and my aunts that if they married me to someone I did not like, I would simply run away from my in-laws' house. They were sufficiently familiar with my personality to worry that I might actually do it. Perhaps I had earned that reputation. I was the youngest child in our immediate family and one of the youngest in the larger joint family, arriving after six boys and many years after my eldest girl cousin. I had therefore been thoroughly spoiled by almost everyone, except Ma, who remained committed to the important task of keeping me grounded. Several marriage proposals came and went, each accompanied by its own collection of expectations and conditions. Then there was this man who seemed genuinely interested in my academic growth. That caught my attention. He himself was a gold medallist from Jadavpur University in Electrical Engineering, completed his MTech at IIT Kanpur and his PhD at Imperial College London, and is now a professor at Imperial College London. But it was not his academic credentials that made me choose him. What mattered to me was that he genuinely understood that my academic life was important to me and never treated marriage as something that would require me to give that up.
We have now been married for fifteen years. In those fifteen years, however, we have actually lived together for only about four years, during my time in London. It is certainly not the conventional model of marriage, but our lives have never followed a particularly conventional path. A long-distance marriage requires trust, patience, understanding and, above all, commitment from both sides. I remain deeply grateful to him for making this possible and for supporting my academic life even when our own lives have so often had to be lived across distance. The kilometres are easy to count; the effort required to remain close across those kilometres is not.
And then came my two sons, who have given me the strange pleasure of watching some of our family history repeat itself. My elder son is much like my Dada. He is more inclined towards books and studies and generally listens to what I say. Sometimes when I look at him, I see my brother again. And then there is my younger son, in whom I recognise myself. He has some of my temperament, my independence and perhaps my tendency to think that there may be more interesting things in life than simply sitting down and studying. So once again, the family has produced one child who is drawn towards books and another who reminds me of myself.
I am not yet sure whether this is beautiful symmetry or a rather elaborate joke played on me by fate.
Now I look at both my sons and wonder what the future has written for them. And I don't want to pretend that I know. I have hopes for them, of course, but their lives will ultimately belong to them. They will make their own choices, make their own mistakes, discover their own strengths and perhaps surprise me in ways I cannot yet imagine. What I hope they inherit from all of us is not necessarily our achievements, but some of our better qualities: the courage to begin again when life becomes difficult, the freedom to think for themselves, the honesty to remain true to themselves and truthful with others, the willingness to work hard, the ability to love deeply, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of humour.
When I think about my life now, I realise how little of it was actually planned. Dadu did not plan to leave Faridpur and rebuild his life in Calcutta. Baba did not plan to give up Moscow. I did not plan to become an academician. I certainly did not plan to go from wanting to be a guard at the Taj Hotel to doing a PhD in Canada. My husband and I probably did not plan a marriage in which we would spend so many years living apart. Yet somehow, all these unexpected turns became our life.
Perhaps that is what roots really mean to me. They are not meant to keep us in one place. They are what allow us to travel without losing ourselves.
I have travelled quite far from that crowded house in Jadavpur, but in many ways I have never really left it. I still carry the voices, the laughter, the arguments, the affection, the habits and the stories of those twenty-two people with me. I think I was very lucky to have grown up there.
I carry Dadu's courage to begin again, Baba's faith in education and his belief in my freedom to discover myself, Ma's discipline and strength, Dada's example and his sense of a world larger than the one I knew, and my husband's quiet, constant support.
And perhaps the little girl who wanted to become a guard at the Taj Hotel because she liked the uniform was lucky too. She had absolutely no idea where life was going to take her.
Thankfully, she did not need to know.😀🙏