Longing for love

Anwesha Beria

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The first of my grandparents to have passed away was my thakuma or my father’s mother when I was 4 years old. My father’s side of parentage emptied in the early years of my life. My mother’s lineage is breathing with life. Having been orphaned as an adult and father to two daughters and husband to a wife, my father was seen shedding tears for his parents only during their sharddho or funeral ceremonies, though, as a four-year-old child when my thakuma died, I cannot recall if my father cried or not, but I am sure he did. That was all the tears, the rest were reminiscences by him.

However, even as a teenager and late into my adolescence, I hardly thought of my grandmother. The strange thing is that I clearly remember the four times I had met my grandmother even though I was 2-3 years old. When I met her for the fourth time, the heavy rains had washed the roads muddy. Everybody was seeking shelter in our palatial house in the village. The whole village had gathered. She looked the most beautiful she has ever looked in my glossed-up memories- wrapped in a fresh cotton saree with a red outline, the parting running along the middle of her hair ran over by a thick line of proud sindoor (vermillion), nostrils oddly stuffed with small bulbs of cotton, eyelids with two big tulsi leaves and her toes painted with designs of deep red aalta. She left her husband a widower, a rarity in those days, and considered very lucky for the dead woman. With her aalta-etched feet, off she went, leaving behind a house full of family, peacefully sleeping on her stretcher, which her four sons carried to the funeral grounds.

She looked the most beautiful she has ever looked in my glossed-up memories- wrapped in a fresh cotton saree with a red outline, the parting running along the middle of her hair ran over by a thick line of proud sindoor (vermillion), nostrils oddly stuffed with small bulbs of cotton, eyelids with two big tulsi leaves and her toes painted with designs of deep red aalta.

Now that I think about it, there is a poetic justice in tulsi leaves on her eyelids accompanying her to the burning pyre because the Holy Tulsi herb is associated with Krishna, which happened to be the name of grandfather, her husband. I think a part of him also burnt to a sublime death that day, flooded with both rain and tears.

I did not understand what death and absence were at the time since I never was familiar with what her love and company felt like. I was removed from her and my father’s full family since birth because my father was the only person to be able to make it out of our village as a now successful engineer who was also the first person in our family to have attended college. He worked in a reputable factory in the town and settled there after marriage, frequently visiting his family. That was why I remained a stranger to my thakuma’s presence and completely missed out on the joint family life. As much as I am resentful of it now, I am, in some ways, thankful to have gotten measly doses of my grandma. I am much more appreciative of her in that way now that she has long left my life- I keep wishing to have gotten more of her, and thus, she remains in my memories. However, I felt boiling jealousy in my heart as I realized growing up that my cousins who did not leave the joint family (some did, though recently) remained in her shelter and company much much longer than I did, and in that way, I am resentful of my cousins and my father’s ambitions. It is a paradox that chains me to this day, I am both resentful and grateful. The grand moments of my life often went severely underappreciated, and in the moments of quiet depravity of parental validation, I close my eyes and muster scenarios of what it would have been like if thakuma were here. How would she have reacted to my achievements? What would she say? Could her reactions of joy and love penetrate through my father’s heart and change it? How different would our family be had she been here?

Questions jam my mind, but unfortunately, even time cannot answer them. I can imagine my thakuma, with her towering presence, gluing our now fragmented household at Harishchandrapur village, with mutual exchanges of visitation from my parents and i, and plenty of love for me had she been alive. The very first time I remember crying for the ghost of my grandmother was during the lockdown of the pandemic in 2021. My parents were following the retelecasting of the popular Bengali serial Subarnalata (2012), though it was discontinued. However, we continued watching it from our phones and made it through the last episode, where Subarnalata dies in the same way that thakuma did- brimming with unfulfilled wishes, perhaps desires for the freedom of life, that of mobility, spare time, and tending to her interests outside the household. Burdened with a big household with all its conflicts, and forever toiling away in her in-laws' house after leaving her palatial life in her own home, Subarnalata felt like home, especially to my parents, and it felt like I saw the inner life of my grandmother that I never got to see or hear about. I cried for three long days after watching the last episode of her dying, because I felt like I had gotten to know how she must have felt throughout the time that she was alive. It made me believe that good people are too good for this world, and God pulls them away early to relieve them of the pains of the world. Now that I am older, I thank God for taking her away from this wretched world. I think she went exactly when she had to go. In fact, had she lived longer, she would have had to witness the inevitable splitting of her homestead she built brick by brick and probably be pushed to one room of the house.

Hearing stories of my thakuma truly awes me. Ours is not the household for some reason that put on display pictures of their dead parents or close relatives as Indian households normally do. I never noticed this absence until a few years ago when I started to miss her as if she died yesterday. It is not because our nuclear family is removed from its roots since our native home follows suit. I think people do not pay heed. Whatever the reason may be, stories and some feeble memories from my infancy are the only ways for me to remember her. My mother also had not seen her in the flesh for long, only for a sprint of 7 years. She tells me how despite having two more brides at home from the marriage of her two elder sons, that is my boro-jethu and mejo-jethu, she still has to do as much work, if not more. My mother saw how thakuma , after doing rounds of cleaning the whole house, doing laundry like a washerwoman in the ghats by the pond, and cooking food for the entire family, she was left with no respite; to top it off, she even had to feed her grandchildren and bathe them, a task that their mothers hardly ever did. Ironically, this is the thing that I am envious of- being fed, bathed, played with, and well-watched by her.

But, as I am writing, I am glad to not have added to her misery. Perhaps, I had also remained in her thoughts when she bathed my cousins, as to how I am, how much I have grown, if my health is alright. Perhaps, she also wished to have bathed me, fed me, and watched over me. Maybe, my absence had left some emptiness in her, at least I would like to think so. Chronic asthma took her life. Given how much work she had to do all by herself, her condition worsened into a fatal pneumonia. The long hours by the pond, lifting and pounding the truckload of clothes weighed down by the water, waking up the earliest and sleeping the latest and the least, and not being able to eat enough and timely, all contributed to it. Essentially, my own family, which had the potential to save her, killed her. Thakuma never complained. She did it all happily. Whenever my parents visited, she secretly snuck in rice, duck eggs from our domesticated ducks, lentils, and produce from our seasonal farm. No one must find out otherwise, she would be accused of favouritism! Her kindness lives through my father, and, dare I say, through me, as well. However flawed we may be, we carry on parts of her by the likeness of her qualities, her giving nature, open mind, resilience, strength, and beauty.

I think I was meant to grab onto her memories because that is all I have left of her. Perhaps, that is why, almost as if a freak of nature, I have memories of her from my infancy. I see her in every act of kindness around me, every person who embodies some of her qualities, even if it is portrayed in cinemas or serials. I do not, unfortunately, see her as often as I used to because of the apathetic world. However, she always comes up in my conversations with my parents, friends dear to me, and in other contexts involving grandparents. I am glad that she has been resting peacefully for 17 years and in that way, she is dearest to me than anyone she has known in her life.

Author bio

Anwesha Beria is a final year English honours student from Jadavpur University, with deep interest in art, literature and history of arts.

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