I wrote this when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
In Boys and Girls, Alice Munro accomplishes the perfect storyteller’s feat–instilling in the reader feelings of delight, shock, surprise, suspense, and dejection, all over the course of a single short story. The narrator is a young girl whose father raises foxes in a pen for selling their fur to traders in wintertime. She helps out her father with the job by bringing water to the foxes twice a day in the summer and raking the grass and money-musk that her father would cut.
As she performed these chores under his supervision, little dialogue was exchanged between the two. The girl, however, took great pride in being able to shoulder his labour, even if in a minimal way.
One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, “Like to have you meet my new hired hand.” I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure. (Boys and Girls, Alice Munro)
Working for her father is one of the ways in which this young protagonist fights the gender stereotypes she is supposed to comply with, even as her flashes of rebellion provoke the ire of her mother and grandmother. In a clever sub-plot, Munro allows this child flights of fancy in which she rescues people in danger from a bombed building, shoots rabid wolves and undertakes other such heroic endeavours with the noble intent of saving others. These situations represent the polar opposite of her actual station in life, where her gender must always precede her will or wish.
However, a moment arrives during the imminent execution of an old (female) horse, for the purpose of its meat being supplied as food to the foxes, when our young narrator has an opportunity to live her imagination. Entrusted with closing the house gate by her father when Flora, the horse, breaks loose from the clutches of her executioners, the eleven-year-old girl lets the horse escape by keeping the gate wide open. The only witness to her defiant act is Laird, her younger brother.
At dinner that night, Laird proudly describes how he saw his father and his farm hand capture the frenzied horse after giving her a chase in their van and cut its body into pieces. He also reveals how his big sister had let the animal escape earlier in the day. The story ends with the father telling everyone present, “Never mind. She’s only a girl,” and his daughter’s ignominious acceptance of what that taunt implied.
As I delved into the universes Munro constructs with an architect’s precision and an interior designer’s aesthetic charm, her ability to zoom lens–be it on a character, situation or even the interior landscape of a person–kept me immersed in her stories, one after the other. Munro’s tales are not snapshots–seen now and forgotten then; they are alleys we have all trodden in our own lives–as perpetrators or victims of cruelty, in happiness and despair, while concealing deceit and guilt. It is this universality of her themes, despite the affectionate localization of her stories, many of them set in Southern Ontario, where I now live, that makes Munro both appealing and important.
In a true mirroring of life, Munro’s stories steer clear of delivering verdicts or solutions to predicaments and miseries. Often the one relating the agony of the victim–whether it be the schoolgirl who bullies her classmate or the husband who contemplates a new relationship even as he assumes a caregiver’s role for his dementia-afflicted wife– is the one responsible for it, usually not by design, but a strange concoction of circumstances, societal expectations and personal quirks.
When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize last week, I was delighted. Not just because she has enviably mastered the art of seizing entire universes within the scope of short fiction. Nor because of her neuroscientist-like ability to get inside the minds of young adults and their tribulations. Not because the locales in which she sets her stories are now part of my personal geography. Or because of her mature portrayal of the internal drama the human mind loves to engage in.
“Her voice on the (answering) machine was different from the voice he’d heard a short time ago in her house…A tremor of nerves there, an affected nonchalance, a hurry to get through, and a reluctance to let go.” (The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Alice Munro).
I was delighted because like her protagonist in Boys and Girls, Munro held the gate to a world she believed in–that of short stories–wide open. And won.
It was the middle of the month of Bhadra. With the onset of autumn, the dark nimbus of the monsoon had left the sky. Clouds came in brighter tones as did sunshine. After the previous year’s drought and poor crop, this year’s rainfall had been abundant. The paddy on the fields had a dark green hue and looked thick and healthy. A serene mood prevailed all around. Families of householders were busy with Durga puja preparations that began with the most laborious and important of them all — plastering the walls with mud. This was to be followed by painting alpona designs at the threshold using white and red chalk, roasting rice into puffed and popped rice, and preparing sweets like naadu and mudki. There was no end to the chores related to puja.
“That woman has ten hands, along with those of her children and retinue; how could we two-handed ones match her strength?” Ginni, the matron of the Chatterjee family thought aloud.
Today their house was going to receive the first coat of mud. The artisans had arrived at the chandimandap to start working on the idol.
Red clay had been dissolved in a bucket of water. The daughters-in-law and maids were ready — with their saris tied to their waist and their gold bangles covered with rags — to witness the plastering of the idol’s frame with mud.
“Dear, can one of you go and check how long it’s going to take?” Chatterjee Ginni asked the women. “Where are all the boys?”
“They are all at the puja site,” one of the girls said.
That — the chandimandap — was exactly where the boys had gathered. Kumareesh, the elderly idol maker was busy arguing with the watchman, “Will you donate your prize money to me? Why should I do your work?”
Kalachand, the watchman said, “Hey, why are you getting worked up? Do they let you grab that soil so easily? Have you seen how they curse you and chase you away?”
“Why, couldn’t you get some on the sly during your night patrolling? Or did you skip your routine last night?”
“How can I skip my duty? I have to go for at least one round. How would I know that you’ll be here today? Forgive me, please.”
Approaching the door, Chatterjee Ginni asked, “O, Kumareesh, are you done yet? The girls are waiting with the mud batter. How long will you keep brabbling here?”
Kumareesh was a short, frail man. His limbs, narrow like the hands and legs of puppets, moved as swiftly. His walk was equally agile. Even before Chatterjee Ginni could finish speaking, he began shouting at the top of his voice, “What do I even tell you, Ma; I can’t work with this Kalachand anymore. He makes no effort, has no brains, no hands, no legs, nothing — what can I do, you tell me?”
Even as he yelled out those words, he drew closer to the matron and bowing before her said in a calmer voice, “Are you doing well, Ma? And your children? All the Babus? And the dear sisters and Bou-Mas, is everyone fine?”
Ginni-Ma smiled and said, “Yes, everyone is fine. How about your children…”
Snatching words off others’ mouths was Kumareesh’s old habit. He began ruefully, “Where do I begin Ma, measles, stomach upset, fever are all playing hopscotch. Doctors and boddis have turned me into a pauper.”
Then, in a quieter tone, he said, “I heard that Chhoto Babu is back, I’m so happy to hear that. Why don’t you bring Bou-Ma, our dear daughter-in-law now? That will fix everything. His blood is young after all, he made one mistake…everything will be all right.”
Putting a lid to the subject, Ginni-Ma said, “What’s taking you so long to get started? The girls are all waiting with the wet mud; when will they take a bath?”
Kumareesh said, “Everything is ready, we just need the soil from the prostitutes’ quarters…”
As she spread it over Dharala’s breast, heaving and restless, each fold of the meshed fibre courted a brisk movement of Fatima’s limbs. For maximum catch. The cast net yielded more readily to her commands now. The river had become just as adept at catching her secrets. There was only so much you could hide over a three-year relationship.
Taming the net hadn’t been easy for Fatima. In those initial months, after the truck crushed Masud’s hand, her rickety frame could barely grab the massive net without skidding into the river’s swampy edge. For almost a year, between hospital visits and the battle to ensure Masud didn’t sleep on an empty stomach, Fatima had experienced little luck honing her fishing skills. With a bed-ridden Masud, the couple lived almost entirely on the greens that Fatima foraged during her failed fishing expeditions. Rafiq brought them geri-gugli and chuno maachh every now and then, for which he refused even a hint of payment. Periwinkles and small fish weren’t items he would sell to Masud, a neighbour and his fishing partner, until only recently. Masud’s unforeseen disability saw Rafiq and Tarannum turn into the parents Masud and Fatima had lost a few years ago.
Fatima dragged the net out of the river’s bosom. With her feet submerged in Dharala’s anchoring grip, she shuddered as the memory of the days after Masud’s accident came rushing back to her. Days that had felt chilly even in the burning joishthho heat. She had barely recovered from the loss of the child in her womb when the truck hit Masud. Her unborn child still jolted her out of sleep at night. Clumps of sweat embossed her face every time she struggled to imagine what the baby’s face would look like if it were born. She would find herself gagging and in need of a sip of water to be able to breathe again.
She would be a day person, Fatima had decided over these three years. Nights were never kind to her. Night, the skinny ghost, an owl’s hoot. It echoed with the sound of whispering laughter and then of footsteps, making the darkness even more viscous. It carried the trapping scent of hasnuhana floating from somewhere nearby. And of the memory of hands rubbing her shoulder and grabbing at her breasts before she could make sense of it all … Nights were irreconcilable for Fatima, like the slick of fish oil that refused to be washed off. She never said a word to him, but Masud smelled the fear on her skin. He forbade her from going out after sunset.
For months that added up to almost a year, Fatima could barely replace a fraction of Masud’s income – by planting paddy on other people’s farms during the sowing season and then winnowing it for well-off families, selling a handful of eggs from the two chickens she reared, and cleaning the houses of neighbours for weddings and Eid celebrations. That and the generosity of Rafiq and Tarannum helped them survive, even if it meant Fatima had to practically give up rice herself and eat jowar flour boiled in water and mixed with some greens instead. The scent of steaming rice, which she now cooked exclusively for Masud, made her crave it more than ever before. She trained herself to restrain this instinct by rolling the end of her sari into a ball and covering her nose the moment the rice grains began bubbling in the water.
On some days, before returning home from the odd jobs she’d taken up, Fatima sauntered off, tired and heavy, to Rafiq’s house for a break. And for a mission. Tarannum was teaching her how to use a cast net. They worked with a net that Rafiq had discarded after it wore out in more than a few places. Tarannum showed Fatima how the best results were achieved by knowing when to let go and when to rein it in. You had to allow the rope to slip through your hand so the net could smoothly hit the bottom, and then as soon as it did, you needed to get a good grip on the rope and pull it right back up, lest the catch escaped. Seeing Fatima’s interest, Tarannum mended the net bit by bit and the two women began fishing, at first in the pond adjoining their house and then in Dharala. That’s when Fatima began sharing her secrets with the river. On most days, they got a decent enough catch of assorted fish. The women would split the haul, but not before releasing the small fish they caught into the river.
It seemed funny to Fatima how she and Tarannum had become fishing partners, the same way Masud and Rafiq had once been. The previous Eid, Rafiq had combined three decades’ worth of his savings with a particularly large remittance from his older son, a construction worker in Dubai, to buy a second-hand boat. For Masud, who was many river lengths away from getting his own boat, Rafiq’s new acquisition came as a blessing. He no longer had to pay rent for using another man’s boat, and Fatima and he began enjoying more fish-and-rice days.
Masud planned to combine a few months’ savings to put up a new roof. The constant leakage during the monsoons made Fatima ill every year. Now that she was expecting, he couldn’t let his baby arrive under a dripping roof.
Good fortune has a special allergy for poor people, Fatima would infer soon. The truck got Masud’s right – his dominant – hand and the money saved for the roof went towards his treatment. Then, Fatima lost the child.
‘Who gave you the fish?’ Fatima didn’t miss the hiss in Masud’s voice.
‘Tarannum apu. They’re having guests today, she had some extra,’ Fatima said, hastening to change. A second more and Masud would definitely spot the streak of mud lining the base of her sari. He would spot the river on her.
‘Hmm,’ Masud said and turned over in bed. Lately, even the smallest of pricks bristled him.
My essay Discomfort Food in Dhaka Tribune looks at food from caste and class angles through the lens of literature.
The first time the appearance of food in a book shook me was when I read Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan more than a decade ago. I read the book in English translation, which retained Valmiki’s original Hindi title. This wasn’t, in all probability, merely a stylistic decision; it seems to have been a necessary one. For, the word joothan, like its Bengali equivalent eNthho, does not have a satisfactory English translation. The closest word that describes it — leftovers — is way too short of what joothan actually means — scraps of food left on one’s plate after a meal meant to be thrown in trash. In the autobiographical book, Valmiki describes how members of the Chuhra community — the caste he belonged to — would be served joothan by their upper caste masters as wages for manual labour. Valmiki describes, in excruciating detail, how the Chuhras would collect the remains of the meals left behind from an upper caste wedding, dry the bits of pooris they collected in the sun, and how he had to guard those pieces from crows, hens, and dogs. These dried bits, half-eaten by other people, would be saved for the rainy season, when they would be soaked in water and boiled, to be had with chili powder and salt or jaggery.
Amala couldn’t resist the urge to try out some of these new finds and took out a five-rupee note from her wallet to buy shahjeera, a darker and slimmer variety of cumin the shop owner told her to use in rich meat dishes and kababchini; small black globules that looked exactly like whole black pepper but apparently had a different aroma, stronger and warmer. A minute later, Amala and Manas joined the crowds drifting out of the market area.
‘There’s a special place I want to show you today,’ Manas said as he approached a taxi.
In ‘Bateshwar’s Contribution’, a short film by Sandip Ray I recently watched, Bateshwar Sikdar, a veteran writer, suddenly finds himself in the company of visitors and advice – both unsolicited. Over the course of three days, as many individuals, supposedly Sikdar’s fans come to him with the same strange request. They all want him to make the ending of a novel he’s writing, a happy one. Based on a story by Rajshekhar Basu, often hailed as the greatest humourist of the last century, the film, or rather that peculiar request, struck a personal chord with me in what has been my nascent journey into published authorship so far. I am coming to that in a bit.
In Sikdar’s case, when the first reader, a young man, approaches him on one of his morning walks, there isn’t much to suspect – he’s seen gushing with praise for the senior writer and shows great interest in his current serialized work ‘Ke Thaakey, Ke Jaaye?’ (Who Stays, Who Goes?). In fact, he seems so involved with the story that he’s eager to find out the fate of a female character. He asks Sikdar about the same, referring to the character as the novel’s heroine. Sikdar reminds him that there are two heroines in the novel, and when the young reader specifies he’s referring to Aloka who is fighting a serious illness, Sikdar tells him that she’s going to die. Our young reader seems heartbroken and pleads with the author to let her live. Exasperated, Sikdar tells him off and continues on his walk. The next morning, the entreaty turns into a mild threat when another man, a renowned surgeon, drops by at Bateshwar’s house with the same proposition – to let Aloka live. As with the first petitioner, Sikdar turns down the physician’s request and remains firm on his stand to eliminate Aloka to have Sharbari, the novel’s other heroine, take her place. He would have a third and final requester – a woman who introduces herself as a film actor – who comes to him with the offer of buying the film rights for ‘Who Stays, Who Goes?’. She’s eager to play Aloka in the film she informs Sikdar, but he has to ensure she’s cured of her illness and continues to live. Sikdar, though excited at the offer, still remains reluctant to change his story’s ending. It’s only when the lady threatens to jump ship and make a similar offer to a rival author that he reverses his long-held decision to let Aloka die.
As she hurried for her train, a blast of snow slapped her cheeks, reminding Aruna of when she had landed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport for the first time. The extreme weather had made her question her decision to come to Canada. It was too late, she had reminded herself.
When she landed in this haven for immigrants nine years ago, Aruna had been nervous. At their parting, her husband Raghu assured her, “It’s only a matter of a few months, maximum a year, Aru. I will be there after that.”
But those few months had multiplied into as many as it took to make nine years. Years that taught Aruna that time was as slippery as her husband’s promise to join her in Canada. Between trying to make a living and raising twelve-year-old Vishnu, she had aged by two decades instead of one. Looking at the mirror one day, Aruna tried to make sense of how it turned out to be like this—three lives that were supposed to make a family now fragmented like left-over noodle strands on a diner’s plate. Those early years they had spent together contained no suggestion of the later distancing. Her husband had seemed caring and involved, if excessively guided by his quest for a “good life.”
Now, snow and coffee — once alien to her– had become second nature to Aruna. And her good life had little to do with what her husband had imagined. She reflected on how time changes a person’s inner landscape in accordance with the outer one.
The train sped past white houses, streets, trees. Aruna planted her cheek, covered with the woollen scarf she’d wrapped around her neck, to the window. The thickly snow-decked walls that vanished and re-appeared on the horizon were home. She rubbed her glove-clad hands and sipped coffee from the paper cup that danced slightly to the train’s motion on a tray table in front of her.
Arriving in the province, she had felt confident of getting a job. Her many years as a lifestyle journalist in India couldn’t have been for nothing. So she consumed herself with the other variables—managing her son’s education, getting a health card made, securing a driver’s licence, and all the other minutia of moving to a new place.
But she rented a damp basement apartment and managed the other details with ease. Only the job eluded her.
In three weeks, the city had turned from an indifferent host into an unforgiving master. The city demanded labour from Aruna in order to grant her an extended stay. A conversation with her widowed landlady made the prospects look bleaker than the foggy winter mornings.
“Beta, I would suggest you try to find something at a grocery store. Or Tim Horton’s or McDonalds.”
“But Aunty, I worked in…”
“I know,” the landlady had interrupted, “you were a journalist. But this country doesn’t hand out jobs in your chosen field so easily. Maybe if you had a degree. But you don’t. You’ll have to be more humble, my dear.”
Aruna felt a dampness envelop her entire body. The very idea of working in a grocery store behind the cash counter made her bones stiff. The dullness of the job, the ominous possibility of turning into an automaton numbed her. Yet, college at her age was nonsense. There was no money. There was no time. She had a child. She tried to adjust to the idea she would have to get started somewhere, even behind a counter, even wearing a funny uniform.
One afternoon, as specks of sunlight sneaked in through the shoe-box windows of her drawing-cum-bedroom, Aruna got out of the house, armed with her trusted jute handbag and the resumes inside it. The snow outside had melted only a little, and black ice lined the streets. The knife-sharp chill had turned the sun into a frosty pale-yellow orb. It bit into Aruna’s skin right through her thrift store jacket.
She walked into the shopping plaza in front of her. With lunch hour drawing near, several cars entered the parking lot. The passengers were headed for a pizza joint. A few stores away, Aruna saw some activity—a new store seemed to be opening. The men offloading furniture from a truck looked to be from her part of the world. She approached one of them, a hefty, mustached and sun-glassed man, wearing a long black jacket and smelling of cologne.
“Er, excuse me, is a new shop coming up here?”
The man turned to her and adjusted his glasses before replying,
“Yeah. We are opening a restaurant.”
Aruna allowed a sheepish smile and reached for the resume inside her purse. A crumpled piece of folded paper came out. By the time she straightened it, the mustached man had already moved on and was almost inside the new restaurant.
Aruna nearly ran to catch up with him. He turned around and stopped at the door.
“Here,” said Aruna, huffing, “my resume.”
The man took the paper from her hands and invited her inside.
And so she found her job–at the South Indian vegetarian eatery, right in the heart of the suburb that had been swelling with South Asian population. Being a Tamil Brahmin helped–in the end, it wasn’t her qualifications or experience, but ethnicity that mattered.
Nausea and nauseating people were what Aruna could recall when she thought of the initial days of her job. Serving the same combinations of gravies and lentils infused with tamarind, curry leaves and coconut, throughout her long shifts turned her stomach. She thanked her luck that daily breakfast was part of her job perks. By the time the shift ended, she hardly had appetite for anything.
But she would take that over the gut-churning invitations some diners extended to her.
“Join me for a late-night movie with drinks.”
“Hey, my wife is vacationing in India. Care to spend the weekend with me?”
“What day is your weekly off? I can come over to your place to keep you company.”
Aruna knew Raghu’s absence made it easier for these passes to be hurled at her. With time and some help from her co-workers, she learned to cite an activity with Vishnu as a credible excuse. Conjugal armour wasn’t necessary. Her son was both her shield and compass.
She couldn’t learn to deal with the apparition of longing, though. The one that showed up frequently, especially on weekends, when she served families huddled at table after table. She would imagine sitting at one of them, being teased by Raghu and Vishnu and giggling in the self-absorbed, vain way she saw some younger women do. After nearly two years, it dawned on her that Raghu probably didn’t want to come to Canada at all. His response to her entreaties in this regard had a tone of measured yet affectionate indifference.
A year later that suspicion was confirmed. The then-teenaged Vishnu had been caught in a drunken brawl close to their home. Aruna had received a call from the police at her workplace. Her boss reluctantly allowed her half a day’s leave. She rushed to the hospital where her son and two other kids had been brought for treatment. An inquiry had begun. Though her mind was spinning with the possibilities: trial, imprisonment, expulsion, worse; in front of Vishnu, she remained normal and even sporting, “Beta, you wanted to have a drink? You should have asked me. This isn’t how you take it–on an empty stomach. Wait until you are legally ready. We’ll have it together. Deal?”
He seemed to understand, his own fear making him receptive. She called Raghu the next day, still suffused with worry. He said:
“Hey, all this happens, Aru. It’s his age. Cheer up!”
“But you do realize that I am all by myself here. I have to face his teachers, the police, maybe even…”
“You will manage it all, my feisty lady,” Raghu had interrupted. “I am confident you will tackle it fine.”
Aruna had broken down over the phone, unable to accept her husband’s phony reassurance, his unconcern. Raghu had yelled that he was forced to be far away only because of Aruna and Vishnu. So he could give them a “good life.” Silently, she had thought of her lean bank account and wondered who, in fact, was getting that “good life.” But she had said nothing. If this crisis wouldn’t bring him to her side, she sensed then, nothing would.
Now assistant manager at the restaurant, Aruna was able to take the time she needed to attend the court hearings for Vishnu’s violence. They went on for a year. Those hearings, weekly meetings with his school counselor, and her increased responsibilities at work–tracking the accounts, preparing budgets, taking stock of inventory–all silvered her once kohl-black hair with a vengeance.
While she longed for the cocoon of a loving family, her middle age offered a different reality. Finding too little time face-to-face, cell phone texts and emails became her allies in raising Vishnu. Through them, she was privy to the heartaches, acrimonious debates, and insults edging on slurs that were at the core Vishnu’s growing up. But somewhere along the way, the rough edges of adolescence smoothed out, and Vishnu turned from an errant child into a friend. Aruna thanked her gadget gods.
“Stop working like a donkey, Amma,” he counseled.
“Oh and what’s going to fund your fancy professional keyboard?” she would quip, thinking of his musical aspirations.
“Maybe that will have to wait. I can practice at Karan’s. You cut your hours at any rate. You are going to collapse if you carry on like this.”
Slowly, Aruna stopped feeling Raghu’s absence. In fact, she began to wonder if she would ever be able to live with him again. Acquaintances and even regulars at the restaurant would ask questions about her husband. She knew that her silence suggested that he was perhaps living a good life himself, not working toward giving one to his wife and son.
Over liberal sips of wine and unrestrained laughter, her closest friends heard more than silence: “Know what? I couldn’t care less. Who is stopping me from bringing a man into my bedroom?”
But in truth, she had found in loneliness a better, more trusted partner. She had, to her surprise, become at ease with being alone in the bed. And as years piled on years, it didn’t seem to really matter.
The restaurant staff–the suspicious and glassy-eyed accountant Sethuraman, the helper boys, Gopal and Dinesh, and all the chefs–from the bulbous-bellied, middle-aged Bala to the bony, soft-smiling young Manoj–had become her extended family. Sethuraman confided his fears and reservations to her, whether at his son’s craze for violent video games or the “lack of etiquette” among nouveau riche diners. The chefs considered her a big sister and sought her advice on important matters like which insurance policy to buy and what made a good gift for a wife’s birthday.
But for all that, Aruna felt glad that the restaurant hadn’t turned into her home. Despite the chaotic dust-storm blowing through her life, she was determined to find a nest: A haven not just for her own trapped soul, but also for Vishnu and his mates to flap their hormone-charged teenage wings with slaphappy abandon.
After the fallout had settled from Vishnu’s brawl, once all the court hearings and counseling had ended, she had found them a town home. Her restaurant family had worked as moving crew, packing and transferring items from her chilly basement with care. Vishnu had saved some money out of his weekly allowances and bought knick-knacks as surprises for Aruna–a small Ganesha figurine, a wind chime for the entrance, a couple of guitar-shaped key hangers.
Evenings, which began at 10 pm when her workday ended, were a combination of m’s: music and masala. Vishnu had recently joined a local South Asian band and was composing music on his keyboard, which he would then test on Amma’s “unreasonably tolerant” ears. He would rebuke her at times,
“Amma, how can you find this nice? It sounds so amateurish.”
“Yes, but you would agree this is much better than what you played last time, wouldn’t you?” Aruna would say.
“Hmpff! You’re not paying attention. Never mind, go back to your cooking.”
And so she would. The kitchen of their new home had become her creative laboratory, spa, and refuge, all at once. The earthy whiff of cumin seeds as they spluttered in the hot oil in a skillet assured Aruna all was well. The pungency released by garlic crushed in a mortar- pestle or asafoetida in searing oil alluded to the spunk and excitement lurking within every seemingly insipid day.
While chopping onions for a Kerala-style fish curry, she smiled at the thought of how her palate had been transformed by Canada and its long winters as well as her son’s rapidly-evolving gastronomic index. Growing up, she would twitch her nose at the mere mention of fish; now she not only cooked it, gently simmering it in a creamy coconut milk stew, but also enjoyed biting into its flesh, spooning in some steamed rice and curry as well.
Food–not the grub people stuff themselves with to satiate hunger, nor even the gratifying ingestion of chosen foods to fill one’s ego and belly on special occasions–but the unsung yet care-sodden home meals, the mothers’, grandmothers’ and distant aunts’ creations—had become Aruna’s lodestar in a territory that offered her unparalleled freedom–to be messy, to fail in experiments, to not stop experimenting. And it gave her the ability to make her son happy.
“When I move out, I am taking you with me. I don’t want to miss this awesome food,” he said one morning as he sipped from a glass of mango shake. Every summer, Aruna would buy boxes of mangoes, expensive as they were, having been imported from India or Pakistan, to make sure that Vishnu could have his mango shakes and lassis for breakfast.
“Why would you need to move out at all?” Aruna asked. “This house is all yours, Beta. But you will give me the third floor, won’t you?”
“The entire third floor? Nah, Amma, you can’t have my music room, no way.”
Laughing, they argued over the proposed division of the house for half an hour, before agreeing on letting it be the way it was–with Vishnu deciding what part of the house belonged to him. That sometimes included his mother’s bedroom. Contrary to feeling betrayed or wronged, Aruna found her son’s near-feudal sense of ownership to be a snug blessing. Anything to make him stay in the house–even if that meant sleeping on the living room couch for nights on end.
Things had started falling into a pattern, like the predictable rhythm of seasons in Canada. Aruna particularly cherished the fall, when leaves changed colours faster than a painter’s brush strokes–as sensuous reds flirted with boisterous yellows and fiery oranges, the thermometer’s dipping mercury made bodies seek the embrace of jackets and light cardigans, sunset morphed into huge pumpkins and descended on grocery stores and maple syrup flowed indulgently over pancakes at breakfast tables. And schools re-opened after the summer break. For a mother of a teenage son, what was there to not love about fall?
Autumn also awakened the writer in Aruna. At first, she fed long nights that refused to bring sleep with DVDs of the latest Bollywood flicks. But she tired of them. On those restless nights, she wrote, remembering the career she had left behind years before. If food acted as her release, writing was her plunge–the deep-sea dive that took her on secret, often uncomfortable journeys. In writing she was compelled to confront and listen to the many women within her–those whose roles she played in real life and those whom she could never be. The single mother, the survivor, the lonely spinster, the comforting cook. The charming partner, the dependant wife, the fighting feminist.
When a freelance opportunity to write for a lifestyle magazine came along, Aruna grabbed it with her raddled hands. An occasional article on parenthood, a sometimes report of a cultural event, an infrequent restaurant review–the writing wasn’t exactly soul-lifting, but it was better than washing dishes at the restaurant, which she had continued to do even after becoming a senior manager.
Then, Bharat, the restaurant owner started complaining to Aruna about finances. He had incurred a substantial debt and would be cutting down on staff. The words dropped on Aruna’s ears as a whipping hailstorm. She knew what it meant. She told Bharat she wouldn’t survive without the restaurant; that it had become a part of her. The continuance of her job had become a reality as simple as the nonexistence of her husband. Losing this “normal,” which had taken years to make, scared her.
Bharat had tried to calm her, “I don’t want to let go of you either. I can’t. We’ll find a way.”
As a start, he suggested part-time work for her. Aruna understood that would also mean part-time salary and didn’t know what to say. She hated the idea of asking Raghu to send additional money: for nine years, he had paid their electricity and phone bills, but no more. And Vishnu was at least two years away from making his own money.
Her hours were cut. The numbers told her that adding the expense of college education didn’t make sense. And yet, a sense of vindication surged within her as she ran: not away from her Canadian life, but deeper into it.
The restaurant went on, and so did she. Through the bleached, bleak Ontario winterscape she rode a train into the city. Thrice a week she attended classes at the college alongside students half her age: broadcast journalism. On two other days, she volunteered at a local TV station. Restaurant work now meant just a few hours in the evening. The digits on her salary cheque had dropped.
For the first time in nine years, nonsense made total sense to Aruna. She was in possession of her power and her possibility, and for the first time she allowed herself a solo flight over an uncertain territory.
The frosty surroundings reminded her that the white always changed to green, no matter how old or young the trees were. As she glided above the ennui of routine and the relevance of marriage, Aruna breathed free. So did all the strands of hair on her cigarette-ash head.
[The End]
First published in Stealing Time literary magazine (print) in 2013.
Chintan Girish Modi interviewed me about my debut novel. The most rewarding part of the interview was his reference to a blog post I wrote in 2011 regarding home and what it means for me. Read the interview in Firstpost.
Manas had little chance to interact with Amala over the past two days as the women were still holed up inside the school. The morning after the clashes ended, Manas and his friends took a tour of the freshly-seized squatter colony. Manas could see the enormousness of the task that lay ahead for the space to become truly habitable. There was no clean water supply or electricity. Nor did the residents have any sewage or waste collection system in place.
As they walked through the area, Subir thought aloud the need for setting up a few hand pumps at the very least. Manas nodded, saying they needed a new fundraising drive to get the basics in place in Bijoy Nagar.
‘We’ll also need more volunteers, Manas-da,’ Manik said.
Manas agreed as he thought of the added effort needed to manage the camp and work with the squatting refugees.
They landed close to Amala’s shack. The landlord’s goons had razed the incomplete fencing Amala had earlier put up. Manas saw Amala resurrecting the fence with a fresh batch of hogla leaves. She seemed engrossed in what she was doing. Manas noticed her lips moving with the hint of a sweet smile.
As the boys came closer, Manas said softly so as not to break Amala’s reverie, ‘Ei je, how goes?’
He thought he had caught a fragment of a song in her voice before it faded away as she looked at him and smiled. A tiny hurricane swept through Manas’s heart.
Bhaswati Ghosh 