Category: Nonfiction

All the Octave’s Notes

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 2 Comments

First published in ABRÁCE LIVE!

A royal courtesan scorned by her lover
A warrior princess who makes her life over
Brothers cursed to turn into beasts
A farmer’s wife who cooks up a feast
The first songs I heard throbbed with dreams and rivers
That’s what music is, a lifelong lover.

A bottle of fortified milk with its sipper inside my mouth, I would lie on the bed or the sofa as the story of Buddhu and Bhutum, two royal newborns cursed to the lives of a monkey and an owl, entered my toddler ears. Long before I knew what music meant, my ears were getting trained to catch a variety of notes. Saving money from their modest salaries, my mother and her younger brother would buy LP records to play for us on a turntable in my grandparents’ house where I was growing up. They were bringing home a variety of musical influences — Rabindrasangeet — songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali Nobel laureate, shyamasangeet — written and sung in the praise of Goddess Kali, Atulprasadi — devotional and love songs written and composed by Atul Prasad Sen, a Bengali composer, lyricist and singer who was also a lawyer, social worker, educationist and writer. Of everything that was played, though, what I and my brother, nearly three years older than me, loved were dramatized musicals (also known as dance dramas) by Tagore and musical folktales of the kind narrating Buddhu and Bhutum’s story in Bengali. The heightened effect of drama, rendered through songs and musical dialogues was the perfect blend of music and storytelling that had our attention, hungry for the goofy.

At the Monday/Thursday class
eight of us circle our guru,
his cotton wool beard just about
eclipsing that concessional smile.
Bageshree holds the room
and our octaves together.

(From my poem, Bageshree)

While singing and listening to music remained a constant in both home and school, it was only in middle school that I came to identify the octave’s notes. My mother enrolled me into private classes in Hindustani classical vocal music, one of the two branches of Indian classical music (the other being Carnatic). She saved money again, this time to buy a harmonium to help me practice my lessons at home. In school, we got to learn a fair share of Hindi patriotic songs and Rabindrasangeet.

And then there was the radio at home. In between preparing for school work and practicing my classical music lessons, the radio — our primary source of listening to music — had replaced the turntable by this time. To me, the radio was a magic box. You turned on a knob and it brought you Hindi film music from the golden era of the 1950s and 60s, you moved the knob to your right and it played English pop songs and Western classical music. Somewhere in the middle, if you persisted, you could catch BBC World News, albeit with the hissing impatience of a faltering signal. Twice a week at dinner time, my mother religiously tuned into two Western music shows — Forces Request on Mondays and A Date with You on Thursdays. While the former featured songs requested by members of the Indian armed forces, the latter was a request show for regular listeners. This was my first window into The Beatles, The Carpenters, ABBA, The Beach Boys, Glen Campbell and many other singers and bands. That they coexisted in my musical universe with luminaries of Hindi film music like Sahir Ludhiyanvi, Sachin Dev Burman, Shailendra, Salil Chowdhury and many others as well as Rabindrasangeet in the melodic voices of Kanika Bandopadhyay, Suchitra Mitra and Debabrata Biswas was simply as natural as the multilingual world I inhabited that required me to switch form Bengali to Hindi to English based on the environment I found myself in.

In grade eight, my musical world became even richer as our first cassette tape player entered the house. It was a small machine, custom made for us by an acquaintance. In the machine’s early days, our cassette collection totaled to two tapes. Yet, the musical wealth these two cassette tapes brought was truly infinite. You’ll see why.

The first tape was a predictable choice — a Rabindrasangeet album my mother bought. The other one, procured by my brother, would alter my musical universe forever. It was a jugalbandi (duet) of sitarist, Ravi Shankar and sarod player, Ali Akbar Khan, accompanied on the tabla by Alla Rakha , legendary musicians all three of them. It was a concert, Ravi and Ali, guru brothers — a relationship tag disciples trained by the same guru would go by — recorded at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City in October 1972, a month after the death of their guru, Allauddin Khan, who happened to be Ali Akbar’s father and Ravi Shankar’s father-in-law. At the beginning of the tribute concert, Ravi Shankar introduced him as one of “the greatest musicians.” I find it curious that the year and the month of that particular concert coincided with my brother’s birth.

The virtuoso musicians played three rāgas (“a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode. The rāga is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradition, and has no direct translation to concepts in classical European music. Each rāga is an array of melodic structures with musical motifs, considered in the Indian tradition to have the ability to “colour the mind” and affect the emotions of the audience.”), opening with Hem Bihag, created by the departed guru, Allauddin Khan himself, followed by Manj Khamaj and Sindhi Bhairavi.

Listening to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan strum the strings of two different instruments in such meditative and yet unintrusive harmony took me to a place I’d never been before, and one I didn’t want to leave. To say that they were complementing each other would be woefully inadequate. It was as if they were playing each other’s instruments, not the one they themselves held. I hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to a true jugalbandi before this, and I remain grateful to this day that my initiation to this collaborative form happened with such a stellar performance. The moment I heard the first notes of the sitar and sarod in alaap (the non-rhythmic melody structure revealing the rāga), at once pensive and uplifting, I knew this was the love of a lifetime. Once they moved on to Manj Khamaj, this time their notes finding the company of Alla Rakha’s beats on the tabla, I felt being enveloped in Delhi’s December sunshine, an experience I’ve forever cherished, with a balmy tropical winter sun bringing a kind of warmth which instead of whip-lashing you, cloaked you in a warm embrace.

A soothing sadness, the colour
of mellow afternoons, glides in.
Tears soak stationary hours
and passing cataclysms.

Negotiating years and terrains
Manj Khamaj keeps breathing.
A footsure confidant. In its
folds, wars lose their way.

(From my poem, Manj Khamaj)

To this day, listening to this Manj Khamaj jugalbandi teleports me to such a comforting, snug tropical winter afternoon. As I listen to it for a millionth time, the music embeds itself into my immediate surroundings with such intimacy that I can’t tell where one instrument takes off and the other follows, as if the sitar and sarod were two brothers themselves, with the tabla as their loving guardian that held them together and became playful with them in turns. Through all my musical discoveries and learning, this album has remained a sublime true north that never fails to bring me back home, metaphorically and otherwise. It’s a discovery I made because of my brother, and that memory, entwined with the divine effect of the music itself, makes this widely-acclaimed concert intimately personal for me.

Ever since that brush with music at the deepest level, at the level of the spirit, I’ve found my musical world continue to expand, to include Sufi music, Latin American jazz, African folk music, the work of innovative composers like Gustavo Santaolalla and Ludovico Einaudi. In this world the inner and the outer become one for me and boundaries lose all meaning.

Music had held me by the hand when the world seemed to slip away from under my feet; it has calmed my nerves when medicine or sleep couldn’t; it has brought me joy in the middle of enervating ennui and it has often taken me back to that crispy sunshine of my childhood winters in Delhi.

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Talking Trees and Literary Paths

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in Usawa Literary Review

How rapturous, this dance of light on leaves
The wild storm in the shal forest makes my heart quiver.
Following the trail of the red road, folks dart to the haat
A little girl sits by the dusty path and spreads out her toys
These scenes that I bear witness to strike the cords of my heart’s veena.
(Rabindranath Tagore)

I listened to that song. As a child. As an adult. Somewhere along the line, I started singing it. To be inside a shalbon or Shorea Rubusta forest for real remained a distant dream for me. The opportunity to witness these forests finally materialized in 2007, when I began freelance work in Delhi and could pick my own holidays. Along with my mother, an alumni of the Visva-bharati University at Santiniketan, I headed to Bolpur, the city in West Bengal where the university — Rabindranath Tagore’s gift to learners of all stripes — is located. Vishwabharati Fast Passenger, the train we took from Kolkata’s Howrah station, sped past unending tracts of green towards Bolpur.

Read the rest in Usawa Literary Review

As we stepped down the station at Noon, a heavy downpour received us. “It’s been raining non-stop for the past two days, Didibhai,” Anwar, our rickshaw-wallah told me. I sighed. We had only three days to spend amidst this verdant, semi-rural landscape. Anwar promised to return to our lodge at 4 p.m. to take us on a rickshaw jaunt.

Shortly after we finished lunch—a filling platter of rice, lentils, jhuri aloo bhaja (finely julienned potato fries) and fish curry—the clock struck four. The rain had stopped. Anwar waited outside. “Come, Didibhai, I will show you a few things around here today. You have come such a long way, from Delhi. How can you miss gramchhara oi ranga matir poth, Khoai, or a Santhal village?”

Friendship in the Time of Mistrust: Dostojee film review

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in Outlook

What sensory forces inhabit the landscape of childhood? What does it look, sound, feel and taste like? For Palash and Shafikul, two boys growing up in rural Bengal, that landscape looks like fields and rivers to play football and take a dip in; it sounds like the toktoki, a small metallic toy that makes a clickety-clack sound; it feels like catching caterpillars and flying kites. Dostojee, Prasun Chatterjee’s debut film, opens with a childhood scene most of us are acquainted with — throwing pebbles into the water. As the two boys try to outdo each other in covering the distance their stones can manage, no boundaries separate them. Yet, a wall appears soon enough, as quickly as the boys — each of whom calls the other by the same name — “Dostojee,” meaning friend — enter their respective houses, separated by a thatched straw wall.

As next door neighbours, the two boys have about as mainstream a friendship as two village boys could have during ordinary days. Except, the days have ceased to be ordinary. A spectre of suspicion and ill-will pervades the air around them, holding in its sway, the minds and moods of the grown-ups responsible for showing them the way. Dostojee uses the powerful trope of child’s play to convey messages that are anything but child’s play. In fact, this relationship couldn’t be developing at a more fraught time in history. The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque has only recently been demolished in Ayodhya by a mob of Hindutva nationalists, who consider the mosque site to be the birthplace of Rama. This last fact is significant, because, although he’s a part of the region’s folklore, thanks to the epic of Ramayana, Rama isn’t traditionally revered as a god in Bengal. Yet as the wildfire of hurt religious sentiments reaches their village, that is set to change.

Dostojee presents a familiar story — of simmering communal tension — in a remarkably unfamiliar way. To begin with, the story takes place in a Muslim-majority village in West Bengal. This in itself is an interesting alternative to the dominant Hindu perspective one often comes across. When I asked him the reason behind this, Chatterjee told me “This comes from my own experience of traveling to areas like the film’s setting in Murshidabad for the last decade and a half, during which time I saw a continuous erosion of harmony between the Hindus and Muslims. There’s also another, more subconscious reason. My family came to West Bengal from East Pakistan in the early 1960s in dire circumstance. I tried to imagine what the relations between the two communities could be like, had we been living in a Muslim-majority scenario.”

Even as the battle lines are drawn — with the Muslims vowing to construct a new mosque, one they will call the Chhota Babri Masjid and the Hindus reciprocating by bringing Rama’s idol to the village temple — the graph of the Palash-Shafi (short for Shafikul) friendship maintains an even keel. The affairs of the grown-ups are beyond their understanding; Shafi, for instance, can’t understand why his father won’t allow him to attend a play on Ramayana, when he’d done the same without any fuss the previous year. When he still goes for the play, in stealth, the two friends walk up backstage during the play’s intermission and find the actors playing Rama, Sita and Ravana (all men), sharing a smoking break. The boys are incredulous, and when invited by the actors to enter their tent, Palash finally asks them, “Aren’t you each other’s enemies?” The response of the actors — “No, we’re friends. We only act as if we were enemies, all for the belly’s sake, you see?” — is one of the many subtle shrapnel director Chatterjee uses to make his point about organized religion and orchestrated clashes. This subtle artistry of getting the message across, where words and images have both external and internal meanings, makes Dostojee compelling yet poetic in the way great cinema is meant to be.

In the ceaseless romanticising of childhood, it is often overlooked that it is also a difficult territory. In a world governed by adults, children have to constantly look for workarounds, wiggling out ways to protect their little worlds while appearing to be abiding by the laws laid down for them. That is how childhood survives, by negotiating, but as Dostojee shows, also by subverting. And so, even as Shafi goes to see the Rama play despite being forbidden, Palash too, quietly brings an Eid treat from his friend’s house, hiding it well from his mother’s eyes, for his little sister. And on the eve of the Hindu festival of janamashtami that celebrates the birth of lord Krishna, Shafi comes over to Palash’s house to decorate the jhulan, an ornamental swing depicting various episodes from Krishna’s life. It is an activity children in Bengal take great joy in, and while Shafi’s innocent participation in an activity associated with a religion other than his own might not seem all that incongruous, what makes it noteworthy is Shafi’s sourcing of mud for the purpose — from the soil for the proposed new mosque.

One could watch Dostojee for its visuals alone — Chatterjee spoils the viewer in that department, with scene after stunning scene representing not only the beauty of rural Bengal, but of the particular joy of growing up there. In one scene, the two children are seen in a wide open field in the evening, wearing something similar to chef’s hats on their heads. Except, these are paper hats Shafi has made using scrap. They look ordinary up until the moment the hats achieve what their maker intends them to —  gleaming with fireflies that stick to the adhesive Shafi has plastered the hat with. Even the word magic falls short to describe this scene — two boys laughing and dancing with a thousand fireflies crowning their heads as dusk descends — and its visual thrill. Then there are the more familiar and enduring images of rural Bengal — endless paddy fields, lush monsoons, village fairs and the bioscope as well as  repetitive sights and sounds of weaving — the source of livelihood for Shafi’s family.

One of the most telling images in the film is that of Pagla, the village madman — sitting silently on a platform attached to a wall, the two halves of which have posters calling for the solidarity of Hindus and Muslims respectively. The madman isn’t a new idea, but even for an oft-used trope, this single wordless scene — depicting insanity as the only balance holding warring groups of religious fanatics in place — is as powerful as it gets in terms of visual coding.

Even as the two boys float — for “rise” is too lofty a word for the natural ease with which they bond — above the discord festering around them, there comes a point when they too must be separated. On an evening of torrential downpour when the boys dip into the river and begin “catching” fish with as much as Palash’s bare hands and the shirt Shafi has stripped himself of, Palash drowns, taking with himself Shafi’s privilege of uttering the word “Dostojee” ever again.

From this moment on, Shafi’s life wouldn’t be the same, of course, but Shafi himself won’t be the same person either. He would give up his waywardness and turn into the diligent student that Palash was, focusing on his lessons and reaching school on time. His friend’s death would make him obsessed with how fish can swim freely in water without drowning. When his home tutor illustrates for him how the fish’s body is designed to draw oxygen from water, Shafi, who had always been the more hands-on of the two friends, decides to invent a machine that would allow humans to similarly take in oxygen when in water.

Shafi would be diligent about one more thing — perhaps the most important of them all — keeping alive a project he and Palash had started together — making a butterfly from a caterpillar. Braving the awkwardness that comes with having to face Palash’s parents, he keeps returning to their house to put fresh leaves into the jar in which they put the caterpillar. The manner in which this simple act of childhood play is turned into metaphor is yet another testament to Chatterjee’s ability to turn the ordinary into the sublime. Gripped by the memory of the caterpillar, as Shafi comes running to Palash’s house late one evening, we see in the lantern’s dim flicker, how the caterpillar’s movement inside the glass jar catches the attention of Palash’s mother. Transcending itself, the tiny creature now becomes a symbol — of something that breathes and moves, and something that carries a bit of her son in its aliveness. She begins feeding it, and the day Shafi releases the fully formed butterfly, she is seen breaking down for the first time since her son’s death. The suddenness of the insect flying out of the jar hits too close to home for her.

It is perhaps in the film’s final scene — ambiguous, magic-realist, open-ended — where the stylistic panache of Chatterjee, comes full circle, albeit inconspicuously. As a reward for doing well in the final exams, Shafi’s home tutor offers to take him around the village on his bicycle. Shafi requests to be taken to the mango orchard he used to visit with Palash. Once there, he comes across the tree on which the two friends had carved the word “Dostojee”. The film could have ended here and made its point, but it doesn’t. As he looks around, Shafi hears the sharp, unmissable call of the koel, filling the air with its drawn-out koo-oo-s. Soon enough, Shafi returns the call with a koo sound and the bird responds with an even sharper call. This calling game goes on for a while, until Shafi, not the bird, becomes the primary caller. The entire exercise is about the echoing of the same sound by the bird and Shafi. Exactly like the echo he and Palash used to exchange every day when they called each other “Dostojee.” The film reminds us that is how friendship lives on — as echoes, as shadows — even when friends don’t.

Telling larger stories through the prism of childhood friendship is a delicate exercise and the execution is where the filmmaker’s facility and skill are tested. As in the case of the Chilean film, Machuca (2004), written and directed by Andrés Wood that depicts a friendship developing between two boys distanced by class during the months leading up to the coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet, or Julie Gavras’s French-Italian film, Blame It on Fidel (French: La Faute à Fidel; 2006), with a nine-year-old protagonist who must negotiate the world of her activist parents acting as liaisons for Chilean supporters of  Salvador Allende alongside that of her Catholic school and grandparents, Dostojee too does a superbly nuanced telling of how children separated by religion are able to keep the faith while working their way through the rough road of bigotry and distrust.

[After travelling to more than twenty countries around the world and winning eight international awards DOSTOJEE has hit the to the big screen in theatres on November 11. The two leading child actors, Arif Shaikh and Asik Shaikh recently won the Best Actor award at the Malaysian Golden Globe Awards 2022.]

Discomfort Food

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
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. 

Read the rest in Dhaka Tribune

In remembrance: Somendranath Bandopadhyay

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
Somendranath Bandyopadhyay (1926-2022)
Prof. Somendranath Bandyopadhyay taught Bengali Language and Literature in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan during 1957–1991. His subject was mainly Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote several books on Bengali poetry, art, philosophy and literature. In 2011, the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata awarded him the D. Litt. The following is my personal tribute to him. 

1986 — A teacher’s visit

I am in Class 7 and we have moved to Chittarajan Park, South Delhi’s very own Bengali pocket, only a year ago. It’s 7 or perhaps 7:30 in the evening, a busy time for our family of six. I and Dada, my brother, are hunched over our schoolwork — homework, preparing for a class test and such. Dadubhai, my grandfather, is coaching me as usual. In the kitchen, my grandmother and mother, both tired from a day’s work at their respective offices, are hustling to get dinner ready. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. We have no telephone (cell phones haven’t been born yet) and aren’t expecting any visitors in particular. When the door is opened, two tall gentlemen, one of them in pristine white dhuti and panjabi, are found standing. The gentleman in white, the older of the two, asks for my mother, and when she comes to the door, she, and the rest of us, are startled beyond words. Professor Somendranath Bandopadhyay, her teacher from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, where Ma went to study for her MA in Bengali, has come to visit her. The last time the two of them had seen each other was more than a couple of decades ago, while my mother was his student.  Back in her student days, he had shown extraordinary compassion to help her get through a difficult academic patch.

They had kept in touch through letters, and that year, as a student of class 7, when I witnessed this incredible moment, I realized why my mother held this teacher in such high regard. Professor Bandopadhyay was visiting relatives in Chittaranjan Park and mentioned that he wanted to meet his former student, who also lived in the neighbourhood. The conversation that followed through the evening is a blur to me, but I remember helping my mother sift whole wheat flour through a soft cotton cloth in the kitchen to ‘make’ refined flour as Ma and Grandma got busy making luchi, a delicacy that had to be served to a special guest. I remember my grandfather, a man of few words, expressing amazed delight that a teacher had taken the trouble of tracing his student’s house and visiting her. I remember that we were all amazed. I remember how a teacher’s visit had changed the complexion of a weary city evening. Over the next many decades, we would receive letters from him on postcards with beautiful line drawings depicting flowers, leaves, and nature on them.

2007 — Visiting a teacher

The author in Santiniketan; Photo © Bhaswati Ghosh

After working for many different bosses for more than a decade, I finally decide to work for myself and become a freelance writer-editor. Working my own hours gives me the reward of finding more time to do the things that bring me joy — write, cook, travel. I plan a long vacation to West Bengal with my mother. We spend the bulk of our time in Kolkata, but also have Santiniketan and Bishnupur on our itinerary. At Santiniketan, when we seek accommodation at the in-campus guest house, we’re turned away, with no vacancy offered to us by way of explanation. We put up at a lodge close to the campus. That evening, when Ma and I visit Professor Bandopadhyay, now Somen Mama to me, she tells him about our lodging woes, and he chides her saying she should have called him right from the guest house. He asks us how long we plan to stay for, and when he learns it would be the next three days, he calls up the guest house to get us a room there. We move back into the campus, a pilgrimage for me, where she would wake up to, as she did in her days as a student, to the calls of doel, the oriental magpie and bou-kotha-kao, the Indian cuckoo. I would discover mornings that sounded sweeter than anything I’d ever experienced in my existence as a city-bred. 

At Somen Mama’s house for breakfast one morning, his affectionate wife, Boudi to all students, and Maami to me, treats us to a deliciously elaborate spread, complete with luchi, torkaari, chop (croquettes), mishti and her signature vanilla pound cake that I’ve come to relish. We sit at the low jol-chowkis in the dining area of this aesthetically pleasing and inviting house as Mama talks to us about Tagore’s worldview and the radical relevance of the Buddha’s teachings. Now and again, a humorous vein emerges, and he breaks into a laughter — resonant, uninhibited, completely disarming. We drift back to the living room for tea and more stimulating conversation. He then brings a copy of his latest book — Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari — that he signs for my mother as a gift. He gives me a beautiful pair of polished burgundy wooden chopsticks that he’d gotten from his visit to Japan. I spend some quiet moments in their beautiful garden outside, soaking in the prettiness of flowers — clusters of Ashok and hibiscus in several colours.

Flower arrangement at Somen Mama’s house; Photo © Bhaswati Ghosh

Back in Delhi, my mother reads the book and keeps nudging me to do the same. I politely keep telling her I will, until I can’t put it off any longer. I’m barely into the first paragraph when I realize I wouldn’t be able to put it down before devouring every last sentence, every last word of it. The book’s format is deceptively everyday — it’s a series of conversations between two neighbours. Only, in this case, both the interviewee — the artist-sculptor Ramkinkar Baij and his interviewer — Somendranath Bandopadhyay are so much in synchronicity that the reader couldn’t ask for two better conversationalists. 

Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari

By simply describing the living quarters of the renowned artist who he found as his neighbour, Somen Mama, draws me in. I am transported to the Santiniketan of Baij’s student and work life, to his world of mud and plaster, of studying from other artists, both at home and globally, of his interactions with Rabindranath Tagore who encourages him to chart his own course without looking back, of deeply empathizing with and drawing inspiration for his work from the Santhal Adivasis living in the area, and most of all, of living a passionate, feisty, and fiercely creative life on his own terms. The book is not merely a gift to my mother, to us, I realize; it’s a gift to all who can read the Bengali language. I am so taken by it that I want to tell the world about it and excitedly write a blog post and translate a few favourite parts. Later that year, I send my proposal for translating this remarkable book to an international translation fellowship. It gets accepted. 

2008-2012 — A teacher for life

I am back in Santiniketan with Ma to meet with Somen Mama, to give him the good news, to seek his permission to translate the book. He talks about having heard of a certain blogger from Delhi who had translated parts of the book; then he realizes that person is me. So far he’s only known me by my pet name, so it has taken him a while to make the connection. While we’re here this time, I ask Somen Mama, now my author, lots of questions regarding the book’s technical aspects. He takes out big tomes from his study and patiently answers each one of my queries. I also spend my time looking more closely at Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptures spread across the open campus — Sujata, Santhal Family, Mill Call. My seeing is now informed by the history and context of these iconic works, captured with vivid sincerity by Somen Mama. 

I travel to Norwich, UK, the site of my fellowship and complete translating the book. Over the next year, I look for publishers for the book and fortunately, the book finds a home. A journey that began with my mother’s master’s education in Santiniketan comes full circle as my name appears below his on a book cover. Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari becomes My Days With Ramkinkar Baij in English. 

2022 — The final adieu

On a March day, we receive the sad news of Somen Mama’s final departure. It’s still difficult to think of him in the past tense. As I reflect on this wonderful human being and the fullness of his life that enriched so many of us, I know what I will remember of and receive as blessings from him the most — humility and grace, a childlike zeal for exploring new realms, and above all, a deep, empathetic compassion for those around us. 

My Literary Wanderings ~ arriving at life’s crossroads, with both pain and joy!

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
A new column about literary journeys I will be curating in Saaranga. This inaugural post starts with my own story.

At seven — an age when writing only means filling the school homework notebook with the dreary repetition of my handwriting — the joy of reading arrives at my door. It’s a hot morning of my summer vacations in New Delhi, and like on most such mornings, I’m preoccupied with some or the other holiday homework — tasks designed to keep children in line and make them more tolerable to their family members for two long and sultry months. A postman knocks on our gate holding that rare item — a parcel — that lights up our faces with barely- concealed smiles. As my grandmother emerges from the kitchen and opens the package with her turmeric-stained fingers, out come the precious contents — a book of Bengali chhawra or rhyming verses and illustrated Ramayana and Mahabharata for children in Bengali — books she had ordered for me through relatives in Calcutta. The fun of words rolling into limericks and nonsense verse as you uttered them, of reading stories you didn’t have to write an exam for, of letting your mind fill with imagination what the words in the books left out — these must have been the initiation for me on the road to being a literary pilgrim.  

*

The year I move on to middle school, I decide to switch schools. I’m glad I do, because in grade six, I find the teacher who would influence me the most in my life. Abha Das, a petite woman who wears crisp cotton saris and glasses on her small but penetrating eyes, doesn’t merely give lectures on the stories in our English textbook. She makes each one of the stories, which she takes days to finish, a riveting experience — at once an education in the craft of storytelling and reading with empathy and understanding. As she gives a lecture on E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir with Love, she asks us to look back and think of the times we felt belittled because of our identity. By doing this — throwing us headlong at our vulnerabilities — she dissolves the distance between the narrator and us. Relating to the characters we read about in fiction in such a visceral way would help make me be a better reader even before I show any promise of being a writer. One morning, I would find the teacher waiting at the end of our morning assembly line. She’s there to thank me for a birthday card I’d left on her desk in the staffroom with a poem titled To Ma’am with Love. Her teaching would turn my joy of reading into a deeper love for words. I would now notice their intonation, their music, and recognize their inherent power to breed both love and violence. 

*

Even as Abha Ma’am enthralls us in school, at home, too, another petite woman — Amiya Sen, my grandma — remains a force I can’t ignore. She’s a grandmother like every other, doting and endlessly patient, yet she’s more. I see her go to work at an office when no other friend’s grandmother does. She stitches the best frock dresses for me every Durga Pua and knits me sweaters with the most exquisite patterns every winter. She reads — books, newspapers, magazines, my school textbooks, packets made from old newspapers — like there’s no tomorrow. And she writes. She writes after returning from work, she writes in between cooking meals, she writes after running errands, she writes late into the night after everyone has fallen asleep, she writes the first thing in the morning before anyone wakes up. She has no writing desk to fulfill this fetish; I only see her writing on the floor where she sprawls on her stomach to lie on a straw mat, her arms resting on a pillow. She would be my first example of what a full-time writer truly means — not someone who has no job and earns their living through writing, but someone who steals and grabs every millisecond of available time to write while carrying out the seven thousand and nine other responsibilities that eat into her writing time. At thirteen, I write my first short story in Bangla and show it to her with nervousness. With a warm hug of approval, she encourages me to write more. Two years later, before I’m able to grasp the full scope of her writing artistry, she leaves the world. And she leaves me clueless about fighting loneliness, about living with the scary beast of loneliness. 

*

Three decades go by. I am far removed from the house I grew up in, the one that my writer grandmother built with her life’s savings and dreams. I now live with my husband in Canada where it’s cold for more than half a year. In the thirty years since my grandmother passed away and I passed out of school where Abha Ma’am taught me, I’ve carried more than luggage. I have lugged Grandma’s stories — literally and figuratively. I have with me a bunch of short stories she wrote longhand, to type out and prepare for possible publication. But I also have the stories she told me as I grew up — stories of her childhood back in undivided India, of her life as a young bride, of her coming to Delhi and learning the English alphabet from her children, of the heartbreaking and unrelenting tragedies she’d had to endure in her life, of the unceasing pain of being displaced from her desh, the native soil of East Bengal that she’d been estranged from with India’s division in 1947. Somewhere along the way, all of these make a story grow inside me, and I end up writing a novel. When Victory Colony, 1950, my first book of fiction is published, I feel happy, relieved and sad at once. Like every new author, I’m elated to finally see my story out there in the world. Yet somewhere inside, it hurts me to realize that the one person I would have liked to read it isn’t there. 

A year after the book is published, I have a dream featuring my grandmother. She is lively and as engaged with current events as she always had been, and I feel anxious anticipating her reaction to my novel. When I wake up, a bittersweet sensation tugs at my throat. I feel relief and yet I also feel an ache. 

Perhaps that is what our literary wanderings are about — arriving at life’s crossroads, with both pain and joy staring at us. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to Saaranga’s new column on these journeys with authors — I hope you’ll indulge us and enjoy taking in the songs, dramas and scenes that forge our writerly paths. 

Guest post by Rekha Karmakar

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

This post, written by Rekha Karmakar who blogs at Tabulous Mom, is a tribute to Amiya Sen, my grandmother, whom the blogger knew as a neighbour in Delhi more than five decades ago.

Story of a woman born about a century ago

A rough sketch of the layout of a chummery in Lodhi Colony (New Delhi) in the 1950s, from my distant memory, where Amiya Sengupta’s and our family lived

This story is not about any female revolutionist, during the British period, who took up arms to fight for the country’s independence. It is about an ordinary humdrum housewife like our mothers and aunts who toiled in the kitchen and looked after their families.


I knew this lady since I was five years old though I lost track of her in course of time. One may wonder why I am writing about her after so many years.

To be very honest, my memories were rekindled by a story written by her worthy granddaughter Bhaswati Ghosh, who currently lives in Canada and is herself a writer. Her story about her grandmother Amiya Sengupta in ‘Memoir Excerpts: Excerpt from Till the River Runs Dry’ published in SETUMAG.IN brought back my memories about her.

Like many of my FB friends, I had not met Bhaswati, who, I suppose, is also an alumni of my school in Delhi. Once she wrote on FB about her maternal grandmother Amiya Sengupta, who would write stories in her copybook, some of which were also published.

‘Amiya Sengupta’ ? I pondered for a while as it rang a bell in my mind. I thought it might be the ‘mashima’ of our ‘chummery’ in Lodhi Colony in New Delhi. I messaged Bhaswati enquiring about her grandmother and was immediately confirmed by her that I was on the right track.

Why did it take me so much time to figure out who Amiya Sengupta was? Later it occurred to me it might have been because those days women were not usually known by their names. They were either ‘boro bou’/’mejo bou’/’choto bou’ (daughters-in-law as per hierarchy) or ‘so and so’s mother’ after their children were born. Amiya Sengupta was ‘mashima’/auntie to us and ‘Gita’s ma’ to others. Her eldest daughter Gita happens to be the mother of Bhaswati.

A few years after independence (in the 1950s), a group of young and daring Bengalis came to Delhi, with their families, to build a new India. My father, Amiya Sengupta’s husband Sudhir Chandra Sengupta and a few others were among them.

Away from home, these men were put up in ‘chummries’ along with their families. ‘Chummeries’ were two storeyed buildings used as a ‘mess’ for bachelor British soldiers during the British raj. Central govt employees of different states of India were temporarily put up in those buildings after independence.

There used to be a staircase in the middle of the building. On each side of it, there were five rooms in a row. These had a bed room and a small drawing room sort of space in front. Each batch of five rooms had three common bathrooms and three common toilets, which were kept quite clean.

Next to it, was the kitchen which was divided into five parts though none had a door. Food was cooked on ‘balti unans’ (coal fire ovens made in a bucket) or mud ‘unans’ built on the floor.

Quite often, I would sit next to my mom and listen to the ladies talking while they were cooking. It usually veered around recipes and always ended with talking about their ‘daish’/native land in East Pakistan as the memories were still very fresh. Amiya Sengupta, whom I shall, henceforth, refer to as ‘mashima’, always took the lead.

Amiya Sen

‘Mashima’ and ‘meshomosai’ stayed on the same floor, as we did, with their two children – a daughter and a son. They were a little older than my parents, who regarded them as their friend, philosopher and guide.

‘Meshomosai’ was very good in mathematics. Whenever I got stuck, I would go to him. Usually the first few sums of an exercise were solved in the class but the last few ones, which were difficult, would invariably be given as home task. Hence, I would have to go to him very often. ‘Meshomosai’ was very glad to help but on one condition. The condition was that I would have to pick up his grey hair for getting the sums solved. (His hair had become grey untimely). I, too, readily agreed. Now I realize I must have made him almost bald considering the number of times I went to him to get my sums solved. 🤩

In the meanwhile, ‘mashima’ did a diploma course in sewing. Not only that, she opened a sewing school at home where she gave tuition to the ladies of the neighbourhood. I always felt she was different from others as no one else, at that time, would ever have thought of adding to the family income by giving tuition in sewing though she was not in dire need of money.

My mom was one of her early batch of students and a favourite one too. My mom bought a Usha sewing machine, which was considered to be quite expensive at that time. But my mom made very good use of it by churning out innumerable frocks for us, shirts and shorts for my brother, blouses and petticoats for herself and pajamas for my father. After her children grew up, she stitched curtains, pillow covers etc.

A few days back, when I called my mom, she ruefully told me that she had sold the Usha machine to a man as she could not move her fingers properly to sew. Unable to control my curiosity, I asked her how much she had sold it for. She replied it was sold for Rs 200/-. She also told me that she had bought the sewing machine for Rs 125/-, by adding money from her saving. She proudly added that it was ‘Tailor’ model, the one which the tailors used for sewing. The other ordinary model was cheaper.

After a few years, we were all shifted to East Vinay Nagar (later named Laxmi Bai Nagar), where new quarters were erected for us. These were two storeyed buildings, having 2BHK flats, with a small balcony in front and a tiny kitchen garden at the back. Both our families were in the same block. The ‘chummeries’, we heard, were demolished later to make way for new buildings.

(After four decades of leaving Delhi, I went back to Laxmi Bai Nagar again but felt like Rip Van Winkle, without being able to recognize anything).

All the moms were very happy having a separate and self contained flat though it took some time to get adjusted to the new upcoming colony.

‘Mashima’, however, did not stop after getting a diploma in sewing. She appeared privately for Matriculation, Intermediate and B.A. examinations from Punjab University and lastly did M.A. in Bengali from Delhi University though her children were quite old at that time. She also started learning Hindi and appeared for Prabhakar (equivalent to Hindi Hons.). Hindi was promoted a lot at that time by the Central government to make it the national language of India. I do not remember if she took up a job at that time. But from her granddaughter Bhaswati’s writing, I came to know that later in life she had a government job.

Many decades have passed since then. I might have jumbled up many facts about her as I was myself a young school going girl at that time. I got a few inputs from her granddaughter too.

This story is not about facts but about the grit and spirit of ‘mashima’. Marrried at fifteen and coming from Barisal in East Pakistan, I realize now, she achieved a great feat. Very few women of her time would have ventured to appear for Board and University examinations from the scratch. Her family, too, must have given her a lot of support or it would not have been possible for her to do anything.

During summer, in Delhi, we used to sleep on the charpoys (portable beds made with strings), in the lawn, in front of our house. ‘Mashima’s family used to sleep just a few feet away from us. Quite often I noticed that she would read a book in the light of the lamp post that was just over her charpoy. Such was her tenacity.

‘Mashima’ had a passion for writing, which she did braving many odds. As per her granddaughter, ‘mashima’ has four books, many published articles and short stories to her credit. I wish her granddaughter Bhaswati edits and compiles them again.

One thing, I must say, is that she was very fortunate to have a granddaughter like Bhaswati, who delved into her writings and gave her due credit for it. I wish my granddaughter Kimaya also, at least, reads my post from my humble blog tabulousmom.blogpost. com when she grows up.

I pay my respect to ‘mashima’ through this post and wish her soul rests in peace.

Homes and the World

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

My personal essay, Homes and the World, first published in Literary Shanghai.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

From womb to the world, I bring emergencies in my wake.

  1. LAJPAT NAGAR

Ten days after I’m born, democracy in my country gets turned on its head; constitutional rights are left meaningless for all practical purposes. The Indian government has just declared a state of Emergency. While I have no memory from that time, people who do still recoil in remembered fear when talking of those “Dark days.” Of disappearances and forced sterilizations, of tortures, interrogations and blank newspaper pages – a way to refuse toeing the government line.

My mother has to fight her own emergency, meanwhile. Her marriage has just fallen apart and she’s back in her parents’ home in Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. When I come bundled up from Holy Family, the Christian missionary hospital where I am delivered to Kasturba Niketan – the refugee rehabilitation colony where my grandmother works, my mother is in desperate need of a job.

Before that first house grows on me, the Emergency has been lifted and my mother finds employment. Her old employer – the library at Delhi University – takes her back, making an exception on its policy regarding rehiring former employees. Her pre-marriage work record helps as much as her post-marriage personal crisis.

Read the rest in Literary Shanghai

Home is Grandma’s Butterfly Breath in a Guava Tree

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

First published in Plato’s Caves online

Home is a kidnapper who has finally made you submit to its territory, mapped and unmapped.

Home is your first partner in crime who, by introducing you to its hidden corners, gives a toddler you a taste of what manipulating adults with pranks feels like.

Home is the no-nonsense courtroom, where, you, still a toddler, take the gods to task by bashing up their idols at the altar for denying your grandma her own house.

Home is the compassionate table fan that breezes through the room on a hot summer day as Rafi and Geeta Dutt croon aankhon-hi-aankho-mein on the radio and two children – your brother and you – sprawl on the cool cement floor of a government quarter to hurry through your summer holiday homework.

Home is the indulgent playground overlooking that same government quarter where children make friends over hopscotch and their mothers, knitting buddies, on charpaais.

Home is the confused late-entry hero that is finally grandma’s own house. Its dust and half walls hold you in a perplexed daze. Your brother, yet to reach his teens, brings you back to reality as he returns with a pot of rice he’s managed to cook in the half-baked kitchen of this unfinished structure.

Home is the jealous new paara, neighbourhood, who estranges you from old friends and the loving playground with its consolatory offer of a cricket-colonized back street and stock loneliness.

Home is the keen, encouraging listener of your early-morning and late-evening riyaaz that mother helps add melody to with the harmonium she buys you off months of savings.

Home is the generous open terrace that grows in personality as you do in age – as your study-time ally in your yet-to-be-teen, mellow winter afternoons; as the host of a star-draped night sky beckoning you to let go in your ambivalent early 20s; as your gym and fitness partner later, when you do learn to let go.

Home is the comforting pal your grandfather brings you back to from the bus stop every evening after school. It’s where grandma waits with hot food and a listening ear for all your school stories, helping you bridge the interval until mother returns from work.

Home is the trusted ally you make your way back to, having survived an attack by gunmen in a public space, to hug your grandma, sick with worry. In the days to follow, home makes you an accelerated learner of what political revenge means even as your eyes adjust to the sight of blood on the streets you call paara.

Home is the saboteur who smashes that trust and hurtles you into the dark, suffocating dungeon of an empty house after making you witness the deaths of your grandparents for two years in a row.

Home is the traitor who makes you grow up while you’re still an adolescent without allowing you the time or the technique for the messy transition.

Home is the embarrassing hole in the bedsheet you cover with a folded quilt that you desperately hope wouldn’t shift when your university friends come over to your house to plan a trip.

Home is the sterile mate you’ve lost all love for but continue to live with, your days drained of élan vital, your nights a concert hall for sleep-snuffing nightmares.

Home, after years, no, a whole decade, is finally the conciliatory collaborator who invites you to work from home – with your mother, now retired from work, filling up all the hollows your grandparents’ departure had cleaved into its spaces.

Home is the humble plot of land your grandma bought, even if it’s no longer the house she built. Her breath moves through the guava tree she planted, still rooted to the faithful backyard soil and alights on your skin as a butterfly every time you fly back.

Home is a detective plot that can only unravel in back stories. Each flicker of memory is evidence of the scraps that went into constructing this labyrinth. Every solution is wisdom distilled only in hindsight.

Photo by Andreea Ch on Pexels.com

Thirty-eight years with Shakti

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Samir Sengupta

Translated from the Bangla by
Bhaswati Ghosh

First published in Parabaas

From Shakti Chattopadhyay’s handwritten
facsimili edition of
Kuri Bochhorer Kuriti
(‘Twenty Years, Twenty Poems’)

I first met Shakti in 1957, at the College Street Coffee House. I still carried on me the smell of Ramakrishna Mission’s Vidyamandir from where I had just graduated. The modernity of Coffee House startled me almost every day. I would find myself a corner to sit at the Krittibas table, with the poets barely tolerating me. Scores of foreign names—of poets, novelists, films, filmmakers—rained down my head. Every single day, I would hear new names—how in the world could I get to read so many books, watch so many films? I hadn’t even seen the magazine Kabita (*Poetry, কবিতা ) yet. I have faint memories of Shakti wearing a red tie and commuting to his workplace, Hind Motors as a daily passenger.

Somehow, with time we became friends. I didn’t write any poetry, only dealt with prose, that too very little. I had enrolled into Jadavpur University’s master’s program in Comparative Literature, which brought me an entry into the haloed and unique adda of ‘Kabita Bhavan’ (*lit. house of poetry, residence of Buddhadeva Bose, founder-editor of Kabita). Shakti’s name was still on the student roll, but one hardly saw him on the campus. He would (suddenly) show up once every six or nine months and that would be it. He was part of the batch following ours, a classmate of Rumi’s (Damayanti Basu Singh, Buddhadeva Bose’s youngest daughter) in the BA course. Buddhadeva had forced him to enroll with hopes of making him return to the mainstream. By then, however, a witch had already seized Shakti’s heart.

Read the rest in Parabaas