Peeved and angered at his failure to put a stop to the Durga Puja festivities, Debendra had taken to disappearing from Kolkata well before the preparations commenced and returning after the festivities were concluded. This was a form of emotional blackmail by which, he thought, he could bring the obstinate woman to her knees. For, the absence of the master of the house, for the whole period of the festival, would surely act as a deterrent! But Debendra’s hopes were dashed. Nothing like that happened. Jogmaya and Tripura were extremely efficient women and, between the two, they were able to manage everything without even involving Nagendranath. No one missed Debendra except his wife. His children were used to his frequent absences. As for the other members of the household, Durga Puja was a festival they looked forward to the whole year. They were relieved, even glad, to be able to enjoy it away from the head’s disapproving eye.
Only Sarada, poor thing, was caught in a dilemma. She loved Durga Puja. From the first flowering of the autumnal kash and shiuli and the first singing of the agomoni, the coming of Durga, by itinerant minstrels, her heart was suffused with joyous anticipation. But her husband was a Brahmo and frowned upon idol worship. She didn’t want to offend him or hurt his feelings. But he gave her no clear directions. What was she to do? What did he expect of her?
The best thing, she decided, would be to tag along with him and escape from Jorasanko.
‘Take me with you,’ she begged, the first time he was preparing to leave before the approaching festival.
‘I have no idea of where I’m going or how I shall live,’ Debendranath answered solemnly. ‘I might find myself in forests and mountains; in the most inhospitable terrain. You are a woman. You won’t be able to endure the life.’
‘But you promised you would take me with you wherever you go. That you would keep me with you always,’ she reminded him tearfully.
‘No, Bado Bou. Your place is here with the children.’
‘Everyone knows why you are leaving. I do too. Why must I stay and take part in what you have rejected? I am your wife and your dharma is mine.’
‘You must act according to your conscience. You need not participate if you do not wish to.’
‘How is that possible? Stay here and not participate? After all, I’m the mistress of the house!’
‘Everything is possible, Bado Bou.’
‘Then why are you leaving?’
Debendranath had no answer.
Sarada tried to keep herself aloof and prayed for the festival to be over. As the eldest daughter-in-law of the house, indeed, its present mistress, she was given pride of place in all the rituals that make up a Durga Puja. Women were constantly calling out to her to join them. ‘O Bado Bou! Aren’t you coming for the jal saowa? The auspicious hour is slipping fast. Wear a new sari and come quick!’ Or ‘O Didi! All the women are assembled in the Thakur dalan with their alta and sindoor. We are waiting for you. After all, you are the eldest. Yours must be the first sindoor in Ma Durga’s parting!’ Or ‘Why are you looking so pale, Bado Bouthan? Haven’t you broken your fast yet? Chhoto Bou! Send some prasad for your sister-in-law.’
Sarada had a string of excuses all prepared and ready. She had a splitting headache and couldn’t walk as far as the pond for the jal saowa. She was feeling nauseous and giddy from her new pregnancy and hadn’t slept a wink the whole night. The others were to go on with their sindoor ceremony and not wait for her. She had eaten so much prasad already she couldn’t swallow another mouthful. Sometimes the calls were so alluring she couldn’t resist them and gave way to temptation. But, immediately afterwards, the taste of her pleasure turned to ashes in her mouth. She felt her husband’s eyes on her, not angry and condemning but sad and disappointed. She shed bitter tears, whenever that happened, and vowed never to be enticed again.
The cold war between Debendra and Jogmaya carried on for some more years. Then, Debendra decided, it was time for a clear confrontation and, if necessary, a split. After all, he couldn’t run away from Durga Puja all his life or pretend that no Hindu rites were being conducted under his roof. As it is, the younger members of the Samaj were looking askance at him. Their eyes said, though they kept their mouths discreetly shut, that he preached one set of rules and practised another. How could he go on living in a house where there was flagrant worship of Hindu idols?
But it wasn’t only religious differences that broke up the family. Things got worse after Nagendra’s sudden, inexplicable death. He was only thirty-nine, in perfect health, when a mysterious fever took him away almost overnight. Everyone mourned his death. But nobody, quite naturally, suffered the devastation that was Tripura Sundari’s. She had no one of her own left anymore. Neither husband nor child. In her grief, she clung to Jogmaya’s youngest son Gunendranath, a delightful boy, for whom she had always had a special affection. She, now, expressed a desire to adopt him legally. Jogmaya gave her consent quite willingly. And why wouldn’t she? She would lose nothing by the adoption. Her child would remain with her in the same house and all would be as it had always been. One added advantage was that he would inherit his aunt’s share of the property. But the proposal was met with firm opposition from the most unexpected of quarters. Debendranath ruled it out.
One day Sarada accosted her husband. ‘Why are you preventing Chhoto Bou from adopting Guno?’ she asked. ‘You know how much she loves him. She has brought him up as her own son.’
‘She can go on loving him and taking care of him. No one is snatching away her right to do so.’
‘But she wants to adopt him! She needs to feel that he is truly hers.’
‘Why? She never thought of doing so all these years. Neither did Nagendra. Why now?’
‘Because she is a widow now. Because she has no one left.’
‘I’m still alive, am I not? Tell her she’ll be looked after exactly as she has been. Nothing will change.’
‘It’s not the same thing. You’re not a woman. You have no idea of what she’s going through. As a barren woman and a widow she feels herself doubly cursed. If some of her heartache is relieved by adopting a child, why stop her? After all, even your father was adopted by his aunt because she was childless.’
‘You’re making a mistake. He was adopted because his mother died when he was born. Besides, his father was alive. The two cases are quite different.’
‘What is the difference?’ Sarada knitted her brows in perplexity. ‘I don’t see any.’
‘Don’t talk like a fool, Bado Bou. It has to do with inheritance. If the adoption is allowed, Guno will inherit Nagendra’s full share as well as half of his father’s. We have six sons. They’ll get three shares of the property between them and Guno alone will have four and a half. Is that fair?’
‘And if the adoption is not allowed?’
‘Then Nagendra’s share will be split in two. Half will come to our sons and half to Girin’s.’
Sarada nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said thoughtfully. Then, suddenly, a flood of invective burst from her. ‘It’s all that wicked Jogmaya’s doing! Chhoto Bou is a simple soul. I’m sure she didn’t think of it herself. She was put up to it by that scheming woman. Hiding behind her widow’s thaan and her tulsi and Ganga jal only to plot and plan against my sons and secure the lion’s share for her own!’
‘Shh…’ Debendranath’s voice hissed in her ear. ‘Keep your voice down. Don’t worry. I shall not allow it. If necessary I shall move the courts.’
‘You must. We can’t allow that she devil to make fools of us.’
Debendranath frowned. He was extremely disturbed. Jogmaya was getting totally out of control. Since when did a woman set her will against that of the family patriarch’s? She was doing it again and again. First, by manoeuvring Hindu rites for his father’s shraddha. Then by flouting his express command and carrying on with her idol worship. And now this. It was not to be tolerated.
Sending for Jogmaya’s eldest son, Ganendra, Debendranath told him that he could not, and would not, compromise with the rule o
f priests and the worship of Hindu deities any longer. The family could continue to live together only if all its members embraced the Brahmo dharma. If not, he would leave Baithak Khana Bari with his wife and children.
Ganendra conveyed all this to his mother. But Jogmaya was adamant. She would not abandon the dharma of her husband’s ancestors. No, not if she had to die for it. In consequence, Debendranath walked out of Baithak Khana Bari in much the same way as his ancestor Neelmoni had walked out of the mansion of Pathuriaghata. But there was one big difference. Neelmoni had protected the Shalagramshila. Debendranath spurned it. Neelmoni had carried it on his head through storm, wind and rain. Debendranath shook the dust of the house in which it was lodged off his feet and heaved a sigh of relief. But he did something else just before leaving. He moved the Supreme Court of Kolkata against the adoption of Gunendranath by his widowed aunt Tripura Sundari Debi.
After the break, the two houses became two distinct entities. The grounds got divided. Only the pond remained common. The inmates of both houses had, for as long as they could remember, lived in amity and concord. Now they were forced to exercise a choice. They had either to join Debendra’s camp and become Brahmos. Or remain Hindu and side with Jogmaya. A wall of ideology divided not only the grounds and gardens, it split the family in two – the Brahmo Tagores and the Hindu Tagores. The news became public in a matter of days. No. 6 was the Brahmo bari, No. 5 the Hindu.
From their apartments on the second floor of Baithak Khana Bari, Debendra’s family moved to one on the first floor of the older, relatively spartan No. 6. It was a change for them all. Sarada felt it keenly. But, for the children, the break from their beloved mejo kaki and their cousins was far more painful than the lack of comforts in their new home. Satyendra was very close to Ganendra and the two, with Debendranath’s eldest son Dwijendra, had formed a trinity. As children they had studied and played together and, now, as young married men, they composed verses, teased each other’s brains with anagrams and exchanged confidences about their wives and their nightly prowess. In this, Satyendra had no inputs. He was only a listener. His father had had a private audience with him, on his wedding day, during which he had explained the true meaning of marriage to his son and commanded him not to enter into a physical relationship with his wife before she attained puberty. Satyendra had obeyed his father’s command to the letter.
III
Genu’s first few months in her husband’s home had passed in a blur. She spent most of it sitting on the floor of the room allotted to her, weeping behind her ghumta. Visitors came from time to time, women from the other branches of the extended family, demanding to see her. On these occasions, Soudamini combed her hair, gave her face a quick scrub, washing away the telltale tears, and led her to her mother’s room where Sarada Sundari sat on a vast bedstead surrounded by her silver paan box, spittoon, maids, sycophants and visitors. Ma is so fat, Genu often thought, she finds it difficult to move. She even needs a maid to hold out her spittoon.
Indeed, Sarada Sundari did nothing all day but sit on her bed, eating paan and playing cards with her aunt Subhankari who was also her great friend, counsellor and confidante. She had one duty, though, which she performed religiously. Her trips to the birthing chamber were so frequent and so regular that she had already, at thirty-two, given birth to twelve children. The poor relations with which the house was filled to bursting and whose sole purpose in life was to grab as many comforts for themselves as possible and criticize their benefactors for not providing more, marvelled at this ability. ‘Her husband is away, touring his estates and meditating in the mountains for most of the year,’ they whispered amongst themselves, ‘Then how…?’ But the maids who waited on Sarada knew the truth. How Kartamoshai sent for her every night on his brief sojourns to Jorasanko. And how, on receiving the summons, she would heave herself off the bed, bathe in perfumed water, no matter how late the hour, then, wearing a broad red-bordered sari and sprinkling herself with attar, walk into her husband’s apartment on stealthy feet, with the shy delight of a newlywed. After the child came, of course, her duty was done. The Tagore children were left in the care of wet nurses, maids and servants from the day they were born.
One day, soon after a group of visitors had left, Sarada turned to her aunt and said fretfully, ‘Did you see their daughter-in-law, Khuri? How plump and fair and pretty she is? And the girls our Karta brings to this house? Thin and scrawny as weeds!’ She glanced vexedly at her second daughter-in-law.
‘She’ll fill out soon enough,’ Subhankari soothed her niece. ‘With all the good food she is eating here it’s only a matter of time.’
‘But she eats so little!’ Sarada’s favourite maid, Kalo, a garrulous woman who had been in the family for years, put in her bit. ‘Half the food on her thala gets sent back every day. And she runs like a rabbit when anyone comes near her with besan and oil.’
‘Is that so?’ Sarada frowned. She felt it was time she bestirred herself. ‘Fetch me a bowl of rice and milk,’ she ordered, ‘and some rooptaan.’ Rooptaan – ‘roop’ meaning beauty and ‘taan’ pull – was a whitening agent made of dried and powdered orange peel, rose petals and cream. It was guaranteed to pull out and bring into the open the most secretive and stubborn layer of fair skin that ever hid itself in the dark. The Tagore women swore by it and used it religiously for themselves and their children.
When the items she had asked for arrived, Sarada ordered the maids to scrub rooptaan vigorously over Genu’s face, arms and neck. The beautification process concluded, she took the bowl of rice and milk and commenced pushing fistfuls of the gooey stuff into the girl’s unwilling mouth.
‘Why do you soil your lily-white hands with such work, Ginni Ma?’ Kalo cried out ingratiatingly. ‘Leave it to one of us.’
Sarada’s hands were, indeed, very beautiful. White and shapely with plump but tapering fingers. ‘You just said no one can manage her,’ she answered. ‘I’ll have to do it myself.’
From behind the ghumta, Genu could not see her mother-in-law’s face, but the feel of her soft fingers in her mouth and the knocking of her nails against her teeth sickened her. She ran out of the room as soon as Sarada put down the bowl and vomited all that she had been fed into the gutter. Needless to say, Sarada could not sustain her resolve or keep up the effort to beautify her daughter-in-law for long. After a few more such tortuous sessions, Genu was set free.
Genu’s husband Satyendra had tried to make friends with his little bride but, overcome with bashfulness, she had clung to her ghumta and maintained a stubborn silence whenever he tried to talk to her. Satyendra wasn’t as handsome as his brothers and cousins. He was darker and squarer in build. But he was the brightest of them all. Having passed the entrance examination with a first division, he had won a scholarship of ten rupees a month and was now studying in Presidency College.
He was different from his brothers in one other thing – his attitude to women. As a young boy he would yank the ghumtas off the heads of his sisters-in-law with the words, ‘What’s wrong with your face that you keep it covered? Are your cheeks bursting with boils? Or have your eyes turned yellow?’ As he grew older and came under the influence of some of his British tutors, his opposition to the system of keeping women confined in the abarodh hardened. ‘There’s nothing to be gained from a Western education, my boy,’ one of them had said to him, ‘if you don’t use it to enlighten your own people. Your women are enmeshed in darkness and ignorance. They are denied the light of freedom and knowledge. Open your doors to them and let them see the dawn.’
Satyendra was highly motivated by these words and dreamed of a time when the wooden shutters enclosing the women’s section of the mansion of Jorasanko would be stripped away and the two wings would become one. He believed that the practice of keeping women as asuryampasya, untouched by the sun, was not Hindu in origin. It was a Muslim custom and had been appropriated by Hindus to protect their women from rape and molestation by barbaric invaders. His favourite textbook was
John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women. It had enthused him so much that he had brought out a pamphlet entitled Stree Swadhinata in response.
He tried to share his thoughts with his mother but she wouldn’t listen to a word. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she snapped at him. ‘What do you want? To turn our girls into mems and take them for walks in the park?’ His father’s views were somewhat different. Debendranath maintained all the old ways pertaining to women and supported the presence of the abarodh. But he believed in educating them. His third son, Hemendra, who looked a lot like him and shared all his views, gathered the children of the house every evening and gave them lessons in Bangla, Sanskrit and basic arithmetic. The girls of the family were encouraged to attend these classes – daughters as well as daughters-in-law.
One day, a couple of months after the wedding, Satyendra said to Genu. ‘Why don’t you attend Hemendra’s classes? I don’t want a wife who doesn’t know her letters.’
This remark had the effect Satyendra had been looking for. ‘Who said I don’t know my letters?’ Genu threw back her ghumta angrily. Then, lifting a tiny hand, she began ticking off on her fingers. ‘I know my simple letters. I know my compound letters. I can count up to a hundred. I can do sums. And I can recite three poems,’ she finished triumphantly. Satyendra burst out laughing. He found her small brown face with its missing tooth and the way she reeled off her accomplishments vastly diverting.
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