‘You go there and see my old house and the land where I want to build my new home,’ she said in a tone of warm, easy familiarity, even intimacy.
Often, when she came in the morning to cook breakfast and lunch, I would ask her to cook lunch for exactly two, Ma and Baba, since the fridge was groaning with leftovers. I loved leftovers and I could happily eat them for lunch every day, but Baba wanted to take something freshly cooked every morning to work, something simple such as rice, a vegetable dish and some fish. Ma, too, I think, liked something different from what she had the previous night, although she was slightly nervous about confessing this to me. Renu, naturally enough, often cooked enough to serve between four to six people, since that was easier to do than cook for one. The outcome was such a surfeit of cooked food at home that we all struggled. But Ma explained, ‘Eat what you want, no need to feel the pressure to finish everything. We can always give it to Milly. She is always happy with the season of plenty that happens when you visit, I can tell. And she can also take the excess food for her children.’
One such morning, around eleven, when it was time for Renu to leave after her stint, she came out to the living room and said to me (Ma was out), ‘The fridge is full of food. Why aren’t you eating anything? You must eat up the stuff in there, otherwise it’ll spoil, then I’ll be scolded by your mother.’ Her tone was playfully chiding; taking some liberties and sailing riskily quite close to a few unbreachable boundaries of class; it was a measure of how easy she felt with me, and how fond she had become. We still addressed each other using the most respectful form of ‘you’.
‘Why don’t you take some of it with you? Honestly. There’s so much … I can put it in tiffin boxes for you,’ I said.
‘Naaah, I don’t need it, I eat only one meal a day, rice and boiled vegetables. I have no use for all that.’
Here was my opening to ask about her living arrangements. But before I could open my mouth, she had achieved a complete tonal shift: ‘I know everything, you give it to that person.’ (It took me a while to work out who she was referring to, since third-person pronouns are not gendered in Bengali.) ‘I caught the person in the kitchen the other day,’ she said, ‘eating the food that I cook. I cook it with my sweat and with love – and you give it to her? I felt my whole body sizzle when I saw her. How dare she?’
She had suddenly become like a storm confined in a room. Her ugly voice had ratcheted up in pitch and volume. ‘She knows her moves – the way she worked her way into your mother’s life … Why is your mother so fond of her? That woman must have done some witchy thing, some kind of spell. She’s exactly that kind. She leaves her children at home and goes out every day, what kind of woman does that? Her husband works, why does she need to?’
‘Enough,’ I cried. Perhaps I hadn’t said it loudly, or urgently, enough – she showed no sign of abating but her tone changed from angry to pleading.
‘You come back home from foreign. Your parents’ lives are empty without you. I know, I see them every day. Before you arrive, they only talk about you. “Renu, my son is coming, he likes to eat this, he likes to eat that, you have to cook well every day,” your mother says. Your father goes and gets all this fish – they don’t eat so many kinds themselves when you’re not here. I know what it is to have the jewel of your eye live in foreign. My brother’s son, he lives in a far-away country. You come back, it’s not good for you to be away from your parents. They’re getting old. You’re a young man, we’ll find a good girl for you, you marry and have children, your parents will live the rest of their days in happiness. I say that to my Dulal as well, but who listens to me?’
By the time she reached the end, that slightly forced tone of jauntiness had come back. It was her insurance, should she have found herself accused of stepping out of line in her conversations with people above her station. Whether, this time, the return of the tone was the result of her awareness that she had allowed herself to take liberties, I couldn’t tell.
I returned to India a year later.
The book had changed personality during work on it in London in the interim: it was no longer centred on breakfasts; its full title, Real Indian Food: Recipes from Homes Across India, gave an accurate idea of its nature and contents. The idea still was that the recipes should be reproducible outside India without making the cook or the browsing reader nervous about recherché ingredients and labour-intensive processes, and, for a completely different kind of reader and cook, without making anything appear watered-down, inauthentic, giving cause for the bitter ressentiment crowd to wield that age-old stick used to beat Indians who resided abroad – ‘tailoring things for Western tastes and sensibilities’.
The time for my annual visit to my parents came round. I had already decided that I would travel to four or five different cities and towns, meeting up and staying with people, getting recipes from them and, most importantly, eating their food. My editor joked that I was following in the footsteps of Matthew Fort’s Eating Up Italy; I had to be mindful of making our book different.
It was inevitable that Calcutta should be the first city on the itinerary. I stayed at my uncles’ home in Shyambazar. It was a huge three-storey house: each of my two uncles had an entire floor to himself and his family, while the ground floor was rented out. The cook, whom I’ve always known as Thakur, the generic Bengali term for a cook, because everybody called him that, was still in charge of the food, as he was before my father left for Bombay with my mother and me. I didn’t visit my uncles in Calcutta often; in fact, I had been back only about five or six times since I left for England. This gave rise to a lot of affectionate passive-aggressive banter (‘Now that you live in London, you don’t deign to visit your poor relatives’, etc.), which I used to find enervating but had learned, over time, to negotiate light-heartedly. What made it all worth it was Thakur’s cooking, despite the food torture that goes in the name of hospitality in Bengali homes. (My mother resented the fact that Thakur didn’t accompany us to Bombay as our family cook, choosing to stay on with her brothers instead. In a way, she was forever looking to find a Thakur whom she could install permanently in her life. Everyone would always fall short of his standards; Renu had lost even before she had joined.)
Thakur surpassed himself again; I felt he did exactly this every time I visited. The food wasn’t dressy; far from it. Things just seemed to come together alchemically in his hands, the final thing far greater than the sum of its parts. Rice-flour pancakes, delicate as muslin handkerchiefs, served with coriander chutney for breakfast; a simple lunchtime dish of potatoes, prawns and spring onions; a teatime snack of very quickly deep-fried flattened rice, served with fried green peas and chillies on the side – it was difficult not to talk about these things using suspicious words such as ‘magic’. If I were to get the recipes from him and pass them on to Renu in Bombay, would she have been able to get them right? No doubt she could have replicated them, perhaps even exactly, but that surplus Bengalis called ‘hand’, would be missing – by the very fact that she wasn’t Thakur meant that his food cooked by her wouldn’t have his ‘hand’s’ touch.
I spoke to Ma every evening on the phone and one evening, while I was giving her news of her brothers and sisters-in-law and nephews and nieces, besides of course a detailed account of what we were being served at breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner – ‘four meals a day’ was a Bengali idiom – I heard someone talking in the background and Ma responding, ‘Achha, enough, you go to the kitchen now.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘Ufff, Renu. She’s saying that you must go visit her home in Medinipur. I mean, really.’
Why not? I thought. ‘All right. Why don’t you ask her to call her brother and let him know? We can work out a date.’ It was instinctive, not thought through, but suddenly seemed like an interesting idea.
Ma was first incredulous, then aghast. ‘Are you out of your mind? What will you do there?’
‘Why? I’m here on holiday, sort of, and it’l
l give me a glimpse of small-town India. It’ll be interesting, no?’
‘But there’s nothing to see in Medinipur!’
I failed to convince Ma that my visit was going to be a different kind of tourism, not about pretty or famous sights.
‘But it’s not going to be comfortable,’ she wailed. ‘Where are you going to stay?’
‘Why, in cooking-aunty’s home?’
I knew what was bothering her – the traversal of class boundaries, the queasiness that derived from the dissolution of certain impermeable, separating membranes that the intimacy of the son of a master going to stay in the home of a servant entailed. It brought out the rebellious teenager in me; I pushed back.
Two days later, the driver who worked for my uncles, Jishnu-da, was taking me to Garhbheta, where we were going to be met by Shankar, one of Renu’s nephews, at a locally well-known sweet shop, Mouchak, and he would direct Jishnu-da to the village, Putihari.
After the hell of driving through Haora district and the squalid small towns of Medinipur, things felt less dirty, less squashed in and claustrophobic, the more we got away from human settlements. The road began to cut through large stretches of countryside with nothing, for considerable intervals, to mar it. We had to get out at a point about five or six kilometres from the village; Shankar said the narrow road was not fit for cars; he had organised people to carry my luggage. I only had a small backpack; I didn’t need any help at all, but Shankar was adamant. I knew I had to put up with this intense servility that passed as hospitable behaviour; the guest was a god in Bengali culture. I still hadn’t got over the moment when the car stopped to pick up Shankar and he fell at my feet to do pranam.
Jishnu-da was going to return the following day to take me back to Calcutta. The car, conspicuous in a place like this, had brought out people, mostly men and children, who stood gawping with undisguised curiosity. Some of the bolder children came forward and gathered close to the car, looking up at me unblinkingly. An old man at the door of a one-storey brick house about twenty feet from where we were parked called out to Shankar and said something that I couldn’t catch. Shankar said, ‘Na, na, pishi’s people, he has come from Calcutta. He lives in London.’
‘Dulal’s friend?’ the man asked.
‘Arrey, na, na. I said, he’s from London.’
‘That’s very far away. Ask him if he has come by ship or plane.’
I was desperately trying not to look at Shankar’s face. The boy – he couldn’t have been more than twelve – whom he had asked to carry my bag was sent ahead of us with my backpack. I fixed what I thought was a blandly pleasant and interested look on my face and followed Shankar. I could hear the boys behind us getting a bit manic. One of them broke into completely unintelligible chatter in a non-language, which I later understood was his attempt, maybe, to imitate English. Two of them started to sing a current Hindi film song that featured a phrase of English – ‘Will you be my chammak-challo?’ – but they sang the first four words as an aurally approximate gobbledygook. They kept saying ‘hello’ repeatedly and breaking into giggles. The word began to saw through my right temple, which had started throbbing.
Shankar must have read something in this because he turned to the boys and shooed them away. It took some tenacity; the boys retreated a bit, but carried on with their antics from a distance until they got bored of it and dispersed.
Putihari came as a pleasant green surprise: trees, bushes, creepers everywhere, neat courtyards with mud and thatched huts, ponds, banana flowers on trees, huge, spiky lumps of jackfruit low on the trunk, date palms, tall coconut and betel-nut trees, bamboo groves, and fields surrounding the village on all sides, dotted occasionally with a built structure, sometimes even brick houses, a lot of which looked either abandoned or half-finished. The winter sun was delicious. I saw bori drying in the sun, and some reddish-brown grain or seed set out on kulos in a courtyard flanked by flowering red hibiscus. The fields which had crops on them were the colour of golden sand in the sun. Other parcels of land looked waiting for something to be sown on them, or were dotted at regular intervals with what looked like tough hay-like stubble. Shankar kept up his patter, calling me ‘sir’, which I asked him not to do several times. Shankar had hardly any English but he insisted on dredging up a word here, a word there, and throwing them at me randomly: ‘Flower’, he would sing out, pointing to a tagar bush, ‘Duck’ when we passed a green pond, ‘Hen’ at a particularly showy rooster preening in the sun. He had clearly been to school, where he had had some rudimentary English lessons. I was still not making eye-contact with him.
Wherever we passed a home on the way, people came out to stare. Shankar pointed to a low L-shaped house of exposed brick and tin roof about twenty metres away and said, ‘We’re nearly there.’ It stood on the edge of a vast rice field traversed by raised earth aals. The house had grown up piecemeal, concrete rooms added as and when resources had permitted. The earth courtyard was impeccably clean, with a border of flowers at one end, at the bottom of a low wall, and two trees on either side of the residential quarter, one a sour plum and another one I couldn’t identify. The veranda in front had wooden pillars on which the roof-awning rested. A green parakeet in a cage hanging from a cross-beam eyed us sideways. There was a blue-painted tin gate, rust smudging it generously, where one of the arms of the L ended and the low wall began. Beyond it lay two squat, rectangular structures, unconnected to each other, it seemed, one with a tin roof and ventilation crosses towards the top of the wall, the other a thatched one. They seemed also to be separated from the main building by an empty stretch; what lay in it I couldn’t see because my view was obstructed.
A whole reception committee was awaiting us; exactly what I had feared. Leading the charge was a dark man with greying hair and moustache, somewhere in his mid-fifties, I guessed. He was wiry but had a paunch. Another man was standing a few steps behind him; his younger brother, it was obvious. I assumed they were both Renu’s brothers, although I couldn’t discern any resemblances to her. Five children, three boys and two girls, of varying ages from six to twelve, I guessed, were standing in the courtyard, staring at us unblinkingly. A woman at the doorway quickly covered her head with her aanchol. Two men in their thirties or forties stood by a tree in the courtyard, one on either side of an empty plastic chair. The boy who had been sent ahead with our luggage, clearly the domestic help, came out of the house, looked at us and ran off.
The dark, wiry man came forward with his hands folded in pranam, head slightly bowed. ‘Come, come,’ he said (using the highest form of ‘you’, although I was nearly a quarter of a century younger), ‘how kind of you to bring the dust of your feet into the hut of the poor …’, then, turning to the children, his tone changing, he barked, ‘Ei, you lot, don’t you see who is visiting, touch his feet immediately, he has come from London.’ I retreated, lightning-quick, as if I had seen a snake approaching, almost shouting, ‘No, no, no, absolutely no need, really, no, I forbid you, no, NO.’ The children halted, looking at my face, then at the face of the man, in ping-pong manner.
The older man was Raja, his brother, Ratan; Renu was the middle sibling. The woman I saw when we came in was Ratan’s wife, Mamoni. Raja’s wife, Lakshmi, was inside, busy with chores in the kitchen. I was introduced to the women as ‘my wife’ or ‘my sister-in-law’. I learned their names later when I heard their husbands call out to them.
We were taken to a dark room to be introduced to Raja and Ratan’s mother, a frail woman who looked very old and clearly couldn’t hear very much. Raja-da shouted, ‘Ma, he’s come from London.’ His Bengali was accented, I had noted earlier, but not in the way Renu’s was, which was slightly closer to pidgin, with the odd Hindi word here and there.
‘No, I’ve come from Calcutta,’ I said over my unease, adding a strained laugh to neutralise what could be construed as a corrective sting.
The woman could neither hear nor understand what was going on; her watery eyes were focused elsewhere. Even on thi
s cool afternoon, I was sweating. As we were leaving the room, I heard her croak, ‘Dulal, eli naki?’, Dulal, is that you?
I had not paid much heed to Renu talking about Dulal being the apple of her eye, but his name had repeatedly come up in the last hour. I was so dreading the imminent discussion of sleeping arrangements, and the state of the toilet that we were about to be shown, that the question about Dulal got pushed to the background.
Raja-da said, ‘You take some tea? Would you like to wash your hands and face first? Let me show you where the bathroom is.’
I followed him through the L. There were only three rooms, two of which were each occupied by a brother and his family; in fact, the room in which the old woman lay dying was shared by Raja, his wife and the two oldest children, a boy and a girl. The third room, in the corner where the two arms joined at right angles, was the size of a box, used for some purpose I couldn’t identify – storage? A room in transition, about to be used as another bedroom? This was when I noticed that the floors were not concrete but compacted mud. Did I imagine the slight smell of cow-dung at that very moment of realisation? I didn’t understand how rooms could be so bare and so cramped simultaneously: there were few possessions; the whitewash was peeling; a calendar from a shop in Garhbheta, Sri Bishwakarma Hard-Ware Co. & Sons, was hanging from a nail at an angle; a lizard had stationed itself on the top of the wall where it met the tin roof; a long, brown graph of a termite colony made its way close to where two walls joined. There was nowhere for me to stay, but there wasn’t any conceivable way I could apologise for putting them to so much trouble – and, I would imagine, embarrassment and shame, too – without drawing attention to my understanding of their stretched lives. Better to go through the remaining hours feeling like an insensitive ogre of privilege, trampling through their hardbitten lives. Not for the first time I wished I had listened to my mother; I had failed to imagine how other people live. But why did Renu insist on me visiting if she knew, as she must have done, that this visit would fairly bristle with all kinds of awkwardnesses and contretemps?
A State of Freedom Page 7