by Sopan Deb
After seeing Sudhirendra and Namita, we went back to Shyamal’s flat. Susmita came with us to spend the rest of the afternoon. In the living room, we talked about her husband, Somnath, whom she married in India. The marriage hadn’t been fully arranged. She called it a “setup” initiated by Namita. Susmita said if she didn’t want to get arranged, she didn’t have to, but she was introduced to Somnath after several months of meeting potential husbands.
“How soon after you met did you get married?” I asked.
“Two weeks,” Susmita said. My eyes widened. Susmita burst out laughing.
“Literally, the ceremony was two weeks later?” I said. This is how things were done almost three decades ago in India. Susmita added that she had Indian friends who are both PhDs in the United States who saw each other for the first time on their wedding day.
I looked at Wesley and said, “We are way behind. Their courtship was shorter than our trip to India.” Then I turned back to Susmita, who said that during those two weeks, she met Somnath’s family first. Eventually, the two of them went out for dinner to begin getting to know each other as best as they could in two weeks.
Shyamal, who was only half listening to the conversation, interjected: “It is a tradition in India, like fifty years back, that once the marriage is done, you have a child in a year or in eighteen months. Why? Because with more time, then you find out each other’s negative points.”
He noticed the horrified look on my face.
“Yes! That’s the way things worked,” Shyamal went on. “But once the child is born, the focus goes toward the child; you can forgive and forget the other. Dating for five years? You’ll never be together for fifty years.”
To have a child to try to mask the deficiencies in a relationship seemed like a recipe for disaster. I wondered if this was why my parents had Sattik and me. It was a question for later.
Through other setups arranged by Susmita’s mother, she had previously met other potential suitors, but Somnath, in her words, was “the final pick.”
“So you had turned down other people?” I said.
“It was the other way for me,” Susmita said. She initially turned him down too.
“I would rather go with the other one,” Susmita said she told her father.
But he convinced her to marry Somnath.
Wesley jumped in: “So it’s a period of several months, where you’re meeting a bunch of people and then it was down to two, and you wanted to go with the other one, and he said, ‘No, no’?”
“Yes! Wesley, I’m very impressed,” Susmita said.
And you know what? It worked. Susmita’s father told her to trust him. She did. They were happily married, and they remain so. Susmita and Somnath have raised two lovely children. Their son, Ron, was managing a state representative campaign in Connecticut at the time. Both Ron and their daughter, Trisha, were about to graduate from the University of Connecticut. Susmita, Somnath, Ron, and Trisha had the last name Deb, just like me. But they are the happy version of our story, a realization of the American Dream my parents knew nothing about.
That afternoon, we went to Belur Math, the temple complex on the Ganges. At night, Shyamal wanted us to indulge his interest in the cosmos. He took us to the Birla Planetarium for a showing of a film narrated by Robert Redford about cosmic collisions, a film for which he couldn’t stop expressing his excitement. The planetarium was cylindrical and dome-shaped, with two visible pillars on the outside, a bit like the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Several fountains on a gated greenery spouted water outside the building.
The line to purchase tickets stretched from the ticket booth to the street, about a quarter of a mile. The occasional stray dog navigated the grounds. This was a popular attraction, it seemed, but the line didn’t deter my father. After gaining admission, ushers helped us find seats inside the theater.
Maybe I was still jetlagged. Or maybe Redford’s voice was too soothing for the film’s own good. There was also the reclining chairs and air-conditioning. But I fell asleep during the film. I was out like a light. Okay, in planetarium lingo, I was out like the dimmed star I’m sure Redford explained in the story. But either way, I was gone after the opening credits. I put on a show though walking out of the theater, matching Shyamal’s raves about the movie.
After Birla, we went to the outskirts of the Victoria Memorial, an early 1900s marble structure built in tribute to Queen Victoria that is now a museum. We couldn’t enter the grounds because it was too late at night, but Shyamal insisted that the lit-up building was worth the trip.
He was correct. It was quite a sight, even though you had to peer through the perimeter security fence and carefully manicured bushes to get a glimpse. The memorial, also featuring a dome, seemed to glow at night. It made sense why it was one of the most visited tourist sites in Kolkata. What didn’t make sense was my father’s method of taking photos of us as we walked on the sidewalk surrounding the memorial’s grounds.
Shyamal would stop approximately every two minutes to take shots of me and Wesley at a sliiiiiiightly different angle from the photo before. This might be normal parental behavior, but Shyamal had a point-and-shoot camera that he barely knew how to use. And he didn’t know how to zoom in and out. So he pointed the lens at us, asked us to stand still, and walked back and forth until the framing in his viewscreen was what he desired. A process that should have taken five seconds took several minutes.
He would have us lean against the fence. Look at each other. Look at the building. Look at him. Have our backs turned. At one point, Wesley gave him her iPhone to take pictures with.
“Ah! This is a better camera,” Shyamal said. But he kept using his, because why break with tradition?
None of these photos were going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair. I didn’t mind, though. He was clearly having a blast. And why not enjoy the modeling gig?
No matter how long it took for him to get the shot.
Nine
“Do you follow my points?”
If Shyamal’s relationship with Sudhirendra was distant, the one with his youngest brother, sixty-eight-year-old Siddhartha, was the opposite. Before we arrived at his house to meet him the next day, Shyamal called him his best friend. They are only about five years apart.
“Even now?” I asked.
“Even now,” he said, without hesitation.
Siddhartha and my aunt Meera lived in a two-story flat that was also a short drive from Shyamal’s. When Siddhartha greeted us, what was immediately clear is that he had a far more forceful personality than Shyamal. Don’t get me wrong: Shyamal knew how to raise his voice and so apparently did Sudhirendra in his day. But Siddhartha boomed, and he spoke almost every sentence in a brusque manner. Physically, he was about the same size as Shyamal: roughly five feet and nine inches tall, average weight. His wife, shorter in stature with notably kind eyes, was much quieter.
In their living room, they inquired about our first couple of days in Kolkata. I mentioned the interactions we’d had at Belur Math, including an episode in which a crowd of children lined up to take photos with Wesley.
“Because she is sweet and beautiful,” my aunt said.
“Have you heard the name of Vivekananda?” my uncle asked Wesley. He was referring to the person who established Belur Math. This would be a recurring theme of this visit. Siddhartha could speak English, but he wasn’t totally fluent. So he’d ask a lot of questions. Sometimes they were rhetorical, because he wanted to make a point. Other times, it was to make sure we were listening to what he was saying, to properly understand. He’d literally say, in his abrupt cadence, “Do you follow my points? Do you follow my points? Do. You. Follow. My. Points?!”
“Yes, that’s where—” I stepped in.
“Don’t help her,” Siddhartha said. “I am just arguing with her. Have you heard the name Vivekananda?”
(He meant “bantering,” not arguing.)
“Well, he was telling us yesterday—” Wesley said, looki
ng at Shyamal.
“Right, right, right. So I think you have seen the Ganges River,” Siddhartha said. “Kolkata is on the bank of the Ganges. Kolkata was totally a British-ruled capital of India. Kolkata was the capital of India under the British rule, okay? So if you want to see a carbon copy of London, then you can see it in Kolkata.”
Siddhartha was very observant of Indian history as well as its customs. When lunch was served, the food came in a specific order. Daal first. Then, fish with coconut wrapped in a banana leaf. Then the main course, a chicken curry. He insisted we wash our hands before the food came out, an important tenet of eating an authentic Indian dinner. I called him kaku, a term for “uncle.” Meera, my aunt, was kakima. (Mashi is a more general term that can also include family friends.)
“To which country do you belong?” Siddhartha asked Wesley.
“I’m American,” Wesley responded.
“American, I know. But where were you born?” Siddhartha said.
“Arkansas,” Wesley said.
“Bill Clinton!” Shyamal exclaimed.
“Oh, Bill Clinton!” Siddhartha echoed. “You are the daughter of the soil.”
Neither of us knew what that meant in relation to the former president, but we politely laughed anyway. I spotted three portraits hanging in a row above a living room couch. When I asked Siddhartha who they were, he reacted with shock.
“First of all, you respect them. This is my family,” Siddhartha said. He had us all stand up to look at them.
They were of my grandparents and my great-grandfather. It was the first time I had seen their faces. Siddhartha said he prayed for their blessings twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. I made a mental note here: I had seen smaller versions of these portraits on a shelf in Shyamal’s flat, but tucked away among other figurines with pictures of gurus who were, presumably, not related to us.
In the center portrait was Sachindra, my grandfather, staring straight ahead. He was wearing a white shirt with buttons, thick glasses not unlike those of Buddy Holly, and his lips were pursed. There was no smile.
Sachindra’s portrait was flanked on one side by my grandmother—Shyamal’s mother, Binodini. Her face was angled sideways and turned toward Sachindra’s painting. She was also wearing glasses, along with a white sari and headscarf. There was no smile there either. And both paintings had a dark background, which contrasted with the pink walls surrounding the frames. Later, Siddhartha told me that Somnath, Susmita’s husband, was at my grandmother’s bedside when she died in 1979, reading the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text. He was a young boy at the time, but Siddhartha attributed Somnath’s height—he is nearly six feet tall—to that reading.
“That’s why he became so big! For the blessings! That’s why I’m telling you, my friend! Collect the blessings from parents! They are more valuable than millions of dollars,” Siddhartha exclaimed.
My great-grandfather’s photograph was styled the same as Sachindra’s, except with a light background. He had a white beard. I took a second to search his face for the resemblance to my father, since I’ve never seen Shyamal with facial hair.
Wesley and I delicately sat on the couch after lunch underneath the portraits as Siddhartha held court. He sat across from us, with nearly perfect posture, facing two previous generations of Debs and the next one. Shyamal hunched nearby silently listening. He eventually dozed off, occasionally jerking his head up to clarify something Siddhartha said.
“Please give me patience here, but you guys don’t know about our family,” my uncle said. “Secondly, I can’t speak like you in English, but I’m trying.”
Siddhartha came to India when he was a young boy of about twelve years old, after Sachindra died and after Shyamal had already left Sylhet.
“I myself could not dream at least forty years ago that my life would be like this,” Siddhartha said. “If a guy lost his father in childhood, he lost everything. Because in our society, father is the main key. He gave the shelter. He gave the food. When father is no more, a son has no way to survive unless there is hard labor and hard struggle.”
He studied chemistry and landed a job in pharmaceuticals in 1972 at age twenty-two. He was paid a hundred and fifty rupees per month. It was not enough to get by, so he put an advertisement in a newspaper offering to tutor children in the equivalent of eighth to twelfth grades. He brought in enough customers to make up to a thousand rupees a month. Siddhartha had ambitions to start a pharmaceutical company of his own. In 1980, with forty thousand rupees in his account (about six hundred dollars today), he met my kakima.
“It was not a love marriage. It was a social marriage,” Siddhartha said, using another term for an arranged union. Meera’s parents went to Siddhartha’s boss at the pharmaceutical company he was working at to inquire about the young chemist.
“It was a blessing from God,” Siddhartha said. They were married less than a month later.
My kakima sat on a chair adjacent to Siddhartha. Like Shyamal, she was silent for the conversation. Unlike him, she was awake.
“She inspired me highly,” Siddhartha said. He looked at me pointedly. “Look, if you can’t get inspiration from her, you can’t produce.”
“She inspires me daily,” I repeated, rather awkwardly exchanging glances with Wesley.
In the 1980s, Siddhartha, at the urging of Meera, started the business that would make his career: He began providing the plants required for pharmaceutical medicine to several companies, making use of both his chemistry knowledge and some botany he had learned over the years.
One of the first things Siddhartha wanted to tell us about was my grandparents. Sachindra was a “well-known lawyer,” whom he called a “saintlike gentleman” and “a very simple man.” Binodini was a “very affectionate lady.”
“My father was earning a lot of money. On the other hand . . .” Siddhartha paused and turned to Shyamal. “What word am I looking for?”
“Donation,” Shyamal popped in. His eyes remained shut.
“Donation! He earned a lot of money! But he also donated a lot of money to the people. He couldn’t tolerate the sufferings of any man,” Siddhartha said.
Siddhartha was deliberate in choosing his words, and he continued to have Wesley and me repeat them back to him. If he wasn’t asking us to follow his points, his sentences were punctuated with a stern “What did I just say?!” Perhaps aware of how little I knew about my extended family and my complex feelings toward Shyamal, Siddhartha was acting as both a Deb family historian and a pitchman for our DNA.
“We are very much sentimental,” Siddhartha said. “We always shout if any injustice is happening in front of our eyes. Thirdly, all our members are very religious. All the members of our family have established themselves by hard struggle, by sacrifice. All the members of our family are educated and well cultured.”
I hadn’t had the chance to ask Shyamal his thoughts on religion. But when I was growing up, I had never gotten the sense it was a big deal to him. It certainly wasn’t the time to tell Siddhartha about my agnosticism, or my general lack of faith in the idea of powerful deities.
“We have three sisters. Two of them have expired,” Siddhartha said.
Much of the conversation was him talking, as if he was delivering a symposium called Deb 101. Wesley and I sat silently, with inscrutable stares. There was no mysterious advice about going to Japan from Siddhartha. Quite the opposite, in fact: He had plenty to say, and it was apparent that he would consider it a sign of disrespect if we didn’t drink in every word.
“My sisters were remarkable, very good housewives. They loved their husbands. And they got all these things from my mother. Understand? Clearly?”
We dutifully said yes. Clearly. I had a feeling I knew where he was going next. Siddhartha looked at Wesley.
“You guys definitely will be happy if you get married to this boy,” Siddhartha said, motioning toward me. Oh no, I thought to myself. More marriage blessings?
“Because this
boy, inside his body, runs the same blood of ours.”
I was hoping that the next sentence out of his mouth would reveal some mind-boggling secret. Something like, “Yer a wizard, Shambo.” Or he would tell me that the Deb blood was infused with some mutation that would be the subject of the next Marvel movie. Alas, no. There was no movie franchise in my future. Instead, the conversation turned to my father.
“There may be some accidents that happen time to time in our family. We cannot resist it. Something odd. Some events like this case. It has happened. It is an accident.”
“This case?” He was beckoning toward Shyamal, referring to his marriage with my mother. Shyamal sat there impassively. Siddhartha was matter-of-factly saying Shyamal was an outlier in the family. But that’s my thing! I’m the outlier! I thought.
I asked Siddhartha if he was close with his brothers and sisters.
“I don’t like to comment about that. Please excuse me. Next question,” Siddhartha said, putting his hands up defensively. “Because if I answer this question, there are so many things that will come, which I don’t like to discuss. Top secret of the family.”
This was a rather mysterious answer to a simple question, I thought. Maybe I was a wizard. There were skeletons in the Deb family closet, it appeared, but I didn’t press. He was a deeply serious man and I was intimidated. This wasn’t an easy feat. I’ve interviewed powerful people, including CEOs, presidential candidates, and celebrities. And rarely do I feel unnerved. But something about Siddhartha daunted me and kept me from pushing when he didn’t want to be pushed.
Instead, I asked about his reaction to his father, Sachindra, dying.
“Oh wow,” Siddhartha said, angling toward the dozing Shyamal. “Your son, these questions. They’re excellent.”
The mood of the conversation changed ever so slightly. Siddhartha’s shoulders hunched, and though he smiled a bit more, his gestures increased. Up until now, I wasn’t sure if he was enjoying this conversation. However Siddhartha seemed to have been convinced of our level of investment in hearing his answers. He turned back.