The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  D calls out now from twenty steps higher and her voice comes on the back of the wind. She asks me to hurry. The crest is nigh.

  9

  There is a puja at the Parashar house today, to which we have been invited.

  This morning, when we were leaving the guest house for the day, armed with our Lonely Planet guide and camera, Polly’s mother, quite the old matriarch, was sunning herself on a chair in the street outside. She had heard about us already. We stopped to chat. After a few minutes, she asked us to the puja in the evening. Dressed in a purple sari and matching cardigan, a scarf wound around her head from which a thin braid snaked down, she told us to stay on for dinner.

  I quickly gather that we are some sort of curiosities to the Parashars. Their guests are almost entirely European or Israeli. Sometimes there are Americans; very rarely, a few Japanese. In ten years of running the guest house, they’ve never had Indians like us. Poor Hindu pilgrims prefer to stay in dharmashalas close to the Brahma temple while upwardly mobile Indian tourists would naturally choose from a range of posh hotels with TVs, ACs and other such amenities.

  While most are backpackers during their gap year, there are a few regulars. Old Mrs Parashar tells us of the fifty-something gora couple (from Germany, Polly tells us later) who spend six months of the year at Mayur. The other six months they run an antiques business back home. I had seen the Germans this morning, when I’d nipped upstairs to the terrace and spent part of the morning gazing at the neighbourhood. The Germans had kept the door of their room open. The lady was in the verandah, pinning clothes on the clothesline with her fair veined hands. The man sat at a small desk, writing, his light hair catching the sun. I had quickly moved past, not wanting to snoop.

  Polly was hovering around. Soon he joined us and we ended up talking for a long time, right there on the street. The sunlight fell in pleasant notes on the blue-white walls of the house. A beautiful house; an architectural marvel. A house so lived-in and unselfconscious, it made me sigh in pleasure every time I looked up. Polly’s mother told us that one of her husband’s ancestors had been granted this plot of land as a royal present. The Parashars are Brahmins – this had come up two or three times in Polly’s telling of their story – and the ancestor who had secured the land was a royal pandit. They still have the old firman. However, she added, bringing out her knitting from a plastic packet, this architecture was nothing. We should go to her hometown, Bundi. Then we would see the glory of Rajputana. Out came my yellow notebook. Bundi, I noted. Children ran past, their shoes thudding on the concrete; endings of conversations drifted in from around the corner in the hard syllables of Rajasthani; we said goodbye and walked on.

  In the evening, though, when we walk back from the Savitri temple after having tea in a dhaba full of Israeli travellers, at the foot of Ratnagiri, the luminous pink dusk turns to a brittle unhappy darkness. A sudden column of loneliness arises between us. My feet are aching, my shoes are full of gravel, and I am overwhelmed with doubts. The sunny morning seems such a long time ago. I even begin to wonder if we do indeed have a dinner invitation after all.

  ‘It was only mentioned in passing, wasn’t it? Maybe we misunderstood?’

  This irritates S. I was positive about the invitation while having the expensive ravioli, wasn’t I?

  The ennui of evenings provides a perfect foil for recriminations. But this larger trend, I am to map only later. Today, I am too tired to react. We merely walk ahead in a huff.

  By the time we reach the guest house, cutting through the bazaar as the sky darkens and lights begin to gleam in shops, S says finally, adopting a conciliatory tone, we should go for the puja, and depending on the situation, take a call on dinner. We could always walk to a nearby place and have roti-sabji if the invitation had been misheard. And perhaps, in that case, we could also stop for cake. We had spotted an old gentleman in the bazaar selling cake in many kinds of flavours: apple-cinnamon, chocolate, coffee-chickoo.

  New Chandra Bakery. The old man stood patiently by the street, in a neat white bush shirt, beside his cart which bore its name in tidy penmanship. Behind him the sky was a dark sheet, decorous, yet with something in it of shattered glass.

  10

  The Parashars are a large family. The parents; Polly and his brother; the two wives; five children. A couple of months ago came the newest addition, Polly’s wife tells me, as I slip out of my shoes in their courtyard. Behind round black glasses, her face with its soft hazy features is radiant. They have had a baby boy, after two girls.

  The puja, though, has not been organized because of the baby. Today is one of the quarterly teej days, something the ladies tell me they would have celebrated anyway. But the scale is perhaps a little more lavish, another little sparkle in the flush of celebrations the new baby has occasioned. By the time we arrive at their place, freshened-up but empty-handed, the pandit has already finished his rituals and left.

  The main house has a courtyard in the middle, skirted elegantly by a verandah. Rooms open onto this. At first we are led into a room on the left side, where the senior Parashar, Polly’s father, is sitting, all muffled up on the bed, under a blanket, watching the epic saga of Rani Lakshmibai on TV. His wife is sitting next to him, although unencumbered by blankets or sheets. They greet us and immediately begin to tell us about the serial. The room is dominated by the large bed which faces the television, and on a mat on the floor, Polly sits comfortably, surrounded by pillows and the children – three girls and a boy. They promptly begin to recite the story, episode-wise. On regular days, dinner is over by seven-thirty. The family gathers around the TV every evening. But today, it seems, the women who have followed us into the room are impatient. When there is a lull in the initial pleasantries, they whisk me away quickly, into a little anteroom on the other side of the courtyard: the puja room.

  The puja room is small and squarish; its whitewashed walls bear the imprints of much devotion over the years; handprints in turmeric, an aum in red, a swastik symbol that was drawn sometime in the past and is now slightly runny, slightly faded. They sit me down on a mat in front of the large wooden simhasan where all the deities are placed amid crushed flowers and incense sticks. The silken pleats of their saris swish near my face.

  The younger daughter-in-law covers my head with the end of my stole.

  ‘No, no,’ the senior Mrs Parashar says, motioning with her hands. She has left the comfort of the bed to join us and sits on a folding chair just outside the room. Arthritis.

  ‘Kaadi chunri na,’ she points out. Not the black stole. I am a married girl after all. I need an auspicious colour. The younger daughter-in-law quickly gets me a fuchsia shawl from her room. The fuchsia shawl, warm and soft, smells of Vaseline and naphthalene. The younger daughter-in-law looks a lot like the actress Renuka Sahane, particularly in the role Sahane essayed in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, her head covered with the end of her sari, a tiny stud gleaming on her nose. I think she has modelled herself on Sahane too; her carriage erect and honourable. Her face is lit up with a lambent intelligence that comes from a quiet sense of control. I take a fancy to her immediately.

  ‘Do you never wear a bindi?’ she asks me in Hindi, amusement dancing in her eyes; oof, these modern girls.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I reply. ‘When I wear a sari.’ The answer pleases her. ‘Haan, while travelling of course jeans is good. How will you manage a sari?’ She puts a tika on my forehead. Then she pulls my palms in front and puts some rice in the cup they form. Old Mrs Parashar tells her what to do in Rajasthani; led by her translated instructions, I do as I am asked.

  There is something primal about the rites. The strange female space. It feels as though I have given over my body to these two women. A very gentle feeling of well-being begins to swirl inside my head. The quiet surrender to memory. A wave of childhood images washes over me. Occasioned either by the naphthalene or the sitting cross-legged before so many gods, in their rough home templ
e filled with crushed flowers and tiny brass utensils. It is all oddly reminiscent of my grandmothers.

  Curiously, both my grandmothers grew up, in very different ways, as Bengal Renaissance women. My mother’s mother, Geeta (first Miss Banerjee, then Mrs Mookerjee), was the eldest daughter of a remarkably handsome barrister. She was one of the first girl students to read physics honours at the Scottish Church College. Her father had originally wanted her to study medicine. Though disappointed in her for exhibiting squeamishness about cadavers, he finally relented. Scottish did not have a girls’ common room then, and so, between classes, she would walk down to the all-girls’ Bethune College to use the toilet and to chat with the students there. She was about ten years older than my other grandmother, my father’s mother, Archana (first Miss Banerjee, then Mrs Roy), the daughter of yet another handsome brown sahib who managed collieries in the tribal hinterland and took his wife, my great-grandmother, to occasional parties where the British wives would speak to her in English and she would reply in Bengali. My grandmother Archana was sent off to Calcutta to board in a residential school where she was one of the first to introduce sanitary napkins to her peer group, and though she was not particularly scholarly, she grew up to become the most voracious reader I know, negotiating with great ease the scale from popular magazines and Rebecca to the most literary novels that Bengali literature has produced.

  But much more significantly for me, both my grandmothers married for love, embraced uncertainties and provincial lives instead of the glamorous if predictable futures far more covenanted Calcutta grooms would have brought. This also freed me, on both sides, from the certainties that accompany growing up in old-money or middle-money families. When my parents moved to Calcutta in the late 1970s, the sort of poverty they faced as young professionals with small salaries has been well documented in Farooq Sheikh–Deepti Naval films of the time. By marrying unconventionally, both my grandmothers had broken the more obvious trends of colonial inheritance that produce a peculiar brand of brash Bengali insiderhood.

  My grandmothers had their modest home temples; more like corners in rooms than temples. And it was at their knee, sitting on my haunches, that I was initiated into the mystical art of ritual-making. The devis and devatas were not about religion at the time, but about the narratives that fashioned them, handed down by these old women even as they customized their own pujas from things they had observed their mothers do. I can pare down my memories to two abiding ones. The first is Geeta Mookerjee’s Lakshmi puja in the rambling old country house in Jharkhand. My mother and I would go there in the Puja holidays. (Lakshmi Puja was about five days after Dashami.) And Archana Roy’s Saraswati puja in a sunny corner of our crowded, high-ceiling, rented, fourth-floor flat in Calcutta, where, in my growing-up years, Saraswati was the most cajoled deity. There were no pandits involved; both were personal if poetic affairs.

  During Lakshmi puja, every year, I was delegated to gather flowers in a little basket. I picked up the fallen frangipanis from below the tree and washed them carefully. Circumventing rules, my grandmother would agree to offer these fallen flowers. But I was not to smell them. When you offer something to the goddess, you don’t partake of it yourself. Suppose you serve a glass of water to a guest, would you take a sip of it yourself? I would follow this rule, though the urge to smell the flowers would be particularly acute since I was not supposed to. I also remember kadma, a unique eggless meringue-like candy that came in many colours and was also offered to Lakshmi. My grandmother would soak rice in a little water overnight and, dipping a piece of cotton in it, she would draw Lakshmi’s feet – a charming S with dots to symbolize the toes – on the red floor. Alpana. Selfishly, I am casting this story to include only her and me, though in reality of course there were many others who would bustle around: my aunts, cousins, the tribal maids. My mother.

  All the while, her hands busy with the preparations, she would tell me the story of Lakshman Seth, a businessman who had all but been ruined. His several businesses had failed, his children were starving, his wife had sold all her ornaments and the debtors were calling night and day. Things had come to a head. He sent his wife off to her parents’ house along with the children. He alone remained behind on the tithi of Lakshmi, to reflect on what was to be done; only a miracle could save them now. It was the evening of Kojagari Purnima. Lakshman Seth sat in his house, in front of his deities, praying to Lakshmi. He drew her feet with great devotion and lit the lamp just as dusk began to creep in.

  Saying this, my grandmother would light the brass lamp, dousing the wick in oil. I remember I would look out to see if the red moon was visible from where I sat on the floor.

  Suddenly, Lakshman Seth looks out of the window and sees a beautiful girl enter his courtyard. She has long hair and the most gorgeous features. (My grandmother Geeta was never one to emphasize fair complexions. She was not particularly fair while her sister-in-law was; this had led to some favouritism among her in-laws. Secretly, I think, she was liable to equate a peaches-and-creams complexion in Indian women with dumbness.) Lakshman Seth immediately steps outside and greets the parama sundari girl, to quote my grandmother. Recognizing who she is, he quickly improvises. ‘Come in, my dear,’ he tells her. ‘I was hoping someone would turn up. You see, my wife and children are away. I have just remembered a very urgent errand but it is bad luck to leave the house empty today. Just sit here and make yourself at home until I am back. Will you do so?’ The girl with long hair and divine features is very gracious. She agrees to house-sit until he is back.

  Lakshman Seth closes the door of the house and hurries out of the courtyard. Perhaps he stops once and turns to look at his house one last time.

  ‘Why last time?’ I ask this every time, though I have heard the story before, with its bitter-sweet goosebumpy ending. The story is printed in one of those useful booklets with thin pages where rituals and stories are recorded in uncertain grammar and spelling.

  My grandmother’s face is shadowy in the 50-watt light. She tells me softly, ‘Arre, the beautiful woman was none other than Ma Lakshmi. He had been the first to light the lamp. So she came to his house. Another name of Lakshmi is Chapala. The light-footed one. She never stays in one place. But Lakshman Seth got her to promise that she would stay in his house until he returned. So he knew when he was leaving the house, that for Lakshmi to stay forever, he could never return.’

  The original must have said that Lakshman Seth drowned himself in the river. My grandmother would leave it delicately ambiguous. I was no fool, particularly in the matter of tragic endings. I adored them though I might cry copiously later. But there was something about this lack of closure – we liked to think that Lakshman Seth went to a city far away and led a parallel interesting life.

  We both knew he didn’t.

  ‘Who will run his businesses then?’ I demand. ‘If he goes away?’

  ‘His wife,’ my grandmother would reply. ‘She is a very smart woman. And since Lakshmi has been tricked to stay back, their businesses expand greatly. They are able to pay all their debts. The wife does a lot of charity too.’ I don’t know if the wife did a lot of charity in the original. But I came away with the rather uneasy conclusion that to make light-footed Lakshmi stay, one has to give up everything, including, often, one’s life.

  Saraswati, on the contrary, was much easier to please. Her day on Basant Panchami falls in spring, when the weather in Calcutta is delightful. All blue skies and crisp cool air and mellow sunlight bouncing off new green leaves. To please Saraswati, one wore a yellow sari and coyly avoided the glances of neighbourhood boys; to please her one did not eat gooseberries till they had been first offered to her (not that I was ever uncool enough to taste gooseberries; they were the sort of things my mother favoured); and of course, ultimately, to please her, one attended to books. My mother claimed that Saraswati would leave only if one ill-treated books, unlike Lakshmi, the light-footed, who was always going away anyway.
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  In S and my life, of course, this has borne out. Light-footed Lakshmi has remained elusive, but our shelves have swelled with books old and new. Or at least had, when we had shelves and walls of our own, the frail fences of our domesticity. At the moment all our books, along with our other worldly goods – a grey fridge, a dismantled garden swing that was the first piece of furniture we bought together and a plastic folder with our degree certificates – lie in Calcutta.

  The older daughter-in-law, by now Badi Bhabhi, extends my left hand and dips the little finger into a small bowl of henna. When I was in school, I learnt about henna at the same time I learnt the word loam in geography classes. To me the two are inextricably linked.

  Mehendi is patterned on the palms of all three; they must have been preparing for this puja for a few days. The henna is cold. Its loamy fecund smell fills the room. For the rest of the evening, I am going to be half-conscious of my finger; it is going to be curiously heavy, with the crust of dried-out henna. Then we go up to the terrace, the old lady with some difficulty, each of us holding a brass tumbler filled with water. Under the full moon, we link hands and move in a circle. They sing a song– I don’t get the words – and then, bashfully (except the old lady, the rest of us are bashful) we stretch our hands and upturn our tumblers and clear streams of water merge into the middle of the circle, falling on the cold stone terrace, silver in the moonlight. And it is then that I realize, the glint of shattered glass in the sky behind the old man selling cake in the bazaar was just the full moon.