‘Was that a bad dream?’ Khaled was stooping down on hers and was caressing her hair. She had woken up, with beaded perspiration covering her forehead, in spite of the four bladed fan going swish swish over their bed.
She just sighed, ‘I am fine, go back to sleep.’
Khaled turned around and slowly drifted back to his deep slumber but Arifa just could not.
Every now and then, she would reconstruct that fateful day back in Calcutta, when she saw a new dimension to the human psyche as the facades of her some of dear ones were stripped to its naked ugliness.
There had been a buzz in the air for days. There were talks of dividing the country into two, ‘partition’ they kept calling it. Stoked by both sides of the debate, things were literally heating up to enforce their respective agendas.
Arifa was oblivious to all that. There had been occasional discussions at the dinner table about moving to Pakistan to the east, possibly to Dhaka or to Chittagong, where they still owned property and where the family had originated from six generations back. To her, those places were beyond her grasp of imagination. Murshidabad, the seat of the Nawabs of Bengal and the place of her birth, and Calcutta, where she has blossomed through her schooling and it’s cosmopolitan trappings, was her world, her realm of existence, and hopefully her future. Her father had passed away twelve years back when she was only six, and her mother four years later, but her three brothers never let her or her two sisters feel their void. Within the realm of a liberal, educated, upper-middles class Muslim household, she had her freedom of friends, going to the cinemas and plays, going for drives with her bhabis around Chowrongee and the Gorer Math, and even the occasional renting of a small barge with all her nephews and nieces, her brothers and their wives, and sail down on the Hoogly and literally gawk at the monstrous Howrah Bridge from below.
Murshidabad was somewhat more conservative. The biggest event was the Nawab’s fete, Held on December 9th every year, her birthday, on the grounds of the Hazar Duari Palace. There the invites were treated to savories and chicken pieces coated in almonds, served in petit little forks. The rest of the year was spend within the confines of the Mussalman Para, a big chunk of which was owned by her Nana and majority of the occupants were tenants, called ‘Projas’. Between the idyllic settings of the palace grounds, her childhood home, the sandy shores of the Ganga, and her schooling in Calcutta, she had a perfect life. As soon as the schools and colleges would close, her family would board the train from Howrah and descended on Murshidabad till it was time to return. It was a time to reconnect with the extended chain of uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, near and distant cousins, childhood friends, and the best part was, there was a always a wedding to attend within these broods.
Now she was in Chandpur, a sleepy little town on the shores of the mighty Meghna, where the other side of the bank was visually non-existent. Consisting of a large number of bungalow type house with corrugated roofs, there were only a handful of pucca houses, one of which they now occupied. The branch of the newly established National Bank of Pakistan was located downstairs, while they occupied the two bedroom flat upstairs. It was what they called a ‘junction’ town, so access to Dhaka and Chittagong was not problematic, but she felt at piece there. Khaled was literally feted as a celebrity here, the handsome debonair banker who had been given the responsibility of opening a branch of one of the biggest banks of the country. As his wife, she was the centre of the social scene, albeit a very small one, that included the wives of two other bankers, the tax collector, and superintendent of the police. As per Dhaka, it was depressing in its totally provincial pettiness of scaled down amenities, Chittagong was pretty but it was nice to be out of the grasp of her Uncle-in-law Shahed Chacha, whose grounds her husband literally worshipped, Murshidabad had become a place across the border, and Calcutta, oh well, it had become a city of betrayal, a place turned out to be a another façade of sorts, hiding the ugliest of human emotions and prejudices behind the facades of its architectural grandness and intellectual hot air.
Elora was a dear, dear friend of hers, both in their first year at Lady Brabourne College. Seated on the bench coincidentally on the very fist day of classes, these two initially shy girls immediately took to each other. When it was ‘discovered’ that her mother was also originally from Murshidabad as well, the friendship was firmly cemented, to the point, her bhabis, specially the Calcutta born older one accompanied her to their places every now and then and the friendship had spilled over to familial terms. Elora had an older sister called Ajanta, already married, but since the husband was in ‘Beelaat’ to become a Barrister, she was back in her parents’ household for the time being. Kabita was the little darling who was only in class four but wise beyond her ages, and spoilt rotten by the two elder sisters, since there were none others, especially boys in the form of brothers to lavish their attention upon. Their house on the vicinity of Hazra Street was a semi-palatial one, which obviously had seen better days, now partitioned into three of their families, but none-the-less grand, with its marbled floors, Greco-roman columns and a vast inner courtyard that was used for everything from drying pulse seeds and rice, to airing the laundry to family get-togethers.
Elora had invited her over the next day to come spend the day with her. It was the 15th of August, Arifa remembered very clearly. The two spent hours on the college grounds chatting, and planning, and then someone had burst the bubble.
‘Baba is not sending me to college tomorrow. Something called the Direct Action Day and hartal. Baba said it may get out of hand.’ Upoma’s father worked in the Calcutta police department, therefore the source was reliable.
‘What then?’ Elora had grumbled. All her plans, including coaxing her father to take all the girls to the cinema was crumbling. She had her mind set on watching Subah Shayam and fantasize about her P.C. Barua.
‘Nothing to do then. Just have to do it another day’, the ever practical Arifa had responded,.
“Nah, you come this evening. Stay overnight.’
Staying overnight anywhere was not well looked upon under any circumstances. One advantage with this household was that, other than Elora’s father, there were no other male members in the household, which her Bhabi knew very well. Since she would be staying with them, convincing her to agree to the overnight soiree should not be a problem.
Boro Bhabi, as expected, agreed, but Boro Bhai did not. However, in all matters of the household, Bhabi had the upper hand, reinforced by her snapping remarks and her cascading voice that was tantamount to a shrill when she was contradicted.
‘Oh leave it.’ She had snapped over his ‘concerns’. “I know them, remember? Besides, it will be good for her to spend some time with those girls during the hartal instead of being cooped up right here all day. Elora is exactly her age and her mother is from Dokkhin Para for Murshidabad, your home….Didn’t I mention that before?’
Her Bahbi’s occasional outbursts would leave Arifa somewhat perturbed in favor of her brother, but this time it was to her advantage. She managed to suppress her smile which wanted to erupt from ear to ear.
So, after having tea with biscuits, a tomtom was duly summoned, and her Boro Bhai and Bhabi, their two children, and Arifa, with a small cloth bag, and her clandestine copy of ‘Chokher Bali’ wrapped inside her clothes, got on the car.
‘It is wise not to go to the cinema tonight.’ Elora’s father had opined, and therefore that was that.
The earlier part of the evening was spent gossiping about their class-mates, the upcoming marriages of some of them and their grooms, and of-course their matinee idols. Elora’s knowledge of the Calcutta drama scene was vast, and could recount in vivid details each and every scene, along with the features of the actor. The latest play to be witnessed by the family was Bijan Bhattacharya's 'Nabanna', and obviously it had left a mark on her psyche. When Arifa asked about it, Elora got all animated and explained how realistic the production was, away from all the over-dramatization that was synonymous with Bengali films and dramas.
‘Dhoor, I did not like it at all’, Kabita finally managed to pipe in within the exuberant description of the play.
After a lull of a second, Elora exploded. ‘See Arifa? This is why little babies like her should not be allowed to see these plays. A waste of a seat, that’s what it is, when more deserving people cannot even find tickets.’
Kabita’s eyes welled up, which irritated Elora even more. “Ouf, I cannot even say anything without the Ganga flooding everything. Just watch Arifa, she will start bawling and go to Maa, and Baba will descend upon me to save his precious youngest daughter.’
As predicted, Kabita started the motion of getting off the bed and dash towards the room down the hall where their parents were.
‘See, I told you.’ screamed Elora.
Arifa, seeing the situation getting out of hand, grabbed Kabita’s hand before she could slip away and held her back in a tight embrace. ‘Ahare, why do you say such things?’ She asked Elora.
Elora just winced, arched her eyebrows, and trying her best to sound as cold as possible asked, ‘So, do you want to hear about the rest of the play or not?’.
Arifa wiped away little Kabita’s tears and cheerfully said ‘Keep going.’
Eventually dinner was served in the room downstairs next to the kitchen and they were summoned. Professing modernity, the whole family dined every night on the huge marble top dining table with solid brass plates and glasses. About to enter the room, she noticed that one porcelain plate and a glass were being hurriedly replaced with the similar brass utensils. Mashi Ma was telling this elderly man, must have been be the Thakur, ‘Haven’t I told you a number of times that these things are not to happen in my household’? She had walked in just at that importune moment and she was somewhat embarrassed. ‘Come in Maa, just sit anywhere you like, except that one’, pointing at the head table. ‘Ajanta’s Baba will sit there’.
Arifa smiled. She knew exactly what had taken place prior to her entry in the dining room. The Thakur, the cook of the household must have been from the old school. Not willing to pollute the utensils with the touch of non-Hindu, he lad laid out a separate set of plate and glass just for her, which, she was sure, was kept in a separate cupboard all together. Her own Murshidabad household was no different. Her father also kept a set of plates for his pundit friends. Narayan Babu was a dear friend of her father’s, albeit from the old school, who, other than well versed in Sanskrit, had rudimentary knowledge of Farsi, in which her father excelled, and they would talk for hours. In fact, she as a child had to sit cross legged at his feet in their huge verandah downstairs along with her older siblings and learn the tenants of Sanskrit grammar from him. Every time he visited, her mother would ‘borrow’ the Brahmin maid from the household next door and food was served through her.
Mashi Ma was famous for her spicy fish cooked on open fire wrapped in banana leaves. In Arifa’s honour, the fete was repeated, which delighted all the women in the family.
Arifa for a few seconds contemplated whether to put the anchol of her sari over her head as a sign of respect for her elders as practiced at home. Usually whenever any older relatives visited, whether male or female, it was customary to do so. However, a quick glance around the table told her it was not necessary.
‘So Arifa, what has your family decided? This side or that side? ‘
‘Jee?’ She had put the first morsel of rice and fish in her mouth, which had exploded into a spicy explosion of taste and aroma and she savoring the whole essence of it.
‘I am just asking, if this Pakistan happens, your family will go in which direction? After all, what I know you come from an educated Muslim family. Both your brother and brother in law are Shibpur graduates; in my opinion this Pakistan thing is not for people like you. It is for those illiterates in East Bengal.. Let them have their Pakistan, and in five years they will want to come back into the fold.’
Arifa didn’t have an answer. Ajanta was busy helping her mom passing the vegetable dish, and Kabita was relishing her food. Elora looked absolutely uncomfortable, and after a quick glance at Arifa, tried to make eye contact with her mom to restrain her father.
“Aare, leave it. No partition fartition talk on this table. Don’t ruin my efforts with the fish by talking of all this rubbish. It happened in 1905 and see what happened? Just eat, will you??’
Relieved from being removed from the spot-light she complemented her on the fish. Eventually the talks moved back to the movies. Jathamoshai had gone nostalgic and was talking about the first film the family watched together. he ever saw, some film called ‘Niyoti’ back in 1939.
Mashi Ma started giggling. ‘He was more interested in Kamala Devi and Hena Devi. He even bought me a sari that was just like the movie…..’. Catching a glimpse of her husband, she stopped, aware that she had said a bit too much already.
Rest of the meal went smoothly, basically limited to conversations about the latest songs, followed by rosgoolas. ‘Not as good as Nabin Babu’s but not bad either……’ Opined Jathamoshai.
Ajanta, being married, had been assigned a bedroom of her own even though her husband was abroad. What was now Elora’s room was still shared by Kabita and tonight it would also be Arifa’s. There was only one toilet in the upper floor, and therefore there was a queue for toiletries. Arifa being the guest, she went last and came back dressed in a cotton sari with a simple golden zari edge.
Elora took a look and retorted ‘Bapre, you are becoming a Bairagee or what?’
Kabita was cajoled into falling asleep and eventually the copy of ‘Choker Bali’ came out. Both Arifa and Elora had both read the book at least a few times, but since they were both ‘forbidden’ to read the book, it had a cult status between them and her friends. To make matters juicier, Arifa had found this copy among her mother’s belongings in a trunk after she had passed away years later, with a scribbling on the front from her father to her mother.
Both fell asleep after reading aloud from selected sections of the book.
Next morning, they were woken up by Ajanta who brought in two cups of sweet tea and a plate full of hot steaming luchis into the room. Since Fazlul Haq had already declared the day to be a holiday ahead of the hartal, a leisurely pace seemed to have resumed. Arifa came out of the room into the balcony facing the inner courtyard and saw Mashi Ma sipping tea on an easy chair. She smiled and gestured Arifa to come forward. Very gently she took hold of her hand and asked ‘Did you sleep well, Maa?’
Arifa swallowed hard and nodded. She was at a loss of words. Her mother used to occasionally use exactly the same words.
The rest of the day was a mild cacophony of sounds. Songs blaring on the All India Radio somewhere, vendors screaming their wares of vegetables, one or two singing beggars, the occasional horn and the ringing of the tom-tom bells, with the girls splayed out on the beds with various books and magazines, but after lunch there seemed to be an eerie silence. Ajanta worked on her cross-stitch, Mashi Ma busied herself in the kitchen to see what was in the works for supper, and Kabita, after busying herself with hopscotch with her cousins in the next wing, came back and fell asleep on the bed.
What transfixed the household was a faint ‘Naraye Takbir’, followed by ‘Allahu Akbar’, followed by screaming at a distant, eventually dieing out. Jathamoshai came out of somewhere and announced, ‘No need to go out today. The whole city has been engulfed in a danga.’ Now Arifa was worried. Her Boro Bhai and Bhabi were supposed to pick her late in the afternoon.
By the time night descended, in spite of the relative silence of Hazra Street, all kinds of rumors were coming in. Stories of outright butchery, of throats being slit, of people burnt alive or cruelly beaten to death, of Hindus torching shops in Muslim neighborhoods and vice versa…..Arifa and the girls were forbidden to go outdoors and even to downstairs. They were also told to stay away from windows lest they were ‘observed’ by someone.
Compared to the relative joviality of last night’s dinner, this night’s was a dark somber affair. Thanks to the black out, a kerosene lamp was put at the centre of the table on top of old tin of English biscuits so that the whole table could be illuminated. The ghostly shadows it cast on the faces was even more eerie. The meal was finished without a word exchanged. Because of the stifling heat, eventually the household help was instructed to lay out the charpoys on the roof. That turned out to be another depressing experience altogether. There were ambers glowing in a distance in every direction, fires and remnants of fire were evident all around.
The next morning, Jathamoshai was devouring the paper over the cup of tea and biscuits. The headlines said it all. The photographs printed showed bodies lying on the streets. There were also reports of police inaction and a picture of Suhrawardy talking to reporters. It was obvious that the reports were going to fuel more agitation and retaliatory actions between the two communities now.
Arifa desperately wanted to be home. There was no sign of her Boro Bhai since yesterday. He had not been able to come and pick her up for obvious reasons but she also could not but help being accusatory towards him.
The tension in the household was visible. No one was talking much except for Kabita, who, initially ecstatic about not having to go to school, but by noon was bored to smithereens and wanted to go. Ajanta was busy with her mom in the kitchen while the two of them was idling away on the verandah as usual with fans in hand and sipping tea.
Their uncle from the next wing paid a visit.
‘Dada’, he came straight out to Jathamoshai. ‘Just heard that you have been a keeping a Musaalman girl in the household. Is it true?’ The conversation taking place downstairs was very audible in the verandah upstairs.
“Yes, Elora’s friend from college is here. They are very close. You have seen her before……”
‘SO IT IS TRUE’. He bellowed. He did not let him finish the sentence. “Has your head gone totally malfunctional? I see that you are reading the paper. What is going on, have you no clue? If some of the people in the Para find out that there is Musallman girl in the house at a time like this, do you know what kind of danger our household will fall into?’
Elora grasped Arifa’s hand and pulled. “Arifa, come into the room.’ But she took her time to un-wrap her hand and go though the motion of putting her sandals on. She wanted to hear more.
‘Either someone will torch us for harboring her or some Musaalman gundas will do the same in the name of saving her. Dada, think. And send the girl home.’
‘How will she? The situation in the city……’
‘I don’t know and don’t want to know. Get rid of her somehow. Just remember, you have three young girls in your own home and you have other nephews and nieces in this house as well. Think of them, will you?’ And he was gone.
Arifa could feel her ears turning red with an acute burning sensation. At the end of the verandah she could see Mashi Ma biting into her anchol, and Ajanta with her hands on her mother’s shoulder. They took a quick glance towards her and quickly disappeared into the rooms.
Elora was pulling her again. ‘Come inside, will you?’
Arifa looked at her friend’s face, whose eyes were welling up with tears of embarrassment. Arifa tried her best to put on a brave face and tried to smile to reassure her friend.
‘Kobita, where are you? Can you ask your father to come upstairs?’ Mashi Ma was calling from that room.
Diligently Kabita reappeared from somewhere and bellowed out, ‘Agge Maa, going..’
Elora’s father duly appeared upstairs, clutching a corner of his dhoti in his hands.
‘Don’t take any of that to heart. My uncle is somewhat like that. Nothing will happen, just wait and see….” Elora was trying to reassure Arifa. But she didn’t have any idea how or what to respond to. She took one of the magazines lying in bed and started fidgeting with it.
Meanwhile the conversation two rooms down between Jatha Moshai and Mashi Ma was becoming audible due to the rising octaves.
‘What he said, was is true? There are three young girls, do you hear me, three….girls in this household. If anything happens to them, I will…..’ Mashi Ma was saying.
‘Maa, will you stop? They can hear you.’ It was Ajanta.
This time it was Arifa whose eyes were welling up.
A few seconds later Jatha was in the room and found his second daughter holding her friend in a tight embrace, with both girls sobbing.
“Maa, as I was saying,’ Jatha Moshai was obviously addressing Arifa. “Your brother was supposed to pick you up yesterday. Is there any way you can contact him to pick you up? As you can see, the situation in the city is quite dangerous. You should be home with your family’.
‘Baba, how do you think she will go? Her Dada obviously could not come yesterday. I am sure he will come once it is safe.’
‘Yes I know….’ he was avoiding all eye contact and was rubbing his head with hand. After a quick glance at the girls, he made his exit.
Mashi Ma was just outside the room. “What did she say?’
‘Aha…will you please be quiet?’ The girls could hear the pair of them going down the verandah.
A few seconds late Mashi Ma's voice was loud and clear. “Elora, come to this room, right now!’
Once Elora made it there, there was no holding back as far as voices were concerned.
‘Who told you to ask her to stay over? You and your ideas from college……Why did you dig a canal and bring that alligator right into our house?? Ajanta’s husband is in London and there are still the two of you to think off. No matter how, all of you make some arrangement to get her out of this house. Did any of you hear me?’
Meanwhile Arifa had come out of her room, holding on to Kabita’s hand and had proceeded to the door of the room. She just wanted to reassure her hosts that hopefully she will go as soon as her brother showed up, but she didn’t get a chance to say anything.
Mashi Ma took a look at the two of them and addressed her youngest. “What are you doing out there?’ She yanked little Kabita out of her hand and slammed the door shut.
‘Maa…..’ it was Elora inside the room, sounding totally grief-stricken and alarmed.
Arifa all of a sudden could not feel her legs. She wanted to run, just anywhere, but preferably just run down the stairs and out to the streets and run all the way home if she had to. But her legs were frozen. Her mind was going numb to.
She just stood there, for what seemed like forever.
Elora burst out of the room, and took hold of Arifa hand and ran towards their room. Arifa noticed that eyes had already puffed up, with copious amounts of tears flowing down.
But Arifa’s legs remained frozen. She could not respond to Elora’s gesture and fell face forward on the verandah. All she could see was a dizzying array of stars followed by a throbbing pain on her forehead.
Elora turned her around and screamed, ‘Maago... .’. Once Arifa’s eyes got back into focus, she could see the look of total anguish in her eyes. Arifa could also feel something warm flowing down on her from around her forehead towards her temple. Obviously she was bleeding.
“Didi, Maa, Baba, come here quickly’, Elora was literally shouting between her sobs.
First to come out instantly was Kabita, who saw Arifa’s bloodied face and started crying.
She was followed by Ajanta, her Didi, who immediately came to Arifa’s side.
Her parents came out of the room in unison and looked down on the lying Arifa a very short distance away.
Now Mashi Ma had started bawling. Then all of a sudden she raised her right hand and brought it down on her forehead in a loud thump. “He Ram….save me. When danger comes, it comes in droves’. Jatha Moshai by this time was obviously coming to his senses. “Will you leave your drama behind and see if she is hurt?’. However Mashi Ma’s crying was accompanied by heaving bosoms, and a distorted face. In that state, she slowly turned around and went back to her room, continuing to sob on the bed.
“Ajanta, go see you mother, Kabita, hold on to Arifa’s hand and pull slowly….Elora don’t let go…pick her up slowly and take her to your room…..’. He was hovering over them, not sure whether to actually make any physical contact with Arifa, but seeing Kabita’s ineptitude, he finally put his hand behind the fallen girl’s shoulder and gently pushed her up.
What followed was a frenzy. Lying down in bed, Arifa could smell and feel the boric powder diluted in water on her forehead. Kabita kept massaging her hand for no particular reason, her father was frantically pacing up and down the room, and Elora kept mumbling ‘Arifa….Arifa….’ There were two or three unknown female faces in the room staring down at her from the door frame. One was nudging the other,’ That is that Musallman girl…….’ “Elora, I am sending you some bandages to dress her. Have to stop her bleeding.’ Arifa figured out they must have been Elora’s aunts from the greater household. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.
The bandages arrived and Elora with the help of one of the aunts, put Arifa’ head in few loops of dressing with cotton inside. A bit later, the area of the cut was saturated with blood and tuned a garish red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. She just leaned her head on the wall and sat up on the bed. She desperately wanted to be in her room in her own house right now, and to be cared for by her bhabis and not this lot, to whom she had become a tremendous liability since this morning. She missed the touch of her own mother’s caring hands.
She started sobbing uncontrollably.
The aunts, having done their duty and somewhat caught in an emotional situation, quickly made their exits, both wiping away tears. Jatha Moshai also made his exit. Ajanta was fanning Arifa furiously. All Elora could do at this point was put her head on Arifa’s head and sob with her friend.
Boro Bhai finally came around six in the afternoon that day. The usually meticulous man with pomaded hair and pressed shirt had looked totally disheveled. He was told to wait in the formal living room as Arifa was sent for. Ajanta and Elora flanked her on both sides and brought her to the room. Bhai literally jumped out of her chair and rushed towards her, almost knocking Ajanta of from her side. “What happened to you?’ and turned on Elora,”What happened to my little sister?’ Elora has tremendous respect for Arifa’s brother, who sometime had also dropped her home from college.
‘Yes, I mean….’ Elora started, but by that time her father also entered the room.
‘Nomoshkar, Boro Babu’, he greeted boro bhai, whose name he didn’t know except that he was the oldest brother of Arifa’s. “Yes, your sister tripped on the balcony upstairs. You know these restless girls…..We didn’t get a chance to take her to a doctor…you know the situation outside…none of us have dared to venture out on the streets today. If you can, take her to one, on the way to your home’. He had emphasized ‘your’ home…
‘Bhiaya, cholo’, Arifa finally said, breaking the awkward silence. ‘Didi, so I am leaving for today?’ she addressed Ajanta, who barely managed a smile and nodded. She just gently touched Kabita’s cheek who responded, “Arifa Di, when will you come again?’.
‘Yes, I will’, Arifa said, and faced Jatha Moshai. She wanted to lean down and touch his feet to show her respect but as she leaned forward, her head started throbbing and she pulled up. ‘No No, leave it, Maa, no reason for that in this situation’.
Elora did not need to be addressed. She just patted her hand.
‘Bhaiya, cholo’, she had said again, and proceeded towards the door. No tom-tom outside but a rickshaw with a scrawny looking coolie was waiting. As her brother was helping her on the rickshaw, a female voice, that of the Mashi Ma’s came out. ‘Arifa, you and your brother didn’t eat anything. Have a cup of tea at least’.
Arifa’s stomach was churning with hunger. She had refused to eat lunch under the grueling emotional circumstances of the day, nor had the family pressed her to eat anything against her wishes.
Now Mashi Ma was coming down the stairs towards the rickshaw and had raised her right hand as if to touch Arifa’s forehead. “Mashi Ma, another day……’ and turned her face forward. Almost in a commanding voice that startled her brother sitting next to her, she addressed the coolie, ‘Cholo’.
That event seemed like it was eons ago….
Khaled had gone off to his bank branch downstairs, and after going through a few pages of ‘Golpoguccho’, Arifa decided to go for a walk. She had not slept well and was felling somewhat restless. There were still remnants of the monsoon clouds in the sky and there was a nice breeze flowing. She summoned her maid Majeda and proceeded towards the riverbanks, a barely fifteen minutes walk. Once there, she felt at peace, the wide expanse of the Meghna being a visual treat, with the sounds of the waves gently crashing on the shore complimenting that scenario. So different from the rivers she was used to, she thought. A small strand of her hair flicked upon her face and she raised her hand to put that back in its place. As she did that, the tip of her fingers felt the small bump created after that fall on that verandah just a few years back. She always took care to hide that with a gently curved strand of her hair. This time for a few seconds, the fingers lingered on it, feeling the small anomaly on the skin that had become permanent. She looked around, at felt at peace as the wind hit her face once again. Yes, it was so different here……
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Thursday, 7 January 2010
UNDER THE TREE
The following story got the first prize in the short story competition organized by Kalakahani of UK; the submitted stories had to be about the Asian diaspora based in East Africa......
Shefali wakes up in the sweltering heat and miss the refreshing chilled air that would have filled the verandah back there. Whenever she wakes up like this, she always seems to be filled with remorse, nostalgia…a kind of longing that is very discomforting. The girls, Maya and Nandita, have no interest in her previous life in the suburban hills of Kampala, the bungalow on the hill, from where you see the lake at a distance on a clear day……
‘It was cooler back there….’, she would say sometimes. Maya, the older one would scoff and retort…
‘Cooler?? Back there In Uganda?? It's Africa mom..!!!!!’
Anther sigh...these kids…why don’t ever Google Kampala and find out about it? Africa is a huge place. But they won’t…not a bit interested…
Her father was a very well known trader there, a 3rd generation at that, originally from Surat at the turn of the century. Life was so different then, wasn’t it? It was a lively, closely knit community; her mom a 3rd generation settler herself spoke fluent Gujrati and Ganda with a smattering of English. There was never any scope of getting lonely….life centered around countless teas, kachoris, cholafali, ‘englis’ sandwiches and dinners and heartfelt ‘kamche?’ throughout. The men separated themselves after a while and brought out their cheroots and whiskeys and the women would, at least some, bring out their ‘paans’, preciously preserved and sourced all the way from Mombassa where they were probably ferried in clandestinely on dhows all the way from India. Tinkling of glasses, a shimmering of saris, a cacophony of mixed Gujrati and Hindi dialects and even a few ‘local’ friends, ‘Emerald’ in particular, whose presence in the house was always discreetly frowned upon by his father.
But here….the kids….they go off to school and she starts her routine. Washing dishes, vacuuming, occasionally a quick trip to Safeway and then to the Indian grocers for the assortment of vegetables and spices, and at noon sharp, parks herself in front of the TV to watch ‘All My Children’ and end with ‘General Hospital’. These characters from the series will sometimes take over her psyche and it will bugg the hell out of her. Then she will force herself to make a few phone calls, play canasta with the neighbors once a week, and late in the afternoon the kids will descent, followed by Rahul, her husband, a few hours later, again preoccupying her with the usual domesticities.
She had been unnerved to the core last week when Maya had a few friends over. One of them, Roberta, is a feisty Tanzanian student, who is at her daughter’s school on an exchange program. Her father is English and mother is from Tanzania, so technically she isn’t a full Tanzanian per se, and even more so, she was born in Brighton. Both of her parents seem to be highly educated, and both works for the UNHCR. What got her attention was that they have recently been posted to Kampala. Roberta was gung-ho about going there in the summer for the first time. They have been allocated a bungalow on the northern suburbs that was once built and owned by ‘Indians’ on Edwards Street, renamed Onyango Boulevard, and has a huge columned verandah at the front from where one could gaze at the vast expanse of Lake Victoria at a distance. The road is still called by the same old name by some.
Some of her acquaintances had recently been ‘invited’ back to Uganda and the stories they have sent back were simply depressing. Businesses ruined and properties in such dilapidated conditions that it took days for them to recover from the shock. Since her father, the original owner of their businesses was long dead and cremated in the UK, there was no documentation whatsoever for them to go back and claim anything. Her brother, born in Liverpool, had made the trip last year and apparently the situation was bureaucratic, but ‘promising’.
‘Can you call Roberta over for dinner one day?’ she causally says to Maya.
‘Since when did you start getting interested in my friends, Mom? What’s the agenda, hmmm?’
Shefali doesn’t have an answer right away. She stares at Maya’s cherubic face, thinking of an answer, since there was an ‘agenda’.
‘Talk to me’. Maya sternly tells her, taking advantage of the few second delay before she could speak up.
‘I was just curious about their house’.
Maya’s face changed immediately from curiosity to disdain. Caught between South Asian, East African, and now the identity of the American South, her daughters obviously are most comfortable with the American upbringing. At the same time, looking at the mirror, there is no escape from their Indian identities, so they play themselves up as these exotic Indo-American chicks, deliberately dressing up in embroidered blouses and skirts and the occasional 'bindis', to school. To introduce yet another identity and an African one at that, especially when there are so many African American students, it is convenient to discard that part of the heritage. It took forever to explain that both of her parents were actually ‘African Indians’ who had never set foot on the Indian subcontinent in the past three generations and were ignonamously expelled by a despot called Idi Amin. She was born in Bristol in the UK, a year after Shafali and Rahul got married, and the family finally migrated with the help of an uncle with a number of businesses to the fertile and humid plains of central Alabama with a substantial black population, and that was that. The second generation Indian kids already taunt by calling her and her sister ‘ABCDs’, American Born Confused Desis that is…and the sad part is she does feel confused. She and Rahul, also of ‘expelled Indian stock’, consistently talks of Uganda as ‘back home’ and even a road trip to Orlando or New Orleans will naturally evoke long winded memories of trips to the resort town of Butiaba up north or to the exotic mix of Mombasa in Kenya. Their Gujrati network extended all the way to Durban and Cape Town covering the entire eastern African coast and there was no end to the choices of places they could go for trips. Even a trip to Niagara elicited an innocent remark, ‘Oh, Victoria Falls was so much bigger than this’. Maya, her elder daughter was having none of this….nostalgia, African nostalgia at that……of her parents.
As for Shefali, how could she explain to Maya that at the age of eight, Shefali’s family boarded a BOAC flight out of Entebbe one sunny day, with her mom crying her heart out, sister Padmini in tow, and twenty English pounds in the pocket and a small suitcase for all four of them? Her dad ceremoniously kneeled down right before climbing the gangway, put his right palm on the tarmac, and when prodded immediately by the tip of a gun of a security guard by raising his palm and gently caressing his head with it. Those tumultuous times, preceded by a life of luxurious bungalows and chauffer driven cars and then immediately followed by a ten by ten room for all four of them in an Asian enclave of Liverpool, how would Maya relate to them? Her father would die four years later, totally shattered, broken and apologetic for not being able to provide for them. She was hastily married off to Rahul, two years older than her, right after her ‘A’ levels, started a family, and eventually rerouted herself to the US while Padmini an their mom stayed back.
Shefali however did not deal too much in those transitive ‘in between’ years. She dwelt on being woken up by Charity, her adorable Ganda speaking Bantu Amah, centering her life around these two sisters ever since they were born, their miniature park with a slide, swing and a see-saw at the back of the house, which was the envy of the neighborhood, the huge Edwardian doll house that was in their verandah, stuffed with miniature English furniture, and moreover Laxmi, their cook, who refused to cook anything that had any vestige of African ingredients of recipes in it. The day Shefali was born, her father had planted an Alphonso mango tree next to the playground at the back, which bordered her mother’s expansive kitchen garden. Eight years later, the tree was almost two stories tall, bore fruit profusely and was the pride and joy of their household. The evening before their departure, she and her sister had dug a small hole close to the roots and deposited their most valuable worldly possessions in it. Padmini had put in a small porcelain faced doll with gold hair and she had put in a penny, yes, an English copper penny with the silhouette of King Edward the Seventh… the King Emperor, inside the hall. Apparently her grandmother had clutched it in her hands when they were shipped to the east African coast and a few years back had given it to her before passing away quietly in their back room.
Somehow her childhood memories are still centered on that penny.
She wants Roberta to ask her parents whether the house was once called ‘Surabai Villa’, named after her great-grandmother and if so, is there a huge mango tree at the back? She is not going to ask about those pink curtains in her room, nor those wooden filigreed partitions in the living room. Looted, damaged or destroyed, it will be utterly foolish to spring those questions to a teenager who had never been there. Just what are the odds of Roberta’s parents being allocated the same house? If her brother, born in the UK two years later after landing there, ever manages to get their properties back, this house should be on the top of the list.
She is very tempted to ask Roberta to dig a hole around that tree and if possible, dig up that penny…..
Shefali wakes up in the sweltering heat and miss the refreshing chilled air that would have filled the verandah back there. Whenever she wakes up like this, she always seems to be filled with remorse, nostalgia…a kind of longing that is very discomforting. The girls, Maya and Nandita, have no interest in her previous life in the suburban hills of Kampala, the bungalow on the hill, from where you see the lake at a distance on a clear day……
‘It was cooler back there….’, she would say sometimes. Maya, the older one would scoff and retort…
‘Cooler?? Back there In Uganda?? It's Africa mom..!!!!!’
Anther sigh...these kids…why don’t ever Google Kampala and find out about it? Africa is a huge place. But they won’t…not a bit interested…
Her father was a very well known trader there, a 3rd generation at that, originally from Surat at the turn of the century. Life was so different then, wasn’t it? It was a lively, closely knit community; her mom a 3rd generation settler herself spoke fluent Gujrati and Ganda with a smattering of English. There was never any scope of getting lonely….life centered around countless teas, kachoris, cholafali, ‘englis’ sandwiches and dinners and heartfelt ‘kamche?’ throughout. The men separated themselves after a while and brought out their cheroots and whiskeys and the women would, at least some, bring out their ‘paans’, preciously preserved and sourced all the way from Mombassa where they were probably ferried in clandestinely on dhows all the way from India. Tinkling of glasses, a shimmering of saris, a cacophony of mixed Gujrati and Hindi dialects and even a few ‘local’ friends, ‘Emerald’ in particular, whose presence in the house was always discreetly frowned upon by his father.
But here….the kids….they go off to school and she starts her routine. Washing dishes, vacuuming, occasionally a quick trip to Safeway and then to the Indian grocers for the assortment of vegetables and spices, and at noon sharp, parks herself in front of the TV to watch ‘All My Children’ and end with ‘General Hospital’. These characters from the series will sometimes take over her psyche and it will bugg the hell out of her. Then she will force herself to make a few phone calls, play canasta with the neighbors once a week, and late in the afternoon the kids will descent, followed by Rahul, her husband, a few hours later, again preoccupying her with the usual domesticities.
She had been unnerved to the core last week when Maya had a few friends over. One of them, Roberta, is a feisty Tanzanian student, who is at her daughter’s school on an exchange program. Her father is English and mother is from Tanzania, so technically she isn’t a full Tanzanian per se, and even more so, she was born in Brighton. Both of her parents seem to be highly educated, and both works for the UNHCR. What got her attention was that they have recently been posted to Kampala. Roberta was gung-ho about going there in the summer for the first time. They have been allocated a bungalow on the northern suburbs that was once built and owned by ‘Indians’ on Edwards Street, renamed Onyango Boulevard, and has a huge columned verandah at the front from where one could gaze at the vast expanse of Lake Victoria at a distance. The road is still called by the same old name by some.
Some of her acquaintances had recently been ‘invited’ back to Uganda and the stories they have sent back were simply depressing. Businesses ruined and properties in such dilapidated conditions that it took days for them to recover from the shock. Since her father, the original owner of their businesses was long dead and cremated in the UK, there was no documentation whatsoever for them to go back and claim anything. Her brother, born in Liverpool, had made the trip last year and apparently the situation was bureaucratic, but ‘promising’.
‘Can you call Roberta over for dinner one day?’ she causally says to Maya.
‘Since when did you start getting interested in my friends, Mom? What’s the agenda, hmmm?’
Shefali doesn’t have an answer right away. She stares at Maya’s cherubic face, thinking of an answer, since there was an ‘agenda’.
‘Talk to me’. Maya sternly tells her, taking advantage of the few second delay before she could speak up.
‘I was just curious about their house’.
Maya’s face changed immediately from curiosity to disdain. Caught between South Asian, East African, and now the identity of the American South, her daughters obviously are most comfortable with the American upbringing. At the same time, looking at the mirror, there is no escape from their Indian identities, so they play themselves up as these exotic Indo-American chicks, deliberately dressing up in embroidered blouses and skirts and the occasional 'bindis', to school. To introduce yet another identity and an African one at that, especially when there are so many African American students, it is convenient to discard that part of the heritage. It took forever to explain that both of her parents were actually ‘African Indians’ who had never set foot on the Indian subcontinent in the past three generations and were ignonamously expelled by a despot called Idi Amin. She was born in Bristol in the UK, a year after Shafali and Rahul got married, and the family finally migrated with the help of an uncle with a number of businesses to the fertile and humid plains of central Alabama with a substantial black population, and that was that. The second generation Indian kids already taunt by calling her and her sister ‘ABCDs’, American Born Confused Desis that is…and the sad part is she does feel confused. She and Rahul, also of ‘expelled Indian stock’, consistently talks of Uganda as ‘back home’ and even a road trip to Orlando or New Orleans will naturally evoke long winded memories of trips to the resort town of Butiaba up north or to the exotic mix of Mombasa in Kenya. Their Gujrati network extended all the way to Durban and Cape Town covering the entire eastern African coast and there was no end to the choices of places they could go for trips. Even a trip to Niagara elicited an innocent remark, ‘Oh, Victoria Falls was so much bigger than this’. Maya, her elder daughter was having none of this….nostalgia, African nostalgia at that……of her parents.
As for Shefali, how could she explain to Maya that at the age of eight, Shefali’s family boarded a BOAC flight out of Entebbe one sunny day, with her mom crying her heart out, sister Padmini in tow, and twenty English pounds in the pocket and a small suitcase for all four of them? Her dad ceremoniously kneeled down right before climbing the gangway, put his right palm on the tarmac, and when prodded immediately by the tip of a gun of a security guard by raising his palm and gently caressing his head with it. Those tumultuous times, preceded by a life of luxurious bungalows and chauffer driven cars and then immediately followed by a ten by ten room for all four of them in an Asian enclave of Liverpool, how would Maya relate to them? Her father would die four years later, totally shattered, broken and apologetic for not being able to provide for them. She was hastily married off to Rahul, two years older than her, right after her ‘A’ levels, started a family, and eventually rerouted herself to the US while Padmini an their mom stayed back.
Shefali however did not deal too much in those transitive ‘in between’ years. She dwelt on being woken up by Charity, her adorable Ganda speaking Bantu Amah, centering her life around these two sisters ever since they were born, their miniature park with a slide, swing and a see-saw at the back of the house, which was the envy of the neighborhood, the huge Edwardian doll house that was in their verandah, stuffed with miniature English furniture, and moreover Laxmi, their cook, who refused to cook anything that had any vestige of African ingredients of recipes in it. The day Shefali was born, her father had planted an Alphonso mango tree next to the playground at the back, which bordered her mother’s expansive kitchen garden. Eight years later, the tree was almost two stories tall, bore fruit profusely and was the pride and joy of their household. The evening before their departure, she and her sister had dug a small hole close to the roots and deposited their most valuable worldly possessions in it. Padmini had put in a small porcelain faced doll with gold hair and she had put in a penny, yes, an English copper penny with the silhouette of King Edward the Seventh… the King Emperor, inside the hall. Apparently her grandmother had clutched it in her hands when they were shipped to the east African coast and a few years back had given it to her before passing away quietly in their back room.
Somehow her childhood memories are still centered on that penny.
She wants Roberta to ask her parents whether the house was once called ‘Surabai Villa’, named after her great-grandmother and if so, is there a huge mango tree at the back? She is not going to ask about those pink curtains in her room, nor those wooden filigreed partitions in the living room. Looted, damaged or destroyed, it will be utterly foolish to spring those questions to a teenager who had never been there. Just what are the odds of Roberta’s parents being allocated the same house? If her brother, born in the UK two years later after landing there, ever manages to get their properties back, this house should be on the top of the list.
She is very tempted to ask Roberta to dig a hole around that tree and if possible, dig up that penny…..
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Of Crumpets and Earl Grey…..
Ever since Michelle literally patted the Queen on her back, Sid, the Kolkata based anglophile royalist husband of my friend Gauri, has been having nightmares. In the last one, he tells me, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second, has been mounted upon by a huge black man, her butler, no less, and she was enjoying it thoroughly in her throes of passion. Initially who the hell was Michelle and why on earth was she patting that old grande-dame, I had no idea. But of-course, then there was the picture of Michelle Obama on CNN, wife of the most powerful man in the universe, patting the remnant of an old hag ruling over a tiny island with a huge past. Faux Pax Extraordinaire no doubt…..
The e-mail was vivid with details.
Geez. Get a life man…..
I keep telling him and that gorgeous wife of his that he desperately needs therapy. His obsession with the English royal family has reached sickening proportions; in my blunt, and lately totally subtle-less conjectures, I have rebuked him over this absurdity. His ongoing mental affair with the long dead Diana, which has also reached a climax by now I am sure, drove me up the wall on his last visit to Dhaka. I literally left him gaping on the dinner table at the Prego and stormed out after some expletives after hearing some anatomical details of the body of the princess while he was about to consummate….geez, sick sick sick….I had gotten down at the lobby, called Gauri, and gave her an earful. Thank God she and I we go way back when we were taking art history courses together back in the States decades ago. She just sighed, then chuckled, and said, ‘Hulo, why do you think I don’t accompany him to his trips anymore? He needs his bloody space and frankly at this point, so do I…. screw him, what are you up to?” The nerve …and she sensed it. ‘Guess what… I teasingly told him about my fantasy with Willy, Diana’s boy and he gave me a mouthful. It totally silly, isn’t it? “
Oh, you have joined the ball game, have you?
Gauri and I, whom she had nicknamed Hulo, like the Bengali stray cat for my wild ways, we are connected somewhat. Soul-mates? I don’t think so…but I felt totally at ease around her and vice versa, even now. To think that there was no sexual chemistry at all would be wrong though. We had our fling, had a huge fight, and then realized we were absolutely necessary in each other’s lives. We moved in. The Indian and Bangladeshi families knew we were ‘cousins’, the yanks didn’t give a damn, Steven and Juan, her true soul-mates and a bona-fide flag bearing gay couple suspected, eluded and hinted that I should join their ‘cause’ since ‘Gory’ was the perfect fag-hag; Alan, Rishi, Rithik, and Eddy, her ‘beaus’ in that order suspected me as her boy-friend on the side, and Teresa, Leslie, Laura, Maria, and Tanya suspected her to be the same while I supposedly double-crossed the lot. She initially tried to cater my cravings for the occasional home-cooked meal by serving blackened chicken and burnt fish and rice more like the ‘moorie’ but harder, and eventually I would look up the recipe books and cook up connotations that never seemed to last in the fridge. Between her coursework and readings, she would swoop down to the kitchen and devour everything in sight. In short, eventually, it was a perfect arrangement. She did the laundry, we cleaned, I cooked, we studied, partied, and got high together, picked up each other from our dates, conveniently disappeared from our flat when someone had to stay over or during the end of our living together, just gave up all pretences and the three of us, in whatever permutations combinations would end up would have breakfast together.
By the time Gauri reached Kolkata after her prolonged Bachelors and Masters, her marriage was already arranged. Dates were fixed, the trousseau was arranged without any fanfare from her side and I was shocked. This girl could don a skimpy mini-skirt, do a table dance on a C&W bar, and kick someone’s ass for being nasty with those crocodile leather boots and she had agreed to wed this character called Shuridoy, Sid for short, after a brief phone conversation between NY and Kolkata, and that was it. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure about this? You know what you are doing?’
Her great grandfather was the last of the hereditary Rai Bahadurs of this principality close to Beltala up north. While the previous generations were righteous with foresight, this particular gentleman was cut from a different fabric altogether. Multiple marriages, tons of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and this one particular passion for gambling, which included stakes of lands as pawn all over the estate. By the time partition had happened, the estate looked more like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese, with pockets of ownerships distributed between the cash rich and the landed gentry, going all the way up to the royals of Bhawal, Rangpur, Cooch Bihar and far away Tripura. When the Cripps commission looked at the situation, instead of the Chit mahals created up north, they decided to do away with the arrangement all together. Thus came five generations of English ass-licking to an end. Her father, claimant to that illusive and non-existent title, had made it his mission to reverse the situation, at least reputation-wise. Gauri’s only brother was Oxford returned, doing very well, married the daughter of former titled scion of an estate, and now it was her turn to do the same. “Sid’ had been to Harvard and Don Bosco, his great grand-father was Cambridge educated, titled ‘Sir’ for his contribution to the Raj, and doing very well in business.
The marriage took place in November of ’93. She was gracious enough to push the marriage by a few weeks to make sure that I could also come, since I was also returning for good. The marriage was fantastic, colourful, full of pageantry and yet totally appalling. Sid came with his retinue riding this fantastic Arabian horse to the gates of the Grand Hotel. What dismounted from the horse was a creature from another planet. While Gauri did yoga, went to the gym, and maintained herself, this fellah was bald, short, pugnacious, and …and …I was totally lost for words. With two rosy cheeks that looked more like Baldrick after a shower, I was stunned, and for a few brief seconds was overcome with the idea of ‘rescuing’ her and run off to Dhaka.
After all the feasting and rituals, it was time for the portraits. Gauri kept insisting that I was in as many of them as possible, with her in-laws, cousins, but I kept avoiding looking at her. She knew what I was thinking and kept slowly patting my hand which she kept making me keep on her shoulder, not sure whether she was reassuring me or herself.
She had her fun and now ‘duty’ beckoned.
My wife Anjali has been more accepting of Gauri as my friend, specially after she met Sid on the very first trip. We had gone to Kolkata for a few days. The deal was we were to stay at the Tallygunj Golf Club for the first two days and then move to their house after their other guests were gone. It was obviously not Gauri who was in charge of the situation of the household. It was Sid. He ran the place like a five star hotel, immaculate, the guest room had three sets of towels, for each part of the day and were changed everyday. It was Eggs Benedict for breakfast, and porridge, followed by Earl Grey, which apparently also traveled with him , but not in tea bags, mind you, loose tea with a strainer. Gauri apparently had plenty of excuses to eat lunch outside, since the ‘smell’ of home cooking at the home kitchen made her husband very squeamish. Dinner was a western sanitized affair. In a sprawling household how the aroma of curry permeated to his royal olfactory was a total mystery to me. The first day Anjali was ‘why cant you be a little bit more like him? The house is immaculate.’ I just told her I just wasn’t ready for an upgrade and that was that, but by the second day, her sympathies were more with Gauri. She took her to her ‘den’ on the top floor on the roof with a beautifully laid out tropical garden. The room was more ‘Ikea’ than ‘Ethan Allen’, …the Gauri I knew. She had forbidden Sid from that room. There was a wall full of pictures attached with simple blue tack, but all composed and in straight lines. There was some of us, including one of me, kissing her on the forehead, and which also required some explanations later.
To come back to the Royal Obsession, there was a bust of Queen Victoria in his mahogany lined library, which was impressive no doubt, but it was the titles that intrigued me. Lives of the Mountbattens, Marlboroughs, Hastings, Curzons, Dalhousie, Earls, Dukes, Royalty of entire Europe, and hundreds of leather-bound copies of the lives and genealogies of the Indian Royals. There was a small framed picture of Lady Diana in that famous turtle neck of hers, and there was a oil portrait of Gayetri Devi, immaculate, beautiful, and regal. When asked about it, Gauri gave a mischievous smile and told me, ‘Why don’t you ask him about it? He would loooove to tell you all about it’.
That mixture of eagerness mixed with sarcasm put me off.
‘Why is that bloke looking down over our plates? ‘ I pointed at the bearded gentleman above the fake mantle piece of the chandeliered dining room.
‘That’, Sid boomed,’ Is Edward the VII th.’ .
‘I know’, I scowled back, trying at my utmost to sound and look as black as possible.
‘But why is he here?’
‘Because,’ he boomed, ‘it was during His Excellency’s tenure that my Great-Grandfather was ‘knighted’ for his contribution to the science of botany’.
I was about to say that King-Emperor did not give out titles those days like the Queen does these days, to the likes of Elton John, and Cliff Richard. There was a Viceroy for that, and if any titles were given, it probably was given thorough a ‘royal firman’, with contacts between the two races kept to a minimum., I knew my history somewhat, but in this case a little knowledge was a fatal thing and the glare Anjali gave me was enough to keep my trap shut. Gauri was having the time of her life, gleefully sipping her watery porridge with sets of utensils cascading out from each side of her bowl. Eerily it reminded me of one of those mornings almost two decades ago when we both had our significant others staying over for breakfast.
Gauri was wearing a simple diamond droplet, significant yet simple. It complimented her long slender neck beautifully. In fact Anjali had drawn my attention to it earlier.
‘That diamond droplet is really pretty…is it from here?’ I asked Gauri to divert the simmering ‘toofan’ based on the Royal of Royals.
‘Pardon?’, she said absently. Gauri’s mind was probably more mired in practical things, like how to manage the car to pick up Rono, their son, from school and squeeze in shopping with us at the same time.
‘Hulo, let ME tell you….’, Sid boomed again. That tiny façade of a body surely packed an irritating voice.
I glared back, literally. He doesn’t have the right to THAT name, and glared at Gauri. She, in turn, snapped into attention and gave a pacifying smile.
‘Zamir, as I was saying…,’ Sid has picked up exactly where he had left off. ‘I had it modeled after the droplet in the centre-piece of the famous Patiala necklace. Surely you must have heard of it. I did send you a message when it was featured in the Discovery chanel. You did catch the show I hope’.
Well I did, unfortunately. The necklace was one huge piece of layered jewelry worn by the ruler of Patiala for some occasion or rather, maybe the Durbar in Delhi. It was one of those obscene pieces of ornament, carted back from Paris that could have fed a million or two, for a week or two. The king also could have had Sid executed for even drawing parallels to the two pieces. It’s like comparing the Himalayas to the ‘tillas’ of Srimangol.
‘Nice’. I said. ‘Can we check out the boutiques after breakfast?’ I am beginning to feel like the nouveau riche interloper in the boudoir of the Prince Regent. But hey, why am I feeling like this for? What is he then? I buttered the muffin and directed my attention towards Gauri and an obscure Rubens that is apparently stored in the Marble Palace and was the subject of agonizing research years ago and from which I plagiarized for another class. I got an A and Gauri made a B+, and she never forgave or forgot. Now totally animated, she started talking about the rest of the collection there while the rest of us ate in silence. ….. Peace.
On the way back, we decided to stop for some ice cream in front of New Market. I pointed out the Grand to Anjli and Gauri and reminisced about the wedding. Since it was just beyond lunch time, the kid has been duly deposited with the nanny back home, and there was no apparent rush for anything. It was a beautiful December morning, sunny and cold, and we started walking towards Park Street. The street has books of all sizes and shapes and price ranges, stalked in the glittery Oxford to the footpaths on both sides. I initially proposed a quick lunch at Ban Thai inside the Grand, but since we were closer to the Park Hotel, the Atrium Café it was instead.
After lunch, the ladies decided to go window shopping. I looked at the Hobby Centre across the street, now a forlorn outlet, but in the early 80s, a real destination for us teen-agers coming from the backwaters of Dhaka. It stocked radio controlled airplanes and exotic accessories for aquariums in those days. I looked up at the edifice of the buildings all around. More than a hundred years old, still standing, stripped of its grandeur and glamour. In one instance, some kind of royal insignia over the main door was painted over with the garish red and gold while the rest of the building looked like it was ready to fall apart but couldn’t out of obligation to history. Having been in London for a few years, I could see the semblance. Looking up, ignoring the throngs of us Bangals below, and it was easy to be transported back to the skyline of London in its Imperial heyday.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Anjali and Gauri was back and my wife was giving me one of those amused looks.
It was then I realized that I had my hands in my pockets, with the jeans jacket on me, looking up to a building across the street and literally laughing away.
‘Nothing’, I said, trying to control myself.
“I know that smile, spill it.’ It was more of a rebuke from Gauri, who looked at Anjali and gave each other one of those all knowing condescending smiles. Those two have bonded, it seems.
‘Oh, nothing, lets go.’, I put myself between the two and put my hands on each of their shoulders.
Looking at that building and its pretentious insignia, I understood Sid.
Sid was that building personified.
The e-mail was vivid with details.
Geez. Get a life man…..
I keep telling him and that gorgeous wife of his that he desperately needs therapy. His obsession with the English royal family has reached sickening proportions; in my blunt, and lately totally subtle-less conjectures, I have rebuked him over this absurdity. His ongoing mental affair with the long dead Diana, which has also reached a climax by now I am sure, drove me up the wall on his last visit to Dhaka. I literally left him gaping on the dinner table at the Prego and stormed out after some expletives after hearing some anatomical details of the body of the princess while he was about to consummate….geez, sick sick sick….I had gotten down at the lobby, called Gauri, and gave her an earful. Thank God she and I we go way back when we were taking art history courses together back in the States decades ago. She just sighed, then chuckled, and said, ‘Hulo, why do you think I don’t accompany him to his trips anymore? He needs his bloody space and frankly at this point, so do I…. screw him, what are you up to?” The nerve …and she sensed it. ‘Guess what… I teasingly told him about my fantasy with Willy, Diana’s boy and he gave me a mouthful. It totally silly, isn’t it? “
Oh, you have joined the ball game, have you?
Gauri and I, whom she had nicknamed Hulo, like the Bengali stray cat for my wild ways, we are connected somewhat. Soul-mates? I don’t think so…but I felt totally at ease around her and vice versa, even now. To think that there was no sexual chemistry at all would be wrong though. We had our fling, had a huge fight, and then realized we were absolutely necessary in each other’s lives. We moved in. The Indian and Bangladeshi families knew we were ‘cousins’, the yanks didn’t give a damn, Steven and Juan, her true soul-mates and a bona-fide flag bearing gay couple suspected, eluded and hinted that I should join their ‘cause’ since ‘Gory’ was the perfect fag-hag; Alan, Rishi, Rithik, and Eddy, her ‘beaus’ in that order suspected me as her boy-friend on the side, and Teresa, Leslie, Laura, Maria, and Tanya suspected her to be the same while I supposedly double-crossed the lot. She initially tried to cater my cravings for the occasional home-cooked meal by serving blackened chicken and burnt fish and rice more like the ‘moorie’ but harder, and eventually I would look up the recipe books and cook up connotations that never seemed to last in the fridge. Between her coursework and readings, she would swoop down to the kitchen and devour everything in sight. In short, eventually, it was a perfect arrangement. She did the laundry, we cleaned, I cooked, we studied, partied, and got high together, picked up each other from our dates, conveniently disappeared from our flat when someone had to stay over or during the end of our living together, just gave up all pretences and the three of us, in whatever permutations combinations would end up would have breakfast together.
By the time Gauri reached Kolkata after her prolonged Bachelors and Masters, her marriage was already arranged. Dates were fixed, the trousseau was arranged without any fanfare from her side and I was shocked. This girl could don a skimpy mini-skirt, do a table dance on a C&W bar, and kick someone’s ass for being nasty with those crocodile leather boots and she had agreed to wed this character called Shuridoy, Sid for short, after a brief phone conversation between NY and Kolkata, and that was it. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure about this? You know what you are doing?’
Her great grandfather was the last of the hereditary Rai Bahadurs of this principality close to Beltala up north. While the previous generations were righteous with foresight, this particular gentleman was cut from a different fabric altogether. Multiple marriages, tons of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and this one particular passion for gambling, which included stakes of lands as pawn all over the estate. By the time partition had happened, the estate looked more like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese, with pockets of ownerships distributed between the cash rich and the landed gentry, going all the way up to the royals of Bhawal, Rangpur, Cooch Bihar and far away Tripura. When the Cripps commission looked at the situation, instead of the Chit mahals created up north, they decided to do away with the arrangement all together. Thus came five generations of English ass-licking to an end. Her father, claimant to that illusive and non-existent title, had made it his mission to reverse the situation, at least reputation-wise. Gauri’s only brother was Oxford returned, doing very well, married the daughter of former titled scion of an estate, and now it was her turn to do the same. “Sid’ had been to Harvard and Don Bosco, his great grand-father was Cambridge educated, titled ‘Sir’ for his contribution to the Raj, and doing very well in business.
The marriage took place in November of ’93. She was gracious enough to push the marriage by a few weeks to make sure that I could also come, since I was also returning for good. The marriage was fantastic, colourful, full of pageantry and yet totally appalling. Sid came with his retinue riding this fantastic Arabian horse to the gates of the Grand Hotel. What dismounted from the horse was a creature from another planet. While Gauri did yoga, went to the gym, and maintained herself, this fellah was bald, short, pugnacious, and …and …I was totally lost for words. With two rosy cheeks that looked more like Baldrick after a shower, I was stunned, and for a few brief seconds was overcome with the idea of ‘rescuing’ her and run off to Dhaka.
After all the feasting and rituals, it was time for the portraits. Gauri kept insisting that I was in as many of them as possible, with her in-laws, cousins, but I kept avoiding looking at her. She knew what I was thinking and kept slowly patting my hand which she kept making me keep on her shoulder, not sure whether she was reassuring me or herself.
She had her fun and now ‘duty’ beckoned.
My wife Anjali has been more accepting of Gauri as my friend, specially after she met Sid on the very first trip. We had gone to Kolkata for a few days. The deal was we were to stay at the Tallygunj Golf Club for the first two days and then move to their house after their other guests were gone. It was obviously not Gauri who was in charge of the situation of the household. It was Sid. He ran the place like a five star hotel, immaculate, the guest room had three sets of towels, for each part of the day and were changed everyday. It was Eggs Benedict for breakfast, and porridge, followed by Earl Grey, which apparently also traveled with him , but not in tea bags, mind you, loose tea with a strainer. Gauri apparently had plenty of excuses to eat lunch outside, since the ‘smell’ of home cooking at the home kitchen made her husband very squeamish. Dinner was a western sanitized affair. In a sprawling household how the aroma of curry permeated to his royal olfactory was a total mystery to me. The first day Anjali was ‘why cant you be a little bit more like him? The house is immaculate.’ I just told her I just wasn’t ready for an upgrade and that was that, but by the second day, her sympathies were more with Gauri. She took her to her ‘den’ on the top floor on the roof with a beautifully laid out tropical garden. The room was more ‘Ikea’ than ‘Ethan Allen’, …the Gauri I knew. She had forbidden Sid from that room. There was a wall full of pictures attached with simple blue tack, but all composed and in straight lines. There was some of us, including one of me, kissing her on the forehead, and which also required some explanations later.
To come back to the Royal Obsession, there was a bust of Queen Victoria in his mahogany lined library, which was impressive no doubt, but it was the titles that intrigued me. Lives of the Mountbattens, Marlboroughs, Hastings, Curzons, Dalhousie, Earls, Dukes, Royalty of entire Europe, and hundreds of leather-bound copies of the lives and genealogies of the Indian Royals. There was a small framed picture of Lady Diana in that famous turtle neck of hers, and there was a oil portrait of Gayetri Devi, immaculate, beautiful, and regal. When asked about it, Gauri gave a mischievous smile and told me, ‘Why don’t you ask him about it? He would loooove to tell you all about it’.
That mixture of eagerness mixed with sarcasm put me off.
‘Why is that bloke looking down over our plates? ‘ I pointed at the bearded gentleman above the fake mantle piece of the chandeliered dining room.
‘That’, Sid boomed,’ Is Edward the VII th.’ .
‘I know’, I scowled back, trying at my utmost to sound and look as black as possible.
‘But why is he here?’
‘Because,’ he boomed, ‘it was during His Excellency’s tenure that my Great-Grandfather was ‘knighted’ for his contribution to the science of botany’.
I was about to say that King-Emperor did not give out titles those days like the Queen does these days, to the likes of Elton John, and Cliff Richard. There was a Viceroy for that, and if any titles were given, it probably was given thorough a ‘royal firman’, with contacts between the two races kept to a minimum., I knew my history somewhat, but in this case a little knowledge was a fatal thing and the glare Anjali gave me was enough to keep my trap shut. Gauri was having the time of her life, gleefully sipping her watery porridge with sets of utensils cascading out from each side of her bowl. Eerily it reminded me of one of those mornings almost two decades ago when we both had our significant others staying over for breakfast.
Gauri was wearing a simple diamond droplet, significant yet simple. It complimented her long slender neck beautifully. In fact Anjali had drawn my attention to it earlier.
‘That diamond droplet is really pretty…is it from here?’ I asked Gauri to divert the simmering ‘toofan’ based on the Royal of Royals.
‘Pardon?’, she said absently. Gauri’s mind was probably more mired in practical things, like how to manage the car to pick up Rono, their son, from school and squeeze in shopping with us at the same time.
‘Hulo, let ME tell you….’, Sid boomed again. That tiny façade of a body surely packed an irritating voice.
I glared back, literally. He doesn’t have the right to THAT name, and glared at Gauri. She, in turn, snapped into attention and gave a pacifying smile.
‘Zamir, as I was saying…,’ Sid has picked up exactly where he had left off. ‘I had it modeled after the droplet in the centre-piece of the famous Patiala necklace. Surely you must have heard of it. I did send you a message when it was featured in the Discovery chanel. You did catch the show I hope’.
Well I did, unfortunately. The necklace was one huge piece of layered jewelry worn by the ruler of Patiala for some occasion or rather, maybe the Durbar in Delhi. It was one of those obscene pieces of ornament, carted back from Paris that could have fed a million or two, for a week or two. The king also could have had Sid executed for even drawing parallels to the two pieces. It’s like comparing the Himalayas to the ‘tillas’ of Srimangol.
‘Nice’. I said. ‘Can we check out the boutiques after breakfast?’ I am beginning to feel like the nouveau riche interloper in the boudoir of the Prince Regent. But hey, why am I feeling like this for? What is he then? I buttered the muffin and directed my attention towards Gauri and an obscure Rubens that is apparently stored in the Marble Palace and was the subject of agonizing research years ago and from which I plagiarized for another class. I got an A and Gauri made a B+, and she never forgave or forgot. Now totally animated, she started talking about the rest of the collection there while the rest of us ate in silence. ….. Peace.
On the way back, we decided to stop for some ice cream in front of New Market. I pointed out the Grand to Anjli and Gauri and reminisced about the wedding. Since it was just beyond lunch time, the kid has been duly deposited with the nanny back home, and there was no apparent rush for anything. It was a beautiful December morning, sunny and cold, and we started walking towards Park Street. The street has books of all sizes and shapes and price ranges, stalked in the glittery Oxford to the footpaths on both sides. I initially proposed a quick lunch at Ban Thai inside the Grand, but since we were closer to the Park Hotel, the Atrium Café it was instead.
After lunch, the ladies decided to go window shopping. I looked at the Hobby Centre across the street, now a forlorn outlet, but in the early 80s, a real destination for us teen-agers coming from the backwaters of Dhaka. It stocked radio controlled airplanes and exotic accessories for aquariums in those days. I looked up at the edifice of the buildings all around. More than a hundred years old, still standing, stripped of its grandeur and glamour. In one instance, some kind of royal insignia over the main door was painted over with the garish red and gold while the rest of the building looked like it was ready to fall apart but couldn’t out of obligation to history. Having been in London for a few years, I could see the semblance. Looking up, ignoring the throngs of us Bangals below, and it was easy to be transported back to the skyline of London in its Imperial heyday.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Anjali and Gauri was back and my wife was giving me one of those amused looks.
It was then I realized that I had my hands in my pockets, with the jeans jacket on me, looking up to a building across the street and literally laughing away.
‘Nothing’, I said, trying to control myself.
“I know that smile, spill it.’ It was more of a rebuke from Gauri, who looked at Anjali and gave each other one of those all knowing condescending smiles. Those two have bonded, it seems.
‘Oh, nothing, lets go.’, I put myself between the two and put my hands on each of their shoulders.
Looking at that building and its pretentious insignia, I understood Sid.
Sid was that building personified.
Monday, 2 February 2009
The Hiatus from the Begum Wars
Written in early 2007, right after the takeover of the care-taker government in Bangladesh, it was published in New Age, retitled "If Mary could marry Elizabeth'....
The Hiatus from the Begum Wars
"It doesn't do to get too starry-eyed about Elizabeth. She was only too obviously made of flesh and blood. She was vain, arrogant, spiteful, bloody-minded, frequently unjust and maddeningly indecisive. She was also brave, shockingly clever, an eyeful to look at and, on occasions, genuinely wise. In other words, she had all the qualities it took to make the political genius she undoubtedly was'. It's a direct quote from Professor Charles Schama's 'History of Britain'.
Given the time of Elizabeth I, she had ruled at a time when links between England and Bengal were bare minimal except for a few stray ships probably. However, on New Year's Day , 1600, she does grant the charter for a company called 'The East India Company', the repercussions of which were of such magnitude that as a Bangladeshi sitting in Dhaka, I find great comfort in writing this piece in English. Historical anomalies aside, if I asked someone which one of our past prime ministers did the above quote apply to, there would be definitely some stroking of chins and the number may or may not be divided between our two contemporary Begums, whose initial claims to fame were very 'Begum' like, i.e. one is the daughter of the martyred former President and Prime Minister and Father of the Nation', and the other is the widow of yet another martyred martial law administrator turned president. Talk of pedigrees, can't get any better than that in the modern era in this part of Bengal, devoid of the opulence and the 'khandaan' of the more royal parts of the South Asian continent. These self-styled princesses have been a thorn and a bane to each others' existence ever since the toppling of the previous wannabe royal called General Ershad, whose amorous attentions seemed to have bypassed these two.
Elizabeth the First also had to deal with another woman who was like a constant thorn to her side….her own cousin Mary, Queen of the Scots. Scotland being a different kingdom altogether during those times, it still had royal connections to the English and the French royal families. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry the Eighth, the first English monarch to be raised under the influence of the Renaissance. In fact, so enlightened and emboldened was he that, when the Pope denied him a divorce from his first Spanish wife to legitimize his hanky-panky for Ann Boelyn, he decided to become the head of the church himself, a self-proclaimed pope you might say, and decided to usurp Catholicism from Britannia. As with all matters of spiritual fate, this of-course opened up a schism within the society that would last another generation or two. Henry's daughter Mary, married to Phillip of Spain, and herself daughter of the Catholic first wife, was determined to reverse the 'reformation' launched by her father for the obvious reasons. Talk about hereditary politics. Given to her extreme persecution of non-Catholics, historians and bar-tenders alike remember her as 'Bloody Mary'. Mary's extreme unpopularity was divinely solved by her dieing without leaving a child. All other siblings being dead one way or another, our Lizzy the First was crowned the Queen. Her father's infatuation for her mother Ann Boelyn was reason for all this Catholic/Episcopal divide, so of-course she was a staunch anti-catholic. However, like fundamentalism today, there were pockets of Catholicism with patronage from very high places, like the Northern Earls, who wanted to ensure that Mary, (the Scottish cousin), sat on the throne and restored the faith. Mary's predicament must have been akin to the military general of Bangladesh in the 70s, constantly in motion due to some intrigue and conspiracies, to the point that she came running to her cousin Lizzy for help, who promptly puts hers in prison. Later on she would go one step further. Wily and full of guile that she was, she kind of cornered her in signing a letter that incriminated herself against her cousin the reigning Queen, , and poor poor Mary, …..off went her head.
In those days, kings and 'shenapatis' being the same, castles and cantonments were also the same, a muti-purpose luxury resort cum garrison cum prison, depending on who you were. Surrounded by the noblemen, yes-men, and ladies and gentlemen in waiting, the political secretaries of those days, the detachment from reality for these ladies were immense, then as now. The so called Marie Antoinette syndrome of substituting cake for bread continued in Bangladesh for an inordinate time. While the northern areas suffered from a famine like phenomenon called 'manga', georgettes and silks shimmered in the power houses. The rivalries surrounding the Lizzy and Mary camps ended up costing countless lives in the name of religion, a foreign invasion in the form of the Spanish Armada, and palace intrigues so much like the Hindi soaps that Lizzy the Survivor decided not to marry, at all. However, looking beyond the petty but bloody family history, Lizzy did have the foresight to declare James IV of Scotland, whose mother, Mary, Queen of Scotts, she imprisoned and eventually beheaded, as her heir apparent, renamed James I, and for the first time Scotland and England unified under the umbrella of the Tudor household. Upon her death and coronation of James the First, other than the few dour-faced Scotsmen cheering for England's opponents in rugby and soccer matches, that unity seem to have endured to this day.
We have a unity of different sorts here in Dhaka these days. However, unlike the unity of dynastical heirdoms (whew, that was just above the horizon, wasn't it??) we have one imposed by a number of 'bhodroloks', propped up by some with big guns. Surprisingly we don't mind. In fact, we are reveling in it. Our 'addas' always end up talking about cricket and politics, and the conclusion is the same, The Tigers are unpredictable, and we can wait for the elections just a tad more…… Again, some of us don't mind. Freed from the cacophony of 'begumspeak' from our tellies, the discussion has turned serious all of a sudden. No more talks of hair-sprays, Gucci glasses, matching Zari-paar saris, or the sheer rude bile that was inflected upon each other by the Begums. It was hard to imagine that both were where they were because of the men in their families, both were elected in a democratic process as the prime minister of a nation of 130 million, and both had more in common with each other as far as tragedies and their personal lives were concerned. In their invectives, the rest of us felt like the comical referee in one of those god-awful American wrestling shows gone bad. Wham-bam, blood pouring, but the glorious warriors are still howling & flying off the trapeze in their customized…er. .costumes, but the referee and his cohorts in their nylon trousers and their black & white shirts are positively shattered with more human concussions. Ours were more to our psyche than to our bodies. The rest of the world went ahead with 10%+ growth rates while we chugged along with 6 or 7. Neighbors are buying passenger aircrafts in triple digits while our aircrafts are closing down Dubai airport for hours. China was commissioning one power plant a week and we were commissioning a hundred power poles a week as well…..all dressed up, so to say, and no where to go…..
The mother of Sylvester Stallone, riding on the Rocky phenomenon of the 80s, instituted this show on TV called GLOW…(the Glorious Ladies of Wrestling). I swear. It didn't do well in the ratings, in spite of the scantily clad ladies smeared in mud, the American TV viewing public showed some taste at least. The matches in Dhaka are over and out for the time being, but we are rather anxious for the next round. The prospect of being in the spectator seat while mud and verbal bile is flying above, with the occasional splattering on the shirt have had its moments but it is getting old. Trying to send these two Begums in their gilded cages abroad seemed to have run of steam, so there will be mud flying over, around, and on us eventually.
There had been an old, wonderful joke, doing the rounds in the 1560s, that all their problems would be solved if only Mary and Elizabeth would marry each other. In one sense they had baby of sorts; once the blood-letting stopped, a stable prosperous Britain that would dominate trade and dominate northern Europe and eventually the globe. Pax Bangladesh? Oyeve….!!!!
The Hiatus from the Begum Wars
"It doesn't do to get too starry-eyed about Elizabeth. She was only too obviously made of flesh and blood. She was vain, arrogant, spiteful, bloody-minded, frequently unjust and maddeningly indecisive. She was also brave, shockingly clever, an eyeful to look at and, on occasions, genuinely wise. In other words, she had all the qualities it took to make the political genius she undoubtedly was'. It's a direct quote from Professor Charles Schama's 'History of Britain'.
Given the time of Elizabeth I, she had ruled at a time when links between England and Bengal were bare minimal except for a few stray ships probably. However, on New Year's Day , 1600, she does grant the charter for a company called 'The East India Company', the repercussions of which were of such magnitude that as a Bangladeshi sitting in Dhaka, I find great comfort in writing this piece in English. Historical anomalies aside, if I asked someone which one of our past prime ministers did the above quote apply to, there would be definitely some stroking of chins and the number may or may not be divided between our two contemporary Begums, whose initial claims to fame were very 'Begum' like, i.e. one is the daughter of the martyred former President and Prime Minister and Father of the Nation', and the other is the widow of yet another martyred martial law administrator turned president. Talk of pedigrees, can't get any better than that in the modern era in this part of Bengal, devoid of the opulence and the 'khandaan' of the more royal parts of the South Asian continent. These self-styled princesses have been a thorn and a bane to each others' existence ever since the toppling of the previous wannabe royal called General Ershad, whose amorous attentions seemed to have bypassed these two.
Elizabeth the First also had to deal with another woman who was like a constant thorn to her side….her own cousin Mary, Queen of the Scots. Scotland being a different kingdom altogether during those times, it still had royal connections to the English and the French royal families. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry the Eighth, the first English monarch to be raised under the influence of the Renaissance. In fact, so enlightened and emboldened was he that, when the Pope denied him a divorce from his first Spanish wife to legitimize his hanky-panky for Ann Boelyn, he decided to become the head of the church himself, a self-proclaimed pope you might say, and decided to usurp Catholicism from Britannia. As with all matters of spiritual fate, this of-course opened up a schism within the society that would last another generation or two. Henry's daughter Mary, married to Phillip of Spain, and herself daughter of the Catholic first wife, was determined to reverse the 'reformation' launched by her father for the obvious reasons. Talk about hereditary politics. Given to her extreme persecution of non-Catholics, historians and bar-tenders alike remember her as 'Bloody Mary'. Mary's extreme unpopularity was divinely solved by her dieing without leaving a child. All other siblings being dead one way or another, our Lizzy the First was crowned the Queen. Her father's infatuation for her mother Ann Boelyn was reason for all this Catholic/Episcopal divide, so of-course she was a staunch anti-catholic. However, like fundamentalism today, there were pockets of Catholicism with patronage from very high places, like the Northern Earls, who wanted to ensure that Mary, (the Scottish cousin), sat on the throne and restored the faith. Mary's predicament must have been akin to the military general of Bangladesh in the 70s, constantly in motion due to some intrigue and conspiracies, to the point that she came running to her cousin Lizzy for help, who promptly puts hers in prison. Later on she would go one step further. Wily and full of guile that she was, she kind of cornered her in signing a letter that incriminated herself against her cousin the reigning Queen, , and poor poor Mary, …..off went her head.
In those days, kings and 'shenapatis' being the same, castles and cantonments were also the same, a muti-purpose luxury resort cum garrison cum prison, depending on who you were. Surrounded by the noblemen, yes-men, and ladies and gentlemen in waiting, the political secretaries of those days, the detachment from reality for these ladies were immense, then as now. The so called Marie Antoinette syndrome of substituting cake for bread continued in Bangladesh for an inordinate time. While the northern areas suffered from a famine like phenomenon called 'manga', georgettes and silks shimmered in the power houses. The rivalries surrounding the Lizzy and Mary camps ended up costing countless lives in the name of religion, a foreign invasion in the form of the Spanish Armada, and palace intrigues so much like the Hindi soaps that Lizzy the Survivor decided not to marry, at all. However, looking beyond the petty but bloody family history, Lizzy did have the foresight to declare James IV of Scotland, whose mother, Mary, Queen of Scotts, she imprisoned and eventually beheaded, as her heir apparent, renamed James I, and for the first time Scotland and England unified under the umbrella of the Tudor household. Upon her death and coronation of James the First, other than the few dour-faced Scotsmen cheering for England's opponents in rugby and soccer matches, that unity seem to have endured to this day.
We have a unity of different sorts here in Dhaka these days. However, unlike the unity of dynastical heirdoms (whew, that was just above the horizon, wasn't it??) we have one imposed by a number of 'bhodroloks', propped up by some with big guns. Surprisingly we don't mind. In fact, we are reveling in it. Our 'addas' always end up talking about cricket and politics, and the conclusion is the same, The Tigers are unpredictable, and we can wait for the elections just a tad more…… Again, some of us don't mind. Freed from the cacophony of 'begumspeak' from our tellies, the discussion has turned serious all of a sudden. No more talks of hair-sprays, Gucci glasses, matching Zari-paar saris, or the sheer rude bile that was inflected upon each other by the Begums. It was hard to imagine that both were where they were because of the men in their families, both were elected in a democratic process as the prime minister of a nation of 130 million, and both had more in common with each other as far as tragedies and their personal lives were concerned. In their invectives, the rest of us felt like the comical referee in one of those god-awful American wrestling shows gone bad. Wham-bam, blood pouring, but the glorious warriors are still howling & flying off the trapeze in their customized…er. .costumes, but the referee and his cohorts in their nylon trousers and their black & white shirts are positively shattered with more human concussions. Ours were more to our psyche than to our bodies. The rest of the world went ahead with 10%+ growth rates while we chugged along with 6 or 7. Neighbors are buying passenger aircrafts in triple digits while our aircrafts are closing down Dubai airport for hours. China was commissioning one power plant a week and we were commissioning a hundred power poles a week as well…..all dressed up, so to say, and no where to go…..
The mother of Sylvester Stallone, riding on the Rocky phenomenon of the 80s, instituted this show on TV called GLOW…(the Glorious Ladies of Wrestling). I swear. It didn't do well in the ratings, in spite of the scantily clad ladies smeared in mud, the American TV viewing public showed some taste at least. The matches in Dhaka are over and out for the time being, but we are rather anxious for the next round. The prospect of being in the spectator seat while mud and verbal bile is flying above, with the occasional splattering on the shirt have had its moments but it is getting old. Trying to send these two Begums in their gilded cages abroad seemed to have run of steam, so there will be mud flying over, around, and on us eventually.
There had been an old, wonderful joke, doing the rounds in the 1560s, that all their problems would be solved if only Mary and Elizabeth would marry each other. In one sense they had baby of sorts; once the blood-letting stopped, a stable prosperous Britain that would dominate trade and dominate northern Europe and eventually the globe. Pax Bangladesh? Oyeve….!!!!
Love, Divinity, and Fantasy...
Is love so divine
With sweetness so sublime
That reality stops
And Fantasy begins?
With sweetness so sublime
That reality stops
And Fantasy begins?
Kiss
That lightest of touches
That hint of moisture
That lightest allusion of desire
That closeness of spirits
That desire to Be…
And that faintest fragrance of life…
Is that the perfect kiss??
That hint of moisture
That lightest allusion of desire
That closeness of spirits
That desire to Be…
And that faintest fragrance of life…
Is that the perfect kiss??
Happiness..
This thing called Happiness
A fleeting thought perhaps…
A place between reality and illusion
Or the first smile of the first-born
Or like the sweetness of a loved one
Or even the touch of a lover..
Alas, ‘Happiness’, so easy to achieve
Yet.. far far away lies that touch of that loved one
Yes, an illusion then, perhaps..
This fleeting thought, this thing called…..
Happiness…
A fleeting thought perhaps…
A place between reality and illusion
Or the first smile of the first-born
Or like the sweetness of a loved one
Or even the touch of a lover..
Alas, ‘Happiness’, so easy to achieve
Yet.. far far away lies that touch of that loved one
Yes, an illusion then, perhaps..
This fleeting thought, this thing called…..
Happiness…
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