On a hot summer day, I saw two men, barefoot, with just a mini dhoti around the waist coming into our front yard. They were not sadhus, nor did they look like ordinary mendicants. One of them, dark and stout seemed to be the ‘captain’, let us say. He came forward and throwing up his arms thundered: Kali megha pani de! His thinner companion repeated: pani de… !!!!
I was scared and ran into the house to inform Didima – Kali megha esheche! Didima didn’t look alarmed at the news. Oder jal dite hobe, she said. Sejo mashi, my second aunt, got a bucketful of water, and I followed her out to the garden, where the two men stood clamouring.
As soon as they saw us, they threw them-selves down and started rolling on the ground from left to right, while my aunt splashed them with the contents of her bucket. The dust and the mud stuck in patches on their rolling bare bodies, while the chorus continued loud and resounding: Kali megha…! After the strange ceremony, they received a few paisa and left refreshed and pacified.
It may have been in the middle of June.
It is well-known that our lakes are inhabited by Gods, that our rivers landed directly from heaven, and that the monsoon rains are sent by Indra himself. No wonder that the ancestors look forward to receiving that precious gift of water from the planet offered by their descendants.
After the rains, the swarms of insects under the lamp-posts at night would disappear and the house-lizards would slip away when you tried to pinch them, leaving you with a fat tail between the thumb and the index. The air freshened under a clear sky with the moon decreasing; so the pleasant season could start with pitripaksha. Devi Durga was sharpening her lance, while her family was getting ready for the holiday-trip, and the forefathers rejoiced in expectation.
Our Dadu wasn’t religious in the sense the word religion is commonly understood by most people. His ‘religion’ was in his work, with his patients, in the house and outside. The only ritual I’ve seen him performing was the annual pitritarpan.
You will have guessed, we didn’t have a special place for puja. Didima had prepared the room where we used to have our meals. Abhilakh Maharaj had brought water from the Ganga in a jar. In the morning she had arranged the grains of rice (dhan), the ‘durba’ grass and the copper vessels – kosha-kushi – for the offerings, along with the fruit and other items of dakshina for Manoranjan Purut Thakur.
I think he liked coming to our house. He arrived punctually, his namavali around the shoulders, a little out of breath and smiling. They took seat on their asana on the floor and the ceremony could begin. Manoranjan recited the sloka, beautifully articulated with musical intonations and pauses marking the rhythm, and Dadu repeated the mantra after him, addressing the ancestors by their names – if I remember correctly, there were five generations of them – once or twice, he’d forget a name and look to Didima for help, who immediately gave him the cue. I haven’t retained all those names, except that of his father – Priyonath Gangopadhyay, our Buro Dadu.
After the offerings, Dadu would have breakfast and it was time to go to his dispensary.
To be continued.
Vizualization and Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
It has taken me years to understand to some degree the outstanding personality that was our maternal grandmother, my Didima, and the strength of mind in that fragile body of hers.
If I have written ‘my’ Didima, it’s not a random slip of typing. It’s as though, she belonged to me by some special chemistry, more than to anybody else. I was, so to say, her daughter and her granddaughter in one – the youngest of her brood – but that’s another story.
Not that I was her docile little girl and she, all tenderness and kisses, no! Love, in those times, wasn’t as demonstrative as it is now. But, she knew how to hypnotize the disobedient little brat that I was by her magical narration of stories. She had the key to the entrance of fantastical worlds, where she regularly took me to meet Gods and demons, Ekalavya in the forest and Arjuna targeting the bird’s eye, gerastho (grihastha) and his daughters Umno and Jhumno, Shankhchunni addicted to fish and chips and sometimes stealing away the freshly fried ‘pithe’ from the kitchen, Suorani and Duorani and so many others. It was depressing to see the mischievous and the bad winning at the start, but to my relief, the good and the pure didn’t suffer too long, their triumph was programmed for the end.
Unlike Thakuma, Didima Suniti wasn’t from a rural milieu. Orphaned at a very tender age, she grew up with the family of her maternal uncle in Calcutta. About her childhood all I know is that she hadn’t got the chance to go to school. A private tutor came to their house to teach some of the children (her cousins?) – She wasn’t part of the group of those pupils. It was just not for her. While the lesson was on and the master was reading, explaining or making them repeat the tables, little Suniti would be squatting alone in some corner of the next room – listening.
How intently must she have listened day after day! Like a thirsty sponge she was soaking in the sounds of knowledge. Before long she had acquired the basics of numbers and Bengali language together with its script.
Dadu knew her appetite for reading and saw to it that his house never lacked in literature. We received several Bengali monthly reviews and magazines. I was very young and saw Basumati, Bharatbarsha, Desh patrika coming in regularly; there was the delightfully illustrated Shishu sathi in a smaller square format for everyone, besides the dailies such as Ananda Bazar Patrika and the English Amrita Bazar Patrika (later, The Statesman). I never heard her speak English, but I remember Dadu reading out to her passages in that language – it was obvious, that she understood it directly.
Once they were settled in Kanpur, she learnt Hindi all by herself and would converse with the poor and the illiterate in their own dialect (Hindi). She sometimes asked me to carry in my bag novels by authors like Premchand to return them for her to a library from where she used to borrow them.
Then there were the medicines – a mini-pharmacy in the house: boxes and bottles, capsules and tablets, syringes and instruments, cotton and gauze, the rectangular table occupying a corner of our sitting-room. From simple anti-malaria drugs like quinine and sub-products, to the sulpha and the newly discovered antibiotics, the adrenaline and coramine – she knew each and every one of them, their effect and the indication to which they corresponded. How often have I heard Dadu discussing with her about his complicated cases, seeking her opinion!
Is what I’m writing here seem credible to you? Let me tell you, concerning her intellectual capacities, I’m simply in the understatement. She was the incense-stick of culture in that house in MacRobert Gunj.
Where we left her, she was just a child without mother or father, charitably raised by her uncle in Calcutta – a childhood too soon interrupted.
To be continued.
Vizualization and Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
Filed under: Christ Church College, Kanpur, Lal Imli Woollen Mills, MacRobert Gunj
Cawnpore
Before Independence Kanpur was spelled ‘Cawnpore’. Its population had a well balanced variety of people from different regions of the country, as well as a number of Englishmen occupying posts in the administration, among managerial staff, as foremen or supervisors in the factories, many of whom had families. There were few missionaries of European origin, such as the principal of the Christ Church College.
Many of you will remember a bungalow with its sprawling green lawn just across the street in front of our house in MacRobert gunj, the white inhabitants of which became, from time to time, the object of abundant interest on the part of the young on our side of the road, especially when they had a party – you could guess it, with the motor-cars started lining up along the road in the evening. The efforts of the tiny spectators climbing on the railings were rewarded and their excitement reached some sort of a peak, as soon as half-silhouettes of dancing pairs (the lower halves remaining a mystery behind the boundary wall) appeared, gliding between the pillars of the lighted veranda. The little that was visible, furnished enough ingredients to cook up fantastic visions.
Close to our house there was the Parsi cemetery with a triangular garden, a shady and quiet place and somewhat mysterious in its turn. The Parsi and the Marwari were mostly businessmen. There were some Punjabi businessmen too, and very few Bengalis. Among the hospital-staff the nurses were as a rule Christian or Anglo-Indian. There were some Muslim male nurses and compounders; our Dadu had a Muslim dentist by the name of Aslam, and my younger brothers – an unforgettable teacher by the name of Sher Muhammad Khan in the Government. High School. A large part of the Muslims were tannery workers, shopkeepers, butchers and the like. Their women wore black `burqa’ assorted with a rectangular patch crocheted in matching colour and sewn mostly on the height of the eyes. The Hindu population was well distributed in many professions and all classes of the society.
Bengali migrants formed a minority of educated and trained people, many of them holding executive posts, some in clerical jobs and others were teachers and professors, among them a number of women. Dr. Radharaman Ganguly, our maternal grandfather, had started his career in the government’s medical service, and had been posted successively in Bahraich in eastern U.P., in Dehradoon and/or in Nainital before coming to Kanpur as chief medical officer in the Lal Imli Woollen Mill. As Mesdi has noted earlier, to the thousands of workers of the factory and their families, he was simply their “mai-baap”. I don’t think I’ll be able to give the right measure of his life’s work nor of his personality. Neither a saint nor a superman, he belongs to the race of those sustaining the order of the world.
Members of the Bengali community from all parts of the town knew that he didn’t charge fees for consultations. The fact was, that he was on duty for all 24 hours – day and night, and was, consequently, not supposed to have a private practice. But when people just drifted in – we had no telephone, so no appointment was ever fixed in advance – he couldn’t refuse to receive them at his residence. Many took undue advantage of his generosity, and he wasn’t duped, but so it was with him. In course of time some of his patients became friends of the family.
At this point I’m starting to feel, that the narration’s slipping away in digressions, it’s escaping me. Shake up Saraju! They’re looking at their watches. Ei to ami! We had just entered in my gallery of portraits, no?
You see, it has pictures and pictures : beautiful aunts and good uncles, Didima’s team with our cows, Bhandari Maharaj and his nephews, Chaudhurain, Mrs Ghosh, Nadur ma, Manorajan Purut Thakur, Phuphi, Ganga Maiya the astrologer, Chedilal master and her other protégés; Dadu’s numberless patients, not to speak of Sannyasini Shyamalchhaya, coiffeur Gurdin – terror of the kids, Chinaman with his enormous bag of Shantung silk tied on the seat of his bike, faces and figures, looks and smiles, seen through young eyes and remained indelible through the years. Shall I be able to tell the tale of our two houses? Surely, not alone.
I know, you’ll come along, you’ll jump into the scene, catch the thread, hold it on and then, pass it on to the next narrator waiting in the wings.
To be continued.
Filed under: Allen Forest, Ganga, Harcourt Butler Technical Institute, Kanpur
Baba’s Fishing Trips
In the mid 1930s Kanpur was a flourishing township. Situated on the bank of Ganga, the place offered a rich potential for industry with its resources in cotton and sugar-cane, leather, and wool. The development of the town included besides factories, where a large number of workers found employment, also many schools and colleges, specialized research-institutes on oil and sugar technology, hospitals, pleasant residential sectors, and many parks and gardens. There were some motor-cars, many tonga (tanga) drawn by a horse and with a coachman, as there were ekka, also drawn by a horse with a high seat and surely less comfortable than the tanga.
Our Baba went to work on his bike like his other colleagues.
On one end of the town the government had installed a military base-cantonment and an ordnance factory manufacturing material for survey and artillery.
On the other end a beautifully green area called Allen Forest was well-known to our father, who had done his training in oil technology in the nearby Harcourt Butler Technical Institute. To him and also to some of his friends, the special attraction was the forest-lake - Baba loved to go fishing there. 
It was a whole ceremony with elaborate preparations. It had to be on a holiday of course. On the evening before the expedition my younger brothers would start looking for ‘char’, i.e. earthworms, of which we had plenty in the garden, especially after the rains. They were collected with much enthusiasm and stored in a small tin labeled ‘capstan cigarettes’. On the next morning shouts of “bhai sahe…b” from the street signaled the arrival of our Ghosh saheb, Sourin Ghosh. Sometimes a son or two would be allowed to accompany the champion fishers, who, at sundown, had often to pass by Parade ka bazaar before coming home with a presentable fish and a dark sun tan, simply happy.
Ghosh saheb was the father of four remarkable sons and two daughters, very handsome children, all of them. He seemed to pay little attention to girls. Boys on the contrary, whether his own or ours, had to be strong, brave, and daring to be worthy. He liked taking risks. I think Baba was one of his rare friends, if not the only one. One winter morning on coming to see Baba he declared that we were going to Delhi to visit the industrial exhibition. Baba knew him well, there was no room for hesitation nor for discussion, after all the plan was very exciting for him too. We just had to get prepared and in no time Sourin G. arranged for two (or three?) cars. The next day we set off in three groups, I got in with his elder brother’s family, Baba and Ghosh saheb with the boys in the other vehicles formed the convoy. I’ll never forget that trip through villages where we stopped to drink tea at a wayside chai vendor’s, picnicked under the trees of some forest. The new Kakima, Ghosh saheb’s sister-in law, distributed a lot of delicious luchi etc. from her big basket – all that was so new! As we arrived in Dehli, it was freezing cold, maybe 0° C. One of the Ghosh brothers, Arun, a prominent economist in one of the ministries, lodged us in the Pataudi House. It was all too fabulous, compared to which the industrial exhibition of 1956 was, well, a huge numaish like any other.
Sourin G’s extreme views had made a stranger of him in his own family. He had been brilliant in studies. I remember the day when his father Rajen Ghosh, a patient and a friend of our Dadu (Radharaman Ganguly) had come to our house to give the news that Sourin was selected in the competitive exams and had chosen to be posted as Excise Inspector – a proud father of an accomplished son. Our Dadu, who had much affection for the young man, was less enthusiastic on hearing that. After his friend’s departure he said to Didima, that he didn’t at all appreciate the idea of Sourin working in touch with alcohol – milieus, he knew the degree of corruption infesting them. But, destiny was at work: addiction to alcohol brought him to the ruin of his family-life. With his untimely death our family lost a cherished friend.
N.B.: Those of you who read Bengali and would be interested in more information on the actions of revolutionary groups in Bengal, may refer to ‘Tegarter Andaman Diary’ by Ashoke Kr. Mukhopadhyay (Ananda Publishers, Calcutta, 1998), giving a very well-documented account of the movement.
To be continued.
Vizualization and Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
