Chapter 7: jurithewriter has started writing her story

 In photos: 

Top: Dhiren mama, mummy, deepak, jumi, me, Mumbai, around 1976

Bottom: the hariharans and the kalitas. 1971, NDA teachers quarters. Radha on the horse, sridhar with his dad and me with mine, left most guy-identity unknown

Dhiren mama would sometimes drop in to my Kumarpara marital home, (post my marriage on the fateful day of 21 January 1992). He had retired a long time back and had built a house in Bharalumukh, near the Bharalu river, which was a small stream like river and joined the Brahmaputra that flowed besides the Bharalumukh-Santipur road. Kumarpara neighboured Bharalumukh and the distance could easily be covered on foot or on a cycle rickshaw. Mama, was quite tall, stooped a little with age, quite fit and always had a beautiful smile adorning his glass rimmed face. I always felt extremely warm and close to Mama, perhaps because of the fondness with which my parents always discussed their stories with Mama and Mami.

Unfortunately, it is only the fondness that got embedded in my memory, I don’t have memories of my mum telling me how she spent the 2-3 month time in their Mumbai home in 1970. Dipika baideo also does not remember too much. As I was writing the previous chapter, I started wondering about how mum must have taken care of me without my dad in a home that was borrowed from someone? What were the feelings and thoughts that might have gone through her mind? How kind must Mama and Mami have been to shelter someone in their home for so many months? How did my Mum feel when she finally left Mumbai to join my father in Pune?

In NDA my father had only been able to manage temporary accommodation in what was called as the Teacher’s quarters. There was a waiting period for the residential quarters which they could move into only once some of the officers had retired and moved out.

The teacher’s quarters were quaint barracks on a small hillock in the D2 area of the NDA officers residential area. NDA is a protected wildlife sanctuary. The construction was made into the natural forest taking all care to maintain the original forest architecture. The roads were paved, all the public areas were aesthetically landscaped predominantly with healthy white lilies, the unconstructed areas had the preserved forest with the local trees, swaying uncut long blades of grass and endless clusters of orange coloured cosmos flowers. The only traffic one came across were the vehicles of the residents going to work or school or attending parties in the evenings. And the occasional spaced out red Pune Municipality buses that would transport residents of the village beyond NDA and the occasional NDA resident who needed to visit Pune city for any reason. As one entered the route to the teachers quarters, one would pass the blood red coloured post box, next to the spotlessly clean bus stop shelter for the PMT bus travellers.

 The Hariharans, lecturer physics department, the Saxenas, lecturer English Department and the Sethis, English again I think, were the families waiting their turn to get a proper quarter. As an infant I was a hyperactive child. My mum would go for walks with the Mrs Hariharan in the evenings, taking her children Radha and Sridhar and me along. I would constantly be running and my Ma shuffling after me shouting

Juri poribi, poribi

Juri wait you’ll fall

Subsequently, Hariharan aunty, who was a Tambrahm, would rush after me whenever she saw me running around and call out

Juri poribi, poribi.

My mum’s written English was impeccable. She had studied in Handique college, Guwahati which imparted education only in the English medium back then in the 1960s. The Hariharan’s spoke English and Tamil only. The Saxena’s and Sethi’s were North Indians and communicated mainly in Hindi. My mother was an intelligent and determined woman. She decided the only way to master spoken English and Hindi was to communicate in these two languages. The mastery was essential to be accepted as a part of the NDA social culture. She therefore started all her communications even with me and my sister (later, of course, after her birth!) in these two languages. Her accent and pronunciations were quite flawless as compared to my father’s distinct Assamese accent that never went away.

 

Chapter 6: jurithewriter has started writing her story

 

In 1997, Vinayakji had come to my Kumarpara home, the house into which I had married. His lush black hair had few strands of white and he was in his regular attire, straight-cut loose white cotton pajama pants; and beige khadi kurta, ending just above the knees. Both were clean-washed but un-ironed. As he sat in the Sora Ghar, the main drawing room of the twenty-five member joint family, making small talk with my husband, he picked up my baby son and sat him on his lap, teasing him playfully. He had come unannounced at around 7 pm on a Sunday evening.

As he played with my son, he told me,

“26 years back tumak loisilu kulat, etia tumar lorak loi asu”, his intonation was conspicuously Marathi even though the language was Assamese.

Twenty six years back I had played with you on my lap and now I’m playing with your son.

His eyes twinkled and he laughed as he said this. I quickly prepared wheatflour puris and fried some pre-boiled potatoes, tempering them with mustard seeds, onions and chillies, for him. Vinayakji was a member of the RSS. He belonged to the ilk that lived in a hostel, ate only vegetarian food, were bachelors (sworn never to marry) and did public service without looking for recognition. 

After a few months of joining NDA as lecturer of Social Sciences, my father returned to Mirza to take me and Ma back with him to Pune. He was missing his family. That will be sometime in the late 1970 or early 1971. The train journey was long, one had to make three changes. During the journey, my father observed a couple of young boys in Khadi pajama kurtas moving among the passengers and putting drops in their eyes. The passengers had red eyes, conjunctivitis or ‘joy bangla’ as it is called colloquially in Assam. Impressed, he started talking to these enthusiastic boys.  One of them was Vinayak Kanetkar, a Maharashtrian Brahmin from Pune, I never asked the name of the other person. He appreciated the RSS culture imbibed by these two boys for the selfless way in which they gave their services and lives, without taking any material gain in return.

The final train change to Pune was from Mumbai. My father stationed my Mum and me in Mumbai in his Mama, maternal uncle’s house, a cousin of my grandmother, Aita from Paragusi. Paragusi was my Aita’s maternal home a few kilometers beyond Mirza. Dhiren Choudhury Mama was a central government officer in the Center of Fisheries Education, then located at Haji Ali and was posted in Mumbai. They lived on the fourth floor of one of the six storied government officers’ living quarters, facing the sea. Mama was just a few years older than my father so we called him Mama instead of Kokadewta. In Assamese there is no separate term for granduncle, all third generation ancestors are called Kokadewta and Aita, whether maternal or paternal.

My father had left for NDA a couple of days after putting us up at Dhiren Mama’s house. It took a couple of months for him to ready the NDA residential quarter, much longer than he anticipated, so Ma and I spent those couple or three months in Mumbai. Mami was surprised at the single small trunk full of things that my parents had brought with them considering they would be spending a lifetime in Pune. I have no recollections of this period, obvious because I was barely a year old then.

Dipika, Mama’s daughter, she is a gynaecologist now, told me she used to love playing with me, I was a little younger than her little brother, and that my mum used to take me down to the sea every evening, and buy six Jahaji bananas for 50 paise daily. Assam has a wide variety of species of bananas. The Malbhog bananas are the most expensive and the healthiest, considered to be almost medicinal. They were smaller than the Jahaji bananas that were the only species found all over Mumbai and Pune. Later when visiting Kerala I did see multiple varieties of bananas, multicoloured ones, but that’s another story.

I remember seeing photos of this Mumbai sojourn, but was unable to retrieve them. I asked Dipika baideo if she had any but their photos were damaged by the 1988 flood waters that entered their Bharalumukh home in Guwahati. 

I suppose Mum didn’t find the sea too different from the massive Brahmaputra river that had taken away her home too. And when I analyze bananas I mean bananas literally.

Chapter 5: jurithewriter has started writing her story

 

Writing Chapter 4 made me wonder many things. I didn’t know the dates of the floods. Dad’s narratives were like fiction, a third party story of someone called Kokadeota, Grandfather, someone who was fiction for us as we had never met him. Being raised in the NDA culture and environment and never having experienced the Palasbari lifestyle made the stories even more fictional, ‘all this happens to someone else, never to us’ kind of fictional.

When I went to Mirza from work last evening, I saw my father’s only surviving brother Arun Khura sitting on the verandah with Khuri, his wife and watching the people and traffic pass by. He is 81 years old, 4-5 years younger than my dad. He told me he didn’t have much recollections of the first time their house was engulfed by the floods, it must have been around the 50’s, but the second time was in 1960 after grandfather had died. They had been put up in a student’s hostel for 2 months, which had been vacated for the flood affected people.

The government then gave them the Mirza plot (a bigha I think) for a premium of Rs 500/- which was a princely amount in 1960. I asked Khura who paid the amount? He told me it was my dad who paid it, he was the oldest in the family and he had somehow managed the funds.

They then constructed a couple of rooms on their newly bought plot with their own hands. The original rooms were of ‘kher,’ straw. What we saw in our visits to Mirza from Pune during vacations was picturesque. A lovely central courtyard with Assam type chambers lining the courtyard. The entrance had a garden with a flowering korobi (oleander) tree, a couple of tamul (betel nut) trees with paan (pipre betel) vines creeping around it, a pomegranate tree and a mango tree too. The hedges surrounding the garden were made of interlocking bamboo sticks. The sticks were cut into half vertically and then weaved. The hedges were to prevent cows and goats from entering into the garden and destroying it.

Aita’s, grandmother’s room was opposite the entrance gate, next to the kitchen and the strongest memories of Aita, were in her hand loom woven white xuta Mekhela Sador, sitting regally on a ‘murha’, a cane stool; and sipping tea in a glass made of ‘kaanh’, bell metal while biting into a piece of jaggery; or pounding the tamul (betel nut which was not dried, special to the north-east part of India, other parts use supari, where the nut is completely sundried) and paan with little bit of ‘chuna’, lime in a ‘khundoni,’ mortal and pestle made of teak wood I think, which was hand crafted and sold by the artisans. There would always be a couple of guests who would be sitting with Aita and catching up on the latest neighbourhood news.

On the right of the kitchen was a gohali (cowshed), where there were 2 or 3 cows and a dheki (a rice grinding equipment), which was used to pound rice to make pithas, pancakes. Neighbouring village women would also use it to pound their rice.  On the left of Aita’s room was the naad, well (deep cylindrical waterhole) which was source of all the water and the water was pulled up with a pulley attached to an aluminium bucket. Behind the well were some kothal, jackfruit trees with huge luscious fruit hanging, but quite smelly, and mango trees.  

These are my memories post 1974 and beyond, when I was old enough to retain some memories. You can imagine why this was like fiction to me if you understand my NDA upbringing. The house in NDA was an apartment with all the amenities in-built. There were taps in the kitchen and bathrooms which had 24 hour water supply of the purest water as NDA had a very sophisticated filtration and water transportation system even back them.  The roads were paved, each public area was landscaped and maintained by expert gardeners. We moved around on scooters, bicycles and our feet.

NDA also was like a village but with houses that were built into the existing forest, preserving the forest architecture, albeit with amenities which were far more ahead compared to the rest of the country. 

For those of you who haven’t seen the other picture ever, it will still seem like fiction, someone else’s story.

 

Chapter 4: jurithewriter has started writing her story.

The floods took away our Palasbari houses twice. I remember my dad telling us this fact. The first time it was before my paternal grandfather Rajat Chandra Kalita (Sotal Mohajan) died. The second must have been after his death because none of my father’s Mirza anecdotes included my grandfather.

When the floods were wolfing away the homes, entire families watched from a safe distance and wailed at the loss of their safe haven. A home is where we all feel safe, secure and protected. I understand this emotion better now as I am at a similar crossroad. Before this it was just another wondrous story. That safe place was gone. I never thought to ask my father about what they did to cope and how did they manage as evacuees till their next home was built or how did they even build new homes.

The home on the one bigha Mirza plot was a design archetypal of the fifties’. There was a central rectangular courtyard with single level Assam type chambers lining the rectangle. When I started having glitches in my life, the frustration of being stuck in an Abhimanyu’s Chakravyu led me to the study of the alternative sciences of astrology, numerology, Vaastu and Fengshui. As I started spending more and more time with my father after he had advanced dementia in his Mirza home, I found out that the originally erected Assam type house was as per Vaastu norms. I was amazed.

The old structure is no longer there. It has been replaced by four concrete houses by the 4 sons of my grandmother Soneswari Kalita. My memories and what I was told by my parents is muddled, don’t know which is a memory and which is an anecdote. Being the first child of the oldest male sibling made me special. The disappointment of begetting a girl child was soon forgotten. My four Khuras, paternal uncles and one Pehi, father’s sister adored the first and only baby in the family after many years.

Tori khura was my dad’s youngest brother. Aita, my grandmother, had told me that she had tried to use hing, asafetida as an abortifacient as she didn’t want another child so late in her life. She already had 7 children. Tori khura was mentally disabled, Aita regretted that the hing made him so. Dad told me that he had typhoid meningitis. That could also be a reason.

Tori khura loved drumsticks (Moringa pods, sojona in Assamese). He was very popular in the village community. Any visitor to our home would be guided instantly without confusion if the person was asked directions to Tori’s house.  He had a lot of friends and was welcome wherever he went. The ladies would give him drumsticks from their sojona trees and he would take the entire bunch to my mother and tell her ‘de de randhi de’, ‘hurry up and cook these’. He adored my mother and my mother loved him like a child.

Tori khura once got a Bajaj scooter in a lottery, he was lucky that way. He sold the scooter and bought a cycle. He then sold the cycle and bought a live chicken. And then got it cooked and ate it. My mum told me this story in 2012 when she predicted that my driver Jatin would do a similar thing when he sold his Nano car to buy a motorbike. I scoffed at her. Of course, I was wrong.

Tori khura died of TB in 1988 or 89 when I was in the 2^nd or 3^rd year of my MBBS course. My father rushed from Pune for his death ceremony and wept like a baby. It surprised me. The surprise at strong bonds was because as a child one is unable to fathom that parents too had their individual families once.

Reference for Abhimanyus Chakravyuh (for those who don't know about it:  http://mahabharata-research.com/military%20academy/the%20mysterious%20chakravyuha.html

Chapter 3: jurithewriter has started writing her story

Everyday I drive home to Mirza this is the route I pass through. I love this journey not just for its beauty but also as it reminisces the cycle tours of the periphery road of NDA, Pune. 

I started walking and talking at the age of nine months. No, that didn’t give me any edge in life. But it did make me tug on the tails of stray dogs and follow them around. The point that’s being underscored here is that the dogs didn’t object to their tails being pulled and never harmed the little baby Juri.

I could see the awe and wonder in my father’s eyes whenever he told this story.

About the same time my father came across an advertisement in a newspaper (he was a lecturer in DK College Mirza then) for a Central Government job through UPSC. Bharat Chandra Kalita was sharp (reason for passing through the fire of life unscathed), had great people skills and lack of fear for the unknown. From a remote (in 1970, Mirza was quite remote) part of the country, against advice from his peers and seniors (getting this job is impossible they said, he was just wasting his money), he booked a train ticket and reached Delhi.

His command over English was pretty okay, but he spoke it with a distinct Assamese accent. The syllables ‘Ch’, ‘Sh’ and ‘V’ do not exist in the Assamese script so every ‘ch’/’sh’ syllable is pronounced as ‘s’; all the consonants are rounded , so Arvind becomes Aurobindo). He topped the interview answering a difficult question easily and was selected for a Lecturer’s post in the prestigious National Defence Academy, Pune.

Dad lived in the Officer’s mess in NDA for a few months before returning home to get my mum and me to join him. There was a swimming pool adjacent to the Officer's mess and it was visible from the balconies of the mess rooms. My father’s eyes popped out figuratively when he saw the ladies in their swim suits. He had only seen them in Hindi movies earlier.

Alone in Mirza, the joint family members were there of course, but mum was struggling to take care of me without the father of the child. She had just completed her BA in Political Science and had joined as a teacher in a local school. I had breakouts in my skin and was delirious with fever. From whatever she described it was probably a combined infection of measles and chicken pox. In traditional Assam, poxes are not treated. Poxes are called “Ai”, “Mother Goddess.” Such infected are worshipped, non-vegetarian food is prohibited.

I was dying, my pox lesions had been super infected with bacteria but the elders kept dabbing holy water and worshipping the baby. Lila Kalita defied everyone and took me to a doctor. She never gave up easily. This was the first out of the two times she made sure her first born survived. The doctor gave antibiotics and it was a miracle for the village folk that I survived.

The miracle actually was the defiant mother I had inherited, lucky for me that I had no say in that choice.

Chapter 2: Jurithewriter has started writing her story.

These two are dad, Bharat Chandra Kalita ; and my mum, Lila Kalita. They were both as delectable as they look and with dispositions to match. My dad’s friends would tell me whenever we visited Mirza (I was raised and lived in Pune till 17 years of age) that dad and mum were seen as one of the most perfect marital alliance in the region and the moment the alliance was declared, everyone was in awe about how brilliant and beautiful their kids would be.

Well, it doesn’t usually work out that way.

So, the fact of the matter is that they were both good looking, academically brilliant (toppers in their respective times), dashing, articulate. Humans are never satisfied with what they have.

Let me tell you by example.

Palasbari, that’s where my roots lie (although I’ve never actually lived there), used to be a flourishing township on the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra in the early 1900s. The economy of the region used to be controlled by the Mohajans. Sotal Mohajan was an affluent timber and silk trader, his trade having reached as far as Sikkim. The Mohajans led a grand lifestyle in those times. Naturally, so did Sotal Mohajan and his 8 children. Like the seasons, life changes, unlike the seasons though not with the same predictability. Nevertheless, any alliance with the Mohajans was considered a privilege and glamorous.

Each rupee that was stashed away under Sotal Mohajans’ mattress disappeared along with his breath while being treated for a serious ailment. His eldest child, Bharat, begged the grocer to give him materials required for the death rituals promising him he would pay it back later. He was just 12 years old.

Durgeswar Kalita was regal, had European looks with light coloured irises and an entire family to match. He had a transferable government job in the agriculture department, was fluent in English and his family was an outlier in the smorgasbord that was formed by the innumerable ethnicities that makes up the North Eastern part of India.  His second child was clever, brilliant, stubborn and his favourite. Lila Kalita was raised with a lot of love, pride and privilege.

After Lila and Bharat got married, despite their pedigrees, they weren’t impressed with what they saw in each other. That didn’t stop them from giving birth to me a year after their marriage. I didn’t look like either of them and was quite a cry baby. Apparently mum would stand me in the centre of their courtyard when I would stubbornly decide not to stop the bawling and egg me to increase my decibels further.

Juri, aru jure (kaand)

Juri, (cry) louder.

And I would oblige.

Post scriptum: Let me wind up today by fixing the ‘loose ends.’ For those of you who are not from Assam, Mirza and Palasbari are twin townships. You could compare Mirza to New Delhi and Palasbari to Old Delhi. The Brahmaputra changed its course over the years, every monsoon the floods would devour homes of the Palasbarians. Those who lost their land then shifted to Mirza which neighboured Palasbari but on the farther side of the river. More about this later.

 

Chapter 1: jurithewriter has started writing her story

 

Everyone has a story. This is my story. Not that it is something exceptional, I just enjoy playing around with words and the process of airing my inner contemplations through writing. I come from a family of writers. Like most musicians or painters or dancers come from families that have these respective art forms inborn into their beings.

As with other art forms, writing is a flow, its natural, there is an esthetics to good writing, an originality, it’s a gift from the Universe, and it has a soul. One doesn’t write for an audience, one writes because one wants to express oneself though a medium. I do tend to digress during my ramblings, a little like the abstract art forms where the expressions get a little mixed up.

So back to my story.

It’s the problem I have with handling intimate relations that somehow confuses me. I mean there’s nothing confusing about it, it’s just that I’m incapable of handling such relations, that’s pretty clear; the confusion lies in the why. Why am I incapable, whereas other normal human beings aren’t.

Let me start with the story of my birth. I did come into existence approximately nine months before my birth, but that part of the story will be shared later.

I was born in Mahendra Mohan Choudhury hospital, Guwahati. My mum’s labour pains lasted the whole night through, you all know how intensely painful labour pains are. The clocked time for my delivery in the gynaecologist's delivery note is 10.07 am. That’s a really long period of bearing the labour pains. As a doctor, I know that the time taken for a primipara (a first time pregnant woman) is the longest. In subsequent pregnancies, the time gets shorter as the uterus and birth canal openings have been prepped by the first delivery.

That was in 1970, in a rural Assamese family. Everyone wanted the first born child (and perhaps all subsequent ones) to be males. Perplexes me trying to figure out that if all kids were male, who would give birth to them if there were no females around. You know, the chicken and egg story basically.

To make things worse, some Goddess had appeared in my mother’s dream when she was pregnant assuring her that her first born would be male. But look what happened, I am the first born and I was born unambiguously female. Obviously, there was disappointment all around, everyone feeling sorry for my mum. My grandfather had come to see me in the hospital. When he went back home, his 7 children and wife surrounded him eagerly, waiting to hear about their new niece.

How does she look, they asked.

Sotal Mohajanor natini, sotal e hoise.

Sotal Mohajan was my paternal grandfather. He was extremely fair, pink and fair, but he had a flat nose. Therefore the nickname Sotal (his actual name was Rajat). A courtyard is called Sotal in Assamese. His nose was as flat as a courtyard.

Sotal Mohajanor natini sotal e hoise. The granddaughter of Sotal Mohajan is also Sotal. That was a reference to my nose.