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.