A fairy tale of our time

Mita, who came to meet us this afternoon after a long time, has changed a lot. If I had met her on the street, I wouldn’t have recognized her; I would have taken her as just another smart young girl in her early twenties in a red salwar suit. But actually, Mita is very special, because her story is very special. But before I tell you her story, I must tell you a little about her family.

Mita was born into a caste that used to carry other people’s shit on their head. The “tradition” continued well into the twentieth century India parallel to steel plants, airplanes, and televisions. The practice has been abolished, but it hasn’t improved the lot of Mita’s people much. They continue to be “untouchables”. More often than not, “they” wouldn’t be invited to sit alongside “us” in a community dinner. In the country, they still live in filthy unhygienic ghettos on the outskirts of villages. The so-called upper-caste has no physical contact with them except when the village gentry rape their women.

In cities, they live in equally filthy unhygienic slums. Mita’s family lived in one such not far away from our home when her mother Lilavati joined our condo as a sweeper. They still live there and her mother still cleans bathrooms and drains, besides sweeping. Twenty years ago, Lilavati was a stunningly beautiful young woman. Now, after six children, recurring ailments, relentless overwork and poverty, she is an old woman in her mid-forties. But for the sake of completeness, I must add here that in all these years of trials and vicissitudes, Lilavati has held her head high. She has borrowed regularly and always repaid her debts in time. But she has never ever begged. 

Her husband was a drunkard. He worked occasionally and beat her regularly. Fortunately, his liver couldn’t manage the amount of alcohol he had been consuming and he had to leave a crying Lilavati and a huge debt behind when he was in the prime of his abused youth.

Of Lilavati’s two sons, one makes an honest living as – what else – a sweeper and the other is a professional thief. Neither supports their mother. Mita is the oldest daughter, and the other three, much smaller, are triplets.

Lilavati put her children in school and struggled to pay tuition fees and buy books. She wanted her girls to live a decent life. However, Mita left school and started working as a domestic help with a family in our building. And soon, she became an expert cook. So, early in her life, Mita made a smart career move and broke the shackles that had tied her forefathers for two thousand years!

When her father died, they needed a lot of cash to repay the debt they had run up for his treatment. Needless to say, most of the money had been borrowed at usurious rates and the debtors were on their back. So Mita made the second smart move in her life – around five years ago, she managed to find a domestic’s job in Mumbai, a city that pays working people a lot better.

Now she is a happily married young woman brimming with pride for her prince charming. A housewife now, she even pays for her younger sisters’ education. Presently her husband is away at Bangalore on work for a week. And Mita has flown down to Kolkata to be with her family. I do not know if she ever dreamed of boarding a flight when she was a child, but it is a reality today and no wonder: her husband is a graduate engineer. He is planning to do masters and taking the GATE exam this year.

How did it happen? We didn’t ask her, but Mita was happy to tell her tale.

‘On the train to Mumbai, I was crying continuously. He was in the same coach. When no one was looking at us, he asked me surreptitiously, ‘Why are you crying? Are you being kidnapped? Have you been sold off?’

‘I told my story and told him I was scared to leave my family and home for the first time, that too for a distant city. ‘The family I am going to work for has promised to pick me up from the station. What if they don’t? I don’t know anyone there.’

‘He gave me his phone number and asked me to call him if I was in trouble. I didn’t trust him initially, but I did phone him after a few days. As luck would have it, he lived not far away from where I did. He even dropped in to meet me at my workplace. I was still not too sure about him, but the lady with whom I worked felt he was a good man.

‘From that family I moved to a women’s hostel where I cooked for forty inmates. It was tough. My day began with making tea and ended after everyone had had their supper. But the pay was good (12,000 rupees) and I could send money to ma regularly. Over time, we paid off all our debt.

‘And then we got married. Ma insisted on “legal marriage”. So we went to Alipur Court and got the papers.’

As Mita told us the story, time and again she told my wife, ‘Kakima, I haven’t met anyone else like him. He is wonderful!’

And every time she said this, her face lit up with happiness. My wife asked her if her husband’s family accepted her without any hassle. She said initially her mom-in-law in Begusarai wasn’t too happy, but after some time, things settled down.

As Mita left, I silently bowed to the ordinary small-town Indian who is her husband. If you didn’t know the Indian society intimately, you wouldn’t possibly know how deep-rooted the prejudice against people from Mita’s station in life is. Consequently, it would be difficult appreciate the significance of what this young man has done.

But let’s put sociology aside for the moment. Please join me in wishing Mita and her husband all the happiness in the world. May they live happily ever after.

[This is a true story. Except for changing names and some insignificant details, I haven't cooked the facts. I haven't even garnished the story.]

Kolkata / 4 Feb 2015

On the way to Goalanda / 21 June 1892

Rabindra Nath Tagore

[Rabindranath Tagore’s Chhinnapatra (literally, The torn letter) is a collection of letters written by him to a niece when he was between 26 and 34 years of age. Tagore wrote them while he was travelling extensively in East and North Bengal and in Orissa on family business.

In a book on Tagore, Kabir Swadharma (The poet’s own religion), a noted scholar, Sourindra Mitra wrote: “There is no dearth of famous and great books in the treasure trove of Bengali literature, but there is only one about which the term “intimate” can be used.” Mitra felt Chhinnapatra is a book that is intimate in the way Walt Whitman described one of his own books of poetry: “Who touches this touches a man”.

This is the third letter from Chinnapatra that I have translated and posted here.]

Been floating on the river the whole day …. What surprises me is that although I have gone along this waterway many a time, felt the special delight of being on this boat between the two banks [of the Padma], when I am back on the land for a couple of days, the memories seem to fade away.

I sit quietly, with captivating scenery on either side – hamlets, wharfs, fields showing up and vanishing; clouds floating in the sky and polychrome flowers blossoming in the fading lights of the dusk; the boat moving, deckhands fishing, the incessant, adoringly fluid sound of the water; as darkness descends, the vast stretch of water becomes absolutely still like a sleeping child, all the stars in the wide open sky wake up and watch from above; late in some nights when sleep evades me, I wake up and gaze into the two dark banks of the river dead to the world, jackals howling intermittently from the wildernesses bordering villages, and the noise of clumps of earth splashing water as the fierce silent stream of the Padma steadily chips off its banks.

As I watch the changing landscape, a stream of fancy flows through my mind, and on its two banks two banks, new desires take shape. Perhaps what lies before my eyes isn’t really fascinating, maybe, a tawny treeless sandbank stretches to the horizon, and on it edge is tied an empty boat – a faint river is flowing along under the shadow of a gloomy sky – I cannot express how I feel when I watch the picture … I think the desire that was born in me when I read the Arabian Nights – when Sindbad the merchant explored new lands and I, imprisoned in a storeroom under the watchful eyes of domestic helps, used to wander along with him – the desire that was born at that time still seems to be alive – whenever I see a lonely boat anchored on the riverbank I become restless. I am absolutely certain that if as a child I hadn’t read the Arabian Nights or the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, if I hadn’t heard fairy tales, such thoughts wouldn’t have crossed my mind while looking at the riverbank; the world would have looked different to me.

The mind of this tiny man is a massive mélange of reality and imagination. One doesn’t know what gets tangled with what else – how many stories, pictures, anecdotes, insignificant and important events have got knotted to each other – still getting tangled every day. If you could unravel the life of a man, so many minor and major stories would emerge.

438 words, Translated on Tuesday, 03 February 2015, Kolkata

Creative writing and Will Buckingham

We invest a lot of time and money to travel around, see places, know the unknown …. After coming back, we share our travel stories and post pictures on the Facebook. But most of us don’t realise that we are on a journey almost every day, a trip no less fascinating, an unending, cashless journey that gives us perhaps an even better opportunity to see – let me use a picturesque Indian English phrase here – new new things!

Every new person we get to know could be as fascinating as a quaint countryside or an electrifying city seeped in a different culture. And last Saturday, I happened to meet not one but three of them: a Bengali couple and a British novelist, lecturer, and philosopher based in Leicester, UK. Suman, a publisher, and his wife Sathi are a wonderful couple and it was great meeting them. But now let me now share with you twenty-five minutes of a three-hour workshop.

Will Buckingham was in our English Language Centre to do a workshop on creative writing. My colleague Chitra, who was coordinating the programme, asked me to join but unfortunately, I could go in only for the last part, when Will was talking about writer’s blocks.

Every writer experiences writer’s blocks from time to time. They are strange dark periods of lack of inspiration and creativity. In times like this, a creative person cannot think, cannot relate to their world of writing, and most importantly, cannot put pen on a piece of paper. A traffic jam, a bottleneck.  

If you are a creative person, nothing could be more frustrating. And I understand this well because I know the neck more intimately than the bottle. Anyway, here is Will Buckingham’s prescription to get over the malady.

He asked the twenty-odd participants to do an experiment. It was a simple experiment to write – trust me – without THINKING. Our task was to write without interruption for seven minutes. And the rules of the game were: 

1. You can write in any language;
2. You have to keep your hand moving;
3. You can write the worst rubbish in the universe;
4. You can’t go back, you can’t cross out anything;
5. You are free to wonder, and finally,
6. YOU CAN’T THINK – let your pen do the writing.

What was the result? As I wrote and tried to live up to the challenge to write the worst rubbish ever written in the English language, I kept looking at the twenty-odd people through a corner of my eye.

And trust me, everyone wrote continuously, no one looked away, seven minutes flew away in no time, and at the end, every one of the faces in the room glowed with creative happiness!

The moral of the story is perhaps this. It’s not your mind alone, but your hand too writes. And don’t worry – just write – writing will take care of writing.

POSTSCRIPT: It was good that I accepted Suman’s invite to join him, Sathi, and Will at a pub in the evening. The place was chock-a-block with people and the loud music blared from a speaker right next to us was not good for my elderly ears looking forward to retirement, but it provided us with the perfect privacy for an intimate chat.

Thanks Chitra, for asking me to attend the workshop.

Kolkata / 2 Feb 2015