Smriti Pishi

I was fortunate to be born in a family that had several strong, professionally successful, and exceptionally gritty women. Given the kind influence they had on me as a child, I was destined to be a respecter of women, if not a gynolator. One of those rock-solid feminine figures was Smriti Pishi, Dr. Mamata Chaudhuri.

Smriti Pishi, my father’s younger first cousin, was also a childhood friend of my mom in Karimgunj, a small town in Sylhet. If you look at the map of Eastern India, you will find Kolkata and Karimgunj on opposite sides across Bangladesh. Her father was a school teacher, a remarkable man who thought it fit to send his oldest daughter to study medicine in faraway Kolkata in the 1940s. Daughter didn’t fail him. She graduated, became a successful physician, married a brilliant doctor, and inspired her younger siblings. Rare would be a family in entire Bengal those days that produced three doctors and three engineers. Smriti Pishi had three other sisters who too were successful in different fields.

Dr. Mamata Chaudhuri specialised in paediatrics from the USA. As a child, I saw her driving her black Baby Austin (or was it a Morris Minor?) to hospital, where she also taught paediatrics. My sister and I were under her care as infants and so were my children. Smriti Pishi was a strong votary of breast feeding and detested commercial baby food. A schoolmaster’s daughter from a small town, the reality of an indigent India was at her heart. She would always tell my wife about the sources of nutrition for infants from everyday food that was equal if not better than tinned products. She was also a no-nonsense person. One day, my wife got an earful from her for putting kohl on our daughter's eyes. That day, the paediatrician began her prescription with: "No Kajal" (underlined).

My peripatetic job took me to different parts of the country, but I re-established contact with her as soon as I returned to Kolkata about 20 years ago. In her late 70s, she had left active medical practice then. Over the following 15 years, her mobility got restricted gradually, but her intellect was razor sharp. She read not only newspapers, but also serious tomes on a range of subjects. She and I shared a fondness for Amitav Ghosh. She was the one who told me about Madhusree Mukerjee’s pathbreaking book “Churchill’s Secret War”. After a visit to her home, I would come back with a sense that I had got to know something new. I believe her decline started when her eyes failed her and she couldn’t read beyond newspaper headlines. She was not much of a screen person, I believe. I never saw her watching TV.

Smriti Pishi was admitted to a hospital around the middle of April. The gritty woman that she was, she managed not to contract COVID-19 even after being in a hospital for two weeks. She was discharged by the end of April and breathed her last at home on 8 May at the age of 98.

In my dear pishi, I had a window to the past, the 1940s in particular: the life in a medical college then, the Bengal Famine, the grotesque Calcutta Killings of 1946, and my father as a young man who was her “friend, philosopher, and guide.” With her passing, the window has been shut for good. I will have to live with the many questions I didn’t ask her.

10 May 2021