THE
LIFE THAT WASN’T MINE
My
Baba didn’t want me to be born. He expected a daughter instead. He already had
four sons; the eldest, a baby boy, died of Baba’s modern caring to make his new
born son stronger, offering the best alternatives to mother’s milk. His over excitement
of becoming a father at 28 might have complicated his baby’s survival.
I
was born in 1945. Baba, on hearing, ‘a tray full boy, extremely fair with
scull-full bushy black hair’, turned and cycled away to the court, across the
railway lines. On this day British General Montgomery was 20 miles away from
Berlin, bombarding his way to force the German Army’s fall, hardly two months after.
Those days Bengal was literary dark naked and hungry, for whatever oil, clothes
and eatable were available, were preferred more for the army in India and
abroad in the background of War ravaged world. Hoarders and unscrupulous were
having their field days. Ill-starred villagers of Bengal left with no alternative
but to guard their disgrace, with newspaper sheets. Kolkata and other towns in
the province were strewn with skinny people hungry and virtually naked. Baba
was a busy advocate and a leader of the peasant movement then in Bengal, Tebhaga Andolan. He was the town head of
the movement overlooking its spread in the rural areas of our district.
Possibly he might have preferred organizing a protest meeting scheduled in the same
afternoon at the ‘congress maidan’ than cuddling a newborn in the hospital.
By
the next year of my birth Bengal began to bleed, Hindus and Muslims were
killing each other mercilessly, a ground of which was being scratched since
1939. The communal riots forced each other to flee with whatever they could
grasp out of their looted and burned down homes and huts. Dinajpur’s Hindus
didn’t flee that way though. Our town, with a less number of Hindus, didn’t
face Muslim as bloodthirsty neighbors, as their fraternity in southern parts of
the province faced. But the deluge of Urdu speaking Muslim refugees from Bihar,
tormented equally by Hindus there, a mere 65 kilometers away, was overflowing our
small town fast and extensively.
My
childhood grew in this environment of nonviolence and linguistic synthesis. I
was equally fascinated to Pujas and Eids, Kalimandirs and Masjids, Kakas and Chachas. My friends included Bengali Hindus and Muslims, Marwaris,
and Biharis. I was attracted to read Sanskrit (in Bangla alphabets) and Urdu
(in original script). I was a kind of child prodigy in playing Dhaks during Pujas and Tashas during Muharram. This was
possible more for our father was an atheist and mother a compelled atheist
having faith in each other’s ideology, self-determination of human being,
politically.
My
first school was Yogmaya Pathshala, a
primary school. Within a few days I started disliking it for many reasons. Our
school was in a dangerous place. Outside the bar less windows of our class, was
a jungle of tall trees and thick bushes. The Santhal para was just next to the school. A huge incensed Goddess Kali, with
shining arms and a severed head in Her hands, covering her bare body with
severed heads and limbs of white men, stood in the middle of the para. Even the playful Santhal children, had furious looking fiery
eyes shining out of their coal-black faces. Our teacher too told us, tigers do
come out of that jungle and chew the inattentive children of the Pathshala and Santhals do kidnap white color children and sacrifice them before the
furious Goddess Kali.
However,
there was a bigger reason for changing the school. It was Bangla School. My
immediate elder brother Bachchu was studying there. Many triggers were strewn
around his school. Back home Bachchu would describe them --the rail line by the
class rooms, the court across the lines, the rail station, buzzing station
road, veterinary hospital, the hospital bridge, fountain in the park, clean and
big red-white buildings of the district hospital, and that large tangible map
of Indian sub-continent, with its mountains, rivers and oceans in concrete,
under his tiny feet– all these went on gearing up my desires and pestering my
elders to agree. I was successful.
2
Our
town wasn’t big. Bangla School was in the heart of the town. A few hundred tiny
steps across the railroad was the wonder filled world of the district court. It
had many stretches of wide-open space separated with large shady trees like
neem, banyan and pipal. My tiny feet needed to walk great distances around the
court exploring the new world. In those earlier days I was nourished with lots
of things, primarily with different faces of mankind.
Baba’s
chamber in the court was on the other side, facing the rail lines. So I wasn’t
afraid of getting caught. If by chance I came across my uncle, Chhotomama, working as the clerk (muhuri) of my father, he would take me
to his part of a long concrete bench, marked for the clerks. It was an
interesting place, rows of such benches, buzzing with people of many
complexion, size, built, attires, and talking.
Court
area was a kaleidoscope-- madaris with
dholaks, child acrobats with
incredible ‘boneless’ body; miracle medicine vendors with amazing roots and dry
leaves; ear hole cleaners with metal sticks and tiny bottles of oil;
‘eye-specialists’ with measuring funnels; people in a fold around a Sadhubaba; soothsayer with a parrot in a
cage; a couple in tattered clothes singing loudly in praise of God; colorful
plastic items spread for sale; running children with steaming tea kettles; pan-bidi-cigretswalas; veiled women and
towel-on-shoulder men folks; rickshaws, cycles… the world was wide and varied.
None of them was alien to me. I went on growing my age with them.
Station
Road was the ‘down town’ of our insignificant ‘city’. A straight road towards
north, upcoming from the mostly sleepy rail station, had all that you wanted.
Books and magazines, grocery, toy shops, play house, cinema theater,
restaurants… whatever you could name, all those were lined up on both sides of
this busy, crowded, honking street. This was one of my favorite walk zones.
With my tiny steps I would slowly walk by the lines of the shops, sometime peep
in, sometime enter into one or two shops to see the wonders. I was of course aware,
salesmen could suspect me a shoplifter, and beat me mercilessly. However, such
event never took place.
During
tiffin time I started going to Zilla school premises, across the pond, to feel
myself an explorer. Zilla School attracted me not for its location or sturdy
widely spread red buildings, but more for a map of India-Pakistan-Celone, made
of stones and concrete layers, under my tiny feet. On every visit I would walk
all over India, from Himalayas to Srilanka and from Kohima to North West
Frontier, would sail over blue Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. Five-year-old two
Pakistans, one far from the other, were painted green on India’s topography,
and I, at that age, could see how easily a country is marked separated within a
country. To be true, fantasy in my life began to bloom from this very map of
India. I could climb ‘high rise’ ranges of Himalayas; walk down to tip of south
India; could sail over calm and turbulent seas. This map didn’t have any mark
on particular cities or metros, and that kept me unaware of multiplicity of the
Indian sub-continent for a very long time. I only knew ours is a vast land with
hills and rivers and two painted-in-green-lands, Pakistans.
But
at one stage, my euphoria started melting away, and my wonder world, like
shifting sand, started flowing towards a world of fantasy. Within two years,
when I was in class II, I lost abundance of this elation. Those one-time
breathtaking places like the rail lines, the court, rail station, the station
road et al stopped exciting me any
more and drove me to change my school for the second time. I got admitted in
class III in Maharaja (Girijanath High) School near our house.
My
days in Yogmaya Pathshala and Bangla School had great upshot in me. In those
early years I absorbed a self-driving persona. My daily walk to the schools for
a mile, meandering through varied social settings of a district town, bared a
larger and vibrant world before me. Lazily gossiping younger youth under a
pipal tree (popularly mentioned as ‘botgachh’, as banyan tree); homeopathic
charitable dispensary with crowded ailing people waiting for their turn; the
intricately interlaced brown puffy nests hanging from the sky high palm trees;
the large three storey unfinished building, then seat of frightening ghosts;
stretches of beautiful buildings, residences of a mighty retired district
magistrate’s clerk; brightly cleaned scavengers’ colony with pigs running
around; the veterinary hospital, the exciting concrete bridge over a half dried
canal; the fountain of the triangular
park; widespread medicine whiffing district hospital etc. all these urban
pastoral widened the vastness of a kid’s world.
Going
to Maharaja school was a different juncture in my early days. These shift moved
me from an urban setting to a rural one. My new school was in the eastern
border of the town, a few furlong away from our house in Balubari, The very
name Balubari (house of sand) was so adoring, one could easily imagine its
surrounding-- a river bed, jungles and villages nearby. Balubari was exactly
like that. I started growing in twin setting of rural and urban within a few
square mile expanse.
When
I started going to school, new born Pakistan was hardly two years old. Our
town, in north of Bengal, away from Calcutta, across the great rivers of Ganga
and Padma, never have had faced the bad faces of the independence, leaving the
populace live in harmony and peace. That’s why I have had zero experience of the
pangs of independence. And I grew in an extremely affable ambiance till I
finished my high school days.
My
Childhood was more vibrant for different kinds of people than for any usual
childhood mischiefs and merriments. Yet I had good number of friends although I
was not interested in any types of games that were physically strenuous like
football, cricket, kabadi, dariabanda or athletics.
Only
once I played cricket in my life and that was when I was a student of class X.
Within a few days into the new school, Dinajpur Zilla School, my classmate, son
of the district magistrate and captain of the school team, found a cricketer in
me. When he selected me to play, I strongly opposed. But he took my words as my
modesty. He couldn’t believe, a tall, slim, fare looking guy in white shirts
and trousers and kids’ white shoes on could stand out from playing cricket. On
his insist I too started believing in myself thinking, after all hitting a ball
with a bat should not be difficult. I played guli-danda well enough! But alas, the opening batsman, in the
opening ball got his mid stump torn apart. I was out! And under the scorching
sun, I had to run around to pick up batted balls of the opponent from almost
all over the ground. Never ever I played this game in my life.
I
was fond of football because, unlike cricket, I could understand its rules and
playing skills. I can recollect only two games of football I played in my life.
Once when I was studying in middle classes, our House clashed a friendly with
another. That day I was playing in the center forward position, and scored a
goal. Another, when I was a college student in Calcutta and was in habit of
smoking the cheapest cigarettes available in the market. In that game, before
half time, I lost my breath and retired to the bench never to return.
Yet
football remained my most favorite game. Listening to Ajay Basu and his
‘Kamalda’ in radio and reading the sports pages on football kept me happy for
long. Television came in my life, that too in the show-windows with chitrahar, when I was 27 and married. There after, till date, I do ignore all
other programme but not news and football. There could be another big reason
for not continuing with outdoor games. I
fled home when I was just 17 and had no time for playing games but engaged
myself struggling hard day long.
I
started learning about social waves from 1953, when I was exactly 7 years old.
I distinctly recollect, I was a student of class III then. Nikhilda, an elder,
who was a frontrunner in many happenings in our school, stopped me as I entered
the school’s premises stepping up the slide of the dry pond. He pinned a small
rectangular piece of paper on my chest pocket, with a one liner in red: ‘Roktato Brihasptibarke Bhulibo na (Will
not Forget the Bloody Thursday)’.
That
‘Bloody Thursday’ was 21 February in the earlier year, 1952. I was not aware of
the day. In our family this might have been discussed several times, but I
possibly couldn’t understand what it was. Primary reasons might be I was not
interested beyond the weekly children’s page in ‘The Statesman’. However, I didn’t take many days to apprehend the
issue involved. I understood, police in Dhaka killed students on this day.
Because the force did not want us to speak in Bangla, since it was Pakistan, a
land of Biharis, meaning outsiders in general. This was enough to trigger my
passion in an ambiance of fearlessness, politically.
My
pride and conviction as a socially sensible and valiant son of Barada Bhushan
and Asha Chakraborty, pushed me into joining the uproar soon, but for what and
why, I wasn’t aware of, precisely. I started joining the processions, carrying
small paper flags and posters in my tiny hands, marching through main roads of
the town, sometime at the tail of a mile long slogan shouting elders, sometime
in the front holding my mother’s fingers, jogging. I became a hero soon.
Everyone in school, students and teachers alike, started recognizing me.
Neighborhood seniors patted my back, calling me ‘Bagher Baccha (a tiger cub)’, referring to my father, a roaring
tiger in the town.
4.
I usually called her
Didima (granny). She was a frail, fair, and smiling oldie, living alone and
guarding spacious mud buildings and the courtyard with stack of harvests. All
her children left the town and crossed over to India. She didn’t follow them.
Didima was a mother to our Ma. When upright educated lawyer groom refused to go
to a remote village in Pabna to marry a small land owner village brahmin’s
daughter, the girl was brought to Dinajpur town and put up in the same locality
in Balubari. Didima received the girl from her village as her daughter and the
groom came to this courtyard to marry the beautiful young school going girl,
eleven years younger to him. The groom was my father, and bride my mother. Thus
Didima’s place became my mother’s home and my indulgence.
Didima would visit our house once in a while, with a purpose. Carefully slipping a post card inside a thin magazine or like she would reach our house. Obviously, Ma would receive her as the most favourite guest of the day. Didima walking down our dusty lane from east, her rosy face absorbed with mellowing afternoon sky, stooping humbly, would instantly attract me away from my any favourite game. Once I reach her running, she would place her soft hand on my shoulder and lead me inside.
I know what was next. I will run into our study to return with an ink pen. By then Ma would spread a corn mat on the floor of our varanda. Didima would sit on it, give me her post card, and I would ask, ‘How many lines, Dida (kato line, Didai)? She would indicate and start dictating. I was her writer.
Thus I learnt to write, at that early age, in different font size. I was known then for my ‘good handwriting’, and it’s Didima, who taught me how to use that in writing. It’s a strange experience ever in my life, how her dictation could be so precise! She would dictate letters to her sons and daughters and else living at distant places, yet so precisely! I don’t remember if those were too emotive or just matter-of-facts. Wonder of wonders, once she would say like, ‘with love, yours Ma’, there would be no space left to write anything more. Whether the letter is 12 liners or 15 or 20, it would leave no space at the end. Thus, unknowingly, she taught an innocent pretty shoot like me what to write, how much to write, and, more importantly, what not to write. The sad part is, did I learn it?
Didima would visit our house once in a while, with a purpose. Carefully slipping a post card inside a thin magazine or like she would reach our house. Obviously, Ma would receive her as the most favourite guest of the day. Didima walking down our dusty lane from east, her rosy face absorbed with mellowing afternoon sky, stooping humbly, would instantly attract me away from my any favourite game. Once I reach her running, she would place her soft hand on my shoulder and lead me inside.
I know what was next. I will run into our study to return with an ink pen. By then Ma would spread a corn mat on the floor of our varanda. Didima would sit on it, give me her post card, and I would ask, ‘How many lines, Dida (kato line, Didai)? She would indicate and start dictating. I was her writer.
Thus I learnt to write, at that early age, in different font size. I was known then for my ‘good handwriting’, and it’s Didima, who taught me how to use that in writing. It’s a strange experience ever in my life, how her dictation could be so precise! She would dictate letters to her sons and daughters and else living at distant places, yet so precisely! I don’t remember if those were too emotive or just matter-of-facts. Wonder of wonders, once she would say like, ‘with love, yours Ma’, there would be no space left to write anything more. Whether the letter is 12 liners or 15 or 20, it would leave no space at the end. Thus, unknowingly, she taught an innocent pretty shoot like me what to write, how much to write, and, more importantly, what not to write. The sad part is, did I learn it?
Putumama was a mysterious yet very attractive
persona to me. He was more a Mama (maternal uncle) to me than an actual Kaka (paternal
uncle) of my childhood classmate, Apu. He was younger to Apu’s father, a
certified lawyer (moktar) in the court. Putumama was tall, straight, and
extremely fair. You would only know true color of his skin, when he would
scratch dirty layers on his skin. Mama had studded curly black hair, and salt
pepper beard stuck to his chin. To us two brothers, Putumama was a learned man.
We could never rout him asking questions from any chapter of our history or
geography books. During winter when he would stand straight with his age old
foul smelling rug hanging from right shoulder, child in us would often find him
a Christ with his flock of sheep….. (UNFINISHED)
