THE LIFE THAT WASN’T MINE

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.

 3

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?

                                                           

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)