Help me pack, Papa, help me pack, says Meera. Mama has gone away again, and they are going to find her and bring her back. Pack my teddy bear also, Papa. Mama loves my teddy bear. Papa packs just a few clothes for himself. Bhaiyya does not pack at all. Papa shouts at Bhaiyya. Bhaiyya shouts at Papa – aap log jao na Papa, I don’t want to go anywhere!! I want to go to Mama, wails Meera. It’s all your Mama’s fault, yells Papa.

Nani comes out of the kitchen – kyon chilla rahe ho, she asks quietly. Meera is sobbing now, tears streaming down her face and falling on the soft toy that she is clutching to herself. It’s all your fault Mummyji, says Papa. You have always spoilt her, pampered her. Go, says Nani – go find her, but don’t force her to come back.

They travel all night by bus. It is cold and black outside. Occasionally, they drive through the lights of a small town or village. They stop for dinner somewhere. The fried rice is so spicy that Bhaiyya has Meera’s share, and Papa buys her a banana and a Cadbury’s bar. Next to them on the highway, vehicles whoosh by endlessly. Papa waits for Meera just outside the Ladies’ Toilet. She has to go alone because Mama is not there. Whenever she thinks of Mama, she cries softly, sniffily, snottily. There is no Mama to give her a tissue, so Papa gives her his hanky to blow her nose into.

They travel all night and wake up when the sun shines through the windows of the bus. Meera can’t sit still. Will they find Mama at the end of their journey? Will she be waiting for them like last time? Where will Mama be, she asks Papa. We will go to Masi’s new house opposite the lake – that’s where she will be, says Papa. When they get there, Mausaji is having tea on the verandah. Meera can see the steam rising from the cup. Mausaji is wearing a blue woollen hat and brown woollen socks. He is sitting on a cane chair with a rounded back. There is a folded newspaper on his lap. Masi is plucking marigolds for her morning puja. Meera can smell the marigolds. She can see the maroon markings on the yellow petals. There is a cat lying in the sun on the lawn. It is jet black with white patches.

Mausaji stands up when he sees them. Masi stops plucking flowers. But Mama is not there.

Going Home to Ma

Crayons in all the colours of the rainbow. A million puzzle pieces. Paper aeroplanes. Those are easy – Ruchi puts them quickly back in their boxes. It is the bits of play-dough stuck to the mat that really get to her. She pushes at one with her big toe, but it only spreads thinner. The children have left for the day and taken their cacophony with them. Now she can hear only the whirr-whirr-whirr of the AC and the soft rustle of the pages of a book flipping forward and back, forward and back where it lies open on the floor under a ceiling fan.

Sejal walks by and asks whether she is ready to head home. Ruchi is exhausted. She wishes she could just go home to Ma. She does not want to go home to her in-laws and help her mother-in-law with dinner. She just wants to go home and have Ma’s special home-coming tea. She imagines holding the hot cup in both her palms. The smell of lemongrass. The hot sweetness going down her throat. Sejal asks again whether she is ready to head home and breaks the reverie. The play-dough on the mat looks mockingly up at her – bright blues, pinks, sunshine-yellows, and dirty smudges where all the colours have mixed together. There are books on the floor and a couple of water bottles fallen on their sides. Sejal says, “Oh, come on! Let’s get this done. Let the play-dough be. Just pick the books up and off we go. Lata Tai says there is vada-pao for snack today. And adrak chai. Come on!” She can smell the vada-pao and the chai. Even before they reach the counter, Lata Tai is putting garlic chutney on the pao. Then she lovingly envelops the fat vadas inside the packets of pao and puts bright green fried chillies on the side of the plate. The chillies are dusted with salt and glistening with oil.

“So, are you really going to visit your parents this weekend?” Sejal asks in the cab. Ruchi doesn’t know what to say. She longs to go home to Ma with all her heart but she doesn’t know what her husband has planned. She doesn’t know what her in-laws have planned. Outside the cab, the Mumbai traffic flows and stops and flows and stops. The sun is setting behind the high-rises and slips in and out of sight as if it is playing hide and seek. Ruchi leans back in her seat and she is so tired, she is lulled almost to sleep. The cab driver is playing old Hindi film songs and Sejal is talking to her mother on the phone. The sun is sinking lower and lower in the sky as the cab flows and stops and flows and stops along with the traffic.

Full Circle

this one’s for you!

Tara walks into the kitchen and fills the kettle under the tap. She is so sleepy that the water runs over and splashes into the sink, onto the floor, onto her night dress. Outside, the sky is opening its arms to the day. Inside, her shelves of colourful crockery are still asleep in the shadows. She doesn’t turn the lights on – she will let them sleep a little longer.

Her eyes fall on the little kitchen table. On the pink, plastic folder she had kept there last night. Her lucky pink folder from college. Well, not so lucky anymore, she thinks. It contains the ashes of her parents’ lives – the deed of sale for their dream house. It is done. Her parents are old now – they can’t live there anymore. The house has gone and taken its garden with it. There will be no more sunny afternoons on the lawn. No more lazy lunches around the big table. Someone else will tend to the garden they grew together for three decades. She picks the folder up and stashes it behind the broken mixer-grinder on the top shelf of the cupboard. They are back together again – Mummy, Papa and her. But it is her turn now to look after THEM. She is so scared that she wants to become little again, growing up in the big house with the big garden up in the hills.

She rinses out her teacup and shuffles out of the kitchen. She can hear her parents stirring in their beds. The day must begin.

this one is for you, inspired by your Tryst with Tagore!

A Doctor's Diary - Alliterative Illusions

My tryst with Tagore

The old man evokes myriad emotions. A columnist writing in The Telegraph[1] mentions a song of Rabindranath Jyotsna Raate and says that it helped her go through with monotonous household chores in the pandemic “….. broomstick would appear to move across the floor but actually would enter my innermost being and make my insides shine. That is the beaut…

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2 years ago · 12 likes · 9 comments · Charulatha Banerjee

In the early seventies in Jamshedpur, a little girl could run across the road on a Sunday morning to get to a friend’s house and there would be Didimoni and Mastermoshai. Didimoni would sing and Mastermoshai’s deft fingers would drum the most beautiful beats on the tabla. We would tie strings of bells around our ankles and dance, and though I could catch but a word here and a line there, the words and the music filled the little room with open fields and the call of birds, fields of ripening grain and boats sailing down the river in a storm.

Summer evenings after work, my father would get out the old gramophone. Tenderly, he would drop the needle on the right groove and magically there would be Debabrata Biswas’s baritone singing Megh Bolechhe Jaabo Jaabo, followed by songs by Suchitra Mitra and Hemant Kumar. My father would go out into the garden and sit under the darkening sky and the songs followed him. Ami Poth Bhola Ek Pothik. Pagla Hawaar Badol Dine. Clouds sailing across the sky, the colours of dusk, a lonely traveller on an open road, the madness of the wind on a stormy day. I sat and watched my father and listened to the songs. The stars came out in the sky and the air grew jasmine-scented. I conjured up picture after picture in my head and the tunes became like old friends.

Decades and decades later, my father-in-law developed the habit of passing out in the shower. It was something to do with an artery that carries blood to the brain. When we brought him out and laid him flat on the bed, he was okay again. I used to put on an old ‘two-in-one’ to calm all our nerves with the old faithful tunes and sure enough, in a few minutes, still lying down with his eyes shut, hair still damp, he would start moving his feet in time to the music, a little smile starting around his lips. All was well again!

During the lockdown, it was my turn to be rescued by the songs, my phone propped up against the salt jar in the kitchen, wiping the sweat off my brow with a kitchen cloth, cooking lunch. Listening to the old songs on loop in the voices of Shaan, Babul Supriyo and Srikanta Acharya helped me put food on the table day after day after day during those wretched months, with my sanity intact. And though, to be honest, I still understood only a word here and a line there, my hot, sweaty kitchen turned into sunny skies and rainy days or the smell of shiuli flowers announcing the advent of Pujo. The voices carried joy and wonder, longing and prayer that somehow brought calm and comfort and the strength to keep going and the thought that beyond my life and my little kitchen there would always be the vast universe with love and grief and laughter and longing and the seasons would change and flowers would grow and life would go on for ever.

Towards the end of his life, my father had narrowed his music preferences down to one single CD of Rabindra Sangeet that he would listen to every day. As evening fell and the pink-orange dusk made way for the night, he would sit in his favourite recliner with the TV on mute and the same songs would play, following my mother as she pottered around the house doing her chores. He kept this practice up until the fag end of the pandemic, until the day he felt breathless after having a cold and called himself an ambulance to go to the hospital. He never returned. After his passing, my mother bravely continued all his work including bank work and home repairs, but the evenings were quiet as she could not bear to play my father’s beloved old tunes in an empty house. On the second anniversary of his passing in 2024, she chose this song to remember him by.

When my feet no longer tread this path, when I no longer row my boat on the river, says the poet, there is no need to look for me among the stars. When all my business with the world is done, there is no need to call my name. The grass in my garden may overgrow and dust settle on my things, but the days will come and go as they do now. And when a new day dawns, when cows graze on the green grass and the cowherd frolics, who says I am not there? I am there – I will always be there! (This is a subjective interpretation, not a literal translation.)

Ever notice how you can never recreate food memories? Because you can cook the food, but the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people and the conversations will never coincide again.

The orange I ate almost fifty years ago, sitting in my grandparents’ garden in Allahabad. The burst of fresh citrus that hit my eyes and nose and the juice that ran down my hands. The bright green patch of grass surrounded by flowers scenting the quiet, winter afternoon. The butterflies that caught the sun on their wings and bees that buzzed around the hollyhocks.

The cake my mom used to make when I was little, that came out with a dark brown crust to die for, filling the house with a smell that wafted out and wrapped itself up amongst the Bougainvellia bushes in the garden. The way it crumbled in my mouth, still warm from the oven, and the sound of my brother going munch, munch, munch.

The fowl curry we ate on a trip to the jungle, with the taste and the smell of the forest in it. The rest house was a tiny speck in the vast wilderness and in it, I was a little girl clinging on to my mother’s pallu, scared of the shadows the lanterns threw this way and that. I heard the table being laid, the clinking of the cutlery mixing with the sounds of the jungle. The curry, cooked with simple spices in mustard oil was was smooth, spicy, nourishing and piping hot.

The kheema-paratha we ate out of paper plates on a train, over the sound of the wheels, rocking to their rhythm. It was night and the darkness flew by outside. Suddenly, another train rushed past, lit-up window after window after window, until it had vanished into the night, its mighty roar fading slowly with the distance.

The fish curry my mother made when I visited for a holiday, my own family now in tow. The taste of the brinjals cooked with nigella seeds in mustard oil. The taste of home, mixed with familiar sights and sounds and smells. The pigeon that sat just outside the window, its head bobbing from side to side almost in welcome. The familiar, faded, lavender coloured curtains framing the window, the sound of brooms sweeping the yard next door, the wind in the trees outside making the branches sway a little against the sky, a red-chested bulbul flitting from one branch to another.

Perhaps the one food memory that we recreate again and again in our family is our neighbour’s biryani which they have turned into a livelihood. For twenty years we have had it home-delivered on special occasions. It arrives with clockwork precision, fills the house with its signature aroma and we pounce upon it and do not rest until our plates are licked clean.

The good part is you keep making food memories! The coffee you will have tomorrow at your favourite cafe? There is a blazing sun outside the glass window, but you are cocooned in AC coolness, and a young girl whose smile you have come to know brings you your cup. On the froth, she has drawn not the usual heart, but a swan, the neck perfectly arched. She is proud of her artwork and beams back when you smile. The coffee is perfect!

Here are two deliciously nostalgic books you should look up if you are a little food-mad like me! 😁💕

And here are some of my own favourites from my Pull A Meal Out Of A Hat Series. This series is dedicated to my memories of shedding real tears when I was a young mother, could not cook to save my life and the cook did not turn up! I would stand at the window, watching and waiting for her to appear at the end of the lane until my husband suggested that perhaps she wasn’t going to come that day!

The classroom was small and the blackboard was ordinary enough – old, uneven, cracked where the duster often got caught and stumbled. But each child had special furniture just for them. Some of them had desks with curved fronts that fit their torsos just right to hold them upright when they were strapped in to their chairs. Their little wooden chairs were just the right height. Padded just where they needed it. And there they would be sat first thing every morning, four children all strapped in for the next six hours, looking at me. The fifth had a wheelchair and strong arms to push it with. He would weave in and out of children during recess, turning the wheels this way and that with the grace of a dancer. There were three more – but they could walk around and so they did, every once in a while, with or without reason. S would get up whenever he was bored and walk on his thin, unsteady legs to the little door at the back of the class that led to the garden. Then he would turn around to look straight at me, throwing me a challenge, eyes twinkling with mischief, a smile starting at the corner of his mouth. Sometimes, I just carried on, sometimes, I pleaded, sometimes, I was firm and sometimes, I just stood there, paralyzed. If I went after him, I couldn’t keep an eye on D. If I spent too much time attending to D, then A would start banging his fists on the table. When I read from a book, only a couple of them followed. When I asked a question, they looked to me for the answer. In the recess, S would try to poke R in the eye with a pencil and run away with J’s tiffin and J would give chase on his wheelchair, God help anyone who was in the way! This memory is twenty years old, but it seems like yesterday that I stood in this nightmare of a dream job in a Special School in Mumbai. It was an impossible situation that could only be handled with a lot of love and good humour, messy art and craft, boisterous lunch breaks and occasionally, some very out of tune singing accompanied by loud banging on desks with hands that could not keep time but were way past caring.

Of course, I wasn’t alone – there was a whole team – colleagues and helpers. But when I look back, it is N that stabs my heart with love and memories. She was one of the kids - around twelve or thirteen but small for her age, hair tied up in two tight plaits. Her speech was slurred but her eyes that peered over thick glasses were sharp and went everywhere. R, she would say suddenly to me after recess, has not had her apple! Well, I tried to say – I didn’t know R had an apple in her bag and anyway, I have so many other things to worry about… But no - N would fumble around in R’s bag and sure enough, out would come an apple, and R was made to finish it under supervision, which she did after one helpless glance at me – by now she knew the power that N wielded on us all! With her odd shuffling but determined gait, she would follow S when he tried to run away into deserted corridors just to have us come chasing after him like a game. She would drag him back by the arm and deposit him triumphantly next to me or at least come and report to me his exact location and latest wrongdoing. Every day, she helped me pack and unpack books for everyone, arranging them neatly in designated cubbyholes. She helped the other kids with art and craft, and was the mother hen rounding up her brood for out-of-class activities. I depended on her to get through every single day of my two years in this job.

I think of her and how she must be now, all grown up, living with her family in a fishing community in Worli. Perhaps there is a view of the sea, a gritty-sandy beach with fishing boats waiting to sail and the smell of fish in the air. I remember her mother used to say all those years ago, that she always waited for her father to get back from work past midnight before having her dinner with him. Perhaps she still waits for him and together they eat a dinner of fish curry-rice and talk about their day. In my imagination she still wears thick glasses and has her hair in long plaits. And she bustles around looking after everyone. Or she has a job – nothing bookish, perhaps she helps to run a tiffin service, adjusting the spices just right. Or perhaps she works at a tailoring shop, happily surrounded by swathes of fine fabric in different hues. And those who work with her depend on her to get through the day just like I did once! They are special people - they are witness to the magic of N. They see her attention to detail. They see how she cares for everyone around her. They see how much her work means to her. The rest of the world does not see beyond her thick glasses, her slow, slurred speech and her odd, shuffling gait. What a loss!

I haven’t yet read Mother Mary Comes to Me. Perhaps because I am still thinking about Estha and Rahel and the story the writer crafted in The God of Small Things!

All day long, Maya sits at the window of the little flat on the sixth floor and watches the world go by. She hugs the little cushion with the threadbare blue cover that her grandmother had once embroidered with pretty pink chain stitch flowers inside a circle of green leaves. She thinks there are two kinds of people in the world – those who sit by the window and those who get about. Those who have jobs and those who only sit at home all day. Those who are married with husbands and children to look after, and those whose old parents must look after them. Those who are healthy and those who are always sick.

In the afternoon, Maya rests in her room, trying to read. She remembers her grandparents here in this room, years ago - touching their feet and being given candy in return. Ringing a little bell while her grandmother prayed to a collection of little idols and pictures in one corner of the room. Breathing in the smell of agarbatti and fresh flowers. Her grandparents are long gone, but some of those idols still survive, and Maya appeals to them to make her better.

The room, like every other room in the house, is filled with books in cupboards, on racks, in stacks on the floor. One day, she reads a bit from Enid Blyton’s Five on Kirrin Island Again. The next day she reads a bit from War and Peace. Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters. Tintin Comics. Agatha Christie. Leela Majumdar’s Kheror Khata. Pride and Prejudice. Little Women. She chances upon The God of Small Things but quickly keeps it back – there is too much sadness in her life already. She can’t even bear to think about how Velutha was killed by the police. Or how the river took little Sophie Mol.

Ma cooks Maya her favourite fish curry with aubergine and nigella seeds. But sometimes she becomes too sad at what Maya’s life has become. Almost sadder than Maya herself. In the evenings, Maya stands at the window and looks down at the city-lights beneath her. She can feel the breeze on her face. There is a marriage hall at the end of the lane, and every so often there is a wedding party there. She can see the fairy lights twinkling and people going in and out.

One day, standing at the window, she feels a madness in the air. She clutches the window-sill hard because she is scared of the feeling that if she spreads her arms wide, she could fly. But the madness gets hold of her. She stands up on the window-sill, spreads her arms out wide and it’s just as she had thought – she can fly! She glides gently over building terraces, feeling more alive and happy and free than she has felt in a long, long time. She swoops down to get a better look at a terrace garden, at roses growing in pots. And then she rises up again. She chooses to land at the marriage hall but when she sits down at the table, it is not a wedding feast that she sees. She is sitting with the four sisters from Little Women, and a very special Christmas lunch is laid out in front of them. The happy squeals of delight from the sisters fill her heart with joy. She eats a spoon of the pink and white ice-cream and then she is up in the air again.

The next time she lands, she is cycling on a hill with The Famous Five. She cycles hard, but she can’t keep up with them and gives up. Then she finds herself in Landour, eating lunch with Ruskin Bond – rice and kofta curry. He shows her a little bird that has built a nest in one corner of his writing table. Then she is sailing down a river in a boat with Ratty and Mole from The Wind in the Willows. The tall grasses on the riverbank are swaying gently in the breeze. She wishes she could be on this boat for ever, but Mole takes the oars from Ratty, and the boat overturns! She has to sit in a sunny patch on the riverbank to let her clothes dry.

Then off she is again. She knows where she has to go next. She has to become The God of Small Things. She has to go to Ayemenem to save Sophie Mol from drowning in the Meenachal, and to help Ammu and Velutha find a safe place for their love…

To say it was a sunny day would be woefully inadequate to describe how hot it was. The sun was blazing down mercilessly out of a clear, blue sky on the sandy beach and the endless azure of the Arabian Sea. This was in Harihareshwar - a small town on the Raigad coast in Maharashtra, and it was the early nineties. That part of the Konkan coast had just gained notoriety as the region where a cache of arms used during the Mumbai serial bomb blasts of 1993 had made a landing. It wasn’t a touristy place like Goa – it was more about the locals eking out a living out of fishing. One night, as we sat on the beach in the darkness, watching the thin, white breakers inching quietly up the sand, iridescent in the light from the moon, I did not find it hard to imagine that somewhere along this same, lonely coast, deadly arms and ammunition had changed hands, en route to their terrible destiny.

But coming back to that unbearably hot day! We were out on a picnic with another couple of families including kids. We were hungry, thirsty, hot, tired, red-faced and sweaty. I must have been in my early twenties, but I felt as cranky as the kids, and terribly annoyed with my father for having masterminded this mad recipe for sunstroke. We had come a long way from where we were staying. We could not step out of the car, and we could not find any refreshments on offer anywhere. A tall glass of chilled beer alongside a fresh, aromatic seafood pulao and the happy notes of a Konkani song wafting on the air waves belonged on another planet – the concept of a ‘beach-shack’ had not been invented in these parts yet.

Just opposite the main stretch of beach was a house with a garden filled with flowering shrubs. The gate was locked, but it was the only sign of habitation as far as our eyes could see, and some of us stepped out of the car and made desperate clanging sounds at the gate, hoping for God knows what. But it was like we had rubbed Alladin’s lamp - a young man stepped out like a genie from somewhere beyond the shrubbery. No, he said, there was no food or drink to be had there. But there was a market nearby where fresh catch could be bought, and other provisions. The house was locked, but out of the kindness in his heart, he let us into the garden where there was some shade to be found. By now we must have been looking like we would start dropping like flies, because when we asked him whether by any chance he could make a cooking pot appear out of thin air, he said he could! Off he went on his motorbike and returned shortly with a large, much used pressure cooker. His mother’s, he explained, when we looked at him like he had performed a magic trick!!

Meanwhile, we had travelled back in time a few thousand years – the men were busy lighting a wood fire in a small brick chulha, the ladies were prepping fresh prawns and soaking rice, and the children were getting in the way or helping with odds and ends. But what a meal! The rice was steaming hot and cooked just right. The prawns had been skillffully steamed as the rice cooked, in their thick, aromatic, yellow sauce of mustard paste, coconut, green chilies, turmeric and salt. The ladies had outdone themselves. But the man of the moment? Our knight in shining armour? Definitely our genie on a motorbike! He had vanished genie-like before we had our meal, showing us a leafy nook in the garden in which to keep the pressure cooker once we were done. And there we duly placed it before we left, with all our blessings!

In a Hindu family, the laws of death are well defined. The men of the family go to the crematorium and perform the last rites. The women stay home, grieve, cry, console, remember, make tea, light lamps, arrange flowers and greet guests. But when my paternal grandmother died in her bed at home five years after her Cancer diagnosis, my father and brother were both abroad. Other male members of the family were all in different cities or countries. I was in college at that time, young, brave, and ready for new adventures. I did not see any reason why I should not perform the last rites, neither did my family.

So, I followed close behind my grandmother as she was carried down the three floors to the ambulance that would carry her on her last worldly journey, along with a number of my parents’ friends and colleagues (all men). When I returned, my borrowed duty done, there was a feeling in the air that I had been very brave. Very strong. I had proved to the world that I could take on tough things that were thrown at me, with an admirable stoicism for one so young.

I wondered a bit what all the fuss was about. I felt that I had taken on harder challenges before, in the context of caring for my grandmother – challenges that, as a female, had fallen somehow naturally on me (after my mother), and that as a female, I had somehow naturally risen to. Sitting by her bed during illnesses. Supervising the attendants hired to take care of her round the clock. Arranging urgent doctor visits when she had lost her will to live and held her medicines tightly in her fist instead of gulping them down. Sharing twelve-hour shifts of hospital duty with my mother for days on end, as she went in and out of the hospital the last couple of years.

Much before that, even as a child, I had sensed her loneliness when she came to us some time after the passing of my grandfather, and gave her company. I slept in the same room as her, and we chatted about her past. She told me about her days in the hostel at a girls’ school in Dhaka, where she and her older sister had once studied. How there was a schedule of bath times that would be put up, and everyone got just ten minutes for their bath. Or how, for evening snack they got slices of bread slathered with butter, which they slapped butter-side down on a platter of sugar. Or how, when they were day-scholars, an ekka gadi – a small carriage drawn by a single horse - would take them to school, its bells jingling and jangling merrily to announce its arrival at their front gate every morning. I shared her pain when our two-storey family home in Allahabad was sold before she could go back for one last visit. All her worldly belongings now lived under her bed in a modest, brown suitcase. I sensed also the saas-bahu tension between my mother and her that frequently pervaded the house, and offered myself as a buffer between them if it would make things better.

So I think I was quite brave and quite strong long before I took on the mantle of a man and walked circles around my grandmother’s bier as instructed by the priest on duty, holding an earthen pot of water. Some of the water sloshed down my back, soaking my thin, white kurta, but I did not flinch. And then I stood along with all the men that had accompanied me, and watched the first flames licking at my grandmother’s body. The moment marked the end of an era in my family. My duty was done.

In the beginning, all I had to do was run across the street to my friend’s house once a week, straight into the music. Didimoni sang in her sweet voice to the beats of Mastermoshai’s tabla, and together with the words of Tagore, they entered our bodies and made us dance. And though I did not understand all the words, the few I knew were enough to transport me to another world where the seasons changed and strange winds blew and clouds grew heavy with rain or the moon bathed everything on earth in her magical light. Some evenings after work, my father would play the same songs on our old gramophone, and sit out in the garden with a drink amongst the shadows of the deepening dusk, and I sat with him, listening, breathing in the floral scents of summer.

In school, I sang with enthusiasm with my friends, songs from my little brown-paper covered Song Book. The hymns we sang at assembly brought a strange comfort. I connected the songs less with any particular faith and more with the knowledge that for the next few minutes I would stand still and focus on raising my voice in song with my friends, following the lead of the nuns in their black and white habits, and the calm that this practice brought to me, in an otherwise rambunctious day.

And every year, when Durga Pujo rolled around, on the appointed day, the dhakis would sound the advent of the Goddess. I could not see them, but the sounds carried in our quiet neighbourhood and the rhythmic beats would enter my soul and fill me with an unbearable, unbeatable excitement. The next day onwards, the loudspeakers would play on loop, I Am a Disco Dancer and Johnny Johnny Johnny Johnny, Aaja Aaja Aaja Aaja. My child’s mind did not question the unrelatedness in themes, the songs just meant that we were getting ready for Pujo!

But we moved when I was twelve and my brother fourteen, from Jamshedpur to Pune, and the old gramophone got left behind in the past somewhere, and for many years, there was no music at home. It was during this time that I discovered that I did not have a singing voice. Every year, I failed shamefully and miserably to qualify for any sort of participation in the school choir or for the annual performance. So, I sat with all the other non-singers and listened to the more musically accomplished rehearsing for their parts, the songs from famous musicals settling down in my consciousness, even though my voice, sadly, could not reproduce them!

Then, when my brother was in engineering college, he acquired from somewhere what was in those days called a two-in-one. That is, it was a transistor radio as well as a cassette player, and we spent a lot of time sticking pens or pencils into the groove and turning it round and round whenever the thin ribbon in the cassette got all rolled up and twisted. Eventually, I inherited this, and listened to Simon and Garfunkel, Phil Collins and Michael Jackson, Jagjit Singh and Kishore Kumar and all the nineties’ Hindi film songs.

The next couple of decades were fast-paced years of always having too much to do in too little time. Once in a while, I would listen to songs with simple, earthy tunes and an easy rhythm. They helped keep me grounded at a time when the world itself seemed to be spinning ever faster on its axis, with some evidence of a tendency towards self-destruction. And then Covid hit. I went overnight from arm-chair cooking to the real deal in the hot kitchen. To make it bearable, I discovered Srikanto Acharya and Lagnajita Chakraborty on YouTube. The songs they sang went well with the fish curries I cooked in mustard oil and kalonji. And though, like all those years ago, I understood but a few words, I felt the emotions the tunes carried and their voices comforted me whenever a drop or two of hot oil splashed on to my face from a pan of frying fish.

And then, my husband and I both got caught up in the Delta wave in 2021. Like a cry from my own heart, I listened again and again to Maalik Sambhaal Lena and Amazing Grace. Very different from each other in time and place, but so similar in their vulnerability and surrender to some higher power in this universe of ours in a time of hopelessness and despair. Outside my window was the quiet, silent night, the street lamps lighting up a bleak emptiness where once there had been a hustle and bustle till midnight. On my WhatsApp groups, the messages kept coming, appeals for help with hospital beds and oxygen machines. And every once in a while, a message of death. One night, two ambulances swooped down on buildings across the street, and drove quickly away, renting the quiet air with those horrible, too familiar sirens. Inside, Rochak Kohli sang words written by Manoj Muntashir. He sang them just for me, and I felt comforted. Maalik sambhaal lena. Humko sambhaal lena. Himmat hume tu dena. Maalik sambhaal lena...

Perhaps one day, I will learn to sing! Till then there is the magic of listening and letting my heart and soul make a sense of living that my brain need know nothing about.

It would be his gift to his beloved community, Mr Biswas kept saying – a Pujo of their own – right there on the lawns of Eden Gardens Co-operative Housing Society in the middle of Kalina in Mumbai. And the Bannerjeas, the Bonnerjees, the Catterjees and the Das-Munshis all beamed back at him and plied him with the best sondesh that money could buy, as he happily wiped his sweaty brow, his shirt stretching tight across his belly. Every year that Pujo rolled around again and everyone had to sweat it out and jostle for space at the LIC Colony Pujo in Khar, he said to hold on just a little bit longer – it was all falling into place now. Surojit Da had agreed to come and perform. And Debanjana had said she would come for the inaugural dhunuchi naach. Pandal decorators had all but been hired.

Finally, he opened a bank account and invited everyone to start collecting funds. Whatever you could afford – no pressure. Contributions would be anonymous. Of course no one could expect the bombastic Mr Chatterjee to keep mum on his generous contribution. Poor Mrs Das-Munshi sold one of her gold bangles so that no one could point fingers at her husband – she was not taking any chances with anonymous! Collections opened up for the neighbouring colonies and the sound of dhaak that was to come filled the air. Bags filled with new clothes took up every corner of every house. Children insisted on wearing their new clothes and then more had to be bought! All the ladies went on diets and the men seemed to be making up by demanding chop, singara and ghugni every day in the evening after office. When it was almost time for Pujo, Mr Biswas said he needed to make a last-minute trip to Kolkata to bring back the decorators and all the material they needed.

But he was not back even when there were only three days left to go. And his phone, his wife’s phone and his children’s phones were all switched off. They unanimously agreed to not pursue the matter till after Pujo was over. They knew what they had to do for now – they wore their new clothes and went to sweat it out and jostle for space at the LIC Colony Pujo.

Mumbai 2009. We had moved on rent into our first big, three-bedroom apartment just around a year back. Now, my daughter had a room of her own and I had filled it with much love. Plus, a beanbag and a child’s cot and a brightly painted bookshelf. My parents-in-law were ensconced in their room with a small cassette player on one shelf of the cane clothes-rack that my husband and I had designed ourselves a few years ago, on the lines of the wooden aalna that is an integral part of traditional Bengali bedrooms. From sarees and kurtas to bed sheets and towels and pillowcases - everything could be draped there, and there was always room for more. For the first time, I had kept potted plants on the windowsill in the living room and in the afternoons, pigeons would come and drink water from the dishes under the pots. This would create tiny ripples in the water and throw gentle, dancing shadows on the windowpanes. The flat was on the second floor, at the height of the streetlamps outside and at nights, after lights-out, the streetlamps cast their soft, yellow light into the flat, keeping it from total darkness. In the monsoons, the lamps would catch the raindrops in their light before letting them fall to the ground to add to the slick and shine of the street below.

Late one night, my husband said he had something not-so-nice to tell me. My heart skipped a beat as I feared first for his health and then for his job. But it was neither. He was saying that we needed to move out of the flat ASAP as the house-owner wanted to take back possession of the flat. That set a ball rolling that just wouldn’t stop for the next five years or so. We moved to one rented apartment after another in quick succession, living in numerous lanes in Bandra, Khar and Santacruz, vacating our flat every time the owners needed their homes back. Once, it was because the building was not waterproofed, and the roof threatened to fall on our heads.

Anyway, the point is that every time we moved, I stuffed things into boxes that remained unpacked in the new house. Cardboard boxes. Many things, many boxes. Things that we did not need but could not discard. Baby clothes - tiny white linen dresses with the prettiest cotton lace at the hems. Books. More books. Old Bengali magazines. Toys broken beyond repair but oh, what wonderful memories! A little, brown puppy that you wound up to make it do somersaults. A hamster that was forever trapped in a transparent, plastic ball and looked dazed when you rolled the ball along the floor. Genius drawings made by my daughter’s friend in Grade II. Old greeting cards. Scrapbook projects made for school. Woollens from another time and place - hats and mufflers, cardigans and shawls. And my wedding trousseau, most of which remains unused till date, more than twenty-seven years later. Sarees that were too grand to fit my ordinary life. I did make dresses out of some of the sarees, but many of them remain buried in my boxes. (Even as I write this, I duck the punches from my saree-loving readers!) Every time we moved houses, my boxes grew in number till there were more than thirty of them. But please don't tell Marie Kondo! And although we have spent the last ten years or so in one flat, my boxes are still packed away behind doors, stacked up bang in the middle of the dining area, or in tiny lofts above the bathrooms.

And how they possess me now! With one voice, they ask: WHEN? When will I set them free? When will they have their day in the sun? When will I release them from cord and sticky tape? When will I tend to them again and show their treasures off to the family? Soon I tell them, soon! Silently, they wait.

Mumbai 1997. I am standing at the window in the living room and looking out. There is a large blue and pink Volvo bus parked across the street. Big and luxurious, with an AC smell. I see a bunch of young backpackers get on the bus and away it sails out of my sight. I have no idea where it is headed, but immediately I think: Goa!! The land of fun and sand and palm trees, chilled beer, prawn fried rice and long afternoons on the beach with not a care in the world. One day, I will go too, I promise myself. In a Volvo bus to Goa. When my baby comes and I don’t feel sick every morning and often throughout the day. I will find a job, too! I will have an office desk with a small potted plant on it. A soft board with post-its reminding me of important meetings to attend. I promise myself all these things. The software industry is booming. I am sure I will find a job once my baby grows up a bit.

But when my baby comes, she turns my world upside-down, topsy-turvy and totally disarrayed. She is no longer inside me, but she fits me perfectly from the outside as well. We are so deeply connected that we still feel like one person. I scoop her up in one arm and sometimes, when she feels threatened (a loud sound, a stranger), she tries to climb me up like a tree - like a little baby monkey. She learns to walk, and we go for walks every evening, just the two of us. When I do get to take that Volvo bus ride, it is to Pune where my parents are, and she comes along with me. She eats Lays chips with tomato sauce and messes up the seat-covers.

The job is harder to get. The dream office with the potted plant is proving to be much harder to realize. The software industry booms along without me in it. I am forgetting my coding skills. I take a number of job interviews, but they all regret to say…. Perhaps I am just not good enough. Perhaps they are looking for people with a background in technology and not Psychology, like me! Perhaps they do not want to employ a mother with a small child to look after, who can only work part-time.

One night, I am mindlessly surfing television channels while everyone else is asleep. My eyes fall on a big, black book lying on the bottom rack of the bookshelf, part of it poking out because it is so big. I pull it out and the embossed, gold letters on the cover glint mockingly back at me in the lamplight. It is my project report for my Master’s Degree in Computer Management. I flip through the pages. I remember typing all of it at an NIIT Cyberdrome in Pune, where you could use computers for a fee. They played soft instrumental music on a loop and let you work undisturbed. I tear out a single page first. Then I tear out as many pages as I can pull together, until the covers have nothing left in between. Not satisfied with this level of destruction, I pick up the pages again, and tear each one in half. I try pulling the thick, black covers apart, but they do not yield. I sit on the floor under the lamp in the corner of the living room and continue with my mission of destruction. I stuff the torn pages and the unyielding covers into a big garbage bag. Then suddenly, I pull a few half-pages back out of the bag for a final look. Half of a flow chart, a bit of programming code designed to communicate with a mammoth database management software called Oracle. The program was written to command the computer to execute a complex bunch of instructions to print some documents for the accounts department of a large manufacturing company.

The next morning, I ask myself – do I regret it? No! Unsure of my own response, I ask myself again – do I regret it? And the same answer comes back to me even as I brush away a tear or two – No. Because deep in my heart, I know that if one door has closed, the universe will open another for me someday, somewhere. And slowly, I turn back to my first career choice – working with children with special needs. What I had always wanted to do with my life before I fell for the charms of the software industry – money, an AC office, out-station training programs where the company paid for your flight and your hotel room…

I start by volunteering at a Special School. Just a couple of weekday mornings. When I walk inside the gates, there are two yellow school buses in the drive. Some children are slowly making their way in, each step a struggle. Some are sitting in their wheelchairs, patiently waiting to be wheeled in. Some mornings, I wait with them a while. Sometimes, a child is drooling, and I wipe his mouth with a handkerchief pinned to his shirt front because he can't do it himself. Sometimes, I rescue something that has fallen from a child's loose grasp: a water-bottle or a single rose for their favourite teacher. In return, they smile at me. Their smiles are so contagious, they make me want to laugh out loud. I smile back at them. My heart is full and there is a spring in my step. I have come home, and I never want to leave again.

My first ward is Muthoo. At fourteen or fifteen years, he does not speak any words. He is tall and big - taller than me. He likes to rock himself to-and-fro as he sits cross-legged on the floor or even in a chair. When I am introduced to him, he does not show much of a reaction. But for one very fleeting moment, a fraction of a second, his eyes meet mine. I am told Muthoo likes to draw. He draws on A4 sheets. He likes to draw horses. Muthoo and I set out on a project to learn to draw on the computer. He sits at the computer desk with the palm of his right hand completely covering the mouse, gently manipulating it to create images on the screen. As he works, he hums the same tune again and again, and rocks his body back and forth slightly in his chair. Sometimes, he rocks harder and the back of the chair moves with him. Creak back, creak forward. Creak back, creak forward. Sometimes, he slaps his left thigh with his left hand. One Two Three Four Stop. It is four slaps each time. One Two Three Four Stop.

One day when I come in, Muthoo is not in the classroom where I find him every day. He is not in the computer room. He is not in the assembly hall where the other children are engaged in their morning yoga session. I find him in the garden behind the school building. He is sitting cross-legged on the grass, arms wrapped around his body, rocking himself back and forth, crying. I wait a little distance away and let him cry. After a while he gets up. He has stopped crying. He walks past me, and I follow. Then we sit together in silence and draw horse figures on the computer.

I still don’t know what made Muthoo cry that day. But I know now that Muthoo, if evaluated using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, may have met the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder, requiring very substantial support for social communication and restricted, repetitive behaviours. In English, that means that Muthoo may have had Autism, and needed love, acceptance, understanding and support (just like every other child in the world). But I didn’t know this then – all those years ago when I had a friend called Muthoo who loved to draw horses. It didn’t matter - he was just Muthoo. Sent to me by the universe to show me another path to follow.

If I left work on time, then as the auto-rickshaw climbed the upslope of the Milan Road Over-bridge on its way to Khar West, I would catch the last of the sun. An orange ball, its glare tamed by the evening hour, bobbing in and out of buildings, sending out long fingers of warmth and light. Catching a tired looking plant on a balcony and bathing it in a warm glow or appearing suddenly on the opposite side of the road, reflected on a window pane. From near the top of the over-bridge, if the time was right, it felt like it was setting in an ocean of grey. It was just an opening in the concrete structures blending into each other, but it seemed to create an illusion in my tired mind. In reality, the sea was some distance away and invisible. But if I shut my eyes, I could feel a breeze on my face that had been touched by the sea, mixed with the smell of sweat and grime and the black smoke from the cars. And this was my time - my time to watch the sunset before it really sank into the sea at Juhu Beach. My time of being neither at work nor at home, of just being a rickshaw person with rickshaw thoughts that no one else need ever know!

In July 1997, I got off a plane with my husband and stepped into my married life in Mumbai. My husband lived in Vile Parle East, just across the gigantic Western Express Highway from the domestic airport. I had assumed we would get a cab at the exit and make a grand entry into our new lives. But my husband was already a Mumbai veteran. He started rolling his suitcase straight out of the airport and made for the highway. I scrambled after him with my own suitcase, hurrying to keep up, incredulous that I would have to walk right across the highway with my suitcase mumbling and rumbling and grumbling behind me. It has been twenty-eight years, but I have never quite caught up with this city. It keeps getting ahead of me. It keeps going forward without ever looking back. It has no time to wait for those who are a little slow.

Pune is the opposite. Though people often talk about how much it has changed, how much it has grown, as it must have for them, whenever I visit my parents’ house in a large complex of buildings, I get a feeling that the city is waiting for me. That it has not moved an inch since my last visit. That it will never move ahead and leave the past behind. That it has all the time and space and heart to remember memories. Sethji at the neighbourhood kirana shop will smile a welcoming smile. The neighbour in the lift will say that they are glad I have arrived – my mother has been waiting for my visit. M in the medical store will have the time in the middle of selling medicines to talk about how my parents had attended his wedding. Then we will discuss the weather and he will remember how Pune was never this warm. We will both remember how the old buildings in Fergusson College did not have ceiling fans because none were needed a hundred years ago. We will talk about the vegetable burgers at Vaishali Restaurant that we both ate in the nineties for the princely sum of five rupees....

And K, who used to drive us around thirty years ago will still come home to take us out some evenings, even though he has a different full-time job now. My mother says he still remembers some things from all those years ago that the rest of us have forgotten! How we had visited the Roys when their new house was built. How the Mullicks first lived in a little bungalow with a garden and a front gate. How we had driven some way out of the city for someone’s wedding. K remembers it all – he is the custodian of our memories!

And in my parents’ flat there are little treasure troves to be dug out – black and white photos or old letters written in a childish scrawl with atrocious spellings or a book with a dull maroon hard cover with an inscription inside that says that my father had won it as a prize for something in 1945! And so I keep switching between my life in Mumbai and my life in Pune, alternately getting carried forward by the city that does not stop, and being held in place by the city that does not forget!

My father was your man in a crisis. He was the one you would want to call if you needed to get out of a soup asap. He would arrive, read the situation and immediately start unravelling the knots to sort you out. He seemed to thrive on troubles big and small. And if none existed, he went looking for them. Every year when I was little, he would pack family and friends into his trusty Ambassador and drive off into the wildest jungles of Bihar and Orissa. Every day he and his friend Uncle B would lead sorties into the jungle in search of wildlife, literally courting danger, us little kids in tow. Sometimes we would park the cars in a clearing and climb up a narrow, steep, iron staircase to the top of a watchtower - a vantage point for animal viewing. I remember sitting in one of these, watching huge red ants crawling in a line next to me on a concrete bench. I remember eating bread and baked beans from a paper plate and peering out at the dense jungle all around us and the red earth down below, a small watering hole a little distance away, where a herd of elephants might appear any minute.

As he advanced in years and slowed down, he started looking for adventures inside the house. In little details in his own and other people’s lives that he would ponder over at length. Little changes that he could make or problems that he could solve. He would sit in his recliner in his bedroom in Pune and organize home renovations for a relative in Kolkata. He would phone friends or cousins and advise them on their lives in general. He would stand at the front door to catch neighbours going about their day and warn them about possible water shortages, a rise in the price of onions or a storm approaching over the Arabian Sea. He would call my brother up in the US and warn him about criticizing the government on social media.

Ever since Covid took him in 2022, I think this is what I miss the most about him – his excitement over little things. The house-help’s child getting admission into nursery school. The neighbour buying a new car. A young friend getting a good job. And when there was nothing to mull over, he created adventures with eggs! “How many eggs do we have in the fridge??!!” he would call out excitedly in the middle of a quiet morning, totally out of context. "Many," my mother would reply, "more than many!" But still he would make her count, and how many ever there were, he would want at least six more and then my mother must make him either a double egg omelette or a nice, spicy bhurji with lots of green chillies. And there must be at least a dozen eggs left over, sitting and waiting in the fridge for the next time the mood came upon him - for the next time he ran out of little things to put right in the world!

After having spent a few years in college as a young woman in the nineties, indulging in idiotic, inexplicable pursuits more outside than inside the classroom, the day dawned when the world started asking the question about what one would be doing for the rest of one’s life. My brother was well on his way to engineer-hood, but I had not given this much thought. Indian women in large numbers, at least in the bigger cities, would move into mainstream careers, shoulder to shoulder with men, and I would be part of this change, but it wasn’t exactly keeping me up at night. I had just thought I would drift along where life took me. I did see some dreams of a plush office with indoor plants, but I never gave much thought to what I would actually do there. In some deep, organic way, I felt pulled away from all the grand things the world expected me to do. Had not my mother and her mother and her mother before her spent their lives nurturing their families? By the time I was a teenager, I had proved to be much better at this than at Math and Science, which everyone said were the only things worth knowing if one wanted a real career. I had episodes of throwing up when my poor Math tuition teacher visited the house in a last-ditch attempt to make me pass the tenth-grade board exams. Chemical equations and the laws of Physics I understood even less than Math, if such a thing was possible. I could always read English novels and then become a teacher which seemed more like a punishment than a career. (Years later, a different kind of teaching would claim me, and I would become a Special Educator.) I thought I would do better at being my mother’s paternal grandmother, who had run a house in Daltongunj in Bihar, looking after the families of her seven children when they visited (not all at the same time, presumably!) for the summer holidays. She cooked, she cleaned, she supervised the delivery of babies at home, she maintained a first-aid corner on a set of shelves covered with a clean, white drape. My mother loved her for always presenting each of her eighteen grandchildren their special favourite dried-fruit or pickle or home-made mouth freshener in little jars just for them. I wished I had been born a hundred years before and could make a career out of cooking and caring for my family and setting large glass jars of pickling vegetables out in the winter sunlight, and to hell with women’s lib. And no need even to travel back in time a hundred years. My mother has spent her life building a home for us. She was always there to feed us, my older brother and me, see that we finished our Bournvita with milk, help us with homework and put us to bed. She played with us and read to us and helped us with our art and craft projects. Unforgettably, she once read aloud to us the entire Mystery of the Missing Man by Enid Blyton. She was in charge of looking after my paternal grandmother through years and years of ill health. (Much later, I would supervise the care of my own parents-in-law through years of ill health and dementia. Difficult years that would call for advanced house-keeping and crazy multi-tasking.) My mother waited a few decades to find the time to hone her own talents in writing. She now has four books in her name, all translations from Bengali to English, published by Harper Element, V and S Publishers, Niyogi Books and Rupa Publications.

So when careers and offices peered enticingly out of the horizon after college, it seemed a bit of a mirage – something did not add up and I could not take it very seriously. I knew even then that it was not in me to handle both a career and a family like a superwoman with ten arms. Surely one could not run a household and work in an office at one and the same time? Willy-nilly, I drifted along with life, studied Psychology and then Computer Management and then got married and had a baby all in a quick and crazy zig-zag-zoom of life choices. Wherever I went, I was asked what I did. I was a full-time stay-at-home mom, and cared for my parents-in-law as well, but I guess that was not enough for the universe. I was a grown woman in a big city who did not do anything. And truth be told, I was bored to the gills myself. The excitement of having half a dozen grandchildren descending on one for the duration of the summer was something that belonged in the past. Mothering a single child could be quiet, even lonely. And so started my double life. I realized that my husband could have one life which was outside the house, and his innocent attempts at cooking or other domestic chores were performed by choice and small errors were giggled at by the family or even indulged, but that I must achieve domestic efficiency every minute of every day – it was not a choice for me! And so, I realized that I must live both inside and outside the house. Part-time work became my practice, and two different threads took on my life. Sometimes the two ran parallelly, as if strangers to each other. Sometimes, they intertwined playfully. Sometimes, one took over all the space and suffocated the other one. And sometimes, they dashed into each other and made many-hued patterns like in a kaleidoscope, coming close and drifting apart and mixing their energies and turning into strange but beautiful new colours and patterns...

The little poem at the end was entered into a contest by and Paper Boat. Though it was not selected for the project, it received best wishes if it ever went out into the world!

The summer holidays have just begun. Your school bag lies forgotten in one corner of your room and you are free to spend all your time outside in the garden. You lie down on the prickly grass and stare at the sky. You can see the spreading branches of a mango tree bearing small, green mangoes and far, far above you, white clouds draw shapes in the sky. There is a sailboat that turns into an alligator and an airplane that becomes a teddy bear. Then you turn on your side to search for ladybugs. Aahhhh – there is a tiny one there, slowly climbing up a tall blade of grass. Perfect, tiny, black dots on its red back. The sun is getting warmer, but you don’t want to go in – you could be here all day. There is only one thing that will send you scrambling for cover – and that is the buzzzzz of a bee. Your ears are alert. But all you can hear is the chirping of birds. Every once in a while, a little, brown bird swoops down to the ground next to you to rescue a half-eaten fruit. And then it whooshes back up to its favourite branch. Your eyes keep going to the creeper on the fence with the big lavender flowers - the one the bees visit. They dive straight into the centre of the flowers and then come buzzing out. They will soon be here – and then it will be your lunchtime too!

Outside, blue skies,

The blazing sun, butterflies.

Inside, darkened rooms,

Still, endless afternoons.

Outside, mango trees,

White clouds, buzzing bees.

Inside, a whirring fan,

Waiting for the ice-cream man.

Outside, a sudden storm,

Dark, dusty, noisy, warm.

Inside, picture books,

Old comics, reading nooks.

Outside, the evening sky,

A flock of green squawking by.

Inside, a cool bed,

Scraped knees, a sleepy head.

On one such trip, as we approached Simlipal, packed into two Ambassador cars, a uniformed forest officer gave us a smart salute. This caused some mild excitement in the cars and woke up the dozers. What? Why? Who? Why the salute? This was not a normal welcome. But a salute is a salute - a couple of us saluted back, and we drove on. When we reached the forest rest-house we had booked, the mystery was quickly and rudely solved. Our reservation at the Chahala Forest Rest House, which in the good old days used to be a hunting lodge for the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj, had been cancelled to accommodate modern day royalty, the Governor of Orissa and his entourage, who were suddenly visiting. There was no place at the Eucalyptus Villa nearby, either. A message had been mailed, which was no doubt still on its slow and arduous journey to Jamshedpur. But here we were - with cameras and monkey-caps, Odomos and matchboxes, fresh fruit and jungle fowls.

My father was not one to give up so easily. He and his friend Mr B kept pestering the forest rangers till they finally said we could stay at Jenabil Forest Lodge, a log cabin which was almost a hundred kilometres away, deep inside the forest. Worse, a bridge on the way had broken recently and been temporarily replaced by a row of logs. My father and his friend hopped back into their Ambassador cars that looked like they were more suited for a short Sunday drive to the club than crossing log bridges over rivers in the middle of jungles. The kind officers tried to lend us a Jeep, but their offer was declined with thanks and off we were again.

The shaky log bridge survived our onslaught, but as evening fell, the nip in the clean, fresh, forest air became definitely chilly. The forest was cold, dark and silent and kept getting denser and denser and colder and darker, but still there was no sign of a lodge. No little path that led to a hot meal and bed. No sign of any human habitation. The mood in the two cars shifted from excitement and anticipation to anxiety and panic. It was pitch dark now, the only light coming from the headlights of the cars, if you did not count the million stars above. Thankfully, one of the children needed to visit the loo and as she was doing her business by the side of the road, she heard a human being cough. Immediate happy shouting and yelling and calling out till some tribal women carrying firewood, no doubt sent by God, directed us to the lodge.

It was like Goldilocks finding the bears’ cottage. There was even a beautiful, large, teakwood dining table set up on the verandah. Soon, there was hot food and warm beds and the next morning, we woke up to the magical sight of a blanket of frost over everything. The next few days, wherever we went in the forest, we were saluted at, and welcomed. But we are just common visitors, we said. In that case, the officers said, behave yourselves, make haste and stay out of the Governor’s way. One day, after we had made a picnic stop for some tea brewed on a wood-fire, the Governor was upon us, and we were hurried away. In our haste, we left behind our young cook, M. When he was missed, the two cars speeding away (minus one cook!) braked hard. We waited in a huge cloud of dust – a kind of rust coloured dust that I have only seen in those parts, for M to make a flying leap into one of the cars, carrying an absolutely giant kettle of tea!

I grew up thinking that there were two kinds of people in this world. Those who were good at studies and those who were not. I had to be in the first group. It was not a choice I made - it was made for me by my parents long before I was born. I think I was born with a pencil and notebook in my hand, completing my homework of the day. Those who were NOT good at studies belonged to a different species. They were to be avoided at all costs. Whenever my father spoke to me about school, he would ask me who had stood first in class. Who had stood second? Who had stood third?

Then when I was twelve, we moved to another city, and I went to a new school. The momentum of my early childhood kept me going for a couple of years and then...the unthinkable happened. I was NOT so good at studies anymore. I just could not get Math and the sciences. Trains that rushed past each other at full speed. Ships that had holes in them and sank slowly to the bottom of the sea. Spooky bath-tubs that never got filled - even though there were five taps running to fill them. The world’s greatest unsolved mysteries and the stuff of nightmares all lurking between the covers of my Math book! I regularly failed Math tests. Chemical equations went over my head like they were Greek and Latin. I did not understand absolutely ANY of the laws of Physics except for the one where a fat man sat in his bathtub and displaced an amount of water that was equal to the volume of his body, and ran around naked shouting Eureka. Naaah – not even that one!

Oh, the shame of it. It was like bringing disgrace upon the family. It was unbearable. There was only one way out. The way that too many children still resort to in school: Read-Memorize-Write-Forget-Repeat. Well, to cut a long trauma short, I escaped with reasonably decent marks in my tenth boards. Fast forward some twenty plus years. My daughter is in the seventh grade, and she is doing brilliantly at a lovely school. Here, learning is fun. Kids can be kids. She is happy...but she does not seem to be swotting like we used to do when we were her age. Something must be wrong - very wrong!! Our parent antennae are up. Then, propelled by some evil force that must have been passed down to us from generation to generation, we yank her out of her beloved school and push her, kicking and screaming, into one of Bombay’s ‘biggest and best’ with a proven track record of high scores in the tenth grade.

We wait for her glorious future to unfold in front of our eyes, but it ends before it has even begun. For some time, she hangs on by the skin of her teeth to a place somewhere in the middle of the class. But soon, she finds herself near the bottom, in very deep waters, sinking. Hands flailing in the air whenever she comes up for a breath of air. But no one sees her drowning, and no one comes to help. She talks lesser and lesser at home and the light goes out of her eyes. She does not want to give up, but it is a very hard fight. I repeatedly appeal for help at the parent-teacher meetings. I try to explain to her teachers that she comes from a very different system of education. She actually loves to learn. Perhaps she needs a little encouragement? A little more support? But all we get is shame. It’s like talking to the walls. Walls covered with ugly trolls that only we can see. Who look at us disapprovingly and shake their heads. When one disappears, another one comes to take its place.

As the Big Bad Exam of the tenth grade comes closer, I notice that my daughter is frequently answering early morning calls on our landline. It turns out that one of her classmates has had to travel to the US with her mother and she must keep up with her schoolwork from there. She happens to be one of the best students in the class. Without being rude, I ask my daughter why she would reach out to her rather than one of the better students. My daughter mumbles something and I am shocked at the explanation. The ‘better students’ are not happy to give their time to help a friend in need. Their time is precious and every minute must be spent cramming for the big exam. Every mark counts. So she reaches out to my kid who has kept her kindness intact through these tough times. I am so, so, so proud of her that I float on air the rest of the day. Some of the shame lifts, and even some of the trolls on the walls look at us a little more kindly.

To this day, more than a decade later, this is one of my biggest regrets – that in a misguided quest for success, we took a happy child and, in a moment of bad, shameful, foolish parenting, let her loose to some of the worst things that the world could throw at her.

My father died a few days before my fiftieth birthday in 2022, but he cut my fiftieth birthday cake! We were all together in my parents’ house in Pune – my parents, my brother and me. My brother would be flying back to the US before my birthday, so one morning, I decided we should cut a cake together before he left. My brother went out to get our favourite Kayani cake and a packet of potato chips, my mother brought out some paper plates and tied a pink ribbon to a pretty knife. I cut my fiftieth birthday cake on the dining table, with my parents and my brother standing around me, murdering the Happy Birthday song. Then we clapped like kids and my father pushed us all away from the cake. He ditched my mother’s pretty knife for a sharper instrument, sat down eagerly in my chair and lovingly cut the cake up into the neatest slices. Just two weeks later, he was gone from Covid. My real fiftieth birthday was cancelled. But in a way, that little family celebration, with the four of us eating cake and chips and singing like kids at a party was more significant than any celebration could ever be. And there is nothing like the death of an ageing parent that reminds you how far along the road of life you yourself have travelled!

My whole life is in front of me. The pitter-patter of little feet all around me turn quickly into confident strides climbing up a slope. We climb together, my friends and I. The horizon is far, far away across rainbow-coloured fields that stretch for ever all around us. There is music and dancing, movies and magic, friends and flowers, beauty and freedom. The stars all have crinkly edges and smile down at everything they see. Sometimes, there are storms - dark clouds rumble and the skies turn grey, but when we hunker down and wait, they turn blue again. Sometimes, strong winds blow and push us – faster they seem to say, higher, higher. Higher we climb, and higher – the sun, the stars, the sky itself coming closer and closer as if we could reach out and touch them. If we all stood outstretched arm to outstretched arm, surely we could touch the sky?

And then we are standing right at the top. When we look up, there is no more hill to climb. We see only the stars shining quietly out of a sky that changes colour from blue to grey to inky black. The winds start to calm and when we look around, we know that the only way to go is down. Slowly, we start the descent. Everything takes more time, and we have to watch our step. The music softens and the landscape rolls more gently. When a storm comes, it stays longer and leaves us slower than before, but there is more time for everything – to listen to the music, to stare at the sky, to lie in the sun. Ahead of us, further down the slope, the landscape looks still beautiful, but bleaker. There are less flowers and more drifts of snow.

There are people we have known who walk ahead of us until some of them reach the edge and we cannot see them anymore. We follow – there is nowhere else to go. Only now, we are much more mindful of the little joys that help us along the way!