by Nilanjana Bhattacharjee
My grandmother’s kitchen is in Kanakpur Part II in faraway Silchar. To get there, you must undertake a perilous journey through the house, cross a verandah first, then an uthan[i], a staircase with just two stairs, separated by a drain from yet another verandah. My grandmother is no more, but her kitchen, whose rusty-red tin roof you can still see from a distance, lives on. I had promised her that when I get a job, I shall get the kitchen roof redone with transparent tin sheets so that the aalo[ii] would float in. Now, with her gone, and the old roof still in place, I wonder if I have any right to disturb it when its owner and builder is away.
Whose paakghor is it anyway?
Back in the day, when she reigned, there were many other stakeholders in her kitchen. None, however, had her sense of authority or grace in executing cumbersome, monotonous tasks. She chopped and cut maach, choto or boro, with precision as she sat over a bothi-daa[iii] with a bag of ash by her side. She lived her life proud of how well she chopped her vegetables and cut her fish, and now with her gone I can only admire her skills and regret not having paid attention when she was teaching. In my defence, our kitchen was a noisy and ugly place, and I was scared of bothi-daas, anxious that I will fall on to it and lose my neck.
Thamma’s kitchen was always populated. If our house were a civilisation, the verandah that led to the kitchen would be its epicentre. By 8:00 am, the womenfolk would sit to drink tea, munch on muri[iv] or biscuits, and complain about power cuts or people. My grandmother would eventually proceed to read aloud her copy of Shamayik Prasanga, while I quizzed her on the different Bangla words and what they meant. She put up with me for as long as it took her to feed me; after that, she would only focus on her fish and vegetables.
From this verandah, you couldn’t hear the gate creak open or close. Neither could you see my grandfather sitting guard on his rocking chair holding his stick with his right hand, as he dutifully announced the day’s guests with a ‘ke aisey go dekho’[v] with either surprise or annoyance based on who was visiting us. If it were a relative (and we have too many relatives), he entertained them till someone carried tea all the way from the kitchen-island and joined them briefly. We kids, also played our part in this whole charade every time a grandfatherly jethu or worse still a grandfather showed up. We would have to parade out of wherever we were to touch their often disturbingly dirty feet with cracked heels and seek blessings.
Few men visited the kitchen, and when they did, they would sit on a mudha[vi] waiting to be served breakfast and tea. They were always too shy to call for service outright. In our house sophistication (and tradition) demanded they repeatedly enquire or mention the time, implying but not ordering; or walk around rubbing their bellies making small talk, so that you guessed. Yet, when all cues went unnoticed my uncle would growl and state ‘khawa aij Sunil daar ghoro ou khawa lahgabo’, which was laughable as they put so much salt in their food that we dreaded going to their house even during festivities. (Sunil Da or Sunil Kaku, as I called him, was our neighbour, who never really got used to wash basins and always brushed and spat on the road, an event you could witness at 8 o’ clock sharp every morning.)
In joint families, often enough you have to put up with people you don’t like. Say for instance my uncle, Noni Jethu, a man old enough to be a vampire, visited our house each morning at 9 to chit-chat with my grandfather. Since he always visited us around breakfast, we always had to engage in a game of offering him food that he would initially refuse but later accept saying ‘khali tumi banaiso dekhi khaiyar’.[vii]
I never understood why my grandmother felt compelled to entertain every single person who came home. A regular at her verandah was an old man from the ashram near our house, which my grandparents frequently visited. Runu Babu, as thamma called him, was a painful gentleman, full of complaints about the new generation. When he arrived, the three oldies would huddle and talk of places that I couldn’t find on the map. It took me a few years to realise my Sylheti ancestry. I learned to read a map when I was in sixth standard, and it was in an Oxford Atlas that I spotted for the first time, Baniachung and Habiganj, both in Bangladesh by then. If Runu Babu, had it his way, he’d hold the ‘new generation’ responsible for everything starting from inflation to the terrible infrastructure of Silchar: ‘Kail maiya ekjon ailo asromo. Ekla. Pronam-unam korlo, boilo. Dekhiya bakka bhala laglo,’ he once said as he settled on our mura.[viii]
I thought the story ended there and all was good in the world. But then he looked in my grandmother’s direction and continued, ‘Aroti diya awar shomoy dekhlam, sele ek gur loge hashiya hashiya maat. Amarey dekhar loge-loge tara haath dhoriya rowana.’ ‘Kita koitay chain ita re?’ he demanded of my grandmother.[ix]
I don’t remember what she said in response. But I remember her telling my cousin and me, very often, how we must first get jobs and then think of everything else: ‘Chakri naholey kichu hobey na.’
‘Unlike territories, stories cannot be stolen so easily’
As a kid, I was silent, meaning I had to be kept engaged with one thing or the other if one wanted to keep me out of trouble. My grandmother would often tell me stories from her ‘first’ house in Baniachong which too had a verandah that led to the kitchen where everyone gathered to work, and where she learned how to skin a goat. Her brother-in-law would from time to time manage to bring home deer or goats and announce ‘Aij toh khawa jombo’[x], as he would set the dead animal on the kitchen floor and disappear. She and the other women would then go on to skin and cut and cook and serve, a common event in that house before 1947.
She would go on to live in many houses, before finding peace in the 1980s in a government-allotted land meant to rehabilitate the refugee family in ‘India’, more than three decades after they lost their home. Many years later, in Sara Suleri’s Rhetoric of English India, I read that ‘unlike territories, stories cannot be stolen so easily.’ My grandmother died in exile from her desh, but she replicated her previous life in the form of little rituals, so that the upheaval of 1947 could be forgotten. She never missed a Manasha puja, never changed the way she cut radishes into nets before frying them and never let us go for more than a week without dry fish. She imported customs from everywhere she knew and introduced a 100 percent Vaishnav-friendly zero-onion-garlic shutki made with sheem and mishti kumra.
The verandah, however, was not just her country alone. It also belonged to my mother, my aunts, to Cheksie, and me. Cheksie was an old man who lived in our house, since my uncle, a policeman patrolling the streets of Hailakandi at night, found him jaundice-stricken on a pavement. When he mentioned he too was from Habiganj, no time was wasted in getting him home. He did odd jobs for the house between bidi-breaks and getting my grandmother her copy of Sananda and Desh. He was her eyes and ears in the colony, and there was nothing that he did not know about. Cheksie spent more than usual time in the kitchen, too much for the liking of the other men of the house who deemed him not man-enough. They lectured him from time to time on quitting bidis, while they continuously smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms and the garden. Sometimes to assert his masculinity, my uncle would tug at his trousers threatening to pull them down if he wore ill-fitting ones again. It never occurred to anyone to buy him a new pair of trousers, or check why he kept losing weight till he died of cancer.
In the absence of men, the verandah became a ‘free speech zone’, if I can be dramatic about this. When my grandmother stepped into the kitchen or left for shower, my aunts and mother would break into giggles describing the men they saw on screen and off it. They would spend time arguing over who made a better Devdas — Dilip Kumar or Shah Rukh Khan? — and never reach a consensus. They would talk of Kalyan Kaku, my boro pishi’s brother-in-law, who was convinced he looks like Uttam Kumar and deserved a big break in the Bengali film industry. Kalyan Kaku was irritating to say the least and annoying, with his chun and khoyer-stained[xi] nails. It’d make my skin crawl every time I saw his fingers. He received a letter in 2006 from Uttam Kumar requesting him to star in one of his movies. He officially began his ‘movie’ career in a music video, playing a cross between a baul and a sanyasi in Dharmanagar. He ended his career playing Kali in the next album by the same singer, because Kumar again wrote mentioning how true talent was no longer appreciated in the industry and kaku must carry on with his regular job in the PWD Department, a fact that relieved everyone but him. The antithesis to Kalyan Kaku was Jhalak Kaku, my father’s cousin, the most eligible bachelor the women of my family knew. He was young, handsome, fluent in salsa after growing up in different BSF camps across India. He was on his way to become a babu in SBI and bring glory to the family but was very much dead from cancer just after landing the job. Choto-pishi, also dead from cancer, would talk at length about her beautiful cousin who could cook chicken wearing a helmet, and also offer aarti to Dugga Maa. You could tell her loss from how she spoke of him and the times they spent together.
My secret hiding spot
Adults tend to think children are dumb. And, despite their goal of bringing up children with no malice in their hearts, say things they must not. Often enough, my grandmother’s gang would gather and gossip about a person when they were not around. So when my pishis were not around my mother and jethi would talk of how their kitchen was funded by my father and uncle’s salary. I realised after eavesdropping one morning that they were the reason I couldn’t join swimming classes and was getting one piece of pabda for lunch. When my mother was not around they would talk of how she was trying to flaunt my father’s wealth by buying that gold bangle for my grandmother, and when my jethi was not around, they spoke of how she was spending on sarees when she should be focusing on having a child while she still could.
I was a neutral observer, incapable of taking sides, and as I grew older, I chose to be the ghost in my grandmother’s kitchen — collecting all the juicy gossip to satiate my thirst for knowledge because it was the easiest thing to do when all the adults you loved seemed to hate each other. My spot thus shifted from the uthan that led to the verandah to the landing of the staircase that led to the roof. From there you could see and hear everything that everyone spoke about, but no one could see you unless you made a noise. In a household with my brother as my sole playmate, I realised it was in my best interest to keep my hiding spot a secret.
So, when I was a teen with raging hormones and had to phone my boyfriend, or BF as I called him, I would go to landing of the staircase armed with a cordless phone. It was here that my brother and I tried and failed to teach ourselves to smoke, after stealing cigarettes from my uncle’s box of smokes. It was here that we also taught our nephew that his tongue won’t fall if he had chicken before anjali during pujas.
However, it was the verandah, the centre of the world, where I acquired important life lessons. I learnt that while roasting fish was normal, wanting to roast your baby brother was not. I learnt how to get rid of leeches when they stuck to your legs, and that a beautiful boy cousin could make you want to spend more time around them and want more of their attention. And if they denied you that or refused to play with your dough of atta, the best thing to do was pretend they hit you and get them beaten up by howling and complaining to your mother, ‘mereche amake’.[xii]
The place changed as I grew older. We got a wash basin to brush our teeth, the coconut tree grew taller each year, and the betel-nut tree, struck by lightning, fell on the kitchen roof damaging it. I progressed from playing with atta dough to setting up buckets on the corners of the tin roof to collect water, to handing my father bleaching powder and salt to kill snails and millipedes after the rain. The morning ritual of meeting at the verandah to chop vegetables never changed.
When my grandfather died, I was heartbroken and withdrew from the verandah to my hiding spot on the stairs. That was the first time I realised our home was going to change though I initially dismissed my fears. All the adults of the house fought over funeral expenses as my grandmother sat mourning alone. A week later, they all came together to chop and cut and wash and cook till, with my grandmother’s death, this country was lost forever.
Nilanjana Bhattacharjee is an aspiring researcher of oral history. She likes to daydream and tell funny stories, and has an intense love-hate relationship with every city she has ever lived in.
[i]Uthan means courtyard.
[ii]Aalo means light in Bengali.
[iii]It is a cutting instrument, used for cutting vegetables and fish, big and small.
[iv]Muri means puffed rice.
[v] Look, who it is!
[vi]Mudha means stool, which in Assam is often made of bamboo and jute.
[vii] I am eating only because you asked.
[viii] Yesterday, a girl came to pray at the ashram, all alone. It made be really happy.
[ix] As I returned after finishing the aarti, I saw her holding hands with a boy. As soon as they realised I had seen them, they ran away. What to do with these people?
[x] It will be a feast today!
[xi]Limestone paste and catechu, used in betel leaves (paan).
[xii] He hit me.