Their quarters began to deteriorate. Nistarini Debi found it difficult to cope, even someone of her efficiency and energy. Without a daughter-in-law to command or condemn or commend, her very personality was dimmed. Unacknowledged by her, since she prided herself on cleanliness and purity, the house began to resemble what she would call in another a pigsty. Used utensils lay in heaps beneath the tap in the backyard; cats leapt over the fence and licked them out. The evening ritual of smoking out mosquitoes became irregular, so the Chitols were forever reaching irritably for their ankles after sundown. Too many meals for the children took the form of beaten rice with curd and jaggery. When anybody fell ill, the dread of another calamity overturned all flow and order.
It was natural, then, that she would enlist her granddaughter, for both their sakes. But unlike nature’s beautiful vines for which the child was named, whose beauty derived in some measure from their tractability, Charulata proved training-resistant.
“Soak those pieces of cauliflower, won’t you?” she would tell the girl, taking the trouble to explain why. “How will the gas go out of them otherwise?” “Will you burp less then?” Charu might answer with a seeming insolence that was, in fact, perfect innocence. Assigned the task of folding and returning the washed clothes to the correct places, she would, as if competing with the boys, make a great joke of it. “Dhrubo, Anando, come arrange these clothes, toh,” she would imitate her grandmother’s intonation, slapping her forehead: “Ogo, my hair will ripen because of these boys!” Then applying lime off the walls to her hair: “See, it has ripened.” The three would roar monstrously. Nistarini Debi’s bones ached. She often thought to herself, “I am not able any more.”
In a world that made any sense, which this strange township definitely did not, her son would have acquired a wife, not expanded the servant’s remit.
But Chitol had succeeded in just that, by employing her own taunts against her: “This is looking like a Kolkata house now” – a line Nistarini Debi used with an expatriate Bengali’s smugness; and “This is looking just like a Bihari’s house” – which she uttered with special relish after the daughter-in-law entered the family.
The maid’s duties were slowly extended within tolerable limits of touchability. Surji was to wash dirty vessels, but not arrange the clean ones in the kitchen, or even enter that room. She was to clean a soiled child but not feed a hungry one. She was to pick up a mess, but keep her hands off an extensive list of places. She was never to handle anything in the vicinity of the altar. Surji, a tall, gracefully angular woman, was the wife of Bidur Dusadh, a guard at the works.
Although her labour was badly needed, she served at Nistarini Debi’s sufferance. She resented that, as if working two houses was not enough of a job, as though raising her four children, mending their clothes, keeping the earth of the hut cool or warm or dry depending on the season was not adequate utilisation of her time, now she had more to do, and for what – for her man to drink it away, and the humiliating superiority of the old crone?
Nistarini Debi could not bear to have the woman getting haughty and indispensable with her shoddy work – the look in her eye!
Eventually, she told her son that Notun Dida would be coming. He did not ask when or for how long.
When she acquired the name Notun Dida, she wasn’t sure whether it was funny cruel, salt-in-the-wound cruel, matter-of-fact cruel or just a matter of fact. New Granny. A child had coined it, so nobody thought she would mind. In truth, like everyone else, she simply stopped noticing.
The events behind the name were as follows. When she was eleven or twelve years old, her father had firmed up her alliance with an excellent Gangopadhyay boy who worked in a white man’s forest concession. Not long after the betrothal, a rabid jackal sank its teeth into the groom and condemned him to a ghastly death. Notun Dida was widely held accountable for the excellent young man’s fate. She herself felt ashamed for being a transmitter of ill fortune, yet was relieved that efforts at finding her a next match ran aground because of it. If this was what marriage was like before marriage, what must it be like after?
Her family was not well off and under the circumstances, let her out to whichever relative required her services. Put to use as a nanny while herself an adolescent, she gained, precociously, the skills of a grandmother – and the name. Through youth and middle age and menopause, through the tumultuous calls of her body, the acceptance of meals and shelter and saris, through the weakening but never-erased conviction that this life was better than that other one she had narrowly escaped, she fed, bathed, oiled, lullabied the children of others, tidied, minded, decorated their houses, planted saplings in their gardens, offered grain to their visiting birds. She had put in stints at her older cousin and milk sister Nistarini Debi’s house before; indeed, had helped with raising Animesh. This house, Animesh’s, would be a new one. Her sixteenth if her count was correct.
In due course, Chitol received a postcard with the details of the arrival. Now that it was in writing, his governmental reflexes compelled him to evaluate it as imminent.
His mother was never quite at ease in the township. It was not that she was unaccustomed to change. But she always had society. Outside Mughalsarai, their last port, they had Banaras, where she had people, and Banaras kept her spiritually fulfilled. Here she had only Bhombal. It was well over a year since the tragedy. The short-term visits by relatives had dried up. It should not be surprising that she wanted Notun Dida. It did not feel to him a worse idea than instrumentally remarrying.
On the other hand, it was a reminder of how much his world had collapsed.
When Charu found out, she felt just as wronged.
“Why, why, why?” she harangued her father.
“Because you don’t help me at all,” her grandmother intervened.
“I’ll do it, I’ll do whatever you want,” Charu replied, with a depth of feeling that surprised everyone.
But she did not protest very much, confusing as the development was. In any case, it was too late. She intuited that her punishment, and intimations of punishment would remain at her side, was to have someone she had never met as a partial replacement for her mother.
Excerpted with permission from Railsong, Rahul Bhattacharya, Bloomsbury India.
