Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Spark

“The spark had found in its wings
The rhythm of a momentary dance…”
--Tagore in Sphulinga (The Spark)

My mother died on the morning of the Bengali New Year, the first official day of summer. A bright day; the sun shone on the saffron colored wall lining the nursing home where she spent the last few days of her life, breathing through the oxygen tube.

After her cremation and other ceremonies that invariably accompany such passages, I had to leave India in a hurry. Although I wanted to carry with me a few snatches of her belongings, objects that possibly could have no meaning to anyone but she and by default now me, I did not take them with me due to a sense of deference to my brother’s family who lived in the same household with my mother. I should do that on my next trip, I thought.

Among her belongings there was a little hard-bound book of poems by Tagore, a collection of Bengali Haiku by the poet published posthumously, the collection entitled by the name of one of the poems—Sphulinga or The Spark.

A tidy mauve colored book jacket with a small print of Tagore’s own stylized painting that tastefully decorated the frontispiece.

It was not the book itself that interested me.

The book was a wedding gift to my mother. A short note accompanied it on the first page: “To Gopa, with best wishes”, then the scrawl of a simple name. A name that I never heard my mother talk about.

My mother took a course on Ancient Indian History and Culture, leading to a Master of Arts degree at the Calcutta University in the latter’s heyday. It was then a new and interdisciplinary program, an amalgam of history and fine art, literature and archaeology. The program was headed by Dr. Kalidas Nag, a renowned historian and Indologist. There was a string of visiting professors, among them was Professor Stella Kramrisch. She described to me how brilliantly irascible was Dr. Kramrisch, who would lecture to the students in fluent Sanskrit and fly into a rage, her hair tucked in a small bun that would bob up and down, as she would castigate her students for not following her exposition.

My mother wanted to be an archeologist, but to qualify one had to spend a stipulated period on fieldwork in remote locations, which was not open to women students in her time.

She did fairly well in her course—she once showed me a hand written appreciation by Dr. Nag—but for some mysterious illness she deferred her graduation for a year. Afterwards she got the opportunity to do PhD, but she didn’t. Instead she got married to my father, left Calcutta, and became a schoolteacher. At the age of twenty-six she became the principal of a high school, and retired in that position after 40 years of service.

As a child I had often heard allusions to this episode of sacrificing her career to marry my father. This would only come out on those instances when my mother would be annoyed with my father, usually due to a disagreement about how to raise their children.

There were other vague stories I had heard. That my father’s marriage was first arranged with my aunt, who is a year younger than my mother. But apparently my aunt refused to marry my father due to his short stature. Since my great grand mother had apparently promised that wedding to my father’s aunt, by then deceased, there was a sense of guilt in the family due to unmet promise, which had apparently compelled my mother to “volunteer” to marry my father. This version couldn’t be all true, because my mother would retort while quarreling with my father that he needn’t have wanted to marry her.

My aunt, however, tells me a different story, that my father was in love with my mother. So it could be that although my aunt was originally betrothed to my father, she realized the situation and made up a story so as not to stand between them. Whatever the reason, my aunt, though the second daughter, was married off first, which was quite an anomaly in those days. That period also coincided with my mother’s mysterious illness.

But I digress. I was curious to know who actually was the top student in my mother’s MA class before she deferred. This topic she would avoid. She had airily mentioned a man’s name once, on a summer night when a cool moisture-laden wind blew past the translucent curtain on the western window, who had become an archeologist and had left for France.

My mother was the paragon of a dutiful wife, valiantly accomplishing all that was required of her both within the family and outside. My father, an orphan who had lost both his parents by the age of ten, was devoted to my mother. And so was my mother to him. As they aged together their bond appeared to grow stronger. After my mother’s retirement from school, she turned her entire attention to my father and to the growing family of my brother. After the sudden demise of my father due to a stroke, my mother re-focused her attention to a life of writing historical works and memoirs with a similar single-minded devotion.

Somehow I had always associated the name inside the book of poems, scrawled in black fountain pen ink, to a mysterious man in my mother’s past. Tradition demanded that I never spoke to her about it. Some thirty years had elapsed between the time I had last thumbed that book in my mother’s bookshelf, having left the country, and my mother’s death. I had forgotten about the book; not really forgotten but it was not in the orb of my attention all these years.

On my flight back to San Diego after my mother’s funeral, I suddenly remembered about the book of haiku. I made up my mind to bring that book with me on my next visit home.

I returned nine months later. The book, Sphulinga, was not in my mother’s bookshelf downstairs. A number of old books were missing. In their place now stood shiny paperbacks by Jane Austen and Mario Puzo.

My sister-in-law said that she had discarded some old books, because they were quite tattered, were eyesores, and because bookworms eating those would spread to the new books.

The spark is now truly extinguished.

4 comments:

Sharmila Dasgupta said...

Chanuda, your writing skill has left me in a dire state of confusion.Can this beautiful piece be actually rendered by the same absent minded scientist whose numerous escapades kept us in splits?

Seriously speaking, I loved your style which seemed to reveal the story in a much heard but no seen movie. I can also relate to the concluding part although in a somewhat opposite way.We have bought an apartment in Kolkata, whose servants room and bathroom were renovated into a library to accommodate all the books my shoshurmoshai had and all that now we have.So next time you are in Kolkata, you are most welcome to a lot of 'priceless uNiye kaTa ' books.:)

Unknown said...

Animesh da,

This is so wonderfully written. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Thanks to Roshni for referring this in FB.

Anasua

Unknown said...

Animesh-da,

Wonderful writing. It was very touching.

Doctorbabaguy said...

Dear Munna,
Thanks. Next time I must take the time to visit yours in Kolkata...
C