My mother, the family’s memory-keeper
Sometimes I wonder if my mother, the dancer, did not dream of the life not led. I might be the writer, but she’s the storyteller
After a great-aunt died, my mother read a little tribute I wrote for her and said wistfully, “You’re the writer in the family. Perhaps you’ll write something like that for me after I am gone. Why don’t you write it now so I can read it?"
I rolled my eyes and said, “The feeling won’t come now."
In the last few weeks as my mother struggles with a slew of sudden health issues, the feeling still hasn’t “come" but when I see her lying in a hospital bed, confused and shrunken, I feel perilously close to it.
I didn’t grow up in a family that said “I love you" easily. That was too western, like in a Hollywood movie. “Have you eaten?" is the way we said “I love you." When I lived in America, my mother would call and ask if I had eaten. Sometimes I made up dishes to avoid telling her I had cereal for dinner because I had been too tired to cook. It was a love lie.
Years later when I returned to India, a middle-aged man, my mother still decided the household’s daily menu. She watched cooking shows on television and wrote down recipes “in rough" on pieces of scrap paper. The ones that got passing grade were transferred to her “fair" recipe book. At dinner, if we failed to appreciate the dish adequately, she would be miffed. Just as she showed love through food, she expected to be shown love through our appreciation of it. In her own ill health though, she is liberated from the need for such niceties. After my sister made chocolate pudding for her, she asked grumpily, “Is this pumpkin?"
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At meal times she still presided over the division of food. Everyone got exactly the same number of prawns, the chicken drumsticks were reserved for the youngest members and the potatoes and potol (pointed gourd) divided fairly though she would complain she was tired of divvying up potatoes and potol all her life. But she still did it, not because the rest of us could not do it, but because it is the last semblance of control a matriarch has over her grown family. This year she ceded that role to my sister. But she would still subject it to eagle-eyed scrutiny saying, “That piece of mutton is a little small. I am just trying to be helpful." It was my sister’s turn to roll her eyes but that too was mother’s love, even if it felt measured out by the millimetre.
“Mother, have the marrow bone from the mutton curry yourself today," we would tell her. But she refused. Self-sacrifice is ingrained in the Bengali mother. She would serve herself the smaller prawn but also make sure we knew what she had done. Again cue the children’s eye-roll.
I am the stereotypical mother’s boy. My mother could always be counted on to regale visiting guests with stories of some debating prize or good conduct medal I had won in school. It didn’t matter that several decades had elapsed and the boy hero of her story was now a balding middle-aged man. My school medals were kept in a locker not because they were worth much but mother was afraid a burglar might think they were.
Yet I know nobody will give me such unreserved (and often undeserving) love ever again. She read everything I wrote, twice over, corrected me if I got an anecdote wrong, complained if it was too complicated, then neatly cut the newspaper clippings and saved them in a folder. Once she observed slyly, “Oh I seem to feature in many of your articles." I cringed yet again.
But every time I tried to actually interview her about something, she would demur, “What do I really understand besides aloo-potol?" That wasn’t true. Mother had studied mathematics in college. She had become a dancer when respectable Bengali women didn’t do such things. I have a black-and-white picture of my mother caught in motion on the stage of the New Empire theatre in Kolkata. She had gentlemen friends, some from pedigreed families but in the end she settled for a sight-unseen arranged marriage with a solid Bengali engineer. They were together happily for over 40 years till he passed away. His job with British Rail allowed them to travel all over Europe by train. I marvel at pictures of her in a sari in a restaurant in Paris or at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. At her age I had not been to most of those places myself. She would get carsick, airsick, seasick but still travelled everywhere. “I’ve thrown up everywhere," my mother says with some pride.
Yet sometimes I cannot help but wonder if my mother, the dancer, did not dream of the life not led. Like many women of her generation, she became “homemaker". As a boy I came home from kindergarten and once told her, “Ma, don’t go to work like Swapan’s mother next door. I want you to be home when I come home." My mother would often tell that story fondly much to my mortification.
She was both fan girl and friend of some of the biggest names in Kolkata’s music and dance scene, from singers like Hemanta Mukherjee and Suchitra Mitra to dancers like Prahlad Das. She remembers waiting at a bus stop and a Morris Minor, licence plate number 6706, stopping in front of her. “Hop in," said Hemanta Mukherjee. “Which way are you going?" she replied. “Why are you worrying? Whether I am going to Tala or Tollygunge I will take you home."
She would tell us that story over and over again. We would get exasperated because we knew it by heart. Now I realise she was telling herself as well, reminding herself that she was more than aloo-potol.
Perhaps that’s why my mother, much to my minimalist sister’s exasperation, is a hoarder. It’s as if she saves everything she thinks might be of value in a life without the usual markers of achievement—postgraduate degrees, high posts, honours and accolades. Her drawer groans with old chequebooks, birthday cards, perfume bottles. She saves plastic bags, sorted by quality. Duty-free bags are premium. She lives for the day when one of us will sheepishly ask for a “good plastic bag".
In a throwaway world, my mother saves. I came home from a trip to find that there had been a shaving foam accident while I was away. The bottom of my canister of shaving foam had rusted away. My mother found foam everywhere in the bathroom, halfway up to the ceiling, covering the sink, all over the washing machine. She had carefully saved two takeout containers worth of foam, slightly grimy now. “It’s of no use now, isn’t it?" she said mournfully.
It was not, but in retrospect in a world of waste it meant something.
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As a hoarder, she is also the family’s memory-keeper. Mother is the person my sister and I go to when we want to check whether something happened in 1985 or 1986. She can triumphantly bring out her diary and tell us. She can remember what sari she wore at a wedding 30 years ago. Her own age though is a state secret. “Don’t tell anyone till I am gone," she instructs us.
Now suddenly and unexpectedly, she is a shadow of her former self. She gets confused and scared. She resents new indignities like diapers and attendants. But as she sits in bed, exasperated with a body that does not cooperate, confused about the time of the day, demanding her slippers so she can go to the bathroom on her own, my sister notices she’s still fixing her hair in the mirror.
And I know the mother I knew is still there, still reassuring herself that it wasn’t just all about aloo-potol. “Your mother is talking about some dance school in Park Circus," her doctor tells me perplexedly. “She is disoriented. But it’s a true story," I tell him. “She is telling you a story of the woman who was a dancer."
I might be the writer in the family but she is its storyteller.
‘Cult Friction’ is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
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