Warm golden rays of the sun gently filtered through the branches of the majestic banyan tree, making the leaves look like mystical filigree fireflies. Its trunk was wide like that of a wrestler’s sinewy torso and its branches reached out to the russet tinged sky like a melody. A medley of bird song filled the crisp morning air. Under this wise old tree stood the naam ghor, a modest bamboo and mud plastered, white washed room with a thatched roof and a door made out of bamboo sticks woven together intricately- no handle, no lock, just a door to give privacy to the Gods the household prayed to everyday. Aita was always the first one to offer prayers here every morning at six, bathed and dressed immaculately in a cream paatsilk mekhela and starched white cotton sador, her sadors were always white, with borders of different patterns and colours. With her silver haircombed into a neat bun and her face powdered, she would tuck the bunch of household keys firmly at her waist, take off her slippers and enter the family prayer room. A petite woman, Aita was rotund and even at the age of sixty-eight her skin glowed like a young woman’s.
The maid Boggi, the wife of the cook Suttu had already swept and cleaned the room by then, smoothening the earthen floor with a soil and cow dung slurry. She had also put fresh flowers in a cane basket -vermilion red hibiscus, yellow allamandas and white jasmine for Aita’s prayers.Prayers, which were short and simple. She would light the earthen lamp after rolling out a fresh cotton wick, fill the lamp to the brim with mustard oil that was kept in an orange squash bottle that had been washed and sunned after its contents had been consumed. After which she would light three incense sticks, move them clock wise in front of the framed pictures of Lord Shiva and his family, offer flowers, fold her hands in a namaskar, bow her head and silently pray to the Almighty for a few minutes. I would watch as I sat on her left on the rugged old cotton mat which had some abstract patterns in green and orange, inhaling that special naam ghoraroma of incense, fresh flowers and cow dung slurry. I was only allowed in if I had bathed and on days I hadn’t, I would have to stand outside while she finished her morning prayers. Six days out of seven, I would be inside the Naam Ghor. “You know Luna”, she told me one day in that gentle voice of hers when I had failed to get up on time and bathe, “I was only three years older than you when I got married and since then, every single day I have bathed at five in the morning and offered prayers at this Naam Ghor.”
I would be Aita’s shadow right from this hour when we were visiting her in Rongajaan tea estate during our winter holidays. I would sleep with her in her huge four poster bed under the white mosquito net and every night there would be a new anecdote from her life as Aita gently ran her hand over my back andhair. The smell of the clean linen mixed with Aita’s night cream, a flowery fragrance, was like a balm that relaxed every muscle in my tiny ten-year-old body. One of my favourite anecdotes was the one where Koka had slapped a man in Peter Cat, a famous restaurant in Kolkata, when the latter had stared at Aita for too long! Aita would giggle like a school girl when she narrated this and I would join in! Snatches of her life floated inside the cocoon of our mosquito net, how she loved to play badminton as a school girl, how she was initially so scared of Koka who was fifteen years older than her, her father who doted on her, and wept like a child on the day she left her home to begin her married life and how she learnt to cook continental food because Koka loved it so much. Every night her memories would gently waft in and transport me to another time till sleep took over.
Prayers done, we would make our way to the sprawling kitchen garden which had some fifty heads of cauliflower growing neatly in rows and cabbage of about the same number in another patch. There would be beds of carrot, turnip and beetroot with their different foliage distinguishing them from each other above the soil. Coriander and mint in wooden crates, tomatoes under the eaves of the kitchen roof, the kitchen had its back to the kitchen garden, and peas dangling from the creepers that clung to thin bamboo sticks.
“So, what shall we eat today Luna?” Aita would look down at me through her silver rimmed glasses, a smile on her lips.
“Ummmm, today let us have cauliflower and peas!” I would reply and so the vegetable of the day was chosen. How important I felt with this decision making! I would hop, skip and jump along as Aita inspected all the beds and straightened a reclining pea climber or pulled a weed out from amongst the delicate greencoriander leaves. We would then make our way to the cow sheds, the hen coops, the fish pond and finally the beetle nut trees with paancreepers clinging like serpents to the horizontally ribbed straight trunks all the way up to the top where the leaves of the beetle nut tree stood out like a crown and the beetle nuts dangled like jewels.Aita chewed up to eight paanswith beetle nuts every day and I would be given a mini paan once in a while. So, our menu for the day was sourced from our morning tour and it was one of my favourite parts of the day during our stay at Aita’s.
I also enjoyed going to the store room next to the kitchen with its rows of wooden shelves and tins and glass jars of different sizes. Lentils of many hues of yellow and pinkin glass jars lined the shelves and Aita would use an old plastic glass to carefully measure out the daal that was going to be cooked that day. She would also measure out the rice which was stored in large tins. Suttu, the cook would be there to hand her the pots into which she would pour out the grains.
“Aita, Aita, let me measure out the rice please!” I would beg her and she would let me. Feeling very important I would carefully plunge the glass into the tin and scoop out the rice keeping the count every time I emptied it into the pot. The store room was such an interesting place with its myriad contents and smells, I once counted fifteen bottles of different kinds of pickles that Aita had made and they all looked so beautiful, the cream -yellow of the chilly in mustard pickle, the golden red of the bogori pickle, the not so appetising brown black of the lemon pickle and the dullolive green of the raw mango.Then, there was the corner with the biscuits and sugar and vermicelli packets and spices! Next to the naam ghor this was definitely the most sacred room in the house and its door was always locked!
By the time Aita had done a round of the lawn and checked the flower beds and asked Khorgesor the gardener, to replace the cut flowers in the vases in the sitting room and on the dining table, the sun would be a radiant golden orb and breakfast would be ready. She always instructed the cook what to make for breakfast the night earlier. Aita had two daughters and two sons, my mother Anita, was the younger daughter and the second born while my Aunt Aarti mahi was a year and a half older than her, Hari mama was the first born and Suren mama was the youngest. Aarti mahi lived in Allahabad, she was married to a wealthy businessman there. Hari mama managed the affairs of Rongajaan and his wife Rina mami and he lived with Aita in the tea estate. Suren mama was still a bachelor and being a late arrival into the family was rather spoilt. He didn’t do very much and was often at the receiving end from Hari mama regarding his laid-back attitude.
It would be Hari mama, Ma, Juna, my little sister who was three years younger than me, Aita and I who would generally eat breakfast together. Rina mami was a late riser and Suren mama would be up only before noon, despite Aita’s many rounds of wake-up calls! On that day however, Rina Mami was there too.
“Ma, what pretty dahlias,” my mother who was the spitting image of Aita, exclaimed as she touched the maroon and yellow flowers in the vase on the dining table.
“This year they have blossomed really well, I must keep these seeds for next year.” Aita replied, beaming. Boggi entered the dining room with two glasses of milk for Juna and me.
“I don’t want to drink milk today.” I announced shaking my curly haired head.
“And why not?” asked Aita and continued. “Yesterday when I had gone to the paddy fields to enquire about the harvest and the farmer offered Juna and you gaakhirpaani which is water mixed with milk, you both licked the bowl till the last drop! And now you say you don’t want to drink milk?”
“I don’t like drinking milk out of a glass, give it to me in the kind of bowl we drank out of yesterday and mix water.” I replied. They all laughed and Aita went on to tell them how embarrassed she had felt in the farmer’s house, anybody would think we were never given milk at home!
As we ate our scrambled eggs and parathas, Hari mama, a tall man with salt and pepper hair picked up a banana from the wooden tray next to the flower vase and peeled it with great care. He cleared his throat and said, “Our green leaf this year is really bad quality, and, uhmmm, I am worried.”
Aita put her cup of tea down and waited for him to say something more. Hari mama seemed to have frozen.
Rina Mami, almost as tall as Hari mama, looked at him and when he continued to be silent, she blurted out, “Ma, we cannot take another bank loan this year to pay the wages of the labourers, Hari has a good offer and we will have to sell the tea estate.”
There was a long silence and at the end of it Aita sighed, it was a long sigh, as if the breath was being tortured out of some deep place within her. As if she had uprooted something from inside her. My mother looked at her mother and I looked at mine, not really understanding what was going on.
I do not know what happened after that but we never went back to Rongajan tea estate for our winter vacation again. They all moved after Hari mama bought a three-bed room apartment in Guwahati in which Aita and Suren mama shared a room. When we visited, we stayed in the third room and we never stayed for more than a few days. Aita still woke up at five and dressed in her spotless silk mekhela and crisp cotton sador and lit an earthen lamp and incense at a small wooden prayer house mounted on the eastern wall of her bedroom. The photographs of Lord Shiva and his family looked stifled inside that tiny prayer house. Aita would sit for hours in the balcony of the apartment and read the newspaper while Rina Mami instructed the part time cook to get breakfast ready. Sometimes, Rina Mami would ask Aita whether she would like something in particular to be cooked but Aita would only smile and say no. Often she would just stare into empty space, sitting there in the balcony.
Aita started a potted plants garden in the balcony and the ten pots, three rose plants, fourdahlias, two ferns and a tulsiwere her joy. She tended to them every day and Juna and I would watch as she spoke to a rose bloom as if it were a small child.
“How pretty you are dear rose”, she would say and turn to us and ask, “isn’tshe?” Juna and I would giggle and agree with her.
As we drove back home from one of our short visits to Hari Mama’s, I recall asking my mother why Aita couldn’t come and stay with us, we had a small patch of lawn and a kitchen garden too and she would be happy to spend her time at our home. “Aita will not come and live with a daughter Luna, mothers live with their sons.” “Why?”, I had asked confused by Ma’s answer and she could never muster up a satisfactory reply, she said something about tradition but said it with no conviction in her voice and that confused me even further.
Our visits to Hari Mama’s home grew fewer and shorter and though Aita did come and visit us once a year, she had changed. She still dressed immaculately but she looked so frail and her skin had lost its glow. As the years rolled by, I met Aita less and less. Board examinations, infatuations, college and a job in Bangalore, life was speeding at an incredible pace and it left Aita behind somewhere.
And then Ma called one morning as I was getting ready to go to work and sobbing let me know that Aita had passed away in her sleep. A stab of pain pierced my heart and, in that moment, I felt like my ten-year-old self, Aita’s shadow in Rongajan, and a tear rolled down my cheek. A cascade of memories engulfed me and the yearning to hug Aita, to hop, skip and run behind her was almost unbearable. I sobbed along with my mother, not knowing what else to say.
