The fairy tale of life

“Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee;

In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”

- Henry Francis Lyte

Mimi (my mother’s sister)’s health had been silently deteriorating from inside during the last two months. Medical treatment came with her daily bread all throughout her life, and probably that’s why I had initially not been much alarmed by her failing health as narrated by my mother, who had been her guide through thick and thin, especially after her trip to Thailand. But none of us, not even she herself, expected it to end all when it did. A dear one’s death, of course is never easy to accept. When her lifeless body was brought home for everyone to pay their respects, I felt a lump in my throat, but I knew that now she rests beneath the heavenly skies.

I tried writing about her life because I trust her life deserves to be told but I soon gathered that the profundity of the agony that was her life cannot be appreciated nor valued by simple narration. So I look at it from a different angle – investigating how altered her life and everyone’s around her would be if she was not so ill fated to have been a victim of immunity-suppressive disease xeroderma pigmentosum – the lifelong battle to which she finally had to succumb to.

*      *      *

I have analysed many people, including my father, who had a rich, memorable childhood with cousins from the paternal as well as the maternal side. If the heavens were sympathetic enough to grant Mimi a ‘normal’ life, she might have had her own family with a husband, children and her own self-sustaining life and I would probably have a few cousins of my own. Maybe one of them would also share my passion for computer science and we could share ideas just like my father and mother do with their cousins. Bhaiphota and Bijoya Dashami reunions would be days of excitement, fun and frolic and the house would be full of people spreading enjoyment – it would be as charming as flowers blooming on a country churchyard. Children running around, mother and Mimi engaged in organising the Bijoya dinner party and my father and Mesho (as Mimi’s husband would be called) sitting at the drawing room sofa discussing matters that we young people consider boring is a most common sight at every mamabari – but not mine.

I have seen my Thamma going often to her brothers’ and sisters’ places to spend an evening, a day or sometimes even a week just for a change of air. Picturing my mother going to my Mesho’s house to spend a day or two, or to help Mimi shop for the Pujo, or help her decide the wedding dress for Mimi’s eldest daughter is what I would pray to God for my mother because just like any other sibling, she deserves such joys. My mother and Mimi might also together have arranged a trip for my grandparents to Thailand, instead of just my mother. Mimi, if her health had permitted, could’ve turned out to be a professor of Geography, or might have worked at a corporate office and the two sisters could collaborate and share their work experiences with each other – as I have noticed my father does with his siblings. But that was what one can have hoped – the truth is far from it.

Having all children successful in their own lives, managing their own family, and living happily is what every parent wants to see. I remember Dadu had said, after my uncle got married and settled down, that he had nothing else to worry about in his life. Seeing the realisation of the well wishes of a parent for the eldest child was never to be so for my grandparents. Seeing the excitement that we as children spark in my grandparents’ faces, I can hardly envision how fulfilling it would make them feel to have four or five grandchildren from both their daughters gather around and listen to the stories of mythical creatures and scientific discoveries of the past that they told me when I was a child. My grandfather would have more grandchildren to distribute the priceless fruits of his rooftop garden while my grandmother would probably have a granddaughter to teach how to wear a saree and how to look like a princess. If all of that were to happen, Dadua and Dida would, like Dadu, have nothing else to worry about for the rest of their lives.

The most common things one associates life with – a job, professional life, marriage, family and children of one’s own – were way out of reach for her. If the stars hadn’t given her such a painful life, then like my mother, even she would have, above all, her own wing of the family tree. Maybe in her college days, she might even have met her soul mate, who she would later marry and have a love story to tell her grandchildren! She might also have perfected her praiseworthy skills in embroidery to run a small scale successful business. In short, she would have a world of her own.

*      *      *

Words are incapable to describe how spectacularly different Mimi’s life would be if her well-being was guaranteed. Although she survived for 48 years, much unlike the doctors’ predictions when she was first diagnosed with the disease, it deprived her of the basic joys of life. Apart from the rewards of an average life, she would also be happily ignorant of a disease called Xeroderma Pigmentosa and blissfully unfamiliar with eye institutes like the L. V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad that one would go to for treating tumours in eyes and be relieved of the excruciating pain that is accompanied.

Imagination, once unleashed, is in its nature to run beyond the boundaries of reality. Mimi’s fate was such that at the age two years, the stars decided that she would be deprived of the things one would expect to have in life and was left alone, diseased, with a crippled vision. Instead of children, she had medicines – steroids for her eyes that would have to be applied every fifteen minutes all throughout the day and night like a new born baby needs attention all through the day; instead of her own family, she had appointments with doctors; in place of a job, she had corneal grafting in her eyes in multiple occasions; instead of her own wedding, she missed some of her younger sister’s wedding ceremonies because of the critical condition of her eyes. Xeroderma pigmentosum is said to occur in one individual for every 250,000 and on top of that, it is roughly six times more common in Japanese people than in other groups. It has been said with truth that fate is never without a sense of irony.

What I have illustrated here is not the life of a queen, but one that every common man lives and takes for granted. Even an ordinary life was too good to be true for her, like a fairy tale – one she might only dream of, but never make real. But even if we do not consider the fruits of normal life, she had to fight for the very things that we take for granted from birth – her eyesight became steadily weaker year after year. There was a time when she exclaimed with joy that she could make out if there was a car a few feet ahead of her and she considered that day to be lucky to have even that little vision. Because the battle that she had to put up with all through her life, she understood the sick and the needy better than anyone else I know. She had always put her best foot forward to help those who needed her even before they could call for help – be it my brother while having a minor surgery, or the poor children of Kathamrita Shangha who were cold and needed warm clothes in winter – she herself went and cared however she could, often transcending her own physical limitations. Sometimes the little things that one do make one great. Her memory will live on through us and her story deserves to be told and listened. But more than that, there’s a lot to learn from her that the Divine Providence taught her – “to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labour and not to ask for reward”.

I have seen so many people who have so much to be happy about but still mourn the smallest of things that they couldn’t have. The struggle that she knew life to be from the tender age of two years is an example how one who had almost nothing in her life could still be content with it. All her life, in spite of the pain she had a firm belief in the Almighty. Although she was put through what seems almost too much, she never lost her faith, and it was that faith that carried her forward and gave her the will to fight and the zeal to survive. I am left in utter amazement and respect for her as my grandmother narrates how painful her childhood, adolescence and adulthood were. All along, her constant companion was pain. I can vividly recall the last few days of her life in the ICU – the strong odour of antibiotics, medicines and disinfectants or the smell of death as I now call it, made me dizzy but she fought on, with determination in her spirit and to the daze of the doctors, till her last breath for she was born into a world to fight, struggle and return triumphant like the charge of the Light Brigade in the battle of Balaclava in 1854. I feel her life was not a journey, it was a test of her endurance – a test by God Himself to see how long before she breaks – and she never did, she never gave up – not even on her deathbed.

“When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder'd.”

- Lord Alfred Tennyson

Mourjo Sen

October 2012

A different kind of Nostalgia

“Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” 

- William Shakespeare

I must have been eight or nine when my parents took me and my brother for a trip to the northern hills. As far as I can recall, we were a lively family group of nine. The trip was centred on Sikkim. When my mother first told me of the trip to the hills, I had pictured myself with a ruck sack and climbing up the rocks of the mountains. Unfortunately the reality didn’t remotely resemble that. In its place, to my utter dissatisfaction, I had to endure five-hour rides in ancient land rovers every day from one hill station to another. I didn’t particularly enjoy that.

Nothing in that trip was exceptional. Yes, a group of fun-loving folk is always much of a pleasure to be a part of even if you are an introvert but apart from the merry and the mirth that my family always brings to me, nothing in that portion of the trip was so fulfilling that I would write about twelve years later. To my wonder, the part of the tour that I least expected from became what I remember that trip by, even today. Life surprises us from where we least expect it to – one might call that divine comedy. As per plan, my parents, my brother and I extended our trip by a few more days after the rest of the group had gone back to Kolkata. The four of us yet again embarked on another of those long jeep-rides to Darjeeling. Quite naturally I didn’t think Darjeeling, which I had first heard of only a few months back, would be any different from the places we’d already been to. Never had I been so pleased to have been proven wrong.

On our way to Darjeeling, I had slept off in the first half of the journey so can’t recollect much. However, I do remember that after travelling quite a large section of the journey, my father started telling us how Darjeeling was not just another tourist destination for him. I listened intently and got deeply absorbed into everything he was saying. Much too soon, as it seemed, the driver called to me as we were nearing a bend, pointing his index finger straight at the hills at a distance. I could see a town sitting on the ridges of the gorgeous hills afar, like a child sleeping quietly on her mother’s lap. “Do you see that?” he said to me, “That is Darjeeling”. Everything about that trip changed that instant.

Every time I tell the story of why Darjeeling is special, for some very peculiar reason, I refer to it in first person, though I shouldn’t, technically, as it was all about long before I was born. I learned, for the first time, that we once lived there. That is, when my grandfather was of my age, the family lived in Darjeeling in a moderately sized middle-class house known as ‘Senabash’, meaning home to the Sen Family. The name itself felt enchanting to my ears. Later on in the tour, we had visited the ruins of the still standing storm-wrecked Senabash.

Senabash is located at Ghoom, the station before Darjeeling railway station and isn’t very far from the town centre of Darjeeling. As the story goes, the members of the then joint Sen Family used to run their own indigenous businesses like a dairy called ‘Kanchan Dairy’, which was highly reputed among the people of the town for its quality, a poultry farm, and a piggery among others. My grandfather’s uncle (passionately called ‘Naw-kaka’), who became the head of the house after the demise of my great grandfather, was a believer in Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray’s ideals of Bengalis becoming entrepreneurs. When there was no one to maintain the family businesses, under his able leadership, it flourished to newer heights. But, with drift of the rural population slowly shifting towards the urban areas after independence, the flow also caught our family. Soon, the young generation in the family were drawn to more economically promising lands like Kolkata and government jobs with their guaranteed salary at the end of the month seemed to be an easier livelihood. But the very thought of living in the hills of Darjeeling with our own family, self-sustaining small scale businesses left me in wonder of how beautifully simple life could be – every member works in their own way throughout the day from early in the morning and rejoice in the unadorned joy of being together in the evening. The fast moving urban lifestyle takes the living out of life.

The wooden house of Senabash was where my grandfather had grown up and my father, too, had spent a portion of his childhood there. The weather in Darjeeling is often very damp and one has to befriend the rain if one is to survive in a hill station like Darjeeling. Indeed that is why there was a room dedicated for umbrellas at Senabash! The other room that I have often heard of is Naw-kaka’s room. It is said that also my grandfather, the eldest of his brothers and sisters, feared to tread when he was at meditation. Respect sometimes is mistaken for fear. On the table in Naw-kaka’s room one would always find a bronze Buddha, as I am told. His sturdy belief in the Buddha (as evident from his daily meditation sessions) has reflected on my father –he, too, keeps a metallic Buddha at his study. As I have never had the pleasure to have entered it, Senabash is a palace of dreams. Like many a child, I had the habit of weaving images of what I heard as stories and from what I heard about our association with Darjeeling, I couldn’t wait to visit Senabash. Those images still take me back to past that I was not a part of but somehow I feel I belong there. Anyway, we contacted my father’s uncle (also called ‘Mejo-kaka’) who at that time still lived at a house next to Senabash and finally visited the ancestral home. Standing in front of it, the depth of its history made me feel very trivial in the sands of time, and also at the same time, a part of something great. There were two V-shaped diverging small flights of stairs leading to the front porch of the house. I found out that throughout its history, the members of the extended Sen Family would come from different parts of the country to Senabash for a family reunion once or twice a year. It was a time of immense festivity at Senabash, as my father recalls, with everyone having so much to share and even more to catch up with. On that same V-shaped stairs, on such reunions, typical family photographs would be taken each time, which became a tradition. As we stood there before what was left of Senabash, we too abided by that tradition and had a group photo in that exact same arrangement as it would be during the glorious days of Senabash. It was as if I could hear voices from inside the house and visualise the revelry of getting together, as we stood there. To a passer-by, it would be just the ruins of an old house but for me it was materialisation of our past and everything I heard and imagined about Senabash. I could stand there and revere it all day.

Mejo-kaka’s house overlooked the picturesque Batasia loop where the toy train would take a round in a loop and return back. The toy train is the pride of Darjeeling. It was a sight to behold. The view from hill resplendent as it was, it was not the most famous view of Batasia loop – what I saw was a foggy view of the faintly visible toy train making the loop. The occasional wooing sound of the whistle of the toy train ruptured the silence of the hills as the train broke through a wall of fog. Every time the whistling stopped, silence descended on the hills like night falls on a desert after a hot afternoon. It was reverence – the sight, the sound and the silence. The reason it is so distinctive is because the atmosphere itself was very typically Darjeeling – misty, moist and mysteriously amazing. My father every so often tells us that Batasia loop was far more splendid when he was of my age and the beautification has robbed it of its natural beauty. In spite of that, it was a spectacle I recall often in my mind and it always brings a smile to my face – it is my host of golden daffodils:

“For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye,

Which is the bliss of solitude”

– William Wordsworth

From the bond with Darjeeling that I cherish, to the walks along the undulating roads of the town and the flat paradise of the mall, from Keventer’s to Glenary’s, from the Darjeeling railway station to the Ghoom monastery – everything in Darjeeling has attached with it fondness, love and emotion. After that trip, I had been to Darjeeling about six times and every time I reach the queen of the hills, I don’t want to come back. It so happened that on one such trip to Darjeeling, due to terrible weather conditions, we couldn’t leave on the day we had to. And that was a godsend for me. I prayed that it would rain like that for the next few days too – unfortunately that didn’t happen!

The term nostalgia describes a sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. But for me, although I do not have any factual personal associations, the heritage of Senabash and every story I heard of it has helped bridge the divide between what is real and what is felt only in the mind. Every time I think about Senabash, I feel that even I am a part of its legacy – or rather it is a part of me.

It might be a cliché to say so but from the first moment I saw Darjeeling, I fell in love with her. For me, coming to Darjeeling is not a tour to the northern hills – it is homecoming.