quiet corner

my grandmother passed away a couple of months ago. i didn't see her before she died. i didn't feel the need to. most things i remember about her are unpleasant. so i prefer not to think about her at all. yet she was an integral part of my formative years. a face that lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

the house on the corner of the street where she lived -- a place called umpling in shillong -- was inviting and forbidding at the same time. it was the house where my father had spent his childhood and my mother was always unwelcome. it still stands there, much the same way it stood some thirty years ago when i first saw it as a child. the drawing room in front was my favourite -- it had a bay window that looked out onto a garden of flowers and green lawns. the path from the front door led up a pebbled path to an iron-cast gate, white i think, and out onto the road.
the back of the house was more interesting. my grandmother grew most of the vegetables the large household consumed every day. she grew a particularly disgusting vegetable called 'squash' in great abundance. it landed up on our plates as pretty much that -- squash. and then there were fruit trees. i remember the guavas -- pale yellow on the outside, red on the inside. it was a busy house back then -- almost every window had a light, the kitchen was always stirring something up, the drawing room had pretty cushions and a small transistor bleated out songs i don't remember from the porch.
the house became quiet long before my grandmother died. the footsteps that used to pound the wooden floors soon found their way up the pebbled path and out into the world. shillong became 'back home' and then a memory and then just the name of a place on a birth certificate. when i last looked, the ink had faded to a lost blue.

sardines, buns and the fireplace

the house used to have a small, cheerful fireplace. well it was cheerful when baba was able to spare enough money to buy a couple of good logs. he would split them into small pieces and pile them into the pit, a dash of kerosene and we had a roaring, happy fire going. those days and up there in the hills nobody really worried so much about the eco-friendliness bit. those were different times. if a tree came down, the seed for another was planted. simple law of nature, simply lived by.

yes, before the curfews started, before men and women saw their faces as khasi or assamese or nepalese or bengali, little fireplaces crackled inside almost every home. the night sky twinkled with stars above and below, the hillsides twinkled with tiny dots of light which peeped out through the glass-paned windows of stilt mounted houses. people hung over neat white or green wooden fences and chatted with neighbours, children didn't have to run home from their playgrounds till six in the evening and the smell of freshly baked, raisin-filled buns wafted out from Gudeti's, the town's favourite bakery, almost half a mile down the road.

a fire in the house was a special treat indeed. it mean't that sardines sauteed in butter were going to be served up on toast for dinner, mugs of hot chocolate would replace the mandatory after-dinner glass of milk and above all, ma and baba were the best of friends. it was the closest we got to being a regular family. baba would narrate stories -- sometimes about ghosts and sometimes about real people. ma would laugh. the corners of her eyes would crinkle up and for one evening we would all forget about the violent nights and dark mornings.

footsteps in the dark

1979 was a cold year. shillong had gotten used to curfew and living life in constant fear of shoot-at-sight orders. the army was out on the streets. the khasis no longer fraternized with the bengalis. the bengalis were queuing up to catch the first bus out of town. schools had declared 'closed until further notice' and commerce had taken a interminable holiday at police bazaar.

baba had a new routine. he would throw on his naga shawl -- the vivid black and red patterns made him easily distinguishable and innocuous at the same time -- and leave the house every evening at around seven o' clock. 'let me see what's happening. i'll be back in an hour', he used to tell us before leaving. we would wait -- it never was an hour, often two, sometimes three. the lights would be switched off, ma would have just one small lamp in one corner -- baba said keeping the lights on was not safe. while he was gone we would sit in the dark and listen to all the sounds outside. it was mostly quiet -- the town had lost its humor and its music. sometimes there were footsteps -- we'd listen to them approaching down the hill and then wait for them to grow faint as they continued on up the hill. that was usually the case, except one night. "ae bangaali, darwaza kholo," shouted a drunken, male voice through the dark night. the footsteps had come down the hill as usual but had then taken a detour -- up the three stone steps that led them across a small garden patch to our front door. i realized that the house inside was suddenly darker than usual. ma had put out the little lamp in the corner and had gathered my baby brother -- then barely two or three years old -- into her arms. i huddled next to my older sister who was staring intently at the door. i knew what was running through her mind -- baba could be coming up those steps any minute.
by now the men outside had started knocking on the door. well knocking would be an understatement. thumping was more like it. then suddenly all was quiet. i looked at ma. her beautiful, sad eyes looked at each of us by turn -- i couldn't see them clearly but i felt their gaze shift from me to my sister and then down to my brother. he was a good baby. not a squeak. his little brain knew something was very wrong and that the only way he could help was to stay absolutely quiet. i felt my sister's hand touch my face in a light caress -- she sensed that fear had almost overwhelmed me and i could cry out from the pressure any moment. i was the coward in my family. and just as i felt that the fear in my chest would break out of its confines, a voice called out through the night.
"mrs chatterjee, please open the door, we just want to make sure you are okay. we're friends of your husband," said a pleasant, sober voice in perfect english. then there was a knock, not a thump, a civilized knock. "please mrs chatterjee, he asked us to look you up. he'll be a little late and he thought you might be worried," the voice continued. i looked at ma again. this time i saw her eyes. they had stopped blinking. i wasn't sure if she was scared, confused or surprised. even my usually gutsy sister had retreated to ma's side. we sat there for what must have been just five or ten minutes and listened to the knocks getting louder and harder. then suddenly everything was quiet again. maybe for about ten seconds. then there were other noises. a tear, a thud. they were uprooting the vegetables in the garden. since the curfews had started we had turned the plot in front of the house into a vegatable garden. after a while the footsteps started tracing their way back down the three stone steps and up the hill like always.
ten minutes later baba came home.

black and white dreams

shillong -- a tiny hill station in north eastern India. green, gently rolling hills. refuge to the homeless. music around street corners -- blues, rock and roll. irish missionaries and saint edmunds. fireplaces and plum jam. upland road, uphill and then downhill and then home and then ma. violent nights, dark mornings and the beginning of black and white dreams.