The window faced the East. In the early hours of the morning, my Vitamin D-deficient mother reveled in the sunlight streaming through the window. She lapped up the golden rays lying on her bed. The beams played on her face, her arms and whatever little feet her nightdress exposed. In her somnolence, her face held the satisfaction of a day at the spa and it didn’t matter if it was the height of summer. My mother lay there with that half-smile for all seasons till her bed tea arrived, brought faithfully every day by our house help Rani, at the stroke of eight.
The window offered more. The chair placed next to it provided uninterrupted views of the distant sky that changed colours according to the season. The sky ended far away over an asymmetrical-shaped building. The shape of the building and its glistening façade was as much a rarity as the view itself in congested South Calcutta. I would have loved to spend my mornings by that window seat letting my gaze travel as far as the clouds would take me. But that seat was never mine, it was always my mother’s, although the window belonged to me, like every brick of the house did.
As a 37-year-old single woman, I was supremely proud that I could use my life’s savings to buy them a swanky apartment in a community in Calcutta. They had settled in well too, but I somehow kept floating from one room to another, feeling like a stranger in my own home.
My mother placed the tea on the windowsill and sat on a cushioned chair by the window. Without a second look at the azure sky, she picked up her mobile phone and her fingers went to Facebook. Earlier, she would take up the newspaper first. Now the newspaper played second-fiddle to the gossip-worthiness of Facebook.
There were plenty of 75-year-olds like her on FB who were as proactive as she was — maybe more — and there were plenty of updates to catch her attention.
“DK lives on Facebook,” she muttered under her breath.
“Who wants to know his opinion every five minutes?”
This was only the beginning. The muttering would get louder and louder till it woke up my father who was still probably playing rally on the table tennis board in his dream. My father was a table tennis champion who had played at the national level 50 years back and landed his lifelong job at a corporate firm by winning a number of championships. That was yesterday, but now, wherever he walked in, he expected people would recognise him like they recognised Sunil Gavaskar or Kapil Dev. But he still hadn’t fathomed that cricketing legends and table tennis stars were not the same in our country.
Although there were ample trophies and photographs of his sporting days in our home, he wasn’t on Google. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that and neither did he care because unlike my mother, he preferred to stay many miles away from tech.
“Oh my God, they are in Greece now; weren’t they in Bangkok a few months back?”
It was a very loud question. Not a mutter anymore.
The excitement in my mother’s voice bounced off my sleeping father like raindrops on a smooth piece of stone.
A limp “who?” was all that he said with his eyes still closed.
“Shukla and her husband! Where do they get all the money from? I am sure their son buys them their tickets. He is settled in the US. But both have arthritis. How do they travel so much? Must be the herbal treatment that they are doing now…”
The rhetoric would have continued had I not walked into the room. She looked at me. I knew that look.
Amrita Mukherjee, author
She was thinking of the current inability of her daughter to send her off to trips abroad. Since my return from Singapore, I got that look many times a day. The reason for my permanent return was her ill health. I had thought I would get those moist-eye looks of appreciation a la Hindi-film moms. What I got instead were daggers.
“Tell Rani to make luchi and aloo with black jeera for us.”
“Not us,” my father corrected.
“I will have two toasts with a poached egg, a banana and coffee. Don’t speak for me always.”
“You love luchi. How would I know you don’t want to have it today?”
This was another thing about my parents. You just could never fathom when the air would heat up over what and then the possibility of a full-blown riot could never be overruled.
“Just one thing, you had mutton last night. Do you think it’s a good idea to have such a heavy breakfast in the morning?”
They both looked at me blankly. This was the look they always gave when they wanted to make it seem like I had never spoken.
When I was a teen, I had no way of wriggling out of what my mother served for breakfast. It was either doi chire or chhana pauruti. If anyone serves these to me now, I could strangle them right there without flinching for once.
All those healthy breakfast habits so vigorously imposed on me for years had suddenly become meaningless.
I told Rani their orders and asked for some oats for myself.
Then I smiled at her. “You choose what you want to eat from all three orders.”
She laughed.
My aunt was sleeping blissfully in the next room but her snores were anything but bliss for us. When she first came to live with us, I would be filled with dread as the night approached. Her nasal reverberations strangely found a way through closed doors. I initially woke up with a jolt in the middle of the night and then the rest of it was spent tossing and turning in bed. I was used to my father’s snoring all my life and as a child his mild snoring gave me a sense of security that he was right there in the next room. It was a childish sense of well-being.
I remember when he was in the hospital after a hernia operation, I was staying in the same room with him. At night, every time he stopped snoring, I got up to check if he was breathing.
That was one snore and this was another. Sometimes I wondered if this was the precise reason for which her son refused to visit India from Australia, ever. I would not say that I did not detest the idea of her coming and staying in our home. But my mother was adamant that her own sister would not end up at the old-age home while she was still alive. It was another thing that she never thought that I could end up in the asylum being at the beck and call of three elderly people.
From being on the top of my mother’s priority list, I had suddenly hit rock bottom since I left my job in Singapore. It had become a given that I shouldn’t be expecting sensitivity from her; instead, I needed to concentrate on being so to others. Deep breaths!
My home felt like a half-baked cake, brown on the outside, a soggy mix inside. No matter how much you baked you couldn’t attain that perfection.
I wasn’t trying even. However, I didn’t expect my home to turn me into the devil incarnate and I never imagined I would end up doing what I did one day!
(To be continued)