In a memorable passage in Pakdondi, an autobiographical work by Lila Majumdar — yesterday was her 11th death anniversary — the author describes her arrival at a house in Darjeeling. As she entered Orchid Lee, a humble building with a tin roof, she noticed some blue birds — they were House Martins — taking flight. This was no ordinary moment. A young, restive Majumdar had sought out the hill station as a refuge. Yet, the first thing she noticed on reaching 'home' was birds taking to the open sky. What Majumdar alerts her readers to is a symbolic, but fleeting, intersection of two conflicting emotions embedded in the human consciousness: to belong as well as to be set free.
Pakdondi, Aar Kono Khane, even Shob Bhuture, some of Majumdar's most popular works, have been enriched by this tension between the search for and the simultaneous rejection of roots. This restlessness, or attempts to explore it, is integral to a long and diverse literary tradition. The Odyssey is often interpreted as an ode to exploration, but it also bares the primeval horror of and fascination for restlessness. Odysseus, on returning to Ithaca, confides to Eumaeus that 'Nothing is more evil for mortals than wandering.' The pull of an illusory shelter is also expressed by W.B. Yeats, most beautifully, in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" ("for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore"). Interestingly, in Pakdondi, Majumdar too writes that in the dead of the night in Calcutta, after the city and its trams had fallen silent, she would pine for the sound of the wind among the trees, the familiar echo of her childhood in Shillong.
Yet, in real life, Majumdar had found it difficult to stay rooted to one place. As an adult, she switched jobs and places at will (her parents disapproved of her 'impetuousness'). But this vacillation was a deeper, existential conflict and the fodder for much of Majumdar's creativity. What is striking is that she chose to examine the complicated interlocking of belonging and unbelonging in books written for children. It is probable that her works would also strike a chord with the constituency of immigrants and the displaced.
Was this incongruity ever resolved? Pakdondi does not provide a clear answer, although it includes a chapter where Majumdar, upon returning to Shillong 27 years later, discovers that even though the sleepy town had become unrecognizable, her memories of what was once home had been left unmolested by change.
Is that a clue that Majumdar has left for the restless — the young and the old — who are caught between the home and the world?
