Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first book of fiction was ‘Victory Colony, 1950’. Her first work of translation, ‘My Days with Ramkinkar Baij’ won her the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship for translation. Bhaswati’s writing has appeared in several literary journals. She is an editor with The Woman Inc. and is currently working on a nonfiction book on New Delhi, India. More about Bhaswati: https://linktr.ee/Bhaswatig
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Homes and the World
From womb to the world, I bring emergencies in my wake.
- LAJPAT NAGAR
Ten days after I’m born, democracy in my country gets turned on its head; constitutional rights are left meaningless for all practical purposes. The Indian government has just declared a state of Emergency. While I have no memory from that time, people who do still recoil in remembered fear when talking of those “Dark days.” Of disappearances and forced sterilizations, of tortures, interrogations and blank newspaper pages – a way to refuse toeing the government line.
My mother has to fight her own emergency, meanwhile. Her marriage has just fallen apart and she’s back in her parents’ home in Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. When I come bundled up from Holy Family, the Christian missionary hospital where I am delivered to Kasturba Niketan – the refugee rehabilitation colony where my grandmother works, my mother is in desperate need of a job.
Before that first house grows on me, the Emergency has been lifted and my mother finds employment. Her old employer – the library at Delhi University – takes her back, making an exception on its policy regarding rehiring former employees. Her pre-marriage work record helps as much as her post-marriage personal crisis.
The house that my mind stretches the farthest back to is the one we move to from Kasturba Niketan. It’s a two-room rented accommodation, a part of the full house owned by Mr. Khera, one of the thousands of Punjabis displaced by the Partition of India who made New Delhi their home in the 1950s. This house is where I would first learn the power of a bribe when my mother puts a slim Dairy Milk bar in my hand as she and my brother sneak out to watch Trishul – a just-released Hindi film about a son growing up to avenge his wronged mother. Its stuffy interiors would also make Khera’s house (the name we would simply remember it by later) my earliest mischief-making workshop. One evening when I can’t be seen anywhere, the family would throw a fit and a search unit go out to find me. When they all return empty-handed and shakily tense, I emerge from behind a sofa where I had been hiding all this while, unable to determine what the fuss is all about.
Somewhere between accompanying Grandma to the hospital where Grandfather is being treated for cataract and loitering about the courtyard that’s obscenely disproportionate in its expanse as compared to the matchbox interior where we reside, I figure out Grandma wants to be in her “own” house and this is not it. I go to the family altar one day. It’s a wooden hub where all the gods and goddesses live inside picture frames or as small idols. I take one of my slippers and start thrashing with it the photo of Ganesha, the god of good fortune. I beat him black and blue, my toddler mouth lashing in tandem, “Why aren’t you giving Grandma her own house?”
- SRINIVAS PURI
I will learn to be patient.
We’ve moved houses again, but this too, isn’t Grandma’s own house. She has worked to rehabilitate refugees who fled into India after the country’s Partitioned independence but hasn’t yet been rehabilitated herself. She and Grandpa also lost all their property overnight when the country was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947.
It’s a sarkari (Hindi for government-owned) accommodation she has been given. This is where I will make my first real friends with whom I would laze on summer afternoons, sampling tart raw mangoes with chili powder and playing pitthhoo. This two-room house with grey cabinets that packs the six of us – me, my brother, our mother, grandfather, grandmother and maternal uncle – is the happy haven where mother helps me with school work and grandfather keeps up with my post-school meal tantrums. This is where I learn the algebra of a community. The buckets of water my anemic mother draws during summer months from the house on the ground floor to cope with the water scarcity bothers me but I’m not yet big enough to share her load. Neighbours help us forge equations by letting us watch Sunday telecasts of Hindi films and cricket matches on their televisions, women (mothers and grandmothers) huddle on charpais to knit sweaters in the winter, Janmashtami and Ram Lila celebrations every monsoon and autumn see both adult and children kick butt as different neighbourhood groups try outsmarting each other in decorations and performances.
This is also where I learn the chemistry of fear.
One October morning, the prime minister, the same one who declared the Emergency ten days after I was born, is assassinated. I’m nine years old now. Her death makes parts of my city combustible. Members of the Sikh community – the one to which the two bodyguards who shot the PM down belonged – are dragged out of their houses and burned alive. Many of them are torched inside the taxis they drive across the city. The violence is allegedly carried out at the behest of the ruling party to avenge its leader’s killing. On our neighbour’s faces, I see the terror that emerges when fire reacts with fear. Section 144C is clamped in various areas, making it illegal for groups of people to gather in public. Women become widows overnight, their children fatherless, their families left without any earning members.
The violent killing of our prime minister has shaken me, but I’m unable to grasp the burning mayhem that follows. I think of Baby as I hear about Sikhs being burned and butchered. Only a year ago, I was part of a small crowd that had huddled in the living room of Baby, a lanky Sikh teenager, and her family living across us shared. We were there to watch the finals of the 1983 cricket World Cup. India had startlingly entered the finals and faced the formidable West Indies team. As we watched the nail-biting final over, holding our breath, the collective gasps transformed into yowls of joy. India had just beaten the West Indies and our cheers along with those of Baby and her folks became louder as the Indian captain lifted the World Cup, his big grin refracted on our faces.
III. C. R. PARK
I am finally double digits old, and Grandma finally has her own house. If you could call it one, that is. She’s no longer entitled to a government quarter and has been pushed to the wall to get the construction of her house started on the modest plot of land she bought in another corner of South Delhi. When the six of us arrive in our semi-constructed new house, we don’t yet have an electricity connection. My brother and I have to soon get used to studying in candlelight and armies of mosquitoes as we prepare for our impending half-yearly examinations.
The area we’ve come to live in is named after an Indian freedom fighter, but this is its cosmetic name. It has another, more official name – EPDP Colony. The last two letters of that abbreviation – expanding to Displaced Persons – bear the genetic code of our family history. Unlike the mostly voluntary displacements that have seen me move to four different houses in the ten years of my life so far, those two words point to a more sinister, irreversible type of displacement. The kind Grandma and Grandpa experienced when they lost what Grandma calls their “Desh,” literally meaning one’s country, but in essence meaning homeland, to the Partition of India some thirty years before my birth. She tells me about the country’s division along its eastern and western borders. She and Grandpa came from the east, and after years of negotiations, a group of folks, including Grandpa, were able to get the central government to sell them plots of land at a subsidised price.
Three years after we move to this house — I am teen now and I bleed every month – there’s a lot of bloodshed in our colony. A group of Sikh gunmen have attacked the neighbourhood on the eve of Kali Puja, when Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction is worshipped. In the years following the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, the prime minister killed by her bodyguards, demands for a separate Sikh homeland gain momentum, resulting in one of the most violent periods of insurgency in independent India.
There are four different worship venues spread over the colony and the gunmen go from one to the next to hunt their victims. I’m in one of the venues, playing the harmonium for my friend as she sings in a music competition. I’m supposed to sing after her. She can’t complete her song, though, and starts weeping in the middle of it. I wonder what has suddenly made her so nervous and by the time I understand the reason, all I know is that we need to run as fast as we can. There’s commotion all around. My eyes search for my mother in the audience. As soon as I spot her, the three of us join the terrified crowd to make our escape. A neighbouring resident gives us shelter. Cramped in his family’s living room I blankly watch the TV where a weekly biopic on Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal king, plays. An hour or so later, we get a hitch from a car and make it home, where my grandparents are oblivious to the harrowing events gripping the neighbourhood. When they hear about it from us, they are as relieved to have us back unharmed as they are shocked. Over the next several weeks, we reel in fear as we learn how close neighbours were gunned down not too far from our house. The gunmen, apparently on a mission to avenge the high-handed anti-terrorist measures of Punjab’s Bengali governor, choose to shoot men dead right in front of their wives and mothers, even as they spare the women and children.
About a month after the dark night of Kali Puja that never came to be for us that year, I find a small scrap of paper that I take to my grandparents. It has these words written in Hindi, “Beware and be prepared.” As my grandmother reads it aloud, I can see the panic it brings to both her and Grandpa’s face.
“Who could it be?” I probe them and while they don’t offer a direct answer, I’m advised to be more careful. We need to be on our guard, Grandma says. The worry on their faces deepens, and I can’t take it any longer.
“I wrote that note,” I tell them. We all have a comforting laugh as they rebuke me. The house nameplate behind which was the letterbox mocks me for days, weeks and years, asking why I carried out that cruel prank on the two people who helped develop the very foundation of who I was. I am unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.
This house, my Grandma’s own, will become my most intimate, most unforgiving secret-hoarding twin. It will grow as I do, bleed in its puberty, struggle restlessly for identity in its youth and eventually reconcile to the inevitability of coming of age. This is where my mother will attach wings on me to help my creative talents soar, find the money from her meagre salary to enrol me to dance and music classes, teach me the art of reciting Bengali poems and songs to sing at Durga Puja competitions, and take me from one venue to the next for inter-school music competitions. This is the house where she’ll have a custom cabinet built to house and display all my prizes.
In the end, the house will turn into my sole mate as its cold hands pull me inside its crevices when I’m fifteen. My grandparents will die within a year of each other, leaving me an empty nester. Only, I’m a fledgling here, with no experience of flying.
I will learn to give in to the ghostly clasp of a brooding house.
I finish school, go through university, join the workforce. Governments come and go – from the right, centre, to a medley of right, left and everything in between. Mosques are razed to the ground, self-immolations take place to protest against reservations to lower castes in education and jobs, more blood flows through the streets and more terror attacks rock the country. I keep descending deeper and deeper into my cave.
One day, I quit full-time work and become even more home-bound. Every morning, I walk on the terrace, taking in bird calls and morning scenes – children off to school, office traffic, and vegetable vendors with their heaped carts. For the first time in decades, I feel relaxed, inside and out. Embracing my introvert soul wholeheartedly, I become a part of virtual writing and blogging communities, the online world safely cocooning me in a mesh of seemingly like-minded souls.
I come across a fellow blogger whose family history follows a track similar to the skewed trajectory of my own. We are both second-generation refugees, with borrowed nostalgia and quilted memories we’ve inherited from our grandparents. We’ve both, him more than me (he’s from Punjab), been scarred by and survived terrorism. We read and comment on each other’s posts and write guest posts on each other’s blogs. We go on to collaborate on the editing and publication of a book written by an activist working with Adivasis in Central India. Two years after we first meet through our blogs, we get married.
After twenty-four years of living in this house, my grandmother’s own, I step out of it.
From home to the world, I’ve carried with me my mother’s hardship, the politics of my homes, and my grandparents’ displacement anxiety. At the same time, I’ve also been able to transcend some of these through an admixture of time’s healing passage and the unique circumstances that became a part of my story.
That’s more than a refugee heir could ask for.