The Lone Lady

The car stopped outside my Grandmother’s red brick house at the dead end of Ashok Row in Ganguly Bagan, Kolkata. I got off the car and stood there awhile to absorb the view of the house. The mango and the coconut trees in the surrounding garden spilled out of the brick wall demarcating it. The Rongon plant outside the main door stood as usual, spiralling its branches across the grills of the verandah, occasionally bursting out in red and mauve flowers. The house had not changed one bit, I thought.

As I opened the blue gate and entered the house, Ma’s wall art of Buddha’s ‘Enlightenment’ greeted me. The walls had been freshly painted a nice tinge of sea-green, leaving out the section of the wall art. The remnants of the old white wall could be seen smiling from the back of the artwork. Beneath the painting was Ma’s signature – “Rashmi, 1965”. But this was not my favourite of Ma’s paintings in the house. I walked ahead and rang the bell.

 “Hi Dida!” I screamed, as she opened the door.

“Oh my, Teesta! When did you come from Bombay?” she asked immediately, hugging me. Her eyes beamed with a glimmer of happiness, despite the usual frown.

“Just yesterday”, I replied, taking my shoes off.

“What will you have? There is rice and fish curry. Ah, you should have told me earlier that you were coming. I would have cooked something nice.”

“It was meant to be a surprise Dida”, I explained. “And please relax. I will have tea.”

As we walked through the passage towards the dining hall, many of Ma’s paintings and wall arts smiled at us. Amongst them, occupying the largest space on the white wall of the dim lit passage, was my favourite of the lot – the lone lady. Ma drew it when she was a teenager. The beauty of the lady in the painting, and the fact she was happy being just with herself, always enthralled me. Perhaps I loved it because I could relate to it; because my time in Dida’s house had always been my escape route. It was a tiny getaway for me to unwind, far away from parents and school. Just like the lady in Ma’s wall-art, Dida’s house was my little window of ‘me time’.

Dida signalled her house maid to make some tea, as we sat down in the dining hall. The dining table was almost clean, unlike how it used to be when I was little. Back then, it used to be crowded with a multitude of things - a steel jug, glasses, jam and pickle jars, a glass holding spoons, fresh fruits, a large bottle filled with plain tomato ketchup made by Dida, and many utensils containing food items for the ensuing meal, depending upon the time of the day. The window sill right beside the table, used to have an array of glass jars filled with biscuits of various shapes and tastes. There were rusk biscuits for the morning tea, small jeera biscuits for the evening tea and a jar especially for me, filled with sweet and salty butter biscuits. Now there is only one jar, containing mixed biscuits, which probably Dida ate with her tea.

“I had sent you some tea from Sri Lanka, did Ma give it to you?’ I enquired.

“Yes she did, thank you’, she smiled and added “Oldies don’t need so many gifts, little girl. Come and visit me when you can. That would be a nice gift.”

Her words made me a bit mellow. It was true; we get so busy with our routine lives that we forget to pay attention to the people who made our yesteryears. I tried to change the topic.

“Can I go and see your room for a bit?”

“Of course! I’ll call you when tea is ready” Dida replied.

For as long as I can remember, Dida’s bedroom never needed a tube-light during the day. Sunshine gushing in through the windows would automatically bathe it in natural light, as it did now. During my stays in the house, I would spend hours browsing through the drawers of Dida’s dressing table. Each drawer would be opened by turn to take a look at the items they contained. Hair clips, some foreign coins which my Dadu collected from his travels overseas, old photographs, long forgotten lipsticks, bus and tram tickets, and the likes. To me, it would appear that each item had a story to tell. When was the last time Dida wore lipstick? Where was that photograph taken? Can I put these coins in a piggy Bank? The questions were many and my curious self would invariably construct stories to answer these. I smiled, imagining myself as a little drawer-ransacker.  

My Mama (Uncle), who lived in the first floor of the house, would cleverly encash out of my knack for browsing through dressing tables. He would often assign me the task of cleaning his dressing table tray, which had similar display of various items, except fancier. I would do it, albeit not as pleasurably as Dida’s one, and arrange his colognes, perfumes and combs neatly on the tray.

I wandered into Dadu’s room, adjacent to Dida’s bedroom. Dadu’s single bed had been neatly stowed into one corner of the room. His chair and desk were unruffled, still containing some of his beloved possessions – a few books, a laminated photograph of him at the University of Chicago, old diaries and some pens. It had been four years since he passed away, but the room refused to give up the ‘Dadu smell’. I could still hear his voice in my head:

“Dadu, early to bed, early to rise,

Makes a man healthy and wise”

A small window in his room opened to the verandah overlooking the road outside. How many mornings of mine began in that sunlit verandah! Every day, before breakfast, Dida would give me a glass of warm milk, sweetened with jaggery, which I would take to the verandah. I would absorb the view of the chaos of life, while sipping on my milk. There would be the rush of the office goers running to the bus stop, the laughter of the neighbourhood aunties as they took their mid-morning break from chores and the sound of the students reading their lessons in chorus in the adjacent school, occasionally interrupted by the honking of the cycle rikshaws. This was also the place where I would read my story books in peace, often accompanied by a seasonal fruit to nibble on.

“Would you like some sweets with your tea?” Dida’s voice came piercing through the living room passage.

“No, please. Just biscuits are fine”.

I decided to take a quick glance at the backyard, before I was summoned for tea. After lunch, Dadu used to prepare a mixture of curd, rice and leftover fishbones, to be distributed to the resident cats in the backyard. They would all be neatly assembled near the tube-well, welcoming Dadu with loud ‘meows’ as he came in through the back door. Dadu would serve them dollops of the mixture, which they would swipe off without any waste of time. They must have really enjoyed it. Now, there was a lone cat, lazying on the boundary wall of the backyard, without a care in the world.

Back at the dining table, the tea party was set. As we immersed ourselves in conversation, occasionally dipping the biscuits in tea, time passed us by. Even back then, my day, betrothed in reading books, playing the harmonium, feeding cats and doing some gardening, would be over as quickly as the tea in our cups. There was no television, no internet and nobody my age to play with. Yet, what a busy day it would be.

When I left, Dida stood in the verandah, waving me goodbye. I could see her face slowly turn grim again. My car faded out of the lane.

In that visit, my only regret was that I could not get an appropriate gift for Dida. No matter the number of tea packets, sarees and shawls that I bought for her each time, material gifts could never make up for lack of intimacy.

“Should I take her on a holiday?”

“ Would she like to visit me in Mumbai?”

I was sitting in office, brooding over these thoughts, sipping on a cup of tea. Suddenly, my phone buzzed, breaking me away from my thoughts. It was a Whatsapp message from Ma.

“Tanwi gave Dida a wonderful gift!”

My sister, Tanwi was in Kolkata, for her annual homecoming.

“Is it Darjeeling tea? Dida was complaining to me over phone that her maid always buys those tea powder packets instead of tea leaves” I typed.

“No no, it is much better than that!” Ma replied.

Her text was followed by a photograph captioned ‘The Lone Lady 2020!’. As I clicked on it, a beautiful painting spread across my phone screen. My sister had drawn a re-invented version of Ma’s depiction of the lone lady, right below the original wall art by Ma at Dida’s house. Only in this one, the lady had earphones on. She was listening to music, while enjoying her ‘me time’.

In the photograph, Dida, draped in a black shawl with colourful embroidery, stood by the side, admiring the little addition to the walls of her house.

Her frown had disappeared. She was smiling.