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In Dear Reader A Writer's Memoir, Sankar Reflects On His Life And Youth

Sankar's Dear Reader, originally published as Eka Eka Ekashi in Bengali, and translated by Arunava Sinha, is his love letter to an ever-changing city and its people

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Dear Reader
In Dear Reader A Writer’s Memoir, originally published as Eka Eka Ekashi in Bengali, Sankar reflects on his own life. Translated by Arunava Sinha, this is Sankar’s love letter to an ever-changing city and its people.
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From his mother and grandmother to his teachers and headmasters, he writes fondly of the women and men who shaped his youth; and of legendary figures like Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Shibram Chakraborty and Sunil Gangopadhyay who stroll in and out of famous neighbourhoods like Howrah Station, College Street Boipaara and Burrabazar.

Here is an excerpt from Dear Reader

Be Happy, and may your family be perfect. These are the words of benediction with which my mother’s mother would bless her daughters and everyone else in the world. Images from that time swim up before my eyes after all these years and I am filled with regret at not having understood my grandmother despite having seen her up close.

She was a true beauty. Her name was Amritabala—and she was indeed an embodiment of sweetness. I can recall the appearance of my grandfather Khirode Bandyopadhyay clearly—tall, tending towards fair, not an ounce of extra fat on his body, a permanent smile on his face. The man himself was reckless and audacious, but we’ll come to that later. Although I remember him well, I cannot recollect my grandmother’s appearance as a married woman; I can only picture her as a widow, in white with closely cropped hair. Her face was one of god’s unique works of art.

She used to live in Calcutta’s Shyampukur area. When I was nine, my mother packed me off to stay with her after my final examinations.‘Be a good boy, don’t make any demands, and never ask about Bogola Mama,’ Ma instructed.

My grandmother’s joy knew no bounds when I turned up at the small house on Keshta Kundu Street. Dipping into the emergency funds she had squirrelled away, she made sure to get fish for her favourite grandson’s meals. Then she took me to the Kashi Mitra Ghat on the Ganga for a bath. The crematorium was next to it. Here she sprinkled water on the spot where my grandfather’s body had been laid on the pyre a few years earlier, muttering, ‘Om shanti, shanti, shanti.’

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Always a precocious child, I asked her, ‘What does shanti mean, Didima?’

Flummoxed by this unexpected question, she calmly answered, ‘You’ll know when you grow up.’

But I wasn’t one to give up. Now that I had asked the question I needed an answer. After her bath, Didima bought 250 grams of assorted fish from the road next to the ghat, along with some potatoes and vegetables which she bundled up in the anchol of her sari. Needless to say, we had no shopping bag. She handed me the fish in a paper packet. As a Brahmin’s widow she must have been loath to give off the smell of fish from her clothes immediately after a bath in the holy river, but with her favourite grandchild—her second daughter’s eldest son—staying with her, what was she to do?

Back in the house on Keshta Kundu Street, I began to wonder how such a meagre quantity of fish would do for the two of us. There were other reasons for concern too. The first: it wasn’t enough to buy the fish, you needed mustard oil to fry it—my grandmother may not have had enough in stock since it was close to the end of the month, she had to make what little oil she had last five days more. She had a special arrangement for conquering the family finances at month-end—this was to boil the rice with potato, dal and seasonal vegetables like radishes, and then add some salt from a little bundle. The country hadn’t been partitioned yet, so Himalayan pink salt was still available. Didima used to call it ‘shonduk noon’. Mustard oil in boiled rice and vegetables was a luxury, its absence didn’t matter.

Satiating me as much as she could with two different preparations, my grandmother would get down to her own meal of boiled rice and vegetables. She was seated on one of the two low wooden platforms, or pidis, and I, on the other. Like a fool, I asked, ‘What about your fish?’ She smiled.

‘I left it behind at Kashi Mitra Ghat for your grandfather.’

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That no one came back from Kashi Mitra Ghat, or that that was the reason my grandmother had given up onions, garlic, fish and mooshur dal was not something I was able to grasp. ‘This is the way of the world,’ she said affectionately, ‘you’ll understand when you grow up.’

The sheer number of things I would have to understand when I grew up was beginning to give me immense anxiety.

Instead of explaining further, Didima added, ‘There’ll be many things in this world you’ll have to think about when you’re a grown-up. Didn’t your grandfather tell your mother you’ll be a great scholar, another Ashutosh Mukherjee?’ My beautiful grandmother often bolstered her fair-skinned daughter’s confidence by hinting at a correlation between dark skin and high intelligence.

One of the things Didima did tell me was that eating fish and wearing colourful clothes after one’s husband’s death would invite harm on the family.

I pressed her to explain what this meant. Finishing her frugal meal, she said, ‘Everyone in the family should prosper and be happy. How will that be possible if we invite harm on them?’

I used to think she was foolish for choosing austere food and attire simply to ensure no harm befell others. She didn’t even have a line of vermilion in her hair like my mother did. When I mentioned this, she said, ‘You mustn’t say that, it will bring harm on the family, there won’t be peace.’

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Excerpted with permission from Sankar's ‘Dear Reader’ translated by Arunava Sinha; and published by Harper Collins Publishers India. You can also join SheThePeople’s Book club on FacebookLinkedIn and Instagram.


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