The most prized possession in our family is a frayed autograph book, well used by my mother when she was a schoolgirl in the ’30s. It is coming off at the binding, but what it lacks in physical impressiveness, it more than makes up through its contents. A lot of the signatures in it, with somewhat ornate, stylised good wishes, are from her immediate elderly of those times. But in between the humdrum are strewn a few gems. There are autographs and sometimes good wishes from some of the most hallowed names of the pre-independence days — Rabindranath, Subhas Chandra Bose and Chittaranjan Das. My mother belonged to the earliest generation of Indian girls who formally went to school and national leaders made it a point to come to schools like Nari Shiksha Mandir in Dhaka to motivate those from among whom would come the flag bearers of independent India over a decade later.
It is no wonder my mother had an outsized faith in education. For her it was not just acquiring the knowledge contained in books but also the entire panoply of values that came with the right kind of education. Throughout our lives we would hear her ask, on seeing some moral or social lapse: What kind of shiksha have such people imbibed?
I was amazed at the extent to which my mother was disappointed when I quit my MA studies early as I had secured a job in the Statesman, then the most prestigious flag bearer of Indian journalism. She was unimpressed by what I considered a great achievement and kept asking if I did not consider it a distinction to enter and go honourably through the portals of a university.
Her greatest regret in life was she could not go to the university. Dhaka University then offered both undergraduate and post graduate studies but her marriage was arranged shortly after she passed the matriculation examinations. When my sister passed her BA and my father started looking for a suitable boy for her, my mother put her foot down and insisted that my sister first pass her MA.
The biggest hurdle my mother faced through most of her life was a lack of gender equality. My father, who was in many ways an exemplary parent, never could understand why my mother needed to have some discretionary spend, as part of her self-realisation process, when he never said no to any household expenditure. So she was determined that the absence of an MA degree would never hold my sister back from working and securing some financial independence.
Reading and writing copious letters was an integral part of my mother’s life. At social evenings, she animatedly discussed which new novel who had read. Pulp fiction, such as it existed then, was never on the agenda. In keeping with middle class women in her times, her values were very Victorian. Explicit personal details were not to be publicly aired. She disapproved of Ravi Shankar, airing the minutiae of his life with his second partner, in his autobiography serialised by Desh.
More From This Section
Life was quite unfair to middle class women of her time. They received just enough education to have minds of their own but then landed up in joint families through arranged marriages where they barely had a voice. And when children came it was one long incredible grind till they went to school. The only source of entertainment in those days was going to the movies, maybe once in three months. I still remember my mother telling me with a smile that for five years, that is till my sister and I were no longer toddlers, she did not get to see a single movie.
The inclusiveness of the joint family and practice of being generous to the needy at the fringe of extended households made women of those times intrinsically large hearted. They, in a way, saw themselves as mothers to everybody. Children of poor relatives who would grow up with the joint family would be treated exactly the same way as children of the family proper. No beggar would be turned away without a fistful of rice.
At the head of this informal social security system would be a matriarch, like my grandmother, assisted by a number of bahus. Their faces would be forlorn after a scolding by the mother-in-law and their day would be made when some grudging praise would come their way.
I grew up believing that all mothers were naturally kind and my mother more so, irrespective of the thrashing I got periodically when I fought with my cousins. Hence it came as a great shock to me when, on seeing me talk endlessly on the phone with girls from my co-educational college, she told me: Baba, whatever you do, do not marry a mussalman. I was aghast. How could she, who couldn’t hurt a fly, say a thing like that. Then it was that the memory of partition for people of my parents’ generation, the riots of Dhaka, the fact that we were living in Bhowanipur in Kolkata and not Wari in Dhaka which was our natural home, and the scars that all this left, came home to me.
Women of that generation were almost naturally god fearing and once they had crossed a certain age — with children settled, grandchildren arrived and infirmity catching up — their constant refrain was: When will bhagwan give me mukti? Seeing how well they understood when their time had come, I realised how stark was the curse of corporate hospitals and modern medicine which made a virtue of staying on and on.
Seeing the way she embraced her end at 86 the other day after a brief illness, I found so much peace in the bhajans and the detachment to list the milestones that made up the social history of the era that her life spanned.