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Chapter 1
In the mind’s eye, a one-way procession of flickering oil lamps sways along the muddy shanko between rice paddies and flooded ponds, and finally disappears into a distant wall of impenetrable jungle. Banks of fog rise from warmer waters, mingle with smoke from the cooking fires, and press in a dense sooty collar, a permeable gray wall that parts, then seals, igniting a winter chorus of retching coughs and loud spitting. Tuberculosis is everywhere. The air, the water, the soil are septic. Thirty-five years is a long life. Smog obscures the moon and dims the man-made light to faintness deeper than the stars’. In such darkness perspective disappears. It is a two-dimensional world impossible to penetrate. But for the intimacy of shared discomfort, it is difficult even to estimate the space separating each traveler.
The narrow, raised trail stretches ten miles from Mishtigunj town to the jungle’s edge. In a palanquin borne by four servants sit a rich man’s three daughters, the youngest dressed in her bridal sari, her little hands painted with red lac dye, her hair oiled and set. Her arms are heavy with dowry gold; bangles ring tiny arms from wrist to shoulder. Childish voices chant a song, hands clap, gold bracelets tinkle. I cannot imagine the loneliness of this child. A Bengali girl’s happiest night is about to become her lifetime imprisonment. It seems all the sorrow of history, all that is unjust in society and cruel in religion has settled on her. Even constructing it from the merest scraps of family memory fills me with rage and bitterness.
The bride-to-be whispers the "Tush Tusli Brata," a hymn to the sacredness of marriage, a petition for a kind and generous husband:
What do I hope for in worshipping you?
That my father’s wisdom be endless,
My mother’s kindness bottomless.
May my husband be as powerful as a king of gods.
May my future son-in-law light up the royal court.
Bestow on me a brother who is learned and intellectual,
A son as handsome as the best-looking courtier,
And a daughter who is beauteous.
Let my hair-part glow red with vermilion powder, as a wife’s should.
On my wrists and arms, let bangles glitter and jangle.
Load down my clothes-rack with the finest saris,
Fill my kitchen with scoured-shiny utensils,
Reward my wifely virtue with a rice-filled granary.
These are the boons that this young virgin begs of thee.
In a second, larger palki borne by four men sit the family priest and the father of the bride. Younger uncles and cousins follow in a vigilant file. Two more guards, sharp-bladed daos drawn, bring up the rear. Two servants walk ahead of the eight litterbearers, holding naphtha lamps. No one has seen such brilliant European light, too strong to stare into, purer white than the moon. It is town light, a rich man’s light, a light that knows English invention. If bandits are crouching in the gullies they will know to strike this reckless Hindu who announces his wealth with light and by arming his servants. What treasures lie inside, how much gold and jewels, what target ripe for kidnapping? The nearest town, where such a wealthy man must have come from, lies behind him. Only the jungle lies ahead. Even the woodcutters desert it at night, relinquishing it to goondahs and marauders, snakes and tigers.
The bride is named Tara Lata, a name we almost share. The name of the father is Jai Krishna Gangooly. Tara Lata is five years old and headed deep into the forest to marry a tree.
I have had the time, the motivation, and even the passion to undertake this history. When my friends, my child, or my sisters ask me why, I say I am exploring the making of a consciousness. Your consciousness? They tease, and I tell them, No. Yours.
On this night, flesh-and-blood emerges from the unretrievable past. I have Jai Krishna’s photo, I know the name of Jai Krishna’s father, but they have always been ghosts. But Tara Lata is not, nor will her father be, after the events of this special day. And so my history begins with a family wedding on the coldest, darkest night in the Bengali month of Paush – December/January – in a district of the Bengal Presidency that lies east of Calcutta – now Kolkata – and south of Dacca – now Dhaka – a s the English year of 1879 is about to shed its final two digits, although the Hindu year of 1285 still has four months to run and the Muslim year of 1297 has barely begun.
In those years, Bengal was the seat of British power, Calcutta its capital, its cultural and economic center. The city is endowed with the instruments of Western knowledge, the museums, the colleges, the newspapers, and the Asiatic Society. The old Bengal Presidency included all of today’s Bangladesh, the current Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of Assam, Bihar, and Orissa. A reconstituted Bengal Presidency today would have over 330 million people and be the world’s third most populous country. China, India, Bengal. There are more of me than there are of you, although I am both.
The eastern regions of Bengal, even before the flight of Hindus during the subcontinent’s partition in 1947, and its reincarnation as Bangladesh in 1972, always contained a Muslim majority, though largely controlled by a sizeable and wealthy Hindu minority. The communities speak the same language – Muslims, if the truth be known, more tenaciously than Hindus. But for the outer signs of the faith – the beards and skullcaps, the dietary restrictions, the caste observances, the vermilion powder on the hair-parting of married Hindu women – there is little, fundamentally, to distinguish them. The communities suffer, as Freud put it, the narcissism of small difference.
The Hindu Bengalis were the first Indians to master the English language and to learn their master’s ways, the first to flatter him by emulation, and the first to earn his distrust by unbidden demonstrations of wit and industry. Because they were a minority in their desh, their homeland, dependent on mastering or manipulating British power and Musim psychology, the Hindus of east Bengal felt themselves superior even to the Hindus of the capital city of Calcutta. Gentlemen like Jai Krishna Gangopadhaya, a pleader in the Dacca High Court, whose surname the colonial authorities lightened to Gangooly, and who, on this particular winter night squats with a priest in a palki that reminds him of wagons for transporting remanded prisoners, was situated to take full advantage of fast-changing and improving times. He spoke mellifluous English and one high court judge had even recommended him for a scholarship to Oxford. Had he played by the rules, he should have been a great success, a prince, and a power.
Jai Krishna’s graduation portrait from the second class of India’s first law school (Calcutta University, 1859) displays the expected Victorian gravitas and none of the eager confidence of his classmates. He is a young man of twenty-three who looks forty; his thick, dark eyebrows form an unbroken bar, and his shadow of a mustache – an inversion of prevailing style that favored elaborately curled and wax-tipped mustaches – reveal a young man more eloquent with a disapproving frown than his words. For ten years I kept the graduation photo of Bishwapriya Chatterjee, my husband – Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur – on our nightstand. Last icon before falling asleep, first worshipful image of the morning. The countries, the apartments, the houses all changed, but the portrait remained. He had that eagerness, and a confident smile that promised substantial earnings. It lured my father into marriage negotiations, and it earned my not unenthusiastic acceptance of him as husband. A very predictable, very successful marriage negotiation. Had Jai Krishna been a native Calcuttan, or had he come from Dacca, Bengal’s second city, he might never have suffered the anxiety of the small-town provincial elevated into urbanity. In my mother-language we call the powerful middle class ""hadra lok," the gentlefolk, the "civilized" folk, for whom the English fashioned the pejorative term, "babu," with its hint of fawning insincerity and slavishly acquired Western attitudes. The rest of the population are "chhoto lok," literally, the little people. Jai Krisha Gangooly lacked the reflexive self-confidence of the bhadra lok. In his heart, he was a provincial from Mishtigunj, third son of a village doctor whose practice included the indigent and Muslims. He felt he’d been lifted from his provincial origins because of his father’s contact sin the Calcutta Medical College. He was not comfortable in the lawyer’s black robes and powdered wig.
And so, the story of the three great-granddaughters of Jai Krishna Gangooly starts on the day of a wedding, a few hours before the palki ride where fates have already been decided, in the decorated ancestral house of the Gangoolys on the river in Mishtigunj town. The decorations signify a biye-bari, a wedding house. Beggars have already camped in the alleys adjacent to the canopy under which giant copper vats of milk, stirred by professional cooks, have been boiling and thickening for sweetmeats, and where other vats, woks, and cauldrons receive the chunks of giant hilsa fish netted fresh from the river and hold the rice pilao, lamb curry, spiced lentils, and deep-fried and sauce-steeped vegetables, a feast for a thousand invited guests and the small city of self-invited men, women, and children camped outside the gates.
Copyright C 2002 Bharati Mukherjee
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