I was barely out of my teens then. It was one of those periods of my family when the fate of the new generation seemed uncertain. I was failing in physics and my brother had received a second class degree in his graduation. I was lying on one side, hiding the phone between by ears and the pillow, hoping that my mother wont notice it. I was waiting for someone to call, when instead of the phone vibrating, i heard stifled sobs. I turned to my mother, asked her repeatedly whether she was feeling alright or did something happen when I was away for tuition. Instinctively, I went to my brother and urged him to do something to make my mother stop crying. My father hadn't heard us till then. I felt confused, even more when I discovered my brother was in tears, asking for forgiveness. I heard that my mother wanted to leave us and go away. It had something to do with her "failure" to raise us properly, about my father never taking stock of his duties as the head of the family. I was standing at the doorstep, guarding it, hoping that that symbolic barrier would make my mother reconsider her decision.
And somebody spoke from behind and I went into a dream...
My brother was born in the year 1982. The year Thomas Keneally won the Booker prize for Schindler's Ark and the census was conducted all over the country. Sex ratios were found to be severely skewed. The Jadavpur University(where I'd study eventually) campus was under siege. SFI activists from the neighbourhood were pouring in with seriously violent intent. Within five minutes, the girls on the campus linked hands and put up a human chain, vowing not to let the goons in. The girls, not the boys. That day, it was the girls, risking personal injury or worse, who protected the boys.
My brother was closer to my mother than I was or will ever be. The irresponsible younger son takes after the father, so much so that he had once expressed a desire to put down in print, the illustrious life of his father. If you ever come over to our place, you will find the drawing room bearing a distinct mark of my father having inhabited it. Portraits, trophies, plaques, his graduation souvenir from the Royal College, his crystal ashtray tucked underneath the sofa in a desperate attempt to quit smoking. I looked upto him for one of the reasons my mother disliked him. He never told us what to do or not to do. His taboos were unspoken and carefully avoided. His liberal progressive behaviour couched a strange malaise.
I left the city to discover myself, almost selfishly. I will do it again, despite being reminded of the family values passed on to me. The need to stick together, to grow in society, not in isolation. Can we ever truly isolate ourselves before death? I can't,which is why I come back to this house, the Calcutta house. It was the summer of 2012, when my mother spoke about his problems to me for the first time.
When my mother first found out I was going out with our neighbour's daughter, she dragged me by my ears, from the community market to our little flat. She tried to reason with a "rebel." How our first loves envelope our consciousness, how we spend hours being infatuated with the idea of being loved and how Bollywood manufactures a notion of how love is supposed to happen. It seemed funny and irrelevant back then. All my childhood grievances came rushing back to me.
I remembered how she had dropped the popcorn when the love scene in Titanic was about to screened in Globe. I only heard gasps, all around, while i meticulously picked up the things someone else spilt. Everytime, a kiss was shown on Star Movies or HBO, the channel was promptly changed till one day, while watching a film with my father, I changed the channel before the "thing" happened.
My mother dealt her trump card by bringing up the issue of their marriage. I suddenly stopped thinking about my childhood experiences and weighed every word she used. She claimed theirs was an extensive period of courtship, culminating in a marriage, when they suddenly realized they are not meant to live and love under the same roof. My father had never taken my mother out post marriage. I shuddered at the strange parallels that were being setup in my mind. Owing to low pocket money, I had taken out my the-then girlfriend on dates, only thrice in three years. I really hoped I wouldn't take after my father.
My mother was crying again. If I were in her place, I would have either run away or cried every single moment. She told me how my father had neglected her, all his married life. He didn't have other vices, he was always a godly figure to the outside world. She lived in his shadow, he-a flame which disregards what feelings live or die in his shadow. He likes spending time with his guy friends than my mother. I used to see my mother going out for films or plays, alone. She often asked me to accompany her to the plays, explaining how I might enjoy it all. Who knew I'd evolve into a theatre addict. My father never read a single story book or watched a single film after his college days. He has survived on an unhealthy diet of three bengali daily and four different news channels, for some 20 years. He has been a stark contrast to Ma. Only once I went to the book fair with him and he gave me a total of 10 mins to choose the book I want and leave as early as possible. My mother held my hand, in queues outside bookstalls as I grew up poring through the books she thought I'd enjoy reading.
My father's malaise was that he never discussed things which seemed alien to his own culture. His beliefs had to be our beliefs. We were to laugh with him when my mother screamed and shouted at the cook or when she squabbled with the domestic help for bungling her work. We never had a male domestic help. But my father sometimes helped with cooking. Sometimes, when my mother was ill and couldn't get out of bed, baba cooked for us and Ma took care of herself. Baba seldom asked Ma whether she was feeling better or if she needed any medicine. Strangely, I followed my father's precedence and didn't ask her anything. Are doctors supposed to take care of themselves, counsel their own psyches, heal their own scars?
On Christmas eve this December, after shutting the doors and windows to the mosquitoes and the Yuletide spirit, I ventured to switch on the light in my parents' room. Ma was sitting up, with her hair open, leaning on one side, looking at my father. My father had turned his head to look at me. In my mother's hand was the machine to draw blood from my father's hands and test his blood sugar level. They were lying under one blanket.
Ma wiped her tears after telling me about baba's neglectful nature. I confessed to her that i might have inherited some of that attitude. Then, almost in a confiding tone, she whispered,
"Ever since you and your brother left for work/studies, your father and I started sleeping in the same room. I hope you don't mind."
