Grandparents

A very old piece I found while rifling through the computer

I never knew my grandfathers. Commander Tapan Kumar Chatterjee, my nana, had the good fortune of dying before his failures reached their zenith. At fifty-two, he was a complete an utter drunk, hated his sons and didn’t much care for his wife. His daughter, on whom he doted in an unserious sort of way, had run off to do an IB in Canada. He had been passed over for the hundredth time, and was probably going to be forced to retire early, as a consequence of his drinking. The bloody puke, when it came must have been a happy purging before the end. He was dead within a week, and his children are fucked up in their own ways, Heroin for one, and booze for the other two.

My other grandfather, P.C Joshi, lived through every failure, and despite his place (small as it is) in Indian history, I know next to nothing about him. He was the first and youngest General Secretary of the undivided CPI, was expelled from the party for, you guessed it, being a revisionist. He was decried because he didn’t think national movement was complete hokum, and thought Gandhi and Nehru were worth admiring. No point blaming the party, they had a point. Everywhere commies have taken on social democrats as comrades, they have stayed commies no more, and end up having too many comrades on the wrong side. He didn’t take it well though, and while he was re-admitted to the party, the rest of his life was spent reconciling political idealism and organisational loyalty with a deep bitterness.  He had a number of strokes in his sixties, tried to set up a trust in Kumaon, which never worked out because he died before it could.

My grandmothers on the other hand were a distinct track in my childhood and beyond. They were both stuck with sons who were dealing with stupendous complexes about their fathers’ and despite their best efforts, they only seemed to exacerbate the problem.

Thakuma was at least as famous as her husband, one of the few women directly engaged in the armed struggle against the Brits, went to jail, became a communist, and was (and still is to some degree) something of minor folk hero in Bengal. After Kalpana Dutt became Comrade Kalpana Joshi, she was if anything exposed to a wider world both in terms of ideas , people and the actual world. She travelled to the Soviet Union, spoke fluent Russian, got a series of awards et al.  Before Alzheimer’s took her, she was still bus-ing it to work at ICCR in her late seventies. At seventy-something she fell down the stairs at our flat and broke her hip. The doctor assured her she would walk normally soon enough. She was worried about when she would be able to resume her morning skipping regimen.

Basically, she was for her time, a wholly remarkable woman.  And she left a train of fucked up souls across generations.  So her sons, born one year apart, were both supposed geniuses.  They were throwing out hints at potential, with double promotions and university-topping across Delhi (my father) and Moscow (my jethu).  This potential exhausted itself, as potential often does, before their prime.  They were good with women, as coddled Bengali boys tend to be. And for their part, within the limits of their personalities and poisons they were good to them as well.  Kalpana Dutt - wielder of guns and makers of bombs at seventeen – independent through marriage and much of what had to be pre Alzheimer’s dementia – was blind to her sons faults. More than that, she was blind to them as human beings, to their choices and their deeply warped sense of being.   

My father is thirty-five years old. He is drunk and playing table tennis at the Hindustan Times building. His mother, old already and venerable as all fuck, takes a bus from ICCR to his house in Hauz Khas heats up the lunch she has taken for him and lands up HT. He has eaten of course, and is passed out in what was meant to be a union meeting. ‘What the fuck!,’  you ask. Will this heroine of the freedom struggle, stalwart of the communist party stand for this.  

“Khokon aajke beshi khe neichelo. His friends force him you know, he is a good boy otherwise.”

Shipra Chatterjee has been carried through life, just so much driftwood flaking away with age. Her father had died when she was quite young, thirteen I think, and she had to suffer the ignominy of living in her mama’r baadi. Her sister grew up to be quite the intellectual, but she never had a chance. She trudged her way through school in Bengali backwaters. A distant uncle visited once, was impressed with her singing or recitation or something and decided to wed her to his son. His eldest son, Lieutenant T.K Chatterjee. It was a match made in arranged marriage hell. Dida had inherited her mother’s lithium imbalance and Nana, who had wanted to be a tabla teacher cowed under his father and left a white girlfriend, discovered he was colourblind and promptly became an alcoholic. Her sons, such as they were turned out to be disappointments and ass holes, in equal measure. Her daughter made choices that were far from a conservative families dream. Her nervous breakdowns, schizophrenic episodes were dismissed or explained away. Her husband didn’t beat her, not to my knowledge anyway, but it seems to be a marriage with a monotonous wretchedness as its undercurrent rather like a job you’re in just for the money. It was sometime after his death that she found something of herself. It didn’t turn out to be all that much of a self, not a Kalpanadutttype identity, but more than a lot of women with her background can find. The bosom of the Government of India opened up, and she was (and still is) entitled to a reasonable pension. They also gave her a flat. A fourth floor two bedroom in West Delhi, which was even further back of beyond then. Her children, apart from the Junkie were out of the house for the most part. 

The auto cant go any further. The road has just ends and all she can see are sprawling lanes. Babu mama is sweating and shaking. The dealer is surprisingly unshady, skinny as hell but dressed in a button down shirt and pants. Dida, still slim and only with the faintest hint of gray in her hair, scores some heroin for her puking incontinent youngest son.