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.
