Cinder

How can something so strange happen to anyone looking at a plate of food? A large puti fish, simmered in mustard sauce with coriander and nigella seeds, is served in a white porcelain bowl, thinly sliced fried potatoes next to it. I have taught Shyama how to make it like Ma did. She sometimes cooks well, sometimes passably. And that is enough for me. That fish in the bowl staring at me with its beady eyes is certainly not alive; it is dead enough to eat. Shyama brings smaller fishes like mourala, koi, parshey or young bhetki from local shops because online stores do not sell these varieties.

Where did you get this fish, Shyama?

They’re available here in the local market. I don’t know if you eat them. I thought I’d try them today.

Oh, this one’s a shorputi.

I used to eat a lot of it in my childhood. A fish that is small yet plump. It isn’t as flashy as the parshey, nor does it flap around like the koi. It is filled with tiny bones. Ma cooked it superbly. But then, she used a lot of oil in her cooking. I have taught Shyama to make it with less oil.

We didn’t have porcelain dishes in our childhood. The shorputi fish curry was stored in a steel bowl. The very same mustard curry. One particular day still comes to mind. I was in the fourth standard. It was an afternoon. Time ambled slowly. Ma hadn’t eaten yet. I usually finished lunch by half past twelve. She was cleaning the kitchen after which she went to shower. When she came out, her hair was wet. She put on a sindoor bindi, and then taking a little sindoor at the edge of the comb, she put it in her hair parting. She was about to sit for her lunch when there was a knock at the door. Phone calls weren’t common back then. Besides, people didn’t call before a visit in my childhood. I wasn’t too happy about the knock. Who could it be at this hour?

It was a woman, draped in a cheap printed-cotton saree, with just the marital red and iron bangles on her hands, and her hair in a messy bun. She had large eyes and a vacant smile. Thin, shy, unkempt. Have you had lunch, Tapu? Why did Ma ask such a question? The one to whom this was addressed squatted untidily on the floor and exclaimed, How cool is your home, Didi, it’s so hot outside! I have been roaming around since early morning and am very hungry now. Ma served the woman her own portion of rice, kept warm on the stove while she bathed. Warm rice. Boiled potatoes. A vegetable side-dish made with Malabar spinach and pumpkin. And that shorputi fish curry. Tapu devoured the food with her chest to the plate. She took a second helping of the rice. Mashed the boiled potatoes with oil and green chili. She chewed the thin spinach stems into carcasses that she kept on the corner of her plate.

Next came the fish. The dead fish seemed to stare at her. Issh … we weren’t rich, yet we left some fish uneaten, some rice always remained untouched in the corners of our plates, and I often finished my meal tucking away some of the vegetable underneath the rice. But this one? She stripped off the skin from the back of the fish and savoured it for a length of time. And she broke the fish into tiny pieces and polished everything off, bones and all, leaving just the head and the spine. Then, lo and behold, she chewed the head to dust! Did she never have fish in her life? Next, she snapped the spine into pieces and sucked out every joint. Ma sat in front of her with a smiling face. And at the end of the meal, Ma gave her a kamalabhog. We always had sweets in our house. Ma placed the pot of sweets on a brass plate with a glass of water on it.

Tapu was our distant relative, wife to one of Ma’s cousins. Our mami. I disliked her as soon as I laid eyes on her. She snatched my mother’s glass and drank from it. She looked the hungry, greedy type. I had never seen a woman of the house behave this way! Gulping down the water in one swig, Tapu said, Ah! You have given me life, Didi. I was so very hungry!

As soon as Tapu left, I jumped on Ma, rather pettily I must say. Why did you give her such a large piece of fish? Ma frowned and said, So should I have served her just the rice with the spinach charchari? Wouldn’t she have slandered us when she got back home? Your Bachu mama’s entire family would have known. After some time, she smiled and said, It’s not just that, she doesn’t get to eat her fill. And because she suppresses her hunger so often, she has grown greedy. Perhaps I didn’t know this because, unlike Ma, I had never seen her before. But after that day, I saw her every now and then.

I used to go out with Ma quite often after school to buy a few odd things. It was something Ma and I liked doing. One day, to my great surprise, I saw two men leading Tapu by her elbows to the alley beside Bharati Cinema after the matinee show. Tapu was wearing a tant sari, a jasmine strand in her bun, and that same ill-fitting, daft smile on her face. I discerned a connection between her hunger that day and those two men grabbing her elbows. As if whatever was transpiring wasn’t to Tapu’s liking, as if embarrassment hid somewhere in that inconsequential smile. Ma’s face was stern. She pulled me away and began walking on the footpath. Tapu’s husband, Bachu mama had a paltry job, and he tutored students for extra income. His perennially irritated face had a sharp nose and an unkempt, bluish beard, and he looked worn out by household responsibilities. Tapu didn’t get any spending money. She was overwhelmed with the pressures of running the household on a meagre income. What could she have done but to hustle on the streets?

A few years later, when I was in class seven or eight, Ma let slip something about Tapu’s life somewhat unmindfully, but she quickly changed the topic and said, That’s why you should study hard. If you don’t have money, if you’re not educated enough, this is what a woman gets. In those days, one did hear gossip about women from rich households in Kolkata earn in the thousands as escorts or pleasure companions. None of them were school drop-outs like Tapu. I came to know of the depreciation of women’s labour in the household during my graduation, how they should be paid for their work.

Poor Bachu mama, how could he pay his wife for her service in their household? Mrinal Sen had already demolished whatever little economic gap there was between the poor middle-classes and the slum-dwellers in his film Kolkata Ekattor by showing how they lived in close proximity to one another after the Bengal Famine of 1943. No, Bachu mama and Tapu couldn’t survive in the slums anymore although the cheap rent would have benefitted them. They lived in a one-and-a-half room apartment now, similar to the one they lived in before – one room to squeeze everyone in and sleep somehow, and half a room for the kitchen. The toilet and the bath were shared with the other families in the building. To use them, they had to wake up early and stand in a queue. There were many other renters, and so Mintu, their son, held place in the queue for the family. Their daughter was younger, six years old, and looked a lot like her mother. Hunger gleamed in her kajal-lined eyes.

The rent was sixty rupees. They could have saved forty rupees a month if they had stayed on in the slums. This was an impossibility now, and so Tapu had to take to the streets to earn something. But not money. Just a movie in some cheap seat in a cinema hall. And food. Chops, cutlets, sweets, kachoris, samosas. She couldn’t eat everything and brought some back home for her son and daughter. If Bachu mama ever saw any of it, he would snatch it and throw it away. Her son also smirked once he started upper school, disgust filling his features. Ma heard about it all from the other relatives on Bachu Mama’s side, the ones who came home and gossiped.

Bachu mama’s elder brother, Jagu mama was unmarried and ill-tempered. He was rude every time he saw Tapu.

And then one fine day, Tapu’s daughter left home and went away with someone. She had dropped out of school after her tenth-class board examinations. She didn’t really like being at home either, and traipsed around the neighbourhood much like her mother. She was found soon enough and married off to some lad in a perfunctory ceremony at the Kalighat temple, and no one knew what became of her after that. Tapu and her family somehow made arrangements for that rushed wedding. Contentment arrived, however, from the other child. Her son was studious and managed to get into a government engineering college, borrowing the money for the admission fees. Later, he got a job in Kolkata just like it happens in the movies. Their household became financially stable for a few years. Tapu mamima had aged as well. She could not take to the streets anymore for those samosas and kachoris fried in cheap oil. And even if she did, she got nothing due to her age. Her son had apparently rented a two-bedroom flat in Bhawanipore. He planned to ask his parents to live in one of those rooms.

A year later, when I returned to Kolkata, I heard Tapu mamima had passed away. She wasn’t old enough to die but had grown skeletal with lack of food. In her later years, she lived with Bachu mama’s elder brother. Just Tapu mamima with the ageing patriarch in that one-and-a-half-room rental. Ma remarked, What dreadful fate poor Tapu has had! Her son suddenly married his classmate. A registry marriage. He brought his wife to the flat, but not his mother. She sometimes came to Kolkata to meet him. He gave her some money from time to time. But that dried up soon enough.

Why? I stopped eating midway.

His in-laws didn’t approve of it, Ma said. After all, the deeds of his mother weren’t hidden from anyone.

What does that mean? Tapu mamima had never done anything just for herself.

I felt a sudden anger course through me. I recalled my childhood wretchedness about the shorputi fish.

Ma said, Poor Tapu! You know she used to sit outside her home, at the crossroads, waiting for her son. What if he came and didn’t find her. Just think! And then one day she draped herself in a cloth soaked in kerosene—

What are you saying, Ma?

She was burnt to a crisp, you know, yet she didn’t utter a sound.

I know, I muttered to myself. Hadn’t women always participated in Sati or Jauhar rituals? Men were seldom heard to take their own lives by burning themselves. It was something that only daughters do. Mothers too, from what I had seen. Women quietly burned themselves to cinders.

 Everything comes back to me now, clear as day.

Her landlord’s sons took Tapu to the nearest hospital after they watched smoke billowing out of her window. She didn’t survive long. Has Mintu come, Mintu? Tapu croaked as she searched for her son. Jagu mama instructed everyone not to bring her home from the hospital. He was the lone Khap Panchayat patriarch of the family. He couldn’t possibly let that ruined, sinful woman back in his house. So, from the hospital straight to the burning ghat she went. What else remained of her body that could burn?

As I sit for lunch now, ashes seem to rush at me from the porcelain bowl, as though they were embers from a pyre. Leaving the fish on my plate, I get up from the chair. I tell Shyama, The fish is burnt. You must have not flipped it properly. The curry tastes as bitter as poison.