“Da da, Ashapurna Devi’r barita konta?” (Which way to Ashapurna Devi’s home?) I asked a passer-by. I was in Kolkata’s Baghajatin area and the man seemed to be in his early twenties.
“What?” he took off his earphones. I repeated the question. He shook his head in a “I don’t know” and rushed off. Wrong age group, perhaps.
I spied a grey-haired bespectacled man in white pyjama punjabi eating singara from a teak leaf bowl at a sweetshop. He was a local resident, I was certain. In between his heaving and gulping, he was chatting loudly with the fat sweetshop man loudly proclaiming how the locality was going to the dogs — not only culturally and politically but literally too since homeless canines haunted the large reeking municipal garbage 10 paces from the sweet shop.
“Ashapurna Devi…” his voice trailed off in a soft dignified self-question and his eyebrows pinched up as he strained his memory. I looked on expectantly. Many million moments later his face untangled and he confidently said “Shay to onek dur ekhan theke” (That’s very far from here) and proceeded to give me directions.
I pointed to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation signboard right next to the sweetshop that read, “This is where Ashapurna Devi lived,” and added that I knew for sure the house was here and was merely trying to identify which exact house. The old man’s expression turned scornful and he seemed deeply offended that a good-for-nothing young man was wasting his time asking stupid questions. The sweet shop man silently agreed. If I wasn’t buying his sweets, I was wasting time.
A third man, who kept cows in that lane, pointed me in the right direction and said “Walk up the lane beside the ponds. It’s the big gate at the end. I walked down that path only to find two big gates. From behind one, a uniformed Bihari watchman was eyeing me suspiciously. I asked “Which of these houses is Ashapurna Devi’s?”
A grin revealed crimson betel-stained teeth and a shake accompanied his frank admission that he has never heard that name. Frustratingly, he advised me to ask at the sweetshop as they are ‘locals’. The attempt to find Ashapurna Devi’s home was becoming ridiculously difficult.
So I lowered my head, offered my prayers to the Sahitya Akademi award-winning Bengali writer who, despite bearing all the burdens of middle-class married women, became one of the most prolific writers of modern Bangla prose. But the prayers didn’t bring peace to my heart; at least not as much as I had hoped it would.
I cursed the old East Bengali man, the pot-bellied sweetshop man, the youngster, the watchman and the garbage dump. And my mind cursed back. “As if you are new to this sort of a situation?”
“But Kolkata is different,” I shot back furiously. “Everybody knows that…I’m perfectly justified in trying to seek such shrines in this city.”
“As if you don’t know that the place to find writers is in their writing?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you just sit by and let special people’s places wash off into the oblivion of the mundane?”
“As if you weren’t warned by Ashapurna Devi herself about how shallow old men cry about the world-going-to-dogs while pushing their personal agenda? Don’t you remember that story where a grey old man from the locality came to Ashapurna Devi’s home and asked her to stop writing garbage and instead wield her pen to drive some sense into the idiotic modern women and help conserve our glorious traditions? Traditions like preserving through practice old complicated recipes including (but not limited to) Chaapri Ghonto — after which the story is named? Did she not tell how the man went livid when Ashapurna Devi simply replied that not all old things need to be preserved; recipes keep getting lost; that it’s unfair to burden disinterested people with the additional labour of keeping recipes alive simply because they are women. And unlike your confrontational self, didn’t she tactfully disarm the man’s East Bengali gluttony masquerading as holy indignation by inviting him to tea and a snack of hot batter-fried onions?”
I needed time-out from arguments with myself. “One tea and one smoke please…na na plastic na…I want the earthen bhnaar ”. Leaving the garbage dump behind, I sat down on the wobbly stool beside a rickety roadside tea stall. As I pulled in the bitter calm into my lungs and the warm sweetness into my mouth, my mind spoke again; a gentler voice this time, “Why do you complain? She is all around you if you look. The mundane, which you reject, is the world she firmly anchored her writing in. Don’t you recognise that garbage dump full of reeking dripping kitchen waste, which found its way into her short stories and became poignant placeholders of the homestead? If you listen for long enough, I’m sure you’ll hear quite a few Subarnalatas waging their wars in their homes pushing at the limits of the standard family — urging their men to go beyond merely increasing their age, money and progeny”.
My phone rang. “I’m on my way. Where should I pick you up from?” asked the real estate agent. “I’m in the Baghajatin area.”
“No, I mean where exactly?”
“Wait I’ll ask.” I put him on hold and asked the tea vendor, “A man wants to pick me up. Where exactly is this?”
“Tell him you are near Big Bazar.”
“I’m near some Big Bazar.” I relayed
“Baghajatin Big Bazar? I know that well. You wait right there, I’m coming”
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