I grew up in a sprawling ancestral home in Kolkata, where my young, widowed mother moved with me, when I was all of two-and-a-half. It was a lonely childhood spent mostly by myself in stuffy corridors, shaded by the melancholic afternoon sun, or in narrow, winding balconies guarded jealously by looming, sepia-stained portraits of ancestors.
There was, frankly, little to look forward to, except for the languid Sunday afternoons when the whole household was in a sort of frenzy, awaiting the arrival of Chabi Dadu (literally translated as Key Grandpa), a staggeringly tall, swarthy man, who was always impeccably dressed in corduroy jeans and a full-sleeved red, striped shirt, his dense crop of hair carefully side-combed, his glasses tinted.
A widowed uncle of my mother, Chabi Dadu was a man who had travelled the world, and every week brought with him his imitable treasure trove of tales, some imaginary, others real.
And while his stories were colourful and copious, what made them easily relished was the way he talked about food.
Chabi Dadu had lost his wife in his mid-30s and had remained a bachelor ever since. He sensed my loneliness and would create a world of magic and memories. On one particular day, when I was about 10, he asked me if I had read Heidi, a novel about the events in the life of a young girl in her grandfather’s care, ensconced in the Swiss Alps, published in 1881 by the Swiss author Johanna Spyri. I answered in the negative.
‘Have you ever tasted cheese?’ Chabi Dadu said, curling up his nose.
‘Cheese,’ I murmured, never having heard of, let alone tasted it.
It had been his dream to travel to Europe with his wife, he added, telling me how cheese always reminded him of snow melting over tall mountain tops.
As he told me Heidi’s story, Spyri’s periodic descriptions of melting Raclette cheese over a fire were enough to transport me to a blissful, imaginary world of my own, where like Heidi, I too was being brought up by my ageing grandparents.
The next evening, I made petulant demands of my grandfather to buy me cheese. He laughed, surprised that I knew about cheese — a foreign commodity back in the early 80s, and yet we trudged in a ramshackle tram to New Market, an iconic colonial market in the heart of bustling Kolkata, to find some. My mind buzzed with aromatic images of Chabi Dadu ’s retelling.
“He commanded her to eat the large piece of bread and the slice of golden cheese. He sat down himself on a corner of the table and started his own dinner.”
Finally, we were able to locate one store that sold imported cheese. I insisted on buying some for Chabi Dadu as well, hoping it would act as a bribe to help him complete the story the following Sunday.
I was scared to slice into the largish cube, back home, saving it for the time when Chabi Dadu would come by.
The moment I returned from school, I would rush to the refrigerator and take a delicious, long breath of the cheese. Bouncing it in my palm. Imagining Chabi Dadu and me biting into it.
“Heidi was running to and fro, for it gave her great joy to be able to wait on her kind protector. Soon the uncle appeared with the steaming milk, the toasted cheese, and the finely-sliced, rosy meat that had been dried in the pure air. The doctor enjoyed his dinner better than any he had ever tasted.”
The following Sunday, Chabi Dadu never came. I waited all day for him, listlessly. Hanging on to an unfinished story, and an uneaten block of cheese.
The next week, Ma bought me Heidi. “It was his last gift,” she wiped her eyes.
Chabi Dadu had passed away in his sleep.
To this day, whenever I eat or buy cheese, I am there, with him. In a world full of warmth and kindness, as seen through the eyes of a lonely child and her only friend.
The writer is the best-selling author of Sita’s Curse , You’ve Got the Wrong Girl and Faraway Music . Works in the pipeline are Cut! and her first non-fiction on single women in India, Status Single.
