Deoghar Memories

I never saw my grandfather. None of my other innumerable cousins, except the first two, did either. He had died way before any of my uncles baring the first one had even married. He died of diabetes that went undetected till he started to turn blind.

To me grandfather meant a black and white photograph on the wall. Him sitting alone on a chair. This I later discovered was enlarged from another group photo where he was sitting with his entire family for a typical family photo. He had a big moustache. Wore a dhoti and a coat. Short cropped hair. He looked very grave and serious with his moustache and a heavy framed round pair of glasses that we used to call the Gandhi frame in childhood. He looked every inch the patriarch of the family.

But I grew up with funny stories about him that showed he was witty and had a brilliant sense of humour. From these stories, told by my father and my uncles, especially Sejoka, I grew up to love him.

After retirement when he settled in Deoghar – way outside the main town - he moved the British district administration to grant him a gun license apparently through the sheer good English of the application and a hilarious logic that he devised to prove how a rifle in his hands would save the administration millions of rupees!! The British District Magistrate issued the license to him without much scrutiny. There is no family tale of him ever having used the gun on anybody though.

In fact I have always harboured the secret ambition of owning a gun license, probably as a result of this story.

Dadu also used to have an obsession for crossword puzzles that used to come out in The Illustrated Weekly then. He dreamt of cracking it one day and getting the first prize, which reportedly ran into thousands of rupees in those days. I am told he never quite got it all correct in his life. It’s quite a shame that none of my uncles imbibed this very English pass time or passed it on to any of us.

The stories of how he would lead his servants on were also hilarious. There was this character called Muni Singh, who wanted to build a house for him. And Dadu gave him a simple puzzle to crack. Muni Singh, all is fine, but how will you put the beam up? Muni Singh yeh beam kaise uthega? Apparently Muni Singh could never crack the puzzle and didn’t quite get to build the dream house for Dadu.

This question is still used in our family jokingly to humour any idiot who comes up with a grand plan on anything without a workable execution strategy. Or we simply call someone a Muni Singh and the rest of the family understands what we mean.

There was this other servant – a cook – who would urge him to have “one more bread” even after he was done with eating his supper. This is a common courtesy in India to request and urge the important man to eat a bit more than he can but beyond a point it can be quite annoying.

Dadu I guess was quite like me. If he said no, he meant it. One particular evening Dadu had had enough of this courtesy. He got annoyed but didn’t show it. When requested for “one more bread”, he quietly nodded. And then he kept on eating until all the bread stock was exhausted and then he got the servant to knead some more flour and make him more breads. I am told the servant learnt a lesson from this and never repeated the courtesy.

Dadu survived one of the worst natural disasters of his time. A serious earthquake that left several hundreds of thousands in his town and surrounding villages dead. Motihari. 1934. Though none in his family died, he had to live with the young boys (of various ages) and his wife in tents for months on end. He even operated his office – the district accountant’s - out of the tent.

Apparently that fateful day one of my uncles got trapped in his friend’s house across a bridge that had collapsed and everyone took him for dead. Dadu was quite unmoved. He was busy protecting the ones that survived and didn’t look perturbed about the one that was presumably gone. I guess when you have nine of them, you can afford to be a bit aloof about one or two.

There is just one story of Dadu ever getting angry with any of his children. It was my father who went on a bicycle with another friend across a dangerous forest – Hazaribagh to Ramgarh – crossing the Chutu Palu Up (I guess a small mountain). The friends they went to didn’t allow them to come back that evening, fearing they would be eaten up by tigers. The next day when the hero arrived home he was tied to a lemon tree and whipped the whole day. I don’t know why Dadu chose a lemon tree for this. I mean I have often wondered about it. Perhaps they didn’t have lampposts in those days in the small towns of Bihar. But I fully endorse what he did.

Having said that, I think my father was also quite a daredevil teenager (though he feels he didn’t think at that time it was a great daredevil thing to do). And I have a lot of respect for him for that. This is on my “to do before I die” list. Drive, yes drive and not cycle, from Hazaribagh to Ramgarh, the Maoists willing. I can’t cycle it up. I am quite certain about that.

I could feel Dadu’s presence most in the house that he built in Deoghar. My father used to take us to Deoghar to spend our puja vacation every year. About a month each year. That was the only place on earth where I could feel completely at home.

There were quite a few items in the house associated with Dadu. Two large easy chairs were the most prominent among these. There were quite a few other minor items as well. A few black wooden homeopathic medicine box of various sizes. A Bengali dictionary. Very thick and leather bound. One of the best dictionaries that Bengal ever produced. There were some old keys, kept in a metal bowl kind of thing. There was one other Calcutta Directory that was quite his favourite. It had lists of owners of all the houses in Calcutta. And his relatives’ names were marked by a fountain pen. If saved it would have been quite an asset in our family. But alas the book, as all his other belongings, just withered away or got lost or were never saved.

Didi and I used to play with these books and boxes in those lazy autumn afternoons of the 70s. I am sure those memories are as dear to her as they are to me.

I always thought it was a gorgeous house to have. I don’t know anyone among our friends and relatives and among our friends’ friends and relatives’ relatives who had not gone to the house for a short vacation. Virtually every month someone or the other would come to us to take the keys for the house and a handwritten note from Baba for our caretaker.

The house had some seven eight rooms. A separate kitchen. A caretaker’s room. Several bathrooms – mostly country style though. And a huge garden with fruit trees and a beautiful large well that was always full with water. There was a dilapidated cow shed with concrete cisterns for the cows to eat from. In its hey days the shed would surely have accommodated at least half a dozen cows.

The most attractive part of the house was the roof. It was at three different levels. And the walls of the roof were simply gorgeous – going up and down like a frozen sea wave. We used to light it up with butter lamps during Diwali and it used to look like a brilliant sparkling necklace from a distance against the backdrop of the dark night sky of Deoghar.

We spent countless afternoons in the small and cozy roof towards the front of the house, which was lower than the rest of the roof. You had to jump about three feet from the higher level roof to get into it. There were no stairs. It offered a certain privacy. You could look at the empty road in front of the house. But no one could see you. It had the added attraction of an Eucalyptus tree drooping into it and covering its floor with its dry fallen leaves and filling the air with the sweet lemony aroma of the leaves.

The front of this roof was shaped like a lotus in bloom. There were gaps between the petals (each petal at least two feet high) and we would walk dangerously in and out of them. Somewhere on this lotus was written “Bimal Saraju” the name of the house. Basically the name of my Dadu and Thakuma (who died even before Dadu).

The well was another source of pride for us. It was huge and had a solid cast iron grill covering the top. According to Baba there were several small springs inside the well that ensured year round supply of water. It was the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood and in the height of summer when the other wells in the locality would turn dry several families used to depend on this well for their water supply.

There was no mechanized way to pull water out of the well though. Therefore pulling water out meant you had to throw the bucket attached to a long rope and then pull it up. You had to stand on the circumference wall of the well to ensure that the bucket wasn’t scraping the side wall inside. This made it risky for children like us to pull out water from it and therefore it was Tilua’s task to do the job for us.

Every year Baba used to plan to build two pillars and a cross bar connecting them to hang a pulley in the middle to make the task simpler. But the mason’s estimate would always be way beyond his means and building the pillars always remained an unfulfilled dream for him that was continuously postponed for the next year.

Baba however had to take care of several other expenditure related to maintaining the house. There was the caretaker’s salary to be paid, taxes and general maintenance, which meant painting the house once in a while, repairing the outer doors for termite attacks and painting the millions of windows.

The biggest expenditure however used to be maintaining the huge wall that surrounded the property. It was easily about eight feet high and ran into at least a thousand feet, if not more.

Not only would it need to be cemented where the bricks were giving way, there was another menace. A small piece of farmland behind our property. Its owner used to dig his farm so close to the wall that it would collapse there every year. In fact every year that was the first thing he had to do.

The cowshed in the extreme corner of the property was quite in a dilapidated state. However, Baba never quite bothered to repair it. We were forbidden from going inside as it was full of weeds and being bitten by a snake there was a real possibility. Didi and I used to use the dry cisterns outside for a completely different purpose for which they were built. We used to lay out our fireworks, bought way ahead of Diwali, every afternoon to dry in the sun there.

I do not quite know if it was really necessary to do this but we would still do it every year very scrupulously. We just couldn’t take a chance with things going wrong on D-day and be left with damp fireworks that wouldn’t burst or light up. Diwali was sort of the high point of our stay there. It was not only big it would also herald the end of our stay there. We used to come back to Kolkata one day after Diwali – brother’s day.

On brother’s day, Didi and I would wake up early in the morning and run to the farmland behind our house to take a few strains of greenish paddy corns (the paddy would be ripe in another month), for her to put on my head as my blessings along with a few pieces of freshly pulled out green grass.

Ma would prepare a light watery solution by rubbing a small piece of sandalwood on a piece of wet stone. This would be used by Didi to put a mark on my forehead. And while touching my forehead with the sandalwood solution on her ring finger (Didi standing and me sitting on the floor) she would recite this short poem which basically meant, “I am putting a spot on my brother’s forehead, this brings thorns on the door of Yama (the messenger of death). Yamuna marks his brother Yama and I mark my brother”. This whole process would be repeated thrice.

A butter lamp would be on next to me. And probably Ma would blow the conchshell. After the ritual I would be offered some sweets. And then we would rush for the station in two small horse drawn carriages to catch the morning train that invariably came in the afternoon.

I go to Didi’s house on Brother’s Day almost every year. But somehow that charm of those chilly mornings of Deoghar isn’t quite there. We both silently get nostalgic about those days but hardly talk about it.