and conservative. Kona was rarely seen alone in public. Her mother, Mrs. Sen, was built like a river barge and towed her daughter around like a tiny dinghy. I remembered Kona vaguely as a moonfaced girl with downcast eyes. I knew she had been engaged to be married since she was a child. It was an arranged match between the two families, but I had not expected her to marry the likes of Manik Deb. It was like pairing a stallion with a cow.
“Is he Bengali?” I finally asked. Had I known Manik Deb was Kona’s fiancé, I would have avoided talking to him, let alone engaged in silly banter about koels and crows. My face flushed at the memory.
“Oh yes. He is a Sylheti like us,” Dadamoshai said. “The Debs are a well-known family of Barisal. Landowners. I knew Manik’s father from my Cambridge days. We passed our bar at the Lincoln’s Inn together.”
Barisal was Dadamoshai’s ancestral village in Sylhet, East Bengal, across the big Padma River. The Sylhetis were evicted from their homeland in 1917. Once displaced, they became river people. Like the water hyacinth, their roots never touched the ground, but grew instead toward one another. Wherever they settled, they were a close-knit community. You could tell they were river people just by the way they called out to one another. It could be just across the fence in someone’s backyard, but their voices carried that lonely sound that spanned vast waters. It was the voice of displacement and loss, the voice that sought to connect with a brother from a lost homeland—and the voice that led Dadamoshai to connect with Manik Deb’s father in England.
“A most extraordinary young man, this Manik Deb,” Dadamoshai was saying, helping himself to some rice.
“How so?” I asked. My appetite was gone, but my stomach gnawed with questions.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what makes Manik Deb—like you say—so extraordinary?” I tried to feign noninterest, but my voice squeaked with curiosity. I absentmindedly shaped a hole in the mound of rice on my plate.
“He has an incisive, analytical mind, for one thing. Manik Deb has joined the civil service. His is the kind of brains we need for our new India.”
Chaya, our housekeeper, had just entered the dining room with a bowl of curds. She was a slim woman with soft brown eyes and a disfiguring burn scar that fused the skin on the right side of her face like smooth molten wax. It was an acid burn. When Chaya was sixteen, she had fallen in love with a Muslim man. The Hindu villagers killed her lover, and then flung acid on her face to mark her as a social outcast. Dadamoshai had rescued Chaya from a violent mob and taken her into his custody. What followed was a lengthy and controversial court case. Several people went to jail.
Dadamoshai turned to address her. “Chaya, Boris Sahib will be having dinner with us tonight. Please remember to serve the good rice and prepare everything with less spice.”
With that, Dadamoshai launched on a long discussion of menu items suitable for Boris Ivanov’s meal, and Manik Deb was left floating, a bright pennant in the distant field of my memory.
CHAPTER 2
On the day of the school inauguration, Boris Ivanov donned a magnificent Indian kurta made of the finest Assamese Mooga silk, custom tailored to fit his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound Bolshevik frame. He gave a rousing speech, and just as he was walking across the stage in his fancy mirror-work nagra slippers—which any Indian will tell you are notorious for their lack of traction—he inadvertently stepped on a fallen tuberose. His foot made a swiping arc up to the ceiling and the nagra took off like a flying duck. Boris Ivanov yelped out something that sounded suspiciously like “BLOOD!” I later understood he had yelled “Blyad!”—a Russian expletive—before landing with a thundering crash that sent quakes through the room. A horrified groan went up in the audience; small children shrieked, and in the middle of it all, I saw fat Mrs. Ghosh roll her eyes heavenward and whisper to her neighbor that this was allokhi—a very bad omen indeed. Just as well Dadamoshai did not hear her, because he would have flattened her out for good. My grandfather had very low tolerance for “village talk.”
Boris Ivanov was forced to change his itinerary. He had planned to leave for Calcutta the next day to visit Rabindranath Tagore’s famous experimental school in Santineketan. Instead, with his leg cast in plaster, he moved into Dadamoshai’s house as our guest and stayed with us for three whole weeks.
He accepted his fate cheerfully and slipped into our life with barely a ripple. He was a big, bushy man, bearded and baritone, who spent long hours reading and writing on the veranda with his plastered leg lying on the cane ottoman like a fallen tree trunk. Most afternoons he dozed in the plantation chair with the house cat draped over his stomach, his snores riffling the afternoon. He woke up to drink copious amounts of tea with four heaped spoons of sugar in each cup, blissfully unaware that it was wartime and sugar was in short supply. He spent the rest of the evening contemplating the universe.
The veranda was the most pleasant room in our house—open and airy, with soft filtered light creeping through the jasmine vines. Dadamoshai’s big desk sat in one corner against the wall. On it were his piles of papers weighted down with river rocks and conch shells. His blue fountain pen sat snugly in its stand, right next to the chipped inkwell and a well-used blotter. There was a calendar with bird pictures on the wall, busy with notes and scribbles on the dated squares.
A door from the veranda led to Dadamoshai’s study. It was packed from top to toe with books of all kinds: art, philosophy, religion, poetry and all the great works of literature. Here The Communist Manifesto leaned comfortably on Homer’s Odyssey, and the Bhagavad Gita was wedged in by Translations from the Koran. Just as comfortably inside Dadamoshai’s head lived his thoughts and ideas—separate skeins interwoven with the gentlest compassion and wisdom to form his rich philosophy and outlook on life.
Boris Ivanov was writing a treatise titled Freedom and Responsibility, a rather obtuse and philosophical work full of difficult arguments. He spent long hours debating ideas with Dadamoshai on the veranda. India was on the cusp of her independence after more than two hundred years of British rule. A great renaissance was sweeping through our nation and many social and educational reforms were under way.
Many people considered Dadamoshai a great scholar and independent thinker, but others saw him as a blatant anglophile and called him an English bootlicker. He was unabashedly Western in his dress and liberal in his thoughts. He lived frugally and thought deeply. He did not take siestas in the afternoon and cursed fluently in seven languages.
Dadamoshai believed that women were not given a fair chance in our society, largely due to their lack of education. Why were Indian boys sent to study at the finest universities abroad, he argued, while girls were treated like some flotsam washing in with the river tide?
Traditionalists accused Dadamoshai of rocking the social order and luring women away from their jobs as homemakers. What good would it do for women to bury their heads in math and science? Or, for that matter, to go around spouting Shakespeare? Pots and pans would grow cold in the kitchen and neglected children would run around the streets like pariah dogs.
In many ways, Dadamoshai saw me as the poster child for the modern Indian woman. He gave me the finest education and taught me to speak my mind. I was free to forge my own destiny. Sometimes I struggled to stay grounded like a lone river rock in a swirl of social pressures. But in truth, this was the only option I had.
* * *
Miss Thompson, my private English tutor, lived in a small primrose cottage behind the Sacred Heart Convent. A spry woman with animated eyes, she had about her a brisk energy that made you sit up and pull in your stomach. Her father, Reginald Thompson, the former
