Ani, my dearest, Remember Sumantra from Sagar? Who cooked for you, watched over massages done for you and Tubby. Remember Tubby’s Riot when he discovered he was captured nude on the video camera?
Here is my Ode to Sumantara: A Homage to a Life Beautifully Lived
(Sumantra died in Sagar on the morning of Christmas Day this year)
We have known Sumantra it seems for all lives
She came to us one day in February, almost forty years ago
Came as maid to my newly born baby brother
Continued as cook, housekeeper and mother….
On the edge of my self-centred adolescence
I knew little then of the great pain that she bore
She had been widowed and was living, a guest in her brother’s home
Having been through the death of three young sons, yet she went on….
Sumantra was our childhood, scolding us, threatening,
“Bagair kahein na rahein,” but never telling!
A home packed to capacity, Amma, Daddy, Sujata, Ratna, Guddoo,
Sushma Jijji, me and Vijay mama (that meant all his friends!)
I see her now, a diminutive figure, muttering,
Stoking the fire in the copper boiler
Filling buckets in the bathroom, stocking water for the day
Feeding us hot rotis from the chulha in the courtyard.
I see her, eating sparsely, saving the grain
Bathing and drying her two saris in the sun
Chatting with maids, drivers and old women
Making full her short and rare periods of rest.
I see her cooking that unending food supply
“Sare dina khat rait,” her voice weary of endless breakfasts
Then break into giggles, a part of conspiracies
Illegitimate boyfriends, love affairs and even elopements!
Life’s little solaces, were Shaival, whom she brought up
Then Sujata’s Roshni, Ratna’s Tanya and Tin Tin.
Always the child in Sumantra, ready to sing and dance and clap
As the kids made her wear a skirt, don a hat….
Sumantra rarely went to her brother’s home
At Sujata’s place she was presiding deity
No biological son for her last rites and yet, in loving and living
she had acquired many, many daughters and sons of her own….
On Christmas morning Tin Tin asked her if she would like to tea. By the time it came she had moved on….