A boyhood Memoir : My Choto Pishe

  An extract from 

My Choto Pishe :

 A boyhood memoir -

Goutam Moitra 

 

It’s a song that is lost in the winds of the earth. But the winds still carry a few reveries of that journey. He swam in the lake in the odd mornings of summer and a few times I was lucky to accompany him. He swam with ease while I struggled with my strokes. One time, I was on the brink of being drowned. That saviour hand stretched to get a hold of me in that moment. But his face would not make you feel that it could turn so serious with the deep waters welcoming me into their womb. On school holidays, we would visit his house so often. His house that was just a quick stroll away on a route and in those days  people loved to stroll through it. And  if it was a morning,  a barber would be sitting with his tools on call in the visitor’s room attending to him , as he leisurely lay down. In those days, children were often rebuked for listening to Radio-stations airing anything other than the local programs - the Stalinist dictate. On the contrary, I had a reverence for that house. It had a huge library, with books on every subject. And there was my Pishe who made it a haven for intellectual discourses. Sarat Chandra volumes were aplenty. If Sarat's thoughts made waves across every corner of the house, the revolutionary poet Nazrul - with his collection of poems and songs - was not far behind either.  I developed a curiosity about Nazrul then, not by reading a single line about the poet (who had been just declared the national poet of newly freed nation of Bangladesh) but  through recitations of a series of poems that Choto Pishe would act through with inimitable  enthusiasm  erupting out of him like a thunderous roar and we imagined there would be clouds grumbling and the thunder and rains that would come falling outside the room, in tandem.

My boyhood was crowded with more than one Pishes. One Sir would love to take us  on a long drive to the Hindu temples of Calcutta. Another Sir would be fond of taking snapshots – beautiful pictures he would capture with his Canadian Camera that had an Instant Photo print-out option which was extremely rare in India at the time. It will be another day, another time, when the pen may walk the pages for them. But today my  pen is going to sing a song for the humble man – my ChotoPishe.

Those big eyes were amusing to behold and so intense that they'd  pierce through your very soul - those pair of eyes still look at me, so many decades past - he was married to my dad's youngest sibling , we called him 'Chhoto pishe' – Choto stands for the "younger" in our Bengali language.

One fine evening, I saw Pishe on the stage enacting a play and I found no words to express my joy. That happiness was pure like the love of a devotee for his God. Yes , he was my hero, who lived and still lives in my world of make-believe. 

 

Races race ahead . Populations multiply and DNA lines grow - animals, instinctively, fight to guard their own territory. So do our Homo Sapiens Sapiens . Primeval instincts. Cave-men chased away by the village-folk. And villages chased away by towns. And towns pulled into the polluting  grasp of concrete cities. A cycle that pulls humanity back to a chaotic dead end, one of an unlivable earth. The greed that was unique to  humanity ceaselessly clashed with the inherent survival instincts of lives since mankind discovered the ways to generate a surplus. It is the same untamed greed that drove cracks and clashes between communities, divided by every conceivable ill-judged binary including religion, race, blood-lines that forced millions to migrate and families get scattered, disjointed  in the tidal waves of time.   The same lust for power led to Bengal being partitioned into the Eastern ( now Bangladesh) and the Western ( now part of India) halves. 

There were millions of people who are branded 'Bangals', a term that may seem humiliating to a few. But  for those migrants from the East, such was their infatuation with the word that they wore it like a badge of honour. They spoke in a dialect that bubbled with sweetness while the ‘Ghotis’(what the local landed Bengalis of the West called themselves) kept taunting and mocking them. Yet the Bangals survived and began to dominate in every field of pursuit. And the binary slang dispersed into thin air in no time – Ghoti-Bati became part of Bengali culture as time welded them together. The Bangals  left behind their beautiful homes in faraway, picturesque lands to huddle into the concrete jungles of Calcutta -  each soul carrying with them their generational histories and a million memories of a land that only existed now in dreams. Those lands  across the borders had the maddening beauty  reserved for the rarest of places on earth. And my chotopishe came from that land.

The land of Bengal is a land of zero-sum risk takers - people hate to take risk. Whether its the rebel saint Vivekananda or the protagonists of all the Ritwik-Ray movies – they search for white-collar jobs which spring up like oasis in a vast desert. And the real heroes or the heroes of movies face the conflict of life. But my ChotoPishe was unique. While most people in our community love to be in servitude and not be business owners themselves, he was the only one from our family who had already taken a plunge into the realm of entrepreneurship. A  small scale manufacturing unit in the backyard would radiate strange noises in a tedious  monotony to announce that while life is a challenge, it's worth taking a bow in a boxing ring. Once on a holiday visit, he sat in our drawing room, and shared his thoughts on the best assets of any business. 

"t's your goodwill, boy! Your promise to any deadline. That's your biggest jumping pad, always remember! A promise given must be kept at any cost." 

Those were fresh words to the virgin ears of a boy whose memory were crowded with stories from servants – the white collar service holders . However, in a later future date , a business tragedy led to chotopishe discontinuing that unit but he radiated that free-willed outlook till the very last of his days.

Chotopishe always carried a small pouch. 

Wherever he went, that pouch would stay at his side like a pet. It contained loose tobacco. While going on a long talk about , say, Saratchandra   - the popular novelist - my pishe would first go completely mum. He would then take out a pinch of tobacco in his left palm, make it into a small stick and then place it upon a small rectangular white piece of paper. He would then turn it and roll the paper, licking its end and turning it to make it into a cigarette . After lighting , and taking in the first puff,  he would close his eyes and begin talking about the many conflicts between Tagore's "Ghare Baire" and Sarat Chandra's "Pather Dabi". The discourse was meant to be turned into an essay that I would enjoy writing the following day.

The indomitable spirit. The roaring voice that recites poems, the characters that  act and essays that are penned. He was such a special gift to our family. One day I heard that Pishe was going out on a long tour to nurture his passion for acting - yes , as a proud member of a theatrical group . I was so eager to see the show on TV but fortune spurned me and I could not. Ever since then, I have time and again frantically searched through the net to get that record – but all of it seems lost in the cruel jaws of obscurity that time assuredly brings. (The legendary Rabi Ghosh was his closest actor-associate  that I came to know at a later date.).

I still remember that he would give surprise evening-visits to his in-laws so often because their house stood barely fifteen minutes' walk away from the Golf Clubbers near-by joint. He would be accompanied by Choto Pishi, my father's youngest sister. He would come with a large thonga packed with hot, fresh singaras. While savouring these singaras with steaming tea, he would be in the mood to enchant all reciting the poem "Vidrohi". If kids were near, he would impress upon them a rendition of "Kathbirali" another popular Nazrul poem. 

 

-- Kadhberali , kathberali , peyara tumi khao ? ( Squirrel! O Squirrel! Do you eat guavas?)

And then my grandfather, who would be listening attentively from another room, would shout after the recitation to make the point noted that the poem "Vidrohi" was in fact banned by the British and that they were no less frightened by Sarat Chandra's "Pather Dabi"( 'The Demand of the Road') either. So they banned that book too.

Then grandfather would proudly smile and explain to us all that during the initial days of the ban on "Pather Dabi", he managed to get hold of a copy of the book for a single night. And he finished it within that one night. My memory is now failing but perhaps he also told us that he read it in the moonlight to avoid getting noticed. In that era , people used to read in moonlight to save money from using oil-lamps. 

As we sat and listened to Choto Pishe who, like a God, would spread an ambience in the evening where family members would gather to appreciate the artist, and remain enraptured, and offered accolades when the renditions were over. Some days he would break into solo classical songs, taking his leave from the poets. A gentle curve of a smile would always hang around his loosely locked lips . And then a laughter would erupt out of the mouth like an unannounced storm and he would, in the meantime, enjoy a few jokes with his in-laws' family.

Even today, during family get-togethers, when we reminisce about the youngest son-in-law of my grandad and we talk about ‘Chitol macher mutha’ (an East Bengal Chitol fish delicacy) that he was so fond of that he would be eager to treat us all to a gala meal. On that picnic day, he would  closely dictate the whole cooking with sheer alert and love. There are men who love to eat and there are men who love to make you eat what he enjoys the best. He always fell into the later category – the culinary connoisseur.  My chotoPishi - the youngest aunt, over the years, also came to be quite a Kitchen-Queen under Choto Pishe’s  guidance. 

That was the era of gentlemen. The era of kept promises in an otherwise hostile business environment of Bengal. A time when an artist would treat his audience like a devotee seeking blessings from God. Souls that  loved to entertain guests. That was the way life used to flow. Ever so gently. That was the way men used to lead their mortal lives. And Calcutta in those days had no dearth of people to fall in love with. He loved to meet people - respected everyone with the assured poise and calm of a mountain. 

My Choto Pishe's Calcutta no longer exists but when I think of him,  the same winds gather strength and  blow like a gust as I travel alone in an empty Calcutta Tram moving like a snail on the electric track and passes off the GulfClub road (where he used to reside) , and the driver is always in a hurry to reach the final destination and call it a night. 

Before the pen ends its roll, and there is no end really as there is no beginning, I quote a few lines from the diary of an admirer - an admirer who blew his wind through a flute on an indomitable man’s  journey from mortality to a land of timelessness, of eternity. A land where everything is elegiac, serene and placid - a deep state of X dimensional life.

"The attending doctor has uttered the final word:

It's unto God. A matter of time ,

before the soul departs that tortured body .

Our uncle is lying in pain,

In that gloomy stinking hospital bed,

Counting his last days.

I peep through the hospital's cabin-door,

The world inside looks so pale .

There he lies in pain,

In a stinking gloomy bed.

Tears of anguish roll down uncle's cheeks,

He murmurs the tune of an old native song ,

As his sister sits beside him,

To sing unto his ears.

The gathered darkness inside the room vanishes.

Uncle begins to sing louder,

Joining her in a chorus.

The song they used to sing

Oh! so often in the distant past .

Uncle's eyelids begin to flutter,

Happy memories swell in his heart.

Then the voice suddenly ceases, empty,

Those questioning big eyes drop into sleep.

A stream of tears, warm, rush through his eyes,

In a heart-ranching flash-back of those sweet distant days!

Oh man! we may not change one's life,

But, can we break one's heart ?

Xxxxxxxxxx

1. Vidrohi recitation link 👇

       https://youtu.be/3gAaUU2zr7s

2. Kathberali recitation link 👇

https://youtu.be/9ZsywE5wX7g

3. Chitol Macher Muitha - revisit 👇

https://bongong.com/recipe/chital-macher-muitha

4.Calcutta Singara