Our House
Updated: 3 days ago
-Sanjukta Dasgupta
Our house was our pride. We were very skeptical about the proximity of our neighbour’s house. They were up to no good. Pretentious, pompous porcupines. Their smiles seemed like the flash of nuclear weapons. It is obvious we disliked them. But we spoke to them. They spoke to us. There was no love lost. For there was no question of any love between our two houses that housed us, porcupines, they, innocent lambs, us.
But Fate and God connived and a lissome teenager from our house, hung to the window, that faced theirs. And why not? The boy next door, around the same age as our lissome girl, was Fevicoled to the window, not just any Fevicol, but the thick adhesives used by packaging companies. The windows were dismayed. They were supposed to let in light and fresh air. But now the roles of these two windows that faced the two houses just created a bridge of smiles and sighs.
As all this happened in the seventies of the twentieth century. Mobile phones were unknown, in person relationships were the hottest thing among high school teenagers and young adults. So meeting the love target at cafes, parks, bus stations, under staircases, in homes when parents were out, and of course those dark as a cavern movie halls. Rendezvous spots were aplenty; it was just a matter of opportunity and inclination. Hand holding, touching, love making, anything was possible as it was possible in prehistoric times. Wedding was not compulsory, single motherhood was not uncommon, take the case of Kunti in the grand epic, as it is not compulsory now. Just woe betide the infants, that innocently emerged as fruits of love’s labour. If the mother was poor the kid was half-fed, half-clad, half-educated and half-human. Not the kid’s fault or the love making. But then if love making takes on the dual role of kid making, problems are inevitable, more so, if all this happens outside wedlock.
So Ritam, the boy next door, and our girl, Priya, what a name, her parents should have been more sagacious. Is there any point in naming daughters Priya and Radha? it’s auto-suggestion and conditioned reflex. They are bound to fall in love and mess up their lives and everyone else’s who may be related to them. I mean, blood relations. Deadly. Familiarity breeds contempt.
This time the complication was far more rooted in generational blood rather than the Romeo Juliet tragedy that destroyed two young lives, due to a false sense of honour, power, rivalry, contempt and impassioned unreason. Shakespeare fortunately was not aware of caste stratification and the granite blocks in the heads of those who believed that accident of birth was ordained by divinity. Divine interventions were fantasized; human interventions were weaponized. In such a scenario, what could lovelorn Ritam and Priya do? Their mutual parents stamped heavily on the ground beneath their feet and said that if they ever spoke to each other, they would be wiped out from the face of the earth.
Ritam wrote more than a hundred poems and two hundred letters in his secret diary that he hid under the mattress of his bed. Priya wrote five hundred letters. She was prosaic. Not poetic. If she saw a spade, she said, oh what is this spade doing here? Ritam was poetic. If he saw a spade he would see it and unsee it and fancy it was the trident of the powerful God Shiva, who was a fantastic dancer. Ritam could not dance. He had flat feet and knock knees. Not very helpful for dancing the tandava or the tango.
Ritam’s caste was considered the lowest of the low. His grandfather cremated corpses at the time when electric crematoriums were not known. When electric crematoriums arrived, they proved cost effective, time savers. Bodies were entered into the blazing crematorium and after more than an hour, re-emerged as a few fistful of ashen dust in a pot. Ritam’s grandfather dealt with cremating bodies in open air funeral pyres. Remember those horrifying Sati pictures? Blazing funeral pyre, the wife desperately trying to jump off the platform on which the lifeless body of her husband had been laid. The very thought makes one feel rebellious, like an aroused Nataraj dancing the tandava.
Well ordinary middle class life is very rarely so dramatic. It is subtle, surreptitious, depending heavily on equivocation, circumlocution and a sense of frustration embedded like a burning ember in the heart. Priya Ghosh was not a Brahmin, but a Kayastha. Probably Kshatriya if you try to give Kayastha a broader north Indian categorization. Ritam’s surname was a giveaway. Ritam Dom. His father Manik Dom studied in a free school and worked in the scavenging unit of the corporation. He did not cremate bodies, unlike his grandfather. Manik Dom’s only son Ritam was his pride. So when one day Priya Ghosh’s father and uncle Tapan Ghosh and Nirmal Ghosh arrived on a Sunday morning at their home, Ritam thought probably it would be a marriage proposal. He blushed. Yes, boys can blush too. Not being light-skinned his face looked pale purple, unlike the Caucasian young men, he had seen in movies. What to do. He wished he could have been born in America. To white parents. Not in this life. Must pray hard. I don’t want to be re-born in this poor country.
As a first year student of political science, Priya joined a girls’ morning college, a fifteen minutes’ walk from her home. In the afternoon the same college metamorphosed as a coeducational college. Ritam studied in the afternoon college. Same building. Different college. Different Principal. Different teaching and non-teaching staff. So it was easy for Priya and Ritam to meet, chat, and go off to films and cafes. Bunking classes was integral to student life. You did not have to be brilliant to know that. Ritam studied Commerce. He dreamt of becoming a bank manager. Priya wanted to be a school teacher. The two college going youngsters shared their dreams with each other. Neither wanted to be a diplomat or a Vice Chancellor. They never even remotely thought of such absurd career targets.
Tapan Ghosh and Nirmal Ghosh did not sit down on the sofa. They declined the offer of tea. Routine in Bengali homes. They looked straight at Manik Dom and told him that he should his son Ritam married. He needs a woman, they said. Understandable. But from today if we notice he is disturbing Priya, the local party boys will give him such a thrashing that he may have to be hospitalized.
There is no way in which our prestigious family can link up with a family belonging to the Dom caste. We can’t even write this embarrassing surname on the wedding invitation card.
Manik Dom had turned into a statue. Then his eyes moistened. He lowered his head and nodded. Priya’s father and uncle returned to their house next door. Ritam had overheard every word from the next room. He too was struck dumb. He was aware and self-conscious about his Dom surname. But he had firmly believed that love did not differentiate between Doms, Kayasths and Brahmins. The scales fell from his eyes at last. Ritam the poet somersaulted into the real world of class, caste, pride, prejudice, power and profit.
Not just low caste. But Dom. Funeral pyre handler. Corpses, dead bodies and burnt human ashes were a part of their lives. Priya was threatened by both her parents. Her mother wept as if Priya had died. Oh my God! Dom! Worse than Chamars and Kamars. Her mother kept on murmuring to herself whenever she caught a glimpse of Priya. That was easy. There were just three small rooms in their house, a small kitchen and one small bathroom.
Priya spoke to her close friends, Seema and Tania. Both of them agreed with Priya’s mother. Loving a Dom, marrying a Dom, when you are a Ghosh! What a loss of face. When you spoke about Ritam you never mentioned his surname. Of course, we did not ask you, After all, who can believe in one’s wildest imagination that the person you loved so madly and obviously blindly, belonged to the Dom community.
The windows that opened towards their houses remained shut from that Sunday. Never to be opened. Priya walked away when Ritam tried to meet her in the college corridor and when she walked back home from college.
Priya Ghosh wrote in her secret diary her last letter to Ritam. This was letter number five hundred and one.
Dear Ritam,
Though I have attended classes about B.R Ambedkar in the Dalit movement, I never imagined a crucial chapter content for getting through the examinations, would be examining me in turn. I love you Ritam, but I cannot marry into the Dom community. The very thought fills me with revulsion. You are refined, you write such lovely poems, you will get a great job after clearing the competitive examinations for which you are already taking tuitions. I will cherish our love for each other. But no. I can’t marry a Dom; I can’t have children with Dom as their surname. Please forgive me. I realize that despite blue jeans and pizza my real life is bound by traditional family beliefs and customs. I hope you will understand my love. Let the two windows that brought us together remain shut forever.
Priya
February 1971
Yes, Priya did not demean our house. Our house was our pride. After graduating, she started teaching in a middle school in Baghbazar. She married her colleague Gautam Ganguly who taught history in the same school. Needless to add, Gautam was Brahmin. Priya was Kayastha. Two rungs down in the caste ladder. Gautam’s family preferred this degradation. The best way to rein in a daughter in law with a job. You should be grateful that we condescended to accept you. Priya’s sense of self-esteem had never troubled her. She led a happy life ever after with her husband, in-laws and her Brahmin-Kayastha children, her son Milan and her daughter Srijita. Ritam Dom never ever appeared in Priya’s dreams. Though one night, Ritam appeared in a dreadful nightmare, that Priya could never forget.
About the Author
Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta is an accomplished scholar, critic, poet, short story writer, and translator who served as Professor (Retd.) and former Head of the Department of English at the University of Calcutta, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts (2007–2012). Her extensive body of work spans literary criticism, translation, and creative writing, with notable publications including studies on Huxley and Hemingway, several works on Tagore (such as Radical Rabindranath and Tagore: At Home in the World), translated Bengali short stories, and critical essays on gender and culture in India. She has also authored multiple short story collections and poetry collections.
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