A Ghost, My Grandmother, Russian Salad, and My Heart (rough, rough draft)
I'm told that my Dima spent her life wrestling morae, the marketplace, and the need to survive--like a diver in a slippery unknown deep--as she tried to feed, clothe and house her children (my Ma, my Mashu, and my Mamma) and herself, in Calcutta during the 1940s-1950s. She was one of the first women to stake a divorce. It didn't serve her. It didn't grant her the identity she knew to be hers. Instead, her divorce made her invisible to her great house, friends and family; and her endeavors, if anyone cared to trace them, were those of a ghost. My Dima's stories were told out loud at the end of a particularly rich and long dinner or at a gaiye'r hulud or more poisonously at first menses. She became a fable. She became a warning.
But for me, Dima was my North Star and in her I found my compass. My Dima was my first, best friend. She was my first feminist. She was my first love. She made me Russian salads with too much mayonnaise, quail eggs and shorshe'r thel. She bought me kites from the shiny, long-limbed, wise-cracking boys on the corner, and bags and bags of freshly made potato chips from the local shop. She was my first taste of power, of freedom, and she embodied my first notion happiness. And then, later in my life, she held my first broken heart in her hands on a rooftop in Delhi, and laughed. She told me that I would be OK. She told me that pain would always find me because that is the nature of hurt but not to worry because I would recover, learn, and outlast.
Over the years as a teenager and a young adult, I'd learn that Dima was living in a rented room or an SRO, in Lake Gardens or Gariahat and I didn't know enough to care. I thought it to be rakish, an adventure, and dreamed of our sleepovers. It wasn't rakish. It wasn't an adventure. And the reality of it didn't sink in. Because when I'd visit from the States, she and I would meet, eat, talk, gossip, laugh and hug. And often, she'd gift me with great extravagance. A significant broach made of a large tiger's claw, hunted dead by her father, wrapped in 24k gold, studded with subtle, winking jewels. A sari colored like daybreak, gossamer and gorgeous woven from mulberry skeins. A resplendent neck piece, vibrant with mina kaj, given to her when she turned 16. I'd like to think that I wondered "How did she manage all of that?" "How did she manage to be thrilled to see me when we left her behind?" But I was greedy and too easily seduced to understand anything else. And I reveled in her attention unwavering and warm as the sun. siver colored items to wear of the wedding
Dima lived on Royd Street when I was a child, in a postage stamp-sized apartment painted turquoise blue. Just by breathing she was a threat. She was a Hindu who had a soft spot for Jesus living in a Muslim neighborhood and she worked as a telephone operator, an insurance salesman and was an attractive, desirable, independent woman who had "boyfriends." I would later come to learn that the intricate, gorgeous German dolls my Mashu received as gifts were a sort of transactional payment. That the elaborate mangsho'r jhols she made for my Baba, newly wed to my Ma, came with a necessarily bitter taste. Because societal expectations lost come with a flavor that is impossible to soften, no matter how skilled a Goti Bengali hand that relies on jaggery or raw sugar to sweeten, uplift and make more palatable what's dished.
When I think of my maternal grandmother I think of cakes. I think of her high hopes and her sweetness, like when she sent an elaborate cream confection to my Ma, from Calcutta to Thalcher, on a train. I think of bottomless cups of strong tea. I think about nightgowns and house dresses. I think about Danielle Steele--where the heroine always wins--late night talks, and the never-ending shifts Dima pulled as a housekeeper at Lahey Clinic, finally green-carded, to stay busy and so she might die, working hard and laughing, as she'd always done, on the same landmass has her daughters who had H1-visa'd to the States. I think of what it must have been like to be a vanguard. A revolutionary. And although I'm told she's with me, I miss her. So much.
