After dinner, we sent to the magazine store Brittons. We encouraged Amrita to get an Archie comic. All her friends are hooked on them and we'd like to get her hooked on something to help her reading.
I got the summer fiction edition of the New Yorker, because there is a story by Jhumpa Lahiri, whom I love. The story is called Brotherly Love and is an excerpt from a novel that will be published in the fall. I thought I could see if I may like the book - that is, if I can manage enough concentration to read the story.
The story is about two brothers in Calcutta during the Naxalite era. The Naxalites were a militant communist party in India, and in the 1970s, they tried to recruit young men to their party. I have a vague memory of them.
It is 1977 and my mother takes me to Calcutta by herself. I am 7 years old and I miss my father. I don't know who the Naxals are except one day, they come knocking at our door - my grandparents' house with whom we are staying. My grandparents are panicking and my memory is that are hiding my uncle, who was in his twenties at the time, in the linen closet that was behind the main bathroom in the house.
Was I in there with him? Where was I exactly? I don't remember. All I remember is that my grandparents were able to convince the Naxals that there were no young men in the house. I'm glad that my father wasn't there.
Was I scared? I don't remember. Just that it happened. And what happened the next day? I don't remember anything else in particular, except that every day was hot and languid, and we only had power every other three hours. And that the mangoes at teatime were better than any you could taste here. And you couldn't go out anywhere until 5:00, when we would go to my rich aunt's house by the lake, and they would order sweets and yogurt and drinks like Fanta and Thumbs Up and Campa Cola, and sometimes my mother would let me have some of it. And they had a white fluffy dog named Don that I loved to play with.
Otherwise, the days were long and boring. I missed my father and asked my grandfather everyday if I could call him. But it was too expensive in those days.
I loved being with my grandmother, though. Dida. I followed her around everywhere and napped at her side on the floor in the afternoons. And I cried and cried every time we left her to go back home. Every time, it would be in the monsoon season that we were leaving and the roads would be flooded making it impossible to get to the airport. My rich aunt's husband, my uncle, would take us in his Ambassador car, driven by the driver who was nearly blind. And he would get out of the car, directing traffic himself to help us get through the traffic jam.
We never missed out flight, though sometimes I wanted to. But then I was glad to be reunited with my father.
Just these vague memories looking at the New Yorker story. We all read our magazines together before bedtime. Amrita did a great job reading her Archie comic.
No comments:
Post a Comment