In my father-in-law’s house in Kolkata, there is no garlanded photograph of my late mother-in-law. When I visited for the very first time, while still in college and newly in love with the 19-year-old SJ, I had been a little surprised by that.
Having two parents and four grandparents bookending my only-child life in nested sets, the only concrete experience of loss I’d had was when I was eight and my great-grandmother turned from my playmate and best friend into a framed photograph on the wall. She’d had a full life, my great-grandmother, if a difficult one. My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was only 39 when she died, leaving behind her two boys one in college, one in middle-school—and her grieving husband, who had nursed her himself through the long battle with cancer.
Later this year, SJ, her younger son, will turn 39. After which, year upon year, he will grow older than Mummy, a thing he still finds strange to comprehend. Even though he lost her more than 25 years ago a quarter of a century, a whole ashram in Hindu life on some days, in some seasons, the grief feels as raw and inchoate as ever. At other times, when the edge is eased off it, she recedes into her usual place in family anecdotes, that imaginary town where all our parents and our parents’ parents reside permanently. He remembers: ‘Mummy always wanted to retire to the countryside, build a two-storeyed-house with a red roof and a garden. If there were surprise guests, Mummy would slip into the kitchen and in no time at all make a pulao with chicken. Mummy loved lending libraries. Mummy loved eating chaat.’ My favourite story about her though was how she got her name. Her youngest sister had recounted this to me, and the reason I love it so much will soon become apparent. (Heads up: writers are shameless thieves.)
A classical beauty even as a child, she had been called ‘Dolly’ at home. Her father was a professor at the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, and the four siblings had had something of an idyllic life on campus. One fine day, when she was eight or nine, Dolly decided that her name was too common, and she announced that her new name was going to be ‘Indira’. As oral history requires certain leaps of imagination, one can make the assumption that her choice was inspired by Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister of India in January 1966, something that made Mrs G an icon for girls not only in the sub-continent but across the world. Eventually, the family came around and the necessary paperwork was done. As she cast off the old name, like a sweater or a necklace casually tossed away, her youngest sister, still a toddler at the time, picked it up and asked for permission to use it: “Can I be Dolly then?” she begged. Permission was granted. SJ’s aunt subsequently became—and has since stayed—Dolly.
Years after, when Priya Kuriyan and I were working on Indira, our graphic biography of Mrs Gandhi, this anecdote returned as a fictional conceit in the way real life enters books obliquely, via strange backdoors.
The most charming—or infuriating, depending on which end of the ‘sorted’ spectrum you occupy—the thing about my mother-in-law was that she was terrible with directions. As my father-in-law remembers, she could get wildly lost within a 500-metre radius of the house. Luckily for me, this came in handy. You see, directions are not my strong suit either. While in my first year at Presidency, I was meant to lead SJ and another senior to a shop in College Square—a shop where I had hung out that very morningbut I never could find the place. Even after wandering in its vicinity for hours. (In my defence, it was evening and everything looked different and maybe the shop was of phantom origin in the first place.) SJ was reminded of his mum. And that is how it came to be that the mother-in-law I had never met became an honorary member of the vague woman’s club I would go on to found—fictionally, that is. My own mother, naturally, is the opposite of vague.
Years later, once my sister-in-law Vinu and I had both become residents of that house, we came to understand in an unspoken way the reasons behind the absent garlanded photograph. In my father-in-law’s bedroom, my mother-in-law’s clothes still hung in the almirah as before. In the study, her books still sat on the shelves, the old Mills and Boon novels (spectacularly chaste if you were to compare them to the current crop), the stack of magazines with clippings of old recipes inside, old letters in the drawers of SJ’s writing table. My sister-in-law and I learnt to arrange our lives around her things, the ivory-inlaid end tables and the Jane Austen novels, the very objects that kept her alive instead of memorialising her in her own home, and in that, we got to know her three men better too.
Devapriya Roy
roydevapriya@gmail.com
Author and teacher Her latest book is Friends from College