My Aunt Dipsikha

My earliest memory of my Aunt Dipsikha goes back to a sunny day in a green tree-filled park near our house where she had taken me to feed the ducks. They came up to her hurriedly as she called out their names, and she took out crumbs of bread from a big brown bag and threw those at them as the ducks greedily gobbled them up.

I would see her all of a sudden one day, and then she would disappear for a long time, perhaps a year, perhaps a two, before visiting me again, never neglecting to swamp me with chocolates of various sizes and colours.

It was only many years later that I was able to understand why she would always visit me whenever she was around in town. The same month that I had been born in 1976, a daughter, Anita, had been born to her, a daughter who had tragically died of pneumonia at the age of three. Aunt Dipsikha never quite recovered from the shock. Not, of course, that you would know or feel this simply by talking to her, so consummately did she hide away her pain behind her cryptic smiles and the distant look in her soft brown eyes. My uncle was then in the Indian Foreign Service and she travelled with him to distant ends of the earth, always remembering to send me postcards with exotic stamps for my collection. He himself had, however, never managed to come to grips with his wife's 'melancholiness', always complaining to my mother about her habit of brooding over the past that she could not forget.

She was the only Bengali member and the only ray of hope in my oppressively Assamese family, and it was she who first brought into my mortal life the beauty and the joys of Rabindranath Tagore's celestial music. She would sometimes sit down with me on the banks of the river Brahmaputra at sundown during the long autumn evenings, stare into the horizon at the hazy bank on the other side, and begin to hum with a slow and hesitant beat :

How many times indeed have I thought

That in a fit of self-forgetfulness

I shall lay bare

The riddles of my heart

At Your feet?

She came to see me when I was in Delhi a year after my mother's death. Everyone else had given me the platitudes, 'Time will heal everything', 'You must be brave', and 'Everything will soon be all right.' But Aunt Dipsikha said nothing of that sort; indeed, she said absolutely nothing at all. We just sat down in silence on a black rock in the middle of the JNU campus watching the sun going down over the rough elephantine grass. I looked at her from the corner of my eye : there was an ancient sadness written all over her tired face which had refused to be beaten by the storms that it had so patiently weathered.

Later, when she came to know that I was studying Theology at Cambridge, she sent me a postcard from Kanyakumari.

My dearest Mimon,

We have this great bond between us that unites us across space and time, and will continue to tie us even from beyond the grave, this bond between two solitary inviduals who must forever live only at the forlorn peripheries of so-called human civilisation. We are like two drops of water in the vast ocean that in search of each other must first lose themselves before they can find each other through that self-annihilation. And yet how different are our destinations! Your protest against society has carried you onto God, and my reaction to it has driven me to the bottomless abyss of nihilistic despair.

Yours as ever,

Aunt Dipsikha

Kanyakumari

25 December 2001

The last time I saw her was in September 2003 when we sat down on a rain-swept afternoon in Dilli Haat, eating hot jalebis and talking about the autumn, the rains, the ducks in Cambridge, the overcrowded buses ... A young girl of my age passed by us, and my aunt lovingly stared at her as she disappeared into the anonymous crowds.

'I want to ask something of you', she said as the white flowers began to fall around us, thick and fast.

'Yes?'

'Someday when you have a daughter, will you name her Anita?'

'Yes', I replied.

This morning, my brother sent me an email that Aunt Dipsikha had peacefully passed away in her sleep last night. And tomorrow morning, she will be cremated and will cross over to the other side of the grave, once and for all. And yet the words that she had written to me from Kanyakumari continue to echo and re-echo in my mind : My dearest Mimon, we have this great bond between us that unites us across space and time, and will continue to tie us even from beyond the grave ...