8th February is my Pishi’s birthday. As a child I did not know her birthday but I cannot imagine my childhood without her. For us four sisters and many after us wherever they lived she was a mother to us second to none. Pishi is Bua in Hindi, father’s sister, she was younger than my father, who formed our lives in many ways. She was working in Telegraph office, used to travel for postings alone and camps, took Mummum, my grandmother for her pilgrimages, was a devotee of Ramkrishna, but for us she was just Pishi. She was just Mejo, second in Bangla to all my other Pishis’ children.
I am trying to bring her alive on paper as alive she is our hearts. As a child she was to me a beautiful, strong, firm and dependable person. Beauty is a relative matter. Once a child got separated from his mother and when asked how she looks, he kept saying she is beautiful. Adults kept showing women whom their constructed mind were made to believe as beautiful. Eventually the child started running and everyone saw a woman again with their perceived sense of beauty a mis-formed human being who could see only through one eye! All the adjectives I have used for Pishi as a child strengthened as I grew into adulthood. Thankfully the family that I was born in provided scope to appreciate beauty in diversity. All my uncles and aunts had distinctive personalities and are all are good looking. Their love for us created my sense of beauty.
As a child I did not realize that Pishi was not married. I do not know when that seeped through. For me she was a complete person just like my two pishis, Boro Pishi and Lapishi who were married then, marriage incidentally did not play a part in the completeness, they remained individuals in a collective, integral all though my life.
An engaging part of our childhood evenings was Pishi coming from office. I can hear our collective childhood voices, ‘Pishi kuch laayee?’ (Aunt, what have you got?) She would invariably get something. The most exciting were half inch width discarded telegraph roles of paper and a plastic bangle on which they were rolled on. Pishi had once said much later that she never felt that she was catering to four girls as we were a disciplined lot. We were collectively what we were as revered her and there was the question of not listening to her did not arise. Obviously because of what she was but she never gave herself that credit.
One incident stays in my memory as if it happened just the other day. She would take all four of us for visits. That day she had taken us to a circus. It started pouring cats and dogs and then rhinoceros and elephants, so much so that the Circus tent gave way. I remembered the deluge of water falling from the the hole in the tent as yesterday (7.02.2021) images of the glacier gushing the river water floated in WhatsApp. We had our Pishi so I do not remember any sense of fear. She remained calm and was a pillar of strength in the midst of sea of people running helter-scelter! She took us out step by step avoiding the flow of water and got us home.
I accompanied her as a child ( eight-nine years) to one of her pilgrimages to Amarkantak, the starting point of Narmadaji, the river which is as much part of our growing up as our dear Pishi. For me Amarkantak and Gwarighat have remained as the only pilgrimages connected to Pishi even though she had visited most pilgrimages taking Mummum, a duty socially given to a son in India. The childhood home which was a rented house was given up at one point which also is a pilgrimage for most but from home it has extended to Jabalpur city. Pishi had an excellent memory and was such an amazing story teller. My sister Bheela Wadehrah has started a blog on Oshin and her story telling and memory (https://bheela-wadehra.medium.com/bheelas-blog-012-d00727492b21) is so like Pishi’s. I miss Pishi more so because as an adult there are so many things I would like to ask which no one else can tell me. She carried a complete kitchen with her to Amarkantak. The way she managed things simply and without complaints (a quality of all women part of my childhood) became a norm to me.
Once Pishi came to Bombay and I made a vegetable of cabbage in the way Amma had taught me which she had learnt from Mummum. Pishi was very happy eating it and I consider what she said as high praise that the vegetable was like how her Ma made. Pishi and Amma were of same caliber but were cursed in the in-law relation perceiving things with different visions. Since they were amazing women they both became friends after Baba died in 1987 as they both became single women. My assumptions are not necessarily seen by either of them and I have no way to confirm as neither is living in body.
I will close on this note, as wanting to post this and share it on her birthday who has been ‘Miss’ Mira Dasgupta woven naturally in the fabric of my childhood!
