Mamacchi

Whenever I see a garden filled with white tulips, it reminds me of the time I had been living in with my grandma and most intimately her life. 

Grandma or ‘Mamacchi’ as she had asked me to call her was different from the rest of us. She was a South Indian, a keralite and the second wife to my ‘Dadai’. That is why maybe fortunately, I had bore no characteristics of her unlike my own biological grandma whose soft angular collar bone features I had, giving a great relief to the elderly.

But still to their dismay, I loved her more than my actual grandmother ‘Didai’ and everyone else.

Mamacchi came to this house much later after Didai had passed away in the summer of ’69. My grandfather or the fearless and powerful, Mr Rabiprasad Banerjee, manager and owner of the biggest estate and factory in South Calcutta then and a resident of Krishnagar regarded himself as a modern man.

That is why he considered remarrying after his own wife died and he fell in love with this keralite who was a widow herself, discontenting all the members of ‘Badalkunj’.

When Mamacchi came into this house, everyone including my mother who being her stepdaughter loathed her. But no one dared to open their mouth against Dadai’s dearest.

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Many years passed and I was born. I used to remember Dadai saying that he finds an exact resemblance in personality and looks of Didai in Mamacchi but just in a darker complexion. It was the year I turned 8 that Dadai had passed away.

In the same exact year, there arose a debate in Badalkunj whether to let Mamacchi stay or not. But this discussion was soon disposed off for in Dadai’s will, Badalkunj and all his existing estate belonged to Mamacchi after his death and that it will be only after her death, that his sons and daughters will get an inherited property and wealth from this large mansion and opulent estate.

From then, Mamacchi was my only reason to visit this dark, lonely place filled with silent taunts and hushed disgust. When she smiled, the long forgotten corridors seemed to be filled with those invisible rays of happiness that could even make the sun;the almighty bow down to the hovering clouds.

Her stories, her laughter, her handmade pickles were the only ways for me to survive in here. All of my cousins were afraid to go near her for she was ‘small’ and ‘dark’.

It was only me who loved spending time with her amongst everyone else.

Though Mamacchi was from South, she knew Bengali. And that is why maybe, no one found another reason to make her feel alienated and less. But sometimes she used all her South Indian words which were difficult to pronounce but mesmerizing to hear, on me.

Mamacchi too loved me dearly and called me her ‘cuţţi’ ,whose meaning I had no clue off.

Between all the rubble, Mamacchi had only one approach she was extremely proud of. Her garden. She spent all her afternoons there taming the twisted vines and nurturing the bristling cacti. She grew a different range of flowers from roses to marigold, from sunflowers to lotuses and even more. She also had a large host of some Japanese varieties of flowers and plants whose names I dont remember.

Mamacchi had limted on bonsais and instead pampered rare orchids, edelweisses and chinese guavas with waging a war on the weather.

But admist all this beauty and chaos, in middle of her earthly paradise stood a bunch of some white tulip plants which according to Mamacchi was her ‘dearest’

It had been 11 years since last Mamacchi had passed away. The next consecutive day after her sudden death, we all had to visit Badalkunj for two reasons. Mine was to mourn and remember her, while for others, it was to get a share of the property. Mourning was just an additional exuse for them.

After that, I had never visited Badalkunj for even once.

But last year when I reached there after so many years, the first I did was rushing to Mamacchi’s paradise. Enduring more than half a century of relentless pernickety attention, Mamacchi’s garden had been left abandoned after her death for more than over a decade. It had grown knotted and wild just like circus animals who had forgotten their tricks.

 Only  the tulips remained the same.

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