Probashi - the Diaspora

We are a family of probashi bangalis – the diaspora. Zealously we guard the Bengali culture inherited from our grandparents and great-grandparents who were among the last of the generations that had lived upon that red earth of Bengal. Even as I tucked into a plate of fish and vegetable stew, I listened with awe to the tales of a little girl who used the loose weave of the end of her sari to fish for shrimps amongst the paddy standing knee deep in the flooded field.

She was my grandmother, who had been forced by my grandfather’s British employers to move to Delhi with her brood of children. India, for her, was made up of three distinct sets of people – to Bengal’s north lived the Punjabis and to the south the Madrasis. She spoke no other language and through sheer goodwill and persistence had succeeded in teaching the gardener and the vegetable vendor Bengali. The fishmongers were never a problem – for they all spoke near fluent Bengali.

Our horizons were widening. Reluctantly the two of us had acknowledged that our Kashmiri neighbours were not Punjabis and that one could not get away by labelling those that could not be immediately typecast as Hindustanis. Were we Hindustanis? No. My six-year-old brain firmly denied it. Well then, Indian? There I was ready to concede.

‘If you lifted your aanchal quickly enough you were sure to catch a handful.’ She waved her handheld fan over my food shooing the flies away. The story had a cooling effect…wading through the water…and the green that stretched for miles.

The summer sun beat down upon the courtyard. It was her courtyard. She had to have a courtyard, she had insisted as my grandfather drew up plans for the house; a courtyard like the ones they had in Bengal or else it would be too stifling. It let in the sun and the rain and chilled us to the bone in the winters for no room in the house could be entered without passing through the courtyard first.

‘They are so tiny that rubbing them together in a bowl of water would remove the shells. A pinch of turmeric and salt and they would turn into crisp golden curls with the help of a little mustard oil. And the fragrance…such a fragrance. With a little steamed rice…a dusting of red chillie flakes…it was a feast for a king’

‘Go on now.’ Her tale came to an abrupt end. ‘You’ve finished eating. What more do you want?’