As A Migrant Daughter, I Lament The End Of This Place Called Home

It is again that time of the year, when I feel alone, utterly sad as I cascade, slowly like a formless jelly, off a large spoon, into infinity. 

I can feel myself slipping as I drown in my pool of nostalgia and sorrow. The thoughts are like fluffy tufts of dark clouds, in an azure October sky. It’s so opposing in its natural habitat yet strikingly similar. Good and bad mixed against the infinity. It is like a home where individuals live with varied dispositions. One dark and the other light, but finally merging into a unit. 

It is supposed to be the perfect time of the year with the onset of winter in India. But it’s so inconsolably imperfect for me. The time of festivals, when families get together, leaves me bereft. 

Finding a home, elsewhere

Being a Bengali and a migrant is a double-edged whammy. Migrants are trying hard to find a home in every city they migrate to for financial or emotional reasons. Also stereotypically most of the Bengali Bhadrolok aka the Bengali gentlemen of my father’s generation are melancholic. Naturally, my father wasn’t different. There was an air of melancholy, quietude mixed with a consciousness of a culture dug deeply within his heart. He took pride in being well-read, well-spoken and using idioms to express distaste and love.

My father held on to his identity in the city of not his origin, with a smug dissatisfaction of being away. I knew he feared that the ignominy in a city so different from Calcutta threatened to tear him apart. It bore on him with its unknown language, unfamiliar ways and no close family in times of duress.

Therefore, obviously, emotionally we three, found ourselves slowly drowning in the labyrinthine lanes of unfamiliarity. Yet we had no choice in the decisions we had taken. So bravely and with honour we tried to swim in the choppy sea. Most days were mundane but some days the moon peered into our souls with its silver light calming the raging waves within. Where is home? Was the perennial question.

In this conflict and hardship of finding ourselves anew, the passing of my father was like a heavy iron lock on our hearts. It was a complete closure of a familiarity that held us together against the storm. 

Migrants don’t tell you about the losses one has to endure with the death of a loved one. For us, it isn’t, just the fading of a human being. It is the end of a family’s togetherness. The tethering into its culture and identity. The security of a home that keeps families cocooned in its warmth, suddenly opens its doors and windows to the cold stone walls of the outside world, as inch by inch it breaks their migrant spirit.

My mother was hit the hardest by the loss of her spouse. He was her anchor. 

So, this festival of Durga Puja isn’t my happiest time of the year. I hold on to the chocolate or the drink to calm my nerves about missing my old life. The earlier version of my much-married mother now turned widow, is too much of a reality, this October. 

So, to numb the pain, I travel to my childhood days when I waited months for these four days. Now the passing of the Puja month seems daunting, to say the least. 

Also, the truth is, that to be present among genuinely happy people is a feat. Only the sad will understand this discomfort. To be among the silliness of this transient euphoria. You want to tell people. Happiness is short-lived, unhappiness is gnawing, like a toxic kidney in your body. 

So the best way to survive the emptiness of the place, I once called home, is to write and bleed my heart out on paper. 

I bleed for my childhood home, where the frugality was my salvation. There was nothing to worry about. A place where my late Baba would plan the shopping for clothes for all four days, for me. As a single child, I was pampered and I felt wanted in that cocoon. There were many rebellious moments too, between us three. But in October we cast aside our differences as it was special. It was Pujo month. 

In my childhood home, the kitchen would be shut and Ma would be less stressed these few days. As she wouldn’t need to plan the meals. We all would enjoy the special food cooked for the Goddess. In my mother tongue, Bangla, we call it Bhog. 

Bhog has a taste that can’t be matched to just about any cooking. The flavour is different and the satiety is soulful. It is the same dishes, dished out year after year, but it gets tastier year after year. Like old age catching up within you, as you ardently hold on to the taste of the food cooked in abundance in a home, far away, left behind in the dirty process of materialism and this idea of growing up, to become individuals. 

For the uninitiated, the bhog is a Khichdi. It is a medley of lentils and rice cooked together into a broth we call “Thakurer Bhog” the food of the Goddess. Which is served with a few fries, a vegetable dish, a sweet chutney and a syrupy sweet thrown onto the plate. As the sweet mixes into the salt, it reminds me that finally there is no escape. It gets together in one place, mixing into dust and ether. 

Coming back to the bhog, none of us minds the palate all getting tangled up. It is like home, where you find the sewing kit in a biscuit box. It’s always found sitting in a corner each time you need to sew a patch. 

It is the bonhomie around me, that tugs at my heartstrings. I miss my father, my mother, and my son when all of us were together. As I watch families getting together to enjoy Durga Puja. I pray they stay close together in love, anger and trials. 

Through my glassy eyes, I can see, the mothers, dressed in beautiful Bengali woven saris, with the fervour in their eyes, daughters and sons in toe. I stare, gulp my regret of not having done maybe enough when all my mother wanted was to sit and hear the sound of the Dhak, a percussion instrument being played to invoke the goddess. I think I did all that I could, but still, I wish I could do more. 

I feel goosebumps as I think of the benevolence of the Goddess’s face smeared in vermillion, looking at me, as the dhak plays the beat and the incense smoke covers her face like a veil of justice and the promise for a better year. 

I wish my grieving mother would muster her courage and strength and come along to normalise the festival for me. I don’t want Puja to die on me. This is the only festival that keeps me connected to my nickname, my mother calling me for pushspanjali and my Baba running into the bookstores to check the next best Puja-launched author. 

After all, the books matter, this is where we do the additions and subtractions of our lives. No one needs to be a mathematician for this. Life just adds up on its own. 

Mohua Chinappa is an author, a podcaster and the Co-founder of Asmee, a digital marketing firm dedicated to promoting stories of women's empowerment and courage.

Suggested reading: Mursal Mohammadi: Story Of An Afghan Refugee Living In India