Piku Mama, a lovely soul, became Arin’s brother figure for the time he sojourned at the Trishul Park wonderland. For only a year. Back in the year 1986-87.
Arin’s life seemed to take on a fascinating turn just by meeting Piku Mama on the first day at the Saha family’s dormitory, where he went visiting off and on; sometimes to watch Chitrahaar, Udaan on Doordarshan, or simply to browse through the tabloid-like, image-heavy Mayapuri, Manohar Kahaniyan, and Filmi Duniya Hindi magazines Mrs. Saha, a former Bengali film actress, voraciously read every week without fail.
When Mrs Saha was not cooking, she read the popular Mayapuri most lovingly; even holding it in her hands, reading while tackling in the kaṛā'i (cauldron) with a steel khunti (flat-bladed ladle) the Drumsticks curry she cooked often, soaked in a lush golden mustard sauce the flavourful aroma of which filled the house, while her husband Mr. Saha, an Army man, strict in a certain sense but not too lenient, and disciplined as they usual are, took it all easy on a Sunday, doing a little bit of gardening out in the backyard. Watering the maturing shoots of tomatoes, green chilies, even gazing at the drumstick tree that has grown so tall, with lots of drumsticks hanging from its many branches, etc. Plucking out shrubs and weeds of multifarious kinds that grew incorrigibly along the periphery of their moderately sized backyard garden. Their school-going son, Raja, ministered to Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny while doing his homework, his books spread out on the bedroom floor.
And Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s younger brother and Raja’s own Mama, took off on his oil painting expeditions on the veranda adjoining the kitchenette, holding an oval-shaped paint palette in his left hand and using brush strokes on the canvas with a thick-bristled paintbrush (probably made from some animal hair) in his right. Wearing his trademark lungi and a plain white Sando banian, he painted with a childlike obsessive passion. Dark, curly hair like a veritable Amazon rainforest on the chest, softly aglow, pitch black and deep. His concentration was so deep on the canvas board on which he painted for several days together, emphasizing specific areas of his painting, which, he said, is still ‘under construction,’ with rapid but brief brush strokes that he probably didn’t hear the doorbell ring twice and Arin coming in at 4 o'clock in the evening to the veranda to fool around with him and Raja around the Saha household until 6pm. Arin suggested that a Picasso or a Leonardo da Vinci was surely in the making this evening. Piku Mama smiled broadly, liking the allusion to the painting greats, and with a laugh said, “Yes, it’s a Piku da Vinci!”
Roxy yapped away in the backyard garden while little Binky the bunny hopped around looking for a taproot of a carrot to nibble on. Wise old Mithu Pakhi kept saying when she saw Arin approach,
“Hel…louwww…! Greetings from my cage!”
“Thank you, Mithu Pakhi. How are you? Kemon acho?” said Arin.
“Awlright! Awlright! Awlright...!” replied Mithu, teasingly.
And then again she said,"Bhalo... Bhalo... Bhalo...!" (I am good).
Even before Piku Mama talked about being an amateur creative visual artist, Arin intuitively knew the man, several years his senior, whom he was meeting for the first time, could be broadly defined as an artist engaged, right from school age, in fine arts. Maybe associated with painting, or authorship in an academic field, as Arin noticed Piku Mama’s artist-like long, elegant and graceful fingers that could only be at best be described as someone who is morally and mentally invested in creative pursuit of the arts, such as painting, and that he liked to live—as he related to Arin later during the long course of his sojourn at his sister’s house—in a sort of creative zone of his own at his traditionally, old-world house back in Kolkata, a heritage city which was (is) perhaps more splendidly cultural, and intellectually emotional in the eighties.
For Piku Mama, however, the kind of conscientious artist he was, with a paintbrush that creates marvellous wonders on the canvas, no put-on perfectionism perspective (that even in those days people lectured about every so often, and still do unsparingly) or self-imposed idealism on himself to show the world how hollowly idealistic he was would never do. Just the normal qualities that his friends and relatives around him appreciated—of being simple, polite, with wonderful prosocial behaviour, and tranquil grace that charms anyone who knows him socially had made the man Arin still considers himself more than fortunate, no less, to come into contact with. Piku Mama was truly one of a kind.
Arin had been overcome, as he realized many years afterwards, simply with the unrelenting effluxion of time running so fast and that the universal truth in the fact that good things don’t last forever, which had placed on someone like Piku Mama—the truly benevolent person, malleable to a fault—maybe also as nostalgically inclined as Arin, an unexpected excess of denial probably coming from someone else, say Mrs. Saha, maybe something on a sudden whim, exhorting her brother to desist from continuing the cheerful camaraderie with Arin, and this actuality had moulded itself to situate his trusting teenager’s soul permanently in a different direction in life: a life of never-ending nostalgic longing for that lone year of the 1980s.
A continuity of time that never liked to pause or look back, not once, not ever again. Perhaps it was an obstinate churn of History, whose irreversible progress is generally understood among those coming of age—especially Arin, Raja, or, to some extent, of older age, Piku Mama himself—that it never forgets or obscures its own absolute ‘situatedness’ in the centre of all things past and present, except to persist wheeling onward, regardless of life's encumbrances we human folks face. Yet, during its creation and for the first time at the delightful Trishul Park dormitory of the Sahas, which continued to have its three resident pets: Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny, time routinely chose to forego the pleasure of placing it in its nostalgic canon and conveniently forgetting it forever after. For time itself, its inevitable succession from the past had always been a festering necessity as it moved forward through the paltry convolutions of human hopes and desires, which are ruined beyond salvation anyway. Nothing else mattered. No one can conquer time or silence its ticking clock, so live deferentially with the present day going by while we lose ourselves in fading history. Time will yet move on.
But Arin grew unwilling to succumb to time’s forgetfulness, as it were; he jogged his memory from time to time to reflect on the past about that particular point of his life, as he had always been doing and overdoing sometimes, no matter what time had granted him for being so nostalgically inclined to the good old days and the old-world grace. For Arin, however, the past is the future. Period.
(To be continued…)
(End of part VI)
By Arindam Moulick
Even before Piku Mama talked about being an amateur creative visual artist, Arin intuitively knew the man, several years his senior, whom he was meeting for the first time, could be broadly defined as an artist engaged, right from school age, in fine arts. Maybe associated with painting, or authorship in an academic field, as Arin noticed Piku Mama’s artist-like long, elegant and graceful fingers that could only be at best be described as someone who is morally and mentally invested in creative pursuit of the arts, such as painting, and that he liked to live—as he related to Arin later during the long course of his sojourn at his sister’s house—in a sort of creative zone of his own at his traditionally, old-world house back in Kolkata, a heritage city which was (is) perhaps more splendidly cultural, and intellectually emotional in the eighties.
For Piku Mama, however, the kind of conscientious artist he was, with a paintbrush that creates marvellous wonders on the canvas, no put-on perfectionism perspective (that even in those days people lectured about every so often, and still do unsparingly) or self-imposed idealism on himself to show the world how hollowly idealistic he was would never do. Just the normal qualities that his friends and relatives around him appreciated—of being simple, polite, with wonderful prosocial behaviour, and tranquil grace that charms anyone who knows him socially had made the man Arin still considers himself more than fortunate, no less, to come into contact with. Piku Mama was truly one of a kind.
--∞--
Arin had been overcome, as he realized many years afterwards, simply with the unrelenting effluxion of time running so fast and that the universal truth in the fact that good things don’t last forever, which had placed on someone like Piku Mama—the truly benevolent person, malleable to a fault—maybe also as nostalgically inclined as Arin, an unexpected excess of denial probably coming from someone else, say Mrs. Saha, maybe something on a sudden whim, exhorting her brother to desist from continuing the cheerful camaraderie with Arin, and this actuality had moulded itself to situate his trusting teenager’s soul permanently in a different direction in life: a life of never-ending nostalgic longing for that lone year of the 1980s.
A continuity of time that never liked to pause or look back, not once, not ever again. Perhaps it was an obstinate churn of History, whose irreversible progress is generally understood among those coming of age—especially Arin, Raja, or, to some extent, of older age, Piku Mama himself—that it never forgets or obscures its own absolute ‘situatedness’ in the centre of all things past and present, except to persist wheeling onward, regardless of life's encumbrances we human folks face. Yet, during its creation and for the first time at the delightful Trishul Park dormitory of the Sahas, which continued to have its three resident pets: Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny, time routinely chose to forego the pleasure of placing it in its nostalgic canon and conveniently forgetting it forever after. For time itself, its inevitable succession from the past had always been a festering necessity as it moved forward through the paltry convolutions of human hopes and desires, which are ruined beyond salvation anyway. Nothing else mattered. No one can conquer time or silence its ticking clock, so live deferentially with the present day going by while we lose ourselves in fading history. Time will yet move on.
But Arin grew unwilling to succumb to time’s forgetfulness, as it were; he jogged his memory from time to time to reflect on the past about that particular point of his life, as he had always been doing and overdoing sometimes, no matter what time had granted him for being so nostalgically inclined to the good old days and the old-world grace. For Arin, however, the past is the future. Period.
(To be continued…)
(End of part VI)
By Arindam Moulick
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please make your comments here:......