I was devastated when my beautiful, outstandingly healthy, and vivacious mother was diagnosed with terminal stage of cancer and succumbed to it within a couple of months. She was my pillar and my best friend. I was walking a thin line between wrenching anguish and a desperate longing to somehow regain the world I had lost forever, when I visited my mother’s house in Kolkata.
I shed bitter tears sifting through things in her lovely home. The long dining table, the epicenter of family gatherings where she, a cook extraordinaire, spread love and food in equal amounts, lay unbearably barren. Her antique furniture pieces were under shrouds, her innumerable potted palms cracked-dry. Her airy verandah, a place to inhale the enchanting smell of wet earth after a summer norwester was full of rubbish. I went about the rooms expecting her to come out of one of them any moment. At night, I lay in bed and imagined her footsteps, she would come into the bedroom and remind me of things I’d forgotten, ask me what I wanted for lunch tomorrow.
I brought back a piece of furniture from her house. An old English sideboard, what Americans may call a buffet. Maybe a late 19th century piece. It was in our house for as long as I can remember with all its beloved fractures and cloudiness of old age. It held cookie tins, liver tonics, and among many other things, my mother’s cooking gas order book which she often misplaced.
On my return to Chandigarh, where I was living at that time, I decided to get it re-varnished. We hauled it out in the sun. It was then I saw the crumbling papers wedged behind the small central mirror. A tug and they fell into my hands. Postcards – faded yellow, blanched with age, crammed with small cursive Bengali handwriting in fountain pen ink. The postal stamps were still clearly legible. Those were missives from a gentleman in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh and my father’s place of birth) to some one residing in Wellesley Street, Kolkata. I held my breath and read – something to do with a house being auctioned, request for a boat fare, a prospective bride being chosen – all written in chaste old Bengali in the year 1920 to 1921.
I didn’t have any connection to any of those people. Yet, the letters were a treasure, a direct connection to a misty abyss we know as the past. What was happening in India in 1920? Mahatma Gandhi was already the doyen of mass movement for Indian freedom and launched the non-cooperation movement. Rabindranath Tagore had already produced his best work. Sitarist Ravi Shankar was born and the British were facing boycott of schools, colleges and law courts.
And in America, women received the right to vote in 1920.
The enormity of what I held in my hands filled me with a joy I hadn’t felt in a long time. These were not mere postcards; the universe was letting me have a glimpse of the lost times in the most unexpected way.
The postcards were a message in the palm of my hand.
I cried thinking of my mother that night, but with the hope that she was not lost, just hidden from me.
To learn more about Indian Postcards
To learn more about the non-cooperation Movement