My paternal grandmother, a statistician who’d go to work every day at the Writers’ Building—shortened to Writers’ by most—the red, Greco-Roman–designed secretariat building in Calcutta that housed the State Statistical Bureau Government of West Bengal, which later moved to the New Secretariat building on Strand Road, now that, that fact was repeated to me over and over. My grandmother Chameli was the director. She was in charge of an office of only men who called her “sir.” A detail so ridged into my understanding of who she was that I’ve often imagined an office long and exaggerated, and practically surreal. An office in space. I’ve imagined men standing up from their desks as she arrived each morning; greeting her as she glided to her office in her sari. A woman gliding was—I’d devised—power incarnate.
Recently, my mother recounted a story to me about Chameli. One year, Chameli noted a statistical error in West Bengal’s rice farming figures; one that she deemed serious enough to change. The dheki is an agricultural tool used for threshing and separating the grain from the husk. It’s composed of a wooden lever, a pedestal, and a pestle. Picture a rocket-shaped seesaw; the pestle like a walrus tooth pounding rice. In all village households, it was the Bengali peasant women whose job it was to husk the paddy into rice. While it was work, the work wasn’t statistically counted as such. Those hours spent were negligible; ignored by virtue of being considered everyday household chores instead of hard labor. Chameli disagreed. She saw the gaffe as a severe misreading of numbers.
Here’s the thing. By no means did my grandmother identify as a feminist. Quite the opposite actually. For her, fixing this error was merely a matter of valuing accuracy. For her, imprecision was totally substandard. When my mother told me this story, I thought about my grandmother gliding through her office, perhaps instilling acute fear in the men who reported to her. Scrutinizing their efforts. Suggesting they reexamine their data. The thought makes me grin.
I too was a bit scared of Thama. She could be mean. Often ailing but impassable. At no point would she back down; the sort of woman who is so obstinate that even the knot in her silk scarf looks stubborn, like a bulb unwilling to blossom. She was callous, brushing me aside by asking about my brother’s day instead of mine. If I was wearing a new sweater, she’d ask me if my brother had gotten a new sweater too. There’s a form of humiliation we learn to stomach young in order to receive attention. Mine was clarified by my relationship with my grandmother, whose fondness for my brother was openly warmer, even if her love was evenly spread.
Thama disciplined but seemed detached; a terrifying combination from a child’s perspective. Her wood cane looked like it was up to something. A sidekick. A snake. Nowadays, I regret every second I spent with her where I didn’t hold her hand or tell her I loved her, or showed her what I was reading or shared with her what I was thinking; who I was friends with; their names. I regret my teenage petulance. I regret the displeasure I wore in my posture. The unappealing stink that secretes from teenagers with a bad attitude who slope in their chairs and see only an old lady who’s taking up a perfectly good Saturday in June. I was sad about the mushy, tasteless food my grandmother was forced to eat, but just as impatient that she eat it faster.
I regret how I wasn’t gentler when combing her hair. Or how, more than once, I absently pushed her wheelchair into a door’s frame. Or pushed her wheelchair too hastily back to her bedroom at the Grace Dart extended care center in Montreal East, where she lived the last years of her life. It’s possible Thama would have enjoyed a more scenic route back to her bed—perhaps one that involved escaping the Grace Dart center entirely. Fleeing in her nightgown, somewhere less cold with a garden and trees, whose leaves reminded her of Calcutta sounds. A place too with an infinite supply of Pepperidge Farm hazelnut Pirouettes. She really enjoyed eating those rolled wafers, as if they were contraband.
I regret one afternoon in particular when Thama was asleep in her hospital room, snoring so quietly it sounded less like snoring and more like a person who’d lived many lives, simply breathing. That afternoon, when I was alone in her room, I noticed a vein protruding from her forehead. Like a cord of thick wale corduroy running down her temple. For no reason I can explain, other than some eagerness to touch, I pressed my finger against it. Thama kept sleeping. I touched it again and went further to push the purple blood that filled it, back up her vein, only to watch it rush forward as I let go. I did this a few times as if magic were involved. As if the tiny purple torrent were anything but blood. Kool-Aid. Dye. Beet juice. It was an odd impulse, certainly.
But even in hospitals, sunlight is beautiful. It animates the sterile and that feeling of sick. Brown cups look caramel and all that metal turns mauve, and Jell-O, well, Jell-O wins—it traps the sun. And suspended ceilings are hardly science fiction when the evening light thaws their grid. And the humiliation of loosely tied gowns and bare skin, and elastic waists, even those degradations fade some when the light pushes through blinds and discovers bare skin, not to shame but to warm. And on that day, the sun was beginning to dip and the purple blood was rushing back each time I pushed it up, and why was I doing this? Why wasn’t I leaving her alone, to sleep her many lives? I regret touching her forehead like that, as if she weren’t Thama but a new, random fascination. Her skin was jellyfish-transparent. Her fingers and knuckles were bent like gingerroots. She was fading. Shrinking. As if there were hardly any room inside of her to contain her memories. From here on out, Thama’s memories would be forced out. They’d emit from her. They’d circle above her like cloud cover on a satellite map. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to feel haunted by the draft of vanishing memories. I felt them that afternoon, escaping from her as the sun washed her hospital room with a little show. The sort of glory you only see when something else is being lost.