Page 58 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes Her dislocation is a product of her circumstances. She is perplexed at the history that has led her
place of birth to be so messily at odds with her nationality and has made her a foreigner in her
hometown, Dhaka. She relates an incident of her college life of 1920s when one of her classmates
was arrested by the police for revolutionary terrorism who looked shy and frail but had a great
resolution and unrepentence for serving the cause of national freedom. Tha’mma so fervently
wished to help him in any way she could, right from cooking the food to washing the clothes. She
states that she could even have killed the British and the Police Officers for freedom.
She gets married to a man who gets postings in the neighboring countries and leaves Dhaka and
goes to different places before finally coming down to Calcutta after her husband’s premature
death from pneumonia. She takes up the teaching job in one of the local schools and continues to
serve there for twenty-seven years and retires as a Principal in the year 1962. It was with this job
that she brings her son up and takes pride in her refusal for help from anybody especially from
her rich sister Maya Devi. Tha’mma is a strict disciplinarian who was very punctilious about the
right use of time and lost her temper if anybody wasted it. This was one of the reasons for her
disapproval of Tridib and his waste of time. For her time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if
it was not used and it began to stink. In her house no chessboard or any pack of cards was
allowed. There was battered Ludo Set somewhere but the narrator was only allowed to play when
he was ill.
The second person that did not find her favour was Ila, the daughter of her sister Maya Devi. She
did not want that her grandson should associate himself in anyway other than ordinary friendship
with her and regards her as a whore. For her, Ila is firmly outside the pale of sobriety and common
Indians, her looks and her clothes were inappropriate to her Bengali middle class origins: ‘Her
hair cut short like a bristle on the tooth brush, wearing tight trousers like a Free School Street
whore’, she comments. Her concept of freedom is quite different from that of Ila. On Narrators’
interference that she stays in London because she wants freedom, Tha’mma quips ‘It is not freedom
she wants—She wants to be left alone to do as she pleases; that is all that any whore would want.
She will find it easily enough over there; that is what those places have to offer. But that is not
what it means to be free.’ Ila on her part regards her as a fascist. Tha’mma’s dislike for her is so
much that a day before her death she writes to the Dean in Delhi where the narrator was pursuing
his Ph.D that her grandson had been visiting the whores and he should be sent home. Until before
her retirement, she had always been careful to maintain a titular control of the running of the
household: Everybody was kept in her place by her; mother at housekeeping, father at his job and
the narrator at his school and homework. Mother was not allowed to listen to her favourite
programme on the radio more than once a week but now she did not seem to care any more. The
narrator states that it was his mother that he was to go then when he was hungry ad wanted the
keys to the cupboard in which the Dalmot was kept or when he wanted money to buy peanuts at
the lake. There seemed to be quite a change that came over her and now she would often look out
of the window and get lost in herself.
Tha’mma was a woman with conviction and views of her own which she did not want to be
flouted or over-ruled. She had contempt for the Sahib for his drinking but a deeper insight would
reveal that it was based on the same iron fairness that she picked up from the school, which
prompted her to pass commands. She dismissed one of her closest friends—a good-natured but
chronically lazy woman; from her job in the school. For Sahib, she thought that he was not fit for
his present high job; that he was weak and spineless and it was impossible to think of him being
from under threat, of reacting to a difficult or dangerous situation with that controlled, accurate
violence which was the quality she priced above all others in men who had to deal with matters
of states. It was in continuation of her iron fairness that she does not approve of helping her
relative, a sister in law in Calcutta, when she goes to visit her. The lady wanted her son to be

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