20 June
My grandfather Kamini Kumar Dasgupta died in Barisal, now in Bangladesh, on 20 June.
Not unusual for a man of his generation and his choices — except that by the time he died, the country he had been born into no longer existed, and the country his family had fled to was one he had visited once, looked at carefully, and decided he could not live in. So he went back. To Barisal. To the house, the street, the air he recognised. And died there, wife and children and grandchildren elsewhere, with only Kushai beside him.
Kushai — whom my father and his siblings called Kushai Kaku, uncle in Bengali — was my grandfather’s Man Friday. My grandfather had found him with a band of dacoits when he was very young. What the precise circumstances were would perhaps be another tale to tell. That’s the kind of detail that gets carried in a family for one generation and then quietly drops. But I am holding on to them, like family heirlooms. Through whatever my grandfather’s life held — and it held plenty, including an unusual job with the British government as a surveyor of land, which was not limited to surveying — Kushai was there. And at the end, when everyone else was on the other side of a border that had not existed when my grandfather was young, he was the one who stayed.
I think about that a lot. The ones who stay.
My father Debal had a different relationship with borders — internal ones, the kind the state draws around its citizens when it decides they are dangerous. He went underground for two years before I was born, or perhaps when I was too young to understand what he was doing. By the time I was old enough to understand what that meant, he was already dead.
What I remember is this: sometimes, late at night, a book would come flying through the window and land on the bed, on our tin roofed house. Once it was a blue-covered edition of Grimm’s fairy tales. The family would stir — quickly eat if they hadn’t, lights off, everyone in bed, quiet. My father would be there for that night, and gone again by morning. Back to wherever he was hiding. Back to the ulcer that was forming in his stomach from the conditions he was living in. The ulcer that would kill him at forty-two.
I don’t remember being frightened. I remember clutching the blue book to my chest and falling asleep on my grandmother’s lap, on her bed.
I am writing this on the death anniversary of my grandfather — 20 June — two days after the fact, because that’s when I finally sat down to write it. He died in Barisal with Kushai. My father died in Calcutta with an ulcer. I am sixty, in the same city, writing about both of them on a platform I built myself this week, having spent the better part of two days arguing with PHP files and category archives.
Debal would have found that funny. Kamini Kumar — I have no idea. I never met him. He went back before I arrived.
But Kushai stayed. And my grandfather knew, I think, that this was the rarest thing.
The ones who stay.