Jui’s paternal aunt, Bomma, had been a hoarder for as long as Jui could remember. The dull maroon single-door LG refrigerator would sag and droop under the weight of expired ketchup bottles, moldy slices of Amul cheese and steel tiffin boxes filled with the month’s leftovers. Bomma was not someone who threw or gave away anything. Boxes of sweets offered for Ma Kali’s puja would be relegated to the bottom shelf and swiftly forgotten as she was insanely diabetic. Their housemaid Asma’s special mutton biriyani would ferment for days on end after she had had one bite and found the meat too hard to chew. Stray mayonnaise and chilli sauce sachets would accumulate by the dozen on the rickety brackets of the fridge door. Every once in a while Asma would attempt to perform a cursory clean-up and be rewarded with choice words for her trouble. It was one of their constant sources of tussle, and the reason why she would threaten to leave every few weeks. But absence must truly make the heart grow fonder, as Asma suddenly starts wailing like a motherless chick.

“Who will scold me now for throwing out stuff?”

Instead of replying, Jui walks through the rooms choked with oversized teak furniture. An engineering degree has taught her to think in terms of modularity, and she decides to tackle Bomma’s bedroom first. The twenty by fifteen feet room looms hollow, stripped off life without Bomma’s familiar presence on the corner bed. Jui sieves through the stack of old newspapers, religious pamphlets and restaurant adverts on the bedside table. She can almost feel Bomma’s vacant gaze on her back, and a shiver of guilt runs down her spine.

“Why are you lying in the dark, Bomma? Are you sick?”

“She is not sick, she is just lazy. She has gotten so used to doing nothing all day that now she is incapable of doing anything. Remember Jui, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.” Her father’s ominous words reverberate through the ravages of time.

Jui digs through the pile with redoubled enthusiasm, fearful of catching the sinful habit. The table has been cleared off rubbish, and she moves on to the storage space under the bed. Jethu, her uncle, had a cement bed built attached to the floor. Perhaps the trauma of forced displacement in the past had invoked in him a need to cling on tighter – to people, to places, to life, to the things we can and cannot see. Ironically, his wife had virtually refused to leave that bed for the majority of her life.

A round shiny thing peeks out from underneath old saris, discarded bed sheets and frayed mosquito nets when Jui opens the first compartment. She fishes it out like a coin from a wishing well, and turns it over gingerly in her palm. It is one of those cheap plastic medals distributed at neighborhood sit-and-draw competitions or annual prize-distribution ceremonies at school. She can barely make out the faded letters “Tarashankari Banerjee” on the front. The back reveals that it was awarded as the first prize in a Rabindra Sangeet singing competition. This unexpected totem from a past life makes Jui feel mildly uncomfortable. How much of Bomma did she really know? It’s naturally hard for children to envision adults having past lives, to think of them as young people with their own sets of hopes, anxieties, insecurities and dreams. It betrays a sense of kinship that is disconcerting. How can you be angry with someone if you know they were in your place once?

Jui never really had a close relationship with Bomma in the first place. Jethu was the one who took her out for long drives on his Hero Honda motorcycle, sang her songs and listened to her poems and ambitions. After her father moved out from their ancestral house, Bomma used to appear in Jui’s life only during the three days of Kali Pujo every year. The whole clan would flock together to worship the Dark Goddess, incarnation of the divine feminine energy that rules the universe. Bomma would be in bed for most of the festivities, refusing to participate in the camaraderie, turning her back on light and love and life. The dense white fumes from the dhoop, the smell of blood-red Hibiscus flowers and snide remarks from relatives would drive Jethu over a tipping point and he would rain down a torrent of blows on Bomma’s flaccid body. She would respond for a brief interval, drape an old sari over her loose cotton nightie and sit down in front of the idol. Jui’s elder sister would sing devotional Shyamasangeets and the kin would chitter away in the background like a bunch of gossipy crows.

“Tara had such a good voice as well.”

“Pity she let it go to waste.”

“Pity she let everything go to waste. She is not even going to work these days. Apparently she is thinking of taking early voluntary retirement.”

“But what will she do all day all alone in this huge house?”

“What she always does. Laze around in bed all day. She has been like this from her childhood, you can’t help someone who won’t help themselves.”

Jui holds up the medal and examines it again under the damp glow of the lone yellow bulb in Bomma’s room. The indisputable proof that Bomma was not always like this stares at her in the face, challenging her to look away. To concede would be to admit that they were wrong about Bomma all this time, that she really breathed and dreamt and worked hard to accomplish something once. That she cared. That she was not altogether beyond their help.

Asma walks into the room with Ranu Mashi, Bomma’s baby sister. The siblings could not be more different from each other if they tried. Ranu Mashi is short and thin, like the bamboo quills they offer to the goddess of wisdom in spring. With her tiny stature and average dusky complexion, she has a penchant for disappearing in crowds. Bomma was taller than the average Indian female and had a plump fleshy body. With her fair rosy cheeks and catlike eyes, she had a natural charm that would make heads turn when she walked into a room.

“Didi used to sing Rabindra Sangeets beautifully.” Ranu Mashi says, noticing the medal in Jui’s hand.

“I didn’t know, never heard her singing. What happened?”  

“Life.” Ranu Mashi sighs. “What happens to all of us.”

This was probably the kindest thing Jui had ever heard her say about her sister.

“Should I ask the packers and movers to come tomorrow to help you shift the furniture, Ranu Mashi?” Asma interjects. This was more like Ranu Mashi, swooping in like a vulture before Bomma had a chance to turn over in her grave.

“Yes, sure. Morning would be better.” Ranu Mashi says.

Jui resumes rummaging through the rest of the items under the bed. “You can take whatever you like.” Ranu Mashi sounds a bit guilty. “She was not an easy person to live with, you know. She did take me in after our mother passed away, but she could be very cruel when she wanted to. She would nitpick on the smallest things, like the way I folded the clothes or made the bed. At times I felt like free household help.”

“She was not a very happy person.” Jui looks up.

“No, she was not. But are any of us?”

Jui keeps sitting on the cold marble floor long after Ranu Mashi and Asma have left. Late fall peeks in through the window by her feet, the window that Bomma rarely opened. Outside in the backyard, kathgolaps droop silently on their high perches, and plop on the ground, one after the other, in unmet desire. Koels cry mournfully on the jackfruit trees, and a few vagrant squirrels try to remember where they had hidden their nuts. Baby mongooses flounder about in the midday sun without their mothers, while yellow-spotted wolf snakes hiss a few feet away. Grasshoppers chirp excitedly in the unruly tall grass, and Jui remembers how she used to catch them as a child. The trick was to mount a swift and unexpected attack, grab them by their tails and tie a string around their helpless bottoms. There was something particularly cathartic about watching them flail around, their range of motion restricted by the pull of your fingers. It used to drive her dizzy with power, drunk with control. 

The shrill chime of the old grandfather clock floats in from downstairs. Jui takes a panicked look at her phone, she had intended to be done with the bedroom before lunch. She decides to leave the storage space for now and turn to the mahogany wardrobe instead. Expensive hand-painted pure silks, kantha-stitched Tussars and vintage Taant sarees lie unworn, unloved, untouched. After a point, her mother had stopped gifting Bomma sarees for Pujo, instead settling on her favorite sleepwear. Jui starts making two piles, one for the new sarees to be given away to relatives and another for used clothes, to be thrown away or made into makeshift dusters. The piles are nearly as tall as her before she notices the red baby onesie tucked away into a corner. How innocuously it lies there! No one ever talked about this part of Bomma’s life, it happened so long ago. Jui had come to know about it in bits and pieces, through overheard snatches of gossip, through lingering stares that betrayed more than they intended to. How they had tried very hard for a very long time to have a child. How they had offered sacrifices to Kali, Tara, Durga and the other seven goddesses of wrath and wisdom. How Jethu had been so happy when Bomma finally got pregnant that he had vowed to leave alcohol. How Bomma had found herself bleeding on a cold night in November and had to be rushed to the emergency room. How the baby that was supposed to grow inside had decided to curl up outside in her tubes. How the only way to save Bomma had been to destroy any chances of her becoming a mother again. How she had never cried throughout the whole ordeal but looked out of the hospital window with the same vacuous face. How that emptiness had never left her. 

The sun, who has already begun his slow descent across the autumn sky, fills up the room with a soft golden glow, trying to wash away the day’s troubles. Jui watches the baby mongooses find their way back to their mothers with a tightness in her chest. Wives of uncles older than one’s father were usually called “Jethi” in her native language, but Bomma had insisted on this title. Boro-Ma, Big Mother, which used to dissolve into Bomma on their unformed tongues. The fresh scent of frangipani flowers drifts in through the window. Jui stretches an arm out and grabs a stray flower left on a nearby branch. She folds the petals upon each other, one after the other, till they come together in a cohesive intertwined whole. It was Bomma who had taught her to make noserings like this, many autumns ago.   

“And what do we do with these?”

“Why, we wear it on our noses, of course.”

“But they are going to dry up soon.”

“So? That doesn’t mean we are going to forget what they were like when they are gone.”

Jui’s phone rings. It is her mother calling her for lunch. She looks around her, at the clothes that need to be tidied up, boxes that must be filled, furniture that has to be found new homes. Collections of an entire life. Items that could not be let go of. “Remember Jui, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins,” rings in her head. She lets out a deep breath and wonders, “But what if it was just grief?”

– Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhuri

Note: This piece was previously published by Pena Literary Magazine (Issue 5: X).