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In the living room hung a huge sepia photograph with a heavy gold-colored wooden frame of her husband and his British friends posing in front of a vintage car, which was said to have been carried on the backs of porters, all the way from Siliguri. The British ladies wore quaint hats with long feathers, flowing skirts, and blouses with buttons right up to the throats, where they gave way to frills around the collars. And whereas grandpa talked with his British guests, grandma was mostly confined to the kitchen where she supervised the Indian, Nepali and British cuisine. Another huge and massive-framed photograph showed him with his British guests with their heavy-duty elephant-guns in their hands, proudly posing in front of an enormous tiger that they’d shot in the terai during a hunt.
After the death of Grandpa she’d grown fond of a tall, gray-haired British physician with a goatee who used to treat the people from the hills and give them pills, tablets, mercurochrome on their wounds and tonsils, and zinc oxide salves smeared on a piece of The Rising Nepal or The Gorkhapatra.
I found Grandma Bender’s story familiar, because it was exactly what happened to my own paternal grandpa who had to live in Kathmandu, Dharan, Darjeeling and Bombay because his children who ‘looked after him’ were scattered in two countries and five towns.
My paternal grandpa would sit in front of his Hindu altar, eternally engaged in praying to the Gods. He’d sit in his lotus position take a mala in his right hand and start reciting the names of as many Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon and paying tribute to them. With 33 million Gods and Goddesses he would be busy for the better part of the day.
There were interesting moments when he’d be also listening to the conversation in the family kitchen, despite his prayers, and suddenly he’d switch in and start talking as though he hadn’t missed the conversation from the beginning. The only people who were genuinely interested in our grandpa were us kids.
He had the habit of going for long walks in the evening, and he’d buy sweets as offerings for Gods like Ganesh, the pot-bellied God with the elephant trunk, who has an affinity for laddus and other sweet things. We’d enter the premises of a temple, he’d ring the huge bell outside, and the whole neighborhood would reverberate with the sound of the bells. There was always the smell of incense-sticks burning, the smell of milk, yogurt and freshly made sandalwood paste with which we’d be blessed on our foreheads as a receipt after making the offering. A portion of the offering would be kept by the brahmin for himself and the Gods, and I’d get the major part of the delicacies for accompanying him to the many temples.
Grandpa was a robust old fellow with a sense of humor, and loved to hum the tunes of Bollywood films through his white starched moustache, whether Nepali, Hindi or Bengali, and could be rather embarrassing at times, for he’d persist even though he didn’t know the tune and lyrics at all. I tried to hold him back, but he didn’t care: ‘Dherai ramro melody chha’ was his reply. He just loved humming the tunes.
Every Indian or Nepali film has at least 14 songs and it’s more like a melodramatic musical with dances, seductive vamps, fights and rescues with liters of tears, screams, shouts and groans and happy ends---when the lovers are united at last after an endless series of ordeals. It’s kitsch but the masses in India, Nepal, Dubai and even Germany love them. The audience applauses, whistles and claps hands, and is moved to tears. The film functions as a safety- valve for the poverty-stricken people, and for two hours they identify themselves with the protagonists, and live their posh lives in palace-like houses, flying first class, drinking champagne, wearing the newest creations, doing the newest dances and suffering with the protagonists, feeling for them, and finally thanking them for enticing them to another fantasy world.
They take home the wonderful images, and perhaps hope and courage to make something out of their own lives. If not, at least have the satisfaction of identifying themselves with someone else’s fantasy-world. When the poor soul comes out of the cinema-hall, the blazing sun glares at him or her, the terrible noise and chaos of the traffic, the stench from the alleys, and he or she is reminded of the struggle for existence and survival within the family and in the social surroundings. The cinemagoer may be in Bombay, Dacca, Karachi or Kathmandu: the brutal and sad reality in developing countries is, and remains, the same. The rich become richer and the poor become even poorer.
In winter grandpa was glad to be in sunny Bombay, and in summer he could retreat to the cool foothills of the Himalayas. That was the problem of industrialization and population migration, when the men went looking for better jobs and pastures, or through marriage in the case of women. It’s always the women who follow their men, leave their hometowns, and not the other way round. The future of the bride is always uncertain and depends on the dowry, the sympathy and mercy of the mother-in-law, and the behavior of her arranged-husband.
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