A stone’s farewell
The word Giridhari is rather sentimental for my didu, my maternal grandmother, one of the many children of her father, a wealthy jomidaar (landowner) of the pre-partition Khemir-Duar, now in Bangladesh. Her family had fled Bangladesh long before the partition actually happened; they had bought land in what is today known as Murshidabad in India when they sensed tensions rising between the Hindus and Muslims of Bengal and suspected that a disaster was to come with the partition. They were wealthy elites of East Bengal, suffering next to nothing compared to any penniless refugee who had migrated to either country during those tumultuous and bloody years. However, the family had to leave their palatial place back when they came to India, only to live in one of the most decorated mansions in the district.
Giridhari and His legends (read: adventures) run with popularity and love in the family. A round black stone, found in the foothills of the Govardhan hill by an ancestor, his identity in the trenches of time, was established as the family deity of this East-Bengali family centuries back. Giridhari was prioritised over anyone else in that household, timetables arranged around His plans for the day or rather plans of the family about him. It is said that He was lost two times while the family was undergoing its very long, anxiety-ridden and chaotic migration to India. In the crowd of a few hundred antics and other valuables that were brought to this country, Giridhari turned out to be really petite and unremarkable, going by His physical dimensions. As a result, this very commanding but rather unnoticeable divine was lost, and found and lost again, to be luckily found once more, before something objectively much worse happened, or was allowed to happen to Him.
The second time he was found apparently at someone’s home who coincidentally worked in the same court of law in India where my great-grandfather was a Judge. The family had spent several sleepless nights by then, out of shame and guilt at their carelessness of losing Him once again, after they had just found Him. However, the lad seemed to have missed His home for too long to reside in someone else’s place anymore. The gentleman who had later escorted homeboy to His home had let the message lose in social circles that some family who was migrating with him from Bangladesh had carried on without the deity and that his family on discovering this estranged divinity had taken it upon themselves to give Him the best care known to them. Fate had it that this information reached my great-grandfather, the two men met and He was brought back with great pomp and show.
However, as happens with many wealthy, capitalist land-owning Bengali families, they refuse to learn things. My didu is an old woman now, her siblings are old too, and the extended families and relatives are either dead or not in touch anymore. The mansion that was built in India is now inhabited by very few people, and most of the property is rented out to tenants. It is old now; fragile and leaky too, perhaps. Its beauty long gone and the Ganga, which used to flow nearby, shifted far away from it. It was being alleged for some time that Giridhari no more received the care He earlier used to, meaning a Brahmin was becoming more and more difficult to employ, who’d carry out daily rituals of the family, now far apart and existing only in name and consolidating over heated fights over property distributions. Allegedly, unless it was a Brahmin’s hand offering it, Giridhari wouldn’t accept even a sip of water. I wonder, if that is so, why didn’t He permanently run off to a Brahmin household? After all, according to rumours, it seems obvious that He knew of all things that had happened, were happening and were to happen. Why then re-enter a household that wouldn’t function according to Him in the first place?
Giridhari was sent off to a temple nearby, soon after such ‘problems’ started surfacing too often. And he was sent off without my maternal grandmother knowing, and neither did most of her siblings know. I remember the fondness with which she remembered Him, a frail woman who can’t get easily out of the house in which she
lives now, a woman who spent years not visiting Giridhari, someone she probably loved as much as her children or parents or even her lover. What must have she gone through when she heard, after the deed was done, that the room she visited every day of her maiden life, now lay empty?
To get rid of her family deity was sending her (dead) parents to an old-age home. To get rid of her family deity was her disowning the last of what remained of a cultural and genetic past she had left long back in Bangladesh. To get rid of her family deity was her feeling a bit lost when she touched her folded hands to her forehead, before taking the first bite of anything she ever ate. To get rid of her family deity was her realising, during the eightieth year of her long life, the last strike at whatever was holding her siblings and their children under the umbrella-like structure called family, was sanctioned, before it crumbled irreparably. To get rid of her family deity was to not know a lot of things at once, to get rid of her family deity was her sky being struck down, and to get rid of her family deity was to get rid of her family.
And it happened without her knowing it.
