Three Love Stories by Debashish Bhattacharya

JULY 25, 2015 · 8 COMMENTS

I met some strangers in a club ( or was it pub) who
wanted the newcomers to introduce themselves
through short speeches. Something like
Toastmasters do in their maiden speech called
Icebreakers.

I could just go ahead with my food and drinks and

ignore the choice of making friends with strangers.
But I chose to please them and follow their rules
and tried to tell them who I am through a chain of
love stories.

The day was cloudy and sometime interspersed

with intermittent rain. So I said, friends I come
from a city where monsoon is the queen of seasons.
We love, hate, eat and drink, fear and pray in the
rain. All we do have a smell of rain clinging to
them. So I will share with you some of my
experiences which will have an association with
rain like today because the three events all
happened in the rain. They said, how interesting.

Then I told them I was going to share three

experiences which had a theme all through. All
three were love stories and helped me to find
myself out, who am I and all that. I warned them
not to expect uniquely new stuff as my stories
would be in one way or another their stories too.
Then I started telling the stories.

Way back when I was twenty two years old and

writing freelance articles and news stories in
different Indian newspapers I met a very young girl
with whom I fell in love most violently. She was a
dancer, gave performances near Victoria Memorial
and Park Street localities inhabited by Anglo
Indians and cosmopolitan people. An Eurasian
herself she looked and danced like a proper fairy, I
saw her first in the monsoon and had my heart
pierced by the arrow of naughty cupid.

She was an orphan. We roamed around in early

dawns and mellow evenings hand in hand, softly
whispering to each other utter fooleries and soft
rubbish. The sprawling maidan lay around us like
the monarchies we owned with lights of
Chowringhee and Park Street twinkiling a little
further. I lived through a fairy tale for a few weeks.
And then something went wrong, the girl had some
problem in her legs which became serious causing
pain and inability to dance, let alone walk. The
distant uncles were too busy to arrange proper
medical care. I saw her withering and depressed
and fading away day by day, week by week.

One day I became desperate, stormed into her

uncles’ places and demanded immediate action. I
took appointment with known surgeons who were
bullied and coaxed alternatively by me, probably
assuming they were dealing with a lunatic. At the
end the uncles were forced to decide action for
their niece, put together funds, surgeons came
together and finally the girl underwent an operation
which was successful. I saw her in the hospital with
flowers, she took my hands and eyed me as if in a
dream. Well the love story must have ended in
marriage or separation either?

No my friends the story ended into my finding out

my strength and determination. It showed me who I
was and what I could do for my passion. An
unrequited love, was it? No neither that. How can
we marry or divorce where the heroine was not
human flesh and blood but the fairy who danced
atop the great Victoria Memorial. Her uncles were
none other than trustees and directors of the
heritage building. The surgeons and doctors were
distinguished engineers from CMERI Durgapur.
What I did was creating a storm through my news
exposures through a local daily. A series of articles
of the sad state of affairs going unattended and
crying for action.

The fairy started dancing again and I moved on my

journey of love.

The second love story also happened in another

rainy day, when I was a few years older, while
passing through Santiniketan Vishwabhatati
campus I heard a female voice singing Tagore
songs in a full moon night. She was singing with
her friends in one of the rooms of Sangeet Bhavan,
the music college. I did not understand the impact
but felt a pain in my chest. I smelled wet flowers
and plants around me creeping like tendrils of the
tunes she sang. Her voice had a drunken quality
and a faint hint of a lilt and these were enough to
kill me in a single shot. I promised to myself then
and there to marry the girl who was singing, whom
I had not yet seen or known even distantly, and
didn’t have an inkling who she was.

Gambling with myself I entered the room and my

life turned a new page. I married her after a
determined wooing of three months overcoming
highs and lows and roadblocks I would better not
describe to you here. The love story I am sharing
with you tought me the lessons of home and team
building. Of expanding myself through one woman
first then through the offsprings, learning to ride
together and share deeply and dangerously the life
and space of our existence. The story, however,
began with a voice and with a song. That’s what I
would request you to remember.

The third story is from when I was thirty five or so.

I had a very busy job with a multinational
corporation whose branding I managed. I had to do
a lot of travelling and often I missed to attend
school functions, games and even birthdays of my
son, a six year old kid who was unusually
perceptive and observant.

On an evening of his birthday despite his request

and my promise to attend I was very late in coming
home only to see a panick stricken crowd at the
gate of my house to greet me. My wife came
rushing and whispered to me Tipu ( my son) has
gone out without telling us, he is lost and started
crying.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and tried to be

calm. After a while I started my car and drove to a
park a mile away where I used to take my son some
free afternoons. It was drizzling then, I had no
umbrella, going through the dark alleyways of the
park I watched the benches where he was not to be
found. My heart almost came to a stop but then lo
and behold there he was, sitting on the wet
grounds, near a thick bush, I went near him and
called his name in soft voice. He looked up with
wet eyes and he said “Bepu I knew you would be
coming here”.

I discovered at that very moment that the lover boy

had become a father and suddenly my eyes became
wet too at the thought of too many children around
me, unseen and unknown till then, waiting to be
loved, heard, seen, touched and handheld.
I take your leave my friends now but I am sure I
could make my point to you through these love
stories. I am sure you all can tell stories of this kind
which happened to you but can be shared and
perceived with sympathetic strangers.

The strangers looked like they were hearing their

own experiences reenacted before them. We all felt
we were strangers no more.

A Hate Story by Debashish Bhattacharya

Today I am going to share with you a story of hate

nourished by a man who was born weak and shy
but grew to become someone whom millions
admired if not actually worshipped. He was born to
a vegetarian family with devout parents who
practiced vegetarianism and non violence as they
were Vaishnavites. At his early teens some of his
friends introduced him to meat eating and he
developed a taste for those dishes. His father loved
him very much and what’s more had great faith in
him. Because the boy hated lies.
However, a few weeks later the little guy felt bad
that he was hiding his meat eating from his parents
and decided to tell his father about it. Meanwhile
his father fell ill and the boy started nursing him
after coming home from school. One day when he
was tired of fighting with his conscience and still
too afraid to tell his father he wrote down his story
on a piece of paper and silently offered his father to
read. His father started reading the note, then sat up
in excitement, and at the end he looked at his dear
son with tears streaming down his eyes. He did not
utter a single word of admonition.
The son took oath to himself that he would never
compromise with his conscience again in life.
Vegetarianism was not the point, he was mortified
that he had caused so much pain to his loving
father by suppressing the truth.
The boy hated the devil who was responsible for all
this.
The boy was made to enter a marriage at a very
early age, owing to the custom of his community.
He treated his wife during his puberty with a
combination of usual factors, male domination,
sexual curiosity and a complete lack of proper
understanding and training to cope with married
life. While nursing his father in the nights once the
latter was in sickbed he invariably grew impatient
for meeting his very young wife in bed and later
felt terribly guilty for this. He often told in later
years that he might have helped his wife with
learning if he were not an immature teenager. He
became a staunch opponent of child marriage.
So the little guy was always at odds with his
conscience, always falling by his own standard and
hating himself for it. He was a traiditionally trained
kid from a western Indian household with very old
moral beliefs and practices. However, he was too
clever and analytical to merely play by the rules
and he wanted to create new rules for himself.
The boy grew up to be a lawyer though he could
hardly practiced law in the court due to a
nervousness to speak in public. He took up a job in
a distant country in a different continent where his
job was to protect Indian businessmen from
bullying and dominating white people. One day
while travelling in a first class carriage he was
thrown out without any excuse by the white ticket
checker and he was forced to spend a winter night
in a cold railway platform in an unknown place. He
was thrown out at the behest of a white fellow
passanger who would not agree to travel with a
black guy in the same compartment.
The anger and hate he felt that night started him on
to a journey which became history known by all of
us. The man was steeled by a conscious hate, hate
for untruth, cruelty, violence and compromise.
Good or bad, you take him or reject him, he makes
us feel shocked or inspired or both, by his lifelong
experiments with truth.
The shy, weak, awkward, tongued tied idiot turned
into a charismatic leader of million hearts who
followed him almost blindly and possibly caused
more harm to themselves and him than the devil
himself who had been his enemy. His hate found a
way to prepare for rectifying the wrongs, to
mitigate the injustices and cruelties inflicted by the
powerful on the weak.
He had the courage to stand against the whole
world when he took on himself to follow a new
lifestyle and new values. He declared war against
the most powerful and feared colonial maritime
power in the world and at the same time was on
friendliest terms personally with many of his
enemies as individuals.
I had not the privilege of seeing this man myself
but his My Experiments With Truth kept me
spellbound. I am not a follower of non violence,
non cooperation and political what’snot woven by
him to mobilise the nation in the stormy decades of
twenties to forties but I fell in love with his simple
ascetic anger and resentment against whatever is
not true, not genuine, not fair.
We know umpteenth number of cases of hate
turning good souls into monsters. Psychologists
and doctors, prophets and artists all urge us to build
our lives on love and hope. We have also see in our
every day lives how many lives get ruined by hate.
But my dear friends, hate can be a great motivator
which can teach us a lesson or two in turning
around and fighting against our enemies. Because
the world sometimes cries for action and fighting
back.
I am also very proud for the fact that I belong to the
same nation which created this man. I do not know
of any other country which earned its freedom from
very powerful opponents by taking the prescription
of non violence. Don’t kid yourselves thinking he
was a nutcase because he was shrewd and
calculating in his struggle and his farmer’s dress
and singing Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram with
others all had a brilliant method in the madness.
It’s a unique case study for IIMs and Ivey league
management institutes. He made his message and
action simple, focussed and unwavering. Once the
bunch of blood thirsty journalists asked him what
was coming after the war.
They wanted to know his plans of India’s
indepedence after Second World War ended. He
smiled and replied: Peace.
He was the most hated person not only by the
diehard colonialists and imperialists but also by the
people in his own country who hated him for
another reason. He was viewed by them as an aider
and abetter of Muslims. We can never imagine
sitting in 2015 the intensity and scale of animosity
between the fundamentalists in both Hindu and
Muslim camps in the late ’40s.
Few days before his death he was touring the riot
torn districts of undivided Bengal, going deep into
the remote and directly affected areas, talking,
counselling, listening, trying to soothe and advise.
He was the mentor of the people ruling India but he
took no seat or title, except the name given to him
by people themselves, the Father of the Nation.
He was light years away from power, wealth, ego,
living a frugal eccentric life on vegetables and
goat’s milk, trying to be with the people.
The point of hate comes back to the story of his last
moments, the shot fired by a fanatic Hindu to end
another greater hate story.
He made hate his weapon, is it because of that he
had to be erased from life by hate itself, was it a
fate accompli from the beginning?
Or is he still around?

Loneliness
AUGUST 8, 2015 · 2 COMMENTS
This saturday’s blog will be on loneliness, a subject
too close to my heart. I dedicate this post to all who
are lonely for whatever reasons. We are born alone
but in a community which takes care of us and help
us grow up. But is it really that simple? Readers
and writers of blogs belong to the population who
can eat, work, love, hate within a community or
social playground. Isn’t it! What about them who
are born to shame, poverty, indignity and foulness
we are only familiar with in a very remote, vague
and distant way. What about the children of
prostitutes, the jobless, the drug mules, the
population living in criminal or socio economic
blackholes?
We don’t know really know the answers to these
questions.
However, even the children born in a reasonably
stable community, the children stop being children
after a while and step into the dark deep forest of
adulthood. People want to trust and get betrayed,
want to love and get ignored or neglected, want to
befriend and get shoved off due to no fault of theirs
really. We often fail to understand why we were
treated unjustly and not treated as brothers and
sisters in God’s family.
Then we come to realise that we are not in a
community in real terms. We are individuals with
ownerships, we will get paid only if we can
transact certain products and services effectively, it
is no more the playtime, win or lose, after the game
we come back to fireside warmth and family
dinner, no sir. The seed of division is planted into
us by the community itself to which we were born.
The values of competition and quality creep in and
we interpret them as going ahead in life as killers.
Don’t we all hear the mantra, you have to have the
killer instinct in you or you do not survive.
Lonely people are seen in both the so called killers,
who don’t care whether anyone suffers or fades
away on the road he is travelling to succeed, and in
the people left behind, unable to cope with
killership, incompetent to compete and thrive. Like
our fingers the individual minds are also of endless
variety isn’t it. There are freaks and casatway,
those who opt for non mainstream life, those who
prefer singing to killing and imagining to doing
real things. The suicide as a theme I chose for my
last blog in fact is rooted in loneliness and is more
an internal thing than external. The lonely person
seeking comfort or relief in work, family, alcohol,
dream, egoism and what not but repeatedly
defeated to beat loneliness of his or her heart has in
his or her mind the ultimate solution sketched in,
suicide, the ultimate route of escape and revenge.
My friend Alena living in an European seaside
town wrote me: Debashish I think it’s time to quit.
My family is grown up and left, scattered all over
outside, I feel so lonely, so alone, the moments in
the evening are just unbearable, television and
newspapers are so dull, I find only marginal relief
in drinking, that’s also going into overdrive ruining
my health, relations with neighbours. It looks like I
know the answer, it’s hard but works.”
Raj is a distant cousin with IBM background but
out of a stable job for a long time. He had a messy
divorce behind him and two offsprings in
expensive colleges. He is into IT, earns something
from off and on consultancy, but becoming more
dependent on drugs to ease the burden of his
fractured soul. His father had committed suicide
long back when our neighbouring industrial
township closed down due to the closure of
Dunlop, the famous tyre manufacturer. Raj’s
family got simply washed away by the impact, one
sister lost to the dark evil world bordering on
prostitution, another younger brother blown away
by suicide after he failed to get a job at the end of
his post graduation.
My friend Alok Nath is a CEO and he has different
kind of loneliness to suffer. Alok said one day, you
know I don’t have anyone to share with me my
thoughts and problems. I asked him, why, you have
such a nice family? He said I don’t discuss
anything official or deeply personal with them,
why should I burden them unnecessarily? I cannot
share in office, all are either sharks or sycophants.
They want to further their careers at my cost.
I saw Alok trying golf, meditation and club life at
different times and of course alcohol and women.
Alok is really a good soul but a victim of his greed
for power and money and does not have the guts to
face that he is losing the game. He is proud and
vain as successful and competitive people are.
One night my son called me from the bed and we
drove fast to a posh clinic in the town to see Alok,
doctors trying hard to pump out the too heavy sleep
medication he had taken. Thank God he came back
but it might have been otherwise too. Alok is one
of the more intelligent persons so he opened a new
chapter in his life after he came home from the
clinic. After three years from that dark night of fear
and despondency Alok is now a detoxicated man,
dividing his time on the one hand between work
and another his home and family. The growing rift
with his wife is bridged well by now and the rebel
children are less on rebellion and more on
admiration towards him.
I asked him recently over a few drinks how is he
now. His answer was I am learning to be with
others and that has reduced my loneliness ( he used
the word self centred actually).
Andre in Paris is sending me pictures of his dog
through Facebook and email saying that he has got
a friend at last. Reshmi, the topper of dance class in
her state academy says, whenever I focus on
competing and beating others I fall sick. Now I
focus on my passion only, and I am feeling better.
Reshmi was a girl of average educational talents
but she always loved dancing. Her parents told her
for a long time that it wouldn’t do, she must do
academically better, dance could not be her
mainstream study. Reshmi was so scared and
uneasy that she ran away once to her aunt’s place
to seek emotional shelter against parental
dictatorship. But alas once she got an award in a
club dance competition she was taken up by her
father seriously and he asked her to become a
topper in dance. She was put in an academy and
under an expensive trainer to earn accolades and
pursue a career in dance. As a result she became a
state level topper but gradually slipped into a
severe depression. Psychiatric medication and
counselling failed to cure her.
When I saw Reshmi she was a ghost of her former
self, no longer the bouyant warm girl she had used
to be but a depressive maniac who was doing
wonders in dance more out of practice and habit
than of love. I took her to a friend of mine who ran
a non profit organisation for poor children. I asked
Reshmi’s parents to lay off their hands from her for
three months. Reshmi took a little longer to recover
from her depression but she undoubtedly bounced
back to life and told me, I have begun to live a less
lonely life, I am teaching dance to the kids twice a
week for free. Her parents asked me why do I take
her to these unproductive work? But their family
physician prevailed on them saying, don’t you see
the girl is normal again?
Loneliness reminds me of a documentary seen in
BBC longtime back. It was about a doctor, a very
successful surgeon in Europe who took out time
and effort to make a home for some mentally or
physically challenged persons at his home, a
village somewhere at the foot of the Alps. Every
saturday he drove down from his city of work to
his home and worked and dined with his more than
dozen mates who were misfits to the society by
general standard. He spent the weekend with his
odd bunch of friends who treated the doctor as
equal and not as a mentor or a superior. These guys
scarcely had a sense of money, or even, for that
matter, gratitude. They worked on the lands
together and sold vegetables, fruits and flowers to a
nearby marketing cooperative.
The last scene made me cry – all of them including
the doc walking along the fields towards the setting
sun in the melting hues of a magical twilight.

Remembering Independence Day and the cost we

paid for it.
AUGUST 15, 2015 · LEAVE A COMMENT
Independence day brings to mind the unforgettable
sufferings of millions of people who had known
themselves as Indians and then had to learn and
adjust with new facts: that they were citizens of
artificially created nations, India and Pakistan.
What a shame that we accepted that. The colonial
masters gave partition to us as their parting gift,
read kick. The lofty leadership of undivided India
accepted and agreed. The political leaders and the
industrialists who funded and sponsored them were
not affected by partition or riots. The communal
disharmony had been planted and grown for a long
time so that the country could be raped and spoiled
and the age old tradition of tolerance could be
dismantled.
Two crippled offsprings were born on 14-15
August 1947 and both nations were fated to remain
mutual enemies for a long time to come without
rhyme or reason. Stalin remarked ” what a joke, I
cannot believe that a partition can be made in this
century in the name of religion.”
Berlin Wall Was taken down. Artificial walls or
boundaries don’t work, do they?
This Independence Day we could take a pledge of
bridging the gaps between India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh.
If Europe can create an European Community why
cann’t we whose bond is far older, deeper and
stronger!
The freedom unleashed untold tales of woe ruining
lives in millions. An excerpt for your reading:
“Partition of India, the pain.
Just watching a documentary of an Asian Indian
actor tracing her roots. And then the documentary
talked about her Grand Uncle and his family being
massacred on a train as they fled from the newly
created Pakistan. She even met her great aunt who
was on that train when she was 20, but somehow
survived. Why do I feel a stab of pain each time I
hear or see anything on the partition of India ? I am
a partition baby, but I don’t really remember
anything… but after all these years, whenever I see
people from the other side of the border speaking
Punjabi, looking and speaking exactly like my
grandfather, I can’t help shedding tears …
….. why did we allow this to happen ? What
happened to us that we became such barbarians ?
Ruthlessly massacring one million men, women
and children on both sides. Ten million people
became refugees, causing the greatest mass
migration of people in known history.
I escape into blaming the British. Not willing to
accept that I carry the genes of the people of
Punjab that did this. My culture, my genes. How
could you take a sword to an innocent child and
ruthlessly run it through her heart ? Could I do that
in those circumstances…
.. so I escape. Escape into the politics of that time. I
hate Mountbatten who came home as a hero,
lauded for the fact that not a single British life was
lost at that time. Who cared about a million Indian
Hindus and Muslims ? In my mind I rebuke Nehru
and Jinnah for standing on their ego’s, unable to
compromise their personal desires to be the first
Prime Minister of India.
But it was not the British that did all the killing. It
was us. Our forefathers.
My parents were in Lahore where my mother went
to Kinaird (spelling ?) College. My father to the
Government College in Lahore, and then the
Medical College. After partition my family came to
the newly formed India as refugees. But my father
went back because there were not enough doctors
to treat the wounded and the dying.
I would often talk to my father about that time, and
I would see the pain on his face. About his muslim
friends lost in time. Friends with whom he stood
shoulder to shoulder as they took the Hippocratic
Oath. But the very friends that were too afraid to
give him morphine to treat the wounded, just in
case the raging, raving crowds found out they were
helping the Hindus. And years later as I would go
along on my scooter to my University in Delhi, I
was shown a spot in Paharganj where apparently
muslim women and children were thrown alive in a
burning bonfire.
My mother would recoil at talking about that time.
Except for the memories of the drains around the
houses filled with Kerosene and put on fire. But
she would soon escape into the memories of better
times. Of when Lahore was the cultural capital of
Asia. Lahore was still the greatest city to anyone
that had lived there.
Years later I went to Lahore. To record the music
for Bandit Queen with the amazing Nusrat Fateh
Ali Khan. I remember walking into the local
recording studios where a large orchestra suddenly
broke out in the theme music from Mr India and
songs from Masoom to welcome me to Lahore. It
was a moment I will always remember.
I went to Kinaid College. Where my mother went. I
saw shy girls, giggling as they recognized me,
looking so beautiful in flowing Salwar Kameez’s. I
tried to imagine my mother as one of them. I saw
her as a pretty young girl who passed me, and then
looked back and smiled that eternal smile my
mother always used to have. Everywhere I walked I
imagined myself as one of everyone.
And I wondered, what turned us all into such beasts
?
Shekhar”

Classical vs Topical
Happy New Year to you all.
January is drawing to a close. However, it’s still
new year trailblaze continuing. I look forward to
2017 as a year of new reading, new assimilations
and of course, new writings. 2015 saw my first
book of poems in Bengali published and get a
mixed response – cold, warm, lukewarm. 2016 end
witnessed my first Bengali novel enter the field of
published books. The novel is named Chiro
Prabash ( Eternal Sojourn).
With an explosion of communication technology
and geometric progression in networking among
human beings across the world the borderline
between the classic and the temporary or topical is
getting blurred. There was a time when the British
readers waited for months for the serially published
parts of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit or David
Copperfield. Rercreations through reading were
indeed limited. In today’s world you have literally
thousands of blogs popping up every week to
pander to your mind. An over bombardment of
information and ideas are creating a clutter which
makes you undecided about the quality, value and
necessity of this humanly unmanageable stuff
archived in the clouds.
Is it a matter of competition as some indicate or
claim ? Is one blogger or two expected to stand out
of the crowd and reach the Holy Gate of Fame ?
One wonders where had these potential writers
been all through the last few centuries ? They have
come riding the waves of the world wide web and
the digital multimedia revolution and insisting
every moment on us to notice them. The more
competent among them often succeed in engaging
and amusing us but can we name even a few out of
them who can replace the serious works of fiction
and reflection and get themselves on our minds’
shelves for a measurable period?
I wonder if they do. I suspect as human beings we
are becoming shallow with the passage of time. We
are seeking limelight with a tiring tenacity and
missing on the factors which help us to acquire
educated minds.
What do you think my readers, do you agree or
disagree?
It would be good to have an exchange of opinions
from all on this, if possible.