Ma and books: a conversation between the author and her mother

Ma and Books: a Conversation Between the Author and Her Mother

Written and Edited

Rajlekha Roy Burman

Me and my mom spontaneously thought to catch-up in a leisurely afternoon over a conversation involving her connection with the past as a humble homely legacy bearer of some readings, travel, cuisine etc and looking forward to gen alfa’s taste, capacity and receptivity.

Me: Ma, let me ask you a question that I perhaps never asked before. How was your childhood?
Maa: Well, my childhood was way different from yours now. Growing in a middle class family in a government accommodation in Kolkata ( erstwhile Calcutta, much better to sound) with both the parents working, I had to curve my own niche. Most of the time I was my own pal.

Me: But how was it different from mine?
Maa: See, mine was a time when having a Black and White tv and a telephone was considered to be the highest luxury in middle class empire. We had nothing of these till I was ten. So most of the time I would lean over books, solid, physical hard copies. Soft copy, pdf, Kindle, Google , internet…..the markers of tech savvy civilization were completely unknown. So, reading books, kids’ magazines, Comics and of course Soviet Literature which I subscribed, kept me engaged in lonely hours. Late afternoon I had the liberty to visit the park and play till the lights began to show up in quarters and my tired mom, having returned home, would give the routine cry from the balcony, ” It’s time to wrap up and study “.

Me: Maa, you said you read a lot. What was / were your favourite read? If you can name a few.
Maa: Ummm… there are quite a few. But two books that became my obsession and were visited by me again and again were Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in Bengali and Chuk and Gek by Sergei Nicolai, a Russian story translated in Bengali.

Me: Why these two, out of the lot?
Maa: See first is the story of Apu and Durga, two siblings growing together in an obscure village of Bengal. They quarrel over trivial issues but are inseparably tied by the chain of love. Despite abject poverty they lived life to the fullest. Everytime I would shed silent tears while reading the pages describing Durga’s untimely death. The description of nature in rural Bengal still haunts me like jasmine at night.
The second is the story of two brothers who, accompanied by their mother, undertook an arduous journey to meet their father who was posted in the stark cold snow covered Siberia. The narrative unfurls how they faced every challenge, adversity that fell in their way and in the process how they grew stronger before uniting with their loving father.

Me: Nods acknowledgingly*.
Maa: And great film-maker Satyajit Ray made a film of the same name based on Pather Panchali . The film created huge waves in the history of cinema in India and abroad.

Me: What do you think readers like me should read?
Maa: Apart from timeless classics like Pather Panchali, you, ie current generation, can take a look at Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Hosseini, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni ( a poet), I mean contemporary diasporic writers who, despite being settled abroad, have not lost connections with their roots, land and people and relentlessly reflect on issues affecting their country and the world as a whole. They are doing wonderful jobs with pen and pain.

Me: I read as well. Perhaps I read more from the digital platform rather than owning physical copies. But you think upcoming generation doesn’t show much penchant for reading books, right?
Maa: Sadly yes I do. The incredible rise of audio visual medium- TV, OTT, YouTube, and the ever vibrant social media has decreased the number of potential readers. They’re more attracted to visuals, not the letters. Visiting Book fairs are more of fashionable trips than self enriching rituals these days.

We both stare at the ceiling as we lay on our backs on the bed, while I started drifting away in my thoughts. My take on certain matters, is however different than hers. But at times it’s tricky to convince someone with whom you have a considerable generational gap, and probably a resource-gap as well.