May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (39 page)

Her voice remained even and she insisted she wasn’t bitter, but her paintings told a different story. I remember in particular one canvas of an Indian housewife, naked except for her sari blouse. A vague kind
of discharge trickled from her vagina, giving the entire painting a feeling of desperation. “I think the reason why women have been appearing in my work is that I feel that Indian women are cloistered and shut in,” Bhargava said. “This hemmed-in existence, this very protected existence, is rather sapping and unhealthy.” She said that she herself had never felt restrained, even during her years of domestic hibernation, but it seemed to me that she had been caught, like all women, in the multiple roles demanded of her. Her grown children still required attention, and Bhargava recently had organized her daughter’s wedding. Bhargava’s parents still lived in Calcutta, and as a good Indian daughter, she tended to them, too.

I told Bhargava that of the Calcutta women I was interviewing, she was the only one who was still with her husband. “Really?” she said, interested again in talking about the pull of professional and personal demands. “It’s a juggling game. You keep your husband and kids happy, you keep your parents happy, and you try to keep yourself happy. At this point, my priority is time, time to work. If there has been any resentment, it may be that I haven’t had as much time as I would like. But then you look at it in another way. Artist friends of mine tell me that I’m very pampered. Well, perhaps I am quite pampered. If I lived alone, I don’t know if I could support myself on the sale of my paintings. Nothing’s ideal in a sense, is it? There are always compromises. And I don’t look back anymore. In some ways I feel as if I’m starting a new life.”

At the end of our conversation, I asked her if she felt any larger responsibility toward Calcutta, and how she rationalized painting the homeless rather than directly helping them. “It’s difficult,” she said. “It’s very difficult. It’s something which does affect me. You can only do your own little bit, you know, in your own personal way. In this building, a number of people come to me for medicines. I’m not a doctor, but something simple like a flu or a cold or a fever, they come, I help them. This is a very small thing, but one tries to … to …” Bhargava stopped, struggling. “I’m not a social worker, right? And at times I feel, What the hell am I painting for? But then, these problems do not exist only in Calcutta. They exist in many other countries. I rationalize that I can only do what I am fit to do.”

And yet, the city had been her muse, and its poor had provided the rich material for her work. “My experience is here,” she said. “I felt it, I feel it, therefore I paint it. It’s got to come from within. I don’t know that I could paint what I’m painting here, living in Delhi, for
instance. Or let’s say I was up in the hills, in the mountains. I think I’d be doing something quite different. Sometimes I feel like escaping. Maybe I’ll go up to the hills and experience a different environment. But I know it will be temporary. I’ll come running right back.”

THE IMAGE OF CALCUTTA IN “RETURN OF THE DEAD,” ONE OF NABANEETA
Dev Sen’s most moving poems, differed from the cruel reality of Veena Bhargava’s work and the pastoral scenes of Aparna Sen’s. Calcutta appeared instead as a metaphor for abandoned childhood love. Written in the rhetorical tradition of Bengali literature, “Return of the Dead” directly addressed a city laden with images of motherhood, fertility and the threads of the poet’s own life. Dev Sen wrote it upon her return to Calcutta in the early seventies, after her marriage dissolved in London. She had lived overseas for more than a decade and now suddenly found herself on her own, with two daughters, memories of two sons lost in childbirth, and fears of what the city would think of a woman whose husband had left her. Like most of Dev Sen’s work, the poem was originally written in Bengali. What follows is her own translation.

Although most creative Bengalis considered themselves granted a muse by birth, Nabaneeta Dev Sen had risen above others to become one of Calcutta’s preeminent voices. (She was no relation to Aparna Sen; Sen was a common Bengali name.) Raised as the only child of the famous Bengali poets Narendra Dev and Radharani Devi—“I was conceived in the womb of one poet and sired by another,” Dev Sen once wrote—she published her first collection of verse,
First Confidence
, when she was twenty-one. A dozen years, two children and a doctorate later, she brought out her second collection,
Welcome, Angel
. After that came four novels, two books of short stories, three travel books, two volumes of literary criticism and three hundred more poems. She shared the prestigious Rabindranath Tagore prize with her mother in 1986, the same year she appeared as part of the Festival of India poetry-reading series in New York. In Calcutta, her days were spent as a professor of comparative literature at Jadavpur University, and also as hostess for the constant stream of friends and followers who dropped by her house.

In fact, the house was itself a character in her life, famous in Calcutta and among some feminists I knew because of what it once was and what it had become. Dev Sen came of age when the house overflowed with the intellectuals and writers who sought out her parents, but in recent years it was known for the three generations of strong women who coexisted uneasily on separate floors. The first floor was rented out to office tenants, Dev Sen lived on the second, her mother lived on the third, and one of Dev Sen’s two daughters lived on the fourth. Dev Sen’s father had died, and she had no plans to remarry, so there were no men to temper—if that was at all possible—the passions that were said to simmer between mothers and daughters.

One warm March evening in Calcutta I made my first trip to the house, in Hindustan Park, a lovely, once-elegant neighborhood that had clung to some of its gardens and quiet side streets despite the
surrounding high rises and decay. Dev Sen’s house, a narrow four stories of yellow brick, was named Bhalobhasha, which means “love” in Bengali. She had been born in the house and had lived there for most of her life. I walked up to the massive front door, rang the bell, then waited. Nothing happened, so I rang again. This time, the door opened so slowly it seemed to be moving on its own. I peeked behind it, only to discover that no one was there. Unsure of whether to enter or wait, I looked up a steep flight of stairs and saw a woman smiling down at me. “You can come up,” she called, introducing herself as Nabaneeta and explaining that she had long since saved herself the trouble of the trip downstairs by attaching a long rope to the door, which opened it from above. “It was my cousin’s idea,” she told me, adding that the device had its risks, “because we never know who is coming in.”

Dev Sen was a handsome, comfortably disheveled woman of fifty, bundled that evening into a traditional Bengali silk sari with intricate folk designs on the borders. Her dark hair was long and loose, and she had a pretty, amused face. I did not notice a discrepancy she had once complained about in an essay: “My right eye always seems to smile. My left eye, on the other hand, does not twinkle at all. Its very shape is mournful, as if I have stolen it from the mask of a Greek tragedy. Even when I am splitting my sides laughing, my left eye does not take part and retains its melancholy identity.” With no trace of a poet’s melancholy that evening, Dev Sen led me to what had been her father’s study, then arranged herself cross-legged on a mattress on the marble floor, in the middle of a nest of files, books, magazines, newspapers, medicines, papers and pens. Dev Sen wrote, slept and received all her guests in this room. None of her visitors called before they dropped in, and no one seemed worried that she might have work to do. “This is India, and it is a sin to be busy,” Dev Sen said dryly. Gregarious and entertaining, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, she loved literary talk and had taken the art of disorganization to unparalleled heights. Poems written over the last fifteen years were scattered uncollected throughout her papers, and she had abandoned a half-finished historical novel about women in Calcutta, awaited by fans and feminists, because, she claimed, she had lost the manuscript in the chaos of the house. It was not hard to imagine this happening: the walls around her mattress were lined floor to ceiling with an alarming jumble of ancient files, dusty notebooks, souvenirs from trips abroad and a portion of what Sen said were the fifteen thousand books—in Bengali, English, German and French—that crowded the bookshelves, tables and floors of most rooms in the house.

Dev Sen’s approach to love seemed equally free and easy. When I asked her if she had been in love since her marriage, she immediately replied, “Oh, every day. How can you not be in love?” Some of her most vivid verses were love poems, such as “The Other Tongue.” Translated by Paramita Banerjee and Carolyne Wright, it was a fervent invitation to a lover to

“I am falling in love all the time,” Dev Sen went on happily, although it was difficult to tell whether her statement was literal or whimsical. The day before she had told me that her two daughters were twenty and twenty-four years old, “and I am twenty-five, so we have all become the same age, and we try not to fall in love with the same men.” Dev Sen said the two “official” loves in her life were her former husband and an earlier fiancé, who had broken off the engagement. “The others are unofficial,” she said. “Only my daughters must know about them, because I must tell them everything. My mother knows one. The other two I think she knows, but she is more intelligent than I am, so she does not bring it up.”

This seemed a good time to ask about the house, and what seemed to be the totally dependent if tempestuous relationships among its women. Dev Sen warmed to the subject, pointing out that she was the only woman in the house who worked for a living—a sacrifice that in her opinion did not adequately impress her mother, her daughters and her female servants. She complained that the servants rarely stirred themselves to pull the rope for the front door when callers arrived, leaving Dev Sen to interrupt her own writing to let in and out the guests. “You see, I am everybody’s servant,” she said, both exasperated and amused. “I drive the car, I do everything that is necessary, but nobody takes me seriously in this house. Nobody thinks my work is important. My mother doesn’t work and she is taken seriously. But it’s my fault. I don’t think.”

I soon learned that the normal wear and tear of mother-daughter ties had run riot in the household, in a way that was comically and somehow uniquely Bengali. Although I never met Dev Sen’s mother, Radharani Devi, because she was not well, Dev Sen described her to
me as “an extraordinarily ambitious person who knows that I am not doing anything.” Her mother, she said, had a brilliant mind and “two personalities—one for the outsider, and one for me.” Her elder daughter, she continued, “has a very complicated relationship with me and is overprotective of me. She was eight when I came back to Calcutta and she always felt that she had to take care of me, that I was not grown-up enough. Even this morning she was telling me, ‘Your problem is that people can see through you. If you hate a person your eyes tell it, and if you like a person your eyes tell it. The other person knows what you think, so the other person is always at an advantage. This is why you have so many friends, because you don’t know who your enemies are.’ ” Dev Sen sighed. “My mother thinks I am underdeveloped.”

Dev Sen went up to the third floor to visit her mother only once a day, but in between, the two poets communicated by notes passed through the servants. “All day long the notes come from her,” Dev Sen said, “saying do this, do that.” This absurdity reached new heights when Dev Sen’s elder daughter was in the United States for her first year at Smith College, “calling up every week, every day, as if she were around the corner,” while Dev Sen’s mother, upstairs, sent her five-page letters in the morning and evening. “This is a really crazy household,” Dev Sen said, laughing. Most of the notes from her mother were unsolicited, although occasionally Dev Sen made requests, such as one on this day asking about a line from a poem or an essay by T. S. Eliot. “My mother has a fantastic memory about everything that she learned fifty years ago, so she sent the correct line back down,” Dev Sen said. The next day, Dev Sen’s mother asked her why she had wanted the line, and Dev Sen replied that she needed to use it for a point she was making in her writing about whether a reader needed to know the background of the poet in order to understand his or her verse. Dev Sen’s mother told her that knowing about the life of the poet was essential to understanding the poem, but Dev Sen replied that Eliot thought the work should speak for itself.