May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (40 page)

It was amazing to hear about these elevated carryings-on between mother and daughter, but to Dev Sen it was just a matter of routine. “I don’t see my mother very much,” she said, “because sometimes she is wonderful, and sometimes not at all wonderful.” In a poem called “Game” that was part of the
Welcome, Angel
collection, here translated by Paramita Banerjee and Carolyne Wright, Dev Sen had written of her mother:

Dev Sen began writing verse as a child, inspired by her parents and their poet friends, who gave her the impression that “the whole world was writing poetry all the time.” Her first two poems, one about sugar and salt, another about a frog croaking during the Calcutta monsoon, were published in her school magazine when she was seven. She grew up mesmerized by the sounds of certain words—especially the words
Binapani Bipani
, which she saw on the signboard of a shop that she used to pass on her way to school. “The name used to play in my mind like the humming of a line from a song,” she once wrote. Although it was Rabindranath Tagore, Calcutta’s greatest poet, who had suggested the name Nabaneeta to her parents, she had never liked it very much and one day scratched it out on the covers of her schoolbooks and replaced it with “Miss Binapani Bipani Dev.” In Bengali, Binapani was the name of a goddess, but
bipani
meant “shop.” “When my mother saw my handiwork, she fell into fits laughing,” Dev Sen once wrote.

In addition to speaking Bengali and English, Dev Sen learned to read French, German, Greek, Hindi and later Oriya and Assamese, the languages of the Indian states of Orissa and Assam. She studied English literature at Calcutta’s Presidency College, earned a master’s from Jadavpur University, worked a year toward a doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University, but then returned home to marry a young Bengali economist she had first met in Calcutta. After a wedding for 1,200 guests, she and her husband left for the United States to embark on the enviable life of a gifted couple with what promised to be two stellar careers. Dev Sen’s husband had a job teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dev Sen transferred the credits she had earned toward her doctorate from Indiana to Harvard. When her husband’s work moved him the next year to Cambridge, England, Dev Sen continued her doctoral work long-distance with Indiana University, mailed in her thesis, and was able to take her oral exams in England because four out of five of her examiners from Bloomington turned up in Cambridge for a comparative literature conference. They were especially lenient, she believed, because Dev
Sen was pregnant with her first child. “So when I was twenty-five, I had my Ph.D. and my daughter,” she said.

But the next decade would drag her down as the tag-along wife of a rising academic star, a situation that provided the material for some of her finest and most deeply feminist poetry. As her husband moved like an academic vagabond between the great universities of England, America and India, traveling to the University of California at Berkeley, then to Delhi University, then to Harvard, then back to Delhi again, and finally to the London School of Economics, Dev Sen followed as a post-doctoral researcher. Although she continued to write poetry, had a second daughter, and published
Welcome, Angel
to critical acclaim in Calcutta, all this did not seem to matter in her husband’s world. “I did not have my own friends or my own existence,” she said with some bitterness. “My husband’s friends did not know I was a poet. Nobody knew. They didn’t know anything apart from the fact that I was a good cook.” Most of her husband’s friends were economists, and in Dev Sen’s view, “They thought I was not a very intelligent person because I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. In fact, they thought I was very dumb.” Her husband, she said, never read her poems. “That was one thing that upset me, although it was very silly of me,” she said. “I wanted all his attention. I think I kind of crushed him with my attention, because I was interested in him and in nobody else.”

The worst year was 1965, spent at Berkeley with her husband, who persuaded her to concentrate solely on her work and leave their ten-month-old daughter with her parents in Calcutta. “He said she would be happy, and in fact she was,” Dev Sen recalled. But the separation, she said, “was too much for me.” Before departing for Berkeley, Dev Sen wrote “Dismissal,” a poem addressing her husband about her anguish. It is translated by Paramita Banerjee and Carolyne Wright.

“I don’t know why I felt that way,” Dev Sen said, reflecting twenty-four years later in Calcutta. “Nothing had happened. He was very sweet to me, although probably I knew he was going to leave me someday. My poetry knew, but I didn’t know.”

At Berkeley, Dev Sen’s husband had spent most nights in his cubicle, working on the research that would advance his career, and Dev Sen, afraid to go home alone, would sleep on the floor next to him until he finished. “He wrote eleven articles, and they made him what he is today,” she said. That summer, she wrote “On That Invisible Tower, You,” the lament of an anxious wife who knew that a more successful husband was “climbing up to the neighborhood of the sun” and leaving her behind. Translated here by Sunil B. Ray and Carolyne Wright, it too became a part of
Welcome, Angel
.

In 1972, Dev Sen returned alone to Calcutta, found her present job at Jadavpur University a year later, and then, for a time, stopped publishing her poetry. “When I was writing all these poems, suddenly I discovered that it was a very personal and confessional view, and because it was a small world, Calcutta, everybody knew what was happening in my life, and people were full of pity,” she said. “I felt that this must stop. So I started writing humorous stuff, about my family and making fun of myself and things happening around me. I didn’t want people to think, Oh, this soulful, sorrowful woman has been spurned by her husband.” I had read the occasional prose she had written in English and found it light and amusing, but Dev Sen herself knew it could not measure up to her earlier poetry or her subsequent work, most of it untranslated, that appeared in the city’s Bengali magazines. “When I retire, should I say I am a retired professor of comparative literature?” she asked rhetorically. “I don’t think so. I would probably say I am a poet. I would say I was a poet before anything else.” As she had once written, “Poetry is entwined in the very nerve-center of my being. It is my guard, it expresses my hurts, my prayers, my aloneness. It is my companion, my fulfillment, my frustration.”

Dev Sen, like the other women I met in Calcutta, did not call herself a feminist, although in her case I think it was a matter of semantics. She seemed to know that her fate in life was to shatter traditions. “In 1988, a woman who thinks and writes—is it possible for her not to break some shackles?” she asked me. Knowing that I was interested in her as a woman writer, she would frequently pull one of her poems out of a messy pile and say, “This is a very definite feminist poem.” She flipped through
Welcome, Angel
, too, and when she came upon a poem called “Space to Graze,” which she had written in 1964, she loosely translated it for me on the spot. “This is about the meadow that is meant for the grazing of cows,” she said. “It says, ‘There is no point in chewing on the cud’—there is a Bengali word for it, for cows keeping their cud in their mouths and chewing it again and again—and
so it says, ‘I want room to graze, although I like this cow shed, and it is very clean, and there are no mosquitoes. But, you see, the jaws get tired. Although I have calves, the heart gets tired, there is no fun in regurgitating. Dear Cowherd, let me go.’ ” She looked up from the book. “I was thinking of myself as a cow with a calf in a very nice, clean and well-taken-care-of cow shed. I never thought consciously of working or becoming a working woman or teaching or anything. It is very strange. I still didn’t even have my second child.”

Like much of Dev Sen’s most moving work, that poem was written in Calcutta. Although the city itself appeared directly in only a handful of her poems, it clearly pushed her toward creativity, and its intellectual tradition seemed inseparable from who she was. “I am glad that I came back to Calcutta,” Dev Sen said. “Every day I get fan letters from unknown people, from old people, from young people, from schoolboys. And that makes me feel good. It makes me feel wanted and useful. I have gotten used to receiving fan mail now, but when it started it was very exciting. It was a good thing for me because my confidence is very low in myself.” Both “Dismissal,” her poem about leaving her daughter, and “On That Invisible Tower, You,” the poem about being left behind by her husband, were also written in Calcutta, when she returned home from the States to visit her parents during the summer monsoon. Although she pointed out to me that Calcutta’s actual rains are not like those in
Paroma
—“The Calcutta monsoon is not at all beautiful; all the roads get blocked, and life becomes very hard,” Dev Sen said—the weather seemed to inspire her.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “Once the heat goes, one feels more relaxed. It must be the sound of the rain falling that has a physical effect on your nerves. Calcutta always has a very strong effect on one’s nerves.”

CALCUTTA ALWAYS HAD A STRONG EFFECT ON MY NERVES, TOO. THE THREE
women I met there unraveled many of the city’s mysteries, taught me about the relationship between an artist and her environment and eventually made me feel at home. But the truth was that in a half dozen visits, I never really came to terms with the suffering of Calcutta. On my first trip I had been overwhelmed. I felt as if a war had recently been waged in the streets and somehow no one had noticed. For a time I decided I should not talk about Calcutta, let alone visit it, unless I was prepared to do something to help. But the city inevitably drew
me in, as it had so many others. I eventually met Satyajit Ray, found painters and poets living on grimy, charming back alleys of one-hundred-year-old row houses with hanging flowerpots, and meandered past the bookstalls on College Street with their copies of Nietzsche and Kant. I spent many long hours in conversations about artists, and about India. In short, I was seduced, all the while nurturing my own guilt that talk was cheap, and that the rest of India had no patience with the greatest talkers of them all, the Bengalis, famous for spending too much time in the city’s crowded coffeehouses and not enough time doing something—anything—about the squalor around them.

During one of my interviews with Aparna Sen, I asked her how it was possible for affluent Bengalis like herself to rationalize making intellectual films when there were so many hungry people on the streets. Her reply was typically direct. “We don’t rationalize,” she said. “Periodically we feel guilty. But we don’t like to think about it too much, because you can’t live like that.” Of course I could have asked any New Yorker the same question, but it always seemed to me that Calcutta’s poverty was qualitatively different because it was so pervasive. Every day, even the very rich and very isolated could not help but be engulfed by it, and be forced to think about it. When I asked Veena Bhargava the same question, how she rationalized painting the homeless rather than reaching out to them directly, I was really looking for an answer for myself.