The Chhordi she was

She left quietly for eternal peace, from a non-descriptive hospital room. But she had arrived in this world amid the noisy bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese. It was the 2nd World War. The city was dark then, under black-out. It was the 8th of November exactly 67 years ago, to the day.
I wonder if she realised, that till the last active moments of her life she was destined to always arrive with a bang, wherever she went. Nobody was ever left in doubt of the fact that she was around. Always bursting with the joys of life, as it were. Fun and laughter formed a vibrant leit motif of her life.
Since, I was only 2 years younger than her - the three other siblings are at least nine years older than me! - we spent the maximum number of years together till she married and left the Chatterjee home in 1968.
When I recall the days of Chittagong, (yes I do remember bits and pieces of our stay there!) , of Darjeeling, of our years in Kolkata spent with gusto in Lake View Road, Mahanirvan Road, Ballygunge Place and Lake Gardens, what stands out is that Chhordi and I were the only siblings together throughout those memorable two and a half action-packed decades. Naturally, we were the best of friends, even till her very last days. We shared a lot of our joys, miseries and secrets that nobody else knew of. However, the one thing that remained the common denominator through all those years and decades was the inevitability of laughter and more laughter!
She even laughed when she realised that the pony I was riding on died shortly after choosing to suddenly sit down, with me precariously hanging from the saddle! This was in Darjeeling during those heady childhood years of carefree abandon, when we went through time playing, riding and exploring the beauteous wonders of the Himalayan town, often with Bapi(our dad) as our guide and mentor. Bapi had taken some wonderful photograhs of the two of us during those excursions. In fact, two of them, taken on the lawns of Government House and on the famous promenade around the Observatory HIll, used to adorn the walls of Chhordi's home, wherever she lived.
Calcutta, where both of us lived from 1951 to 1968, was to be the place where we spent time growing up, through school, college, university, et al. Those were truly fun years because, no matter what she was engaged in or I was busy with, we would have plenty of time for each other, more often than not, to laugh together. This included some common parties we would attend. She would come to watch a few of the cricket matches I played in, never failing to create a ruckus from the boundary line, often resulting in my embarrassing misses on the field!. I reciprocated the compliments by attending her college exhibitions (she was qualified in Fine Arts from the Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta) although, I must confess, I was more partial to visiting her in college when she was in her 3rd year when the nudes would be posing for the students!! It was fun to watch her trying to shoo me and my friends away, no doubt wishing every moment that the earth would open up and swallow her!
The mid-sixties saw Chhordi and I spending a lot of time with the Cosmopolitan Club, a club founded by our parents together with several other original residents of Lake Gardens. This was a club which subsisted on the spirit of the members more than anything else. It had no premises.The objective was for the members to have a lot of wholesome fun amongst themselves, through weekly tea meetings and monthly dinner meetings at their residences by turns.
This is the forum in which the two of us were given the unenviable task of teaching some leaden-footed enthusiasts, by far our seniors, the rudiments of ballroom dancing!Needless to say that this endeavour was soon abandoned, not so much for the lack of aptitude on the part of the
participants, which was considerable, but more for the fact that Chhordi, the chief instructor, was apt to spend the time rolling with laughter at the antics of the amply-proportioned learners!! Invariably, the sessions would end up in a riot!
I shall never forget the fancy dress party that the Cosmopolitan Club organised. Chhordi and I appeared as a newly married couple with she being the groom and me the coy bride! This, I am sure, is the only "case of the giggling groom" on record!!
There used to be two pretty girls, sisters, living right across the road from our house. One night, three of my friends who were sleeping in for the night and I decided to have some fun by scaring the wits out of them. It was around 2.00a.m. We thought that hurling missiles against their bedroom door and windows would be the best ploy. Soon Chhordi was amongst us and was promptly roped in for our game. Lo and behold! Not only did she help us prepare the missiles with her used paint tubes, but also in no time she was busy hurling them with irrepressible glee alongside us!
Not that she was a tomboy. Oh no, not at all! During her college days, she was like a veritable moth to a flame, the way she drew attention from numerous male aspirers. In fact, several times she insisted that I accompany her to stave off the more dogged ones. This itself was a source of hilarity to her because, those days, I resembled a cadaver far more than a normal human with my miserable lack of the much needed avoir dupois!
My nephew Bunty has written about Tuku Shome (then Air Force officer) and how he would strike a pose and literally go cross-eyed while singing for Chhordi's benefit. He was not the only one. Kushal Singh Bisht was a sturdy, stocky Kumaoni tea-planter in the Terai during the 60s. He too would burst into song every time he saw Chhordi! I remember a scene where Bisht (my brother-in-law, a fellow planter, insisted on calling him Beast!) threw back his head and launched into "hey rajnigandh tumar gandh sudha dalo, chander hansir bandh bhengo che....!" while sitting, as we were, in the verandah overlooking the front lawns of Simulbari. Chhordi shot up like a jack-in-the-box, ran inside and laughed her guts out for about half an hour! Meanwhile, Bisht carried on singing! And believe me, this fact caused Chhordi to laugh even more!
Then there was Bonny, yet another planter aspiring to be her suitor. A product of North Calcutta, his upbringing had obviously not exposed him to smart young women of the "forward type". So Chhordi was like a bombshell in his life. Boy, was he smitten? After his efforts in or around Simulbari (we used to visit that place every year) he gathered up his courage and landed up in Lake Gardens to press his suit with my parents. Unfortunately for Bonny, at a rather early stage in the evening, he chose to comment on the mosquito menace of Lake Gardens to Chhordi, in his pronounced North Calcutta accent and remarked " ekhane bheeson mosa!" As a conversational gambit it was an abject failure. For, it only resulted in Chhordi beating a hasty retreat from the room in a paroxysm of laughter! Exit Bonny! (short for Bonnerjee)
And who can forget about her mimicries! She was par excellence! There was hardly anyone we knew who she, and I, did not imitate. Any such comic act was always there, delivery with or without demand!
Yet, this woman was not really without a care in the world, as it may seem from hearing or reading about her.
Life was not easy for her, right from her birth. She was borne with an unusual growth on her forehead, over one eye. This would, it seems, hang like a bunch of grapes and bleed buckets every now and then. Imagine the plight of a little girl bearing the pain and mortification of such a problem! After going through numerous forms of treatment, all to no avail, God smiled on her in the form of Dr. Subodh Mitra, a pioneer in radium therapy in those early years of the 40s. Chhordi was to become Dr. Mitra's first guinea pig in this experiment with radium. And she triumphed over the unknown with such completeness that, after a few years, anybody who cared to look closely at her would have been hard pressed to notice the faintest of scars over her right eyebrow, the only relic of her post-natal afliction.
After a relatively carefree life through school and college, Chhordi's marriage made things really tough for her. Hers was an arranged marriage to a chap with impeccable credentials. But he was an alcoholic and this fact ultimately, after several years, drove them to the inevitable divorce.
She never married again. Instead she worked herself silly trying to keep her daughter and herself in some degree of comfort. At the fag end of her life she did find someone, but, true to her wretched luck, did not live long enough to enjoy the relationship.
She worked in several companies, travelled abroad extensively and, all in all, enjoyed a relatively good corporate experience.....some were excellent, others were not.She saw the best of times and she saw the worst of times.
In the hospital I was privileged to meet her boss, colleagues and subordinates from her last job ... a few days before she passed away. I was privileged because it is not everyday that one hears such glowing 360 degrees tributes about the achievements of a person in an organisation. Her Big Boss's words still echo in my head..."the impact that Gopa made in 6 months had not happened in the entire two decades of the organisation's existence". At that moment I indeed felt privileged to have been the "kid" brother of such a person.
Chhordi was a magnificent human being. I can say with full confidence that nobody, but nobody knew her as much as I did. After all, right till her last month, we always talked to each other, if not face to face, definitely over the telephone, or as in recent times, through text messaging and email. There was never any secret between us...not when we were young, not when we were grown up.
Although she went through several bad patches in her life, she did not ever allow herself to wallow in self pity. If she appeared moody and sullen at times, she, more than anybody else, had the right to, for life had been often unfriendly to her. She did not deserve any of it. But like the person she was, she always stood up and fought. And what a heart she had! Always giving, always generous to a fault, totally unmindful of her circumstances. I have been touched so many times by this inherent goodness of her heart that I used to marvel at her magnanimity. Every body is not at that level. I was always humbled by this trait in her for I knew that I could never hold a candle by her in this regard. She was a true Champion!
She was an artist, a corporate executive, a businesswoman,a social worker, a comedian and a friendly human being...all rolled into one ball of joy and exuberance. But to me, at the end of the day, she was a sister extraordinaire!
Rest, chhordi. You deserve to.