Maa loves stories. She loves telling stories, to be precise. Listening to them, on the other hand, requires a kind of patience that my mother has proudly discarded. So it is a well-established quietly welcomed fact within the family that Maa loves telling stories.
But, more importantly, her stories are always real and strangely glorious, without even the tiniest trace of mundanity that usually often accompanies reality. To think about it, it is an art to make reality as glorious as fiction and Maa is an artist with skills honed and sharpened with every round of storytelling at dinner parties and Pujo pandals and online singing classes.
All such events seem to be lined up in a grand game of musical chairs; a game where her stories keep playing on loop with pauses at the right second, lingering undertones, the voice rising and dropping almost in a perfect pattern. So, Maa has always been quite a storyteller. At dinner parties and get togethers from years before, details of which my mind has left behind to make space for newer fresher things, there would always be one almost stubbornly constant picture of my mother. My mother at the centre of attention, with laughter and pomposity accompanying her vivid glorious stories and her captive audience hanging onto every word.
This particular picture of Maa I am in awe of but not quite fond of because the Maa in this picture was never mine. Maa was someone I could see, maybe someone’s saree I could touch in the middle of the crowd. But Maa did not belong to me then. Maa belonged to her faithful listeners.
A picture of Maa, however, that I am fond of is of her one game with me. The game was more of a ritual, played every alternative day. The game was a strange take on hide and seek. It was our little secret and in that Maa belonged to only me. She would hide things and I would have to search for them. The object of the game was never really the object hidden. The object of the game was a test. It was a challenge to identify the mode, means and place of concealment.
To me, the game was the most intimate affair I have religiously shared with Maa. It was a journey to the places where her mind went – the books she touched and deemed unworthy to hide my paper boat in, the bags she had shifted and the clothes she had scattered to portray the illusion of normal, undisturbed, untouched. It was a journey that would only end upon my final conquest of settling my eyes upon the place Maa had finally deemed worthy of hiding my paper boat in. The journey would only end with me finding the exact place her mind last went to, the exact place she last laid her hands on.
Also read: Growing up With Books: A Tale of Three Generations
For quite some time, these two pictures of Maa – Maa, the storyteller and Maa with her hide-and-seek – seemed completely different. They seemed to be worlds apart – two absolutely disjointed out-of-sync aspects of my mother. And I felt no want or need to reconcile them. Until the stories started sounding different with every progressive year. With every round of Maa’s storytelling that started seeming different, there grew a compulsive need to keep getting back and replaying her words. I felt a compulsive need to start my own game of musical chairs of her stories. It was a need to see more, hear more. It was the same need with which we go back to old books time and again, to find new snippets to take with us.
And Maa’s stories suddenly started to seem strangely familiar. Every story, like a game, had parts hiding in plain sight waiting to be found. A beautiful round of musical chair with Maa’s hilarious anecdotes playing on loop but the music keeps stopping at unusual places. “And that’s when I saw from under the table two enormous paws – it seemed enormous to me then, I was only seven – and a tail thicker and bushier than Rumi’s braid, can you imagine?” and laughter.
But the music stops and the scene shifts: Maa at seven is hiding under a big wooden table and crying, quite terrified to be found. And then she notices paws and a tail. And a lifelong story about childish awe – Maa’s first encounter with a civet plays on.
“The bus stopped and I knew I would be late. It was so dark that I could not even see my own hands and for all of you youngsters, we didn’t have phone torches back then. But you know me, I just had to write the letter and send it somehow” –music stops, scene shifts. Maa at 25 is crouching under the last seat of the bus. She clutches on to a bag that is much too heavy for her frame. Her sindoor is askew and her accessories are stashed deep within the folds of her bag. Drunk laughter of two strange men comes adrift from the driver’s cabin and Maa is terrified to make a sound.
Also read: Me, Ma and Macher Jhol: My Fishy Adventures With Bengali Food
Therefore, Maa is quite a storyteller and a master of the art of hide and seek – hide the terror, seek the intrigue. Maa is quite a storyteller with oceans of stories and hundreds of paper boats in their beds.
It is an art – storytelling, one I have grown up trying to master. So, I tell stories and music starts. “And then trust me, I opened that bag and it had so many clothes from when I was fat and I just did not have the heart to throw them away. So, I took all of them to Jamal – that Dakshinapan tailor and the way he looked at me. I don’t blame him. Those kurtis were huge but see, he did a good job, no? This is one of those altered kurtis, you would not even realise”.
But the music stops and the scene shifts. Me at 15 crying and eating, a ritual. Deflated packets of chips lay around unbothered. “Tears and Blue Lay’s, the saltiest mix you would ever find” – a snippet of storytelling. Music stops, scene shifts. Me at 17 as I compulsively add and subtract one spoon of rice four times, five times, six times. “Too much or not enough, too much or not enough, too much or not enough”.
Again, scene shifts. Me at 17, feeling my skin stretch over my bones, flesh too heavy on my frame after every meal. Instagram story, new mode of storytelling: “Is it just me or everyone feels super fat after a meat platter because today I had the largest breakfast platter ever guys. It was almost tiring, but man it tasted good” – music continues.
Anwita Bhattacharyya is a law aspirant, very purposeful about making glorious extraordinary things out of her life but also almost entirely clueless about what is indeed extraordinary and what is not.
Featured image credit: Pariplab Chakraborty