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Sunlight filters through the dusty leaves of coconut disheveled by Phalgun breeze. The guava tree is leaning away from the hot brick wall of our home here at Siliguri. Phalgun brings in celebration of spring in India. Holi, the festival of colors, is day after tomorrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi) . In Shantiniketan (http://www.santiniketan.com/), the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, Holi is celebrated with panache as the Vasant Utsav (Spring festival). Drama, dance, singing and poetry recitations and other cultural activities animate their celebration. The soil in this part of West Bengal is very red and the summers are singeing hot. I have never been to Shantiniketan, but I have been to parts of Birbhum district within which Shantiniketan is located.  The rich green foliage of Bengal countryside contrasts strongly with the soil color there. When it rains the gullies become bright red, as if the bricks of old temples have melted and their blood-steeped history has mixed with the melancholy of long monsoons.

I have been cooking every meal since returning home. Today, at lunch, I was feeling the spell of cool spring  afternoons intoxicate my mind. The curtains are rippling in the breeze. A faint clamor of hammer on metal from the blacksmith down the road is keeping the afternoon marginally awake. The peddlers on the streets have retired. The sissu tree in our yard languidly warps her shadow over a stretch of the narrow lane outside. Tired rickshaw-pullers pause to rest. Girls and boys returning from school loiter and chatter. The horns of motorbikes and auto-rickshaws are less frequent now.  Some shop-owners have returned home briefly from bazaar for lunch, either closing their shops only to open up again later in the afternoon, or leaving the slim midday sales on apprentices and servants.  The local grocer is dozing off on his cane-chair and the packaged-milk store on the other corner of the road is shut after selling out on their morning stock. Nirmala Mishra is singing a melancholic song on the radio, “Ooo tota pakhi re, shikhal khule…”, here is a rough translation,

“Oh, Tota bird, I will let you fly free, if you bring me back my mother, if you bring me back my mother. I was fast asleep on her lap, who knows when she left and went away, everyone says she is lost in the skies… to find her out.

Other say that she is in the blossoms of the morning champa flowers, and she plucks them for her morning puja and comes to the alter… “

What a song, if only the ethos could be translated! The concept of Mother, both the physical and the ethereal, has such a nuanced influence on the Bengali psyche, culture and literature. How sweet is this idea that God, the eternal Mother, is as eager to find her child (the devotee) as the child is in finding her! This separation is only temporary, as if the Mother has left us for a moment to take care of household chores, and in the meantime we have been in trouble, may be singed a finger, and whimpering for her. She is going to come and pick us up. She certainly will! Because she is a Mother! The smarting of that singed finger is neither sin nor suffering but just a childish mischief.

Many birds visit the Cinnamon tree at our home. It’s flowering season is nearing and the inflorescence of small creamy-white flowers bears a very sweet fragrance. In our neighborhood, houses are not too close to each other and though there isn’t a plenty of yard space, every house has a few shady trees and flowering plants. Our neighbor in front has a wonderful creeper over their gate that blossoms in spring with pinkish flowers (madhabi lata) and a very strong fragrance that drives insects mad!  This flower features in many of Tagore poems. We have a Kamini plant, it’s little white flowers are very fragrant. And in Autumn, right around the time of Durga puja our shefali (Bengal jasmine) shrub strewns the grass with little offerings of white-petal-saffron-stalked flowers. And who doesn’t know how extolled jasmine is in Indian poetry right from the age of VedaVyas and Kalidas?

You see, home is like a island you discovered, and after long explorations you return to find that the island, however small, is like no other port or city or kingdom, because  your ship however tall and white and gilded, is dwarfed by her old drooping weathered trees and her red glistening inviting sand. Her wood has matching grain.

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