Page 218 - Kolaj Sharodiya Review Edition

‘Writing’ Home

Sangeeta Roy

What if the Goddess, instead of coming to her paternal home for the festivities, escaped to an exotic locale in another planet and then, didn’t return to Kailash at the end of
stipulated time? Would she still be the venerated deity to the popular Bengali imagination?

In the collective Bengali psyche, Durga Puja is more often, synonymous to the conception of a longing, a longing for ‘home’. The idea of such ‘longing’ draws on the popular
narrative of the Goddess visiting her paternal home for a stipulated few days, once a year, from the home of her husband in the mountains of Kailash.

This seemingly simple, rather, simplistic story serves as an emotive script for many Bengalis to express an almost idyllic notion of home that perhaps inadvertently, obfuscates the
unease that many other Bengalis feel about the home and its myriad associative meanings. The celebratory status of this story thus attempts to consolidate a prescribed set of
sites that can constitute home. In effect, the story also, and rather uncritically, conflates the conceptions of house and home, though the contexts of such conflation can be
located in a range of historical and socio political contexts. Dominant discourses that affirm the prescribed sites that denote home, identify not only a set of the physical sites,
but also a range of individuals, practices and emotions that contour the meanings of the institution. Such circumscribing of meanings can restrict all those whose experiences
cannot necessarily align them with the entrenched socio cultural scripts of conformity that construct the home. Ethno cultural normatives that inform the processes of
socialisation attempt to inculcate cultural scripts of gender, sexuality, and class, which, in particularly stringent ways, aim to fix erring children or even childhoods. The socio
spatial location of the home becomes then the primary unit to inculcate a set of cultural scripts of ethnic masculinities and ethnic femininities that aim to tutor a generation of
young people into appropriate members of an ethnic group. This, in effect, means that many children and young people who cannot identify either with the assumed
dispositions or the markers of their ethnic identity, have to either succumb their aspirations or find themselves elsewhere. Through its physical and connotative meanings, the
home figures in this conversation irrespective of the ways in which we are implicated in it.

My earliest and sort of bitter flavour at what my family perceived as Bengali bhadralok socialisation came at the expense of my cousin. His euphoric indulgence in the world of
his pets, once discovered in the room adjacent to our garden was met with scorn and repugnance. These ‘pets’ (comprising of a medium sized scorpion, three particularly
large black ants, and a snake that he claimed was still growing) and his elaborate indulgence in their wood and tin residence structure and food sources along with
information about their individual dispositions, irked my mother more than overwhelming her with wonder at his keenness with insect ecology. He had to let them go the day
after. Of course it is another matter that while one their way out, the scorpion stung the postman and also the electrician, articulating its retaliation on behalf of my cousin.
Dada probably didn’t understand that he was becoming the black eye in not attempting anything that could consolidate the bhadralok culture and class of my family. I can
remember the recurring refrain of my mother’s disgust towards my cousin who in her view was,” a boy disinterested in everything”. This “everything” to her mind comprised of a
specific nature of interests in particular forms of art, literature, music, and cinema, along with an aptitude for football and mathematics. Instead, I remember my cousin
spending hours on end trying to figure if spiders and honey bees experienced electrocution in the same ways in which human bodies do. If it were not for the persistent
rejection by the adults, for all I know there could have been a conservationist in the family of some sort.

In fact both my cousins who maintained a telling silence at home and conducted themselves with some sort of clinical detachment, were considered two of the most
easygoing, affable men by their friends and in our neighbourhood. Such silence was probably the only way out for two teenaged boys who never seemed to be able to
‘become’ the boys with demeanours, interests and academic capacities that would reaffirm my family’s bhadralok culture and status.