“I am a widow now”, says Maa as we sit for matsya mukh – an eating ritual to end our 13-day mourning period.

There are no other people. There was no WhatsApp invitation. It’s just Maa and me. There is no curated feast prepared by professional caterers. A piece of frozen Basa fish I bought in the morning from the local meat shop, fried with some turmeric, salt and oil. There is arhar dal and steamed rice to go with it. After completing yesterday’s shraddha rituals, I didn’t make the effort to go to the fish market in Chittaranjan Park and buy fresh whole fish and cook an elaborate fish curry to begin living again. After eating khichdi and shiddo bhaat for the last 13 days, from hereon, as we eat these morsels of dal-soaked rice with fried fish, we may now resume eating non vegetarian food and other items cooked with elaborate spices. We may now let go of our mourning and resume normal lives, if that is possible.

Maa declares her widowhood as something that needs to be stated clearly to identify herself. She had first declared it the night Father left us. As if at 4.57 PM that evening when Father’s heart rhythms finally stopped completely after being out of sync for a while, Maa became a different person with her place in the world changed.

This is not the 19^th century so she won’t need to adopt social markers of widowhood such as undergoing tonsuring, wear a white sari all day or renounce non vegetarian food and sweets. In the modern urban society, no one will impose a life of austerity and renunciation on her. But is she allowed to laugh, now that Father has left? Or enjoy a nice meal of prawn tempuras and butter garlic rice without him? Her Facebook friends will offer comforting words that this difficult period will pass and she should look towards life with joy. They will like and comment on photos of her wearing muted colours sitting on a bench in the park. Bhalo theko tumi! Khushi theko! Stay blessed! But what if, on my cajoling, she posts a photo of her standing by the window overlooking the sea, wearing a dark green or lavender coloured top? And wears a little matte lipstick and boho jewellery? Does her new identity allow that? Will that imply a betrayal of her grief, loss of purpose in life and her long wait for her own end?

Now that she is a widow, what does Maa do?

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“Please fill in the details of the account to which the money is to be transferred.” I fill in Maa’s bank account details in the form. Maa is stifling her tears as I close Father’s account in ICICI bank. It will be the first of many things that I will now be closing, modifying, letting go. She signs the form where the bank staff tells her to. 

“Tor Baba kono din amake kichu janalo na…” She says later in the car. “He never showed me how to deal with the outside world. And now he has left. What if you were not there? Ki kortam aami?”

What would Maa have done if I was not around to look into and consolidate what Father has left behind for her? He has left enough for her needs for the rest of her life. But she does not know how to access what she needs to live her life independently from hereon. How does a physically and emotionally vulnerable elderly woman, who stayed behind closed doors for decades, now step out and navigate on her own through a world where the local shopkeeper does not have change and asks her to pay online for buying two items, or where she can no longer hail an autorickshaw on the road to go to the market without booking through an app? Like Brooks Hatlen, who could not survive in the freedom of the outside world after living five decades in the Shawshank prison, how does Maa survive in a system increasingly being designed only for dullards whose only life skills are scanning QR codes and using apps funded by billionaire sociopaths of western countries?

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Maa was a married woman for 42 years, 4 months and 10 days. For over four decades, she carried out the purpose of her life – building a home, taking care of her husband, bearing and nurturing a child, chopping vegetables, cleaning the fish, cooking, more cooking and some more cooking, washing clothes, washing utensils, cleaning the house, and several other administrative tasks of running a home. She gave her mind, body and soul to nurture her one and only shongshaar – her household universe; the job of marriage like she believed she was supposed to. It came naturally to her. The astrologers had told her all along. That she would be an ideal homemaker; an ideal mother. She believed in the job description and excelled at it without any work-life balance.

Now that Father doesn’t turn the key in the lock after coming home from work in the evening, what does Maa do in the suffocating silence. She can no longer scream at him for coming late, bringing wrong groceries, or letting her rot in the hell of life. She doesn’t have to cook any elaborate meals for him. Bland hilsa from Gujarat passed off as exclusive and obscenely expensive ilish from the Padma river, cooked in three different styles – with shorshe bata; jeere bata; and a mellow jhol with lots of green chillies, raw banana, diced potatoes and jeere phoron. Mutton cooked in mustard oil with ginger, garlic, onions, garam masala, bay leaf, big cuts of potatoes and topped with ghee. Koraishutir kochuri – pooris made of refined flour stuffed with a mixture of green peas, salt, chilies and infused with hing to overwhelm the senses, paired with aloor dom. Pyanj kolir bhaja – stir fried onion blossoms, or muri ghonto – lentils, rice or cabbage cooked with fried fish head. Seasonal sweets of Patishapta, pua, narkel nadu. Given her only son, a weird species from another planet, doesn’t appreciate the exotic wonders of Bengali cuisine, who does she cook for now. How can she indulge in the pleasure of eating mutton cooked by herself when her man is not around to feast on it anymore.

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Being around someone over a long period of time, the changes that have inconspicuously appeared in them owing to erosion by time, often go unnoticed. But once in a while, you go through the old photo albums and realise the person you are now living with is not the same as the one in those photographs shot over a 35 mm film years ago. The soft, petite, 26-year-old woman with a faint smile on her face standing in the porch of a small hotel facing the hills in northern India, holding the hand of her little curious kid. The small budget hotel has now changed to a five-star resort within a private tea plantation in southern India. The young woman, now in her sixties, carries the physical and emotional weight of imbalanced hormones, despair and resentment piled up over the decades, and lives forever in the painful past created each passing day. That long, dense hair reaching for her waist is now replaced by a few brittle strands barely reaching her shoulders. Thyroid, insomnia, arthritis, drudgery of daily life, anger, loneliness and depression slowly, gradually, without ever announcing loudly, has eaten through her body, mind, confidence and self-worth.

Now that Father has left her to fend for herself, what does Maa do? She has never worked outside her shongshaar. She never put on office wear, sat at a desk in an office with paperwork around her; dealt with colleagues, clients, targets, organization goals and performance appraisals. She waited for the water supply to come after two days so she can finish washing the dirty clothes soaking in the buckets before Father returns from his 10-day office tour with a suitcase full of another batch of soiled clothes.

She never worked in an office because she didn’t know that it is something she can do. She graduated in Arts and got married like she was supposed to do. Like all the women around her did. Nobody told her that she can go to an office, crib about work, gossip with colleagues and make her own money. After another sleepless night, she would wake up at five in the morning to cook for her family and finish all the chores by 9 AM before the water ran out. She taught Father to tuck his shirt inside his trousers and look smart. Nobody taught her that she can have a bank account in her own name where money earned by her will be deposited and earn an interest compounded over time. Then she won’t have to ask a man for money to buy something she wants.

Maa has two bank accounts but she doesn’t know the account numbers or the banks. She does not know how much money is there in those accounts. She never asked. Father never told her. She has a few fixed deposits in her name. But she does not know in which bank or how much they are worth. She does not know how to encash those FDs.  Father had opened the accounts for her and would deposit money in them regularly to save taxes in his business and for their future. But he never took her to the bank and showed her how to access the money when needed. During all these years, living behind doors closed to the world outside, imprisoned in her shongshar and mind, Maa never learnt how to sign a cheque to withdraw money.

Father had given her a debit card. I had shown her how to use it, to withdraw cash or pay at a store. But she barely ever used it. Because she never went anywhere without Father or me, when by default, as protective men of the house, we would take care of payments. Occasionally, when Maa expressed to use her card, Father would insist on paying himself. “It’s all the same. You pay, I pay”, Father would say.

“So, every time I purchase something using the card, you will know?” Maa would ask Father later.

“Yes, I get an SMS when a transaction has been made. My number is linked to the card.”

“Why did you not link my number?”

“It’s an add-on card so my number is linked. It’s the same thing. Shob i toh tomar.” Father would give a sheepish smile to Maa.

It is never the same.

In the 2015 Bengali film Belaseshe, Soumitra Chatterjee’s character Biswanath Majumdar wants to divorce his wife Aarti played by Swatilekha Sengupta, after 49 years of marriage. Now in the final lap of his life, Biswanath is suddenly gripped by a longing to travel the world and see exotic things like his American friend, Patrick, and is fed up of his dutiful wife’s attachment to domestic responsibilities. Towards the end of the film, he reprimands Aarti for being tied to her shongshar and never wanting to do anything else. Of never learning how to withdraw money from the bank or many other ways of the outside world. Of her being forever dependent on him and their children.

Unlike Biswanath, Father had no desire to travel the world. He was a family man who forever liked coming home and eating the sumptuous dishes cooked by his wife. He also liked being depended upon by his wife. Most men like that responsibility and find a satisfaction in fulfilling it. I like to believe (though Maa would disagree) that it was his male oversight that Father did not show Maa the way to navigate the outside world. Growing up and operating in a society designed by men, his social education taught him that it was his job to manage the outside world for his family. It never occurred to him that supporting his wife did not always mean signing the cheques himself. Sometimes it may have looked like asking her to pay the bill using her own card and sign the credit slip.

Of course, Father knew that I would take care of things in his absence. So Maa’s dependence on a man continues. With her wobbling knees and spinning head, she has no confidence to go out alone and do things on her own. “You manage everything….”, she tells me. “I don’t want to know anything.” I accompany her every time she wants to withdraw cash from the ATM. With different machines, her fragile mind does not process the instructions on the ATM screen confidently. So she always insists on doing it in my presence. What if the card does not come out? What if I press something wrong and money is deducted from the account? I stand behind at a distance for her to deal with the fear on her own.

Do you want a receipt? Maa doesn’t know if she wants a receipt so she looks behind at me and asks what to press. Like she did not know whether she should accept an offer for a job to teach computer science in my school thirty years ago.

********************

For a while, on my insistence, Maa joins a senior citizen club. Those boring places where old, frail people sit on chairs and pass the ball to each other. Where they are made to stretch their arms and legs in and out ten times to keep their joints mobile. Where they are asked to narrate a happy memory from their childhood or sing a song. Where the technologically challenged are taught the use of UPI and Uber. For the first time ever, Maa sat amongst a group of such strangers without Father or me being around. She played some games, had tea and laughed with them. But we both knew that this will not last long. That the bright, young woman inside her will soon get bored. She might be lonely and her body below the waist might be in perpetual agony. But Maa is not old. Like me, she is too self aware, proud, and has low tolerance for dumb activities. She knows that like childcare, elderly care too is a business. She would rather prefer musing over her pain accumulated over sixty years in isolation than play UNO everyday with some oldies.

Maa was a married woman for 42 years, 4 months and 10 days. She has now been a widow for more than nine months. As she looks out of the car window while we return from another pointless movie outing to kill time, she wonders when it will all be over. Now that she cannot call Father and ask when is he coming home, what does she do?