My Grandmother's Incredible Life: From Orphanage, Abuse to a Lonely Death

The strongest memory I have of my father’s mother—or Thakuma, as I had been taught to call her—is from when I was seven. I was reading a story on Florence Nightingale when she came over and, just like that, started reading the text out loud in fluent, unaccented English. A woman who never got to go to school beyond the age of 12, who never stepped out of West Bengal her entire life, had somehow, at some point in her life, set her fingers on the pulse of English Language.

I never got around to asking her where she learnt that from. Honestly, I don’t think I ever sat down to chat with the woman; a thought that never quite bothered me until the until I saw last afternoon when I watched her coffin get hammered shut with six twelve-inch nails.

The 'Benevolent' Kidnap

Loss of parents in childhood, though unfortunate, isn’t unusual. Accidents happen, Cancer happens. Sometimes, tectonic plates shift and parents fall through the cracks. For my grandmother, however, this tragedy crept up like the serpent in the Garden of Eden; almost sadistic. And a bit like that of Umrao Jaan.

Born in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to a North Indian family, Thakuma had a different identity, a different name, one she would go on to forget later in life. At the age of six, some sort of natural disaster (reports get a hazy here) hit the town she lived in while she was in school. When officials from a missionary camp came to aid the victims, they found her in the school, separated from her family. When they were unable to get an address out of the shaken, lonely child, they packed her up and brought her to a Calcutta-based orphanage.

Here’s where my anger kicks in. The missionaries probably had good intentions at heart, but how could the search for a child’s parents stop at her being unable to tell her address? She remembered her father’s name, couldn’t that have been a trail? But as fate would have it, one moment she was caught in a disaster in Kanpur; the next, she was on a train to Calcutta with a bunch of strangers.

Orphanage, Adoption, Child Marriage and Widowhood

After being uprooted from her land, Thakuma was given a new name, a new identity in the Calcutta orphanage. It was here, I believe, where she picked up her impeccable English.

In a few years, she went on to be adopted, along with five other girls, by a wealthy widow in town named Golab Buri. Rumour has it that one of my grandmother’s foster sisters was singer Rupam Islam’s grandmother. I believe that the lone way to prove this speculation died with the two women.

Anyway, back to the story. After a small bite of a good childhood, my grandmother was married off to my grandfather at an early age. A military man in the British regiment, my grandfather — I’ve been told — wasn’t the easiest man to live with. But he, however, wouldn’t be the worst Thakuma would have.

Marriage took the Kanpuria-turned-Calcutta-smart-lady to the nooks of rural Bengal. Here, she saw the death of her first child, a son, days after he won a competition for being the cutest baby in the village. Then, while still in her teens, she got pregnant with my father. But before my father could be born, my grandfather dropped dead after consuming a ‘tall glass of warm milk’. This tragedy, for my then-teenaged grandmother, would upturn her life yet again, in a crueler way than before.

Married into Abuse, Separated from her Child

My great-grandfather, upon losing his young son, could no longer stand his daughter-in-law, or his sole grandson (i.e. my dad). As my dad recounts, this old man pretty much abandoned them when they most needed his support. And so, when my grandmother became the victim of extreme abuse in his house, no one was on her side.

My grandmother was still so young at this point; my dad, an infant. That’s when the abuse began, at the hands of someone — rumours have it — from her dead husband’s family. When I heard these stories, decades later, in hushed voices, I was still too young to understand the horror of it all. Now, I wonder if her in-laws knew about the alleged assault; whether they ignored it. Perhaps, everyone feared her attacker’s ill temper.

Or was it just that, they had no repercussions to fear? My grandmother, after all, had no family or husband they had to be accountable to for her. She was the ultimate embodiment of vulnerability.

When the whispers could no longer be contained, my grandmother was hurriedly married off. And to whom, but her dead husband’s brother. This marriage within family came at a great cost. For one, she was ostracised by the society. Next, she was separated from her son.

In Thakuma’s new house, poverty was rampant, and a place for my father — the orphaned son from a previous marriage — was absent. After spending the first few years of his life under his grandfather’s hateful eyes, my father was shipped off to a poor man’s free boarding school, which was as good as an orphanage. He was all of four.

My father, in his seventies now, vividly remembers the day his mother left him at this Indian 'Dotheboys’ Hall', never to be taken back home.

He smiles dryly, now, when retells this story. How he was still nuzzled in his mother’s arms, still breastfeeding, still too reliant on her, and incredibly unaware that he was, for all means and purposes, being abandoned by his last remaining family.

The cycle of tragedy had made a full circle at this point. A woman who was torn from her own family in tender childhood, abandoned her toddler in an orphanage.

There are women who turn goddesses when it comes to fight for their children. My mom's mother, my Dida, was one of them. But my Thakuma did not belong to that kind.

But as angry as this episode in my father’s life leaves me, I understand my grandmother’s side too. She was barely in her 20s, unemployed, outcast, and with no maternal home to flee to or in-laws to count on. Her choices were to either take on the world, with no support whatsoever, or to leave her child for a promise of a fresh start. She picked the latter.

The Last Days

While my father grew up in neglect at the missionary shelter home — much like a protagonist from a Charles Dicken’s novel – my grandmother had four more sons.

In her new home, poverty was an autocrat. There was never enough money and always too many mouths to feed. My grandmother used to say that there were days when all she and her children got to eat was rice and salt. My mother, too, recounts that when she first visited my grandmother’s house as a newlywed bride, all she had in the house to offer her was a spoonful of sugar.

During those dark days, one of her sons once asked her for one rupee, which she refused to give, probably because in a house were food was scarce, she couldn’t afford to give away even that small an amount. As a kid, I remember that ‘uncle’ of mine boasting about how that refusal made him work hard to become a wealthy man.

When he became a wealthy man, with a big bungalow and a fat bank account, this story from his childhood was his crutch: because she had turned him away when he asked for a rupee, he has the right to turn her away in her old age. In her last days, fellow villagers recounted that my grandmother had to walk from one house to another begging for food.

Thakuma and My Mother

Through my life, I saw my mother bring my grandmother to our place several times to stay, but for some reason, her love for her younger sons always trumped her sense of self-sustenance. She would always insist on returning to her ‘children’, sometimes going as far as leaving without informing us.

The last time she visited us, during my brother’s wedding, I watched her and my father break down as she requested him to ask his ‘brothers’ to not hit her. Some raise questions as to whether there was any truth to this claim or if it some simply senility.

During her last days, she lost her sight. My aunt, I clearly remember, would call my mother multiple times a day, asking her to come and take care of Thakuma. “Yours is the only name she remembers,” she would tell my mother. So my mother left for my uncle’s house, to take care of a mother-in-law in whose house she wasn’t ever welcome.

The moment my mother entered my Thakuma’s room and opened a crack of the window to let in some light, my sightless grandmother called out, “Tumi eshecho?” Her wrinkled, broken face lit up in smile. 'You have come?' she recognised my mother at once.

My mother was the only person she remembered in her last days; not her sons, not her grandchildren, not even her own name. After a life of lost parents and ungrateful sons, her last ray of sunshine was a stranger’s daughter, wife of the son she had abandoned. Her daughter of sorts, I guess.

Over the next few days, we watched her crumble to death. And in death, the only people who shed a tear were my mother and a woman who’d helped her wash Thakuma’s body before burial. Not her sons.

In 2012, I stood at a familiar graveyard and watched strangers nail shut my grandmother’s coffin — a scene that sprouted the seed of thanatophobia in me. I watched as my grandmother, born decades ago in a different world, to a different culture, get laid to rest in her husband’s grave.

I wonder what would’ve happened had she not gone to school that fateful day a hundred years ago, had she not lost her parents. Would my grandmother’s life been better, raised closer to her roots, amid her birth family and culture? Would her family have watched her back, would her husband been better? Would she have had better sons? Would she have know love, care and nurture?

I'd like to believe, in some other life, she will find all that.

Today, as I sit and write this, I can't help but feel more things than one. I’m sorry for not having been a better granddaughter, for not having done more to know her, to help her; but I’m also angry for her not having been a better mother to my dad. But mostly, I’m remorseful for not having known her well enough when I had the chance. For not having heard the story of her incredible life from her own mouth, perhaps over a cup of tea.