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The family joked whenever she called out to one of her seven daughters, my grandmother would never hit the right name first. She’d begin “Chanda, no Jayanti, no Gaura, no Indira, no, oho Manjulaaaaa”. The daughters reacted variously. 

Aunt Manjula, the one called out to, would usually hoot from somewhere in the garden that she was learning to ride a bike so no matter how urgent the task, she was unavailable. Another daughter, quieter and more straitlaced, would rock with silent laughter at her mother’s well known quirk. And the youngest, one irritated at being summoned suddenly in the midst of school homework, would scowl and tell those of us who were always lurking around that her mother was losing her marbles. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Memories begin to unfurl some more. The sundry widowed aunts who had nowhere else to go and had sought shelter under my grandparents’ generous roof, thereafter pegging their tents in their surrogate, sat shelling peas or mending old clothes or polishing brass. When they heard grandmother calling out names, they wiped their eyes and sighed, “ Aha, how large and merry this family was once. Now that’s her way of touching them all like her prayer beads. As Mother she can never let go of even her long dead calves.”

Memories are what lives are made of, not algorithms. Once upon a time, family memories passed through mediating structures erected by the earlier generations, changing with each telling, but always putting our family histories in perspective for us. And then they gradually go on to join a longer chain of human memories as we begin to read the history of humankind. This explains why even the old fading widows, wrapped in their invisibility in their own way, formed a timeless chorus that sensitised all who may care to be listening, about bereaved........

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