NOTES OF A SUMMER
“Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.” (~Gwendolyn Brooks, “Annie Allen,” 1949)
Summer. India. 1950s and 1960s. Mangoes. Mangoes. Mangoes and more mangoes.
My parents had a house in Hazaribagh, in the mineral-rich low hills of modern-day Jharkhand (land of forests), about 250 miles northwest of Kolkata, where the nearest railhead at that time was 60 miles away. We went almost every year during the summer. The property had about four to five acres of land and a large portion of it had mango trees. The trees, during the summer, would have their branches stooping in supplication, pleading for the ripened fruit to be plucked.
India is a land of extremes. So much of it is staggeringly incomprehensible. All the cliches are true. The beauty and the squalor. The creativity and the thuggery. How can a culture that had spawned the inclusivity of Hinduism also embrace the viciousness of casteism? How could the land of the Buddha, be drenched, routinely, in blood? How could a country have 10 percent of the people control over 75 percent of the wealth, and also be the birthplace of one of the greatest philosophers of the modern world, born Narendranath Dutta and known to us as Vivekananda, who every politician and bureaucrat pays lip service to, who said :
“So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every person a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!”
In today’s India, this might draw an FIR (First Information Report) by the modern-day religious saber-rattlers.
And mangoes are no different in India. There are . . . are you ready? . . . approximately 1,500 varieties according to government sources. But we didn’t have 1,500 varieties slumping from the branches at Hazaribagh. We had, I think, a combination of six varieties that grow in Bengal and Bihar (where new Jharkhand is). That combination includes Gulab Khas, Himsagar, Kisan Bhog, Lakshman bhog, Langra, Fazli.
We ate mangoes morning, noon, and night and then we’d load two cars full---I mean FULL---with jute sacks bloated with these delicacies and transport them to Kolkata for the kids at the blind school. Sometimes, the lead car, a 1950 Chevy station wagon, a “Woody” with wooden exterior paneling and styling, that would be so overwhelmed that the rear fender would be sparking on the asphalt road as it bounced ahead. There’d be numerous flats and repairs and picnics by the roadside before we’d roll into our courtyard probably after twelve to fourteen hours.
Summer. India. 1983. My sister, with her husband went to India in June. I saw them off at Kennedy Airport in New York. The first AIDs cases were making national headlines. I remember as we talked about it waiting for the flight to be called. When she landed at her final destination, a short flight from Kolkata to Ranchi, about 40-50 miles from Hazaribagh, where the summer flowers were in bloom, Mahua, Karavira, white lily, pink hibiscus, she was told that our father had died that morning. He was going to drive from Hazaribagh to Ranchi to pick them up but probably had a heart attack (his third) when he tried to get out of bed. He slid to the floor, resting on his knee, his hands on the bed, head bowed at the edge of the mattress. That’s where my mother found him. He was a meticulous man. He kept a blue pocket diary and he wrote down things he had to do, how much money he had in his pockets each night, something he’d read. The last entry read “Pick up Pupu and Bill at Ranchi. Take water bottle.” I have the diary and I still look at the page sometimes.
Summer in India. 1989. I’m pacing the deserted Bombay airport terminal. It’s 3 a.m. in mid-June in the morning. Long before it became Mumbai and long before the glittering, brash, airport-anywhere-in-the-world look. This was more like a clean bus station. I’m smoking one cigarette after another. Thank goodness, the tea and coffee stall is open. I get minuscule cups of coffee ---Nescafe for sure. I’m waiting for the first flight at dawn to Calcutta, having landed from New York about an hour earlier without a connecting flight. I’d raced out of New York with a carry-on bag and a card in my pocket from my first wife, Lisa, who’d put a photo of my first-born, Arnav, for my mother in Calcutta. Ma hadn’t seen Arnav. He was seven months old.
Later that morning I land in Calcutta. My maternal uncle, Mesho, my youngest aunt’s husband, wraps me in his arms as I exit out of immigration. He’s almost six-feet-four, a giant by Indian standards of his generation and as handsome as a movie star. I always thought he was a Gregory Peck doppelganger. He told me my mother had passed away in the early morning, probably as I was pacing the terminal in Bombay, destroying my lungs.
Summer in Maine. 2022. Pam leads a wildflower walk in western Maine. I go along. She has taught herself so much about wildflowers ( most often ignored by people like me tromping along trails). I am someone who marvels at a particular type of obsession to understand bits of our natural and physical universe. Even if I lack understanding of the urge in its entirety, I am mesmerized at the effort. She’d trained as a classicist at some of the best institutions in the world for that area of study. It had limited cache in the commercial world but is sheer poetry in its aesthetics and learning about our past. She brings that same scholarship and joy and depth of discovery to wildflowers and the forest floor.
Before she started the walk, she introduced us to a quote. Of course, it applies to so much more than the forest floor.
“Many an object is not seen though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray—i.e. we are not looking for it. So in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”
~Thoreau in “Thoreau’s Wildflowers”
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