In the tree-lined road to the studios of the Film Institute of India a chariot drew up. Upon it the woman who was cast in white was looking beautiful. In that moment I was dead. Dead as in the water.
The woman was Jaya Bhaduri. Much later Jaya Bachhan. My father, Samiran Dutta, was professor of direction and screenplay. My Ma, Bani Dutta (nee Roy) was among the first women to break the mould and become a filmmaker. Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha is in part about my Ma. I recall that early memory from childhood now because of the agonized love we share as Bangladesh rips itself apart.

A maelstrom is not a revolution. It is a whirl.

Last week, when the strains of an azaan wafted across the Ichamati River the tinkle of the bell was muted. It was the time of the evening prayer. The waters in between were waving this way and that so much that it confused whether the tide was incoming or outgoing in this northern edge of the Sundarbans, the delta through which the Ganga pours itself into the Bay of Bengal.

In the wash of the river my father once along with the cinematographer who first filmed the Jarwas in the northern Andaman, Prem Vaidya, and Edmund Hillary were crafting a documentary called Gangasagar to Gangotri. I recall this today because back in that Poona tenement there was an argument over whether the wash should start from Gangasagar that is in India or from Sandwip that is in Bangladesh, both at the mouth that emits or swallows the river.

Water was an issue in our Poona quarter. The municipality then rationed it. The waters we lived on then were in the falls. Chatusringee. Once, and I am confused whether this anecdote was about Ritwik Ghatak (who was notoriously principal of the institute later) or Soumitra Chatterjee who my father treated as a younger brother, were coming home in the Vespa. The Vespa was then a two-wheeled scooter. I still have the scar of stitches on my body since trying to kick start it and bashing through a barbed wire fence. But I digress….

The point of this memory is: when in Poona, we had to shutter our windows with black paper because it was a blackout. My Ma was holding me by the hand, guiding between beds in the Military Hospital where mukti joddhas, liberation warriors, were being treated, their hands and feet bandaged. My was Ma giving them milk and water through a bottle with a rubber nipple, drip by drip, squeeze by squeeze.

They were times when we could laugh at ourselves. Today when we chug chug across the Ichamati, the boatman Jagadish tells us they didn’t come for the immersion. In the Ichamati India and Bangladesh meet every year on Durga Puja visarjan. Midstream where a cynically topsy Cyril Radcliffe drew a line in the water in August 1947.

Up north and upstream the bridge that is being built across the delta is at a standstill while the mind is in a whirl, a maelstrom, that rides waves to a military hospital in Poona where Ma was translating Bangla to English for Malayali nurses.