Doing Time…

‘Once upon a time…’  holds promises that didn’t lend themselves to the  birth of Labanya L, born the fifth daughter (in lieu of…)to  a conservative Brahmin mathematician and his nearly illiterate wife.  The Brahmin was handsome. The wife was not.  Labanya L  picked up bits and pieces of both and blossomed into a girl not-quite-not pretty. There was a strangeness about her sepia eyes that stood out in stark contrast to her very dark complexion, and the reddish brown curls that fell flippantly on her small forehead became her porcelain sisters a lot more. The father was lost in the metaphysics of numbers. The mother wept when new born Labanya L was brought to her.
The sisters turned heads and changed hands like magic by the time they were twelve. Labanya grew darker and older and was wedded to numbers and obsessed with Bankim Babu’s novels. Things happened in that world. Beautiful princesses fell in love with middle aged Kings and made them their own.  Pretty young wives stayed hopelessly in love with decrepit husbands; blind girls found love. And vision.

Caught in the twilit zone of illusion and reality,  the  Dark Duckling developed a strange passion for a man who was twenty five years ahead of her, married, with two kids and a third on the way; she was thirteen ; he, thirty eight.  She was silent and observant, and each day waited for the middle aged lawyer to show up at her father’s outer chamber for manly conversations almost every evening; the man did strange things to the girl’s fluttering heart and opened up forbidden vistas.  Then, destiny struck and the sickly wife died three months after giving birth to the third child.
As  Labanya L was a girl of numbers and the only one who could take on the mathematician in complicated debates on the epics, one fine morning she walked into her father’s room, tossed her wild mane  and told him that she wanted to marry his friend. She was fourteen; he, thirty nine. The mother wailed. The father fell silent. Labanya L continued to meet their eyes till the war was over on the third day. The conservative mathematician drew his illiterate wife to a side and told her that the girl was a ‘swayamvara’ and therefore, not to be offered to any other man; that would be sin. Having found a mythical justification for the waywardness of his daughter, he wore his wooden sandals, and showed up at his friend’s house to offer Labnya L in marriage.  The middle aged lawyer stared in disbelief and broke out into a guffaw that filled the room (he was famous for his roars). He tried to convince the Mathematician that Labanya L was a dark Lotus and would soon find herself a prince.  The Mathematician repeated what he had told his wife: Shastras were not to be flirted with, nor divine dispensation.

So one day,  she of the sepia eyes and red curls found herself   in the large sprawling courtyard of the father’s friend, as the ‘new’ bride, the ‘Naya Khurima’ as the nephews and nieces of that large family would call her. The step daughter welcomed her with an open smile for she needed someone to play hopscotch with. Besides, who would be scared of a mother who was two years and some  younger? The elder son turned away confused, not knowing how to react to a mere girl who would soon replace his mother in his father’s life. The wailing infant of course had no choice as he was shunted to an unfamiliar lap that would cradle him to his toddling years and hold him firmly the rest of his life.
While the bemused women of the family waited and watched to see how the strange drama unfurled, Labanay L geared herself up for difficult conquests: she treaded on hostility, ignored cruelties and protected her husband from the hurts of the big, bad world that found him guilty of unnatural passions at the ripe old age of thirty nine!  She rejected colors, deciding to drape herself in plain white saris with red border, found a match for the sister-daughter and   initiated herself into womanhood. She meant business. Sons came her way and a daughter almost every alternate year.  All grew up knowing that theirs was a strange destiny, in which a mother’s affection was meant to be only a hurried, furtive hug in the dark nooks of the family fortress when no one was looking. They accepted the distance and the detachment as a definition of maternal comportment and took refuge in the uncomplicated, effusive affection of a father who was as confused as his own flesh and blood by the mysterious ways of a girl-woman who had made him her own without his consent.
Labanya L’s baffled, throttled womanhood   invented ways of keeping the emotional and the physical two disjointed spheres; in a world in which she slept with her husband every night with the former wife glaring at her out of an oversized garlanded frame, she was scared of loving her own blood lest the world found her guilty for not loving the not-her-own.

She devised a strange strategy and redefined her gestures as an epic of consumption. That was the only sphere where she was allowed to love her fifty some husband (her youngest was born when she was twenty five), shower affection on her own children and not be judged for it. Cooking was the world where she felt safe. Not judged. Not found guilty of misdemeanor.  She churned milk that was brought in daily in a huge clay pitcher from the family cowshed everyday to make fresh butter to be delivered straight to the traditional brass plate of the husband before he left for the district court. (whatever was left went towards…),Cooked fish with strange combinations of fenugreek and fennel pastes for the  daughter who declared herself stranger to vegetables early in life; made ‘taktis’, sweets with cream jaggery and fresh coconut for the sons who cared nothing for anything and everything that floated in gravies and curries; made  kheers with over ripe jackfruits that dropped off from the trees  when their hour arrived;  her reputation as a cook grew and palanquins from neighborhoods and other villages arrived to take her  as the Reverend Chef to supervise the making of traditional feasts for marriages and sacred thread ceremonies. Her fatal flaw was ghee; her aberration was turmeric; she refused to touch meat; Sweets were her forte, but not part of her own consumption tale.  None fathomed that cooking was her way of loving and living and that is precisely why she perfected the art, why she stopped when such gestures became redundant.

As other women came into the sons’ lives, she quietly passed on her culinary mantras to them with the same aloof-detached way that the Man in her life could never accurately translate.  Paanch Phoron and mustard oil for tempering for chutneys; Pineapples were special: they merited ghee and fenugreek; rice had to be sautéed in ghee before getting added to the creamy base for Payesh; make a paste of raisins to add to meat and fish ‘Kaliyas’ for that special color and flavor; but of course the amount of rice for ‘khichuri’ should be a third less than the lentils…
As time passed, granddaughters arrived and became awestruck listeners to these tales imparted by their mothers; Labanya L never concurred. She battled the pony-tails with a mysterious smile… but of course she has forgotten the recipes… why don’t they go and ask their mothers?

She was not good at elucidations.
She never told the world that she was born Labanya Lata.
The youngest Daughter -in -law found it out by accident. She was let into the terrible secret by her Grand -mother in law (the poor woman was scared of her dark daughter too): “didn’t you know, Her Royal Highness was a ‘…Lata’ before she ensnared your poor Pa-in-law; he transformed her into “Prabha”, the Light of his life!”

Labanya  Prabha knew that was not a story to pass on.