by Mandira Pattnaik
Mandira’s story describes the different associations of greenery that two young cousins have. For the adolescent, green becomes a colour she grows-up to abhor because it stands for unpleasant past and unrequited love. For the other though, green is synonymous with childhood and an escape like no other.
Bela-di peeps from the dusty drawer. Her dusky face is framed by stiff, dark-green, mango leaves. At her shoulder, Bumba-da smiles, a thin hairline on his upper lip. To his left is bespectacled, gawky, Chumki-di, whom your ten-year-old-self is hugging. To Bela-di’s right is the youngest Jhinuk, making a mock-face at the camera.
The snapshot within the wooden frame is encroached overwhelmingly by the greenery behind you–a green so vivid it is etched in your memory. Ah! The mango trees in your grandfather’s garden, near whose branches you posed that day. You can almost smell the leaves – leathery, glossy, wavy at the edges. And spot the unripe mangoes, green against the green leaves, playing peek-a-boo with you, teasing you, saying ‘touch us if you can’, from a moment frozen in time, thirty years ago.
You went missing an entire morning, summer of 1988. All five of you; an army of cousins aged seven to seventeen. Green Army, you called it, invading the mango trees for bounties. Your mothers pinched your ears; your grandfather and uncles and aunts rolled their eyes – attesting that your mothers had not done a good job of bringing you up. But ear pinching notwithstanding, over that summer vacation and several that followed, these instances only repeated.
For you, kids from Bangalore, Delhi, Kottayam or Canada gathering in Calcutta, it was an insignia of unbridled freedom. It was escape. You still hold snatches of the escapades close to your heart –the two mango trees competing to keep the sunlight out, bang in the middle of the garden –the unripe Lyandga, and next to it, the majestic Himsagar; the earthy smell of the deep-green elongated leaves; and the sturdy branches that could easily hold the load of your Army, kids who competed with each other to climb the trees faster.
You were one of the youngest, so you would wait on the ground, in the mossy shade, where busy black ants made a beeline to their nest, till someone helped you onto the lowest branch from where you swung to the higher branches, your primitive skills at work. You reclined against a kindly shaped branch and lorded over the empire of green until half the day was gone. In the end, you lifted the hem of your skirt to make it a cloth basket in which you carried home the bounty of your spoils.
‘Look here! Touch them raw,’ said Bela-di. Feel the green, of your life, in your mind, the shades of life, of bounty, of possibilities. Your tender self gaped at her words.
Only Grandma would be approving when you re-entered the house. She would lay a bed sheet on the floor to let you spread the unripe green fruits. You’d watch her wash them and cut them into pieces. She’d let you smell them as they dried in the sun. You knew you’d carry them back, pickled in mustard oil and spices, to last you till the next summer. A slice of green memories would travel back with you.
That day, thirty years ago, when your uncle stoodin for the family photographer and Bela-di was nowhere to be found, your army of cousins was dispatched to summon her. You went running across the long black-and-white checkered verandah, you rushed to grandma’s room on the first floor and your aunt’s room overlooking Jorasanko too. You looked behind cupboards brimming with fine china, and racks drooping with clothes, and still, you couldn’t find her. At last you climbed the staircase to the terrace. You tiptoed the last few steps because you sensed something was amiss. You heard faint murmurs – perhaps Bela-di was sobbing.
Through the cracked wood of the door, you saw Tito-da of the house next door, leaning towards her, wiping away her tears.
‘You’ll be proud of me, Bela, and my uniform. When I come on leave, you’ll see me in olive green’, he said.
Bela-di was still sobbing.
‘I’ll not be gone for long, only a year or so, before the Army – you know how it is –’
You too heard the words, muttered under his breath. But sometimes you know, by their sounds, when words of promises are hollow.
That day you knew it too. You had tiptoed back.
One year rolled into two, two into three.
Bela-di was married off to a doctor in Florida, the same year she graduated. As a parting thought, she mused to us cousins that she hated green – olive or any other.
The green in Bela-di’s life had died a tragic denouement; felled and de-limbed, and sawed into wooden planes. With that dead green, in a wooden house in Florida, she weaved another life.
You grew up and went to college. You dug a burrow of books, which was neither sunlit nor green. You didn’t make the yearly trips to continue your green escapades anymore. You let the memories of your grandma fade; you let the smell of earthy moss disappear.
On the occasions you caught a drizzle beyond your dorm window, you ran out to soak yourself. You scanned from your window – the tops of houses, glass faces of buildings, and rock faces of the hills – to find a speck of green in the rain. You trained your eyes to spot a potted plant, somewhere afar, or an unkempt bush, to stand in for your greenery.
When grandma died, you were many thousands of feet up in the air. You were travelling to work in a place where the only desirable green was in a popular card!
Alas! Your greenery was in other pastures. When you mourned, you thought of the mango trees, you thought of its sour leaves, your tongue moistened for the mustard pickles, and a tear escaped your eyes.
You got married; you had kids – kids that did not know green because they were wedged between frozen-white snowscapes and their classes – Ballet and Bharatnatyam included; kids that had no escape akin to your childhood, that unbridled freedom, that joyful abandon. You let them be. What could you do?
You go back and forth from your throne on the mango tree branch, hiding under its leaves, filling your lungs with the tangy smell, and then, to life as it is today. You want to dye yourself the ancient pigment that colours the vestal earth, that once coloured your childhood. The colour between melancholy blue and sunshine yellow, is that which beckons you… and will forever do. This longing has been visceral today, prompted by the face of adolescent Bela-di.
Bela-di calls you when she misses green. You know that little secret and will always do.
She muses about burgundy wildflowers near her home, or paints with words the orange-yellow maple leaves, or says she’s tired of the colour of the sea, but she never mentions green.
Mandira Pattnaik has travelled extensively and worked at different times as teacher, as accountant and under the Government. Her first publication was in The Times of India when she was still in school. Most recently her work was the Editor’s Pick at Juggernaut. She regularly sends her pieces to international magazines like Blackbird, Agni and Ruminate.
