As India Builds (Part 7)

Our family, miraculously, still holds the old property pretty much intact. The partition suit continues, providing the building itself a temporary protection. Meanwhile the real estate boom in India marches on around it, with the house sitting there, frightened, like an old bride of Bengal at the mercy of the patriarchs.

On my recent trip, I assembled as many of our kin together as possible, for a single evening. Cousins from Geneva, Mauritius, Australia. Negotiations had to be made with a few to convince them to leave aside their hostility, their grievances. One meal together, I asked. In the end, they all came; one family after another stood in the doorway, as if modern portraits of the same families that had come 30 years before.

I had spent the afternoon arranging flowers, as I had as a child. In the evening, we gathered, scattered over the entire first floor. Children – the children of my cousins – jumped from the same staircases that we skipped on in the seventies, running towards kinship with cousins from New York. The littlest ones – two girls just learning to speak – charmed all to forget that once upon a time, having a girl-child (like myself) was something to apologize for.

As I passed from one room to another, I heard one uncle, 69, say to another, 80, “You spent your whole life suing people!” There was a roar of laughter from those seated nearby, but then also the quiet that follows truth, and in it Deesha, my niece, passed, oblivious, tinkering with her newly acquired iPod Nano.

This segment is part 7 in the series : As India Builds
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