Kaka

Kaka, standing on the balcony of the house
in New Alipur in the 1950s.

When I was a little girl, we lived in a house my grandfather built. It was common then for sons to remain in the house with their parents even after they were married and had children. It was an extended family system that is dying out fast now in urban India.

I grew up rich with memories of relatives, close and distant. I was privy to my father’s family history, told in most vivid detail by my uncle, Samir Kumar Basu. I always knew him as Kaka, the Bengali moniker for a father’s younger brother.

Kaka was only a year and half younger than Baba. The two were extremely close growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, united perhaps in their eye problems that took root at a very early age. Both had macular degeneration. Both wore glasses so thick that I substituted them for magnifiers to look at flower parts for biology class.

Kaka lived on the third floor of my grandfather’s house in New Alipur, then a fairly new development in Kolkata. He was a brilliant man and soon rose to the top of the companies where he worked. Eventually, he became director of Chloride India.

We ate breakfast together every morning. I sat with my roti, potatoes and cauliflower. He, with his half-boiled egg on a porcelain English stand and two pieces of white toast with butter.

Playing chess with my father in Florida, late 1970s

Afterwards, I climbed into the back of his Ambassador for a lift to Gokhale Memorial, the school I attended  in those days. On the way, we would talk about everything. It must have been irritating for him to have a five-year-old chatterbox go nonstop before a hard days work was about to begin. 

“Boddo kotha bolish,” he would say sometimes. You talk too much.

In the evenings, after homework, after an evening bath, I waited anxiously for my Baba and Kaka to return home. Both had a habit of pacing from verandah to verandah. Kaka would whistle popular Rabindrasangeet. I tried to imitate him. How was he able to get tunes out with such precision?

We sat down to dinner together and Kaka always made sure to grill me on what I had learned that day. He’d quiz me with a geography question. And when I wandered off point, he’d tell me I was talking too much again.

Kaka and me at a family wedding, 2009

In later years, Kaka moved out into a posh company flat. I wanted to go spend days there not just because of the air-conditioning but to monopolize Kaka’s time.

He never married or had children. Over the years, he grew accustomed to life alone, though he was always generous to open up his home for others. After my parents died in 2001, I often stayed in one of Kaka’s guest rooms.

Evening conversations were never dull with Kaka. We argued sometimes but he always treated me with respect; asked me about things in America that he did not know well. He was one of the few members of my family who took a keen interest in my journalism. Even introduced me to his friends to talk about the Iraq war.

Kaka at Calcutta Club.

He especially liked to gab with his peers at Calcutta Club, a social club that was started in 1907 when Indians were not allowed into the whites-only Bengal Club. Later in life, when Kaka became frail and his eyes failed him completely, he held onto his trek to the club as salvation from loneliness. He left exactly at a certain time and was rarely late coming home. He napped for three hours, limited his cocktail hour before dinner and ate with extreme discipline. I admired that about him. How he kept to routine. How he never indulged.

The last time I saw Kaka was in early December. I had stayed with him for almost two weeks during a visit home. He liked to listen to Bengali songs on my iPod. The noise-cancelling headphones, he said, made it feel as though he were in a concert hall. He marveled at the technology that his poor eyesight prevented him from enjoying.

Some nights, we watched Bengali soap operas on television. He listened intently to the dialog and when the screen was silent, I described for him what was unfolding.  I thought it was grossly unfair that a man who lived by himself should not have the benefit of sight – without being able to read or enjoy television.

But Kaka never felt sorry for himself or allowed pity. I will always think of him as the most fiercely independent person in my family.

Several years ago, the night of my departure from Kolkata, Kaka sat me down at his dining table. 

“Wait,” he said, shuffling off to his bedroom, counting his steps as he always did and feeling his way to his closet.

He returned a few minutes later with an old jewelry box. It had once been a rich blue velvet. Now it was worn, the cardboard peeking through.

“Toke ar ki debo?” he said. What else can I give you?

I took that to mean that he thought I had all that I needed. True. Or that I wasn’t one for ornate ornaments that most Bengali women ogle. Also true.

He began telling me a tale of a trip he made to Hyderabad, years before my birth. The southern Indian city is famous for two things: Biryani, the Mughlai rice dish, and fresh water pearls, he said.

My cousin Sudip took all of us out to eat in 2005.
Kaka loved food and enjoyed it throughly.

“I bought this in Hyderabad. It’s not biryani,” he laughed.

A string of iridescent pearls glowed under the light of his chandelier.

“Kaka,” I said. “You don’t have to give me these.”

I wondered why he had bought them. Had they been meant for someone? Or had he just picked them up because it was the thing to do in Hyderabad?

“It’s a very small thing,” he said. “Wear them and think of me.”

Last November, he’d called me in Atlanta to ask that I bring him good Belgian chocolates. He loved the taste of cocoa on his tongue just before he went to sleep every night.

Kaka at a wedding in 2009. 

My aunt, Pishi, told me that Monday night, Kaka had asked for chocolate. She took that to mean that he was recovering from a recent bout of illness. But Wednesday, he was gone.

He died in his sleep, peacefully.

In 2010, when I visited Kaka, I had recorded some of our conversations. Kaka loved to tell me stories about my father’s childhood. I had planned to finish those conversations. Ask him questions about a time with few records, save a few old black and white photographs. Kaka was a wonderful storyteller and now an important part of my family’s oral history has been silenced.

He was the eldest living of my father’s siblings. Many thought him as the family anchor. I simply thought of him as Kaka, the man who became my father after my own died, the man who stood by me always.

I will miss you terribly.