The Weed Woman: How a sharp-tongued refugee made a forest of the Bangla language

Being around Maya-mashi was like living in a forest..She was short enough to be taunted as a dwarf, thin enough to have her shadow be mistaken for a reed’s. Poverty had marked her face and skin and hair in such a manner that she seemed the oldest person in the neighbourhood. And we were cruel, like only children can be..My playmates and I called her names and annoyed her with the most ridiculous rhymes. I still remember one:.Maya-mashi aagachha.Maya-mashi-r nei pachha.(Maya-mashi is a weed.She doesn’t have a butt).The “aagachha-pachha” rhyme must have been an invention of the playground, but I now wonder where that weed metaphor came from. How did a middle-aged Bangladeshi refugee, abandoned by her husband and, later, her own family, come to have this effect on teenage children in a small town in sub-Himalayan Indian Bengal? It is possible that this happened because Maya-mashi spoke in plants. Compulsively, every day, she expressed herself in botanical idioms and proverbs. Her Bangla was a thing of leaves and fruit and stems and roots – her forest..I loved and hated Maya-mashi in equal measure – but I kept the love private, because I thought it would make me look weak in front of my playmates..LIKE MOST FEMALE domestic workers of the time, Maya-mashi did not have a surname. This was the common destiny of women who worked as household help in Bengal, subject as they were to the callous gulf of privilege that such work entailed. Their surnames were unimportant to their employers, and so they severed them easily, like nails, and instead acquired suffixes that denoted virtual relations: often didi, or sister, but most commonly mashi, or maternal aunt. .Maya became “mashi” to both my parents and me – a strange relationship, the kind that is possible only in mythology. She had two boys she had brought with her from Bangladesh, with rhyming names that made us laugh – Mongol, or Mars, and Jongol, or jungle. Chhaya, her eldest child and daughter, whose name meant shadow, she had left behind with her mother back home, hoping to bring her to this new country after she had settled here. It must have been more than a decade since she left, but Maya-mashi still had not found the opportunity to fetch her daughter. It is this bit of history that first made me curious about Maya-mashi – how could a mother abandon a daughter like that? It made me scared for myself. Could my mother abandon me like that as well?.The daughter’s nickname was Lata, which meant a creeper. Every afternoon, as Maya-mashi cleaned the dishes or scrubbed the red oxide floors in our old house, that name appeared and disappeared on her lips like a chant. We grew used to it the way one does to a grandparent’s chronic coughing – a metaphor that came to us from a friend of my father’s who, fond of annoying Maya-mashi, proposed to marry her daughter, the never-seen-but-always-spoken-about Lata. .I remember Maya-mashi’s reply because I did not understand what it meant. “Anarash bawley kathhal, bhai tumi bawro khoshkhoshey” – The pineapple tells the jackfruit that its skin is rather harsh to the touch. It made my father’s friend go silent..AS I GREW older and the more secretive implications of idioms and proverbs began to make sense to me, Maya-mashi began to change in my eyes from an awkward and annoying person to someone mysterious, a person worth tenancy in my curious teenage mind. I’d begun to find her means of self-defence oddly attractive – when scolded or taunted, she lashed back with a Bangla proverb. And that proverb was inevitably about plant life..It was my mother who brought this to the family’s attention over dinner one day. And she, a teacher, because she treated all the world as her schoolchildren, explained and bolstered her observation immediately: Maya-mashi’s daughter’s name was Lata, her son’s Jongol. This was a psychological giveaway; it was “abnormal”, my mother concluded, her attachment to plant life..I was at an age when the psychological life seems unattractive, even a burden, when compared to the riches of the material, of smell and skin. I did not bother with these deductions. I did not think Maya-mashi’s lexicon unusual. There were already many proverbs from plant life that surrounded us. My mother was herself fond of using one for us: “Aek laphey gachhey otha” – Climbing the tree in one leap. It was her schoolteacher’s way of instructing my brother and me to shun shortcuts..WHEN I WAS twelve, I came down with a series of ailments that left me confined to bed for months. Every morning, my working parents and my school-going brother left me alone at home to befriend the day. Pity is a great lodestone, and so Maya-mashi – usually harsh and pungent, especially with children – began to spend significant portions of time by my bedside. .I was too weak to be interested in anyone besides myself and my ambitions to return to the life I had left behind on the playground. Her stories whirred like the ceiling fan above my head, never making a home inside me. To grow up to be a detective was my life’s aim, and I liked to think of people around me as detectives of their own kind. The doctor was a disease detective; my father, a banker, was a money detective; a botanist, a plant detective; and so on. In this world, I did not know where to place Maya-mashi. She could not be a detective of pots and pans, nor of dirt and dust. Then what?.It must have been to answer this conundrum that I began spying on Maya-mashi’s words. A severe moralist frustrated with an unfair world, she was seeking justice in the natural law of plant life. For what else is there in our proverbs about plants? “Trinobomonnotey jawgot.” These polysyllabic words leaked out of her from time to time: The world is in a blade of grass..There were others she used to pass judgment. One of these, delivered with great scorn in her voice, was “Aapon cheye pawr bhalo, pawr cheye jungle bhalo” – The stranger is better than dear ones, and the jungle even better than the stranger. My school education had only equipped me with the awkward, exclusionary expression “law of the jungle”, one that invoked fear and privileged animal life over plants. Maya-mashi’s jungle, with its ecosystem of justice, was a universe of plants rather than animals. Hence her fondness for forest proverbs, the saddest of which I now use in my complaints to my loved ones: “Bone porey shawbai dyakhey, mone porey keu dyakhey na.” Everyone sees the forest burning, they don’t notice the heart burning. .Maya-mashi’s biography, which she loved to give away for free, was composed of such self-pitying morals. “Nyara bel-tawlaye aekbari jaaye” – The bald man stands under a wood-apple tree only once – was deployed when my mother asked her to consider marrying again. Maya-mashi was firm – she was not going to be fool enough to stand under a wood-apple tree and injure her bald head again. When the process of acquiring ration cards for her looked difficult, or when she pined for the taste of the sweet-water fish of the rivers of her old Bangladesh, another plant proverb would escape out of her: “Aek gachher chhal onnyo gachhey jora laagey na” – The bark of one tree cannot become the bark of another. .When my mother scolded her – uselessly, of course – for her lack of family planning and bringing three children into the world, Maya-mashi used a self-mocking tone. “Agachhaye phawl beshi,” she said – Weeds produce more fruits than fruit-bearing trees – simultaneously calling herself a weed and praising her own reproductive strength. When my mother asked her to take care of her skin and passed on a vial of cosmetic cream or body oil, Maya-mashi refused, making her argument with another plant proverb: “Upokari gachher chhal thhakey na” – Medicinal plants rarely have their bark left on. Maya-mashi refused to take any criticism, even if it was for her own good. She likened herself to plants that had no use for suggestions from gardeners and admirers. .Readers like you make stories like this possible. Become a Patron to support Himal!.WHEN HER HUSBAND came to visit her from Bangladesh and she refused to go back with him, the man beat her up, leaving open gashes on her back and neck that she showed to my mother the next morning. .“Aada shukaleu jhaal jaaye na,” she explained to my mother – Dried ginger does not lose its heat. And then she came up with a consolation herself: “Taap baarey jhopey aar khejur baarey kopey.” The heat abets the growth of the bush just as the date palm needs to be hurt and wounded to bear fruit. .There was little to separate her sons from her daughter, she said, explaining her children’s lack of affection for her. “Shawb roshuner aek-i koya” – All the cloves in a garlic bulb are the same. .A GREAT DEVOTEE of Time, she always asked us to be mindful of its grace and rhythm. For this too her instructions came from the behaviour of plants. Her words were annoying, particularly on the eve of examinations, when she scolded us for staying up late to cram instead of pacing our study schedule evenly throughout the year. If my brother or I or our playmates said something inappropriate to our age, two words would come rushing out of her: “Awkal pokko”, prematurely ripe, which is ripeness without taste or consequence. Or this saying, which I did not understand for years and whose meaning I was scared to ask my mother about: “Awkaley kheyechho kochu, monay rekho kichhu kichhu” – You’ve eaten an unripe yam, you’ll remember a few things. There is another one which I find myself using now, especially when I see people coming out of the gym or going through crash diets – “Kiliye kathal pakano”. Beating a jackfruit to make it ripe..Maya-mashi and my mother created an ecosystem of such sayings, one borrowing from the other – though, of course, my mother’s stock was meagre. Both shared a dislike of flamboyance and fantasy and were sadly intolerant of daydreamers. “Gachhey kathal gNophey tel” was thus a favourite indictment of theirs – The jackfruit’s still hanging from the tree, but he’s oiled his moustache in anticipation of the sap sticking to it. They used it in particular for a young neighbour I called Robi-kaku, someone who had failed his school-leaving exams a few times but harboured dreams of becoming a successful doctor. Robi-kaku passed his tenth-grade exams eventually – he had, perhaps to avoid looking older than the other boys in his class, shaved off his moustache by then. But Maya-mashi’s adage did not stop stalking him. In fact, another one joined it soon, when Maya-mashi discovered Robi-kaku smoking weed with a group of older men in an abandoned school building. “Kaacha bashey ghoon dhorley rokkha nei tar kono kaaley” – If the young bamboo attracts weevils, there is no escape for it. .GRADUALLY THINGS BEGAN to change about the way I saw people. Their names, their hobbies, their habits, even their jobs, receded into a blur. Instead, the plant proverb that Maya-mashi had used for a person came to direct my consciousness and became their visiting card, as it were. .When someone scolded her sons for being naughty in school, I heard Maya-mashi saying this under her breath: “Chandey kawlonko aachhey, golap-ey kawntok” – The moon has its flaws, the rose its thorns..But her worldly wisdom also made her see the inequality in plant life. “Not all fruits or vegetables are worth a life in proverbs,” she explained, before reciting a list where some fruits and vegetables were privileged over the rest. Aam over aamra – mangoes over hog plums. The jackfruit, taro, the toddy palm and paddy kept recurring in these sayings, as they did in the work of the poet Jibanananda Das. Tasty or nutritious – these were praised only for their usefulness to humans. This made her angry, this expectation to be useful to humans, and the “human” for her was inevitably an educated, salaried person. Sometimes she asked our family physician – she believed doctors knew everything – if there was a plant that humans had not found any use for..I MUST HAVE been too young to understand Maya-mashi’s permanent state of anger. It couldn’t only have been the obvious differences of socio-economic class that made her feel like an outsider. She endured jibes about her hygiene and the quantity of rice she ate, and, often, also threats about her precarious legal status in this new country. That none of us knew her surname is also telling – “mashi”, as used for domestic helpers, had been turned by the Bengali middle class into a caste and class category. I can now remember a neighbourhood uncle trying to guess Maya-mashi’s caste from her high cheekbones and short build, and, in the end, calling her a “tribal”. This hierarchy – and its irrational and ruthless codes – was like a sport that everyone liked to play, both adults and children. It conditioned us to see her behaviour as outrageous and even an assault on the confidence of her employers. .It would have been this conditioning that made me find Maya-mashi’s superior air annoying. She often contrasted what she saw as the muscular and robust intelligence of the poor with the supposedly effeminate ways of the wealthy, comparing the latter to decorative house plants. “Tumi phero daaley daaley aami phiri paataye paataye” – You move through stems while I move between the leaves, she would tell someone who she thought was trying to cheat her. She suffered from a persecution complex, forever racked with the anxiety of being cheated for being illiterate. Among all the things she envied in the rich, foremost was the intelligence that came to be a custodian of their lives after school and university. .Yet she tried to show herself as superior. “Dhaaney aekgoon, ghashey shawtogoon” – Paddy has one virtue, grass a hundred, she would say, taunting her middle-class employers whenever they made her feel low and lowly. Or, when reprimanded for her obtuse behaviour, she’d confront them with “Lebu kawchlabey joto, hawbey teto tawto’” – The more you squeeze a lemon, the more bitter it becomes. .In fact, most of her conversation with her employers was tit for tat and bristly. But, perhaps because it was melded with the workings of the natural world, her sharpness did not cause long-term damage. She would happily call herself a “dumurer phool”, the flower of a fig tree that did not reveal itself, when she reappeared after a long absence. As I grew older, I began to enjoy this, her unbending nature, her refusal to bow to the employer’s commands, the kind of rebellious streak that teenagers find attractive. “Shukno daal bhangleu noye na” – The dry branch of a tree breaks but does not bow, she told an employer once before quitting..Her smallness was a gift to her at times, but allied with it was a fear of big things – big people, big families, big trees. When my parents asked her to quit all her other jobs so she could stay with us and save herself the exhaustion of working in several houses, she refused. She did not want to put all her eggs in one basket, she meant, but her choice of adage was “Bawro gachhei jhor laagey” – A storm strikes the big tree. Another recurring fear, given her fragile legal status, was of living a parasitic life, and she held on to her independence, however tattered it might have looked to her employers, with great pride. “Bawro gachher tawlaye baash, daal bhanglei shorbonash’” – If you live under a big tree, even the breaking of a branch might be the end of you. .When municipal authorities came to raze the “illegal” settlements on the riverbank where she lived, she led the protesters, shouting “Gachh tultey shobai aachhey” – Everyone will join you in uprooting a tree. For a neighbour she did not know very well, but about whom she had heard rumours of corruption and miserliness, she could casually say, “Gachhero khaaye tawlar-o kuroye” – He eats from the tree and gathers fruit from the ground beneath it as well. This same neighbour, who would have been in his early sixties, suddenly began wearing a wig. Maya-mashi shouted out to my mother as he passed by our house, “Mawra malonchey phutlo phool, taakey aabar uthlo chool” – Flowers have arrived on a dead branch, hair has sprouted on a bald head. .There were a few for whom she reserved her most astringent self. The milkman was one of them. And, perhaps because I hated milk and my own dislike for the milkman seemed a natural corollary, I did not mind Maya-mashi’s jokes at his expense. I can only remember a few of those now. When the milkman appeared with a swollen face one morning and explained to my mother that he had been kicked by a cow while trying to milk it, my mother came up with a common adage: The cow that kicks is also the cow that gives you milk. Maya-mashi came running from the garden to say that the swollen face suited the skinny man: “Shadher kamal tultey giye haatey phutlo kata” – Trying to pluck the desired lotus has resulted in the thorns in his hand. Before the milkman could respond, out came another proverb. “Phool-er shobha bhomra, gai-er shobha chamra” – The beauty of a flower is to be seen from the bees around it and the beauty of a cow is to be found in the quality of its leather..Who could convince Maya-mashi that this had been an inappropriate use of the proverb? She was adding her own life to these sayings, using them to make sense of her destiny, which she likened from time to time to that of Bangladesh: a small place, its birth snatched out of violence..I REMEMBER ASKING her where she had learnt these proverbs..The question made her angry at once. “Whoever taught the trees?” she lashed back. This she shared proudly with the trees – a happy illiteracy. In this, she also seemed driven by a compulsive need to pare down the egotism she associated with formal education. .Once, when teaching my brother, my mother said, “All the sounds that we need are to be found in the alphabet.” To this Maya-mashi added, as if it was a complementary statement, “All the learning that is to be had is to be found in the plant world.” .Also, she never apologised, no matter what the circumstances. Plants did no wrong, they did not understand apology..MAYA-MASHI WORSHIPPED many gods, but she was frustrated with the Hindu temples for not hosting a god whose portfolio was rebirth. In her imagined instalments of rebirth, she saw herself as a tree. This current life, lived amid proverbs using the behaviour of plant life, was, for her, training for the next one, where she would be a plant. Once, when I asked her if she missed her surname, having been reduced to being everyone’s “mashi” in a new country, she said she did not. Plants did not need surnames, she said, and this was their safeguard against the violence caused by surnames – the violence inherent in the differences of caste and community, manifest in surnames. .My parents did not fight her idiosyncrasies. When she began working for us, for instance, Maya-mashi demanded a surprisingly large salary. I remember my mother telling me later how they tried to reason with her, but Maya-mashi just would not give up. Her explanation came much later – instead of an annual increment, she would take an annual decrement. “Like trees,” she said. “Young people need more money than the aged. Haven’t you seen how saplings need more care and water than old trees?”.I WAS A high-school student in Calcutta when my mother last saw Maya-mashi. Everyone knew she was dying, but Maya-mashi refused to believe doctors and well-wishers who told her so. .When my mother asked her about her ailment, the older self returned: “Baash mawrey phooley, manush mawrey bhooley” – The bamboo dies for flowering, man for his mistakes. .Maya-mashi had been my mother’s closest confidante when our family moved to this small town. “You know that I don’t have a birth certificate,” she sat up on her bed to tell my mother. This was not news, my mother had heard this multiple times before. The concept of a birth certificate was then quite new in the Subcontinent, where written records were still uncommon in rural areas..“Sometimes I wonder how people will remember me, if at all,” Maya-mashi whispered..My mother later told me that she thought she’d given a very intelligent and poetic answer when she said, “People will remember you like they remember a tree.” .Maya-mashi held my mother’s hand and said, “Bherendao brikkho.” Bherenda – a weed – is also a plant.