Antara had long felt that there were several individuals around her who didn't have credible backstories as Indians. They had either not grown up in India or had grown up as someone else and were busy taking away her relatives and former batchmates to create a credible Bengali universe around herself or himself.
Antara might have felt punished by her isolation but, somehow, her character was also being taken away. In a way, she was glad that her Brabourne classmates already had assignments allotted to them when they studied for BA, they didn't care for her.
But a university class that was secretly focused on Purulia, and for all the wrong and mistaken notions, and whose postgrad course would coincide with the 9/11 attacks, was taking on a seriousness difficult to handle.
ii. Antara had no idea what her classmates thought about her. The only reason she had joined her MA at Jadavpur was because the BA course had not been challenging enough. Was there anything intellectual to studying English Literature at all? The syllabus looked promising, running into several pages, it was another thing that many topics were not taught.
She attended almost every seminar and what she witnessed, scripted and pre-decided focus on certain areas, was what later came to be known as the Obama and Donald Trump administration.
As far as the Jadavpur students were concerned, many of them wore synthetic clothes in humid weather, Antara didn't understand why. It was a small little place, crowded, only English Lit students, distinctly unfriendly, they didn't strike up conversation except with those they'd known forever.
It was called JUDE, the Jadavpur University Dept of English. Antara never told her parents about the JUDE bit, the very fact that it was called 'Jay-U' was bad enough.
"What's up at Jay-U, Je-wu," her parents would ask.
"Why were you making fun of me, you went there too," Antara argued back at her father.
"Different times, it was hardly Jay-U," he'd reply.
Though Antara did well in her MA final exams, hardly anyone knew her at the University, which ought to be understood.
iii. Not too many might know that Antara's parents stayed close to Jadavpur University for the first year of their marriage, 1969-70. This was what she heard as she grew up.
"Santoshpur (where they lived) was just coming up, land given to those coming from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) on dole."
(Antara had not known that Robert Dole of Kansas was House Representative from 1961 to 1969.)
"It was not easy living there, the surroundings were all empty. I used to come out into the verandah and wave goodbye when your father left for work, then we saw a couple of guys leering at us, almost every day. So I stopped coming out when your father went to work."
(Antara hadn't known her narrative else she might have connected it to the fact that Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood', about the murders at Holcomb, Kansas, was published in 1965.)
"The landlord was a cop at Lalbazar (police HQ in Kolkata). He had five children. His wife taught me how to cook cabbage, the Bengali way. The eldest son was my age, quite friendly as well. The cop's wife was not very well-educated, I took her daughter to get admitted to high school, filling in her forms etc."
(Antara had thus grown up on a discussion of Kolkata's officials and Mannesman AG. The Clutter family's end had come in 1959, it was during Allen Dulles' CIA Directorship, which stretched from 1953 to 1961.
What Antara's parents saw in Kolkata a decade after the Clutter murders in Kansas, well, it had to be very disturbing if Antara's mother brought it up every few weeks or so.)
Antara's life was different. She didn't know how to write blogposts without mentioning Bob Dole or Allen Dulles. Antara's livelihood had been taken away, now what was the NRI after?
May 22, 2025.
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