Aunt B
A sneak peak of my just released story collection— Not Quite A Disaster After All
A little sneak peak from my collection Not Quite A Disaster After All: Flowersong Press US 2025
Winner of the Andrew Lytle Prize 2021
First published in Sewanee Review 2021
There were a few hours of the day that Mother had allocated purely as her own, for her own. No one was allowed to disturb her then. Not Magan or Kanak or the gardener who might want his monthly dues. Between the hours of two and four in the afternoon, her bedroom door would remain shut. She’d turn on Bengali news for half an hour waiting for the heaviness of the afternoon to descend.
I’d return home at three, to find the crack beneath her door disappear in darkness and would retire to my own room, where I could unravel in privacy— I’d write a letter to a pen pal, or make up a story for my dolls.
At precisely four, sometimes, a quarter past—and then she would tell, whoever would bring her tea, how she had overslept by mistake—the light beneath her door came back on and I could imagine the whole universe in there— the television, the drapes, the tumbler and glasses and unpacked suitcases from my father’s many rushed trips— all having awoken up at once.
Some days, she would shower after her tea, put on a fresh sari, always of a somber print and color, and head down the stairs to her car. Her heels scuffing against the carpet on the staircase importantly. If she had woken up in time, she might peer into my room and tell me she had a meeting or an event to attend.
Time in my house was always divided into two parts—that when my parents were home and all the lights on the ceiling were on and so was the television and all the servants scattered here and there on errands; and that when my parents were not home, away at work, when the lights and fans and sounds switched off and for a brief moment, the house would seem mine.
It was always on those days, at precisely the time my mother’s car had rolled out of the garage, and I was ready to feel alive, finally, that Aunt B would arrive.
Aunt B wasn’t really my aunt. She was my mother’s aunt. A cousin of my grandmother’s. But, being younger than my mother, she was too young to be called a grand aunt and possibly for not finding an adequate salutation, I called her ‘aunt’ as well. Come to think of it, everyone I knew did.
Aunt B was a squat woman and her most prominent feature was her thick lips that were always painted dark Burgundy as though they had been charred by the summer sun. Her hair was always pinned in an eloquent bun at the base of her neck. She never looked up as she carefully hitched her sari and tackled the staircase up to our living room as though she were wading water.
To compliment her features, she had a voice that sounded as though she were puckering up her tree stump of a nose to make room for decibels. But it wasn’t so much the tone as it were the words itself which grate in me.
“Is your Mum-mum at home?” she would ask, almost knowing what the answer would be.
She came every week and each time into a living room taken over by the evening shadows. Yet she never relented. She came at exactly the same time with a blatant hope, desperateness, at the very dark end of daylight, only to turn around disappointed and sadly make her way back— to once again endure her own life.
Some days, she would ask for tea before she heaved her stoutness back to Mayfair Road, the street parallel to us, connected by a narrow lane. It was no more than a five minute walk back to her building— a large white multi-story that looked as grim as a government school. It was across the road from the general store where I would often go to buy chocolates and later cigarettes, and each time I would be weary of the possibility of bumping into her.
I suppose, though, she needed the rest before she dragged her body through the lonely journey back. Perhaps she was wondering which relative’s house to go next. Whose printed sofa to sip tea on now. Her plump lips now deflated but still holding on to its last smile.
At first, I would sit on the armrest of the green fabric sofa, which had remained the same color despite surviving many a reupholstering, and politely answer her questions with single words. “Yes, school was fine.” “No, I don’t know when she will be back.”
Aunt B’s face was aglow with futile effervescence. You could see her almost willing the answer, “Yes,” when she inquired of my mother.
This obscene optimism, perched on her lips—plump with expectation— made me more adamant not to give in to her. So I didn’t offer her biscuits and I didn’t inquire about her daughter D and I was annoyed that Magan served her tea in the pretty floral pot with plenty of refill, instead of offering her a single cup. After a few minutes I would excuse myself and go back to my own room. From the corner where I had to turn away from the living room, I could see the back of her bun— held delicately with pins and clips to form whatever semblance of dignity that she could muster up.
Sometimes it would be a good half an hour before I heard her footsteps on the staircase again. Once in a while, if she was really lucky, my mother would return. Then they gossiped about relatives and I could hear her nose grovel at my mother’s name, “But you don’t know, Chini.” She would sing the songs of her grief while my mother patiently listened— to her sorrows, and the sorrows of all their other relations— then, in her curt, precise words, hand out her consolations, her little favors.
Aunt B would say, “I knew you’d know what to do.”
Sometimes, my mother made the trip five minutes over to May Fair Road herself. Once a year, when she would clean out her closets, she’d keep piles of saris on different parts of the bed and later, tell Aunt B, “This yellow would look so good on you, I kept it aside just for you.”
My mother never spoke of her work with the Ladies Study Group or the Citizens Action Forum with Aunt B. Nor of my father’s new ventures. It’s as though she brushed aside who she was, to make time for her poorer relative. A form of entertainment— easy and mindless— where she didn’t really have to give too much of herself. A real life daytime soap.
Aunt B had a daughter who often came with her.
D was technically my mother’s cousin and therefore my aunt but being that she was a few months younger than I, I called her by her name-- D. Thankfully the customs of Bengali civility didn’t stoop so low as to force me to use a more deferential salutation on her.
The greatest misfortune of Aunt B was actually not her own profuseness, but the existence of D. For I couldn’t imagine seeing Aunt B without fearing the possibility of D in our house.
D was a younger, more rounded version of her mother. Where her mother’s exuberance would flow out of the folds of her sari, bulging from the edges of her blouse, D’s abundance was more contained under her demure salwar, her face not yet having relented to the gravity of years. The worst part about her was that she was actually not a terrible person.
The days D accompanied her mother to our house, I could feel despair settling heavily in my chest. I would have to entertain her as long as my mother decided to entertain Aunt B. Worse were the days when my mother wasn’t at home and Aunt B would leave D behind in my care. They didn’t have a car, nor spare help at home who could pick her up, so it was left to my mother to arrange for her to return. This meant there was no limit, no foreseeable end to her visit. She stayed as long as my mother allowed her.
What made D most intolerable was her deference. Her compliance in anything I wanted to do. If I wanted to play with the dolls, she would agree. If I wanted to draw, she was awash in eagerness. Her figure replete with submission.
I once sought her help to burn the hair on my Barbies. We stole a match book from my mother’s prayer room upstairs and watched the synthetic hair fizzle and char. D didn’t say anything. She held a Barbie in her hand and stared at it. Sometimes, she would ask how much they had cost and I would wave away her curiosity by saying, ‘I don’t know. Baba bought it.’
She would also hold the red pencil case my father had brought back from Japan—with countless hidden compartments for erasers and sharpners and little clips. She would open the compartments and smell the fragrant erasers. I was used to this kind of scrutiny—in my school no one else wore the kind of socks I did, bought from London, no one had such a pencil case. On one hand was the thrill in owning something special. On the other, was the glaring proof that brought everything spiraling back to a central truth. I was different.
Back in the days before we had Pepsi and cable television and imported chocolates in our corner stores, the only way to get these coveted items was to go to Park Street, where, the shacks at the edge of the road were filled with all sorts of things we only saw in the American movies which we rented from the video stores. On a very special Sunday, my father would drive us there so we could buy a box of stale Kit Kat which had somehow reached this poor vendor’s hands via Dubai and Thailand. They tasted of an arduous journey as well—battered and bruised with expiration dates we ignored by virtue of our mirth. These vendors kept imported cigarettes, after shaves, lighters, electronic goods— all of America, what we later learned was really the Middle East, under one plastic shack.
One year, during Diwali, when our dining table was filled with trousseaus of sweets, cakes and candles, the new Consulate General of Germany, perhaps in trying to make a statement, sent us something quite unique— cases of Coca Cola cans.
We had cola in India. Our domestic version, called Thumbs Up, which had a red and white drawing of a fist with the thumb sticking out. But Coke—that was the thing of films and rock stars’ posters—something we knew existed in a far away, parallel world.
Reader, this was akin to having Disneyland be brought to your doorstep, for your and yours only, private use.
My parents, who never touched fast food, measured the soup and salad they ate for dinner, had no interest in such things which meant, I usurped all of it— all thirty six cans.
I rationed them carefully. I never mentioned to visiting friends that there was anything so magnificent in my house. I let them ogle on at my enormous toy collection, the miniature houses, the plastic horses with synthetic hair, never letting on that there was something more physical, more corporeal to the larger world we only theoretically knew existed, in my possession. I would consume one as a reward after completing my school work. Sometimes, on a Sunday as a special treat. I saved the cans afterwards, crushed them to give them what I thought was an ‘authentic’ look, the kind I aligned with the teen magazines I used to buy from the roadsides on Park Street, and used them as pencil holders. Years later, when my habits became more explorative, they turned into ashtrays, hidden in the nooks of my desk.
One day, at the edge of the afternoon, when time whirled and stirred lazily through the day’s absence, while the door crack of my mother’s room was still dark, news came via Magan that D had arrived and was downstairs, in the living room. She had obviously been informed by the guards at the gate and the workers that I was at home and there was no point in trying to hide in the ocean of jasmine pots my mother grew in the terrace, craning my neck to watch her retreat back out through the gate. Reluctantly, I headed down, dragging myself over each step in submission.
D was sitting erect on the sofa, one hand resting on the other across her lap, her hair swept back dutifully with a plastic hairband, glistening of oil that her mother must have applied on her, looking nowhere in particular.
