Little lessons of life and knowing about my caste

My first marriage was a great lesson about the big, bad world outside.  I had been brought up steeped in morals, ethics, principles and discipline.  I automatically endowed my new family with the same qualities.  Day after day, year after year I came to understand that my parents’ teachings and moral values were of a distant land and era.  Each day tore apart the cushion of love and uprightness I had known to be a part of me.  When Mamoni (Ashok’s mother) knew about my second pregnancy she could not believe how a smart girl like me allowed it to happen.  Her idea was since I had been an airhostess I should be aware of contraceptives and things like that to avoid conception.  It was taken for granted that as an airhostess I must have been sleeping around all those years in the airlines and knew how to be smart in such matters.  Mamoni, as far as I could make out, was not being acrimonious or derogatory about it; she was just stating a fact as popularly believed.  This incident again made me wonder about my parents’ planet of origin. 

Both my parents did not know falsehood, cheating or any devious qualities that are so much part of life and the world.  Baba (Gyanendra Chandra Deb) would leave for work in his chauffer-driven Zephyr car promptly on the hour and be back at the scheduled time in the evening.  Dada and I knew it as a rule to come back from playing sharp at six p.m.  And after a little chat or admonitions from Baba we would gather to sing Brahmo Sangeet for an hour with Ma at the organ.  Then it would be time for studies and then a blissful hour of being completely on our own when both parents would go for a walk before dinner.  We could proverbially 'let down our hair' after dinner when all of us would be involved in serious discussions about anything and everything under the sun; but mysteriously never touched the nether part of life I realise now.   

Knowing about our caste

Our home did not have any altar or any particular worship area; we just knew that every corner of the house was holy and respect for everything and everyone was the unspoken command.  By the time I was in high school, my school – St. Mary’s Carmel School was applying for government affiliation.  This required some government forms to be filled up by the students or their parents.  Quite naturally I gave it to my mother (Bela Deb) to do the needful.  She paused at a particular point and asked my father which box to tick.  The question was about religion and caste – something we were totally ignorant about.  Baba got very upset as he had not expected a catholic missionary school to come up with such questions.  But one cannot ignore a government form and I had to go back to school the next day, so finally the form was duly filled and I came to know that we were Brahmins by birth.  Much later in life I came across people, especially women who would question me on my caste and religion.  Yes I have often floored them with the Brahmin fact – I noticed how attitudes go through a sea change when they know the truth.  Somewhere in our minds we Indians still harbour strange reverence for Brahmins.