The Bose Clan

My father would not have known beforehand that his bride-to-be would be from a household so completely alien to his own upbringing. My mother was born in Calcutta in a traditional middle-class Bengali joint family household.

A 'joint' family concept would be completely alien to my son's generation anyway. For those totally in the dark, a joint family is a household where the parents, along with their sons, daughters-in-law and their children reside together. The head of the family is the eldest, usually the father, and on his demise, the mother. All the family members contribute their income into one common savings place (which could be a bank account or under the mattress). All the women gather together in one common kitchen and cook meals for the entire household. The children play together and often, one of the daughters-in-law is responsible for them. Usually this is one of the younger daughters-in-law and it is common for all the children to address her as chhoto ma (or younger mother)!

So, ideally speaking, the joint family is to promote oneness, closeness and harmony amongst siblings and their offsprings. There is no 'mine' but rather, there is 'ours'. Of course, most of the time, this system completely backfires, as there is hardly any privacy, the ability to choose for oneself, or the ability to buy what one may desire as everyone sinks their individuality for the sake of the paribar (family). Often the men grouse at the unfair spending ability where a hardworking individual will get the same spending money as his jobless brother. The wives also have their own share of petty politics and probably only the children benefit from such close interaction with their cousins.

In my grandmother's (didai's) generation, however, this was the norm. The Bose family she married into were zamindars in Dhaka and so, along with the five sons and their individual families, there were dozens of poor relatives and other dependents who lived in the huge house where she first stepped into as a new bride. Each son and his family was allotted two rooms for their own purpose, bachelors were given a single room, the matriarch of the family, my grandmother's mother-in-law (who was a widow at the time my grandmother joined the family) had two big rooms and a kitchenette (where her meals were cooked by a Brahmin cook) for her own use.

The rest of the rooms, the dining room, halls, bathrooms and kitchen were for common use and were appropriately quite large. There was a balcony-cum-living quarters on the ground floor where there was always a floating population of tenants from the zamindary, poor relatives looking for a handout and other people whom the family could not turn away and who therefore stayed on. The kitchen was a huge dark room with stone floors. The main cooking was done by a thakur (Oriya cook, who are famous for their culinary skills), all the wives assisted by cutting vegetables with botis. The wives were also responsible for the jol-khabar, or evening snacks.

Each wife took turns every two months of managing the household expenses. When you consider that there were about 60 people eating every day, it seems quite a feat! The money was adequate to substantially provide for everyone but there was little left over for luxuries. Everyone would hope that it would be my didai's turn during the mango season, as she would make it a point to spend out of her pocket money to give everyone, even the servants and tenants, fresh mangoes with curd for their evening repast. For this, she was called Phool kakima (or Flower aunty) by everyone.

As I said, the children benefited from such close association with their cousins. My mother's childhood was filled with happy play-times with all her cousin brothers and sisters. The concept of sharing was very quickly and easily enforced...no one got their own of toys or sweets. My mother remembers my didai giving her a bagful of mangoes and telling her to share it with all her brothers and sisters. My mother went heaving the heavy bag up and down the three-storied building, delivering one mango to each child, even tucking a mango under the pillow of one of her brothers who was sleeping, before realizing that she had exhausted her load and she had forgotten to keep one of the mangoes for herself! She then went crying to her mother and was proclaimed ekdom bokaa (completely silly)!!