The lockdown is being treasured by some people. Fans of Leela Majumdar and Satyajit Ray are among them since this period of enforced confinement has led to the discovery of hidden treasures. Sandip Ray stumbled across a jewel trove comprising unpublished photographs taken by his father as well as unseen negatives of film stills while rummaging through the corners of that famous address on Bishop Lefroy Road. The riches have kept tumbling out since. Days later came the joyous news of the discovery of several unpublished translations of the works of Abanindranah Tagore, James Joyce and some of Shakespeare’s plays by Ray’s equally luminous aunt — Leela Majumdar.
But Podipishi — one of Majumdar’s immortal creations — would have snorted at these gems. Her beloved bormibaksho — a box made of Burmese teak — she would insist, contained pearls the size of duck’s eggs. Snorting back at pishi, readers of Podipishir Bormibaksho would confirm, can be risky business: the mercurial dame, dressed in a white thaan — the marker of widowhood — and armed with a heart of steel, had once cast her fiery eyes upon a cow causing, lore has it, the bovine to yield curd instead of milk for three days.
Majumdar’s legion of fans would be itching to lay their hands on the booty that has now been unearthed. But Podipishi would be grinning at their greed. Treasures, she knows better than us, have a rather nasty habit of slipping through our grasp. The bormibaksho had slipped out of pishi’s armpit after she reached home in the dead of the night, leaving behind a distraught, wailing Podi holding a betel-leaf container. The bormibaksho would be found one hundred years later, but its second life was far from glittering. One of Podipishi’s descendants used it to store condiments.
The idea of material wealth being ephemeral is a theme that Majumdar returned to in many of her tales. In “Bhagyadebi Branch Hotel”, Annapishi, yet another ancient lady living in Benaras, recalls receiving a magical pot that dished out an endless supply of tasty treats, only to lose the battered hnaari in the end.
Treasures slipping through fumbling, aged fingers do not diminish the aura of Leela’s mighty matrons. They remain, their bunglings notwithstanding, fiercely defiant of a culture that invariably imagines younger, beefy men in the role of hunters or guardians of treasures.
None of these men — including Indiana Jones — is a patch on Leela’s ladies. Annapishi went on to win a national literary award by ‘penning’ — therein lay the twist in this tale — an enchanting book depicting the rhythms of daily life in the alleys of Kashi. Podipishi returned too — albeit in a dream — carrying a mace in her hand: did the poor cow start leaking doi instead of doodh, once again? The old treasures — Majumdar’s published works — say nothing of this. Perhaps the new ones, discovered during lockdown, would.
