THE INHERITOR

                                                                      

             (for my maternal grandfather

               late Kunjabihari Samantaray

  of  Barasahi, Khurda in Odisha)

I have seen only your old snap, Grandpa,

Your old and beautiful snap

Taken probably in a studio in Calcutta

Sometime in nineteen twenties or thirties

And that I greedily possess,

Having recovered it dust ridden

From the mud wall of indifference and lime

At your own home where it was just a photo

That was losing its lustre in course of time.

Even my mother doesn’t remember

If she had seen you,

Since she was hardly a one year old baby

When you left this world young and romantic,

May be at the age of twenty five or thirty.

And granny told me how, inhibited,

You would come quietly like a thief

To fondle mom when no one was around,

Hiding from the watchful eyes

Of your old fashioned mother,

As if fatherhood those days

Was something to be ashamed of.

            

             Granny would just watch me grow

And tears of happiness would come to her eyes

Nursing, as it were, a secret pride

In my progress and position at school.

But one thing I don’t understand.

When the question of inheritance came,

The inheritance of his adopted son

Who posed to be our well-wisher,

Why did your brother say granny was childless?

Or to put it rightly, why did he say

That the baby, my mother, had died years ago

And granny, in fact, had sold him her share?

An emotional lady, thank God, mother is alive

To see a dozen grandchildren of her own

Born to her three sons and two daughters,

And dying for brotherly care and concern

She would have gladly sacrificed her share.

Granny was satisfied with the thought

That it was she who had adopted a son

And mother was happy too to have a brother.

Their sacrifice was made unimportant.

With fifty percent share of the property,

             Mom was ignored when the papers were signed.

“Your signature will be taken later

If necessary,” my mother was told.

What she could not understand at the time

Was that it would not have ever been necessary,

And granny herself was too innocent

To smell of any such development.

Nor did she know that the thumb impression

She might have given earlier on

What she was told to be the paper of adoption,

Was actually the sale of her fortune.

Your brother now is no more.

After undergoing the painful experience

Of being bed-ridden for twelve cruel months

Awaiting the end, which would come only

After confusing confessions, he died in 1980.

Poor old man, he carried with him nothing

But the cane walking stick

I had taken for him from Puri.

Kept in the dark all the years of her life

And having been made to know late

That she had no legal link with the inheritor,

The vacuum granny could not bear.

She died two years after

Without a bona fide to perform her last rite,

And all that I could do

Was to watch everything like an idiot,

Silent under the spell of Uncle Hypocrite,

Who in his usual do-gooder way would tell me,

“You should not have come travelling a thousand km

And wasting money to attend a sheer ceremony.”

When material gains are all that people care,

Delicate feelings like the fond memory of one

Who once loved and probably had a dream,

Have little importance in the game.

Thus, you have been long forgotten, Grandpa;

In spite of your faith in goodness

You have been forgotten at home

And it pains to see no trace of your name.

                  ____________ 

(In honour of my mother Sulochana Devi,

 who passed away on July 29, 2011./

 From my 3rd poetry collection 'HOMECOMING'

 published in 2010)

Bipin Patsani