Adityarup ‘Rup’ Chakravorty.
In some ways, my grandmother’s life was framed by bananas.
When I was a child in Calcutta, amid red double-decker buses and intermittent power cuts, my grandmother would tell me stories about her childhood among the interweaving waterways and endless rice paddies of the Bengal province in British India. She told me how one of her earliest memories was walking home with her parents late one evening, the sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine in the air and the haunting calls of nightjars flying through the dusky sky.
They were walking on a little levee between two ponds when she looked up and saw a giant silhouetted against the western sky, waving huge arms.
“I remember shrieking, panicking, almost falling into one of the ponds and nearly dragging my mother along with me,” she said, sitting in the candle-lit room in a house in the urban heart of Calcutta, her mind traveling decades and miles to a narrow path in rural Bengal. Then she would laugh a little — sharp and clipped. “Turns out it was just a banana tree swaying in the breeze,” she would say, “and my parents never stopped teasing me about it.”
I had met her parents; my memories of my great-grandfather are hazy, as he passed away when I was less than 5 years old, but I remember my great-grandmother clearly. She was a short, boisterous lady who always had a ready supply of narus — little sweet balls made with grated coconut or sesame seeds and either sugar or jaggery — for her great-grandkids. She had brought the recipes with her from what would become Bangladesh, along with her husband, her five children — including my grandmother — and whatever else they could carry when they were forced to cross a suddenly drawn international border. She would never go back, but she never stopped sharing with us her stories of her life there.
At that time, I was too young to appreciate, or even realize, how lucky I was to be able to hang out and interact with my great-grandmother.
My son was born in May in Madison — to much joy in Nebraska, where his mother is from, and across India, where most of my relatives live. But he will never meet his great-grandparents on his father’s side. He won’t even meet his grandfather on his father’s side. My father passed away unexpectedly in May 2024.
Unlike my grandmother — or me — my father lived all of his life in a single country. From the time he was about four years old to his death, he lived in the same house: the last house on a dead-end street beside a small garden with a giant blackboard tree where jungle mynas would chatter. He had a table by a north window, and he would sit in the winter sunlight sketching, drawing, and painting beautiful pictures that he would then mail halfway across the world to his son. I was born in that house, his only child, and lived there until I was 17, when I exchanged the warm monsoon rains and spicy fish-and-rice meals of my childhood for the sparkling snowfalls and Friday fish fries of the Midwest. But the walls of our home in Madison are full of my father’s art.
I was in Madison when my grandmother passed away several years ago. Her last days were also punctuated by a banana incident. She was past 90 by this time and had begun to show signs of dementia, but she would always recognize my mother (her daughter-in-law) even if she occasionally forgot some of her other relatives.
One day, she pulled my mother aside, and said, “Ruma, I think my nurses have been stealing my bananas.” I remember my mother saying she had no idea how to react to this statement. Why would the nurses steal bananas? They could have bananas any time they wanted. The mystery festered for close to a week, puzzlement percolating into people’s daily lives.
Then, one night, the answer to the mystery walked in through a kitchen window. Turns out, a palm civet had been sneaking into my grandmother’s kitchen and daintily making off with a banana or two.
My son will not grow up seeing palm civets slipping through kitchen windows in the middle of the night. He will not wake to the rhythmic beats of coppersmith birds in the plumeria trees outside my grandmother’s house or eat mangoes warm from the tropical sun. But I hope he will chase squirrels across our backyard on the east side of Madison. He may watch red-bellied woodpeckers hammering at the silver maples that line our street. In the fall, I hope he will want to go apple picking and berry picking, maybe making them into pies and strudel and compote.
And one day, when he is old enough for bedtime stories, I will tell him about the delicious narus his great-great grandmother used to make and how his grandfather smiled while painting the little pictures that now hang in his room. I will tell him about the night his great-grandmother mistook a banana tree for a giant.
Rup Chakravorty is a longtime Madison eastsider where he lives with his spouse, son, and their two black cats. He works as a research scientist and (very) occasionally as a freelance writer.
