Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter - 98.04 - 0 views
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Van Piercy on 31 Jan 13Interruptions of family and memory by media. Invasiveness of technology.
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Mrs. Basu
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labor strike, everything closed down, not even the buses running. But you can't really blame them, can you? After all, factory workers have to eat too.
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Mrs. Dutta knows that Mrs. Basu, who has been her closest friend since they both moved to Ghoshpara Lane as young brides, cannot be fobbed off with descriptions of Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge, or even with anecdotes involving grandchildren. And so she has been putting off her reply, while in her heart family loyalty battles with insidious feelings of -- but she turns from them quickly and will not name them even to herself.
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though the minty toothpaste does not leave her mouth feeling as clean as does the bittersweet neem stick she's been using all her life.
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Whenever she lifted her hand to him, her heart was pierced through and through. Such is a mother's duty.
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Mrs. Dutta bends over the sink, fists tight in the folds of her sari. Hard with the pounding in her head to think what she feels most -- anger at the children for their rudeness, or at Shyamoli for letting them go unrebuked. Or is it shame she feels (but why?), this burning, acid and indigestible, that coats her throat in molten metal?
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For this she blames, in part, the Olan Mills portrait. Perhaps it was foolish of her to set so much store by a photograph, especially one taken years ago. But it was such a charming scene -- Mrinalini in a ruffled white dress with her arm around her brother, Pradeep chubby and dimpled in a suit and bow tie, a glorious autumn forest blazing red and yellow behind them. (Later Mrs. Dutta was saddened to learn that the forest was merely a backdrop in a studio in California, where real trees did not turn such colors.)
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A strange concept, a day set aside to honor mothers. Did the sahibs not honor their mothers the rest of the year, then?)
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even though they have put away, somewhere in the back of a closet, the vellum-bound Ramayana for Young Readers that she carried all the way from India in her hand luggage.
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Indian Shyamoli, the docile bride she'd mothered for a month before putting her on a Pan Am flight to join her husband
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She knew she should not store unclean clothes in the same room where she kept the pictures of her gods. That would bring bad luck. And the odor.
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Ignorance, as Mrs. Dutta knows well from years of managing a household, is a great promoter of harmony