How does it all go so pear-shaped?: Poonam Saxena writes on bonds with mothers
It can become something of a fractured relationship, the one with a mother. No one explored this with more delicacy than masterful Hindi writer Swadesh Deepak.
There is a short story about a man and his mother that has stayed with me for almost eight years, ever since I first read it.
The story is Bagugoshe (Hindi for Pears) by Swadesh Deepak. I’ve written about Deepak before. He was the outstanding Hindi novelist, playwright, short-story writer and author of a one-of-its-kind memoir, Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha, on his seven-year battle with mental illness. (His own story had no firm ending: In 2006, at the age of 63, he walked out of his home in Ambala, Haryana, and was never heard from again.)
Bagugoshe shines a light on a different side of his story.
It is a striking portrait of a talkative, spirited old woman, written by her son with much love, yet with an absence of sentimentality that gives it a strange, uncomfortable edge. The 18-page story, with a distinctive Punjabi flavour, brims with little details, from her trove of Punjabi swear words to her blunt life advice (throw away the dentures if they’re bothering you, she tells her husband; “after all, who are you going to give love bites to now?”)
I re-read the story again recently and reached out to Deepak’s son, Sukant Deepak, who translated Bagugoshe into English as part of the 2024 collection A Bouquet of Dead Flowers. He confirmed that, but for a few small details, the tale is entirely autobiographical.
Swadesh Deepak’s parents lived in Rawalpindi before Partition. His father was a doctor (in the story, the mother, Shobharani, refers to him as a “hakim”).
Deepak writes that this was a time when women were almost constantly pregnant. His mother lost two babies before he came along. Terrified that something might happen to him, she wouldn’t let anyone see him when he was an infant. She didn’t want him to fall victim to the evil eye. When people visited, she would cover him up and say “Kaka soya hai”.
The family moved to India after Partition, where Deepak’s father contracted tuberculosis, then an almost-incurable disease. He urged his wife to leave him and live with her brothers instead, but she refused. He was admitted to a TB hospital in Patiala. It took him five years to recover.
When her husband later died, Shobharani moved into the home of Deepak’s younger brother, but she visited her elder son from time to time, usually without letting him know she was coming. Once there, she longed to talk. After all, writes Deepak, “She was the badshah of talk! But we educated people don’t know how to talk. We make do with a Yes or No most of the time… She had seven seas in her heart, but all the water inside us had vanished into the sand.”
This is exactly what used to happen, says Sukant. “My dadi was a motormouth. Our house in Ambala was very quiet, all of us in our rooms, doing our own thing. But when she visited, she wouldn’t stop talking! ‘Why is everyone so silent,’ she’d want to know.”
In the story, Swadesh Deepak writes that his mother could talk about anything, because, though she was illiterate, she had for decades listened to the news on the radio twice a day. She knew about the Cold War. She knew about the moon landing before her husband did.
The title of the story comes from a time when she was visiting Deepak, and he asked her what she wanted to eat. She said she craved the sweet pears she had eaten in Pindi (Rawalpindi). Could he get her some bagugoshe? He had never heard the word (bagugoshe is the term for a specific breed of Indian pear; generic pears are nashpati in Hindi). He didn’t know what she was referring to, so he got her some kulche-chhole instead.
Years passed, and her visits became more infrequent. As he entered his own troubled phase, mother and son lost touch. As he was emerging from it, his younger brother wrote to him asking him to visit; their mother didn’t have much time left. Deepak found Shobharani shrunken to a small, silent bundle. She was on her deathbed. She asked why he hadn’t come to see her. Someone whispered that he had been very ill and had almost died. Why didn’t anyone tell me, she asked.
She beckoned to Deepak to come closer and when he did, she was alarmed by what she saw. “Kaka, where is the fire in your eyes? Kaka, who stole the colour from your face?” she said.
“Don’t say anything about my illness,” he responded. “Don’t ask anyone anything about it. Do you understand?”
She started to cry. Her throat began to rattle. “Did you bring my bagugoshe, kaka,” she asked.
When he didn’t answer, she said, “Never mind. I’ll go to Pindi and get some.”
Her eyes closed.
Perhaps that’s what makes Bagugoshe so moving. It is full of Deepak’s love for his mother, but full of the distances between them too.
(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email poonamsaxena3555@gmail.com)
