I loved my grandmother. Like most people do.
But a lot of things she did made no sense to me. She was paranoid about ‘eto’ a word in Bangla for which I could not find the English equivalent. The main concept was that some food items were considered untouchable. Cooked rice, non-vegetarian food being top of the list. You could eat them with relish, but if you happened to touch them you had wash your hands before touching anything else, otherwise all you touch becomes ‘eto’.
As a kid spilling rice generously over myself at mealtimes, I remember my mother hauling me to the bathroom after meals and hosing me down before I could go into any other room and contaminate toys, books and even bedsheets.
A newspaper on the breakfast table would be ok only if everyone had bread, butter or jam. An egg on the same table and the paper would end up in the dustbin.
We cribbed about it, made jokes, protested as teenagers, and looked back at those incidents as fond memories as we grew older.
As for Dida, she ignored our ‘new-gen’ logic, refused to argue about the beliefs of a lifetime and continued to wash her hands between touching onion and the potato, and a hundred other times. At one point her nails had to be bandaged due to fungal infection from constant wetness.
CIRCA 2020
My fingertips feel itchy and my palm feels scaly.
Today was weekly fruit-vegetable-grocery supply day. I am being extra careful ever since known corona virus cases were reported in the city. I have watched a dozen WhatsApp videos on sanitizing stuff from the virus. I have also read the recommendations from CDC and WHO but they have been changing their stance so many times that I refuse to trust them completely. I make my judgement based on good old instinct and mother-sense and a combination of all that I read and watched.
Everything is soaped and washed now-not just my hands. My family tried to help in the first few weeks but I somehow feel that nobody can sanitize things as thoroughly as I would.
They think I am paranoid.
I refuse to argue about this. I continue to soak and scrub and wash every object that comes into the house. Soap, bicarbonate, sunlight, sanitizers-everything I can use, gets used to the maximum.
The newspaper is restricted to the corner sofa-read and stashed away before it gets trashed or hosed down. The family cribs, jokes, sulks and protests. I am not sure if they will ever look back at this time as a fond memory.
I probably will not. At the end of each ‘supplies’ day, my back hurts, my knees ache, my hands feel scaly and itchy. But I am not giving up.
Because after all these years, I understand my Dida.
