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Aunties and spaces of care: Familial spaces of sustenance

With choto pishi and pishemoshai, enjoying a meal she prepared. These meals are a part of the journey home.

Familial spaces of love and care, extending to wide networks of familial connections, offer powerful registers of sustenance. 

Reflecting upon my childhood and my large joint family, Dutta Bari, I grew up in, I am drawn to the pedagogy of care that has shaped the ways in which I relate to the world, anchored powerfully by my mothers, aunts, and grandmother. 

Within this broader ecosystem of care, my aunts (father's sisters) played salient roles, upholding us, their eighteen nieces and nephews with love, joy, and friendship. 

From our aunts, we learned the practices of eternal kindness, knowing we could go to them with whatever requests we had, big and small. From our aunts, we learned the power of our collective, connecting us to land and place, tying us to the roots that shape our everyday lives.

Choto pishi is my youngest aunt, beautiful, soft spoken, and kind. A teacher of Biology at a local village school that was built on Gandhian ideals, she dedicated her earnings to care for our large joint family. 

The wellbeing of her family anchors choto pishi's life journey. This deep-rooted connection to familial wellness is intertwined with the everyday prayers, celebrations of food, and gifts that have come to represent her practices of care.

For all these years of my life, on the occasion of my birthday, I wake up knowing that my choto pishi would be offering prayers for my wellbeing. She does so for the whole extended family, meticulously remembering the birthdays of each family member, and chanting the blessings my nana (grandmother) passed on to her to recite. As we have welcomed the next generation into our family, the number of birthdays to remember and to offer prayers on has multiplied manifold.

Choto pishi introduced us to the enchanting world of diverse food practices. In the middle-class pre-liberalization Bengal of the 1970s and 80s, eating out was an annual celebration. The whole family, across two generations, waited in anticipation for the annual trip to New Restaurant, a small restaurant in Gole Bazar, the shopping area of the town. 

Eagerly sifting through the menu of fish fry, devilled eggs, egg rolls, etc., ordering the food, savoring and sharing it brought immense joy, staying with us for the year and in anticipation of the next family outing.

The enticing flavors of cuisines beyond the borders of Bengal would travel home with choto pishi as she experimented with different recipes over the weekends. We, her nieces and nephews, would line up with bowls in our hands, to try out the flavors drifting through our house with open courtyards.

The time of the year we would receive new clothes was during Durga Puja, the annual celebration of the Goddess among many Bengali households. Building up to the Puja, choto pishi and boro pishi would make weekly trips to Gole Bazar, visiting different stores to buy clothes for us. The clothes would be handed out by nana to be then put away by boro pishi to be taken out on the days of the Puja.

Just as much as Hindu religious festivals shaped our childhood, we participated in celebrating Eid and Christmas. On Christmas eve, we would put our stockings on top of the mosquito nets covering the beds we slept on. 

The next morning, the stockings would be full of lozenges, candies, biscuits, and cakes. We would wake up early in the morning to open our stockings, to collectively explore the goodies we received, and to share them with each other.

My aunts anchored these powerful memories of childhood. 

Their eternal love, care, and rootedness taught us the precious gifts of family and connection, that wherever we live, we must connect with these roots to find our anchors, to discover the values that form who we are in the world.


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