AN INHERITANCE OF HOME

How three generations of women navigated the ever-changing idea of home and belonging across time and borders.

- Diya Kohli

My grandmother is buried in the General Episcopal Cemetery on Lower Circular Road in Kolkata, a 33-acre plot filled with trees and birdsong. Her headstone reads: “Kamala Dutta née Clara Camilla Fisch, born in 1918 in Lahore, died 1996, Kolkata.”

A mango tree stands at the head of the path that leads to her final resting place. It is a marker that my mother has made me memorise for when looking after this grave will become my inherited responsibility.

This is a culmination of all the places that my grandmother has lived in and a vital piece of the pastiche that makes Kolkata my mother’s home. This is my connecting link to a city that was also my home.

Is home the architectural blueprint of the four walls that enclose our present? Or is it an imaginary place whose building blocks are the stories of our mothers, names of cities, people we have loved and the errant, unreliable memories we are left with?

A HOME ACROSS THE BORDER

My grandmother, or Mamoni as we called her, had a life and a home on either side of the border that now demarcates India from Pakistan. And her stories of the past were torn like the land—some in sharp technicolor renditions like the life she lived, and others, fading impressions like her own memories in a body grappling with ill health and old age.

Mamoni was born to Nathaniel and Helena Fisch. Her father was Rajput by descent, her mother a Punjabi-Christian.