Jamai Shashti

My husband is sad today. And I realise yet again how the departure of my own beloved parents has left a hole in his world, that will remain an open wound forever. Today is the day celebrated every year when his relationship with them did not involve me.

Today is Jamai Shashti, the Bengali celebration of the Jamai, or the son-in-law. An antiquated ritualistic marking on the calendar when fish prices soar to their highest. When elderly Bengali couples spend wild sums to feed their jamai, who aging himself, incongruously becomes the deity worshipped for the day.

As a family, we mocked this ritual! My father and I were both averse to anything that did not make sense to us and tended to shred it with scorn and pragmatism. Ma would join in nervously, in this collective derision, but also make a quiet point about wanting to celebrate her own jamai, who was more of a kindred spirit to her than her own children were. And in the same quiet way, she always had her own way.

For the first two decades of our marriage, it was easy to avoid the day, living as we did oceans apart, first in China, then Zimbabwe and finally settling in Scotland. The day was always marked between the two of them though, mother-in-law and son-in-law, over the phone. And whenever we met and exchanged a year’s cache of gifts, he got presented with an extra shirt or kurta or Panjabi for the missed Jamai Shashti. It always irritated me, this upsetting of the neat balance of gifts, with him getting one more than me, and the debate would rekindle itself about the lack of Bou (daughter-in-law) Shashti.

Always in good spirit though, as all arguments in our family tended to end with my father singing strange songs, atrociously out of tune.

However, since the year 2009, Sarajit has managed to successfully place himself strategically in Calcutta on this day. Things worked in his favour professionally, with a transfer to Delhi for seven years. After retiring from the company, a leader in the energy sector, his only job of thirty-six years, he set up his own company in Calcutta, thus straddling both countries to his convenience. It worked well all around, a little space never harmed a marriage, and with him spending half his time in and around West Bengal, our parents (my two and his mother) were better cared for in their old age.

And thus, it was, that for the last decade or so, I would feign indignant horror at the extravagant offerings on the lunch table. Plus, the mandatory shirt, of course.

As time went on, and they got frail and bent with age and illness, the shirt turned into an envelope containing 4000Rs, to spend on what he liked. And this sixty-year-old man of mine treated it as reverentially as a six-year-old with his first pocket money.

Both my parents left us just before the pandemic, avoiding the covid bullet, so to speak. I am thinking of all this now, through misty eyes, my own permanent grief put to one side. Who am I to scorn rituals which brought them joy?

I think I shall buy him a shirt. Or maybe give him 40£ from his own bank account to spend on whatever he likes!