Reincarnations

I.

I followed my Patti, grandmother, with eager excitement for my favorite daily ritual. We walked onto the veranda and they were already waiting, as they did each day. Most of them were perched on the balcony’s ledge from which we watched the goings on of our corner of Kalighat. The bolder crows had jumped down onto the intricate mosaic-tiled floor. It was a flock of about four dozen, spanning the length of the wide veranda. They perked up as she approached, squawking and crowding around her. Patti, freshly showered, was still reciting some of her morning prayers as she spooned out heaps of rice from a small stainless steel vessel.

I loved watching this rare moment of commotion in my grandparents’ orderly house, this welcoming of animals despite being warned to avoid the stray dogs who wandered the streets. Patti offered fresh, steaming rice first to the pantheon of Gods in her prayer room, second to the crows, and then finally to us, demonstrating, through this small ritual, how we worship the Gods by caring for their creatures. When it was all done, the crows took flight, leaving not a single grain of rice behind.

II.

Moving to the New Jersey suburbs meant that we could stretch into buying all the things we never had space for in the city. Moving up in life meant not having to worry about reusing things to save money. We could now use once and toss and never consider where all this waste was going because it was far from our abundantly-watered, verdant lawns.

My elderly grandparents moved into our basement and there, under Patti’s watch, used objects were reincarnated and infused with new purpose. Ziploc bags were no longer single use. Rubber bands were collected and stored carefully for future missions. Even coffee tins and plastic cereal box liners went on to store various grains and mixtures. Patti adapted the precious contents of her large prayer room which had held images of Hindu deities from floor to ceiling to a small basement closet, and though she no longer fed crows fresh rice each morning, her other spiritual rituals continued, unabated by the thousands of miles that now separated her from her homeland.

Meanwhile, during my sophomore year my wealthy, white high school classmates eschewed their costly Ralph Lauren and Banana Republic attire overnight for ripped jeans and tie dye t shirts to commemorate Earth Day. Suddenly, recycling bins appeared in our school cafeteria along with signs telling us to recycle used plastic containers. We attended school assemblies to discuss the importance of taking care of our planet by reducing waste and we painted Earth Day murals and sold tie dye t shirts to raise money for the Amazon Rainforest.

A year later, other than the plastic bins in our cafeteria, it was as if Earth Day had never happened. My well-heeled classmates, who once seemed to care about reducing their footprints, went back to showcasing their trendy footwear, keds for girls and Nikes for boys.

III.

When I left for college, Patti carefully packed savory snacks, including her perfectly spiraled murukku and sweet treats, like her luscious ladoos, into cereal bags, encased in oatmeal boxes, secured with a rubber band from her collection. I hoarded these homemade treasures, trying to make them last through the months ‘til my next visit back.

As the daughter of doctors, with siblings who planned to follow in their footsteps, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I took a class in Urban Studies, or Growth and Structure of Cities, as it was called in my college, and I was hooked. I was intrigued by the forces that shape cities, make them grow, contribute to their decay, those that pull people to them, and those that push them out.

We learned about adaptive reuse, ‘the reuse of preexisting structures for new purposes,’ saving them from demolition thereby preserving them for posterity. It was presented to us as a largely modern, Western concept, as in the stunning Musee D’Orsay, which re-envisioned a defunct Parisian train station as a museum for 19th century Impressionist art or London’s Tate Modern, the transformation of an oil-fired power station into a home for modern art. I was inspired by this notion of taking obsolete structures and finding a new purpose for them, bringing a piece of history into the present. But as I reflected on it more from the hallowed halls of my liberal arts college for women, these reinventions of grand edifices of yesteryear seemed no greater than a spoonful of rice or a used rubber band guarding the treasures within a repurposed oatmeal box.

Kavita Das is the author of Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar and the upcoming Sparking Change on the Page: Lessons and Reflections on Writing about Social Issues.