The Journey

THE JOURNEY

JAYANTA BANERJEE

Copyright © 2023 by Jayanta Banerjee.

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Rev. date: 19/01/2023

Palibrio

1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403

849686

IN MEMORIUM

In loving memory of my grandmother

KRISHNA-MANINI DEVI

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1     Early Education

2     Professional Education And Training

3     Graduate Studies At Waterloo

4     Latin America

Postscript

Las Semblanazas

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My sincere thanks to my daughter, Dr. Anyana Banerjee, for revising and editing the final draft.

Also, I am very thankful to my wife, Matilde Muñiz Troche (Matty), for her understanding and patience, while I was busy in word-processing and editing the manuscript.

Finally, I am ever grateful my ex-wife, Eligia Briceno, for taking so good care of our children and educating them during their adolescent years.

1

EARLY EDUCATION

I still remember with crystal clarity my first admission day in primary school. Yes, the school was very well known in the neighborhood and so, they had an admission test even for the kids. I was entering grade 3. My mother did the homeschooling for the first two grades and prepared me well for the third grade. I was sitting in a large room with many other kids who also applied for admission. I was looking around, full of curiosity with surprising eyes, and saw at a distance an elderly person sitting in front of a large table and talking to a little boy in front of him. It immediately occurred to me that the elderly person must be a teacher, and hence must be asking a lot of tough questions of the poor little boy.

Soon, my turn came. I approached the table and man with fear but the elderly man gave me a broad smile and said, please sit down, my son! This ‘my son!’ totally took away my fear and I felt very relaxed. He asked, again with a smile, How are you feeling today? Good, Sir. I replied, with my head a bit bent down for not looking straight in his eyes. What did you read this morning? he asked. I replied, this time looking straight at him, A poem, Sir.. Great! Can you recite it for me, my son? This second time ‘my son’ gave me a wave of joy, and I recited the full poem that my mom taught me the night before. When I finished, he was overjoyed. He stood up from his chair, and looked at me, again with a smile, and said, You are all set for Grade 3! Come to school next Monday. Oh, by the way, bring with you a small exercise book for writing and, of course, a pencil. Apparently, I must have had my happiness reflected on my face, for he moved forward and gave me a little pat on the shoulder, and said, Now go home and enjoy the day! I turned around and left that large room. My father was waiting outside the door.

Later, after many months in Grade 3, I came to know why the entrance examiner was so happy with my reciting the poem. That very poem was in the textbook for Grade 3! He took me as an ‘advanced student’ for the class!

The school was only a five-minute walk from our house. Just across the road there was a park, and the school was located right beside the park. I could go to that very prestigious school only for its proximity! The name of the school was Mitra Institution where many famous Indians, from musicians to politicians, attended during British rule and, also after independence. Freedom fighter like Shyma Prasad Mukherjee, musicians like Hemant Kumar, went to that school. India gained freedom in 1947, and in the same year I started in Grade 3. I was only seven. It was a glorious year in Indian history and a year for me to remember at the onset of my formal education!

Homeschooling with my mother was great. There was no fixed time, no big schedule. Whenever she had time after house-spousing her daily duties she would sit with me, and we would start together reading, writing and a bit of arithmetic. She taught me the very basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We used to sing together the multiplication table in Bengali. It was an ideal mentor – mentee relationship!

As the classes started on a Monday, I remember I had to get up early, prepare myself to get ready, eat breakfast and reach the school gate on time. A new routine! Mother used to prepare a small lunch, and I used to take it with me in a tiffin carrier, as was its popular name back in those years. From free homeschooling to a very scheduled school day was my first impression on how a long formal education would be waiting for me! There was a gatekeeper at the school entrance, and he would greet each schoolboy at the gate. He used to sharpen our pencils with a small knife. He was very fast in this job as we used to have a big line behind him to resharpen our dull pencils. During the recess period around lunch hour, he used to be really alerted at the gate so that no boy could sneak out of the gate and cross the street. That was a true gatekeeping duty.

The school building was quite big with four floors and a large rectangular open yard in the middle. The yard was used for sports activities, and for any large-scale gathering of the students and their teachers. Our grade 3 class was in a small room at a corner of the yard. On the same floor there were a couple of rooms, one for the gatekeeper and the other one was for a teacher. Both lived on campus.

Our classroom was good enough to accommodate roughly twenty boys. By the way, it was not a co-ed school; the girls had a separate school nearby. In our classroom, we used to share long wooden benches with attached desks, and the teacher had his own separate table and chair right in front of us.

Our class teacher was a middle-aged man in his fifties, and he had long grayish hair covering the ears and the forehead. In the very first week, he drew on the blackboard a square quadrant, just like a monthly calendar page. Then he wrote the days of the week, Monday to Friday, at the top of the horizontal rows and the hours of the day (9am – 10am, 10am -11am, 11am – lunch break, etc.) on the left end of the vertical columns. Then he wrote in each square box the subject to be taught, like English, Bengali, Arithmetic, General Knowledge, and so on. I was very confused. Yes, I remember even today that it took me quite a few days to understand the table. At home mom taught me all these things without such a complicated diagram! Again, I reflected on what a formal education would be awaiting me!

Unlike today, in those days back in 1947 we didn’t have Workbooks; only the textbooks, an exercise book with ruled lines and a sharp pencil to write with, were good enough for early education. In the first week, the teacher handed over to us a small list of a few textbooks, mainly for Arithmetic, English, Bengali, as well as for History and Geography as a part of general knowledge. I handed over the little list to my dad. Next week when dad bought the few books and brought them home, I was surprised. He handed over the packet to me, and said softly with his usual smile, Open the packet carefully!. I opened the packet very carefully, as he said, without tearing it apart, and there flashed out the beautifully colored cover page of each book. The living aroma of a brand-new book! I smelled each book repeatedly. This was quite a new experience! In mom’s homeschooling there was no such fresh smell of a new book. I only knew the crude odor of the daily newspaper delivered at our door each early morning by the mailman.

Besides my mother, another person in our home who made a profound impact in my early childhood, and later in my education up until the university years, was my paternal grandmother. She lived with us, or in other words, we lived in her house! We, all her grandchildren, used to call her Ma, meaning mother in many Indo-Persian languages including our native tongue, Bengali. She was the ‘beloved mother’ for all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren! Just one word Ma closed all the generation gaps.

As far as my earliest memory goes, maybe when I was 3 or 4 years old, I used to hang around a lot with my grandma. She would take me with her whenever she would go out to see her brothers and sisters and especially her nieces. Traveling with her stopped as soon as my primary school started! This was another impact that I still remember, apart from leaving my mother’s homeschooling, in the earliest part of my formal education. Even today my grandma comes quite often in my dreams.

Ma took care of my school fees. It was only 7 Indian Rupees (INR) per month in those years till I finished Grade 10 in the same Mitra Institution. Like the British Matriculation system, at the end of the 10th Grade, there used to be a big State-wide exam. The city of Calcutta now renamed Kolkata, where I grew up, belonged to the State of West Bengal, one of the most populous and crowded states of India. So, the entrance examination to a college was long and tough. Anything could be asked from anywhere in the written tests. When I passed that exam and entered the Presidency College, another prestigious institution, my grandma continued to take care of my college fees. Her only income was the monthly rent she collected from another adjacent small house.

As I couldn’t go out with my grandma any more during the week, she would sometimes postpone her visits till the weekend, and take me with her. This way I came to know some of our distant relatives. Such occasional weekend family visits with my grandma continued till I finished my college years. This way I came to know that some of my college friends were also my distant relatives. One of them, Rabin Chatterjee who lives now in Toronto, Canada, is also my distant cousin. Such family ties that built in our mind a sense of togetherness, is unfortunately lost in the modern day modular living system.

I have pictures with my grandmother that I share today with my children and grandchildren just to show that this extended chain of family clanship is not that bad at all. It gives a feeling of belonging to a much wider world. It makes you take the first step for a global family, a universal brotherhood. As we face today the common crisis of COVID-19, we feel the urgent need of a sincere global response, independent of the political differences and often rivalry amongst the nations, especially among the strongest ones. It can only happen if we cultivate global awareness by living in an environment where we can share our personal belongings with others. From this point of view, a joint family environment has much to contribute. I knew a family where four brothers lived together in a big ancestral house. They all had different jobs in the same city. Family expenses were shared proportionately according to their individual monthly incomes. But the most impressive sight was that all of them and their wives and children would share the same kitchen and enjoy the same evening meal after returning home from work and from school. This way the cousins shared things like brothers and sisters!

In the 1960s the hippies experienced sharing things in the environment of a common family in their communal living. During the Vietnam War, many young hippies left the USA and moved North to Canada to avoid the compulsory military draft of the USA. They were also ridiculed and searched worldwide by the US government as "Draft Dodgers"! I had the opportunity to live a few months with them in Northern Ontario, Canada. They not only lived together in a commune but also worked together in harmony throughout the day. In the evening we would all eat together the same food cooked by the women, and then we used to sing together before going to bed. It was a wonderful lesson of love and peace! There was no difference in daily food and shelter, no matter whether you were a millionaire’s daughter from California or a poor farmer’s son from Maine. We were all Draft Dodgers, as if war criminals, in the eyes of the US government authorities! While with the hippies, I used to remember the communal family system amongst some of my relatives in India many years ago. Even with the difference of diverse cultures between the modern hippies and that of ancient India, both worked well. With the mounting problems of today: COVID-19, Global Warming from pollution, increasing population particularly in the poorer parts of the world and, above all, the extreme misunderstanding and economic war amongst the superpowers, such as between bigger and stronger Russia and relatively smaller and weaker Ukraine, a sense of fellow-feeling in the younger generations is a viable solution for harmonizing our future existence on this perturbed planet Earth.

Summer vacations were long for the hot and humid months, from May to July, in Bengal. In one such vacation, grandma took me with her to one of her daughters’ homes in the beautiful city of Shillong, situated at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas. This was my first experience in the mountains. My auntie’s house was near the top of a hilly section of the city, called Mulky. We had to move up a winding path with many stone steps in between to reach our home, walking from the city center where the main shopping areas were located. I used to accompany my auntie’s husband to buy groceries downtown, and on the way back it was a very good exercise climbing up a few hundred steps on a winding path. He would usually carry the big shopping bag on his back, and I would carry the smaller one. On the way up he used to tell me many stories of his living experience in Shillong and about the tribal people who initially settled there long before the people from Bengal and Assam moved into this mountainous region during the British regime that continued for almost two centuries.

Three hilly tribes, namely, Bhutia, Khashia and Jayantia, lived in and around the city of Shillong. They were the original settlers in that eastern end of the Himalayan range that bordered with Nepal and China. Shillong was the biggest city of the province of Assam, adjacent to West Bengal. The state language of Assam is Assamese, similar to Bengali or Bangla in its scripts, but quite different in speaking. Besides, the three hilly tribes have their own dialects. Most of the tribal people were Christianized by the local missionary groups but they all lived in harmony with others, mainly with the Hindus and the Muslims. My auntie’s next-door neighbor was a Khashia family; they were Christians, and very good friends of my auntie’s family. These tribal societies were matriarchal, meaning the lady of the family was the biggest boss. The head of our neighbor’s family was a fine lady in her late fifties or early sixties; and we used to call her mammy. My two cousins: Manju and Khokon, a girl and a boy respectively, were very much attached to mammy. She used to give them a lot of Indian sweets and sometimes imported chocolate candies as well. She had several girls and only one boy, Mike. The girls also had all Christian names, like Nancy, Susan, etc., and Christan education. While leading a Christian way of life, like going to the church every Sunday, they respected the local Hindu and Muslim customs. At that time Mike was around 25; and he used to smoke cigarettes. In Christian customs there is nothing wrong with smoking publicly in front of others, but in the Hindu customs, younger people don’t smoke in front of the elderly persons. Every time Mike would see my auntie’s husband, he would hide his cigarette!

I was around 12 years old then. My cousin Manju was 9 and her little brother, Khokon was 5. Manju and I used to hang around each other a lot, sometimes playing, sometimes fighting over petty things, like who would accompany auntie to pick up the pieces of wood for burning in the chimney at night, or who would stay home with grandma to help her cut vegetables. Khokon was too small to do any of those household jobs.

The Khashias had their traditional tribal festivities along with the Christian festivals. One of them was a very colorful folk-dance festival only once a year. It used to take place in a village called Nongcraime, at the outskirts of Shillong. My auntie’s husband once took us there. The dresses were so colorful, and the rhythmic steps were so fast that Manju and I were surprised. Khokon was spell-bound! The steps were as fast as the modern salsa or merengue in the Caribbean part of Latin America. Various groups from different villages participated in that grand gala that lasted for several hours each evening under the canopy of a full-moon sky!

That was my first trip to an area so different from the big city of Calcutta! As the summer vacation was coming close to its end in the last week of July, huge Monsoon rain attacked Shillong and the whole province of Assam was under water! There were great floods all over in the planes of Assam, and the rail-lines for the passenger and goods trains were all shattered. There was no train connection because of the derailment. We couldn’t afford to pay airfare. So, my grandma and I were stuck in Shillong for several months!

We used to have a lot of homework in summer for the class. Since I was stuck in Shillong for the whole summer and further into August-September, a classmate of mine helped me with finishing my homework until the rails were repaired and we could get back to Kolkata. His name was Bachchu and was a good friend of mine and a close neighbor. He helped me in math and handwriting. He was very good at math. In those days there were no laptops, and we had to do everything by hand. Therefore, the handwriting exercises were very important, almost like practicing calligraphy!

Bachchu’s family lived on the same street as ours, only a couple of houses ahead. The street was very narrow, almost a lane, and a wider car couldn’t pass through. We were all neighborhood kids and used to hang around together. Apart from the park across the wider road, there was a smaller playground on the other side of the lane, and we used to play there barefoot soccer in summer and wicket-less cricket in winter. There was also a slum nearby. We were used to all standards of living, mainly the middle-class and lower middle class. Extreme poverty of Kolkata was not around us, not even in our nearby slums. The culture of sharing things among the neighbors helped reducing extreme poverty in the families and its crude picture was unseen in our neighborhood. As a child, I could only remember a very impressive but sad scene of poverty, and that was a beggar in all torn out filthy clothes crawling in the middle of that narrow lane and all the passers-by were looking at him in disgust. He couldn’t hold his body in balance even while crawling; his skin was full of leprosy-like rashes. He was really in a miserable condition! The scene was so strong