3.   A Place for my Grandmother’s bench…  

                           When my grandmother (Dida) died in 1997, she was buried at some out- of-the-way burial ground near Roorkee by my uncle, her only surviving son. The other beloved son, who was in the naval fleet of the Indian Airforce had been tragically killed over Pakistani soil in the 1971 Indo-Pak war. His plane had been shot down and to this day, his name crops up in the list of POW’s or ‘Prisoners of War’ and the ‘Missing believed Killed’ lists. While Dida was more realistic and after so many years had lost hope of ever seeing her son again, especially after he was posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra by the Indian Government for bravery, my poor Grandfather never lost hope and believed him to be in Baluchistan somewhere. Anyhow, the fact remained that none of the grandchildren could ever visit our dear Grandmother’s burial site  as we had no clue where exactly it was.

 My mother’s parents, Dadu and Dida, as we grand-

children always remember them in Dehradun

This turn of events made me dream of a place we could dedicate to her in a part of India she loved dearly. Hence, even before we bought the land on ‘Pari Tibba’ I had planned to dedicate a bench or something to that effect in both my Grandparents’ names. Both of them dearly loved the mountains and in fact, most of my Didas’ beautiful paintings (yes, she was an artist who had many art exhibitions too!) depict the splendour of the mountains. Some of Kashmir, some of Nainital, Manali and of course, of Mussoorie. These gorgeous paintings hang in all our homes today.

When we finally did buy the land, the house was truly secondary in my mind. It had by now, slowly and surely dawned on me that building or for that matter, any form of construction would be a long and uphill task considering the pretty remote location. We began by building a one room out-house and then, a make-shift shed for storing construction material. Every moment there, over the years of getting the main house built, I thought of places in the beautiful area around us where we could build a lovely, large, comfortable, all purpose bench which the whole family could sit on and remember the super-happy times we spent with Dida and Dadu.

 In Delhi, from the marble market, I chose a small, white, marble piece and got it inscripted with the following words :

‘In memory of our beloved  Dida and Dadu,

Ira Roy (1913 to 1997)

Major General A.N.Roy (1910 to 1985)

From your loving grandchildren.”

As soon as Saaremaa was ready, the bench was the first thing to be made by our helpful Chowkidar, under my watchful gaze. It is large, both in length and width, with arms on the side and covered with terracotta coloured broken tiles. The marble inscription was inserted at the head of the bench and it was just perfect. I even had the soil which my in laws had carefully collected and brought all the way from my Grandmother’s childhood home in Kasmu, Estonia, the previous year (This lovely house is now a Writer’s Home and houses different authors who need peace and quiet from the main cities of Estonia and all over Europe).  We sprinkled the soil behind the bench along with some Estonian strawberry seeds also brought all the way from Estonia by us during our visit there in 2008. 

View from Grandmother's bench - Mussoorie range and The Haunted House

2.   The two Estonian-Bengali couples meet

       When my father in law and his (also!) Estonian wife came from New Jersey in the United States to settle down in Kolkata, India, they were told that there was another Bengali –Estonian couple, also by the same name who lived on  Kid Street. This was the year 1954. Of course the two families met and became fast friends.

 Prior to that, my grandfather (who retired as Major General A.N. Roy) was a Major with the  British Army Medical Corps.  He was posted to several places in India and during the 2^nd world war, served with the British medical Army in Quetta, Pakistan, while grandmother lived with the missionaries in a quaint old home in Landaur, Mussoorie. Their two older children studied at Woodstock school, while the 3^rd was a baby. My mother was not yet born! My grandmother had truly happy memories of her life during those pre-independence years in Mussoorie and made sure that, over the years to come, not only her children, but grandchildren too, visited her favourite haunts, Clock tower, Landaur Bazaar and Sister’s bazaar on top of the hill.

 It was so ironical that my grandfather, who retired as a Major General in the British-Indian Army Medical Corp and my grandmother had met in the early 1930’s at a youth hostel in England where my grandfather was studying medicine on a full scholarship at Bartholomews Medical College. My grandmother had been sent to England to learn English and get over a budding romance in Kasmu, Estonia, which her parents were not very happy about.. Her parents thought the change would do her good! Little did they know that another, much more permanent romance awaited her across the seas! 
 My dear grandmother sadly told me when I was much older, that when she went back to Estonia with my handsome and dashing grandfather, to tell her parents that she would be marrying the Indian gentleman who accompanied her, her mother (Nadezda Kaskni Kristenbrunn) was heartbroken because her precious, only daughter would be going so far away, to an almost unknown land. My great grandmother  died at the young age of 48 after a bad bout of pneumonia, and it is said till today that she died of sheer sadness at the thought of rarely seeing her daughter  again, as in those days travel across the seas was long and tedious and only by ship. After her mother's death, my grandmother and grandfather tied the knot and once they left London and returned to India, poor Grandmother truly did not ever have a chance to return to Estonia.

Similarly, my husband’s parents and my in laws met at Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., while my father-in-law was doing a doctorate in Chemical engineering from M.I.T. and my mother-in-law studying at Bennington College, Vermont. Both the Bengali gentlemen  married their Estonian wives against their parents’ and family’s wishes, yet both couples chose to come back to India and face the ‘not too pleasant’ music on their return! However, their friendship grew over the years while my father in law headed the Chemical Engineering department at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and then shifted to Delhi, while my grandparents moved from Kolkata to Dehradun. The couples made it a point to meet regularly and my mother as a nine year old remembers helping my mother in law at one of her little nursery schools! 

My Bengali father in law and Estonian Mother in law
 (Dr. Tuhin Kumar Roy and Silva Mardiste Roy) 

SAAREMAA  -  A dream come true....

1.  How it began……

It all began with our dear friend way back in 2003.... She was the one who wanted to buy land in ‘Pari Tibba’ or ‘Witch’s Hill’, and suggested that we should too. Little did we know just what we were getting in to! Land, on the outskirts of Mussoorie, just a few kilometres from Woodstock school ! Wow, we would have a lovely little cottage and a much needed get-away from the dry, hot plains of Delhi in the summer. How very simple it seemed..... Mussoorie has always been the most sought after hill station for both my husband and me, purely for happy memories and nostalgic reasons.

For me, Mussoorie brings the most wonderful memories of my beloved grandmother, who left her homeland Estonia, to marry my Bengali grandfather. They met in England, and after a brief visit to inform her parents in Estonia, sadly, due to Russian occupation, she never could go back to the country where she grew up. India became more than home to her, and she learnt Bengali, both the language and cuisine, wore a sari effortlessly and had it not been for an old, faded, blue photo album of her childhood she showed my younger sister and me in Dehradun during one of our many summer holidays there, I wouldn’t even have guessed of a life beyond India and more important, a life beyond her grandchildren for her.

The album had old sepia tinted photographs of her in her little sea side home town called Kasmu, just a two hour drive along the Baltic coast from the capital city, Tallinn, in Estonia. There were pictures of her home, her family and her friends whom she talked about so lovingly. She must have had deep regrets at never meeting them again as many among her family and friends fled Estonia and the rest were sent to concentration camps in Siberia during the cruel Russian regime. However, she never let us know it and was always so wonderfully cheerful and positive. It’s only as I grew up and actually visited her home town, Kasmu, did I realise what she gave up and what a lot of adjustments she must have had to make in a country where just about everything was so alien – food, dress, religion, language, culture. The thought always brought tears to my eyes.

 

My Estonian grandmother who lived in Kasmu, Estonia.

My grandmother’s father (Alexander Kaskni) died when she was very young and her mother remarried one of the pillars of North Estonian Maritime business and Headmaster of the Kasmu Maritime School (Eduard kristenbrunn) who adopted my grandmother. The Kasmu Maritime School is now a famous Maritime museum full of memorabilia. My grandmother’s cousin (aunt’s son) also came and lived with them in Kasmu as his mother had passed away at an early age. My grandmother tells me how she was initially quite jealous of my grand uncle as he took a lot of her mother’s initial attention as a little 3 year old would, but  within a few days they were inseparable and thick as thieves. He finally settled in Denmark after escaping Estonia during the Russian regime.

My darling grandmother is no more, but Saaremaa, our home in the Himalayas, just outside Mussoorie, has been made in her memory and all the wonderful times as children - my brother, sister and I spent with our grandparents, our ‘Dida’ and ‘Dadu’, as we called them, in their  Dehradun bungalow. We would also rent a little annexe cottage at in Landaur, Mussoorie , where we would lazily spend our summer holidays. My husband and his brothers too, stopped several times by at my grandparent’s place in Dehradun, on their way up to Mussoorie. They were very fond of my grandparents, and my in laws' and grandparents’ friendship goes back at least 60-odd years to Kolkata, then of course, known as Calcutta. Thereby, lies another fascinating tale....