twelfth grades. He brought in enough customers to make up to a thousand rupees a month. Siddhartha had ambitions to start a pharmaceutical company of his own. In 1980, with forty thousand rupees in his account (about six hundred dollars today), he met my kakima.
“It was not a love marriage. It was a social marriage,” Siddhartha said, using another term for an arranged union. Meera’s parents went to Siddhartha’s boss at the pharmaceutical company he was working at to inquire about the young chemist.
“It was a blessing from God,” Siddhartha said. They were married less than a month later.
My kakima sat on a chair adjacent to Siddhartha. Like Shyamal, she was silent for the conversation. Unlike him, she was awake.
“She inspired me highly,” Siddhartha said. He looked at me pointedly. “Look, if you can’t get inspiration from her, you can’t produce.”
“She inspires me daily,” I repeated, rather awkwardly exchanging glances with Wesley.
In the 1980s, Siddhartha, at the urging of Meera, started the business that would make his career: He began providing the plants required for pharmaceutical medicine to several companies, making use of both his chemistry knowledge and some botany he had learned over the years.
One of the first things Siddhartha wanted to tell us about was my grandparents. Sachindra was a “well-known lawyer,” whom he called a “saintlike gentleman” and “a very simple man.” Binodini was a “very affectionate lady.”
“My father was earning a lot of money. On the other hand . . .” Siddhartha paused and turned to Shyamal. “What word am I looking for?”
“Donation,” Shyamal popped in. His eyes remained shut.
“Donation! He earned a lot of money! But he also donated a lot of money to the people. He couldn’t tolerate the sufferings of any man,” Siddhartha said.
Siddhartha was deliberate in choosing his words, and he continued to have Wesley and me repeat them back to him. If he wasn’t asking us to follow his points, his sentences were punctuated with a stern “What did I just say?!” Perhaps aware of how little I knew about my extended family and my complex feelings toward Shyamal, Siddhartha was acting as both a Deb family historian and a pitchman for our DNA.
“We are very much sentimental,” Siddhartha said. “We always shout if any injustice is happening in front of our eyes. Thirdly, all our members are very religious. All the members of our family have established themselves by hard struggle, by sacrifice. All the members of our family are educated and well cultured.”
I hadn’t had the chance to ask Shyamal his thoughts on religion. But when I was growing up, I had never gotten the sense it was a big deal to him. It certainly wasn’t the time to tell Siddhartha about my agnosticism, or my general lack of faith in the idea of powerful deities.
“We have three sisters. Two of them have expired,” Siddhartha said.
Much of the conversation was him talking, as if he was delivering a symposium called Deb 101. Wesley and I sat silently, with inscrutable stares. There was no mysterious advice about going to Japan from Siddhartha. Quite the opposite, in fact: He had plenty to say, and it was apparent that he would consider it a sign of disrespect if we didn’t drink in every word.
“My sisters were remarkable, very good housewives. They loved their husbands. And they got all these things from my mother. Understand? Clearly?”
We dutifully said yes. Clearly. I had a feeling I knew where he was going next. Siddhartha looked at Wesley.
“You guys definitely will be happy if you get married to this boy,” Siddhartha said, motioning toward me. Oh no, I thought to myself. More marriage blessings?
“Because this boy, inside his body, runs the same blood of ours.”
I was hoping that the next sentence out of his mouth would reveal some mind-boggling secret. Something like, “Yer a wizard, Shambo.” Or he would tell me that the Deb blood was infused with some mutation that would be the subject of the next Marvel movie. Alas, no. There was no movie franchise in my future. Instead, the conversation turned to my father.
“There may be some accidents that happen time to time in our family. We cannot resist it. Something odd. Some events like this case. It has happened. It is an accident.”
“This case?” He was beckoning toward Shyamal, referring to his marriage with my mother. Shyamal sat there impassively. Siddhartha was matter-of-factly saying Shyamal was an outlier in the family. But that’s my thing! I’m the outlier! I thought.
I asked Siddhartha