Kalpana Lajmi: As I Knew Her
On my first day of kindergarten, the legendary Bhupen Hazarika happened to be staying at our house in Long Island. My mom asked him to bless me and so he sang “A Joy Raghura Nandana,” a wistful-sounding Assamese devotional borgeet, as I went off to school.
Most of you know the close relationship my family had with the late singer, activist and unofficial Assam ambassador. Today, his longtime partner and noted filmmaker Kalpana Lajmi died in Mumbai.
And I suddenly am remembering ALL these moments with them, these moments that ensured, as my mother asked, that my life indeed would be a blessed one.
I met her through her films first.
In the summer of 1986, we were visiting the mainland from our then-home of Puerto Rico. We were at the Boras in South Brunswick, New Jersey when my mom called for me from the living room and said to come quick. I arrived to a grainy image on the TV of Bihu dancers in a Bollywood movie.
“Assamese movie but in Hindi!” my mom exclaimed, proudly. We would take a VHS copy of “Ek Pal” back with us and I watched it — over and over. My father bought the record and I listened to it all the time, learning traditional Assamese wedding rituals such as bathing the bride near a banana plant and the almost-childlike-teasing nature of our matrimonial songs. In more recent years, I downloaded the soundtrack via Saavn and listen to it often, mostly days when I miss my extended family. It was my introduction to Bollywood and only later would I realize just how much — with its setting, songs and strong female protagonist — it bucked convention.
In 1989, the annual Assam Convention was in Toronto. I believe this is the first time I met Kalpana. Nobody introduced her as Bhupen Uncle’s girlfriend then; that wasn’t a word we used a lot. Nobody said she was a manager or friend either. I just know that she kept ledgers of songs and appointments and accompanied him everywhere. She made him take medicine, go to bed, watch what he ate and drank. She answered calls from all the people who wanted him to come and perform. So this time, he was not alone when he stayed in our house, which at this point was in suburban New Jersey. They stayed in my room. I liked having her there because she was loud and honest and served as a youthful buffer/translator to this man who was so so famous and a bit of an enigma to us kids.
That was the summer that “Dead Poets Society” came out and Kalpana, Bhupen Uncle, my elder brother Sanjib and I went to see it at Princeton Marketfair. Afterward, I remember we talked the outsized role of teachers and of following one’s own dreams over one’s parents’.
There were other visits in subsequent years. When I was in college at Rutgers, Kalpana happened to be staying with my parents shortly after my car got totaled. She came with me and my father as we checked out another. We were about to buy it when my dad asked to see the VIN. Because Papa is one of those savants who knows what every digit represents, he figured out the car had been refurbished and we were probably paying too much. “Mohesh Da,” Kalpana exclaimed in her signature voice, full of boom and enthusiasm and accent. “Only you know these things! She is so lucky!”
Years later, her house in Andheri West became my landing place in Mumbai. This time, I took over their room. I shared many meals with her mother, the talented painter Lalitha Lajmi, and her father Gopi, who retired as captain of the Bombay Port. They showed me a part of India my parents never had — dinners at the Oberoi, movie screenings and art openings, walks on Juhu, so so so many phone calls to get a film funded. Only once, just once, I asked about the nature of their relationship. She said something like, “What else could it be? I am his partner, his wife, his mother, his manager…”
I saw Bhupen Uncle one last time in 2010 during a quick trip through Bombay; he was aging, ailing and disoriented but he finally met my husband and asked questions about everybody. He told me he felt his time to die was coming soon and that efforts were underway to translate his works and preserve his papers.
He died little more than a year later, on Nov. 5, 2011. When my father called Kalpana to extend condolences, she admonished him for not coming to see Bhupen Uncle in his final days. “You were like a brother to him,” she said.
That was generous and probably true but I think a part of the reason both Bhupen Uncle and Kalpana trusted and befriended my parents so much is precisely because they didn’t crowd or hover; there were enough people accosting this famous singer, and my parents intentionally gave Bhupen Uncle and Kalpana space. We waited for them to initiate; and they would — staying weeks on end and taking over our kitchen to cook and that time in 2012 that Kalpana told me she was at JFK Airport and ordered my father and I drop everything and come see her during a layover. (We did.)
I thought twice about writing even this much. I do because both Bhupen Hazarika and Kalpana Lajmi hold such an important place in Assamese culture and our legacy. I also respect efforts among the Hazarika family to honor his tremendous repertoire and make their political, lyrical, universal meanings accessible to many more generations to come.
After nearly three decades of friendship with Kalpana, I observed and underscore what her relative and colleague, the director Dev Benegal, wrote on Twitter: “She was a powerhouse who made men uncomfortable because she stood fiercely for her rights, her point of view & to tell stories her way…”
Indeed, she tried to get the last word. Just days before she died, in an excerpt of her new book, “Bhupen Hazarika: As I Knew Him,” Kalpana asks: “Somewhere down the ages, I too would be remembered, something that I had not asked for, but was given because Bhupen gave me in death what he could not in life: his acceptance and the status of his wife and consort.”
As I read it, I recalled this refrain, a medley from the film that introduced me to her: “Chupke Chupke Ham Palkon Mein” Because my formal Hindi can be unreliable, I looked up the translation.
Chupke, Chupke, Chupke Hum Palkon Mein
Kitni Sadiyon Se Rehte Hain
Aa Doobke Dekhe Nile Se
Sagar Mein Kaise Behte Hain
Aa Jaana Doob Ke Dekhenge
In English:
Secretly in the eyelashes
We live since ages
Let’s immerse in this blue
Ocean and see how we flow
Come, my beloved, let’s immerse and see
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