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  • Bosom Friend by Hira Bansode

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    Dipanjan Goswami
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    The poet invites her friend over for dinner for the first time. However, the friend criticizes the way the food is served and mentions traditions of serving buttermilk and yogurt that the poet does not follow due to her impoverished upbringing. The poet explains that as a child she did not have access to milk or yogurt and recalls the difficult conditions of her childhood, implying that her friend does not understand her experiences and still clings to traditions of inequality.

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    The poet invites her friend over for dinner for the first time. However, the friend criticizes the way the food is served and mentions traditions of serving buttermilk and yogurt that the poet does not follow due to her impoverished upbringing. The poet explains that as a child she did not have access to milk or yogurt and recalls the difficult conditions of her childhood, implying that her friend does not understand her experiences and still clings to traditions of inequality.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    459 views2 pages

    Bosom Friend by Hira Bansode

    Uploaded by

    Dipanjan Goswami
    The poet invites her friend over for dinner for the first time. However, the friend criticizes the way the food is served and mentions traditions of serving buttermilk and yogurt that the poet does not follow due to her impoverished upbringing. The poet explains that as a child she did not have access to milk or yogurt and recalls the difficult conditions of her childhood, implying that her friend does not understand her experiences and still clings to traditions of inequality.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    of 2

    Roychoudhury 1

    Bosom Friend

    By Hira Bansode

    Today you came over to dinner for the first time


    You not only came you forgot your caste and came
    Usually women don’t forget that tradition of inequality
    But you came with a mind large as the sky to my pocket size house
    I thought you had ripped all those caste things
    You came bridging that chasm that divides us
    Truly friend I was really happy
    With the naïve devotion of Shabari I arranged the food on your plate
    But the moment you looked at the plate your face changed

    With a smirk you said Oh My – Do you serve chutny koshambir this way?
    You still don’t know how to serve food
    Truly you folk will never improve.

    I was ashamed really ashamed


    My hand which had just touched the sky was knocked down I was silent
    Toward the end of the meal you asked
    What’s this? Don’t you serve buttermilk or yoghurt with the last course of rice?
    Oh My Dear we can’t do without that...
    The last bit of my courage fell away like a falling star
    I was sad then numb
    But the next moment I came back to life

    A stone dropped in the water stirs up things on the bottom

    So my memories swam up in my mind


    Dear Friend – You ask about buttermilk and yoghurt

    What/How shall I tell you?

    You know in my childhood we didn’t even have milk for tea much less yoghurt or buttermilk
    My mother cooked on sawdust she brought from the lumberyard wiping away the smoke
    from her eyes

    Every once in a while we might get garlic chutny on coarse bread


    Otherwise we just ate bread crumbled in water
    Dear Friend – Shrikhand was not even a word in our vocabulary

    My nose had never smelled the fragrance of ghee

    My tongue had never tasted halva basundi


    Dear Friend – You have not discarded your tradition

    Its roots go deep in your mind


    Roychoudhury 2

    And that’s true true true


    Friend – There’s yoghurt on the last course of rice
    Today the arrangement of food on your plate was not properly ordered
    Are you going to tell me what mistakes I made?
    Are you going to tell me my mistakes?

    1. Comment on the irony (“a situation in which something which was intended to have
    a particular result has the opposite or a very different result”) in the title of the poem.
    Is the poet’s friend truly a “bosom friend”? 5

    2. Who is the friend referring to when she says “you folk”? 2

    3. What sort of a childhood did the poet have? 5

    4. What is the poet’s tone in the last two lines of the poem? 2

    5. How are the words “sky” and “star” used to describe both the poet’s happiness and
    her sorrow? 2

    6. Comment on the “tradition of inequality” the poet mentions. 4

    7. Comment in the change of the poem’s mood during the course of the poem. 5

    8. Use any 5 words to write a descriptive paragraph:

    memories, lumberyard, sawdust, smoke, sky, house, mistakes 5

    9. Write an expository essay analyzing the current status of caste-based discrimination in


    India. What can we do to change things? 10

    10. Write a persuasive letter to the poet’s friend, explaining to her the problems in her
    casteist point of view. 10

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