I had planned to write a nice long post this evening for BP since I felt I had neglected this blog for far too long.

As I was finishing my earlier work, I had to scroll on Facebook, which I rarely do unless it’s for a specific reason. As I scrolled down the feed, my heart shuddered; Sukrita Paul Kumar had posted a notification about her sister-in-law, Ruchira Paul.

I had known Ruchira for so long I cannot place the beginning of our friendship. Many names come to mind when I think of that early period (the late noughties), the Brown Blogging Dynasts. I was always a pretender to that company; Ruchira was among its most gracious members. Sukrita has written a poignant obituary on Facebook, which anyone who wants a proper account of her life should read.

Also worth reading is Namit Arora’s touching note on Ruchira. Judging from the comments on the two Facebook threads; my feelings are shared by hundreds and hundreds of individuals, whose lives Ruchira touched over the years.

This is a smaller thing: an accounting of what she meant to me across nearly two decades of friendship, most of it conducted over email and Facebook, none of it ever in person.

Accidental Blogger was Ruchira’s signature. She started it in 2005 as a solo author. By 2006 she was inviting others in, and by the time she wound it down in early 2013, roughly a dozen writers were contributing under her banner. She told me once, quite matter of fact, that readership had dwindled and she saw no point in continuing an enterprise that took so much of her time and energy. That was Ruchira in miniature. No sentimentality. A thing had run its course. She moved on. I remember leaving a comment on her concluding post in January 2013 to say goodbye. She wrote back a few days later, characteristically, to thank me for taking the trouble.

That was already several years in. We were Facebook friends from April 2011, but we had certainly been in touch before that. Whatever the origin, the friendship settled into a rhythm of quiet, regular contact. She wrote to me on my birthday, year after year. On 16 December 2011, 16 December 2012, 15 December 2013, 15 December 2017. Sometimes she signed with a single line, sometimes only her name. On my 29th she wished me many happy returns and a happy holiday season and added, in her small careful way, Mubarak!

A decade on, she wished me again on my 39th.

Few people ever used Facebook as well as Ruchira did. After a return from a “long” hiatus, I had complained to her that the platform was dull; she was much of the reason it was not always so.

This past May she posted a cropped photograph of her mother as a student at Dhaka University, standing in the third row behind one of her professors, flanked in the back row by two women who would become lifelong friends, one of them later an aunt by marriage. All graceful, smart and kind women, Ruchira wrote. It was an inheritance that ran through her own life of the mind and runs on today to her daughter, an acclaimed professor.

Some years earlier she had written a piece I have not been able to find yet, about a wedding in her extended family. A cousin brother who had grown up in the same household, though much younger, had put her name on his wedding invitation card, and the gesture moved her so deeply that she couldn’t write about it till the emotion had been processed. She wrote it so well that it moved me deeply too, and I still remember it, years later.

In 2018, when the great Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz died, Omar Ali’s obituary for Brown Pundits carried Ruchira’s English translation of Aqlima, Fahmida’s furious feminist meditation on the forgotten sister of Cain and Abel. A Bengali woman in Houston, translating a Sindhi feminist’s Urdu poem for a South Asian intellectual blog. That was the reach she carried, and the quiet, unfussy way she offered it.

Continue reading Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more