Boo boo in select company

Boo boo in select company
Something to say?

Monday 14 December 2020

My Favourite Writer -- John Le Carre'

 My Favourite Writer -- John Le Carre'

I always wait for Le Carre' to write another book. I buy the hard copy as soon as they come out -- Kindle won't do. I have to hoard them for my granddaughter to read when she is old enough to know the difference between trash and quality writing. Now, le Carre's mellow, confident, honest, analytical, caring voice will not be heard anymore. What a loss! Irreplaceable as John Snow said.

Le Carre's voice had that rare quality of being 'just right' from the first sentence. The first page captures you and never disappoints. Spy-writing? Yes. But not entirely. There was social comment, unforgettable characters, an informed look at institutions, social as well as domestic, and above all a benign look at people, their frailties and strengths, their loyalties and loves. I think I would read Le Carre' if he wrote about the Stock Exchange.

Smiley, for instance. That part made for Gary Oldman. Cleaning his 'specs with the thin end of his necktie, the self-effacing cocoon inside which his crystal-clear intelligence operated, the soundless withdrawing from the wife's infidelities... The Smiley books are his best, if there can be a best.

The CONSTANT GARDENER was not a spy story, for instance. The spy element varied from book to book. The British embassies and outposts run by the aspiring, but not quite there, henchmen of the Foreign Office did not take kindly to Le Carre's take on them. For heaven's sake, they were the elite, weren't they? and he was taking their life-structures to pieces. 

When Le Carre' arrived in Kenya to research for the 'Constant Gardener' the local High commission quietly passed him on to their lesser brethren -- the British Council. He had been excoriating about the career diplomats and their lifestyles in many countries. The British Council asked my daughter, Radha, who was then an Assistant Director in Nairobi to 'look after him.' That translates to: take him around, introduce him to the local colour, buy him lunch at the five stars, entertain him ...

So, one afternoon, when she came home from work, she told me about John Le Carre'. She had just had lunch with him. When she mentioned that her mother ( I was at the time on holiday in Nairobi) was a fan, he offered to sign some books for me. And he did, a few weeks later.

When he did a 'talk' in the Barbican a few years ago, I went with Radha and her daughter. He spoke without notes, about his books, his people and places. 'When Communism is finished, there is Capitalism to fight,' he always argued. That is now.

When THE CONSTANT GARDENER came out, some in Nairobi argued that the character, Ghita Pearson, was modelled on Radha; this she firmly disputed. However, the general bubble in which the Foreign Office functioned was cruelly clear. The internal jealousies and promotion tactics, the off-hand liaisons of bored middle-aged Lotharios promoted beyond their competence, the abrogation of long-learned moral structures because your family is not looking over your shoulder, the deliberate distance from all things local... I am reminded of what one very bright Ugandan said to me about a project I was managing in Kampala. Even I knew there was nothing I could teach them. 'Just give us the money and go, Anand,' he said, not unkindly. And he was a friend. Our behaviour in foreign places can be excruciating.

Today I looked at the phalanx of hardbacks on my bookshelf, all written by Le Carre' and thought, I'll just have to read them again. And again, and possibly again.

Saturday 5 December 2020

Buying Local

 Buying Local

The politicians don't sound too sure of what they appear to be saying -- buy from your local shops.

The last time I heard this was in the mid 1940s. Gandhi was telling all of us Indians to shun imported goods and buy only from the small retailer, things made in India. We all knew we couldn't defeat the British Raj by our puny push-backs. However, we obeyed.

   It was not difficult to obey. Shopping as a pleasant pastime had never existed in our minds.When a need arose, whether it was for Kirby grips for my short hair or a new bath towel because the old one was in shreds, we asked the master of the house, many times, and eventually we'd get that bath towel, and that Kirby grip. Maybe. Sometimes we tore strips off old rags and tied our hair with that.

   My father and I wore Khadhar  or Khadhi, as it was sometimes called. This material was home-spun and rough and thick. I was never a petite, slim person and the khadhi skirt made me look fat and graceless. But we persevered. My father, slim as an Arecanut tree, looked like a clothes-horse in anything he wore. I clearly did not get my genes in this respect from him.

  Not enough with wearing the damned things, a charkha appeared on our veranda in due course. Accompanied by thin cotton slivers. I was taught to sit down like Gandhi did and spin thread. I never got the hang of it -- my thread got knotted and broke. My father did not do much better. Thankfully, he gave up quite quickly on that.

  Not having money to spare helped. Clothing stores being nearly empty and cloth being rationed during the war years helped. When my father was arrested for being an activist, my fervour increased. The Khadhi habit persisted until I started wearing saris some time when I started College. My father continued, like a few others to the end of his life.

   It may not be much - but we can all do a little to help the local retailer, by buying from the small shops. The supermarkets can look after themselves, but we need to show solidarity with the local butcher, florist, fruit and vegetable vendor... 

   As they say, 'every little helps.'


Wednesday 2 December 2020

The Reading Addiction

 

This Reading Addiction

Here I am, again, trying to write. Ben Okri, he of the Famished Road  fame was on TV (6/6/20) talking to the news anchor about James Floyd's death. And I think, there are writers like me and there are writers like him. So many more like me. Yet, we are compulsive writers too. If we don't write we feel dispossessed, as though we have been ousted from that intellectual and emotional domain we occupy.
   My problem is that I have to feel strongly about something for me to venture an opinion. (Friends who have suffered from the 'strength' of some of my opinions, will vouch for the fact that this happens much too frequently. Sorry.) At the moment I am staggering under the weight of happenings that make my thinking frenetic and confused. I  don't know where to begin. So I consider the writers I have really respected, and learned from. A more pleasant exercise -- you could call it a cop-out.
   Penelope Lively wrote Moon Tiger and won the Booker Prize some time in the eighties. Every little section in a chapter, sometimes consisting of a paragraph or two, like the brother and sister dancing, oblivious to all around them, with a faint suggestion of incest; much later the sister, in a car with the brother and his wife, and her total contempt for the woman...
   There was also Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in the year Indian writing in English nudged all others out and declared ownership of that language. And later, Arundhathi Roy with her The God of Small Things, which reinvented the English Language so powerfully. All over the Commonwealth, countries claim their own version of English: Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie... The list is a long rainbow list of wonderfully evocative writers.
   Many, like Rushdie have woven long stories flitting in and out of the realms of fantasy. I am not a great admirer of fantasy, but that image of yellow moths crowding round the naked woman as she walks, keeping her covered, has stayed with me for decades. Put that alongside, the brutal dinner-conference, generals moving pepper-pots around on the dining table to visualise the steps in the assassination of a President – no fantasy in that. Kashuo Ishiguro is another writer who cannot be boxed into any genre. There was ‘Remains of The Day,’ and much later, ‘Don’t Ever Leave Me.’ Remembering those books, I want to find them again on my shelves, boxes, loft, wherever they are, and dive into them.

  Which – leaves me with a selfish thought. After a die, all these and many more amazing writers, will keep on writing, and I have never heard of a library in the eternal silence. If there was, I would start believing in it.

Friday 13 November 2020

The University Entrance Quagmire

 The University Entrance Quagmire

How does one negotiate this quagmire? There is so much muck thrown in there, of different ilk, that most parents struggle to traverse it.

In the days of a previous life when I taught Secondary school, the Careers Department would interview each child and try to help them through the maze. The end of the school year, with exams approaching, and teachers teaching less furiously, I would have time to spare. Especially as the A and O level exams finished early in the year. 

Students would come up to my table and talk to me. J was one of them. She was a lovely child in a group where most of the students were out to create as much disruption as they could. I asked her what she wanted to do after she left school. 

'I'm going to be a doctor,' she said without hesitation.

Mmm. I was trying to break it gently. 'Will you get the grades needed?' I asked, J was an average student, and she would get three or four O levels, but she would not get A and B grades. She had the kind of personality, which would make a great G P. Kind, considerate, caring. In my mind I wished her well. But -

She must have read my mind, I thought when she added. 

'I'll get a place at Barts. 

'My brother qualified from there. He is working in Canada now, but he'll come back to make sure I get a place.'

I left the job that year and a few years later I met some old students at the hair dresser's. So I asked about their year-group. J, apparently, was now two years into her medical course at Barts. And I thought this happened only in India!

Later I came across teachers in fee-paying schools who had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, and easily got their charges into their old colleges. As for predicted grades, I tend to take them with a large pinch of salt. If the teachers like you, your predicted grades (they genuinely believe they are being impartial) tend to be good. If you are untidy, unruly and uncouth, you got damned. So, I'm glad Universities will now look at actual exam passes. 

No one doubts that the system is unfair and complicated. However, it is good to know that the marsh is being dragged and some of the muck cleared.


Thursday 12 November 2020

Kerala Marriages -- 2020 Style.

 I came across photos of two marriages in Kerala, from two weeks ago. Since then I cannot decide whether to laugh or to cry.

The bride was drowning in gold necklaces. Her wrists were not showing in the photo but she had an inch-wide band of gold on her upper arm. She was a pretty girl, about twenty years from the look of her, and she was almost tilting under the weight. 

I looked at the pictures of the shamiana (the tent where the ceremony is performed). On one end the bride and groom were placed on a raised dais -- no escape. She was gaudily attired in bright red and held a bouquet of large red roses in her hands, compounding the image of a sacrificial offering. Did this level of gaudiness and excess come recently, or was it a gradual descent into opulence displayed and waste sanctified? In a country where so many do not have enough to eat or survive? Especially today, with Covid restricting movement, so many families who live on daily wages have no income at all.

I looked at the decor in what appeared to be a large hall, a venue probably dedicated to weddings. The walls were pasted with flowers and red cut-outs. There was something like a half-circle of a frame behind the couple who were on show, made of coloured cloth and wire and tinsel. The whole thing looked silly and laughable.

In my youth marriages of all communities were quite sparing in time and cost. I used to quip that it was a quick approval of the elders for a couple to copulate and live together. 

I got married on a September day in 1957. Nair weddings take place in the night and I remember the tent was made of bamboo and coconut fronds. The ceremony itself took about ten minutes. Garlands in front of the sacred lamps while the swami chanted, three times round the lamps holding hands. Now you are single, now you are not, off you go, The event took place in our front yard and the women crowded round the windows to watch. Dinner after, on plantain leaves, seated on grass mats on the floor.

My trousseau consisted of eight cotton saris and one wedding sari. The wedding sari was a white Benares silk with a gold motif. It became off-white over the years and the gold dimmed, a lot like my marriage, I used to think. Jewelry was sparse and barely noticeable. Looking back, what was remarkable was how quickly the life-changing event was accomplished.

A new fashion is for rich families to schedule weddings in Colombo,while Sri- Lankans come to Chennai to get married. All very strange and inexplicable.

Now, if only the money spent on these public spectacles was distributed to the very poor, for their education, for their food and their general survival. I hope it will happen.  Perhaps the government could get a law passed capping the wedding extravagances.

Monday 9 November 2020

Euphoria for U S

Euphoria for U S

 I am so full U S election-related thoughts , I am uncertain where to begin:

I am concerned that the Trumpet is planning rallies -- his favourite modus. Hope the Proud Boys and the White Supremacists will not think this is a call to arms. If Trumpet incites,even by a hint...

When Biden started winning I kept hoping that he would consider the 'Bad Cop' problem in the U S immediately. I am relieved to notice it is one of his four immediate targets. Bad cops, of course, have to be managed by the local precinct heads. Why are they staying schtum about this? Don't they care about what is happening on their patch?  The 'shoot first and look afterwards' practice seems to be common practice in some Southern states. How many black men and women have to die before the government takes responsibility and punishes the cops and the precincts? I am glad Biden and Harris have flagged this one up. A strategy is needed to stop cops using blacks for target practice, before the event rather than after.

I am delighted that America will now come back into the comity of nations, return to the W H O, re-sign up to the Paris climate agreement . Climate change must be the most serious threat to our world, and we are painfully slow to react to it. We are sleep-walking into a global calamity. Individuals can do much -- take their cars out less, use paper bags instead of plastic,plant tress... Countries can invest in green energy, in retraining for this , in fulfilling the promises they make over white wine and roast meat in the climate conferences. Thunberg is correct to call it hypocrisy.

What is our own blond horror going to do about this? When are we going to stop worshiping fossil fuel? Can we believe anything Boris and his small coterie of Tories say?

A pinch of honesty from all concerned would be a beginning.


Friday 30 October 2020

Labour Self Harm

 The Labour Party's capacity for self-harm appears to be infinite. Just when the Tories are shooting themselves in the foot daily, we deflect attention from their disastrous policies to our in-house spats. And, of that we have many.

   Let's not forget how the sickening group within the Labour Right, set out deliberately to make sure that Corbyn and the Left did not win the 1919 election. Disgraceful! Owen Jones's book 'This Land' discusses the schisms within the party and the few who set out deliberately to defeat Labour. And they succeeded.

   And now we have the Jewish issue surfacing again, I wonder, are there Tories working within the Labour Party? The Jewish issue destroyed the Party in 1919 and it seems to pop up whenever someone is looking for a stick to beat the Left with.

   So, what does the Party executive do? It suspends Jeremy Corbyn and removes the parliamentary whip from him. Of all the daft things to do. I am a strong supporter of Jeremy because he is principled and honest. He genuinely cares about the poor working classes and focuses on the inequalities that keep them underfoot. 

   Now, I imbibed politics with my mother's milk in that most political of all states in India-- Kerala. My father was sent to jail n 1942 for his Satyagraha activities. In 1953, he contested the Thalassery seat for membership of the Legislature, knowing full well that the unholy coalition of the Communists with a splinter party of the Congress would wipe the floor with him. And they did. He turned his mind to activities within the community to help the poor, the 'lower castes' and the down-trodden. 

   As a young woman, I witnessed the horse-trading within the Parties and the friendships forged for a day and then discarded. I can sniff out a self-seeking politician a mile away, 

   Clearly, there is a vindictive caucus within the party which will self-destruct to destroy the Left of the Party.  I am devastated.

   I support Keir Starmer for leadership of the Party, because he has the gravitas, the skills and the intent. I hope he has the wit to see his error and restore Jeremy to his place in the Party.


Tuesday 6 October 2020

A Special World of Ego-maniacs

 I notice that all the would-be autocrats have many things in common:  Boris, Donald, Modi, they all believe that their personal  aberrations are important to the rest of the world.

   Boris sounded very pleased with himself in his speech today. He described in detail what a hero he was because he lost 26 pounds in weight after recovering from COVID. Well done, Boris. Now, please p--s off and stop squirting nonsense towards this gullible world.  He spent a whole speech on the virtual podium talking about the wonderful things he/ the UK, were going to achieve after we come out of the pandemic. No details, costing etc, but every home is going to function on Green Power by the end of the next decade. Wonderful. Tories have been saying this for a while, without actually finding any resources to do this. But he is superman, 'harvesting gusts from the deepest oceans.'

   Donald Trump has come out flying, literally, from Walter Reed. COVID is just another 'Flu, a minor inconvenience. Don't be afraid; don't let it dominate you, he instructs the American folk, standing on his balcony, a little breathless. Just summon the helicopter, get fussed over by a dozen doctors, some of who might even embellish the truth a little to show what a warrior you are. Then be treated with the most expensive drugs you probably don't need, but demand as of right. You could even do a victory parade in a black SUV. AND, when you get home, throw that mask away. So many more in The White House to infect. Some might even take it home to their families.

   Do these men see beyond their silly probosces?

   Modi wants all India to be Hindu. He will have to get past the Constitution to do that. Meanwhile his coterie promote the personal myth of this great saint, clad in saffron robes, while he condones massacres on many boundaries. Never mind his outfits are custom-made to promote his image.

   I listened today to the speeches of Sunak and Johnson and wondered which world they inhabit. Not the one in which the daily-paid labourers are out of work, food banks proliferate, parents are literally losing their sanity, teachers are going to school each day wondering when COVID will strike them or any child in their classroom, medics despair whether this time round the PPE supply will be adequate to demand, and the general public cannot trust a single statistic the Government puts out. 

   Numbers are now a game you play, bringing them out to maximum advantage -- to deflect attention from disasters, to explain systemic failures...

   Can Britain survive this disaster of a Tory government?


Wednesday 30 September 2020

OUR INGLORIOUS PRESENT 

I think Priti Patel is slowly going off her rocker. Early dementia? Clearly, she has forgotten her immigrant lineage. Whenever I feel put upon by the discrimination practiced in this country against immigrants, like me, I remind myself that, in the end, I was able to make a good life here. I got a job, bought my first home, educated my children without much cost. Manju and Raghu did M A courses n Law and Civil Engineering at Kings College, London and Imperial and UCL. Kitta did his Ph.D in Mathematics, again with considerable assistance from the State. They all make / made good livings. When they are ill, they have the NHS to fall back on. They don't have to find the money for doctors and medicines. The NHS has fallen back on some of its original promises, but it is still an amazing service.

   And that vile woman wants to send immigrants off to an island 4000 miles away. The last time I came across this level of malice was in Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth. And we all know how mad SHE became. Watch it, Priti. Venom destroys its owner too.

   I cannot believe that we cannot, in this country, accommodate about 4000 migrants, every year, who have risked their lives to get here. Like me and Priti, they may actually have some skill to offer this country. Are we forgetting all those nurses and doctors we (hypocritically) clapped for?. 

   Who will you deny next Priti? What's eating you?

   

Tuesday 22 September 2020

Covid Boundaries

 I peeked into my daughter, Manju's office this morning -- I'm really not allowed to go in there. She says I am vulnerable, at eighty-five. True. Vulnerable to a great many other things in addition to Covid. Such as age and senility, obstinacy, general disregard for rules...  She drives to Caterham and back daily with her daughter, who can bring all sorts of unwelcome visitors home from school, she maintains.

   The thing I miss most is watching T V with her, book in hand, periodically surfacing to slag off our nincompoop P M, supply words for Hancock when he stutters and stammers, all the while counting the U-turns and ticking off another day from the next four years of this Tory government.

    Even more, I miss watching football with my daughter. We shout at the pundits, who have their heads so far up their fundaments, they can't see what is happening on the pitch. When Son scores a hat-trick, they sing a whole a song of praise for Harry Kane. Racism? or like I said, not being able to see beyond their ----- 

    Actually, I watch mostly when Liverpool is playing. Liverpool is the house icon, and after the last league success, they can't do any wrong. We must get a plaster cast of Klopp to worship. Whereas Manju will watch football even if it is the local schoolboys kicking a ball around, I have other things I like almost as much, some of them, more  All through the last few months, Manju showed distinct withdrawal symptoms. 

    So, I was disappointed yesterday, parked in front of the T V on my own, watching the City-Wolves match, switching off when it was 2-0 to City. Manju says Wolves came back in the second half. By which time I was deep into my book. City is so predictable: play clinically for 23 minutes, get goals, then kick a ball around, just thwarting the other side. Those long balls to De Bruyne and Sterling are very effective. However City are so skilled, I'd like to see some real display for a change. All too easy for them. So how did they lose eleven games last season?

   Liverpool's first match against Leeds just about kept Leeds at bay. The team looked as though they were sleep-walking. Chelsea, after that, was going to be a challenge. And this is what is so exciting about football --  Liverpool was a joy to watch: sleek, accurate passes ; Salah back to his old speed where he could outrun most people for the ball; Alexander-Arnold showing he had more than one-card of a swerving free-kick up his sleeve. 

   Alexander-Arnold defended as well as Robinson, almost. Chelsea, it was that sleepwalked. Mane' was Mane', totally reliable, ducking and diving and escaping his pursuers, showing off almost. But there is no fun watching without Manju, in her state of frenetic eagerness.  No Manju alongside to gloat, scream, curse the referees, and use inappropriate language in describing various protagonists.

    I might have to give up football.

    



Monday 21 September 2020

A Covid Morning

A Covid Morning

These Covid days don't linger; they fly past. What have I done with today?

   Made several teas, drank all. Ate my usual breakfast of two pikelets and a piece of apple pie. (yes, yes, I know. Very bad for ... ) Listened to the news and lies from BBC. Another cover-up being organized for Bo bloody Jo. Did he, did he not? Go on holiday last weekend, just when the country is supposed to stay at home. Did he go to Perugia? Why didn't he go further? My only chagrin -- if he went, and the airline insists that he did -- is that he came back.

   Listened to Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the streets of somewhere or other. The rendering was not great; I've heard better, but the people on the street joining in one by one, parents jigging around with infants, little boys getting a better view on top for the lamp post  -- made my day. So I parked it with my favourite tunes. I had to bribe my granddaughter to set that file and the Tracker up for me. I then listened to a Hindi song, 'Hame tumse pyaar kitnaa' sung by a talented duo from Kozhikode, then Eric Clapton and Paul and Ringo in 'Concert for George,'  with 'And my guitar gently weeps...' Decided to marry Eric Clapton, told my children. My daughter didn't bat an eyelid. She said he had a reputation for being a racist??? Where did she get that from? Raining on my tired parade as usual.

   Tried to bring up Moody Blues' Knights in White Satin, with no success.

   Ironed one solitary Hawai shirt for my son, put slug pellets on the Hostas. Then raked last week's grass cuttings on to the flower beds. My body announced it had had enough. So, shall now go to sleep, think, whatever comes my way. It is now lunch time.

   Chicken stir-fry for the evening if I can persuade my son to chop the thighs up for me. He has taken to wearing ear-phones - to avoid hearing me, my music? My daughter is in one of her perennial Zoom meetings, discussing the fate of justice in Somaliland. If it exists. Oxymoron?

   There you are. Exciting ?

Friday 18 September 2020

THE THREE ABOMINATIONS

 The Three Abominations.

I think -- I don't know what India did to deserve Modi. But, of course I do. Same as I know why we have an unfeeling, blundering sociopath for our Prime Minister in Britain, and that destructive five-year old, Trump, in the U S. It's like giving a box of crayons and white walls to a child to play with. The people voted the monsters in.

   I was a teen-ager when the best minds of India, protested non-violently against discrimination in temples. Christians, for instance, were not allowed into temple premises at that time. My father was one of the protestors. They won and the temple was opened to all. It was a great victory for communities who believed in living together with grace and kindness.

   Interestingly, the people who protest most vociferously, about the harm Muslims do to India (define, please), are the ones who are quietly getting rich working in the gulf countries. What are the garbs that prejudice and racism wear?

   Growing up, our corner-shop in Thalassery was left of our front gates. It was owned by Moosa. At that time Muslims did not seek education and were generally employed in businesses. They were good at commerce. The richest men in Thalassery in those years were two Muslims who traded in timber.

   My aunt would call out to Moosa over our fence for paan and cooking oil and salt... Moosa would wrap the pan and salt in old newspaper and bring it around. The day Ammamma died he was on our veranda, through her dying agony, waiting with wet yes.

   In Thalassery, I walked to college daily with Mabel, my long-term friend, whom I still keep in touch with. I spent Christmas with her family every year, and she came round to ours for Onam.

   I attended a Catholic Secondary School and still know the prayers and responses. I am always thankful for that eclectic upbringing. It opened up my mind to the kaleidoscope of our lives.

   The gulf-crowd who worship 'Modiji' should hide their heads in shame. They have become rich on the tax-free incomes from Muslim countries. Our village, Kodiyeri, which used to be mainly thatched houses is now preening, with ugly concrete flat roofs and all mod-cons. They have money to spare. 

   Be grateful to the Muslims, who gave you jobs, and a way out of joblessness, which used to be the fate of the men, who passed out with 'empty' B As formerly, and had nowhere to go. I knew a few of them.

   I hope the next election in India will see our fake fakir, Modi, out.

   


Friday 11 September 2020

Obedience is Bad, especially for Women


Obedience is Bad, especially for Women

 I think I was about three years old when I realised I had special status as a 'motherless child.') I was going to Madras (now called Chennai) to visit my maternal grandparents on that day in May, which I remember. My father told me to go next door and tell my echis (cousins, sisters) and ettans (brothers) there that I would be gone for a week or two. 

This is the house where I spent most of my waking hours. There were no children in that house and they spoiled me silly. Except Kannettan. He was a tailor, with a pedal Singer sewing machine parked on his veranda. He never smiled and would not let me go anywhere near his precious corner, full of multi-coloured bits and swirls of cloth, that I wanted to reach. But, on this day when I was leaving he went into his garden with me and plucked a perfect red rose for me. 'Poor motherless little one,' he said.

So motherless had its positives. Indeed, as far as I was concerned, it made no difference to me. My aunts and cousins loved me -- they combed my hair, dressed me for the day, wiped my tears when the kitten scratched me... Nani edatht always put a lot of love on to the semi-toothless comb when she did my hair.

However, our house was a little bare and naked compared to others I visited. Next door also had just the two chairs and the odd rickety bench. The women never sat on the chairs in either house. My Achan ate his meals at a small round table all his own, and the rest of us had palakaas -- low wooden stools. The food was served in tin plates on the floor.

My Velyamma hardly came to the veranda -- her domain was her kitchen. In houses with mothers, I noticed embroidered cushion cloths on the chairs sometimes. There would be a colourful hand-loom sheet occasionally on a bed. Next door, there was even a bunch of plastic flowers on a little table, on the veranda.

I had strict instructions from my father not to hang around in the kitchen, which I loved doing. Looking back, I think he was scared I would become like his sister and niece -- a denizen of the kitchen-world. So he set me work to do most days when I was at home. The long Malayalam poem, Karuna, by Kumaran Aashaan, was in four-line verses, and I had to memorise a verse a day. Tennyson's In Memoriam was another boring chore. I hated that one and have never looked kindly on Tennyson since.

I must admit the Eliza Doolittle role started early, with unforeseen consequences later on, when I started having my own ideas about what to think, how to live. At twenty-one I chafed at the bridle and gave my Achan enormous headaches. When he complained to a friend, the man said, 'But you told her not to be obedient.' This was true.

I remember my father going up the stairs one day while Velyamma complained I had been disobedient. 'Obedience is bad,' he retorted. 'Especially for women.'



Thursday 10 September 2020



I thought Covid would make me write. The thoughts were going to be a deluge in my head and then they'd reach these pages to flood them. But, actually, I've dried up. So I have called me to the head-mistress's office and chastised me: delinquent in duty, lazy, non-stop commitment to T V...

So I promised the ogre that I would write two blogs a week to please her. She didn't really believe me. So much for my stupid, task-master alter-ego. Time to show her up.

My recent murmurings in my head are about the new India. In the families I know, birthdays are celebrated with profuse wishes, mainly on Facebook and the recipient says a bundled thank you at the end. This is a new custom. On my birthdays as a child, I received no 'wishes' or gifts. Velyamma insisted that I bathe BEFORE breakfast, do my devotions in front of the puja-room plaster images, and thereafter behave myself. That was a special responsibility: no lying, swearing, leaving food uneaten on the plate... Also, no one else should shout at me in the house and they should all do things for me. So the echis (cousins) plaited my hair, put pottu on my forehead, made rice-and-jaggery sweets for me. When I misbehaved, almost, Veiyamma warned echis that today was special and I should not be scolded.

These days, Facebook reminds me to wish 'friends.' I am obstinate that I will not be instructed in this manner by Crazebook. I am often sorely tempted to give up my Facebook membership, but that and Whats App are the only ways I can keep abreast of the busy lives of my friends and family -- marriages, births, deaths...

One or two girls in my class would bring a box of penny sweets or toffees to lessons  on their day and distribute them. They'd be wearing new clothes and you could see they felt important on that day. Achan had a very extended family to feed and educate and his going to jail for two years didn't help. One day, I moaned to him, and as usual he came up with a brilliant suggestion.

A suggestion I could have managed without -- at the end of the day, you must tell me what you did for someone else, he said. That is what makes a good birthday, he insisted.

Why couldn't he be like other girls' fathers? I thought.

.'

Saturday 15 August 2020

That Dietary Supplement -- the Milk of Human Kindness.


That Dietary Supplement -- the Milk of Human Kindness.
 Last week's heat-wave was caused by the immigrants -- all those unwanted, homeless, supplicant people, coming to the United (???) kingdom in leaking boats. As if we don't have enough surplus-to-need blacks and browns coming here and flooding this place with doctors and nurses and such-like. And now, the thunderstorms -- they appear to have brought their murderous weather with them.
   Priti, our Home Secretary (made-for-the job) knows all about these people of course. She was one of them that came from East Africa, mostly Uganda, when Amin threw them out. So were Sunak's family. That cohort came by plane, with sterling bank accounts preceding them to smooth their way. They prospered here and now occupy positions of power. But Priti is adamant -- she wants none of them reaching here. And Rishi Sunak advises them that France is a much better place for them to be. 
  I was one of those too. I came in 1974, fleeing a bad marriage. The country was desperately short of Maths teachers at that time, and a job was available the week after I reached the U K. I spent ten years teaching in Comprehensive schools. On occasion, even the odd student objected to being taught by a wog. Accommodation was difficult to find and the only rooms I got were in the house of an Indian, taking a lodger.
   Eventually my children came, the eldest qualified as a lecturer of Maths, the second became a Structural Engineer, and the youngest a Governance adviser with the British Council.  We did not need any benefits ever and were warmed by the kindness of the ordinary British person.The odd racist asked me to go back to where I came from, my children suffered nicknames ---- It didn't disturb our sanity.
   All four of us were acutely aware of the glass ceilings within our professions then. That invisible top is still there. We accepted that as par for the course, grumbling a little now and then.
   Are we not a compassionate people here? I ask myself in 2020. The 4000+ immigrants in a year, desperate people who come here in suicidal conditions can surely be accepted with care and kindness. We have big enough hearts for that, don't we? I hope Priti and Sunak will look hard at themselves and do another U-turn. The Tories have done so many, they must be pretty (Priti?) good at it by now.

   And, of course, our economic collapse was definitely the fault of the immigrants-- it is beginning to sweep us into recession, and the Government will need someone to hang that one on. Immigrants? Who else?

Friday 31 July 2020

My Threadbare Home

I rarely offer to empty the dishwasher as it requires bending and straightening up many times. There is no space in the cutlery drawer for all the armaments we accumulated over the last decade — it wasn’t too bad before that. Around 2007, my daughter returned to England from Kenya and I from India, bringing with us our households. So three households were now crammed into the small bachelor home of my long-suffering son. In the end, he bought a larger house, just to accommodate his unwieldy family.

When the spoons and forks spill over into the drawer, I remember our home in Thalassery. We had one metal spoon in the house, which was my father’s for use with his evening conjee. The rest of us had spoons made from the leaves of the Jack fruit tree. This was an adhoc arrangement. When conjee was served, one of us children would be instructed to pick a few jack leaves. This was no off-hand chore. The leaves had to be fresh but not too soft — they shouldn’t disintegrate in the hot conjee.  And they had to be shaped and held together by a piece of eerkili (spine of the palm leaf). I was never great at these feminine skills.

Once, my visiting aunt got so disgusted with my ineptitude, she asked me to go back to the jack tree and fetch better leaves. I had enough by then. I gave her my father’s precious spoon.

‘That thing that is sucked by all and sundry?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘I’d rather go hungry.’

This happy spoon-less state of affairs continued till I got married and went to Colombo to live with my in-laws. They were of a different ilk; I would call it faux-western. Proper china and a plenitude of spoons and forks and knives, not to mention sofas and sprung beds, and curtains in the windows. When I went home to India to have my first baby, I felt as though I could breathe again. I packed away my tooth brush and Colgate tooth-paste, and happily went back to an earlier oral hygiene — burnt husk on my index finger.

My husband threatened to visit after a few months. Now I would need to pander to a different food-protocol. He ate rice like the urban Ceylonese — with fork and spoon, the fork in the left hand, pushing food into the spoon in the right hand. And we,in Thalassery, had no forks or knives or spoons. The gofer was sent into town to bring back two spoons and two forks. He returned empty-handed. So I went hunting and unearthed some cutlery in a disused drawer in a small shop at the bus-stand.

‘From the time of the White Saives’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Who is this for, now?’ Emphasis on the NOW. I refrained from answering. The deal seemed almost a betrayal.

How far have the mighty fallen! My father grinned with great amusement, when I went home with my finds.

‘What are you going to do about the dry latrines?’ he asked. But that, as they say, is a whole other story.


My Alter Ego

My alter ego from Keralam

This is a blog about my very Indian other self. Actually Malayalee, (from Keralam, speaking  the local language, Malayalam) because I probably have less in common with people of some of the northern parts of India than with crazy Croydon, where I have lived  since the late nineties, with occasional forays into Keralam to recharge my other self.  I started this site in 2013 and never pursued it. But now, senility combined with Covid Lock-down,  and the remorseless tick-tock (Rushdie style) of seconds, minutes, hours, days… persuade me that I must get this going, if my granddaughter is to have any idea about her fractured beginnings.

At fifteen years, she has a room and bathroom of her own, you enter there at your peril — unless your sneak in to pick up the daily debris, while she sleeps the sleep of the innocent. In our house in Thalassery, in the north of Keralam, I ponder, five of us females, aged between seven and fifty-five, slept in the puja room. Ammamma, the eldest had a narrow bed, the rest slept on mats spread on the floor. It was a small room; when the mats were rolled out, there was no walking room, so you stepped over the others if you needed to get out. I did not qualify for a pillow at my age, graduating to one only on my wedding night. I wonder what my new, just unpacked husband thought when he found his wife constantly slipping down a notch, in the bed, to escape the pillow. It didn’t help that some kind souls had covered the nuptial bed in jasmine petals. JESUS WEPT!

Men were considered superior to us; they slept upstairs on beds and mattresses. Indeed, but for the beds upstairs, the house was mercifully devoid of furniture. My father had two chairs in his office in the corner of the veranda. His clients sat on a bench, which was not trustworthy, as it had uneven legs and tended to go up at one end, when a weight came down on the other. My father also had a big table and a Dutch glass-fronted almirah. The almirah contained his law books, with The Indian Penal Code occupying pride of place. He was a lawyer.

We had a Planter’s chair too on the veranda, on which I used to curl up and sleep, waiting for my father to pick me up and carry me up to bed, when I was still little. It was a lovely object, that chair, until you got close to it. Most of the wickerwork had torn off on the seat and you had to stick to one little Strip, which had a few strands left. And look out for those sharp bits of unravelled cane sticking out!

For the rest, we sat on palakas and thadukkus , wooden stools and small grass-mats. These days, when I visit India, I see no stools or mats to sit on. The middle classes sit on sofas, while the poorer families sit on basic wooden chairs. Just as well considering the shape of my knees


A Forgotten World.

Talking about your hometown, which you visit for two short weeks every second year, is slightly hypocritical. Let's face it: this blog is about undiluted nostalgia, which I believe is an old person's congenital illness. If I look too closely I might find things that at the time I grew up, were a tad unpleasant.
   I hated the latrine detail -- the family that came to empty our shit buckets made me desperately sad. Most of the time, it was a young man who came; he did his job, hoisted the big bucket on to his shoulder and carried it to the waiting Tellicherry Municipal Council cart. TMC. We called it, Theetam, Moothram, Cashtom, i.e. shit, pee and garbage.
   Very occasionally a young woman came instead of him. She was pretty and saucy, smiled at everyone who met her eye, and would greet the telegraph poles if no one talked to her. She would ask for a drink and Achamma would give her a drink of conjee water, standing as far away from the woman as she could. I would dance around Ammamma and speak to the woman; she loved that. When I got married and left India in 1954, there was still no sewage system in Thalassery. It was only in the sixties that septic toilets became commonplace and the latrine-man became redundant.
   Thalassery was a small town in which, apart from two or three businessmen, who dealt in petrol or dry good,s everyone else was either poor or a notch above. 
   We bought a list of dry goods,-- rice, wheat and pulses -- and coconut oil, once a month -- it cost a glorious twenty-seven rupees. To get it in perspective, though, a doctor's home visit would cost five rupees, a gunny-bag of rice was eleven rupees and a yard of printed cotton was half a rupee onward. My college saris were between ten and fifteen rupees each of them. The fifteen rupee one was the precious khatau voile. I got six saris at the beginning of each year. Indeed, my wedding-sari was a breath-taking one hundred and five rupees. Six yards of Benares silk, generously decorated with gold thread for the present price of a man's vest.
   With lock-down time to spare, I have been taking a closer look at that time when we didn't consider a car an essential middle-class object, when plane travel was for the rich few, and nothing was made of plastic or nylon. Not long ago. I am talking about the early fifties when I was a young girl with limited aspirations, and life was perfect because I had three meals a day, and I knew every family who lived down our road. Without road-lights, I could see the entire night-sky on a rain-less day and a friend of my father's taught me to identify them by their constellations.

Thursday 2 July 2020

People of the World, Unite. Our leaders are Vile.

Look at the leader-list: Trump, Johnson, Modi, Bolsanaro...  A lying money-grubber; a lazy, lying, incompetent buffoon; a racist, Hindu fanatic, who ignores India's secular constitution; a tyrant who disposes of opponents in multiple, creative ways. Add Putin and you have a world in the throes of a blustering, mindless parade of leaders and parties, interested only in staying in power and self-aggrandizement. As for citizens, the devil take the hindmost.
   It is the buffoon that we in England have to suffer. I look at his disheveled, incompetent, glib comments, with that offensive smug smile on his face, whatever he is talking about, and I think --  that's it, it is a scarecrow he reminds me of. A straw thatch on top, a flat featureless countenance, which cannot show empathy; looking often as though he slept in yesterday's clothes and didn't have time to get clean before the cameras arrived.
   What is the hold that our very own Rasputin-Cummings have on our stammering, stuttering Prime Minister? Today I am listening to the Government's (Gove - Cummings Partnership) plans to get schools functioning completely in September. From the plans unveiled today, we can see the hands of people who have not been in a school for many, many years. Bubbles for six-year-olds? That will be something to watch. And how far will the teachers stand -- inside or outside the bubble -- from their charges, for whom they are, while in school, in loco parentis.  While the little ones sing 'ring-a-ring-a roses' gleefully, and collapse in a heap within the bubble, where is the teacher going to stand?
   At today's unexpected Downing Street briefing, Jenny Harris, the voice of government health said that 'schools are very important for children.' My, My MY... I didn't know that.
   With this silly government we are scuppered. Any ideas , teacher friends?  I am wondering how we stop teenagers wandering around, wherever. Just look in any park. I still cannot fathom the unholy haste to let the doors open on the lock-down.  Even the limited intelligence available in the Government must know we are in for another long, hard spike of the virus.
   Incidentally, I wonder -- can the Government really force parents to send children to school and fine them if they don't go??? Just a thought.
   Also, is it true that Gavin Williamson is going back to do his A levels?

Saturday 20 June 2020

Spilling out of Burrows

Today, suddenly, there is a quickening of eager life on the roads. On the residential road on which I live, along with many other oldish or middle aged families, the people are briskly about. On Brighton Road, which is fifteen minutes' walk downhill, the noise of traffic is getting back to its urgent hum. The road behind our house is pounding and rattling to the familiar, earth-shaking noise, of heavy duty vehicles. I am deeply, deeply concerned that we have learned nothing after the death of forty-thousand plus people. We seem to be ready to jump right back into our destructive lives.
   In the last ten weeks, there has been blessed peace in my back garden. The bees and moths are back, the birds are chattering away near my bird table, and from their nests, mother-birds warn me off when I go towards the trees on which they live. Or, perhaps, they are merely greeting me. How quickly they forgave us our trespasses. There is enough room for all of us on this planet, I think. Why do we threaten nature away?
   I am so grateful that the birds, moths and bees are willing to give us a second chance. They are such a benediction. We simply cannot afford to go back to our wanton ways.
   I consider what I, personally, can do, my little bit to avoid disastrous climate change. So, I shall, for a start, stop cooking beef in this house. This one's easy as we are not great meat eaters anyway. In winter, may be, we can keep the heating in the house a notch lower. Not easy for me, as I am the one with cold limbs. Instead of one pair of woolen socks, I shall have to wear two. An extra jumper would help too.
   As for the car, we have to consider it as a luxury, not an indulgence for those short trips to the local corner shop or park. The best way would be if families could share transport for school drop-offs and pick-ups. We tried that once, but evening activities in schools were all over the place. And, in the whole process, there was little or no goodwill. Yet, when I worked in Wickford and lived in Laindon, four of us teachers went to work in Bob Ashford's car, and paid him fifty pence a week for the privilege. Very civilised. Until public transport becomes safe it would be a good idea to share.
   Long distance flights are something we have taken for granted, with family in India, and friends all over Africa. That will have to stop. More Skype conversations, perhaps??
   We could all shop less, buy less. Indeed the whole idea of shopping as a desirable social or leisure activity, is one only affluent societies indulge in. In India, where prosperity has slowly advanced, middle-class folk still do not go shopping for fun. You go to the shops or market because you need something specific.
   Not buying more than we NEED, avoiding waste, is probably the first thing we can all consider. No one needs a wardrobe suffocating with tops and shirts and footwear overflowing.
   Here endeth my lesson for the day!!
 
 
   

Tuesday 16 June 2020

A CLUSTER F--K OF U TURNS

What is the collective noun for U TURNS? There have been quite a few by the Boris herd -- we have to have a name for them. STRING OF U TURNS? AN EMBARRASSMENT OF U TURNS? A Cluster f..k of u turns?
   Actually I don't care how it came about -- bless Rashford -- but if the children get their meals I am on the side of whosoever provides them. Tax payer?
   Therese Coffey needs a few lessons on poverty, such as a definition of it, which works for her. Will, 'hungry but no food coming' work? In this respect I have no problems. Food poverty is crystal clear to me from the visual images of my childhood. It is unforgettable. I watched the refugees from Pakistan begging from house to house in my little town, Thalassery, in Kerala. Since they didn't know Malayalam, they touched their lips and stretched their cupped palms out, looking at us imploringly. Achamma (grandmother) saved Conjee water for them when she drained the rice daily, and dropped a handful of rice in it, to give it more substance. She kept half coconut shells handy to serve them.   The ragged children hid behind the mothers; no men in the beggar-stream. Where were the fathers? Now, there are no beggars to speak of in India.
   In the late forties, a young man from the neighborhood came to our house in the evenings to help me and my two cousins with our homework. His mother, who had eight boys to feed,  pleaded with Achamma to take him on -- -You don't need to pay him,' she said. 'Just give him an evening meal.' He was a bright young man, who rose to the highest echelons of the local civil service. The whole community was very proud of him.
   Hats off to Marcus Rashford. Pity he isn't playing for Liverpool.

 
   

Sunday 14 June 2020

Learn in Schools?

Learn in Schools?? Or are they convenient places to park children while we make money, gossip, quarrel, go shopping... Because I figure children will not learn the valuable things they need to learn by a 'social distancing' school environment. They'll learn no more than my granddaughter does by 'isolating' herself in her room with mobile phone, laptop, make-up stuff. mirror... And Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.
   Children need to learn to negotiate their social environment, chatter, play, love, hug, shout, ask questions, make friends, quarrel, make up... Even criticise, question...   Every day, when my granddaughter proceeds to schools, her skirt just that half centimetre shorter than it should be, I don't say to her, 'Focus. Learn a lot.' Instead I say, 'Be happy, be kind.' And when she comes back in the evening with an avalanche of news, 'He said, she said, and she is like...' , I merely ask, 'And what did you do for someone else today?  She disdains to answer me; old people are so strange.
   And do these silly suits in office really believe children will be irreparably damaged by not going to school for a month, a half-year? My children, two boys and a girl were born in many countries, in some where schools started at eight years and boasted no reception classes. They are not exceptionally able or disciplined. And I certainly was not a demanding parent. Indeed I was not even around a great deal of the time, as I was teaching 'other people's children' in strange and distant places. My sons and daughter among themselves garnered four Masters degrees and a Ph.D, while somewhere along the way, I managed to do evening classes and an M A in Education. In spite of all that EDUCATION, we are extremely flawed individuals.
   Children have to be in places that other children gather and school is one of many places this can happen. We have to make that possible soon, but not while the two-metre rule applies.
   I know of at least two families who taught their children at home, and the children did as well or as badly in their GCSEs as anyone else. {Another blog some time on the monstrous imposition on parents and children called exams. What a way to calibrate a child as a functioning individual!)
   And, I hate to say this: so many teachers are damaged and weary by their every-day; I was one of them for many years.  We have no lien on knowledge of any kind, let alone child-rearing wisdom. There are some great individuals among teachers and children benefit hugely from their humanity, but they are very few. Most are like me -- chasing the material for the next lesson, catching up on marking homework from weeks ago, marking essays without consistency or objectivity...
   And now I will probably have a deluge of complaints from good teachers (whatever they are), so I shall go into hiding. SELF ISOLATION??

Tuesday 2 June 2020

A Strange Childhood

I write these memories down because it is only with age that I realise how strange my childhood was -- strange, that is, in comparison with other Indian girls of my age. I think other girls in my school-year found me a little strange too: my reading marathons, my political views, (most of my friends had no views at age ten), my short, boyish hair, and my careless clothes and appearance.
   After Achan (father) went to jail in 1942 for being a local leader in the Independence battle, things went further downhill. I remember I was in a school concert in 1943 and I didn't have a dress suitable for the stage. The teachers produced a pink satin dress and Rukmini teacher took her gold necklace off and put it round my neck. She had borrowed the dress from another girl in my class; It helped that the girl had a mother. 
   My father did not notice little things like clothes anyway even when he was around. He checked my hair, clipped my nails with a '7 o'clock' second hand blade, which he had finished with, and taught me things like how to write the number eight. A bit of a battle that; I had trouble getting the loops to close, especially as my writing lessons were on sand spread on the parapet of our veranda.
   Achan had good reason to keep my hair short, however -- it was full of lice. Every weekend I had to spend time getting the lice and nit out, only for them to come back with a vengeance a week later. When I got married I was terrified the lice would migrate to the hair of my new husband. That would have been quite a scandal. At some point during my early married years, the lice left. I wonder, was there a message there?
   As for books, there was a small glass-fronted almirah in the narrow corridor that ran the length of my school block, one for each class. Except it was for children with only a moderate desire to read - if forced. I generally finished the almirah's stock of fairy tales (fairy tales from Greece, Rumania, every conceivable country in Europe) and moved on to the next almirah in a term. In my standard 9, I had travelled the entire corridor and was looking for another book-habitat. My father took me down to the Victoria Library in town, and enrolled me. It was a dark and musty room with hardly another visitor, still a necessary right of passage. And  - it stocked Malayalam books too.
   It was only when I joined the Brennen College at age fifteen, that I went ballistic. Here was a library with long alley-ways full of books. You could get lost in there. I visited so often that the librarian started saving new consignments for me before he stamped them. What a discovery that library was! By the time our lecturer started on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,  in my first year at College, I had read it and knew Mark Antony's speech by heart. I stumbled upon 'The Tempest' next and realised how limited my understanding was.
   Today, I think--  why did my young,widowed father spend so much time doing his Professor Higgins act on me, when he should have been out at the Cosmopolitan Club having a good time with his friends? That club is a whole other story. 

Tuesday 12 May 2020

Rituals and Culture

I am reminiscing, what old people normally do when they have been restrained in one living space. We have been discussing Harari's HOMO SAPIENCE and his legends:
   According to Harari, humans have taken refuge in many myths. Ideas of religion, God, even our international banking systems, he argued, are convenient constructs. These structures console us in bad times. give us sanctuary, and situate us in comfortable surrounds. We need them, so we accept them and suspend disbelief. For instance, we hand over our money to banks across national barriers, comfortable in our belief that when we want our money back, it will be swiftly returned to us. When banking systems collapse we forget that we built them up and gave them credibility, and we are outraged.
  So I have been thinking about elaborate cultural practices -- I was well-placed to examine them as I was a Hindu girl growing up surrounded by Muslim houses. Their children were my childhood playmates, their men ran our corner shop and their women exchanged gossip with us over the broken down compound wall.
  But, when it came to ceremonies and practices, the divergence was palpable. When Hindu girls got married, they left their homes for good and followed a strange man (if it was an arranged marriage) to his home, after shedding a few obligatory tears, or, as in my case, sobbing my heart out for leaving my Achan (father), who was the only person I loved in the whole world.
  Muslim girls had no such problems . When they got married, the bridegroom just turned up in the evenings, after supper, and left early in the morning. The girl now, would get an ara, a room of her own, where she would collect and display little tokens of her married life.
  Aliyumma lived across the gully from our back garden. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Flawless complexion and beautiful features, not to mention a smile to die for. Muslims in those days married early. Aliyumma had stopped hopping across the gully to play with me when she started menstruating. She had always worn a flimsy thattom,, an apology for a face cover. It was always a small thorthu (bath towel) twisted around and under her hair. She taught me how to secure it without pins or slides. Interestingly, she never wore a burqha, the full-length head-to-foot gown that is now common practice in parts of the world. And ugly beyond despair.
  Aliyumma also stopped going to school at about the same time. When I asked, her Umma (mothersaid she would soon get married. She was all of thirteen years old. Our world diverged, mine to college and exams, hers to visiting husband and babies. Her husband worked in the Indian Navy and he wasn't around very much. When I went to her ara she would show me the small bottles of attar in her display almirah, silk scarves, crockery that had been presented to her... And she would giggle, carrying secrets that an unmarried me could not guess.
  Sometime later I heard her husband died quite young. I had lost touch with her when I myself married and left India.
  On one of my recent visits to my hometown, Thalassery, I stopped off at a textile shop near the bus stand to buy dothis as a birthday gift for a favourite friend and relative, Balettan. I spoke in Malayalam to the owner when I reached the counter to pay.
  'You are from Thalassery, I can see, from your Malayalam accent,' the shopkeeper exclaimed.
   'Yes, I lived near those fields on Court Road. My father was a lawyer.'
  He was Muslim, this shopkeeper; so I asked whether he knew my friend, Aliyumma.
  ''She was my Umma,' he said. 'She died quite young.'
  I had married into a westernized Sri-Lankan family, went where I pleased, and worked as a teacher.
  Aliyumma did not stand a chance.



  

Wednesday 22 April 2020

Accretions and Affluence.

We have allowed our daily lives to be suffocated with so many accretions over the last three or four decades:
  In 1943, when I was an eight-year old, growing up in the colonial shadows of the second world war, I did not know the taste of canned and bottled fizzy drinks. Or squash. If it was the lime or orange season the fruit would be squeezed, sugar added and it was delicious. Often, with sugar rationing during the war years, Ammamma (my father's sister, who ran the household) would add vellam, a raw jaggery, which came in dark brown lumps. We had no fridge, indeed in my father's house there was never a fridge. I offered to buy him one in the late eighties, during a brief bout of imagined wealth, but he wisely refused, saying he didn't want another addition to the list of necessities of his life.
  Now, my family buy Coke and Pepsi in numbers and our fridge has to make ice cubes to augment the luxury. Interestingly, I still can't drink very cold drinks, never having had the practice in my childhood.  Netflix is of course my family's best indulgence on Covid nights. I try to remember what I did at their age in India, beside reading to pass the time.
  I remember we had a brown-and-black bakelite Philipps radio, the size of a small microwave oven. Radio, Ceylon came on at four in the evening and Binaca Geethmala, (a stream of songs sponsored by Binaca toothpaste) could keep me occupied for hours. Until the radio went up in smoke one day; it self-destroyed. Never found out why. The radio was not replaced, until the seventies when I went home from England one time carrying a transistor radio as a gift for my father. That was the size of a toaster.
  Now, in my home, there are four TVs, two sound systems and a radio by each bed. With three wage earners in the house, we just buy whatever we think we need. Emphasis on the word think.
  As to clothes,  the less said, the better. We are running out of storage space.
  And the three adults in our house own a car each though we tend to travel to the same places. My father bought his first car in 1949;  a light blue Standard Eight, with a small window on the roof, which never became rain-proof. It was the runaround for the whole neighbourhood. I continued to walk the two miles to school and back. Eventually father sold the car because he found he couldn't afford all the trips he financed for everyone on our road.
  Looking back, as people my age spend time doing, nothing was imported in our little town. Fish came, practically gasping for air, straight from the sea and the river. The fisherman trotted down the road, eager to sell the fish before it got spoiled. Similarly the lamb and beef were butchered right in front of the customers, in the market stall.
  All the vegetables were grown locally.  The vegetable vendor would offer aubergine, bittergourd, drumsticks, pumpkins... Cabbage and French beans were not grown in our town and were considered expensive English vegetables. Ditto tomatoes, capsicum and cauliflower. The woman who sold veg to us generally had several types of fresh spinach and long beans, which she grew in her back garden.
  I have to think really hard to picture anything that came from outside our little town. Saris arrived from other parts of India and pretty textiles too.
  All this has changed now. India is fully globalised. The lemmings all over the world are blindly walking towards dependence on far-off lands, waste, and in the final reckoning, destruction of our long-suffering planet.
  All we need now is something from somewhere else that can do our thinking for us. We have made a start with Google Searches.

Friday 17 April 2020

The New and Sparing World

A New and Sparing World
No, I don't mean the mighty U S of A. Some of the people in the mighty USA are dedicated to consumerism in a way I cannot even fathom. Once upon a time I lived in a place where life was quite basic -- no supermarkets, frozen food or Doctor Pepper. I once asked one American friend what he missed most in that place. Disposable kitchen tissue, he said. In a country where women boiled strange vegetation for hours to make something that resembled mushy soap.
  With COVID terrorizing us, I have wondered, what price our extravagances? At the end of all this, are we willing to take a good, long look at our silly indulgences? Are we able to consider the harm we are doing to our world?
  I think: do we need to travel quite so much to quieten the sheer frenzy of our indulgent selves? Do families need more than one car in their front-gardens? And are all their trips in them necessary or useful?
  I start with my own household. The number of items of clothes we buy for our grandchild is sinful. And then we give away two or three bagfuls to charities twice a year. A few years ago, I remember I used to buy clothes a size too small for my biggish self. In the hope that I could slim down to them. Did I ever succeed in wearing them? The answer can be guessed.
I look in my condiments cupboard and there are several kinds of vinegar, Soy sauces and pickles.They fester there for years, and jars barely used get chucked out after a year, or two, or many. My linen cupboard is bursting with towels and duvet covers from all over the world; pillow cases that never see the light of day...  Recently I counted the saris I haven't worn since decades and there were sixty-four. I periodically look at them -- they are pretty to look at. But I don't wear them in England. Some are from the time of my youth, old and saturated with memories, but still, there is no excuse with such covetousness.
  After Covid, shall we see some sense in our lives? Less time rushing around wanting more and more, instead find more time to enjoy what is all around us. Just now, the butterflies, wasps and bees are back in force in my garden. The birds are reclaiming the trees, the grass, the bushes. I potter around in the wet mud, knowing I have to wash my hands so many times anyway.
  Next year, hopefully with death and damnation behind us, I shall make a list of how I shall trim down my life. Stay still. look. listen...  

Thursday 16 April 2020

Food in the Time of Covid

Today it looks as though our bread supply will run out.  In spite of my eating ends, crust and all, which I normally disdain to look at. We eat an unhealthy amount of soft white in our house; we have enough of that to carry us through to next week, but my daughter's seeded brown is over. So she's baking bread. I think the last time she did this was a decade ago. Meanwhile, having taken out the Kenwood and the balance, she made scones for me. She didn't approve of the fact that I insisted on ladling butter, jam, AND cream on to each half.
   There's been a revolution in our house about our concept of food. We don't waste a morsel of anything. Yesterday I tasted my courgette and spinach in yoghurt and quickly put it aside. Uneatable, I thought. My daughter added bits and pieces, pulverized it in the mixer and named it soup. My son and she ate it. I am reeling from surprise. My son does not often notice what we put in front of him, which, at the moment is a blessing.
   I am going back to Malayalee ways, cooking up Moong dhal, lentils and chick peas. We excavate things lurking deep inside the freezer, and eat it, sometimes not quite sure whether it is animal, mineral or vegetable. Whereas, in the past, I would flick such lurking unknowns into the bin, pleading unhealthy appearance, now I look closely, talk to it, and cook it.
   Yesterday I cooked an enormous cabbage-fry, normally something that hangs around in the 'frig accusingly for a whole week, but it has disappeared. I had to cook a whole cabbage because I couldn't countenance letting it get dry and mangy, (it looked a little yellow in parts) with the current paucity of veg. Fresh vegetables involve a trip to the supermarket, which we do not try very often. Yesterday, I also cooked a big pot of Lentils in coconut milk and that too, nearly disappeared. So, I think,what shall I create today? There is some flaked rice sitting in the larder for at least a year. I will make uppuma with it. Cook it with onions and green chilli after briefly frying it in a dry wok, and cooking it in a very little water. No coconut for garnish, but I shall do the Indian tempering with mustard seed and a dry chilli bean?
   Necessity, closely related all inventions. As they say!

For my UK friends, an easy, quick recipe:
Chick peas in yoghurt
Drain liquid from the can and empty one can of chick-peas into a pan. Add boiled water to cover, a quarter teaspoon of turmeric powder and simmer for 5 minutes. Add half an onion, chopped, a pinch of crushed pepper, one green chilli  chopped fine, and a teaspoonful of mashed ginger.  Add salt to taste. Add 8 ounces of coconut milk and a tablespoonful of chopped coriander leaves.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then add a cup of yoghurt. Stir gently. 
Goes with any kind of bread or rice.


 
   

Monday 13 April 2020

Write or Eat Chocolate

Write or Eat Chocolate?
That's the choice today. I could read of course. Just downloaded one by Tayari Jones. What a writer!  Chocolate of course beckons for brunch as usual; I am tempted, because it does not involve any thinking. Dreadful business, thinking. And it threatens:

  Bubonic Plague across the road. When I got up in the morning, as a child of seven years, in 1942,  and looked out the window, there was always this huge more-or-less, but not-quite-finished house. The porch was big enough to park one of those long Chevrolets that rich Indians favoured in the forties. The red brick had not been plastered -- the owners had gone overseas just before the second world war started, and had been stranded in Penang, much like the families blocked from travelling now in the COVID 19 months. In those days Indians migrated to Ceylon, Malayasia, Burma, Singapore, even East Africa, not the UK or the USA. There was a big pond on one side of the house, in which, many years later, after the family returned, I learned to swim, using a float of old, dried coconuts tied round my waist.

  In the war years, though, a family of beggars squatted in that empty house, appearing out of nowhere. Two young men, two women, and several half- naked children. The women came to our well sometimes for drinking water; occasionally there would be a toddler tugging at her mundu. At that time, my father was in jail, having got on the wrong side of the British Raj because of his political activities and we children, Mani and I, could wander across and stare at the beggars.

  They cooked on a three-stone fire set up on the front veranda and slept on the end of it too. Nobody had electric lights then and kerosene was rationed. The beggars burned wicks in coconut shells briefly in the evenings, like fireflies flitting around.  One day, when Mani and I went to stare, the women chased us away. They didn't speak our language, but their distress was obvious.

  'They're sick,' our maid informed us next day. 'Bad sickness,'  We found out how bad when the family started dying one by one. Plague, my father's colleague, Nambiar, informed us. 'No one should go that side.' Achamma (father's mother) filled coconut shells with cow dung solutions and lined the walkway to the gate to ward off infections. It must have worked because we didn't get plague, though there was no dearth of huge bandicoot rats in the firewood.

  The family across died one by one, until there was just one woman and a child left. When the shit- cart came to take the last dead child away, Mani and I hid on the back-parapet of our house and cried. The unfinished house was empty again, soon after.

  Looking back, I am surprised at the number of deadly diseases we survived -- Smallpox, Typhoid, Measles, Whooping cough... My young mother, all of eighteen years old, had died five years back of Tuberculosis, and a young man from the house behind ours also died of Tuberculosis. In homes around us, people died, but we escaped. No doubt the cow dung worked. Inoculations against Cholera, and vaccinations against Small pox gradually became commonplace. I still have an imprint of that old vaccination on my upper arm; the weapon used was so enormous.

  Now I am wondering whether I should look for cow dung again.

Saturday 4 April 2020

Thank you Jeremy Corbyn. 'May your tribe increase'.

The conspiracy within the Labour Party to get rid of Corbyn succeeded because the rest of the membership allowed it to happen. Today I remember the hope and confidence within the party when Corbyn became leader. When the young chanted OOooooh Jeremy Corbyn in the most unlikely venues, I thought, at last, there is light to be seen at the end of the tunnel.
   Here is a man who never said anything he didn't believe in, never posed and wooed the Press.  He had principles, recently missing from politics. He was honest, caring and fair. He energized ordinary people like me to step out and canvass for Labour. In parliament, Corbyn didn't slash below the belt like May and Johnson. He was civil and professional. In the wrong place obviously. What is the point of being polite to Boris bloody Johnson?
   The Labour manifestos during the 1917 election and the 2019 debacle were a wonder to read. At last, we were going to attempt to remedy some of the imbalances in our festering society. But it was all too much for the electorate, too long used to accepting whatever excrement was handed out to them by the Government in power, Tory, New Labour, whatever...
   The NHS, of course took a crippling hit, because they said, we had no money. The money tree was barren. Corbyn maintained that money would be found when and if the Tories wanted to find it. Like right now. I rest my case.
   A country has to be pretty diseased to elect a Tory Government, as of ours now, which is not only uncaring right, it is also incompetent, incoherent and incapable of planning. When did they start considering ventilators and masks for the hospitals? Tomorrow?
   What makes an impoverished section of the country vote Tory? And that too under bungling, blustering buffoon, Boris. In my worst moments I thought the red wall in the North, which had turned toxic blue, deserved what they got.
   They took it all out on Labour, on Corbyn, blindly following  the glib 'Get Brexit Done' distraction.     So, I am writing to thank Jeremy, who tried so hard to educate the party, the public, the people, and failed because he never learned to do the suit-and-tie act. Any time you care to come back, Jeremy, I am right behind you. I think  the country lost the one opportunity they had in decades to try to have a level society. The Press, of course, were complicit.
   I think Starmer will do great. I hope he succeeds in booting the Goves and the Borises out.
   I love you, Jeremy. And thank you. You restored my faith in politics. 

Tuesday 31 March 2020

Isolation 31.3


ISOLATION 31.3

The milk is gone -- all four pints of it. Not satisfied with that, the selfish so-and-so has also taken our
milk- bottle basket, fruit juices and bread, all of which came with our delivery early
morning yesterday. Corona brings out the worst in some people, fortunately a tiny deluded minority We have occasionally had one pint stolen, (I thought I should put some sugar out to go with it) but the whole delivery? Jesus wept!
  I normally wake up to the sounds of the workmen tinkering with metal and stone from the building
site across the road from us. This whole road is gradually being re-constructed by greedy developers.
Old England is disappearing fast. (Some of it like, houses without central heating or indoor toilets
for instance, we are glad to forget) Alan Bennet, where are you, who moaned so powerfully about
that lost landscape?
  Our road was the epitome’ of grace and privilege. Houses set back from the road, lovely green
lawns and trees, three-car families flaunting their wealth… I often felt out of place here, like a bag
lady at the Savoy grille) Now, we have these monstrosities, three and four storey flats with mean
little windows and no parking spaces. Maybe the new residents who will move into the flats in front
will be a little more friendly (I hope) than the stuck-up doctors and such-like, with their heads up
their fundamentals, who took the developer’s generous cash and disappeared
   Today, finally, the workmen are staying at home. So, I have unobstructed view of the three mobile
toilets, one cobalt blue, one leaf green and the other sky-blue, which served the builders. As I write,
the only distraction is the 24-hour news-feed about COVID 19.



Thursday 19 March 2020

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, published 1937


(Not going out at all, except into the garden, on the rare days when the sun peeps out. Not today. So, too much time to do some unnecessary thinking:
Random thoughts about my antecedents.)


 I believe this book by Lin Yutang spoke to an impulse already in me –interestingly, it came from the shelves of a man who was a declared hedonist. I was nineteen years old when I read it, going through an ascetic phase. I had suddenly come alive to the fact of the poverty and misery in India. I had fallen in love for the first time (for all of three weeks) with a young man who had no time for me. Deep contemplation and life-choices were in order.
  The refugees from newly-born Pakistan were fleeing into India still (this was 1954); they had trickled through to Kerala in the far south of India. All were sick, starving and in some cases, mutilated. Muslims from India were going in the opposite direction, similarly traumatized. I read too much, had just finished looking for inspiration in the old and new Testaments, The Baghavad Githa and Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. Thompson’s An Indian Day, which came at the end of this readathon stunned me. I could no longer live my casual, gossip-and-cinema existence with my friends. I drew away, started wearing white clothes, put my jewelry away and became vegetarian. My aunt said I needed a laxative and my father looked hard at me and as usual commented, ‘She’ll get over it.’ He was right. But my friends became impatient with what they called my posturing and abandoned me.
  Lin Yutang spoke to me directly about enjoying all the sensual things in life. Use your senses, he said. Enjoy the murmur of the crickets, the gurgle of a happy baby, the birdsong, all the sounds that make you stop and listen. Look for the beautiful in your life, flowers, sunsets, whatever gives you pleasure. I remember reading that one of the most satisfying tactile things in life would be to scratch an itch. And so on with food, smells…
  This was a gap-year for me and I had time. We lived surrounded by rice fields, as far as my eyes could see. Every evening, I sat on the edge of my compound, blissfully alone, with my latest book in hand, relishing that lovely feeling of contentment. Later, in the night, as the rain poured in torrents, noisily, down the Calicut tiles on the roof, I lay awake and listened. The crickets set up a soft whir and the bull frogs croaked in their watery domains. I have never since enjoyed a more complete existence.
  All my life since then, I have let my senses revel in the world around me, the people in it, and the spaces around me. I remind myself, agnostic that I am, that this is all there is; don’t let it slide past unnoticed.
  Some Hindu spiritualists believe that we are living in Maya, a hallucination. This life does not exist; it is magical entertainment for the Gods, of which there are so many in the pantheon.
  So, wherever I am now, I am open to the sights and sounds and all that make me aware that I am alive. I stroke my cats till they purr, watch the goldfish in the pond (they are not unlike us humans) and the sunlight glinting on the silvery Kochi backwaters near my house is magical.
  Within all my insecurities and discontents there is quiet core of completeness, thanks to a Chinese author I stumbled upon at the right time in my life.