Prison and Moong for Supper

Prison and Moong for Supper In late August of 1942. the police came for my father. It was all very civilised. There were two of them, in an open-topped jeep and they were not in uniform, but the jeep shouted 'police' loudly. I saw them walking up our walkway. My father was shaving, looking in our mottled old mirror, propped up on the window sill. I saw the jeep because I hovered where my achan was -- always. 'Policukaran,' I said and my father looked up. Achan got up quickly and wiped his face with his small towel. Streaks of lather, as usual, remained in his ear lobes. The men knocked on the front door and my aunt opened the door to them as Achan called out, 'Tell them to come up.' Achan knew they would come for him; a friendly policeman had warned him some weeks before about this LIST. 'Yor name is top of the list,' Lateef had said. Lateef was a member of the crowd that assembled in the far corner of our veranda to play '28', on Saturday evenings. On our veranda because Achan was a widower and didn't have to worry about a wife objecting to the crowd and the noise, or even the many cups of tea that had to be delivered periodically. 'If they pass the QUIT INDIA resolution in Wardha, the arrests will start,'Lateef had whispered, and they did. The ALL INDIA CONGRESS COMMITTEE met in Wardha, and passed the resolution on the 12th of August. It is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being released that brought all this back into my head.For Achan also, there had been no trial, the period of incarceration was not mentioned, nor were the nature of his crime, or the jail to which he would be taken. It was three months before we got a letter from him, severely inked out by a vigorous censor. So now, we knew he was in Velloor jail. The policy was to put them in jails away from their states so they couldn't communicate with others in the vicinity. Achan, as many middle-class people spoke Malayalam and English fluently. When he returned from Jail in late 1944, he was fluent in Telugu as well. I was seven years old when Achan went; some days I thought he would never come back. Achamma, his mother thought he was being tortured. She lost her marbles, refused food, spat medication out, and died slowly. When she died, Achan was parolled for two weeks and I knew he would live. At home, my aunt struggled with Arithmetic, the arithmetic of money and its elasticity. She grew spinach, okra and aubergine in the compound and stopped buying fish. In the evenings we ate a conjee made of moong and wheat, because black-market rice was beyond her budget.Kannettan, next door, who took me to the temple festival every year refused that year because I had no dress that was not torn or shabby. The nuns in school were strong supporters of the British Raj; they made me stand up in class, and mocked my 'criminal' dad. After several incidents, I bit back one day. 'He is in jail because he is fighting for our freedom. Yours too, Sister.' She looked shamefaced and stopped baiting me after that. The neighbourhood looked after us, giving us sugar and rice, fruit and vegetables. The tailor, dhobi and jutka driver did not take money from us. And the day Achan came back, they crowded in our veranda and their love of him was obvious. I glowed with pride. My Achan was SO special.