In the Beginning.

In the beginning there was the slate... For ever and ever, Amen!
Here also there was variety. If you got one of those slates in your school bag, which had a rough wooden edge and stained black from the poor quality of the slate, hard luck. Some would not clean properly and the marks made by the slate pencil would still show on the surface, muddling up your already ham-fisted attempts to write. Then there were the aristocrats - thin frames, lovely slate, which wiped clean and pencils from heaven, which wrote clear, did not break when you bit the end and lasted a whole year.I remember the pink-and-white striped paper on the bottom half of it - what was that for?
   Cleaning the slates was a whole art form: every morning you got this moist weed from your compound and squeezed the wetness on to your slate. Then you rubbed clean with a rag - or the side of your hand, or the end of your uniform. Whatever.
   When did the slate become an endangered species? Now we have white boards, which wipe clean at a pull of the sliding board on top, markers which behave as they should and school backpacks full of unimaginable wealth. In 1939, we dropped our slates into a cloth bag and waited for the four-lined copy book, which came much later. With the abcd.. and the ellemenopee. No sandwich boxes,no games kit, no dry tissues, zilch.
   The slate went through several incarnations. The edges broke, then the frame cracked. Sometimes you were left with a piece of black slate, an irregular, sharp piece that was good for a lot of mischief.
   Learning started with 'Thara, para, pana.' I remember that distinctly. Except the Lord's Prayer was the first thing every day in class. Hands in prayer mode, heads down and sister listened to the fumbles. I did not understand a word. 'Art in Heaven?' What was that?
   With reading there were four pictures on the page to help you. The beginning of actual reading in Malayalam, because it is a phonetic language. You learned your fifty-four alphabets and away you went. Slowly at first, then gathering speed.
   Can't remember any English till much later. Long past the first week's tears, the beginning scrapes and scratches when you got pushed down in the play ground and waited for Amma to come and pick you up. Or as in my case, Nani edathy who did duty for my mother. But that's a whole other blog.
   I lost my bag in the first week and remember crying in the hall at play-time, totally ignored by the rest of the world. Such sorrow! The rains drowned out my misery until Sister Veronica caught me by the arm when the bell rang out and said 'Ponnu bag, was it?' So much for empathy with the babies entrusted to her. I was four then.
   Lunch came in tiffin carriers. Mine was made of brass as stainless steel for kitchens had still to make its appearance.The gofor at home walked all the way, sun or rain, to bring that food to the school dining room, which smelled of Sambar, fish curry and pappadam. Then he had to find you in the play ground and that became harder when you grew older and learned the magic of hide-and-seek and chain runs.
   It was a long school day, which started at nine and went on till four in the evening. I dozed through most of the afternoon.Thankfully afternoons were about drawing, needle work, games and such like. I never learned to draw or sew and there was no one at home to teach me either.
   There were rituals when you went home too. As soon as you jumped out of the rickshaw you left your bag on the veranda and washed your feet and your face near the well. The adults would have left water for you there. Then you got a cup of tea and it was me-time till sixish, when you were called in to pray. 'Ramaramarama...' and then hymns to Saraswathy ('Saraswathy he, palayamam. Sarasiruha rehane. What did that mean? I still don't know.)and Shivan.
   The Gods propitiated, you sat down on the little floor mats or wooden stools to have conjee and the day's punishment. Moong dhal or tapioca mashes. Then it was bed time.
   Roll out the mats, fight over the one case-less pillow, which smelled of very old coconut oil, and slip away. Till tomorrow morning and that slate.
   

The Thalassery Fix

Came back from Thalassery yesterday after four wonderful days. Got my Thalassery fix. Hope it will take me through another pallid year.
   It was cool the way Ernakulam never feels. Clean and fresh with the gentle winds of Shishiram just skimming the ground cover. In Moozhikkara and Kodiyeri (Yes, that of the Balakrishnan fame.) the compounds are still the old compounds: large tracts of land with ancient trees in which the birds establish dynasties. Dawn -song is a benediction in itself.
   If you are a light sleeper like me, you have the owls, the foxes, the stray dogs, all contributing to the cacophony of the deep night, which is unmitigated dark, except where the moon manages to trickle through the trees. It is as though the night is theirs - go away, people.
   Morning song, literally, starts with the Hindu devotional songs from the temple, followed by the call to prayer by the Muezzin. What Graham Greene called the unholy alliance of old religion with new technology. But he did go for an old religion in the end.
   My father once pointed out to me the house where I was born. It had green glass on the windows giving it the air of a Muslim house. The walk from our house, hugging the Koduvally river and veering off left at the old Dharmadam bridge, took us over the brow of a hill and in rapid descent towards the Courts after that. At the zenith, the old European Club was guarded by sentries late into the forties and no Indian was a member. It was later the site of Justice V R Krishna Iyer's house and subsequently became the Bishop House when he left for Delhi and the Supreme Court. Bouganvillea grew on the fences near by and the whole area was a little dark. I held on to my father's safe, cool hands till we reached the descent. The Arabian sea was just a whisper away.
   I keep going back to this place and I know it is not any one house that makes my step springier, makes me slough off the marks of age. It is the people, I am sure. A quality of welcome in them that I don't find anywhere in the world. The sounds of North Malabar Malayalam, which spell good fellowship to prodigals like me.
   This place made me, I think. The beaches in which I had the space to consider the world, while the breakers attacked the rocks below. The Sacred Heart Convent is still quietly there on a side road, inconspicuous unless you are looking for it.
   Many Hail Marys and Our Fathers later, I got to College and discovered the library at the Brennen. An amazing place, that was. I cosied up to the English Department and declared intent to the librarian. He indulged me, while I went through that long room full of books and dust in the old college. How ever did I pass any exams in Maths? I still wonder. But I shed religion and became firmly agnostic.
   Now I meander here and there, pause for breath and let the words come. All the words that I garnered those many years ago. The words and the thoughts that started in Thalassery.

This Other India

I am still reeling from the Hungama (sounds like a festival) news yesterday. One in three children dying from malnutrition is Indian. I can't get past that. Where do you begin? Where is the government? Where are the NGOs, the charities, the other lucky Indians with full stomachs?
   And India is meant to be shining. Right. Shining for whom?
   The middle-class that rushes to satisfy every whim of their offspring, can they imagine what it is to a mother to see her son or daughter withering away, a heap of bones diminishing daily? What it is to know you cannot change that because there is no money to buy food?
   India should be cringeing, this incredible (Yes, very difficult to believe.) India of ours. Food security is coming, we are told, but it is coming from a long way away (to the tribal lands in the North) and many children will die before it reaches them. Before the Government is finished with the Lokpal and much else and turns its attention to the children.
   We have got our priorities totally wrong: that vulgar display of the first Rolls Royce driving into Kochi, the District Collector (who should know better)) getting in and driving it. What's wrong with this lot? Maybe he should drive down to the waste lands on which the migrants camp and take a look at their existence. Sans sanitation, sans clean water, sans food at times. That Rolls is going to do them a lot of good!
  The last time I witnessed starvation in India was when the refugees from Pakistan flooded into India and dribbled down South just after Independence. There was a beggar every few minutes asking to be fed, making that universal humiliating sign of hunger, hand to mouth. The household saved the starch from the rice, threw a handful of rice into it, but it was always too little. These Hindi speaking families did not know the languages of the South and were totally bereft.
   I thought all that was over forever. But here we go again! Ethiopia is encoaching into certain parts of India!

The Dubai Syndrome

 It is commonmplace for Indian husbands to go to Dubai (at one time all of the gulf states were subsumed under the tiltle 'Dubai') with wives staying behind. Remittance wives are not new to Kerala or to India for that matter. At first there was Malaya and Ceylon, Burma and the east coast of Africa. They went in steamers, which took weeks to cross the oceans and came back years later. Interestingly, my father-in-law went to Scotland for seven years to become a doctor and his young wife stayed behind. Some marriage that. So we went where the money beckoned and some came back rich. Others never came back. My husband's old man returned wearing a three-piece suit, a bow tie and a fob watch. He ate bulls eyes and porridge for breakfast ever after.
Hanging around in the long corridor in Dubai airport one night, some years ago, I came across some Malayalee drivers chatting. They did not spot me for a Malayalee, probably because I was wearing a shift - my usual, shapeless, maximum-relaxation outfit for air travel - and carried hardly any luggage. If you were from Kerala, in the sixties, you travelled behind a barrage of shopping bags.
   In those days the travel between Dubai and Cochin was fraught. Men carried back 'three-in-ones' and 'two-in-ones,' making the aisles of aircrafts dangerous places to be when embarking. All over the place the red-and-white bomb-proof Dubai plastic bags could be seen with five-kilo tins of orange squash and milk powder, dried fruit and chocolate and sweets enough to pay for the new Benzes of at least three or four dentists.
The aisles sounded like a Kochi bus at rush-hour, Malayalam urgencies being called out as passengers settled. I generally ended up completing customs forms for a whole lot of them at three in the morning as they had no English. I breezily wrote 'no' against the questions about new goods they were bringing into India. Getting the details from them was just too difficult.
I got talking to those drivers in the Dubai lounge eventually as they kept sneaking looks at me and my sparse hand luggage. 'Will she carry some for us?' they asked each other in whispers looking at the Emirates official sizing up hand luggage items. So I had to put them out of their misery.
   'Bad shoulder,' I said in Malayalam. 'Can't carry too much.'
   'Do you go home often?' I asked, trying to mitigate the refusal. The two answered together. 'Good Lord , no.' One went every two years and the other every four. The first one thought he was extremely lucky to see his family once in every two years. 'Haven't seen my new baby,' the other volunteered. 'Over three years now.' Poor sod, I remember thinking. He'll need all the sweets in the world to entice that little one into his strange lap. I supposed the compensations would be the new concrete-roofed houses, indoor toilets and dowries for sisters. Come to think of it, if those guys decided to stay home, their families would probably forcibly drag them to Nedumbasseri or wherever and put them back on the planes to Sharjah, Abu Dhabi or Quatar.
   This migration has of course been responsible for many changes in the social - and possibly- physical landscape of Kerala. It hits me in the solar plexus when I travel to Thalassery these days, which is once a year on my visit to Kochi. I can no longer find my way around the town in which I was born and raised. You'd think that is because of development. Not so. Not so at all. North Malabar is the despised poor relative of the State Government. Too stroppy by half, too violent and so, no money.
   Thalassery remains without the usual signs of civilisation: good, wide roads; trustworthy water supply; power, broadband ...  There are hospitals scattered here and there and I suppose that's a step forward, considering the old general hospital, into which you went (Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.) if you were poor and had the temerity to get sick. Mind you, the hospitals are private now and and a  sick appendix could cost you more stomach ache (and head ache) than the original disease. But there is a choice anyway.
   What I notice these days is that there are high-rise flats all over the place dominating the landscape; I get claustrophobic just looking at them. And then there are the new concrete boxes where once we had fields and red spinach and tapioca growing, rippling in the breeze. They have low ceilings and sit squatly on village land, looking a little out of place. I could feel sorry for them.
   I should accept that people now have flat-tops to live in as compared to the old fragile thatches. Definitely more durable. But, for sheer ugliness those flat tops are hard to beat.
   There is money in Thalassery now, I console myself. People eat better, dress well and have longer lives. What started as a few smuggler's boats dropping off contraband gold on the beaches at midnight, has now turned into a legitimate livelihood. Still, I don't know whether I can call this progress if a man and woman have to spend their youth apart, though married, so that their families can prosper. There must be other less painful ways, I tell myself.
   I remember what one wife said to me; her husband was expected back soon.
'You must be happy,' I said. 'After so many months.' She looked confused.
'I am not sure of anything. I don't know him, his clothes, his ways. I have forgotten all that. Then he comes back and ...'
Did it look like an intrusion? That was an embarrassing moment. What was she trying to say?
  

The Changing Face of Indian Marriages

Some years ago, in the fifties, when I was ripe for sacrifice, there was the Suitable Boy and the supplicant parents syndrome. Like, I have this daughter: beautiful, brilliant at college, sings like a nightingale, cordon bleau cook and I will give her away to any odd-body that deigns to take her away. (Not me I am talking about, but the general trend.)We'll also give him a lot of money on occasion, and deck our daughter with gold. So long as he is the right caste, and of the same education and social levels.
   In those days I was merely irritated by this. Many Indian novelists writing in English became successful on the phenomenon of 'arranged' marriages, Seth included. Now things have changed (for the better) and I have to be astounded.
   When I got married in 1957 I had no expectations beyond a secure home and a husband who would let me be. A few rich saris and gold trinkets would come in handy too. Love did not enter the equation.
   My problem was that I couldn't let him be. I wanted him to have words like me, discuss the nature of religion, death, and the sun rising daily. Now I know this was unreasonable. But then, I felt cheated and wondered why my far-seeing father had lost his courage when it came to his daughter's spouse. I had married into a family that had got degrees, but never got educated. They deplored the strange fact that their new bride wanted to read books while still on honeymoon.
   The next generation did not fare too differently. The girls were still decorated and given away for nothing, on a plate. The bridegrooms sat back and took their pick - or their families did. For them it was effortless.
   Not so for the brides. They had to fast and pray on Saturdays so that they would get good husbands. And their mothers directed them to make themselves desirable with oil baths, and frequent the temples to plead with the Gods.
   If, in addition to being merely stroppy, you also had Saturn in your seventh house according to the astrologers - as I had - God help you. The prospects were gloomy.
   The only saving grace in those days was that most weddings took place in the home of the brides and took all of ten minutes. Now you are not married, now you are. Many people came for the vegetarian feast but the gold expected by the bridegrooms' families did not require a second mortgage and festivities did not go on for five days in five different places.
   Now of course the girls have wised up. They have flooded the higher end of the job markets and stride the world with confidence. If they don't like what they get they come home in six months and forget the husband.
   How easy it has become to 'unmarry?'  No stigma attached and no shame to the family.
   There are many reasons why the women these days get disillusioned with married life:
     No one has mentioned sex in passing, so there is trouble in that department sometimes.
     The concept that marriages are all about gold jewellery and fancy clothes takes a beating. There is cooking to do, mother-in-law to contend with and the husband is after all a stranger, whose character comes to focus slowly.
     Two families have got married too in the process and both have to be placated.
     Expectations, ratcheted up by cinema and television soaps are hard to meet.
   A few are lucky - allowed to make their own mistakes. That is for urban women. For the rural girls times lag behind.
   The sacrificial lamb however is still decked out and fortunes spent on getting rid of her. Families are impoverished in the process and grievances last a lifetime.
   If I could persuade these young girls to stand firm and reject husbands who demand dowries, if I could show them how they can get married simply and with grace and the outcomes would be no different... It would be a step too far if I suggested they live together with future spouses, test the domestic waters, but I live in hope.
   It is all just a question of time. Rock on girls, the future is with you.
 
   

The Quality of Memory

   Inevitable that when I begin admitting to age (senility?) I also have to consider the quality of my memory. At seventy-six, (the new sixties they call it, hoodwinking themselves) I am only beginning to stare down anno domini face-on. I am not winning.

   So I dig deep into my Thalassery beginnings, and sometimes I come up with gold. Brings a smile to my heart:

   My first train journey on the Madras Mail: it usually came in at about mid-day daily (a very elastic mid-day as trains did not care too much about schedules then; there were so few, they took major liberties with time.) and left two hours later, after its journey further north. I could hear the magic whistle of that train as it approached the station, huffing and puffing, and when it went on its way to Mangalapuram, I listened to it clickety-clacking on that flimsy bridge across the Koduvally river. I counted the wooden sleepers on the bridge once when I was older - there were eighty-three of them. And little 'reserves' for people walking on that bridge, if a train came by. They jutted out of the bridge and seemed designed for a small cat.

   I was going to Madras to visit my mother's family, the first time after my mum disappeared from my life, around the age of two-and-a half years. I had not started school yet, so I would be less than four years old at that time. My father got Shekaran Meistry, his tailor, to make me four silk dress; dark, velevety green, rich maroon, sunshine yellow and midnight blue. They all had small white or cream prints on them and Meistry had added piping and frills. For a little girl who lived in white mul-mul slips this was untold luxury. That day I wore my green dress. 

   Just before I left - for all of six weeks- my father reminded me to go next door and say goodbye to our neighbours, the two sisters, Madhavi and Nani, who 'borrowed' me every day for a while. They fed me eggs from their chicken and let me play in the goat-poo, which dried to black nuts and didn’t smell at all.

   Their brother Kannan used the dried waste for his garden and he was a severe looking man. I called him Kannettan. In an age when all older men wore Ettan tags and women were Echis. He was forever chanting the nos. Picking up the goat-poo was a definite no-no.  But that day he smiled and hugged me. Picked a red rose off his one rose bush, indeed the only rose on that bush, and told the women to stick it under my bobby pin. That rose was perfect, shiny, with petals shaped in rose-heaven. I can still remember the lovely smell of it.

   'Motherless little one,' the women murmured as they fussed over me. Memory is not a video; it is a series of stills, crystal clear as in the eyes of a child. A pretty green dress, the silk slippery on me; a red rose to die for; a whisper in my ear, which spelt love. Perfect!

   That day I learned there were advantages to the motherless state, especially if you did not know your mother. Much later, my father fed me books, while most other girls were learning to cook, getting wood-ash in their hair, as I cultivated a reader's hump with bad posture. I learned words and how to play with them, to conquer the world with them. No one told me the parameters of a young Malayalee girl's existence, no one used that horrendous word, obedience. As in obedience to the masters of the household, the all-important MEN.

    My father, well ahead of the pack, insisted that obedience was an over-rated virtue. Could be a serious handicap, he said, and I never knew whether he was joking or not.

   Many years after, when I left my husband and went to England, my Velyamma, maternal grandmother, who had no role in my growing up, said to me, 'You never learned obedience.'  She meant that special willingness to accept what the men decreed. Thank God for that!

   Memory is splintered and the chronology is suspect. However I continue to make my own rules. And when I pull out a special card from that jumbled pack of fading cards we call memory, I colour the bits that are going sepia, fading on me. I can pick my own colours.

Time-Pass

Last night it was big-time thumb exercise for me- clicking the remote to find something worth watching. Reality TV, it seems, had done for quality soaps. Upstairs Downstairs, Minder, Love thy Neighbour, The Good Life - all those stellar cameos we now see ad nauseum in repeats till the fun is squeezed out of them - why can we not produce that quality of TV anymore?
   I had just finished a lovely novel by Penelope Lively (How it all Began) and was looking for time-pass till I homed in on the next one. Which was in the end, a P.D. James via Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. (Death at Pemberley.) Not sure I like where she is going, but must give her a few more pages before I decide.
   All this made me wonder: how did we entertain ourselves before television, computers, videos and the like?

   We young girls gossiped a great deal and there was much to gossip about. Remember, in Kerala of that time (the forties), even looking at a boy for too long was a punishable offence. (This was called 'eye flinging.') A fourteen-year-old girl I knew swallowed copper sulphate and killed herself because someone had intercepted a love-letter she had written to a boy in her class .Girls and boys sat in different sections of school and college and did not socialize beyond the odd lending or borrowing of lecture notes. (Lots of scope there, mind you. My first clandestine message was the photo of a boy who lent his Organic Chemistry text book to me, with his photo pasted on the back-flap. Daring! I treated it like hot coals.

   Normally we combined hair drying with gossip - the activities blended well. We girls would actually organize ourselves in the back-veranda: take out the wooden foot stools to sit on,  find a corner at a safe distance from the adults so that we would not be hijacked for domestic duties... The boys were exempt from all kitchen fatigues. What did they do? Hang out with other boys on the roads? Kick a worn out tennis ball around? There is so much you can do with balls. Excuse the pun, quite unintended.

   Times when we girls had our periods were best as we were considered 'impure' and nobody would expect us to fetch and carry, grind the coconut or red chillie on the stone for the fish curry or wash up... Indeed we were not allowed to enter the kitchen, even bathe, till the third day had passed, so we spent the time sitting about in places where the men would not look on us. It would be a bad omen for them if they saw us.
 
   I secreted books to pass the time, but was reprimanded - books would be sullied if touched at that time and the goddess of learning, Saraswathi, would be displeased. Some times my cousin, Thankamani and I would decide to have periods at the same time, one faking it while the other was 'outed.' My lynx-eyed grandmother of course had ways of finding out.

   Mani was a disappointment in the lice-catching department. Unlike me she had no lice in her hair. But we spent a lot of time looking for lice in each other's hair. The fun was in the looking. When you got one you placed it carefully on one thumbnail and squashed it with the other. The plop was greatly satisfying. After a good half-hour of this there would be sticky gore on your thumb, evidence of time well-spent.

   We walked to the temple a lot as this was the one place we were allowed to go unchaperoned. Who or what  we looked at there was another matter. I was not particularly devout and by eighteen I was rapidly becoming an agnostic, but the conch-blowing and bells, the smell of incense and sandalwood, even the sight of worshippers trance-like before the idols, were entirely to my liking. Also the fact that we could dress up for the event and meet other college mates there.

   Reading was frowned upon except by my father who was way ahead of his time: the women thought it wasted too much time and led nowhere. Certainly not to good husbands. The young men shied off women who could think or talk back. And since Thalassery did not have too many graduate men in the late forties or early fifties, aside from a crop of lawyers, many with no briefs, we had already condemned ourselves by entering College. At the time there were five girls to forty-two men in my College year for Mathematics. In the pre-degree years many girls had dropped off before graduating. My father had a tough time persuading any man to marry me; I think I frightened the wits off them.

   Going to the cinema was such a rare and exciting event, it happened about twice a year in the summer. We folded our best clothes under our pillow overnight to iron them and counted the hours to six in the evening the next day. Bombay Talkies came into town in the summer and pitched tent in an empty space at the end of town. If the rains came down during the show, we had to abandon the film and run for a rickshaw. The day I saw Ramarajyam with Shobana Samarth in the lead role as Seetha, the skies came down while Lakshmanan was placing Rama's sandals on the throne rather than usurp his brother's crown. I remember the sandals looming large on the black-and-white screen while we edged our way out reluctantly. 'Use your imagination,' and 'Write your own ending,' my unsympathetic father used to say while I looked disappointed and near tears.

   It got a little better with the first solid theatre building that came to Thalassery some time in the late forties - the famous Mukund Talkies. Rain was no longer a threat. But four annas each  for three or four young girls was quite a chunk off the house keeping and we had to beg from many 'uncles' till we had enough to go.

   The circus was another diversion - annual like the festivals at the two temples. After all Thalassery was where the circus was born and trapeze artists were dime a dozen.These  were passing diversions, part of the after-harvest euphoria. All of these came to a full stop during the war years and when they returned hezitantly after the war, the world had changed and so had our expectations.

   Above all, on hot nights, after supper, the whole family sat on the veranda or out in the moonlight and chatted. This was a special time and children like me felt the benediction. We were secure and well-loved, listening to the murmur of the grown-ups around us, as we drifted away into half-sleep.