The Affluence Disease

My friend from Thalassery complains about her granddaughter. 'Does your girl eat without coercion?' she asks. She has a tough time persuading her grandchild to eat anything.

   I comfort her. 'Mine is just as bad,' I say, 'but getting slightly better with each year. It's because they never went without. The house is always awash with food, yours and mine.We always rushed off to get them what they wanted, when they refused the food on the dinner table.'

   Today my lovely granddaughter asked for bacon for lunch when I offered the three-beans stew and rice on the table. I put my foot down gently. 'You have to eat what has been cooked,' I insisted. And she did. And loved it. I may make her that bacon for her next meal.

   All this choice and decision-making confuses me.  At home in Thalassery we had Moong and rice in one form or another for most meals, except lunch. The mid-day meal was Sambar and rice, catch-all vegetable gravies with whatever vegetable was there. Four-annas worth of fish was bought most days from the fish-man who trotted along with his catch each morning. The fishy water would be leaking on to the dirty head-cloth under the basket on his head, but the fish would be straight from the catch. Mostly sardines and mackerel, which would be made into a curry and may-be a few tail-ends fried for the men. Not much fish trickled down to the children of the house and the women, most of them were vegetarian anyway.

   They cooked small amounts - there was no 'frig and what was left over at the bottom of the pots would be given to the maid with a scraping of rice to take home to her family. She herself ate with us.

   Today, some days, I look at my 'frig and despair. It is crowded with food and no one is really anxious to eat. Even the dog is choosy.

   This needless plenty applies to everything in the house: clothes, furniture, books. Every now and then a huge bundle is taken away by a willing charity. But even charities will not tale old mattresses away. And the man who brings the skip to our house to take building rubble away reminds me sternly - no mattresses. I can't help thinking of Makeni in Sierra  Leone where I once had to destroy a mattress. 

   I came back from leave one summer and there was a huge, stinking rat squashed under my bed-spread. I got one of the boys in the flats below mine to take that mattress away. 'Please burn it, ' I said. He held his nose. ' Can I keep it, please?' 'It's gross, I answered. 'You don't want to sleep on that.' But he pleaded and the mattress became his prided possession. I never asked how he managed to clean it and mend the hole where the rat had been, but I saw it in his bedroom, when the boys got together there for a chin-wag. He was proud of that mattress.

Age has its Advanages

After that little moan yesterday (right, big moan, if you insist) here I am searching for the illusory benefits of being old:

   I look at the gymnastics of the two major political parties and know this has all happened before. If not here in the U K , perhaps in India, Italy, Nigeria...

   All that horse-trading and and in-fighting  - the press must be really delighted. Now they don't have to go looking for news; news is coming to them in large and delicious rolls. Their tiny little right-wing minds cannot decide which bemused Tories to support - the ones honestly Tory in the Tory party, or the Tories in the Labour Party. Laura Keunssberg is having a blast - her lips curling, happy smile hovering, and the sentences drawn out to maximum selective brilliance. Doesn't the B B C give even lip-service to impartiality?

   I am asking myself: how is the Momentum caucus in Labour different from the 1922 Committee in the Conservative Party? Prime Ministers live in mortal fear of them; whole national referendums are organised to please them. Momentum can't even get the Eagle to behave herself, or indeed the self-indulgent Blairites to stop sulking.

   As with us old people, I escape into the past, remembering quite another U K. One in which it was not all about the bottom line, when people counted irrespective of colour or religion. 

   We celebrate the anniversaries of World Wars but forget how we plunged in to help small nations against bullies. 

   When did so much of the news become about shares and the preoccupations of big business? How many of us own shares, especially among the working classes? How many have enough savings to buy a new car, let alone put in £15240 into an ISA? 

   House prices going down? Great, I think. More people can afford the prices and the mortgages. House prices are a little ridiculous recently.

   Bankers a little lost? They can get more lost as far as I am concerned. They sit on our money and give us laughable interest rates while they gamble with our resources. And Carney just gave them a bit more to play with.

   This is a good time to think where we are headed, our much-lauded  British sense of values, which all immigrants have to sign up to. Except we really can't be much bothered with immigrants, can we? That is also recent.

Like a Czech friend of mine said, 'When we come to Britain, we are immigrants, when you come to our country, you are expatriates.' Bulls-eye, Theresa!



   

Older by the day.

Last year, when I saw my G P about sundry age-related ailments, she was quite encouraging. Vital statistics all reasonable, she said. Just cut down on those cheese toasties (with red Leicester specially) and walk for at least 20 minutes, five times in the week. On the whole a satisfactory encounter. (Be patient. Us oldies like talking about our insides, specially bowels, and we take time getting to the point. Restraint needed on the part of listening family.)

   As I got to the door, my G P asked, 'Not incontinent, are you?' That came out of the left field. So I answered without thinking. 'I have that to look forward to.' She has since left the practice. Mmmm... 

   This year it is all teeth - or lack of. Another spare part threatens. I counted - I am down to sixteen now and one more is soon destined for the chop. I can either wear dentures or stop smiling. I vote for the latter.

   But, I keep telling all who come up against me on a bad day, that I am still compus mentis. Or almost. Why do they look uncertainly at me?

Granted I list a bit when I walk and fall into the flower bed often when I walk on uneven flowerbeds. But why does my carpenter think I can't drive? Driving is a lot easier than walking on a wonky knee, and he will find that out when he reaches eighty.

   I do an audit: hearing reasonable, teeth fifty percent, but not the chewing ones, knee serviceable but just, eyes can read as fast as ever but after eight in the evening, they are untrustworthy.

   Which do I hate more? People not jumping up to do things for me (like that tenth cup of tea at ten at night) or doing too much assuming I am not functional.

Ah! the loss of control. I hate those airport wheel-chairs and the handlers that treat us oldies like laundry. Sad lumps to be pushed around and parked here and there.

The Hay Buzz

It's still with me - that excitement and optimism that Hay can generate in a book-mad person like me.

   It was busy - claustrophobic busy in the corridors.  It took fifteen minutes to go from one tent to another. But the quality of discourse Hay brings together year after year is amazing.

   I had the pleasure of listening among others, to Bridget Kendall on Russia, its current and past agendas with respect to to rest of the world, its wonders and our misunderstandings about it. She made Putin sound irrelevant.

   And then there was Dara O'Brian, almost 90 minutes of stand-up hilarity. Th audience, figured out his end-lines even before he reached them, so that he had to finish each joke amid laughter. 'You are laughing too soon. Hold on,' he pleaded.  

   The rains came down half-way through, like a deluge, beating on top of the Tata tent and making a quagmire of the fields where we camped. This was my very first experience of camping. I wish I had done all this earlier, when I could still get down to the floor-level futon without flopping on to the floor and crawling in. Also, to state the obvious, a private toilet would have been great. 

   In the Masai Mara national park in Kenya your camp has a toilet and shower for each tent and the beds are normal beds. I remember being totally spoilt. The hippos can be heard in the dark African night munching away at the grass just outside the back of the tent , which is on the river-bank. The monkeys set up a signalling system alerting all their mates when a lion is near and the elephants crunch at the palms and pull down the odd one for sport.

   However, I go to Hay for the intellectual excitement, the stimulus that makes me want to start writing as soon as I am within reach of my desk-top.

   It was fun to meet Lionel Shriver. I just finished reading the signed copy of her new novel, The Mandibles. Shades of 1984, I thought. She writes beautifully with an in-bred arrogance. I did not find her likeable, cold-blooded in fact. But I will forgive anything in honour of good writing.

   My daughter calls Hay the Davos of the thinking person. It certainly gets me thinking. The research from Cambridge university on the pathology as well as the functioning of the ageing human brain was interesting. I have a vested interest in this.

   I have already booked up for next year. A proper B and B with a bathroom at the end of the corridor.

Walking the Woman

This morning, I am getting the collar and harness on our Jack Russell puppy, whom we have named Lily, (Who said she couldn't be a Lily, though I am told it is not a dog's name.') when I realise how clumsy I am. The animal is contemptuous. 

   I am reminded of the two dogs in Nelspruit then. (Well, actually, Nelspruit is now called Mbombela. Lost all its Afrikaner associations.  Not too dissimilar from Bombay becoming Mumbai and Madras, Chennai. But I just keep on calling them by their old names, the ones I have an association with, pre-independence.):

   Cody was the young brown male, pavement special breed, my friend Dorothy said. Joey the old, tired female had significant bits of Jack Russell in her and a very pretty face. When Cody got bored, he tried to persuade Joey to go out with him. They lived in this huge mansion with much garden space and the whole veld outside their front door.

   If you opened the impressive roll-back gate in front of the compound and stepped out, the path went left to the end of the housing estate and right towards Nelspruit town. Me and the dogs always walked left. No collars, no harnesses. There were no humans to be seen for miles and no traffic to worry about. No paraphernalia to carry around either.

   I did not have to take poo-bags with me. I did not have to hold a leash. The dogs ran happily in front of me. Well, Cody ran, but Joey hobbled along. They wandered off into the bush now and then and unfailingly did their deposits. They always returned to me when I called them.

   That fortnight in Nelspruit was a hot one. Dorothy gasped for breath and I broke out in a heat-rash on my face. Something I mind admitting, born and bred South Indian that I am. I think living in England has destroyed my heat defences and sucked all my D vitamin away.

   Joey sensibly, found her cot in that kind of weather or slept under a tree. Behind the living room curtains was also a favourite place. Cody could be found by mid-day under the living room fan, proudly displaying his masculinity.

A puff adder appeared from nowhere near the edge of the swimming pool and lay there, absolutely motionless until Cody found her and mayhem broke loose. It had crawled on to the edge of the swimming pool and had to be rescued and liberated by Sarah, Dorothy's daughter.

   England's test cricketers toiled in the heat and won two matches, but lost the series. After the first two matches, which we won, South Africa asserted itself and we also lost the plot. And the matches.

   Gradually, Cody got the message. I could be coaxed out if she hung around me and wagged her tiny tail. I got the impression she loved walking the old woman. I loved it as well.

Nelspruit

At Tambo airport, Johannesburg, the immigration man asks me, ‘How are you?’
   ‘Good,’ I say. But he shakes his head. ‘You don’t look good,’ he insists. I am back in Africa, I think. No white lies for me.
  

 The young girl in charge of my wheelchair does a great deal more for me than she’s paid to do. She peels off my old-woman pressure socks and helps me put away my cold-weather stuff, two cardigans, two pairs of woolly socks, shoes and shawl, in my suitcase. The cabin in the plane was freezing. My toes are slowly recovering from blue to something close to lavender.
   

I don’t need warm clothes for the short hop to Nelspruit. I put my Indian sandals on and feel immediately more human. This is where I belong, I think, sometimes even more than in India where I was born. I have spent half my adult life on this continent, working or hibernating after retirement. Unlike the UK, this is a good place to be when you’re old, if you don’t expect too much by way of resuscitation, if your lungs give up on you. In a way that is good too from where I stand.
   

 ‘You’re very kind,’ I say to the girl.
   ‘May be you also very kind to me.’ She smiles. This is a language I understand I make a mental note to find some extra change for her

'Pounds or Rand? I ask.  

‘Pounds,’ she answers without hesitation. The Rand is slipping fast. The last time I was here, in 2011, it was sixteen to the Pound. Today it is twenty-three.

  When eventually, I get to Nelspruit, forty-five minutes away, it is boiling hot. The Strelitzia, (named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George, the third, of Mecklesberg, Strelitzia) or the Bird- of -Paradise as the plebs like me call them, are holding their bird-like pink-and-blue heads up proudly along the short walk-way to the airport. A surfeit of elegance! I wonder, was Queen Charlotte elegant too?
                I walk slowly to the concourse, enjoying the brief moment in that no-man’s land between one sector of a journey and another, to yet another wheel-chair assistant, and another inefficient search in my disorganised hand-bag for tipping change

.   It’s hot here – hotter than I expected, hotter than ever before.  But this is one of the things I came for, I remind myself, running away as I was from the February chill in England, which in the end, never quite arrived.
                

 In a moment I am surrounded by my friends; it feels like home.
 

What a Con!

We've fallen for it - Valentine's day, Mothers' day, Fathers' Day...  What next? Postman's Day? We, the yuppie Indians of today - take out our heavier purses and give our money to the shops. We buy junk, which will be thrown out with next week's garbage. The only winners are the shops and the ad-agents who have been targeting us relentlessly through the year.

   So much to learn from the West and we go for the maniac end! When I came to England, escaping from a bad marriage, no one asked me why I had left my husband. No one asked me, ever, how much I earned. No one here asks a bachelor why he is not married or a married couple why they are not having children. Blessed liberty to live as you please.

   Teaching Comprehensive school in the early seventies I was impressed with the sense of humour of my students. They laughed at each other and themselves. I admired their individualism, like Amanda who said she was going to be a long-distance truck-driver. At fifteen she knew that was what she wanted. She also knew she was free to choose.

   If a British person claimed Einstein was Indian or that Indians discovered black holes, his friends would laugh him out of the pub. Indians have enough to their historical credit to stop purloining from the rest of the world. No- lady Diana did not have Indian ancestors. For heaven's sake!

   As for our riches, we could just cast our eye beyond our own navels. All those beggars on the street corners, the children sleeping rough who will never own a book, the women who support drunken husbands and even more drunken sons. We could spare a tithe for them.

   I object to being commanded to, coerced, conned into lifestyles, which are surplus to need just to feed the rampant commercialism of any world.

   I'd like to go back to that time when Kerala bought a set of clothes for Onam (in September, after our harvest,) and a pound of mutton on Vishu, our new year's day. We had no 'shopping' culture. School uniforms were bought once a year. Beyond that, that one set of clothes for Onam was precious. For the rest we got just enough. That mutton was a luxury for a fish-fed family. That one pound of mutton would have to feed a family of six on Vishu. But did it taste good?

   Christmas was celebrated only by Christians and Ramzan by the Muslims. My Christian friend, Mabel's mother, would sent us a piece of fruitcake with almond icing at Christmas, and our neighbours, the Mukkatil people would send us delicacies made of egg and chicken on Id and Ramzan. Now our family buys Christmas gifts for every one every year and I would love to cancel that practice.

A day of meditation would be good.