HOME

This home -- three small bedrooms, a tiny office room where my father met his clients (and they spilled out on to the veranda and yard when there were more than four) a sitting room in which there was no furniture, apart from my study-desk; and one bathroom and kitchen. The latrines were outside and in the rain you sprinted.
  Now, in Purley, there are five bedrooms, three bathrooms and two sitting rooms. And our junk is endless demanding more -- and still more -- space. My books dominate all the rooms and the attic. The place is expensive to heat, clean and keep in a fair state of repair. What a transformation! And when I think about the homeless and the rough sleepers I have a deep sense of guilt, which a few quick-fire donations to Shelter or Crisis will not ameliorate.
  In that unpretentious house in Thalassery, I spent my years between fifteen and twenty-two. The college years, the read non-stop years, and the desperate search for answers years, to questions that still remain unresolved. Religion, life and death, poverty...
  I think of the one-hundred-and one saris I don't wear, some of which, ever; others once in two or three years when I visit India. Most were bought because they were so pretty to look at and cost so little. And my ailing cousin decided gold and brocade were not for her after the age of seventy, so she gave me a heap of south Indian silks and brocades. I yet have to decide what to do with them when I die. Burn them on the pyre, drape on windows?
  The house is now demolished, the land 'acquired' by the Government. A stadium now adorns the fields around.

Below are three short excepts from my memoirs AS FATHERS GO, about my home:

That house on Court Road was to all intents and purposes the home I grew up in; anything that came after, wherever in the world they were, were way-stations.

Until age and distemper caught up with me, I did an annual pilgrimage to Thalassery; I always returned to England feeling replenished in spirit, wondering how long that feeling would last. When I am in that little, government-forsaken, back-water of a town, even my grey cells stir and gear up for action.

I feel more Indian – I wear saris more often and take out my Indian jewellery, and the pottu box comes out from the recesses of the dressing table. My eyes get a lining of kohl, which will seep into the wrinkles below and proclaim my age. It doesn’t last long; the cotton saris that I favour need to be starched and dried, the weather is unfriendly and an overcoat above the sari is an abomination. The Kohl and Pottu don’t do much for my ravaged face either.

Looking at my valiant, but half-dead walnut tree in my bleak, front garden here in Purley in winter and remembering the lush green of my home-country, I think of this journey, this annual pilgrimage with wonder. If I travel by car I see the countryside getting gradually more devoid of development as we leave South Malabar behind.

I know now that I will never belong anywhere but in that little coastal town, which is rediscovering itself. The cosmetic surgery, with grey concrete and chrome is unbecoming, but only bits are gone. Most of Thalassery is blessedly old, a little shabby and natural. I shouldn’t complain; in my childhood, there was one government hospital in town; it was near the beach and as you walked past, you could see the sick men and women, too poor to afford private doctors, sprawled on benches and the floor, waiting to be seen. Not unlike the A and E at NHS hospitals recently

Now there are two huge hospitals in Thalassery, one near my grandfather’s old village, Moozhikkara. It is ugly, its front gate crowded into a busy road, all concrete and glass, but it serves its purpose. Sick men and women do not have to travel five miles to reach a hospital in an emergency. Similarly, there is another huge hospital on the road where I lived my childhood and adolescent years.

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There is a stadium where the paddy fields used to stretch peaceably as far as eye could see; now cricket rules, O K. The Koduvally river has shrunk into itself. A river that gave name to and defined that whole area has morphed into apologetic little rivulets. I cannot find my way around my hometown.

On these visits, I always go to my old house, (which my father built in 1950, the year I joined the local college,) to chat to my dead father, can we ever quite see him off? He lingers. I normally pick up a few grains of mud from the spot where he was cremated and drop them into my purse. The money-plastic will be gritty for a few weeks and the holes-in-the-wall in England may find another reason to refuse me my hard-earned dosh. Ah well –

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The stadium is now complete in the fields where I roamed, where the young men battened the ground down and played badminton after the harvest, fished for river-fish in the shallow waters of the paddy-fields and I gazed between turning the pages of my latest book. There is nothing to look at now. The house has been 'acquired' and is slowly dwindling away before the offices of the stadium are built there.

The cast-iron gate, which was my father’s pride and joy, has broken down and someone has carted it off. The concrete slabs at the entrance are breaking up.

The house itself is dismal. Male nurses from the nearby Co-operative Hospital are lodging there and doing to the house what young men do when they have no resources and no style. Colourful lungis (sarongs) and greying underpants hang on a rope on the balcony, to dry. The woodwork is rotting, the front office window is hanging on one hinge, and the young man walking on the terrace upstairs seems part of that dilapidation.

I am glad to get away to my cousin's house, where I am staying for the night, and the welcome of my family. Forget the tasteless mall, the dried-up river bed and all else that we call modernisation.

I know I'll keep going back to that road, that place, in spite of the shambles it has become --  will the remnants see me out too? Last through the fag end of my life? I hope so.

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