Nair Marriages -- Pudamuri (The cutting of Cloth)

In those days, that is in the early twentieth century, in the Nair caste to which both my parents belonged, engagement was an event organised by the elders, and because it was a matrilineal society, with inheritance passing down the female line, from uncle to niece, rather than father to children, this engagement was master-minded by my mother’s uncle. It might have been mentioned in passing to the child-bride-to-be by her mother, if she was lucky. The uncles, in those days, took responsibility for feeding and clothing their nieces and nephews, finding husbands and wives when the time came, and for conducting the weddings.

The kaniyan, the local astrologer, was the central figure in this event; he would decide whether the horoscopes of the prospective partners matched; he would even pronounce on their sexual compatibility (yoni porutham), without seeing either of them. He generally came with a bagful of cowrie shells and a piece of chalk. A representative from the prospective bridegroom’s family would attend to approve the decisions.

I remember the sense of occasion connected to the arrival of the kaniyan in any house. Generally, there were only a handful of them catering to the community, and everyone knew them by sight. They came at moments of significance in a household, heralding weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals… The kaniyan, it was, who would decide what were auspicious times and dates for starting journeys to foreign countries, or a housewarming.

There would be the sacred nilavilakku presiding over the ceremony. Of course. The kaniyan would draw some columns and lines on the floor, a complicated noughts-and-crosses shape in front of the ceremonial lamp. Then he would start arranging the shells within his diagram, according to the horoscopes of the prospective bride and bridegroom.

After placing the shells he would ‘read’ them. He would chant Sanskrit verses, justifying every prediction made by him. The men of the house would sit around him, leaning forward, listening avidly, even if they did not understand a word of Sanskrit. Women would hover near the windows in the corridors behind to get a whiff of the decision being formed.

If the horoscopes of the bride and the groom ‘matched,’ especially the positions of Saturn, Mars and the Sun in the firmament when they were born, he would ceremoniously tie the two horoscopes together. (I should know, because Saturn was in all the wrong places in my horoscope, and so I was able to escape marriage for a very long time.) After that the kaniyan would suggest auspicious dates for the wedding and leave with his fee, a few coins, tucked into the waist of his mundu.

       The marriage ceremony itself was a non-event. The point of it was to permit a man and a woman to sleep together and produce off-spring. The ritual was minimal. A garlanding of the bride and groom, with jasmine garlands if they were available, in front of the lighted nilavilakku, in the padingitta, the puja room of the house. A few family members and neighbours would be watching. Then a feast, which would go on till late in the night because Nair weddings took place in the night. Somewhere, in between, the bride would be led to the nuptial bed and the door of the chamber closed firmly behind her, by one of her paternal aunts. There you are then, go forth and copulate.

       I wait hopefully, for the time when Indians can live together a while and test the waters out before they get married to partners of their own choice. Even in the villages. I would happily endorse a few dirty weekends here and there. Definitely preferable to the head-long somersault into marriage.

       And the sad part is, even to this day, marriages are hard to get out of. People look at the urban, educated professionals of India; obviously they find it easy to terminate marriages. They make their own choices; people looking in from the outside assume this is true of all of India. In villages, (and remember, ninety percent of India’s population live in villages,) marriages are life-long, and women have to stay in them, however abusive or love-less they are.

       For the man, it was always a matter of choice, and they did exercise that choice. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, men taking second and third wives was common. My aunt was a second wife, my grandfather’s sister was a first wife who had to suffer the humiliation of a second wife, in the same house, ensconced just down the corridor.

       Here, again, we may notice an imbalance of power between a man and his wife. Add to that the fact that, in a joint family home, loyalties were fragmented, and the wife was dependent on the mercy of many people. She would have no financial resources of her own and no home of her own. Her own family would not countenance her return home with equanimity – they would try to send her back. Today’s working women do not depend on husbands for income, do not meekly stay with their in-laws and are quite capable of going it alone.

When I left my husband in 1972, I didn’t go back to India for six years. I’d experienced the slander and the harassment when I went home briefly, and it took me a very long time to summon up the courage to return. I was not invited to any family events during this period as I ‘would bring misfortune on the event’ with my presence. I was persona non-grata.

I noticed that later, when I became independent financially I was accepted back -- for the same reason that professional women manage to get control of their lives. The common denominator in all these situations is money. And shelter. For a woman, in my book, the most important safeguards are a place to live and an income. The home doesn’t have to be owned, rented would be fine if you can afford the rent. If you don’t have a place for you and your children to live, you are man-fodder.

Treatment Pre-Independence

Treating Disease Pre-Independence

Most of the treatment in those pre-independence days for any disease, consisted of herbal medicines. There was a herbal medicine vendor about a mile from our house, and as I travelled daily to school in my rickshaw I would see him chopping leaves and roots and other vegetation on a two-foot tree trunk he used as a chopping board. The medicines were vile tasting.

The Vaidyan (indigenous doctor) was always the first port of call for illness in the family. Unless my father got involved, which he rarely did, because no one told him about stomach pains or back pains. Doctors trained in Western medicine were rarities in Thalassery in the thirties. We had one – Kunhikkannan doctor. My father went to him, and he took me too for childhood ailments. For most things, I remember, my aunt would go down to the compound and pick what looked like weeds to me. But she knew which herb did what. She brewed them for many hours and strained them; they worked. This is a knowledge that has now been lost. After Ammamma, no one in our family knew anything about those herbs.

Ammamma prescribed a laxative for most illnesses: Senna pods stewed and strained. Mani and I did not mention small aches and pains to her for fear of that concoction. The alternative was cod liver oil – not much to choose from.

We had one dentist; when my milk teeth started coming loose, my father would take me to the dentist, to take the tooth out gently with a steel instrument. If that didn’t happen, Ammamma would tie a knot with thread round the tooth where it met the gum; the other end would be tied to an open door. She would then slam the door suddenly and the tooth would come off. She didn’t give me a sweet after the extraction like the dentist. It was a question of who got there first – Achan or Ammamma

By the fifties we had two or three trained doctors, all men, and in the sixties, we had our first lady doctor. During that period, gradually, the faith in western medicine grew and the vaidyans lost ground.

Recently clinics have sprung up all over Kerala, which offer Ayurvedic treatment or Homeopathic treatment. Medical schools in India offer these options as specialisms in the third and fourth years of a medical degree, and the take-up is enthusiastic. When I am in India, I often spend a week at an Ayurvedic Nursing home nearby. It is a kind of pampering unavailable with the NHS. The oil massages are deeply soporific during and after the massage. The food is vegetarian and oil-free; I find I lose half a stone of weight in one week. Meditation events are included, and if you are determined, you can keep up the discipline and continue to enjoy the benefits after returning home.

My Homeopathy doctor knows more about my body and mind than I do; a great deal more than the fragmented me that the NHS sees. His initial diagnostic meeting is always over an hour long. The treatment is delivered through tiny pills as they are in England. Those pills have never once let me down: they have no side effects, no stomach angst.

It took only ten days for the doctor to cure me of three food allergies, food allergies that had plagued me for decades, and the same amount of time to get rid of rashes picked up in the garden, talking to my irritable Dieffenbachia, or by insect bites indoors. My children, who have lived here in England from early childhood, do not trust either treatment. They are amused that I go to these ‘quacks.’ They think it is my Indian origins that give me faith in this kind of ‘superstition.’ The arrogance! I go by proven efficacy of both Homeopathic and Ayurvedic treatments.

Having experienced the disasters that the monsoon brings, I am wary of the monsoon season even now, in my old age; I remember it as the time when most of the deadly diseases like cholera and plague attacked our community. Now, when the scourges of those years have been conquered, I still avoid going to India during those monsoon months. Today there are new diseases to avoid: Dengue fever and in some parts of India, Malaria. When I was a young child in Thalassery, we didn’t need mosquito nets – indeed we didn’t have one in the house. Now, even in the villages, where houses and people are not living in close and unhealthy proximity, mosquitoes will not let you sleep without fans or nets.

Though the Southwest Monsoon brought disease and death, it was also exciting to all – students, for possible days off from school, farmers for the reassurance they brought of healthy rice crops, all households for relief from the summer heat…  Just as I did, my father liked following the course of floods. When it had rained steadily for several days, my father would sit on the very edge of the veranda, watching the water level rise. He saw it as a contest between man and nature and waited to see who would win. Visitors would discuss the rains endlessly as the weather is discussed in England. The kitchen would be littered with pots and pans of all shapes to catch the roof-leaks and a thin coir rope would be strung across, over the stone fireplace, to dry our uniforms. The whole house would smell of mould.

           When it became clear that the rising floods had won, my father’s compassion and sense of community would kick in. He would spring into action, insisting that I gathered up my spare clothes to offer to families, which had lost all that they owned.

I was quite selfish and didn’t want to part with anything to donate to the people washed up like flotsam on the banks of neighbourhood rivers. I didn’t have many items of spare clothes, so my father’s instructions caused a great deal of heart-searching. Was there anything I had outgrown, or torn beyond rescue? On one occasion, when I did not co-operate quickly enough, he went to the rope in the compound, where the day’s wash was drying, and pulled out a skirt and blouse from it. I lost my favourite skirt and learned my lesson. When I complained, Achan said, ‘You’ll survive.’

Schools always re-opened early in June, after the fierce, humid heat of the summer months. Rains came generally in the last week of June, petering out after a fair share of death and destruction achieved, some time in early August. On the first day of the monsoon, just before the skies opened, the frogs would announce the arrival of the sight-and-sound show. The birds would fly hurriedly to their nests as the sky darkened. The thunder, (my father said it was the Gods moving furniture in the heavens,) would drive the frightened snakes deep into their holes in the ground, but when the rains stopped, the petrichor would bring them out again, to slither joyfully in the mud. That smell of new rain-washed mud must be one of the delights of a tropical inheritance. Now it has been obliterated by petrol and diesel fumes; one has to travel deep into the villages to experience that heady smell again.

           Rainy mornings in Thalassery had a soporific quality – In my childhood I would sit on the floor of my veranda, and watch the water-level rise in our yard, daring it to touch the cement floor; it never did. I would do it for hours, with my thumb stuck into some hole in my petticoat, which could, with a little imagination, pass for a frock.

I lived in those two-piece slips, all white, put together quite casually by the local tailor (he didn't believe in straight lines) who plied his uncertain trade in a corner of the little shop left of our gate. When my father realised I spent most of my hours at home in those slips, he got the tailor to make me four coloured slips, which I loved. Untold riches!

Those days, sticking my thumb into a tear in my garment was my childhood equivalent of sucking my thumb – or meditation. The cement on the veranda steps was cold and rough, cracked as they were. My bum generally suffered, but the heavy raindrops falling on the puddles under the eaves made a rare and pretty picture. Where the sun caught the bubbles in the morning, light slanting through moving coconut fronds, split into rainbow hues. I was child enough at six and seven years to believe that I could catch that colour; I would stretch my palm out and the rainbow would settle on my hands. Magic! Quite often I would be drenched as the winds drove the sheets of water in many directions.

We lived near the railway lines later; indeed, we could see the trains chugging along, on the other side of the Koduvally river, with their head of steam, from our veranda. I thought of that railway line as mine because my beloved maternal grandfather worked as a guard on the South India Railway.

On the road to the railway lines, which was one of my father’s favourite morning walks, he would often point out the huts of the poor, lean-tos put together with coconut fronds, sheets of corrugated iron, cardboard and tarpaulin. They were never more than three metres long, and narrow, to fit on the width of the raised banks of the Koduvally river. Children, half-naked, played on the soggy surroundings of their homes and when we walked by, almost another species, with our dry clothes and our certainties, they stared at us as at another life-form. Everything, their clothes, their faces, their bodies, their huts – all seemed to be the uniform dispiriting colour of clay.

Indeed, the river was lined with houses on one side, and the railway line on the other. The latrines of the houses flanking the river were built precariously over the edge of the compounds, partly over the river, on coconut trunks driven into the water. I once asked my father what would happen if the folks in those houses fell into the river while defecating. ‘Then they wouldn’t need to wash after,’ he answered with scant mercy.