Educating the Daughter
When I was about
fourteen years old, my father decided my school was just not doing enough;
there was so much the school could not teach me. it was part of his mission to
fill that gap, to educate, improve, and generally make me fit to manage the
twentieth century, (and totally unfit to marry a local Nair man). I resisted
that mission vigorously when he was not looking; I just wanted to be like all
the other girls around, relaxed, uneducated man-fodder.
One of his original ideas was to train me to speak fluently and lucidly in
public, in both Malayalam and English. On a lazy Sunday morning when I should
be picking green mangoes from the compound behind our house, he would summon
me.
The lesson would begin on the front veranda of our house -- one prong of a
many-pronged attack. This involved me standing six metres from him, on our
walkway to the front-gate, and speaking on a topic he would set. He would stand
on the veranda and instruct. I had five minutes to prepare. He was a demanding
teacher, teaching me to ‘throw’ my voice, slow down, look at him, not mumble…
Topics included Freedom, Non-violence, Books I liked and why…
Father dictated what I read and supervised that process. When I finished
reading a book he had instructed me to read, I had to do a little review in a
note-book and show it to him. I often tried to copy the blurb at the back, but
he found me out very quickly. ‘I am not looking for second-hand opinions,’ he
said. ‘I want you to think for yourself – not trust others.’
With poetry, he was more demanding. I had to memorise four
lines of the book of that week and recite it to him. Karuna by Kumaran Ashan was his favourite. Karuna was the story of Vasavadatha, a beautiful prostitute in
Madhura. I enjoyed that story in verse; she sounded feisty. In Memoriam was another matter. For the
rest of my life I have kept a safe distance from Tennyson, including the
bewildering Lady of Shalott.
Interestingly my reading speed in both Malayalam and English grew
exponentially, and my memory blotted up anything that came along, without
discrimination.
Our walkway was a public place, and when I had to perform, passers-by would
stare. For an audience, I generally had the crows on the coconut tree, the
ownerless cats going from house to house at the time the fish parted with their
heads each morning, and two or three children from around the neighbourhood,
who would stand and gape at this unusual girl and her even more unusual father.
I hated all of this, but there was no escape. In school and college later,
however, I became the star debater.
My father enticed me into his activities (all except swimming) and now, in
my eighties, I find I have a variety of diversions to call upon when time hangs
heavily, and I am looking to escape my writing, I have a large savings account
of varied activities that I have banked, under duress, for my old age. Not to
mention a greedy reading speed.
Gardening, which is a favourite occupation of mine, works every time.
Though, at the time, I joined in reluctantly. Achan usually planted red
spinach, green spinach, aubergine, beans and okra. There were also the climbing
beans (mange tout), the centrepiece of the garden. He and his best
friend had an ongoing competition about whose beans did the best each year.
My father would send me out to water the vegetable-patch every evening in
the summer. Water had to be drawn from the well and carried in pots to the
garden in front of the house. I was supposed to join the young boy who was our
gofer, as it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to do it all on his own; also, I
had to spend hours weeding with him, when I would rather just be. I was a
teenager then, but Achan made no concessions to the alternate world of teens,
which my granddaughter, Asha, now inhabits with such panache.
I would hitch up my ankle-length skirt, along with my reluctance and draw
water from our well, tugging at the rope-and-pulley system. Physical exertion
was meant to be ennobling! But, all it did for me was drench me from waist
down. My skirt would start getting entangled in my legs; periodically, I would
need to stop and wring out the water from the bottom of it. Neighbours and
family looked on in astonishment in those years at this father-and-daughter
team; in those years girls were not meant to be going everywhere with their
fathers. And fathers, as the alpha males in the house, were not meant to take
any notice of daughters. Also, digging, weeding, watering, were not occupations
of middle-class females. You had maids and helpers for that, didn’t you? What
was Vakil’s (lawyer’s) daughter
doing, joining in with the garden-boy?
The garden boy, was a priceless urchin. He could disappear into thin air if
he heard my father’s footsteps approaching, with what he imagined was
instructions about the watering. I knew where to find him though he changed his
hidey-holes on a regular basis.
‘Don’t want to get your skirt wet, do
you?’ he’d ask innocently. ‘We could do it early tomorrow morning before your
bath.’
There were in fact a few rules in our
house regarding house-boys. No shouting at them and don’t ask them to do
anything you are not willing to do yourself. If they were young they had to be
fed when the children of the house were fed. I believe my father adopted all of
this from Mahatma Gandhi; in practice the women who ran the kitchen ignored my
father with impunity because he never went anywhere near the kitchen.
