My Threadbare Home

I rarely offer to empty the dishwasher as it requires bending and straightening up many times. There is no space in the cutlery drawer for all the armaments we accumulated over the last decade — it wasn’t too bad before that. Around 2007, my daughter returned to England from Kenya and I from India, bringing with us our households. So three households were now crammed into the small bachelor home of my long-suffering son. In the end, he bought a larger house, just to accommodate his unwieldy family.

When the spoons and forks spill over into the drawer, I remember our home in Thalassery. We had one metal spoon in the house, which was my father’s for use with his evening conjee. The rest of us had spoons made from the leaves of the Jack fruit tree. This was an adhoc arrangement. When conjee was served, one of us children would be instructed to pick a few jack leaves. This was no off-hand chore. The leaves had to be fresh but not too soft — they shouldn’t disintegrate in the hot conjee.  And they had to be shaped and held together by a piece of eerkili (spine of the palm leaf). I was never great at these feminine skills.

Once, my visiting aunt got so disgusted with my ineptitude, she asked me to go back to the jack tree and fetch better leaves. I had enough by then. I gave her my father’s precious spoon.

‘That thing that is sucked by all and sundry?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘I’d rather go hungry.’

This happy spoon-less state of affairs continued till I got married and went to Colombo to live with my in-laws. They were of a different ilk; I would call it faux-western. Proper china and a plenitude of spoons and forks and knives, not to mention sofas and sprung beds, and curtains in the windows. When I went home to India to have my first baby, I felt as though I could breathe again. I packed away my tooth brush and Colgate tooth-paste, and happily went back to an earlier oral hygiene — burnt husk on my index finger.

My husband threatened to visit after a few months. Now I would need to pander to a different food-protocol. He ate rice like the urban Ceylonese — with fork and spoon, the fork in the left hand, pushing food into the spoon in the right hand. And we,in Thalassery, had no forks or knives or spoons. The gofer was sent into town to bring back two spoons and two forks. He returned empty-handed. So I went hunting and unearthed some cutlery in a disused drawer in a small shop at the bus-stand.

‘From the time of the White Saives’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Who is this for, now?’ Emphasis on the NOW. I refrained from answering. The deal seemed almost a betrayal.

How far have the mighty fallen! My father grinned with great amusement, when I went home with my finds.

‘What are you going to do about the dry latrines?’ he asked. But that, as they say, is a whole other story.

My Alter Ego

My alter ego from Keralam

This is a blog about my very Indian other self. Actually Malayalee, (from Keralam, speaking  the local language, Malayalam) because I probably have less in common with people of some of the northern parts of India than with crazy Croydon, where I have lived  since the late nineties, with occasional forays into Keralam to recharge my other self.  I started this site in 2013 and never pursued it. But now, senility combined with Covid Lock-down,  and the remorseless tick-tock (Rushdie style) of seconds, minutes, hours, days… persuade me that I must get this going, if my granddaughter is to have any idea about her fractured beginnings.

At fifteen years, she has a room and bathroom of her own, you enter there at your peril — unless your sneak in to pick up the daily debris, while she sleeps the sleep of the innocent. In our house in Thalassery, in the north of Keralam, I ponder, five of us females, aged between seven and fifty-five, slept in the puja room. Ammamma, the eldest had a narrow bed, the rest slept on mats spread on the floor. It was a small room; when the mats were rolled out, there was no walking room, so you stepped over the others if you needed to get out. I did not qualify for a pillow at my age, graduating to one only on my wedding night. I wonder what my new, just unpacked husband thought when he found his wife constantly slipping down a notch, in the bed, to escape the pillow. It didn’t help that some kind souls had covered the nuptial bed in jasmine petals. JESUS WEPT!

Men were considered superior to us; they slept upstairs on beds and mattresses. Indeed, but for the beds upstairs, the house was mercifully devoid of furniture. My father had two chairs in his office in the corner of the veranda. His clients sat on a bench, which was not trustworthy, as it had uneven legs and tended to go up at one end, when a weight came down on the other. My father also had a big table and a Dutch glass-fronted almirah. The almirah contained his law books, with The Indian Penal Code occupying pride of place. He was a lawyer.

We had a Planter’s chair too on the veranda, on which I used to curl up and sleep, waiting for my father to pick me up and carry me up to bed, when I was still little. It was a lovely object, that chair, until you got close to it. Most of the wickerwork had torn off on the seat and you had to stick to one little Strip, which had a few strands left. And look out for those sharp bits of unravelled cane sticking out!

For the rest, we sat on palakas and thadukkus , wooden stools and small grass-mats. These days, when I visit India, I see no stools or mats to sit on. The middle classes sit on sofas, while the poorer families sit on basic wooden chairs. Just as well considering the shape of my knees

A Forgotten World.

Talking about your hometown, which you visit for two short weeks every second year, is slightly hypocritical. Let's face it: this blog is about undiluted nostalgia, which I believe is an old person's congenital illness. If I look too closely I might find things that at the time I grew up, were a tad unpleasant.
   I hated the latrine detail -- the family that came to empty our shit buckets made me desperately sad. Most of the time, it was a young man who came; he did his job, hoisted the big bucket on to his shoulder and carried it to the waiting Tellicherry Municipal Council cart. TMC. We called it, Theetam, Moothram, Cashtom, i.e. shit, pee and garbage.
   Very occasionally a young woman came instead of him. She was pretty and saucy, smiled at everyone who met her eye, and would greet the telegraph poles if no one talked to her. She would ask for a drink and Achamma would give her a drink of conjee water, standing as far away from the woman as she could. I would dance around Ammamma and speak to the woman; she loved that. When I got married and left India in 1954, there was still no sewage system in Thalassery. It was only in the sixties that septic toilets became commonplace and the latrine-man became redundant.
   Thalassery was a small town in which, apart from two or three businessmen, who dealt in petrol or dry good,s everyone else was either poor or a notch above. 

   We bought a list of dry goods,-- rice, wheat and pulses -- and coconut oil, once a month -- it cost a glorious twenty-seven rupees. To get it in perspective, though, a doctor's home visit would cost five rupees, a gunny-bag of rice was eleven rupees and a yard of printed cotton was half a rupee onward. My college saris were between ten and fifteen rupees each of them. The fifteen rupee one was the precious khatau voile. I got six saris at the beginning of each year. Indeed, my wedding-sari was a breath-taking one hundred and five rupees. Six yards of Benares silk, generously decorated with gold thread for the present price of a man's vest.

   With lock-down time to spare, I have been taking a closer look at that time when we didn't consider a car an essential middle-class object, when plane travel was for the rich few, and nothing was made of plastic or nylon. Not long ago. I am talking about the early fifties when I was a young girl with limited aspirations, and life was perfect because I had three meals a day, and I knew every family who lived down our road. Without road-lights, I could see the entire night-sky on a rain-less day and a friend of my father's taught me to identify them by their constellations.