Buying Local

 Buying Local

The politicians don't sound too sure of what they appear to be saying -- buy from your local shops.

The last time I heard this was in the mid 1940s. Gandhi was telling all of us Indians to shun imported goods and buy only from the small retailer, things made in India. We all knew we couldn't defeat the British Raj by our puny push-backs. However, we obeyed.

   It was not difficult to obey. Shopping as a pleasant pastime had never existed in our minds.When a need arose, whether it was for Kirby grips for my short hair or a new bath towel because the old one was in shreds, we asked the master of the house, many times, and eventually we'd get that bath towel, and that Kirby grip. Maybe. Sometimes we tore strips off old rags and tied our hair with that.

   My father and I wore Khadhar  or Khadhi, as it was sometimes called. This material was home-spun and rough and thick. I was never a petite, slim person and the khadhi skirt made me look fat and graceless. But we persevered. My father, slim as an Arecanut tree, looked like a clothes-horse in anything he wore. I clearly did not get my genes in this respect from him.

  Not enough with wearing the damned things, a charkha appeared on our veranda in due course. Accompanied by thin cotton slivers. I was taught to sit down like Gandhi did and spin thread. I never got the hang of it -- my thread got knotted and broke. My father did not do much better. Thankfully, he gave up quite quickly on that.

  Not having money to spare helped. Clothing stores being nearly empty and cloth being rationed during the war years helped. When my father was arrested for being an activist, my fervour increased. The Khadhi habit persisted until I started wearing saris some time when I started College. My father continued, like a few others to the end of his life.

   It may not be much - but we can all do a little to help the local retailer, by buying from the small shops. The supermarkets can look after themselves, but we need to show solidarity with the local butcher, florist, fruit and vegetable vendor... 

   As they say, 'every little helps.'

The Reading Addiction

 

This Reading Addiction

Here I am, again, trying to write. Ben Okri, he of the Famished Road  fame was on TV (6/6/20) talking to the news anchor about James Floyd's death. And I think, there are writers like me and there are writers like him. So many more like me. Yet, we are compulsive writers too. If we don't write we feel dispossessed, as though we have been ousted from that intellectual and emotional domain we occupy.
   My problem is that I have to feel strongly about something for me to venture an opinion. (Friends who have suffered from the 'strength' of some of my opinions, will vouch for the fact that this happens much too frequently. Sorry.) At the moment I am staggering under the weight of happenings that make my thinking frenetic and confused. I  don't know where to begin. So I consider the writers I have really respected, and learned from. A more pleasant exercise -- you could call it a cop-out.
   Penelope Lively wrote Moon Tiger and won the Booker Prize some time in the eighties. Every little section in a chapter, sometimes consisting of a paragraph or two, like the brother and sister dancing, oblivious to all around them, with a faint suggestion of incest; much later the sister, in a car with the brother and his wife, and her total contempt for the woman...
   There was also Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in the year Indian writing in English nudged all others out and declared ownership of that language. And later, Arundhathi Roy with her The God of Small Things, which reinvented the English Language so powerfully. All over the Commonwealth, countries claim their own version of English: Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie... The list is a long rainbow list of wonderfully evocative writers.
   Many, like Rushdie have woven long stories flitting in and out of the realms of fantasy. I am not a great admirer of fantasy, but that image of yellow moths crowding round the naked woman as she walks, keeping her covered, has stayed with me for decades. Put that alongside, the brutal dinner-conference, generals moving pepper-pots around on the dining table to visualise the steps in the assassination of a President – no fantasy in that. Kashuo Ishiguro is another writer who cannot be boxed into any genre. There was ‘Remains of The Day,’ and much later, ‘Don’t Ever Leave Me.’ Remembering those books, I want to find them again on my shelves, boxes, loft, wherever they are, and dive into them.

  Which – leaves me with a selfish thought. After a die, all these and many more amazing writers, will keep on writing, and I have never heard of a library in the eternal silence. If there was, I would start believing in it.