Nostalgia

 Nostalgia

Anand Nair

 

Nostalgia: sounds like a medical term, like neuralgia. Makes me think about what the word actually means to me.

   So, I dug into my inglorious past, for places, people, events that I long to remember, to return to, albeit briefly, in my mind. Like all good Maths teachers, I started from the beginning, or as far into the beginning as my memory reached.

   Childhood? A time to forget quickly. 1942 and thereabouts -- war time in a household with two other children, one old aunt trying to make a tiny income stretch to the end of the month – and then she had to start all over again the next month. Rice, sugar and kerosene were rationed, the only wage-earner in the house, my father, was enjoying the hospitality of His Majesty, George the sixth, for daring to line up behind Gandhi, Nehru and the rest of the bevy of activists, who had the impertinence to believe that the British should get out, (Quit India was the slogan of the day) and India left to self-destruct, in whatever manner it wished.

   Forget that time quickly and move on. School and College were uneventful – a succession of books, notes and exams. I remember some excellent lecturers in Malayalam and English Literature, who managed to make me, for the rest of my life, totally dependent on words and books to inspire me. But, do I want to go back to that time? A resounding ‘NO.’ This was a time when others made decisions for me: what was respectable to wear, say…

   I got married, as all Indian girls were meant to do then, in 1957, to a man who was vetted and picked for me by my family. The poor man never realised what he was walking into. The less said about my married life, the better. Suffice it is to say that in the first ten years of my marriage I did not read a single book.

   The small beach near my home in the little town of Thalassery, on the south-western coast of India, was peaceful and let me think and grow. The many places I lived in after my marriage – Colombo, Jaffna, Ikot Ekpene in the Nigeria of the early sixties, the totally westernised Ndola of the late sixties in Kaunda’s Zambia, the small Kyambogo Hill on which the Teachers College perched, in Kampala…were interesting, different. Makeni in the north of Sierra Leone, hot, dusty, friendly, was home for six years, but it soon outgrew me. They were all way-stations and I was glad to move on.

   It is a little pitiable that I cannot remember anywhere, anything, or anybody, that makes me glow with nostalgia. Are there many others like me? Or is it that some essential empathy was always lacking in me?