At the
back of my Retina
Saris, magenta, indigo, saffron, emerald …, drying on a
clothes-line, in bright sun, near a ‘dobhighat,’in Chennai; dark pink, silk
umbrellas with silver trims, held over the image of Ganeshan at a temple
festival, as the drums beat, the cymbals clash, and the elephants in the holy
procession toss their ears; the
sindhooram powders for the dot on the forehead, in all the colours in creation,
and some extra, displayed in front of an odds-and-ends shop in big bazaar in
Thalassery; glass bangles shimmering in the sun, in a bangle-wallah’s basket;
these are some of the colours of my childhood, and they survive in the back of
my retina, to be called upon whenever I need a reminder of who I am.
I recover this sense
of belonging to my colourful past when I travel to India. During the months and
years in between, the colours fade. When I come back to work in England after a
summer in India, my colleagues are amused; they don’t quite know how to respond
to this new Anand, who wears silk saris and chunky jewellery, as she swishes
down the corridors. ‘Dressed up like a Christmas tree,’ one says, as I float
past the classrooms, piles of books in hand. But it is all too much effort to
be sustained as winter mornings get shorter, and I revert to my mongrel self.
There are compensations.
There is no green like the green of England, I think, as I drive from Laindon
to Brentwood to drop my boys off at school. And it is everywhere, with no
respect shown to urban areas. The small parks, the spaces full of trees and
hedges -- it is as though the creator spilt huge barrels of green without
discretion, all over the place and it spread willy-nilly. My visiting American
friend is envious of this plentiful green.
This green is a
green all its own. Not sure about the ‘pleasant’ whenever I come across that
other unmentionable intrusion of colour into my daily life. It is bad manners
for the non-white person to mention it, but I often wished one of my ‘liberal’
friends in the staffroom would pick up the cudgels on behalf of Mo, Prashar,
and myself, the three ‘persons of colour’ in a staffroom of ninety others.
Persons of colour, my foot. Are all the others colourless, like see-through,
pink plastic?
I was lucky – I spent
half a lifetime in Sri Lanka, Africa and India, and garnered a whole backdrop
of ‘other’ to prop me up, through sundry episodes, which threatened to diminish
me. I also carried that green in my head, that blazing, vivid, forest-green of
Africa. When I am homesick, it is not India I miss, but the little towns of
West Africa. I remember the multi-coloured Garra cloth in the market, rolled
out on makeshift wooden tables, the head scarves of women saying boo to the
limitations of their lives, and the family of yellow birds that made their home
on a tree in front of my first-floor flat in Makeni in Sierra Leone.
