S'Lone

This one is for all the S'Lone volunteers who made my life happy and wonderful in Makeni.  What a revelation Sierra Leone was to my naive brain!

This was in the period 1984 - '86 and I was a lecturer at Makeni Teachers' College, trying to train Maths lecturers and develop the Primary Maths Curriculum. I lived in a small, one-bedroom flat on the campus and it was an uncertain life.

Electricity was available rarely and water had to be carried upstairs to my third floor flat in a bucket, when it came, sporadically. Then, we all rushed and queued up - or pushed and shoved- to reach that trickle before it stopped. We learned the optimum height from which to pour a half-bowl of water into the toilet to clear it. Rosemary, a Canadian volunteer, taught me that.

Food was limited to what you could get locally. On the days the butcher slaughtered a cow, approximately once a fortnight, I waited on my small terrace to see him hang it up on a pole down the road. I would rush to get the fillets before the sun did the cooking. Fillets, of course, cost no more than other bits of beef.

The vegetable stall in the local market contained a few squashed-up tomatoes, half-onions, tiny okras well past their eat-by date... Nothing to take home. The Lebanese stores sold potatoes and you could buy cassava leaf and potato leaf anywhere. Corned beef and spam if you were lucky.You learned new tastes. And I lost two stones in weight.

The plassas was out of this world. Served with rice. I loved it. Sometimes I went down to the Shell station and ate it with the owner. You could also collect the local gossip: which musungu was sleeping with which black beauty, who was drunk at Pa Kargbo's veranda bar before eight in the evening...

The three-storey flats in which I lived was a self-contained community. Philip Kargbo's radio woke us all up at odd hours of the night and all of us ran down to see the cobra, which lived in the wood-pile behind my flat. Susan, who lived opposite, dumped her baby on me to look after when she had to go somewhere in a hurry and my friend, Fiona, the VSO who lived next door, made groundnut soup for me. It was delicious. She also taught me a great deal about Primary teaching.

Entertainment in a place sans TV or power was inventive. I played board games with Matt for match-sticks and rode pillion with the PCVs to unnamed places. I remember going skinny-dipping in a delightful, isolated, pond somewhere in the bush with one PCV. There was a waterfall and we had to push the tall grass aside with our hands to reach the pond on a motor-bike. We cooked and ate communally many-a-day, mainly cabbage soup and rice. Someone on a trip to Freetown would have brought a precious cabbage back.

Riding pillion was forbidden, but I got myself a helmet and risked being told off. HQ was so far away  and how would they communicate with us anyway?

One night a happy gang of PCVs woke me up at the two in the morning to see the forest fires. I tagged along. At 51, I was twice the age of most of them, but it did not seem to be an issue with those girls and boys. They were fun and non-judgemental in all matters. They always found new ways to have a good time.

The PCVs looked after me. They asked me along to fourth-of- July celebrations and spontaneous song sessions. They were talented and original. One designed a fish- breeding pond; several created prosthesis for children with damaged limbs. In Makeni they created swings and climbing frames for the children near by.

On the 25th anniversary celebrations they made me an honorary PCV. I was very proud that day.

I have been in other African countries since, living and doing similar work. More 'developed' some of them. But I have never been happier anywhere else. Now, at 78, I long to go back to SL and wonder how Makeni is now, how the College is and how , above all, my SL friends are.

What a country and what a people!

Tiny Communities

There wasn't much of a choice. Our little world had to be small:

   There were about four buses a day plying between Kunnoor and Kuthuparamba. If they went further north - or south - none of us really comprehended such distances by bus. If you needed to go to Vadagara or Kanjyankadu, you thought hard and wondered how far the train would take you.

   To go to Maliyil house, which I sometimes did, with Damuettan directing proceedings (I bet he still does that, given half a chance), you had to do some serious planning. Bus? How much walking if you went by bus? Or train? Again, could we go the distance on foot?  

   In our house, our world was a microcosm containing just a few households. And we knew everything about them. The people even had the same names. We hadn't yet tapped that vast directory of north Indian names, all of which got amputated at the end. For instance Shankar, insteady of that nice dignified Shankaran. Sometimes it got to Sankarankutty too. Bliss!

   We had a Madhavi, and a Nani in our house. Next door, the two sisters were also called Madhavi and Nani. A few Ammus were scattered in the mix and a few Rohinis, mainly in the Thiya community.

   All of us had similar homes, some thatched, some partially tiled, others fully tiled like the rich Muslim houses near by. Mukkattil was such a house slowly decaying due to lack of care.

   None of the women had got beyond basic Malayalam literacy. So the only people with books were the lawyers on the road. They had impressive tomes called Law Books. In addition, my father actually brought home books to read for pleasure. To this day many of my friends in India are surprised at my library in Kochi.

   All the things we needed to buy were within walking distance at the turn of the road, near the Civil Courts. A dry goods man, who was also our neighbour, a tearoom owned by another neighbour, a tailor on our doorstep in a veranda room, a corner shop run by Mammadu for coconut oil or salt in a hurry.

   If someone got ill, the whole neighbourhood held their breath, while the native Vaidyar came and went. The 'doctors' were only called in-extremis. Children wandered around from house to house and adopted sisters and families. Mani, my cousin and I, adopted the house behind ours and all in it. They baby-sat, bathed us sometimes, took us to their temple and made jasmine garlands for our short hair.

   When my father was in jail, gifts turned up from many houses. Sugar, kerosene, sweet-meats; this was their way of showing solidarity.

   School was the limit of our world. A sparse world, but then all the houses were like that. There was nothing for display and nothing wasted. Even the beggars were local beggars; they knew when the mid-day meal was eaten in our houses and when alms would be distributed.

   Education as a given arrived with my generation and that was when the world expanded and we glimpsed imaginary lands.

This Brave New World

Recently I took the extreme step of surrendering my head and hair to a hair-dresser. Haven't done that in years.

   She worked on it for a long time, repeatedly saying, 'There is so much hair.' I felt I should tip her extra for the hair I had. 

   I insisted that she should not blow dry my hair. But, of-course, she was on auto-pilot and blow-dried my hair to hell and back. I emerged looking as though I had straw for hair. I went straight home, put olive oil on it, and washed it again. The hair stayed straw-like or a long time.

   So, one day, I says to my daughter. 'How do people with sparse hair get volume in it?' She said, 'Oh, there are creams and stuff. And they don't comb it to perdition like you do.'

   Of course. This is a definite trend of this decade. Very few women under sixty comb their hair. They are all promoting this sophisticated, disarranged look. Some succeed more than others ending up by looking merely untidy. When I see this I have a strong urge to find my bottle of coconut oil.

   Then there is the stance. Always slightly bent forward, head down, peering into a small screen of some sort. Soon they will discover a new 'app' (sounds like baby-food.) to straighten the necks of all ages and groups.

   In the sitting room the conversation has died. The concentration on the little screen is so complete, no one hears any one say anything. No one has time for conversation.

   Is thinking a casualty as well?

   In India there is much talk of the Aam Admi Party and the eradication of corruption. Now that's an ailment of long lineage and can withstand many aniti-biotics.

   Corruption is not restricted to politicians. What about contractors, engineers, judges, schools??? That little 'contribution' when you register a child in nursery school? What's the other name for it?

   I remember a group of defendants in a murder trial visiting my home at midnight. With one lakh rupees in bank notes in a small bag. I was ten years old. Their purpose was to persuade my father, who was then a Public Prosecutor, to go easy on the defendants. When he refused to collude with them, they threatened him. He was trembling with anger long after they left. I was scared for him.

   There was not much to get corrupted for then. Most houses had nothing beyond absolute need. We had no sofas, no wardrobes, no big mirrors... Achan shaved in a little mirror nailed to the pillar on the veranda. There was so little to buy in our reach that we did not think of it.

   I believe corruption is spawned and nurtured by the culture of too much to see and buy around you. I would love to go back to a more simple life. But then, I'd have to borrow a laptop. Mmm...

   I think the landscape has changed forever.

Of Floors and Feet and Foreign Places

The men came with Stanley knives and bulging biceps. They ripped the carpets off the floors exposing tattered underlay and ancient aspirations. Very gradually they laid the walnut floor, with reverence as befitted the bill at the end. As they worked, Radio 1 kept them company. I listened, excluded from my living room, and longed for the voice of Miriam Makeba. I am not of here, I thought.

   In the evening my son came home from work as usual when the chaos had been sorted out by the women. 
   'Mmm... A little too dark for me,' he said. 'A shade lighter perhaps?'

   This is all a bit beyond me. I remember the floors I grew up on, barefooted.

   First, the house in Thalassery. The floor was cow-dung except for the front veranda and my father's quarters upstairs. Every Thursday and festival day, my cousin, Nani edathy - my friend and foster mother - got the maid to collect a basket of recent cow-droppings.

   The cow-dung was mixed with water till she got a smooth watery paste. While she stirred it with her hand, she would pick out the twigs and undigested debris and throw it away. After the house had gone to sleep, she would apply the cow-
dung to the floor with a spatula made of the bark of the arecanut tree. 

   A room could take an hour or more. Some times, if I was a very good girl, she would give me a small bowl of my own to apply to the floor. Bliss!. I would have to bathe all over again before I went to bed.

   Next morning the floor would be a fresh green-black colour and smell slightly of dried dung. We would be ready for the Friday prayers and the puja.

   When we moved down the road to our new home, which my father built when I was about fifteen years old, we thought we had gone up in the world. Only the kitchen had a cow-dung floor. The rest was red cement. It was beautiful though the polish came off on your feet and your bum, when you sat down, for a while.

   It was only after I got married , at twenty-three- and went off to Colombo, that I realised there were cement floors and then, cement floors.

   The floors in the Colombo-seven house where my in-laws lived had red cement floors that gleamed. You could check your pottu in them. When my very handsome brother-in-law came to greet me, I slipped on the bottom step of the staircase and had to be hauled up to talk to him. It could have been the sheer surprise of his starling good looks of course.

   Every week the maid applied Cardinal polish and buffed it till it shone. Nothing came off on your feet. In between, once a month she applied colour-less Mansion polish to make it sparkle even more. 

   In my father's house, the floor was dull and pock-marked by the time I left. Not in the same league. But I had learned something.

   When my family went to Nigeria in 1962, the floors in the Ministry of Works houses in which we lived were also red cement floors. My first steward, Akpan, buffed the floor with a large coarse piece of rag, dancing on the floor, as in a twist. Much later in life, I discovered electric polishers and learned to do my own polishing, to the rhythm of the High-LIfe.

   The rapid descent to cracked linoleum happened on my first visit to England, staying in cheap B and Bs , who would not turn the non-whites away. Much later there were the scuffed carpets of no discernible colour in the lodgings I occupied briefly, in Richmond.

   Get your bearings, girl, I mouth to myself silently ,as I watch the new wood floors in my son's suburban house. What next?

   

Loneliness and the Old

Jeremy Hunt talking about family. Well, his family, including Bottomley propped him up nicely. So he can't complain.

   He was talking about the elderly and loneliness. I have lived alone in remote places, without water and lights some times, and the books and the music have kept loneliness at bay. If I ever thought about it. I was of course much younger, just fifty.

   I remember the nights in Makeni where the campus generator went off at nine. I would light three candles behind my bed and read by its flickering benediction. It was actually a contended time. The bed cool and snug, the book at the end of a long and hard work-day, the music on the transistor ( I remember listening to Billy Joel on it - in 1985, while the cockroaches came out for their nightly game of 'find-the-bread' in the kitchen.)- what was there to make me feel isolated? All around me was the campus, the evening chorus of families putting children to sleep, washing them in scarce half-buckets of cool water at the pump, Philip Kargbo shouting at his wife...

   In Makeni I was not lonely. I built a small comfortable cocoon in what had been a Catholic monk's cell once upon a time, and the world around me was friendly, if not near me.

   Freetown was another story altogether. Now I had lights and water 24-7. On the British High Commission compound the generator, big as a house, hummed its way right through the night. Air conditioners came on even in flats where the occupants had gone on furlough a month back. Nobody complained and the British tax payer paid.

   But I was lonely. In that expatriate island, nobody looked my way. I didn't hear the domestic voices from the houses set far apart from each other on that diplomatic compound. It was eerie. I now lived in a huge house and I walked the hallways and thought about being alone. I had the books, the music and the comforts, but no one human being near me. And, in that luxurious compound, I was, for the first time aware of being on my own. 

   When the British Council tried to persuade me to stay for another two years I refused. A gentleman boss visiting from London threatened me: 'You will be unemployed back home, you know.' 'No,' I said proudly. 'I am after all a Maths teacher and there's always some school that needs a Maths teacher.' I thought he was a very silly man and a bully.

   Here in England I do see many old people dragging their shopping home in plastic bags, listing to one side. I think, where are the children, the friends, the neighbours? In India, some one would run to the rescue. Here also, this happens - occasionally. Once I was on an escalator in the Underground, looking down on the steps in front of me, and feeling giddy. 'Are you OK?' A young man asked from behind me. 'A little woozy,' I answered. 'Here, let me,' he said. He came down to the step in front of me shielding me from the long descent. 'Here, have a toffee,' he offered. 'Makes you feel better.' I took one. 'Keep the packet,' he said. 'You may need it going back.' He smiled as he left the escalator at the bottom. So there are people who will help the old; it is just that it is so rare.

   Not to talk to another adult for a whole week is a kind of incarceration, of dying. 'This life seems pointless,' an old man on TV said. Alone in his little front-room full of cushions and rugs. Then again, you don't have to be old to be lonely.

   Jeremy Hunt praised the Asians for the way they look after their old. This is true; there is more respect and more care in China, in India , in similar countries in Asia.. But this social fabric is slowly disintegrating with the young going to far-away countries to work. From the United States they come home for two weeks leave in a year. They rush around from one relative to another like a video on fast forward. The parents watch their goings and comings and after two weeks they wait for the phone calls again.

   I live with my children and consider myself lucky.They could have been in Australia or Canada. In my father's life, I was always far away when he needed me, seeing him rarely, not managing to travel to India often on my meagre teacher's salary. He was in a bad place, I think.

   Here, the closed front door makes it impossible to sit on the stoop and be part of the world outside. The television is no substitute for real people even if they are only acquaintances. A group of old men have solved this problem by forming an old people's club, where they meet and enjoy the presence of others from the human race. Perhaps the women should do the same.

Learning Survival Skills

I walk slowly these days. My knees say, slow down. I picked up my granddaughter from Primary School today. Six years ago, I'd carry her all the way from the nursery, five minutes away. Two years ago , I could still sprint after her when she showed signs of straying on to the road or running away to the back of the school. Today she walked well in front of me pausing to wait now and then, while I caught up.

     Mind you, I have to admit, even in my tennis days I avoided running to the ball; the ball had to come to me. Allowances have to be made for laziness.

   'Sorry, Baby.' I said to Asha as she walked to the car with me.. 'Ammamma is slow today. The knees are not so good.'
   'You're perfect,' she said, taking my hand to cross the road. Who is looking after who?

     I suppose most people my age have the same problems: wonky knees, stiff hips, a tendency to sway back or to the side. And then the sullen digestive system, which has its own agenda. When I stay with friends my age, their bedside cabinets are the same as mine. They contain: ointments for knees and hips and weary shoulders, balms for chest, pills for constipation or for acidity.

     When we travel a large part of our luggage is daily medication. I think we should just phone each other to check whether the same medicines are in their houses too. Like asking a friend whether we need to bring towels and tooth paste when we go for a weekend.

   When I meet up with my College mates in Chennai a large part of our day is spent talking about our various degenerative ailments. Tremors, constipation, anxieties, arthritic bones, all these figure prominently in our conversation. We are light-hearted about these as nothing much can be done about all this. Age is irreversible even when it does not show very much.

     One or two have died. Like being air-brushed off, without making a noise. One or two have cancers; they deal with it with dignity and humour. After all, we've got this far, they say. I hope they are totally cured and I feel sorry about the chemos and the radiations that leave them tired and with loose teeth.

     These friends of mine have beautiful skin, though nearing eighty years. They laugh like girls. But we eat small quantities of food, we can't read the small-print on packages in the shops when we go shopping, and we tire too soon.

     I have noticed though, as the world has started to become less respectful of me, I have become more demanding. The nastiness buried deep in us comes out as a survival skill. If a stranger assumes I am stupid because I am old, fat, ugly or slow, I hit back. In England being all these and Indian too does not help. 

     Our heads have not quite caught up with our ageing bodies. The hiatus shows.

RED ED

When Cameron runs out of ideas, he falls back on personal insults. Red Ed, my foot.  Find a better one, Dave.

   To begin with, what's wrong with being Marxist? I'd like to know. Now all of us from Kerala have first hand knowledge of both sides of Marxism, Naxalbaris, Indira Congress and everything in between, that silly Pinarayi included. Marxism has always been a well-meaning philosophy if you separate it from the methodologies attached to it. Remove the 'End justifies the means,' for instance and you can tell Soviet Russia where to get off. It's been done, I hear. By Gorbachev, was it, or did they do it all by themselves?

   Wasn't it Harold Laski who said that Jesus Christ was the first ever Communist? From each according to his means, to each according to his need. What's wrong with that? I think Christianity talks of a tithe. Either will do. C'mon Dave - tax those big businesses, discuss their tax status when they come to lunch at Downing Street like the CEO of Google did. The lot of them - McDonald's, Google, Microsoft... Watch them. See who is stealing from the people of the United Kingdom, stealing the food out of their mouths, the rooms out of their shelter.

   I know that you collude with them, Dave, because of the bedroom tax (but not the Mansion Tax), the wiping off of benefits, but not the bank bonuses. Dave, what do you think you are there for? Power an end in itself? No-no.no. You are there representing the people, all of us, not just the conservatives. And not just big business and the rich. So, please. get off your back-side and attend to the country. Forget you majored in Public Relations. Or you will end up on your backside come 1915 and I shall enjoy the spectacle.

   Ed nudged Labour a little to the left within sight of the poor of this country who can't afford their fuel bills or shoes for their children. He warms the cockles of my ageing heart. (whatever cockles are.) So what do you do? You nudge your party a little to the right. Now the battle is joined for 2015, eh? 

   Will you also team up with UKIP without quite mentioning it? I hear you are against it. Let's see if you'll stay that way when Ed pulls away in the polls.

   My provenance? Definitely Labour. So's you know. There used to be a decent country here, but the money-men and the so-called entrepreneurs, have ruined it. Now we have Rip-Off Britain instead. You can't trust anyone. Pity!

   Have I done mouthing off? Almost. Except for what you have done to the Liberals. Maybe they did it to themselves too. That abrogation of simple humanity.