Christmas Fatigue

It's over -- for this year anyway. Mind you, some friends suggested it should be banned for good, along with Black Friday and Guy Fawkes day...
  Being a pagan I am wary about saying these things out loud. Might upset the seriously Christian Christians, who sincerely believe in the seven days of creation, virgin birth, resurrection etc. And I am firmly on the side of anyone who can believe in ANYTHING that they can't prove, witness or explain. People with beliefs are, my Psychology teacher used to say, immune from scepticism in selected directions. A man HAS to believe in the fidelity of his wife, he used to say. He cannot make that belief negotiable. Everyone needs a few buffers.
  But now -- the lights on the tree are out. It is quietly counting down to Croydon's tree-clearers. My daughter's head has surfaced from the crepe paper, shredded paper, brown paper and cardboard of various provenance. The greeting cards are stacked, not displayed. We don't send any cards these days. The tree is our excuse.
  Our expenditure on the season was about a third of our usual annual indulgence. Yet Manju spent a whole three days wandering in Croydon's depressing shopping malls. I spent a few hours getting confused online by the number of different nameless junk on display. And safely settled for books. Predictable.
  We have fallen prey to the businesses -- they have conned us into more and more excess. Amazon is in full flow; you can have it the day before you order it -- almost.
  I ate so much on Christmas day at Mary's that I had to rest for three days after.
  BUT -- I enjoyed seeing my friends.

HOME

This home -- three small bedrooms, a tiny office room where my father met his clients (and they spilled out on to the veranda and yard when there were more than four) a sitting room in which there was no furniture, apart from my study-desk; and one bathroom and kitchen. The latrines were outside and in the rain you sprinted.
  Now, in Purley, there are five bedrooms, three bathrooms and two sitting rooms. And our junk is endless demanding more -- and still more -- space. My books dominate all the rooms and the attic. The place is expensive to heat, clean and keep in a fair state of repair. What a transformation! And when I think about the homeless and the rough sleepers I have a deep sense of guilt, which a few quick-fire donations to Shelter or Crisis will not ameliorate.
  In that unpretentious house in Thalassery, I spent my years between fifteen and twenty-two. The college years, the read non-stop years, and the desperate search for answers years, to questions that still remain unresolved. Religion, life and death, poverty...
  I think of the one-hundred-and one saris I don't wear, some of which, ever; others once in two or three years when I visit India. Most were bought because they were so pretty to look at and cost so little. And my ailing cousin decided gold and brocade were not for her after the age of seventy, so she gave me a heap of south Indian silks and brocades. I yet have to decide what to do with them when I die. Burn them on the pyre, drape on windows?
  The house is now demolished, the land 'acquired' by the Government. A stadium now adorns the fields around.

Below are three short excepts from my memoirs AS FATHERS GO, about my home:

That house on Court Road was to all intents and purposes the home I grew up in; anything that came after, wherever in the world they were, were way-stations.

Until age and distemper caught up with me, I did an annual pilgrimage to Thalassery; I always returned to England feeling replenished in spirit, wondering how long that feeling would last. When I am in that little, government-forsaken, back-water of a town, even my grey cells stir and gear up for action.

I feel more Indian – I wear saris more often and take out my Indian jewellery, and the pottu box comes out from the recesses of the dressing table. My eyes get a lining of kohl, which will seep into the wrinkles below and proclaim my age. It doesn’t last long; the cotton saris that I favour need to be starched and dried, the weather is unfriendly and an overcoat above the sari is an abomination. The Kohl and Pottu don’t do much for my ravaged face either.

Looking at my valiant, but half-dead walnut tree in my bleak, front garden here in Purley in winter and remembering the lush green of my home-country, I think of this journey, this annual pilgrimage with wonder. If I travel by car I see the countryside getting gradually more devoid of development as we leave South Malabar behind.

I know now that I will never belong anywhere but in that little coastal town, which is rediscovering itself. The cosmetic surgery, with grey concrete and chrome is unbecoming, but only bits are gone. Most of Thalassery is blessedly old, a little shabby and natural. I shouldn’t complain; in my childhood, there was one government hospital in town; it was near the beach and as you walked past, you could see the sick men and women, too poor to afford private doctors, sprawled on benches and the floor, waiting to be seen. Not unlike the A and E at NHS hospitals recently

Now there are two huge hospitals in Thalassery, one near my grandfather’s old village, Moozhikkara. It is ugly, its front gate crowded into a busy road, all concrete and glass, but it serves its purpose. Sick men and women do not have to travel five miles to reach a hospital in an emergency. Similarly, there is another huge hospital on the road where I lived my childhood and adolescent years.

..................

There is a stadium where the paddy fields used to stretch peaceably as far as eye could see; now cricket rules, O K. The Koduvally river has shrunk into itself. A river that gave name to and defined that whole area has morphed into apologetic little rivulets. I cannot find my way around my hometown.

On these visits, I always go to my old house, (which my father built in 1950, the year I joined the local college,) to chat to my dead father, can we ever quite see him off? He lingers. I normally pick up a few grains of mud from the spot where he was cremated and drop them into my purse. The money-plastic will be gritty for a few weeks and the holes-in-the-wall in England may find another reason to refuse me my hard-earned dosh. Ah well –

........................

The stadium is now complete in the fields where I roamed, where the young men battened the ground down and played badminton after the harvest, fished for river-fish in the shallow waters of the paddy-fields and I gazed between turning the pages of my latest book. There is nothing to look at now. The house has been 'acquired' and is slowly dwindling away before the offices of the stadium are built there.

The cast-iron gate, which was my father’s pride and joy, has broken down and someone has carted it off. The concrete slabs at the entrance are breaking up.

The house itself is dismal. Male nurses from the nearby Co-operative Hospital are lodging there and doing to the house what young men do when they have no resources and no style. Colourful lungis (sarongs) and greying underpants hang on a rope on the balcony, to dry. The woodwork is rotting, the front office window is hanging on one hinge, and the young man walking on the terrace upstairs seems part of that dilapidation.

I am glad to get away to my cousin's house, where I am staying for the night, and the welcome of my family. Forget the tasteless mall, the dried-up river bed and all else that we call modernisation.

I know I'll keep going back to that road, that place, in spite of the shambles it has become --  will the remnants see me out too? Last through the fag end of my life? I hope so.

 ......................

Independence

On 15^th August, 1947, on the midnight hour, India became independent. The whole household stayed up to listen to Jawaharlal Nehru, standing on the ramparts of Red Fort, Delhi, to make that unforgettable speech about ‘our tryst with destiny.’

Now, he said, we were redeeming that promise, a promise made to ourselves long ago. Not completely, he reminded us. We now had a Constituent assembly, which would draft our constitution; the members of that assembly were nominated, not elected. It would be some while before India had its first general election and there was a truly representative government at the Centre and in the states.

Meanwhile a little chunk from the North West of India had been chopped off; another bit had been amputated from the East. The wounds were bleeding, suppurating, and would never quite heal. The surgery was ham-fisted, because the surgeon was in a hurry, and didn’t know very much about this kind of surgery.

The man drew lines on a map, bisecting villages, rivers, monuments; in places the line even went through the kitchens of houses. So you cooked in Pakistan and ate in India.

In our elation at becoming independent, we hardly noticed what was happening up north as Muslims and Hindus killed each other by the thousands. The British had left in an unholy hurry abandoning an India they could no longer contain.

My father was chosen to make the Independence Day speech at the big Maidanam, early the next morning, after the Sub-Collector’s wife hoisted the Tricolour. She made a short speech in English, which he translated. After that he spoke in Malayalam. There were not many in that town who could slip seamlessly from English to Malayalam and back ag

All the school-children had been led to the big maidanam in town in orderly lines, to participate. We had small tricolours pinned to our blouses and we sang the national anthem after the flag was hoisted. I was so proud, I thought I would burst.

Belonging

Clearly, having been born and grown up in India, leaving it only to go next door to Ceylon when I got married, where everyone looked a little Indian anyway, I am indisputably INDIAN. But then, India is a big place, I don't speak the languages of North India (though I think I should be able to speak Hindi and my bookshelves are littered with books in that direction) and only understand a smattering of Tamil from the South, and my own very precious Malayalam ( no language I know in which  I can swear so effectively) you could safely say I have, in certain respects, more to do with English-speaking countries, Britain, America and many commonwealth nations. Even South (south effrica, God help me?)


   And then I remember something that I always thought when I was young and green, and it delights me: you don't have to be any one thing. You can be all things and own the whole world -- why restrict yourself to one small part of it?
   Going to Nigeria for the first time in 1962, when I was a brash twenty-six year old, changed my entire perspective on the world, on humanity, on my own India. Gradually Africa seeped into me,  rich, untidy, noisy, in-my-face. What a blessing! The world shifted as the screen of a mobile phone being turned around and the kaleidoscope was awe-inspiring.
   In parts of India we pay dowries to the bridegroom's family to walk off with that precious daughter, loved, educated, an earner, to become cook, mother and wife for another family. In Africa they pay bride-price as the woman is considered an asset (though one treated casually in households -- the beast of burden) worth paying for in cows, goats, pots and pans and clothes. I am still reeling from all those different world-views.
   So I know I have to record that growth in my mind, the me that altered beyond retrieval.
   But the shoulder is frozen, the right arm is recalcitrant and doctors advice me to rest my clicking arm. Hence a little diffidence. Stop writing for a while? Not a hope. I can't stop breathing either.
   Happily, a workshop in Sevenoaks for writers comes to mind, and a Spanish woman who could not write to save her life. Not in English anyway.
   They were talking of writers' block and I was telling myself that what I have is writers' diarrhea, not constipation. Never mind the quality of my output.
   This lady said that if you wrote a page a day, a book could get written in a year. So that is what I shall do. Bear with me. All Africa vignettes will have Africa in the title to distinguish them from my other blogs.
  So Africa, here I come...

Short days

Another short, miserable winter day. I dread them

  My bones are old and cold and I layer myself with cardigan upon jumper upon t-shirt and hide. I wear two pairs of socks and still find the floors cold. With the weather almost spring-mild, this does not augur well.

   The worst of it is the diminishing of my life for four months till April. The fish in the pond have gone down; they are hibernating. The birds are around just to feed and then they disappear. My cats ask me to open the door for them to go out (disdaining their cat flaps. After all, we are all their servants to do their bidding.) and then change their minds. They stand at the door weighing the weather up while I freeze. I myself will look out longingly at my garden from the window. There is still a dash of colour here and there in the garden, mostly wild roses, which disregard the rules of December behaviour.

   I wake up at three in the morning and my hands are stiff. I do yoga exercises in bed and search for my sausage bean-bags, which keep me warm. But my cat, Pepper, gets there first and will refuse to budge. She likes sleeping on the warm sausage too.

   Short days, I think, remind me of the human life. Flitting by like a DVD in fast forward. I wake up late after my insomniac night and sleep late. When I come down, my daughter is well into her work and the squirrels are waiting for bird-feed, the naughty urchins of the garden. There is no grace in the day, no slow passage of time. It rapidly scurries back into dusk and I wonder where the day went. Or the week, or the month -- or the life.

I am reminded of the words of the venerable Bede. Human life, like a bird's, which flies into a lighted room briefly and then goes out into the dark again.

   Now, I must find a decent book to cheer me up. A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, again, I think. 

Anandam gets an Education -- of sorts

Educating the Daughter

When I was about fourteen years old, my father decided my school was just not doing enough; there was so much the school could not teach me. it was part of his mission to fill that gap, to educate, improve, and generally make me fit to manage the twentieth century, (and totally unfit to marry a local Nair man). I resisted that mission vigorously when he was not looking; I just wanted to be like all the other girls around, relaxed, uneducated man-fodder.

One of his original ideas was to train me to speak fluently and lucidly in public, in both Malayalam and English. On a lazy Sunday morning when I should be picking green mangoes from the compound behind our house, he would summon me.

The lesson would begin on the front veranda of our house -- one prong of a many-pronged attack. This involved me standing six metres from him, on our walkway to the front-gate, and speaking on a topic he would set. He would stand on the veranda and instruct. I had five minutes to prepare. He was a demanding teacher, teaching me to ‘throw’ my voice, slow down, look at him, not mumble… Topics included Freedom, Non-violence, Books I liked and why…

Father dictated what I read and supervised that process. When I finished reading a book he had instructed me to read, I had to do a little review in a note-book and show it to him. I often tried to copy the blurb at the back, but he found me out very quickly. ‘I am not looking for second-hand opinions,’ he said. ‘I want you to think for yourself – not trust others.’

With poetry, he was more demanding. I had to memorise four lines of the book of that week and recite it to him. Karuna by Kumaran Ashan was his favourite. Karuna was the story of Vasavadatha, a beautiful prostitute in Madhura. I enjoyed that story in verse; she sounded feisty. In Memoriam was another matter. For the rest of my life I have kept a safe distance from Tennyson, including the bewildering Lady of Shalott.

Interestingly my reading speed in both Malayalam and English grew exponentially, and my memory blotted up anything that came along, without discrimination.

Our walkway was a public place, and when I had to perform, passers-by would stare. For an audience, I generally had the crows on the coconut tree, the ownerless cats going from house to house at the time the fish parted with their heads each morning, and two or three children from around the neighbourhood, who would stand and gape at this unusual girl and her even more unusual father. I hated all of this, but there was no escape. In school and college later, however, I became the star debater.

My father enticed me into his activities (all except swimming) and now, in my eighties, I find I have a variety of diversions to call upon when time hangs heavily, and I am looking to escape my writing, I have a large savings account of varied activities that I have banked, under duress, for my old age. Not to mention a greedy reading speed.

Gardening, which is a favourite occupation of mine, works every time. Though, at the time, I joined in reluctantly. Achan usually planted red spinach, green spinach, aubergine, beans and okra. There were also the climbing beans (mange tout), the centrepiece of the garden. He and his best friend had an ongoing competition about whose beans did the best each year.

My father would send me out to water the vegetable-patch every evening in the summer. Water had to be drawn from the well and carried in pots to the garden in front of the house. I was supposed to join the young boy who was our gofer, as it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to do it all on his own; also, I had to spend hours weeding with him, when I would rather just be. I was a teenager then, but Achan made no concessions to the alternate world of teens, which my granddaughter, Asha, now inhabits with such panache.

I would hitch up my ankle-length skirt, along with my reluctance and draw water from our well, tugging at the rope-and-pulley system. Physical exertion was meant to be ennobling! But, all it did for me was drench me from waist down. My skirt would start getting entangled in my legs; periodically, I would need to stop and wring out the water from the bottom of it. Neighbours and family looked on in astonishment in those years at this father-and-daughter team; in those years girls were not meant to be going everywhere with their fathers. And fathers, as the alpha males in the house, were not meant to take any notice of daughters. Also, digging, weeding, watering, were not occupations of middle-class females. You had maids and helpers for that, didn’t you? What was Vakil’s (lawyer’s) daughter doing, joining in with the garden-boy?

The garden boy, was a priceless urchin. He could disappear into thin air if he heard my father’s footsteps approaching, with what he imagined was instructions about the watering. I knew where to find him though he changed his hidey-holes on a regular basis.

‘Don’t want to get your skirt wet, do you?’ he’d ask innocently. ‘We could do it early tomorrow morning before your bath.’

There were in fact a few rules in our house regarding house-boys. No shouting at them and don’t ask them to do anything you are not willing to do yourself. If they were young they had to be fed when the children of the house were fed. I believe my father adopted all of this from Mahatma Gandhi; in practice the women who ran the kitchen ignored my father with impunity because he never went anywhere near the kitchen.

Education of yore --Brennen College in British Times.

2

The years of my childhood were also the years of famine in parts of India, especially Bengal, and extreme poverty in many states. One of the regular sights of Thalassery in the forties was the steady procession of beggars; an unending, sad stream of them in the streets and in the doorways. They came to the richer houses in Thalassery every day, and soon learned to differentiate between the kind and the cold-blooded. They made the universal sign of begging for food -- touching their mouths and opening their palms. I remember the terrible procession of shabby, hungry and hopeless families.

In our house, Achamma saved dry coconut shells for the beggars to drink conjee out of, and when our rice was drained daily, she set aside a few handfuls, that she would drop into the starchy water drained from the rice. She would keep this  in a clay-pot; around three in the afternoon, the clay pot would be empty and she would have to turn away the remaining procession of beggars. Gradually, the beggars learned to clock in before that three o’clock ‘closing’ time.

I would look at the children of around my age or younger, clinging to their mothers’ garments or hiding behind them. My family would not let me go within touching distance of them; Ammamma warned that they might be carrying infectious diseases. I wondered, where were the fathers, rarely to be seen with them? Where were the older children?

                 When it had rained continuously for many days and the water-levels rose enough to create mayhem and destruction, my father and I would walk to our little beach, only five minutes from where we lived, to see the objects the sea had claimed.

Unlike famine, which may have been avoided, the rain wreaked economic havoc of a different sort locally. Whole barns, full of copra, (coconuts dried for months to be milled and made into coconut oil, were generally stored in barns made from bamboo poles tied with coir rope.) would lift off from the banks of rivers, where they were situated, and float into the sea; you could see them bobbing away gracefully towards the horizon. Someone’s livelihood for the next year washed away. The sea would be an ominous gun-metal grey, and occasionally, far away, there would be a huge shark tossing and turning with the water.

 

So, for me, rain-washed Thalassery is where it all began.

In 1933, my mother, Janaki, all of fourteen years old, got engaged to my quicksilver father, Raghavan. Quicksilver, because of his sudden changing moods and incessant pursuit of goals he set himself – reading, swimming in the sea, gardening, walking… 

Achan (father) was somewhat older than my amma (mother) and better educated, naturally. She barely reached standard nine before she was offered to my father’s family. What did education have to do with females? Achan started in the local Government Brennen College, which provided for only two years of post-school education after matriculation, then called school-finals. F A, the qualification was called, Fellow of Arts; about the standard of British A levels.

To most men in that small town, Thalassery, finals would have meant just that. Time to stop all that school nonsense and start earning a living. The women, in those days didn’t get that far. The Nairs lived off their lands and didn’t aspire to do much with their lives. Malayalam enjoys a phonetic alphabet, which meant once you learned to read and write the fifty-four squiggles, you were literate by definition. Men and women attended the first two or three years in local one-room primary schools and became ‘literate.’ All the women in our family, of my father’s generation, could read and write, but ‘educated’ they were not.

       My father and a few others also attended these thatched, one-room village schools where one teacher taught all the children, cane in hand. The only difference with my father and two of his friends from the same village was that they decided to walk the four miles to town to attend the next level of education, and then the next. These three were the first three young men from his village, Kodiyeri, who graduated. (In my father’s family, I was the first woman who went to college.) Achan would therefore have been considered a good catch in the marriage market. There were a few hiccups – he was the kind of man who would instigate hiccups whatever he did and wherever he went.

       At the time, early twentieth century, most of the lecturers in Brennen College, Thalassery, were British, mainly Scottish. The story goes that my father took umbrage at an imagined insult, made by the lecturer, which involved the phrase, ‘your father.’ I gathered my father was late to the lecture. The lecturer, from another culture, would have had no way of knowing that you simply did not use that phrase ‘your father’ contemptuously, as part of an admonition, anywhere in Kerala. When my father tried to explain why he was late, the lecturer retorted, ‘I am not interested in your father or your grandfather.’ My father apparently staged a walk-out, and being who he was, it would have been a dramatic exit. Whereupon two of his friends also walked out behind him, in support. They had started an incident, which would lead to life-changing events in all three lives. Indeed, one of them never went back to his studies.  

       All three, to begin with, were suspended from the college. They could be reinstated if they offered a public apology. Two of them refused, the other apologised and returned to his studies. Later, my father admitted to me in passing, that in that atmosphere of nascent and aggressive nationalism, the young men were looking out for anything they could represent as a grievance. 

       The institution was a government college and no other college in the State of Madras would offer my father a place to continue his studies. (This Brennen College was established by Edward Brennen, an Englishman, who worked in Thalassery Port and made his home in Thalassery in the late nineteenth century.) It took my father a long time, to be accepted by any college, and in the end, it was a private institution in far off Madanapalle, in Andhra State, which offered him sanctuary, and hope.

The Theosophical College in Madanapalle was established in the name of Annie Besant. (Annie Besant, an Irish woman, devoted her life, fruitlessly as it turned out, to the idea of a caste-less Indian society. She helped establish the Benares Hindu University and worked tirelessly to promote Indian culture. She was also the president of the Congress Party in India in 1917.)  Here, my father completed his degree in History. He told me it was a harsh life; he had to go to college, far from home, in a place where he had to rent accommodation, and pay for train-travel to and from his home. He went home only for the summer holidays, once a year.

He settled into a corner of the veranda of a local house for a small rent. They let him cook his daily rice and dhal in that corner, and he bathed by diving into the well in the compound. Apparently, he would put his rice and dhal in one pot, which was all the kitchen utensils he possessed, and go off for a bath while the food cooked. He told me a story of how, once, he got winded in his dive and couldn’t surface for a while. His food was burnt to cinder by the time he managed to come up and get to his pot.

Achan had to fight for his education. There is a story in the family that he went on hunger-strike for a week to persuade his impecunious parent to fund his law degree. Apparently, Achachan (paternal grandfather) had to sell his ancestral home to finance my father’s ambitions. Apocryphal or not, I could imagine his relentless pursuit of his goal; he was a stubborn man.

After he graduated, he did a law degree in Madras (now Chennai in Tamil Nadu). There was also professional training in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala, for a year, before he could practise law in his hometown. He was then twenty-six years old. Malayalam was his mother-tongue, as is mine, but in Madras and Madanappalle he learned a smattering of Tamil and Telungu and became fluent in the English language, representing his college at many debates and winning silver medals and other accolades.

When I was about sixteen years old I came across a horde of medals in a tin box in his chest of drawers; Achan said I could pick one and put it on a chain if I wished. I got the local goldsmith to attach it to my necklace and displayed this heart-shaped medal proudly on my person.

‘Why do you spoil your nice gold chain with this cheap pendant?’ my friends asked. I described with pride how I came by that silver locket; I still have it in my jewel box.

The languages my father acquired in Madras and Madanapalle would stand him in good stead when he was in prison in Vellore, and later Tanjore, in the war years. The freedom fighters immured in those prisons were from all over India and he had to become polyglot in a hurry. It was British policy to send the men as far away from their homes as possible, preferably to another state – this would prevent them from fraternising with the warders and other prisoners. None of this worked of course. When the Andaman Islands were occupied by the Japanese, the prisoners were informed by the warders; the warders sneaked newspapers into the wards when something momentous happened, so the inmates knew all about the course of the freedom struggle, as well as the armed struggle going on in the Far East and in Europe at that time.