Food in the Time of Covid

Today it looks as though our bread supply will run out.  In spite of my eating ends, crust and all, which I normally disdain to look at. We eat an unhealthy amount of soft white in our house; we have enough of that to carry us through to next week, but my daughter's seeded brown is over. So she's baking bread. I think the last time she did this was a decade ago. Meanwhile, having taken out the Kenwood and the balance, she made scones for me. She didn't approve of the fact that I insisted on ladling butter, jam, AND cream on to each half.
   There's been a revolution in our house about our concept of food. We don't waste a morsel of anything. Yesterday I tasted my courgette and spinach in yoghurt and quickly put it aside. Uneatable, I thought. My daughter added bits and pieces, pulverized it in the mixer and named it soup. My son and she ate it. I am reeling from surprise. My son does not often notice what we put in front of him, which, at the moment is a blessing.
   I am going back to Malayalee ways, cooking up Moong dhal, lentils and chick peas. We excavate things lurking deep inside the freezer, and eat it, sometimes not quite sure whether it is animal, mineral or vegetable. Whereas, in the past, I would flick such lurking unknowns into the bin, pleading unhealthy appearance, now I look closely, talk to it, and cook it.
   Yesterday I cooked an enormous cabbage-fry, normally something that hangs around in the 'frig accusingly for a whole week, but it has disappeared. I had to cook a whole cabbage because I couldn't countenance letting it get dry and mangy, (it looked a little yellow in parts) with the current paucity of veg. Fresh vegetables involve a trip to the supermarket, which we do not try very often. Yesterday, I also cooked a big pot of Lentils in coconut milk and that too, nearly disappeared. So, I think,what shall I create today? There is some flaked rice sitting in the larder for at least a year. I will make uppuma with it. Cook it with onions and green chilli after briefly frying it in a dry wok, and cooking it in a very little water. No coconut for garnish, but I shall do the Indian tempering with mustard seed and a dry chilli bean?
   Necessity, closely related all inventions. As they say!

For my UK friends, an easy, quick recipe:
Chick peas in yoghurt
Drain liquid from the can and empty one can of chick-peas into a pan. Add boiled water to cover, a quarter teaspoon of turmeric powder and simmer for 5 minutes. Add half an onion, chopped, a pinch of crushed pepper, one green chilli  chopped fine, and a teaspoonful of mashed ginger.  Add salt to taste. Add 8 ounces of coconut milk and a tablespoonful of chopped coriander leaves.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then add a cup of yoghurt. Stir gently. 
Goes with any kind of bread or rice.


 
   

Write or Eat Chocolate

Write or Eat Chocolate?
That's the choice today. I could read of course. Just downloaded one by Tayari Jones. What a writer!  Chocolate of course beckons for brunch as usual; I am tempted, because it does not involve any thinking. Dreadful business, thinking. And it threatens:

  Bubonic Plague across the road. When I got up in the morning, as a child of seven years, in 1942,  and looked out the window, there was always this huge more-or-less, but not-quite-finished house. The porch was big enough to park one of those long Chevrolets that rich Indians favoured in the forties. The red brick had not been plastered -- the owners had gone overseas just before the second world war started, and had been stranded in Penang, much like the families blocked from travelling now in the COVID 19 months. In those days Indians migrated to Ceylon, Malayasia, Burma, Singapore, even East Africa, not the UK or the USA. There was a big pond on one side of the house, in which, many years later, after the family returned, I learned to swim, using a float of old, dried coconuts tied round my waist.

  In the war years, though, a family of beggars squatted in that empty house, appearing out of nowhere. Two young men, two women, and several half- naked children. The women came to our well sometimes for drinking water; occasionally there would be a toddler tugging at her mundu. At that time, my father was in jail, having got on the wrong side of the British Raj because of his political activities and we children, Mani and I, could wander across and stare at the beggars.

  They cooked on a three-stone fire set up on the front veranda and slept on the end of it too. Nobody had electric lights then and kerosene was rationed. The beggars burned wicks in coconut shells briefly in the evenings, like fireflies flitting around.  One day, when Mani and I went to stare, the women chased us away. They didn't speak our language, but their distress was obvious.

  'They're sick,' our maid informed us next day. 'Bad sickness,'  We found out how bad when the family started dying one by one. Plague, my father's colleague, Nambiar, informed us. 'No one should go that side.' Achamma (father's mother) filled coconut shells with cow dung solutions and lined the walkway to the gate to ward off infections. It must have worked because we didn't get plague, though there was no dearth of huge bandicoot rats in the firewood.

  The family across died one by one, until there was just one woman and a child left. When the shit- cart came to take the last dead child away, Mani and I hid on the back-parapet of our house and cried. The unfinished house was empty again, soon after.

  Looking back, I am surprised at the number of deadly diseases we survived -- Smallpox, Typhoid, Measles, Whooping cough... My young mother, all of eighteen years old, had died five years back of Tuberculosis, and a young man from the house behind ours also died of Tuberculosis. In homes around us, people died, but we escaped. No doubt the cow dung worked. Inoculations against Cholera, and vaccinations against Small pox gradually became commonplace. I still have an imprint of that old vaccination on my upper arm; the weapon used was so enormous.

  Now I am wondering whether I should look for cow dung again.

Thank you Jeremy Corbyn. 'May your tribe increase'.

The conspiracy within the Labour Party to get rid of Corbyn succeeded because the rest of the membership allowed it to happen. Today I remember the hope and confidence within the party when Corbyn became leader. When the young chanted OOooooh Jeremy Corbyn in the most unlikely venues, I thought, at last, there is light to be seen at the end of the tunnel.
   Here is a man who never said anything he didn't believe in, never posed and wooed the Press.  He had principles, recently missing from politics. He was honest, caring and fair. He energized ordinary people like me to step out and canvass for Labour. In parliament, Corbyn didn't slash below the belt like May and Johnson. He was civil and professional. In the wrong place obviously. What is the point of being polite to Boris bloody Johnson?
   The Labour manifestos during the 1917 election and the 2019 debacle were a wonder to read. At last, we were going to attempt to remedy some of the imbalances in our festering society. But it was all too much for the electorate, too long used to accepting whatever excrement was handed out to them by the Government in power, Tory, New Labour, whatever...
   The NHS, of course took a crippling hit, because they said, we had no money. The money tree was barren. Corbyn maintained that money would be found when and if the Tories wanted to find it. Like right now. I rest my case.
   A country has to be pretty diseased to elect a Tory Government, as of ours now, which is not only uncaring right, it is also incompetent, incoherent and incapable of planning. When did they start considering ventilators and masks for the hospitals? Tomorrow?
   What makes an impoverished section of the country vote Tory? And that too under bungling, blustering buffoon, Boris. In my worst moments I thought the red wall in the North, which had turned toxic blue, deserved what they got.
   They took it all out on Labour, on Corbyn, blindly following  the glib 'Get Brexit Done' distraction.     So, I am writing to thank Jeremy, who tried so hard to educate the party, the public, the people, and failed because he never learned to do the suit-and-tie act. Any time you care to come back, Jeremy, I am right behind you. I think  the country lost the one opportunity they had in decades to try to have a level society. The Press, of course, were complicit.
   I think Starmer will do great. I hope he succeeds in booting the Goves and the Borises out.
   I love you, Jeremy. And thank you. You restored my faith in politics. 

Isolation 31.3

ISOLATION 31.3

The milk is gone -- all four pints of it. Not satisfied with that, the selfish so-and-so has also taken our

milk- bottle basket, fruit juices and bread, all of which came with our delivery early

morning yesterday. Corona brings out the worst in some people, fortunately a tiny deluded minority We have occasionally had one pint stolen, (I thought I should put some sugar out to go with it) but the whole delivery? Jesus wept!

  I normally wake up to the sounds of the workmen tinkering with metal and stone from the building

site across the road from us. This whole road is gradually being re-constructed by greedy developers.

Old England is disappearing fast. (Some of it like, houses without central heating or indoor toilets

for instance, we are glad to forget) Alan Bennet, where are you, who moaned so powerfully about

that lost landscape?

  Our road was the epitome’ of grace and privilege. Houses set back from the road, lovely green

lawns and trees, three-car families flaunting their wealth… I often felt out of place here, like a bag

lady at the Savoy grille) Now, we have these monstrosities, three and four storey flats with mean

little windows and no parking spaces. Maybe the new residents who will move into the flats in front

will be a little more friendly (I hope) than the stuck-up doctors and such-like, with their heads up

their fundamentals, who took the developer’s generous cash and disappeared

   Today, finally, the workmen are staying at home. So, I have unobstructed view of the three mobile

toilets, one cobalt blue, one leaf green and the other sky-blue, which served the builders. As I write,

the only distraction is the 24-hour news-feed about COVID 19.

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, published 1937

(Not going out at all, except into the garden, on the rare days when the sun peeps out. Not today. So, too much time to do some unnecessary thinking:

Random thoughts about my antecedents.)

 I believe this book by Lin Yutang spoke to an impulse already in me –interestingly, it came from the shelves of a man who was a declared hedonist. I was nineteen years old when I read it, going through an ascetic phase. I had suddenly come alive to the fact of the poverty and misery in India. I had fallen in love for the first time (for all of three weeks) with a young man who had no time for me. Deep contemplation and life-choices were in order.

  The refugees from newly-born Pakistan were fleeing into India still (this was 1954); they had trickled through to Kerala in the far south of India. All were sick, starving and in some cases, mutilated. Muslims from India were going in the opposite direction, similarly traumatized. I read too much, had just finished looking for inspiration in the old and new Testaments, The Baghavad Githa and Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. Thompson’s An Indian Day, which came at the end of this readathon stunned me. I could no longer live my casual, gossip-and-cinema existence with my friends. I drew away, started wearing white clothes, put my jewelry away and became vegetarian. My aunt said I needed a laxative and my father looked hard at me and as usual commented, ‘She’ll get over it.’ He was right. But my friends became impatient with what they called my posturing and abandoned me.

  Lin Yutang spoke to me directly about enjoying all the sensual things in life. Use your senses, he said. Enjoy the murmur of the crickets, the gurgle of a happy baby, the birdsong, all the sounds that make you stop and listen. Look for the beautiful in your life, flowers, sunsets, whatever gives you pleasure. I remember reading that one of the most satisfying tactile things in life would be to scratch an itch. And so on with food, smells…

  This was a gap-year for me and I had time. We lived surrounded by rice fields, as far as my eyes could see. Every evening, I sat on the edge of my compound, blissfully alone, with my latest book in hand, relishing that lovely feeling of contentment. Later, in the night, as the rain poured in torrents, noisily, down the Calicut tiles on the roof, I lay awake and listened. The crickets set up a soft whir and the bull frogs croaked in their watery domains. I have never since enjoyed a more complete existence.

  All my life since then, I have let my senses revel in the world around me, the people in it, and the spaces around me. I remind myself, agnostic that I am, that this is all there is; don’t let it slide past unnoticed.

  Some Hindu spiritualists believe that we are living in Maya, a hallucination. This life does not exist; it is magical entertainment for the Gods, of which there are so many in the pantheon.

  So, wherever I am now, I am open to the sights and sounds and all that make me aware that I am alive. I stroke my cats till they purr, watch the goldfish in the pond (they are not unlike us humans) and the sunlight glinting on the silvery Kochi backwaters near my house is magical.

  Within all my insecurities and discontents there is quiet core of completeness, thanks to a Chinese author I stumbled upon at the right time in my life.

Of Issues and Tissues

Of Issues and Tissues

It was a stray mention on Facebook that started my deep meditation about important issues and tissues. Like toilet paper and kitchen wipes, baby nappies and all else that wipe, clean and we throw away.  My friend, Sue, I know, considers all her buying options carefully. For instance, she doesn't buy anything from Amazon. There was a discussion on Facebook, between her and friends, on the most important issue (tissue) resulting from COVID 19 and the panic buying. Toilet paper in particular.
  I have been in this place before, I think. There was the time in Ndola, in Zambia, in 1971, when there was a run on toilet paper. I couldn't care less, as I was hanging on to my Indian/ Kerala personal hygiene  protocols. The crisis passed unnoticed in our household.
  Later, in the early 1980s when I worked in Makeni in Sierra Leone, there was an acute shortage, which lasted a while. I lived on the Makeni Teachers' College campus, where I worked; the students in the hostels created an enormous cacophony about the absence of toilet paper in their bathrooms. Mr Lenga- Koroma, our no-nonsense Principal told them off for acquiring 'Western' habits. 'In your villages, how did you manage?' he declaimed from the stage in the auditorium, to disgruntled budding teachers.
  Enough detail on this delectable one -- suffice it is to stay that our college water supply was not reliable. Nothing was in assured supply in Makeni except the warmth of our Makeni Temne people.
  Apropos of all this I did an audit of our larder in prosperous Purley, and considered the numerous things we now consider essential, which I had not heard of in Thalassery, where I grew up.
  I came across, tomato sauce, disposable nappies, pure, flowing cooking salt, Jeyes cloths, sponges, shampoo... Instead, in India, we had crystallized salt, which came straight from the sea via the local corner shop; it took a moment to dissolve in our conjee, occasionally looked a little sea-grey, but it cost almost nothing as the sea was just round the corner. For sauces we had pickles and sweet chutneys, and instead of shampoo, we managed with chick-pea flour and moong paste. Worked well enough. The chick-pea left skin smooth to the touch. The moong was a nuisance when it wasn't ground properly to a paste, it would stick to our long hair and take ages to  wash off. Sometimes we used pounded Hibiscus leaves for our hair; it made hair lustrous. My first soap -- a green Rexona -- was a gift from my father at the wondrous age of fifteen.
  As for nappies, my children grew up on cloth napkins, which I washed and re-used; for wipes for surfaces and floors , we used old cloth. I am delighted and grateful for all the new things in my Western existence, but I would not call them essential.
  So it's back to basics for me.  Starting with old strips of cloth for my spills and surfaces and floors.

The Age Expert

I've been wondering over a year or so, if I should start a separate blog about things connected with ageing. After all, at eighty-five (almost) I could safely say I have some experience. 

  For instance, today I am thinking about the ways in which age diminishes perfectly harmless people like me. I have been thinking for a long time about visiting a close friend who has been ill. So I am going from room to room in my house asking my son and my daughter as to who might be able to drive me there. And here's the crux: they are nice Indian children who wouldn't dream of saying 'no' to this request. Then I see them peering anxiously at their diaries and deadlines and I'm not sure I like this dependence.

  Two years ago I would have taken a train from East Croydon and fumbled my way to Sheen Court. But today, I know my balance getting in and out of anything (trains, cars, toilets et al) is suspect. I have fallen only once till now -- that was the day I decided to wear a sari after ages. I get this occasional urge to assert my Indian beginnings. So I am stepping out of my front door and as front doors go, it is a grandma trap. Two or three different levels and steps to manage. (Now that I know, I negotiate with the door and the steps before I commit myself and my stick.)  My slippers came off my feet and I tumbled, ingloriously, into the flowerbed and the Pyrecantha.

My friend, Michael, who was giving me a lift to the Croydon Writers' monthly meeting had a good laugh after he had hauled me up. 'Being fat saved you.' he said, not unkindly, when it turned out I hadn't broken any bones. Just the argument with the recalcitrant Pyrecantha, a few scratches and bruises to nurse for a few weeks after.

I meander -- another old age illness: Now I am not allowed to drive. My socially ultra- conscious children remind me that I shall be a menace on the road with my uncertain levels of spatial awareness. They've got a point, but another little sliver has been broken away from my life.

I contemplate my long-ago life when I drove a Landrover in the interior of Sierra Leone where the roads were so bad the pie dogs slept in the middle of the road. Vehicles tended to to drive on the strips of soil on either side to avoid the rutted middle. It took five hours to reach Freetown from Makeni and nine to Kabale in the North. The distances were small, but oh, the roads!

Uber is a blessing when I can afford it, but I am a little wary of it. I have a tame taxi service that is also expensive, but I know my usual taxi driver who I request.

I am not giving up -- I shall consider how to get my freedom of movement back, if only in my head.