A Strange Childhood

I write these memories down because it is only with age that I realise how strange my childhood was -- strange, that is, in comparison with other Indian girls of my age. I think other girls in my school-year found me a little strange too: my reading marathons, my political views, (most of my friends had no views at age ten), my short, boyish hair, and my careless clothes and appearance.
   After Achan (father) went to jail in 1942 for being a local leader in the Independence battle, things went further downhill. I remember I was in a school concert in 1943 and I didn't have a dress suitable for the stage. The teachers produced a pink satin dress and Rukmini teacher took her gold necklace off and put it round my neck. She had borrowed the dress from another girl in my class; It helped that the girl had a mother. 
   My father did not notice little things like clothes anyway even when he was around. He checked my hair, clipped my nails with a '7 o'clock' second hand blade, which he had finished with, and taught me things like how to write the number eight. A bit of a battle that; I had trouble getting the loops to close, especially as my writing lessons were on sand spread on the parapet of our veranda.
   Achan had good reason to keep my hair short, however -- it was full of lice. Every weekend I had to spend time getting the lice and nit out, only for them to come back with a vengeance a week later. When I got married I was terrified the lice would migrate to the hair of my new husband. That would have been quite a scandal. At some point during my early married years, the lice left. I wonder, was there a message there?
   As for books, there was a small glass-fronted almirah in the narrow corridor that ran the length of my school block, one for each class. Except it was for children with only a moderate desire to read - if forced. I generally finished the almirah's stock of fairy tales (fairy tales from Greece, Rumania, every conceivable country in Europe) and moved on to the next almirah in a term. In my standard 9, I had travelled the entire corridor and was looking for another book-habitat. My father took me down to the Victoria Library in town, and enrolled me. It was a dark and musty room with hardly another visitor, still a necessary right of passage. And  - it stocked Malayalam books too.
   It was only when I joined the Brennen College at age fifteen, that I went ballistic. Here was a library with long alley-ways full of books. You could get lost in there. I visited so often that the librarian started saving new consignments for me before he stamped them. What a discovery that library was! By the time our lecturer started on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,  in my first year at College, I had read it and knew Mark Antony's speech by heart. I stumbled upon 'The Tempest' next and realised how limited my understanding was.
   Today, I think--  why did my young,widowed father spend so much time doing his Professor Higgins act on me, when he should have been out at the Cosmopolitan Club having a good time with his friends? That club is a whole other story. 

Rituals and Culture

I am reminiscing, what old people normally do when they have been restrained in one living space. We have been discussing Harari's HOMO SAPIENCE and his legends:
   According to Harari, humans have taken refuge in many myths. Ideas of religion, God, even our international banking systems, he argued, are convenient constructs. These structures console us in bad times. give us sanctuary, and situate us in comfortable surrounds. We need them, so we accept them and suspend disbelief. For instance, we hand over our money to banks across national barriers, comfortable in our belief that when we want our money back, it will be swiftly returned to us. When banking systems collapse we forget that we built them up and gave them credibility, and we are outraged.
  So I have been thinking about elaborate cultural practices -- I was well-placed to examine them as I was a Hindu girl growing up surrounded by Muslim houses. Their children were my childhood playmates, their men ran our corner shop and their women exchanged gossip with us over the broken down compound wall.
  But, when it came to ceremonies and practices, the divergence was palpable. When Hindu girls got married, they left their homes for good and followed a strange man (if it was an arranged marriage) to his home, after shedding a few obligatory tears, or, as in my case, sobbing my heart out for leaving my Achan (father), who was the only person I loved in the whole world.
  Muslim girls had no such problems . When they got married, the bridegroom just turned up in the evenings, after supper, and left early in the morning. The girl now, would get an ara, a room of her own, where she would collect and display little tokens of her married life.
  Aliyumma lived across the gully from our back garden. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Flawless complexion and beautiful features, not to mention a smile to die for. Muslims in those days married early. Aliyumma had stopped hopping across the gully to play with me when she started menstruating. She had always worn a flimsy thattom,, an apology for a face cover. It was always a small thorthu (bath towel) twisted around and under her hair. She taught me how to secure it without pins or slides. Interestingly, she never wore a burqha, the full-length head-to-foot gown that is now common practice in parts of the world. And ugly beyond despair.
  Aliyumma also stopped going to school at about the same time. When I asked, her Umma (mothersaid she would soon get married. She was all of thirteen years old. Our world diverged, mine to college and exams, hers to visiting husband and babies. Her husband worked in the Indian Navy and he wasn't around very much. When I went to her ara she would show me the small bottles of attar in her display almirah, silk scarves, crockery that had been presented to her... And she would giggle, carrying secrets that an unmarried me could not guess.
  Sometime later I heard her husband died quite young. I had lost touch with her when I myself married and left India.
  On one of my recent visits to my hometown, Thalassery, I stopped off at a textile shop near the bus stand to buy dothis as a birthday gift for a favourite friend and relative, Balettan. I spoke in Malayalam to the owner when I reached the counter to pay.
  'You are from Thalassery, I can see, from your Malayalam accent,' the shopkeeper exclaimed.
   'Yes, I lived near those fields on Court Road. My father was a lawyer.'
  He was Muslim, this shopkeeper; so I asked whether he knew my friend, Aliyumma.
  ''She was my Umma,' he said. 'She died quite young.'
  I had married into a westernized Sri-Lankan family, went where I pleased, and worked as a teacher.
  Aliyumma did not stand a chance.



  

Accretions and Affluence.

We have allowed our daily lives to be suffocated with so many accretions over the last three or four decades:
  In 1943, when I was an eight-year old, growing up in the colonial shadows of the second world war, I did not know the taste of canned and bottled fizzy drinks. Or squash. If it was the lime or orange season the fruit would be squeezed, sugar added and it was delicious. Often, with sugar rationing during the war years, Ammamma (my father's sister, who ran the household) would add vellam, a raw jaggery, which came in dark brown lumps. We had no fridge, indeed in my father's house there was never a fridge. I offered to buy him one in the late eighties, during a brief bout of imagined wealth, but he wisely refused, saying he didn't want another addition to the list of necessities of his life.
  Now, my family buy Coke and Pepsi in numbers and our fridge has to make ice cubes to augment the luxury. Interestingly, I still can't drink very cold drinks, never having had the practice in my childhood.  Netflix is of course my family's best indulgence on Covid nights. I try to remember what I did at their age in India, beside reading to pass the time.
  I remember we had a brown-and-black bakelite Philipps radio, the size of a small microwave oven. Radio, Ceylon came on at four in the evening and Binaca Geethmala, (a stream of songs sponsored by Binaca toothpaste) could keep me occupied for hours. Until the radio went up in smoke one day; it self-destroyed. Never found out why. The radio was not replaced, until the seventies when I went home from England one time carrying a transistor radio as a gift for my father. That was the size of a toaster.
  Now, in my home, there are four TVs, two sound systems and a radio by each bed. With three wage earners in the house, we just buy whatever we think we need. Emphasis on the word think.
  As to clothes,  the less said, the better. We are running out of storage space.
  And the three adults in our house own a car each though we tend to travel to the same places. My father bought his first car in 1949;  a light blue Standard Eight, with a small window on the roof, which never became rain-proof. It was the runaround for the whole neighbourhood. I continued to walk the two miles to school and back. Eventually father sold the car because he found he couldn't afford all the trips he financed for everyone on our road.
  Looking back, as people my age spend time doing, nothing was imported in our little town. Fish came, practically gasping for air, straight from the sea and the river. The fisherman trotted down the road, eager to sell the fish before it got spoiled. Similarly the lamb and beef were butchered right in front of the customers, in the market stall.
  All the vegetables were grown locally.  The vegetable vendor would offer aubergine, bittergourd, drumsticks, pumpkins... Cabbage and French beans were not grown in our town and were considered expensive English vegetables. Ditto tomatoes, capsicum and cauliflower. The woman who sold veg to us generally had several types of fresh spinach and long beans, which she grew in her back garden.
  I have to think really hard to picture anything that came from outside our little town. Saris arrived from other parts of India and pretty textiles too.
  All this has changed now. India is fully globalised. The lemmings all over the world are blindly walking towards dependence on far-off lands, waste, and in the final reckoning, destruction of our long-suffering planet.
  All we need now is something from somewhere else that can do our thinking for us. We have made a start with Google Searches.

The New and Sparing World

A New and Sparing World
No, I don't mean the mighty U S of A. Some of the people in the mighty USA are dedicated to consumerism in a way I cannot even fathom. Once upon a time I lived in a place where life was quite basic -- no supermarkets, frozen food or Doctor Pepper. I once asked one American friend what he missed most in that place. Disposable kitchen tissue, he said. In a country where women boiled strange vegetation for hours to make something that resembled mushy soap.
  With COVID terrorizing us, I have wondered, what price our extravagances? At the end of all this, are we willing to take a good, long look at our silly indulgences? Are we able to consider the harm we are doing to our world?
  I think: do we need to travel quite so much to quieten the sheer frenzy of our indulgent selves? Do families need more than one car in their front-gardens? And are all their trips in them necessary or useful?
  I start with my own household. The number of items of clothes we buy for our grandchild is sinful. And then we give away two or three bagfuls to charities twice a year. A few years ago, I remember I used to buy clothes a size too small for my biggish self. In the hope that I could slim down to them. Did I ever succeed in wearing them? The answer can be guessed.
I look in my condiments cupboard and there are several kinds of vinegar, Soy sauces and pickles.They fester there for years, and jars barely used get chucked out after a year, or two, or many. My linen cupboard is bursting with towels and duvet covers from all over the world; pillow cases that never see the light of day...  Recently I counted the saris I haven't worn since decades and there were sixty-four. I periodically look at them -- they are pretty to look at. But I don't wear them in England. Some are from the time of my youth, old and saturated with memories, but still, there is no excuse with such covetousness.
  After Covid, shall we see some sense in our lives? Less time rushing around wanting more and more, instead find more time to enjoy what is all around us. Just now, the butterflies, wasps and bees are back in force in my garden. The birds are reclaiming the trees, the grass, the bushes. I potter around in the wet mud, knowing I have to wash my hands so many times anyway.
  Next year, hopefully with death and damnation behind us, I shall make a list of how I shall trim down my life. Stay still. look. listen...  

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.