My Ancestral Village

My Ancestral Village We, my Achan and I, lived in Thalasseri, only four miles from the houses where my father and my mother were born, themselves only ten minutes' walk away from each other. As I grew up, I visited these villages – Kodiyeri and Moozikkara, about once a year, when my mother’s family came on annual leave (my grandfather was a guard in the South India Railways, posted to Thamabaram in the outskirts of Madras, now called Chennai.) There was no electricity in the villages, and I was scared of the dark in the compounds. I didn’t really know my mother’s siblings very well though they were roughly my age l; in any case they looked too smart for me – they had pretty school uniforms and were self-sufficient in a way I was not, at seven years of age. The fact that they spoke with a slight Tamil accent some of the time did not help. I would spend two days with them and go home to my lighted-up, Court Road, with buses lumbering past, and fishermen bringing fresh catch to our backdoor. Clearly, I missed the noise and bustle. Later, much later, I would walk straight from college to my aunt’s house. At the edge of our town, you stepped suddenly into a vast green expanse of banana and tapioca plantations that went on – and on – and on. My aunt’s home had a huge compound with a pool in one corner. She had cows and calves and lived off the land. Lunch would often be red spinach and cucumber straight off her vegetable patch. Supper may be jack fruit mash. The food was alien but the moong dhal and rice were familiar. And her unhusked rice fresh off her fields was slightly pink in colour and delicious. The evenings started early with the sound of children in the neighbourhood chanting evening prayers. The dark, when it came, on moonless nights was total and the silence deafening. Before the town bus service started in Thalassery in the early fifties, we walked on the narrow bunds between the paddy fields to reach my aunt’s house. When the new shoots were planted, with the start of the rainy season, you saw miles of tender green stretches floating in pink water. I wanted to grow up quickly and find the words to describe that village. I am still trying.

On the Subject of Birthdays Over the past few years, I have insisted that my family do not give me birthday gifts, instead the money should be donated to their favourite charity. At 87 I should be clearing out the cupboards, not collecting more junk. They can, if they prefer, pay for something I have bought for myself anyway. (This is me being cunning,) So Kitta and Manju are paying for the John Snow book, THE STATE OF US, which I have pre-ordered, and THE CONCERT FOR GEORGE video, which brought so many of the big singers together. I keep listening to Billy Preston singing ‘My Sweet Lord.’ I have reached that harmless age! I have to remember that birthdays were non-events in my childhood in Thalassery. Velyamma (aunt) would not give me my morning coffee until after my bath, and prayers at the household shrine, evidenced by a smear of sacred ash on my forehead. There were no new clothes, gifts, or fanfare. Achan did not notice; in any case the date of the birthday varied from year to year because it was my birth-star-sign that was significant, not the date. So, the day could fall on any date between mid-April and mid-May. It was my husband, Balan, who started the gift-giving when our boys were three and five years old. Balan was brought up in Colombo, in an affluent home, which of course took gifts seriously. It was all a question of habit and expectation. Life in Thalassery was pared down; my father had a large joint family to sustain. He was determined to make me understand that. Later, when he stopped practising (he was a lawyer) he handed the responsibility towards the clan to me. I had to pay for roof-rethatching, school fees etc for some relatives. Gradually, that generation died, or their children became prosperous; they no longer needed me. As I became old, then older, my children indulged me, until I called time on that. I have a new rule in my house: on birthdays my children must obey all my ’commands.’ Fetch tea, indulge me to watch news several times a day, not complain when I play Indian music loudly in the sitting room… This works!

The Boris Charade

The Boris Charade Today I watched the ’tangled web of deceit’ within the Conservative Party ducking and weaving for dear life; in the end they threw Boris out with the bathwater. After all, they had their own political fortunes to safeguard. Constituents were getting a little restive. The mighty Steve Baker, he of the powerful ERG, spoke at length in Parliament today. He squirmed and slithered and, in the end, decided Johnson was too toxic to stay near. However, what escapes me is why the Tory M Ps could not bring themselves to shed the P M weeks ago, when it was clear that he had no respect for the truth, and he was a liability. Did he respect the M Ps who were propping him up? I doubt it. For Boris, it appears, the whole thing is a huge joke, and that offensive smirk never leaves his face. Now we have the ethics committee investigating a serving P M. How far have we descended! Meanwhile, Boris is in India, in good company, I must say. Modi and Johnson must agree on so many things, including Modi’s abhorrent treatment of the Muslims in India. I cringed watching the charade: Boris in turban and Indian garments, Boris paying his respects to the image of Gandhi. Boris being greeted with flowers on his arrival in India. Jesus Wept! Modi has debased India to the point of no-return.

Party-Gate Revisited

Party-Gate Revisited I am watching the elaborate system that is trying to save Boris’s skin. And the best of them is our Press, especially the BBC brigade of sycophants. Once upon a time we had a BBC that was the envy of the whole world, including me when I was working in some god-forsaken countries in Africa. I would wake up to the 6 am news on the World Service and my day would be heralded happily. Now, I look at them on T V, spinning out excuses for Boris, and I am puking. My daughter says, ‘He is one of them, Mum.’ As though that is a good reason. Boris is not going to resign. Remember he said quite recently that they would have to drag him out with heavy machinery. Rishi Sunak will go, because he is not able to face ignominy as well as Boris, who is well acclimatised to it. Rishi is ‘precious.’ As the very rich tend to be. And if you are Indian as well… Once upon a time, the ‘Mother’ of parliaments was revered, and countries (like India) built constitutions based on the unwritten British version. Now we have institutional greed and no principles anywhere in sight. I think we are stuck with this bunch of cowboys at the top. I wonder, surely, within the Tory members of Parliament, there must be some who are ashamed of the way the cabal behaves. Why don’t they get rid of the bunch of incompetents at the top? So, I think, another two years or so of turbulence, disregard of the public, reprehensible behaviour at the top, and of course financial misery for the poor.

What A Sunday Boris Johnson, our undaunted Prime Minister arrived in Kyiv, on Saturday, probably parachuted in like James Bond, I imagine, because no one is quite sure how he got there. Must have asked Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commissioner, who went before him. The Press here did not make a huge issue out of her visit. But, of course, she was a mere woman. And does not weigh anywhere near as much as Boris, and cannot claim an unruly blond thatch. Rishi Sunak, our esteemed gilt-edged Chancellor, meanwhile, is throwing a tantrum, because unknown, conniving people, started investigating his wife’s tax status, and publicised the extent of her enormous wealth. Very bad manners in rich-boy circles. No 10 would never do such a sneaky thing, would they? After all Rishi is a neighbour. Now the lady is threatening to move her establishment to the United States. Our chancellor will become a grass-widower. Boris is on a mission to save his PM-ship. Sunak was getting too close for comfort, but now it looks as though the Chancellor has burnt his boat. Not Machiavellian enough. He could of course, return to California, which he once called home. Boris, of course, is showing big ‘as a global leader.’ The Ukranian PM, Zelenskyy, doesn’t have a clue about how insubstantial Boris’s affections can be. Thankfully, City drew in the match against Liverpool. The commentators were all disappointed. What is City’s magic with the guys, that make all of them drool when City gets a goal? Klopp and Guardiola hugged after the match, as though they meant it.

Prison and Moong for Supper

Prison and Moong for Supper In late August of 1942. the police came for my father. It was all very civilised. There were two of them, in an open-topped jeep and they were not in uniform, but the jeep shouted 'police' loudly. I saw them walking up our walkway. My father was shaving, looking in our mottled old mirror, propped up on the window sill. I saw the jeep because I hovered where my achan was -- always. 'Policukaran,' I said and my father looked up. Achan got up quickly and wiped his face with his small towel. Streaks of lather, as usual, remained in his ear lobes. The men knocked on the front door and my aunt opened the door to them as Achan called out, 'Tell them to come up.' Achan knew they would come for him; a friendly policeman had warned him some weeks before about this LIST. 'Yor name is top of the list,' Lateef had said. Lateef was a member of the crowd that assembled in the far corner of our veranda to play '28', on Saturday evenings. On our veranda because Achan was a widower and didn't have to worry about a wife objecting to the crowd and the noise, or even the many cups of tea that had to be delivered periodically. 'If they pass the QUIT INDIA resolution in Wardha, the arrests will start,'Lateef had whispered, and they did. The ALL INDIA CONGRESS COMMITTEE met in Wardha, and passed the resolution on the 12th of August. It is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being released that brought all this back into my head.For Achan also, there had been no trial, the period of incarceration was not mentioned, nor were the nature of his crime, or the jail to which he would be taken. It was three months before we got a letter from him, severely inked out by a vigorous censor. So now, we knew he was in Velloor jail. The policy was to put them in jails away from their states so they couldn't communicate with others in the vicinity. Achan, as many middle-class people spoke Malayalam and English fluently. When he returned from Jail in late 1944, he was fluent in Telugu as well. I was seven years old when Achan went; some days I thought he would never come back. Achamma, his mother thought he was being tortured. She lost her marbles, refused food, spat medication out, and died slowly. When she died, Achan was parolled for two weeks and I knew he would live. At home, my aunt struggled with Arithmetic, the arithmetic of money and its elasticity. She grew spinach, okra and aubergine in the compound and stopped buying fish. In the evenings we ate a conjee made of moong and wheat, because black-market rice was beyond her budget.Kannettan, next door, who took me to the temple festival every year refused that year because I had no dress that was not torn or shabby. The nuns in school were strong supporters of the British Raj; they made me stand up in class, and mocked my 'criminal' dad. After several incidents, I bit back one day. 'He is in jail because he is fighting for our freedom. Yours too, Sister.' She looked shamefaced and stopped baiting me after that. The neighbourhood looked after us, giving us sugar and rice, fruit and vegetables. The tailor, dhobi and jutka driver did not take money from us. And the day Achan came back, they crowded in our veranda and their love of him was obvious. I glowed with pride. My Achan was SO special.

The Banshee Wail

The sirens on the T V are weird, banshee-like wails, from the cities in Ukraine that are being attacked. The people under siege, crowd into the underground stations. A milling, jostling mass of women and children and a few men. The siren is a familiar sound, which started in Thalassery with the second World War, when Japan was threatening the British colonies in Asia. As it happened, Japan dropped a couple of bombs on the Madras coast and never came back. Events overtook them, such as being wiped out in the Pacific after America joined the war. Indians working in Burma, started the long trek home and many died on the way due to starvation and Japanese bombs. My uncle, a doctor working on rubber estates in Penang and Sungei Patani could not get out for four years. By the end of the war, his savings had been wiped out -- when the Japanese came, they had converted all assets to Japanese currency, now totally worthless. He had to start saving again for passages on steamer for his wife and himself. That took another year. He came home in 1947, with crisp bundles of Japanese money, which he gave to us children to play with. Children, yes. He had not seen his son and daughter, who were living with my father for a very long time, and attending school in Thalassery. They melded into our household and did not remember the parents much after the first year. Mani, my cousin, a few months older than me, occasionally talked about her mother’s food and clothes. Mymoon was a noodle dish, she mentioned – what did I know of noodles in Thalassery? Appuettan and Mani gradually became my father’s brood. They never quite trusted their parents after they returned to take charge. Every school holiday, they rushed back to us, like homing pigeons. Our house waited for them. The siren in Thalassery came from the Municipal Building, next to our College. The sound reached us two kilometres away at nine in the morning and six in the evening. At nine a m it reminded us to get dressed for school, and at 6 in the evening, the clarion call was time to wash and settle down to prayers, and then homework. There wasn’t a clock anywhere in our house, so the siren was useful. I wonder—is that siren still going on?