A Difficult Transplanting Recently, my mind strays back to Sri Lanka. I haven’t been there since 1972; it was called Ceylon then. I remember the enormous house, which my in-laws rented in Adams Avenue, Colombo. My ageing mother-in-law and rapidly disintegrating father-in-law rattled around downstairs, while my new husband and I occupied three humungous bedrooms and all mod cons upstairs. Once Balan, my husband, had rushed off to work, around 8 a m, I had nothing to do other than contemplate the view from the many windows. From my bedroom I could see into a beautiful garden next door, so I did that daily. I would go downstairs for breakfast when all others had finished. At home, in Thalassery, it had always been Dosa or Idli with coconut sammandhi (relish). Bread, butter and strawberry jam didn’t cut it. I often made up with many cups of tea. Did wonders for my waistline – until the waistline came into its own with my first pregnancy. I learned elementary kitchen Singhalese to communicate with the young Tamil maid, Pakyam, who reigned over a vast kitchen, where nothing much was cooked except my father-in-law’s insipid mushes. Pakyam had supreme contempt for me and didn’t like me around in the kitchen. My kind sister-in-law, Kamala, would come round in her chauffeur driven Cadillac, once or twice a week, to take me ‘shopping.’ Shopping as a leisure activity was new to me. My father nurtured an extended family on an uncertain lawyer’s income; if there was any spare cash, it went to sustaining waifs and strays in his village. Kamala’s chauffeur with his peaked cap reduced me to silence. Kamala would go to many shops in a day, getting material for sari blouses, garments for her niece, and odds and ends for the ‘sewing woman’ who came once a week to sew for Kamala. Clearly, this was an industry sustained by the posh Colombo -7 crowd, who kept the wheels of Kotlewala’s government turning, and subsequently, that of Bandaranaike. The Times of Ceylon would occasionally describe the fineries of the rich ones at some soiree’. After a few weeks. I signed out of the shopping events and devoted myself to sitting on a chair on the veranda and day-dreaming. As usual with the pregnancy related practices at home in India, I would go home in the seventh month. I counted the months out. Was I cut out for marriage? I wondered. I still wonder.

Where The Rain Was Born --- an exercise in nostalgia Thalassery -- A verdant, little, coastal town, tucked away in the South-Western corner of India along the shores of the Arabian Sea. If you walk a long, long way north, hugging the coast you will finally reach Mumbai (formerly Bombay.) If, instead, you walk in the opposite direction, you will end up in the Arabian Sea, quite quickly, somewhere near Sri Lanka. I always thought that Kerala, our state, was where the rain was born. When I travelled from Chennai to Thalassery, by the old Madras Mail, (so called because it delivered our mail -- why else! -- all the way from the east coast, at just after mid-day, every day) I would see how the terrain changed from barren brown to rich green as we came out of the tunnel, through the Western Ghats. I’d press my eager head into the horizontal bars of the train window, and breathe deep of that familiar smell of wet vegetation and home; with it I would also take in the particles of soot and ash that came out of the front of the steam engine, making my eyes itch and my hair gritty. Well before the fears of global warming and consequent flooding, the monsoons arrived with predictable regularity each year, at the end of June, and swept away a few houses nestling precariously on the top of river-bunds. There was no welfare state as such, so the community, neighbours, had to step in. After several days of unrelenting downpour, the waters would rise and spread. My father’s sister would have spent the whole month of Karkadagam, ( the Malayalam month that falls between the middle of July and the middle of August) known for disease, death and devastation,) chanting prayers to ward off the disasters. Generally Small-pox, Chicken-pox, Typhoid and Plague, arrived in the rainy season. The old women in the house, whose duty it was to guard against all evils that could be fended off with prayer and incantation read out of the holy book, Bhagava, at dusk and dawn, in front of the nilavilakku, the scared lamp. But, of course, Chicken pox spread through the house and went. It lingered with one person or another and all of us waited for it to strike. That extended household had three children: myself and my father’s brother’s children, Mani and Appu, Mani eighteen months older and Appu four years older. My father’s niece, Nani, father’s sister whom I called Ammamma and father’s mother, Achamma, also lived there. So Chicken pox had quite a haul. Achamma (father’s mother} always organised her second line of defence when disease got close – as in next door. She kept coconut shells filled with a cow-dung solution along both sides of our walkway to the front gate. This was supposed to ward off Mariamma, the evil goddess of Small pox. Maybe the same Goddess did duty for Chicken pox too. I had a mental image of this vile witch, grotesque and pock-marked. She haunted my dreams. She was always hanging about our front gate, working her way up to the house.

Animals

Animals I cannot imagine a home without animals. In our house, who owns who is always debatable. When our fluff, Booboo, perches on Kitta’s knee when he is marking a hundred university scripts; when Pepper, my cat, complains as I move my legs in bed (My legs are solely for her to sleep on at night.); when the mutt, Lily, nudges my daughter’s legs aside on the sofa so that she can curl up in her lap, the answer is crystal clear. I often wonder how it is that some families love animals and some don’t. Genetic, or exposure to pets early in life? Next to our house in Thalassery there was a Chayakkada. Men going to work at building sites or factories stopped there, on their way, to get a hot cup of chai; my aunt said they probably never bought tea leaves or milk for their households, the morning drink generally being yesterday’s conjee. The chayakkada was a tiny roadside veranda and a small room with two rickety benches in it. It was run by a man called Kumaran, and when he washed his tea-pan out, he swung the dregs on to the road. He had some saving graces. Every six months he would have another litter of kittens to give away, all fluffy-tailed and long-furred. They went quickly; in passing, our household got one or two. Achan disapproved of cats saying they caused asthma, but he was on a losing wicket. When he was near, we hid the kittens under the gatherings of our pavadas (long skirts) or later, my sari. Sometimes the kitten gave the game away by purring on my stomach. My first cat was named Sundari. She was all white and had a beautiful face. The next one was Beauty, which meant the same thing. They had pretty faces and plentiful fur. They disappeared often down the road, scavenging at houses where fish was being scaled and finned, but returned to puke on our doorstep. Eventually, they would disappear into cat paradise – I would call their names without a miaow in reply. The last one was Mimi; when I got married and left, my father, who maintained he disliked cats, arranged for the fisherman to feed her daily. In my husband’s home, no animals were allowed. My husband’s parents did not like them either. So, it was not until I became single again that I got another animal. Leone and Makeni, the two dogs were named, after my favourite places – Makeni is in the north of Sierra Leone. I had to give them to friends to keep when I left Uganda for good. It broke my heart and I vowed never to get another animal. Next year, in Zambia, (1993) I got Inji (Malayalam for ginger)– a majestic ginger tabby. By now, I could afford to take my cat with me, so Inji went with me to Malawi. Meanwhile my daughter, who was also in Malawi, had acquired another kitten – Ammu. A boy was holding some kittens up at a roundabout; predictably, she fell for it. Ammu drove Inji mad cavorting all around her and got frequently swatted. She came with us to England. Inji died of a kidney disease in Malawi, and Ammu became road-kill in Croydon. In Croydon we got Tyson and Louis, (we never learn) forever fist-fighting as kittens. My little granddaughter called them Tyson and Nui-nui. Two road-kills again. I vowed I would never get a kitten after that, but my daughter came back one day with Booboo and Pepper, two tiny kittens that hid under a cupboard in the kitchen, until they were really hungry, and came out to eat. They are still with us, now five years old. Pepper sleeps on my bed and Booboo pesters my son. There was also Keeri, whom I got in Kochi, and I brought home to England with me. She was adorable, intelligent and followed me around. She slept on my right shoulder generally, and would scurry up to bed with me. She also got run over in 2015. Now, my daughter won’t let me get another kitten. ‘They all die,’ she says. We have Lily instead, a long-suffering, loving dog that does not recognise that she is not human. She is also thoroughly spoilt. We are right suckers for animals. I’d love another Bengal-kitten like Keeri. [ Pepper died of old age last month, at thirteen years.]

Christmas in Thalassery Thalassery, or Tellicherry, as the British named it in their time, is a small town on the south-west coast of India. My hometown. On quiet nights you couad hear the dash and murmur of the Arabian see, which was only a five-minute walk away. It is an unpretentious, friendly place, which claims to have started the game of Cricket in India. There are many schools and a college, so people tend to get educated. Most men still wear a mundu (a cloth for the lower half of the body), and my father, a lawyer, wore a pair of trousers and a black jacket only when he went to the Courts. There was one Christian family on our road and the two daughters of the family, Mabel and Ida, were my friends. Until Mabel got married, we spent a great deal of time together, walked to college, played badminton and throwball together. Met up most days to gossip. And, Christmas dinner was always at Mabel’s house. Chicken Biriyani rather than Turkey and sweet rice payasam instead of cake. No one put up Christmas trees; generally, no one gave or received gifts. Mabel’s family would attend midnight mass at the local church. And that was it for another year. Christmas has become an expensive end to the year in England. Tree and baubles, fancy food and a cake, gifts all round…My daughter hauled her box of decorations down from the loft and spent a morning creating colour and glitter. On Christmas day, we shall dine lavishly at the house of a Christian friend. There will be gifts given and received though we say ‘no gifts’ every year. The drive to our friend’s house will take forty-five minutes, and the day will be joyous and noisy. I wonder, does anyone go to church for midnight mass anymore?

There is Something Rotten in the State of ...

There is Something Rotten in the State of… --- and the stink is pervasive – on the obsequious media that will turn on Truss when they are sure she is history, (quite soon now from the noises coming from our toe-licking BBC,) and on the Conservative MPs who are like rodents caught in the headlights. Now, a wordy member of my household says, they want to shuffle the deckchairs about and put Ben Wallace and some such layabout at the head of this country. Anyone will do so long as the Tories can stay in power for another year-and-a-half. Jesus Wept! The Mother of Parliaments was thrust into my receptive twelve-year-old Indian head, by the Sacred Heart nuns in my Convent school in Thalasseri, in the mid - forties. A model not only of functioning democracy, but also of elegant government and political rectitude. In 1981, when my father visited, I took him to see the Houses of Parliament, the Palace and the door of Number 10 from a respectful distance on the sidewalk. When he returned to India, he did a brief talk on All India Radio, Kozhikode, about his trip. Full of eulogies for the wonderful buildings, the tidy (!!!) streets, the punctual trains… Late last night all hell broke in the revered Westminster Hall. Tory M Ps were being manhandled into the lobby if they were not quick enough to go in to vote against a labour motion. All decorum had disappeared through the august portals. The Kerala Marxists could not have put up a better example of rowdy behaviour. So much for decorum and elegance ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1.32p.m - The P M walked out of number 10 and to her podium as I was writing and announced her resignation. Now the horse-trading will begin. The Tories do not have the talent or rectitude in them right now to find acceptable replacements. So, we will end up with another set of nether orifices. No escape. I watch with some discomfort – who next? However, much better than the soaps on T V.

Our Winter of Destruction

Our Winter of Destruction I look at our PM, Liz Truss, and I think, how did this come about? What were the Tories thinking? They are self-destructing, I tell myself. I am happy to think that, but meanwhile, we have 18 months of this government. Liz Truss, bouncing on her high heels, travelling in search of a brain transplant. Before that, we had bungling Boris, empty as a finished beer-can. Now crunched up and binned, thank God. About him, the less said/ thought, the better. She took the cap off bankers’ bonuses (and because of that, the bottom off workers’ wages). She gave the green light to greedy fracking, never mind the creaking, tumbling local landscapes. What next? Jeremy -unt is back at the helm, more or less, and he is cruel as well as cunning. Put your crown jewels away and get ready for a harsh winter. The Tories are muttering and murmuring, but no one takes Liz on. What is her power-base? I wonder, what keeps her at No 10. ‘Who will rid us of this…?’ I think, as Liz minces in and minces out. We are in dire need of a government that cares about the people in this country who have to choose between heating and eating. We need a general election, now, not a year later. The advent of -unt does nothing to allay my fears of a subsistence winter. This man is the austerity chancellor. Any ideas, Keir??

Self Destruction? I have to be wary of wishful thinking. I listen to the sound bites coming out of Kamikazi and Busy- Lizzy and wonder what they are hoping to achieve with their loyalty to the notorious mini budget. Self-destructing, I say with glee. The Tory grandees murmur in some remote background, but do not come out of their rabbit holes. Lizzy just goes home and dyes her dress another colour overnight. As she bounces in to public view she looks radiantly smug. Even the Tories must have come across the word mortgage in connection with their loyal lumpen masses who vote them into power. Another 500 pounds or thereabouts on their monthly payment is a minor irritation. Rees- Mogg will instruct them to work harder, in between switching their heating off and inventing meals that are mainly bread and vegetable soup. Maybe more children will become eligible for school meals. Rashford, where are you? Schools will supply old uniforms to more children. Mothers will have nervous breakdowns and become thinner with denying themselves enough food. Fathers will look for second jobs and get progressively angrier. Are we a third world country now? Labour can sit back and enjoy the side-show. Tories are doing it all on their own.