Pilgrimage to Thalassery

Back from my annual pilgrimage to Thalassery. Feeling replenished in spirit. Even my grey cells are waking up and gearing up for action.

   I have a novel to tweak, bits to add, an ending to reinvent. So this blog can be safely called displacement activity. Slightly better than finding the kettle or the toilet.

   I am used to this journey now, the countryside getting gradually more devoid of development as we leave South Malabar behind. See what you've done to us, Pinarayi and Kodiyeri and you lot, now toothless yourselves. Even the Janashathabdi train refuses to go past Kozhikode, so we had to go on the dilapidated Eranad - squatting toilets, old seats and dirt-filled trays to cater for us.

   However - and this is a big HOWEVER- as the train draws in to Mahe, I know already that I'm almost home. I talk to all the people at the door getting off at Mahe. A muslim couple and children and a young man who invited me to his Niramala offering at the Thiruvangad temple. Talking to the people around you is de riguer here, no vacant stares past your face as I get elsewhere in Kerala,. Certainly not the cool summing up I receive in the Tube in London. Well, I've all that in front of me in another three weeks. So let me stock up on human warmth and sheer joy of belonging.

   I know now that I will never belong anywhere but in that little coastal town, which is rediscovering itself. The cosmetic surgery is unbecoming, but only bits are gone. Most of Thalassery is blessedly natural.

   I go to my old house to chat to my dead father, if we can 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 it into my purse. The money-plastic will be gritty for a few weeks and the holes-in-the-wall may find another reason to refuse me my hard-earned dosh. Ah well -

   This time I cannot reach the spot as the compound is grown over, the under growth is a few feet high and dense. There were snakes there always and I don't go close. Instead I say in my mind to my father: I don't think I'll come this way again. You are gone by now. You would not abide this desecration.

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

   The gate 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 near-by 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 and greying underpants hang on a rope on the balcony to dry. The woodwork is rotting and the one young man walking on the terrace upstairs seems part of that dilapidation.

   I am glad to get away to my cousin's house and the touch 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 the place - will the remnants see me out too? Last through the fag end of my life? I hope so.

   For now, I am whole again. In my mind there is a blessed peace.

Cell Phones - B.C.

My son argues that B C will no longer stand for Before Christ; it has to be before cell phones. Got me thinking about our newly acquired freedoms because of the cell phone.

   I've said this before - it would have been a great adjunct to my non-existent, (sporadic?) love-life if there had been cell phones in the fifties and sixties. I could have pestered the men/ boys more frequently perhaps, and who knows, made myself unforgettable, when all else failed. 

   When I was growing up, if you wanted to make a phone call, you walked to the Victoria Hotel ten minutes away and asked to use the phone. All it cost was a preliminary social chit-chat with 'Marker' who owned the place. Marker, so called because he kept the billiards score in the place, of an evening, I've heard said.The health of our families would be discussed, the difficulty of getting a trunk call, the big whale in the Arabian sea within seeing distance... The trunk call had to be booked and waited for.

   Then you made your call with Marker, may be his wife or son, and the gofor in the hotel for assistance. All would hover helpfully.

   'Hello,' you'd bellow into the black bakelite mouth piece and the chorus behind would ask, 'Kekkunnundo?' Can you hear? Thus the dialogue would proceed. Magic!

   The gist of the conversation would reach my home before I got there. Some times it reached other homes on the way as well.

   Now, again, conversation is hardly private. In the tube in London, we are besieged by the comings and goings of all around us - the cacophony is constant and I have to wonder why a reticent tribe like the British are so happy to discuss their plans for the evening, the conversation with their boy friend/ girl friend the previous evening and who said what to the boss at the water cooler, in hearing distance of total strangers.

   Mind you, often, the loudest conversations are from the Indian, Sri Lankan and the 'other' non - British folk. There are addicts who talk continuously from one end of the journey to the other. I can listen to the music of several different languages at once, while I read the requests on the walls of the compartments asking people to keep calls to the minimum. Ah well...

   All in all, I am still pleased the cell phone has arrived. My minions in India who have never owned landlines can now blow a whole week's wage in a day talking to their married children all over the world. If the cabbage burns to a cinder in my kitchen I consider that happened for a worthy cause.

   My son says he is still waiting for a way to get his washing done by me long distance.

Overseas

My first serious journey was a trip to Madras in 1953 to attend a debating contest. Before that I had gone to Madras twice as an infant, once to visit my mother on her death-bed when I was not quite three years old and she was eighteen. After that I went once again - my father taking me to see my maternal grand parents a few months after my mother died. That was the extent of my other worlds.
   So when I became engaged to a man who lived in Colombo, I had to consider this concept of overseas. 'Faren' as they called it. Colombo just did not cut it. It was too near, the people looked like Indians and even the language spoken in parts was Tamil, albeit a purified version of it. Across the Palk straits, but not overseas, I concluded.
   There was definite cache't attached to going overseas after marriage. It was a rare thing and Dubai was still a big hot desert, bubbling with oil underneath the sands and awaiting its glory days, when Indians would flock there. I took Colombo in my stride.
   When I got off that Fokker Friendship aircraft of Air Ceylon and walked into Ratmalana airport, I was quite blase'. What struck me first was that they were all Indian, but several shades darker. My just-unwrapped new husband's two bachelor friends were there to meet us, looking sheepish at this betrayal by their friend - getting married for heavan's sake!
   M.G C.P. Wijayatilleke was jet black and Frederick Mahasinghe was only half a shade paler. Both, I later learned, had changed their names from Burgher-sounding to Singhalese. The C.P. in Wijayatilleke stood for Cecil Pereira, and after independence in Sri Lanka he was not owning up to that one.
  The five years I spent in Ceylon did not convince me of anything different regarding Ceylon. Ceylonese ate the same food more or less (substitute coconut milk for ground coconut), the women wore saris (occasionally with the gathers at the back in Kandy) or Chitha, not that different from the lungis working women wore in India. Mind you, they went all out with their tops - the hethe. Huge puffed sleeves, a waist clinched tight and the bust displayed proudly under a skin-tight blouse.
   My first real trip to genuine overseas was in 1962 to Nigeria. This was just after Nigerian independence and they recruited teachers, engineers and doctors from India and Ceylon. There was a real exodus until the Government of Ceylon threw a tantrum and refused passports to those technocrats who wished to go to Nigeria or Ghana.
   Now this was definitely overseas. I couldn't wait to get there. I had read Gunther's Inside Africa and was ready to get close. I went to my father's home in India and started shopping frantically for saris and spices. Saris which I would not get in Nigeria and spices essential for curry - mustard seed, cumin, fennel and the like. When I hauled my tired self home from another shopping trip laden with clothes and linen, my father would look at me quizzically.
   Until one day he could stand it no longer.
   'They do wear clothes in Africa now-a-days, I believe. Can't you just wear whatever they wear?'
   A slow drip-drip of common sense from him as normal, throughout my life.
   He was annoyed also at the many Indians who turned up with addresses of their families in Africa - never mind they were in East Africa, nowhere near Enugu, where I was headed. Finally he had enough of that too.
   'Look, Anandam,' he said tersely. 'If you want to see more Indians, there are 600 million of us here. Why go anywhere to see them?'
   I learned my lessons, made friends with my colleagues and neighbours in addition to the Indians and Ceylonese in Nigeria, wore the African cloth in the garden and at home often and was immensely enriched in my life.
   The spices were confiscated by Lagos customs and never reached my larder. For a long time, I cooked without.
   I enjoyed the experience of Nigeria so much I subsequently lived half my working life roaming around in Africa. I was forever at home there.
   

Journey into the Unknown

Makeni - A friendly-sounding name, I thought, when I accepted the Lecturer's post in Makeni Teachers' College In Sierra Leone. It was 130 Kilometres from Freetown. Not too far to feel lost.

   Hanging around in Freetown in the first five days, going from one introductory visit to the Ministry of Education and the British High Commission, to another, I was beginning to feel more and more important with each day. Though I was demoted when I reached the BHC - instead of the reigning delegate of the Queen, it was one of his minions I met, the First Secretary. Overpoweringly large office, starched white shirt on the man, blazer hanging on the chair (clearly we did not merit the donning of the blazer) and the non-committal look. It was obvious this was one chore he wanted to get done with quickly.The air conditioner hummed and I remember thinking, you didn't need it with him sitting there.

   When the formalities were finished, Mike, my boss announced. 'Time to go to Makeni.' My official Landrover was still coming from wherever Landrovers go to birth, but a new Ford Capri stood in. And an old Landrover of the Head Office in Freetown. I travelled in the Capri with Charlie, the driver, and my stuff travelled behind in the Landrover, tilting and dancing all the way over the potholes. The Capri just jumped about.

   Mrs Stanley, our Office Manger, had been reassuring. 'We've send you with the single kit' she said. The single kit was a huge trunk which filled the back of the Landrover and there was enough stuff in it to go to the North Pole and back: crockery, cutlery, linen, blankets, water bottles, fans... We saw the Landrover occasionally behind us when the dust cleared.

   The tarmac was ancient history. The pot holes on the Freetown Lunsar Road were so deep you had to travel in second gear for most of the journey. Actually we travelled on the sides of the road: it was the middle that had been destroyed. When cars came by the dogs sleeping cannily in the middle of the road, got up and strolled over to the sides for a moment. Then they returned to the safe middle where traffic could not travel.

   I had no idea what to expect. Getting past the Okra hill, half an hour into the drive, so named because the road was as slippery as the inside of that vegetable, was an experience. You were on the edge of the hill and when lorries came from the opposite direction, you slowed down and prayed. The Landrover tilted precariously and seeing my clenched hands, Charlie remarked, 'They can tilt to 45 degrees without overturning.' He didn't slow down, I noticed.

   Half way to Makeni the first tyre on the Capri went. The drivers got out, stretched, drank water, and looked at the tyre. The next one went a few minutes later. They put the spare on. 'Where on earth can we get the tyre fixed?' I asked. 

   'Tubeless,' Charlie said. 'We'll manage.' And we did just about, limping into the College campus at four in the evening.

   'Shouldn't we be looking for somewhere to fix the tyres?' I asked. The Capri was going to be my transport until the monster Landrover arrived.

   'I'll come back tomorrow with ordinary tyres,' Charlie said.  'This is no good in this place.' And he was as good as his word. I was beginning to see how well the British Council looked after its staff.

   My home was in a shabby three-storey building, which hadn't seen paint in years. A woman had put up a stand in front of the entrance to sell cigarettes and matches. Her baby crawled around on the floor near her.

   I was expecting Paul, the British Council's English Lecturer, to welcome me. But what I got was a crowd of local women and children. They followed me up to my third floor flat and stood around looking at me. Someone produced a 'soda.' In this case a Fanta.
'Paul is gone to the waterfalls with his girl friend,' they said. Right.

   'I wanted them all to go away, so I could shower. My blouse was sticking to my back and sweat was pouring down into my eyes and down through my bra. Someone read my mind when they saw me looking in the direction of the bathroom. 'The water will come at 7,' they said.

   I walked around the flat, children tagging along. The bedroom was tiny and the slats of the bed had given way. The mattress sagged in places. I lifted it and had a look. I wished I hadn't. There was toilet paper stuck to the wall near it with slimy looking stuff on it. I went in search of the kitchen.

   The kitchen was the kind where only one person could go in at any one time. A narrow passage to the sink and a cooker on the right. It was clean and the cupboards above were pristine. The bathroom was a shower cubicle with a toilet and wash basin. Without water.

   'What have I got myself into?' I thought. Paul may have some answers.

   The drivers left and the crowd melted away slowly. I sipped the Fanta out of the bottle too tired to open that enormous trunk sitting in the middle of my tiny sitting room.

   'I'll manage,' I thought. And in the end I did. I loved Makeni and it was my best posting. 

Cars and Me

I have this theory that our cars say something about us. Particularly the inside of the cars. Kitta's  dilapidated chariot is full of empty KFC cartons and coke cans. Mixed in with that there are papers with Maths scribbles all over them in his thin handwriting. Raghu prefers to take a bus if he can and leaves his car behind. Nothing of him is to be seen in his sixteen year old Micra because he is rarely in it. It is often being used by Manju. Manju's Landrover has little-girl things belonging to her daughter: magazines with ends curling from the damp, odd bits of Asha's toys and books abandoned after reading. My Honda, also 16 years old,  smells of compost and garden things. There is black mud in the back seat and fallen leaves.The Honda is now gone to the car graveyard.

   In 2009, I went to my local garage in India to sell my Tata Safari. It was now eleven years old. The owner of the garage was a family friend and he said it gently: you might get a sale if you paste lots of hundred rupee notes on it. Since then I've rented cars when I go to India. Much simpler.

   My first car in the UK was an old Morris Minor of green-black hue, the colour of cow-dung Indians would say, which I bought from the Lab Assistant at the school where I worked. I loved it. It cost me £240 pounds. Cheap you'd think. But my take-home salary was 120 pounds a month, so I had to borrow from the bank and repay painfully at £20 pounds a month. The car was well worth it and lasted for six years until a man in a hurry drove straight into it at a cross-road in Basildon. He apologised profusely, admitted liability and two days later changed his mind. He owed me for a very long time.

   I was also in a hurry: I was taking my son to his Cambridge entrance exams and I could not hang around. A policeman visited me the evening of the accident for information. He wouldn't talk to me. Naturally. A woman and Indian at that. What would she know about cars? forget the fact that she was driving. So he harassed my son till he got fed up. 'Why don't you talk to my Mum?' he shouted. 'She was driving.'

   The Morris was a write-off and I needed wheels to get me from Laindon to Wickford and back every day. I bought a three-year old Ford Escort for £1600. I had gone up in the world, courtesy of the 1000 pounds Kitta saved up from his holiday job at the Social Security, at nineteen pounds a week. Riches! I kept the car and drove it into the ground. My friend, Bill, often borrowed it and when he was 87, he drove the Escort straight into another vehicle. It scared him so much he handed in his driving license. He died two years later of a stroke. He often said he may have had a black-out when he had that accident.

   My next venture was a VW Polo, again three years old. It went on for ever. Meanwhile I had gone overseas to work for the British Council and my children were all drivers. The British Council let me play with one Landrover after another, the short ones and the long ones. I carried so many colleagues around in them that I sometimes had to kick the back door in to get it to close. I fell in love with Landrovers, lazy hand brakes, leaking roofs and all. 

   On the road to Gbendembu, 27 kilometres from Makeni, the path was narrow and it was rocks all round. Huge boulders on the track and even bigger ones on either side. I did that trip once a week. As the landrover tilted at 40 degrees, I could rely on a flat tyre. I carried a long iron rod with me to put into the spanner to act as a lever. I jumped on the rod to undo the nuts on the wheel. Then I would call the urchins in the neighbouring huts to help me lift the tyre.

   Today I avoid driving but I like to think I can still do it if I want to. Like so many other things that have gone with time: walking fast, chasing after Asha, runng up the stairs, carrying the shopping...

   Let's not go there.

   

   

   

   

Foolhardy or Courageous?

In my intrepid days, when I strode the world like a Colossus, (as Mark Anthony said of Caesar), a trip to Nigeria would have been a minor matter. Like catching a bus to the Whitgift Centre. After all I had lived in Nigeria for five years, what could surprise me? 

   But now, I dread to think I have to travel to Nigeria. I have unfinished business there. The last time I went that way was in 1994, returning from a Gender in Maths (Numbers with little spokes straight or sideways at an angle?) conference in Quebec City. I had been full of vim and professional certainties. But the experience at Lagos airport was unpleasant.

   The queues, if you could call them that, were long and untidy. Near the check-in counters the anxious travellers were milling around without direction. Nobody could find the forms to be filled before you were released out of that airport Babel. The man at the counter had several stacks of A4 size forms next to him and he doled them to each passenger when they reached him. They then filled them up laboriously and he processed it. Each person took a good ten minutes to be waved through. I was in transit, I had forty minutes to catch my connection to Entebbe and nothing was happening my end.

   Between the passengers and the forms to be filled there was a low two-foot-wide wooden bench, about knee high. I climbed the surface to the other side when the man was not looking, grabbed a sheaf of forms and distributed it to all the men and women in the queue. Then I helped the passengers who were struggling with the form. At least they would now be ready for the officer when they reached the front of the queue.

   There was a Canadian lady in front of me and we both came to an unspoken decision almost simultaneously. She stood aside and shouted to the queue in a school marm voice. 'Right. Line up properly.' She made sure there was no pushing and shoving and no bunching up. When she reached the front, (the queue was moving forward fast now) she turned to me and said, 'Now you take over.' So there I was managing traffic in the middle of Lagos airport.

   In the eighteen years since I did some sillier things in my ignorance. On my first morning in Kampala I drove on the right side of the road, out of the College in Kyambogo.; I had just come from Sierra Leone, where you did just that. Three armed guards with machine guns came slowly towards me and stopped my vehicle. Prayers time, I thought; Idi Amin was not long gone from that lovely country and AK 47s always make me feel sub-human. I squirmed, explained myself and was let off with a warning.

   When I went to Makeni from England in 1983 I drove round the little roundabout in the town the wrong way round too. I should have been going right. A little Sierra Leonean urchin came up to me with a scrap of paper. 'You will die if you drive like this; maybe you come in for  some coffee,'  was scribbled on that paper.Who can resist such an interesting invitation? 'Who gave you this note?' I asked. He pointed to the hardware store opposite the roundabout . Thus began a life-long friendship with the Abihanna family. Their home became a place I drove to when I was alone or tired or merely wanted to eat food cooked by someone else.

   I haven't seen them for twenty-six years, my friend Marie, her husband, Simon, or her father and brother. But next year I shall travel to Journieh to meet them all again. Some friends are very special. 

   Marie's son Susu owes me for all the times he peed in my lap. And for the many command performances of 'Hello, is it me you are looking for?'  Marie danced in their sitting room while I sang and little Susu, now definitely Joseph would go to sleep in her arms. 

   

   Fireflies: Foolhardy or Courageous?Fireflies: Foolhardy or Courageous?

Untidy Lives

Mary was always the leader; Mani followed. Mary-Mani club was the bane of my life when I was in Luanshya, that lovely mining town with its nine-hole golf course and beautiful mining houses set well back in manicured lawns.

  In 1973,  Balan, my ex husband had a graceful, old, rambling, house there and I visited now and then. Mary and Mani were then nine and seven, both ready for the next adventure. Today they are in their late forties. With children, mortgage, in Mary's case, husband - all the appurtenances of growing up.

   Mary is the daughter of Thankamma, my friend who died in 1996. In Zambia Thankamma and I had a mutual help society. We looked after each other's children and without the assistance of husbands, managed a decent life. She was a widow of long standing and I had just left my husband and started living alone in a flat in Ndola. Luanshya was half an hour by car away.

   In the way that children make clean splits impossible I had too much residual business in Luanshya. There was our dog, Lassie there, my former steward was now working for Balan and mutual friends had still not decided who to take sides with.

   Thankamma and I often travelled to Lusaka together, children tumbling around at the back of the car and us gossiping over that cacophony. In Lusaka we stayed at the education department guest house and enjoyed ourselves shopping at ZCBC and ZOK. In those days you could get St Michaels good there and we bought trouser suits and children's clothes. Trouser suits had arrived in Zambia just about the time it became pass'e in the West. How were we to know? 

The Luanshya house came with my ex-husband Balan's job. It had three outhouses and a sprawling, untended garden. The steward, Fison, lived in one of the outhouses with his family of four children. The other two were vacant one - room sheds.There the girls decided to make their club. Glasses, cups, plates, spoons... things just disappeared in there and came back a few days later dusty and mangled.

One day they decided to take a broom to the room. They did a bit of sweeping and abandoned the place. As soon as the dust hit the noses, that is.

But they still had the Blue Moon Hotel (Mary was creative with names.) as well. This was inside the house on the top shelf of the linen cupboard, which was where you kept pillows and blankets.. They had to climb up to get there, sheets and other paraphernalia of house-keeping trailing from short arms. The pillows and blankets got dumped on the floor in passing. If you looked up on your way to the bathroom you saw two little heads - one a curly mop-head, the other largely occupied by two saucer eyes.

Mani got into trouble with me now and then, with Mary in the lead. Once I caught Mani sliding down the concrete banisters outside my second floor flat in Ndola. If she fell, she would have broken her head. She, of course, blamed Mary. I couldn't slap Mary, so I slapped Mani. Mani says that is the only time she remembers me slapping her. Should have done it oftener,  think, now. She insists the worst part of it was I pulled her trousers down, with her knickers, so that the slap met backside.

Looking back, those two girls grew up wild, except when confronted by their mothers. Balan's compound had a huge Poinsettia tree and they spent a lot of time under it. I worried that the pap would be poisonous. When I went for a walk in the evening  I had an entourage of two girls and a dog. Our Lassie. Lassie always left half-way to run back home when the feeding time came.

I did a part-time teaching job at the local technical college when I was living in Luanshya over a long Christmas vacation. Lassie would walk me into the classroom. I would pretend I didn't know her.

Once friends of the children came visiting because it was a birthday. Whose? I don't remember. I made a cake, and Tarun, a guest, then about 12 years old, decided to decorate it. Balan ran a bachelor home usually, so Tarun had difficulty finding the things he needed. The message on the cake was done in purple when the pink colouring ran out and there was no room to write anything after 'happy birthd.' The rest came in very small letters below. Lassie ate that cake up long before it got to the table. Just as well.

Balan pulled his hair and muttered at the vandalism in his store. But the girls were a force of nature. In those days Zambia had a shortage in many necessary things - like toilet paper. So Balan's frustration was more than justified.

The whole set-up was untidy the way separations can be, nothing quite de-linked, no certainties anywhere for anyone. And I didn't care to bring any order into that existence, dysfunctional as I was at that time.

I returned to Zambia twenty years later, in 1994, as a Maths adviser in a DFID education project. The British Council project transport was a long- wheel -base Landrover. I had a workshop in Luanshya and decided to take a look at that old house of Balan's. I was sure that the Landrover would be my credential to get into that compound.

A six-foot brick wall and tall metal gates now hid the house from view. I honked many times, but the guard who finally opened the door wouldn't let me in. Zambia had become a very scary and dangerous place and no one opened gates to unknown vehicles. Gone were the days when I could sit on the veranda ledge and read the morning away, watching the cars come and go in the house opposite.

I finally got out of the car and went up to the guard and begged to be allowed inside. I explained my connection with that house. He let me in reluctantly. The house looked diminished and dull. There were a great many children about - clearly the extended family of the Zambian owner were now living in the outhouses. The Poinsettia tree, which had caused me such grief had grown and spread. The rear wall of the house on which I had practised tennis still bore the scars of years of misuse by people like me.

I felt sad, lost. Balan had died in 1986 and those old battles with him now seemed a waste of living time. In between I had forgotten all the reasons why we quarrelled. I was well into middle age. The only thing I was certain of was that I liked my life better as a single. I was not good wife material.