Keeri - Passport for a Cat

Meet Keeri. There she is, sleeping on my front veranda in India. This kitten came to us asking for food, raucously, almost screeching at me. She knew her rights under UN regulations, I suspect. She was on the far corner of our garden wall. My son and I saw how skeletal she was and I asked him to stay with her while I ran inside to fetch milk and bread. I knew she would, at that moment, eat absolutely anything.

   'I don't want her taking up residence,' I said. 'We are leaving soon after all.' We left the food and escaped.

Half an hour later Keeri was on our front veranda step, talking about the weather, the cruelty of the human world, news in the feline towns... We ignored her. She just jumped into a lap and went to sleep.

   Me and my family , now, are definitely cat people, but we did not want another cat in our Croydon home. Two were bad enough. One, Pepper by name, strays on to the road and cars screech to a stop on either side of her. When she is lucky. One night she wasn't and lost half a hip bone. She is incontinent when scared. So about once a week there is cat-pee to clean up.

   The other, Boo-boo, my son says, is a mouth and an arse connected by an alimentary canal. She'll eat anything and needs constant food. Both think all the beds in the house are theirs and we are just allowed on them now and then. This morning Pepper woke me up at seven in the morning so she could go out for a wander.

   We named the new little one Keeri for mongoose in Malayalam. She has that charcoal-ash colour and a pointy tail. 

   This cat, now, is closer to the human genre than the others. When she sleeps on the bed, her head is on the pillow. When Saraswathy wants to remove my night-dress for washing from the bed where I have thrown it, Keeri hangs on to it. It's hers. Like a child's comforter. Saraswathy generally loses the battle.

   When visitors come, she unerringly picks the cat - people and abandons me. She is a promiscuous little one and I shall have to stand in line for her favours.

   The airlines want to know what breed Keeri is before they will transport her to England. Local, I answer. But that is not enough. Look at her, for heaven's sake. She is an unremarkable stray that can't even boast a respectable tail. But she knows how to wake up my grand daughter to play with her and run straight into a lap without brakes on, when the neighbour's dog barks.

   I am travelling next week and I face a week of jet lag. Keeri will usurp my rocking chair. I shall run around like a mad head-less rooster for her 'papers', but I can't wait to see her. I hope she doesn't mind the English weather. If she does I am going to hear about it. Loudly and frequently.

Thatcher - an exercise in hypocrisy

Soon after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister I went to work in Bishop Ward Boys' Secondary School, Dagenham. I was moving from Wickford, a reasonably prosperous commuter town. It was a huge culture shock, and as the years went by the shocks to the system became more and more painful.

     Bishop Ward had a catchment area, which was almost entirely employees of Ford, Dagenham. Most of the children were Irish Catholics and so was the Head Master. Many of the  parents lost their jobs as Ford closed down and we had practically a whole school living on the dole. The families were big, six and seven children in some of them, wearing hand-me-downs and looking under-nourished.

     Thatcher's England brought devastation to England's working class. She is now praised for taking on the miners, the unions... As far as I am concerned, she could have taken on anyone she wanted, if she could have done so without destroying the very fabric of British society. I think of all those workers going about saying -gi'us a job.

     We lost our industrial base during those years while she nurtured the money-men. London became a strutting city of illiterate money-mongers. The language of the media and newspapers changed, as money became the biggest news of all. Today we know what happened to that unrestrained greed and how it has affected ordinary people. I don't call them working class - where is the work for them?

     Thatcher , the milk snatcher, charged ahead, blinkers on, knocking down all industry in her wake. The mines went, the motor industry went, the steel went... British people are some of the most original and inventive in the world, but they now have to take their patents to the  United States to see them developed. We are too busy counting money.

     Thatcher had no regard for the South African black people who were being trampled by the Apartheid regime. She thought the ANC were terrorists and she cosied up to the Prime Minister of South Africa. And we are supposed to honour her with a state funeral? For that alone she should be relegated to the ranks of the unfeeling despots. And she was a despot - ask her cabinet and they will say that in private. After all, they got rid of her eventually, not the public.

     I am sorry to hear the Queen will honour her by participating in her funeral - what a sham! I wonder which Adviser takes the credit for that piece of hypocrisy.

     The celebrations in Bristol and Glasgow make me sad. Nobody's death should be celebrated. But I wonder: is it because of the exaggerated eulogising that is happening since yesterday.

     I feel sorry for Margaret Thatcher as a person. Dying in the Ritz Hotel. Oh Boy. I hope someone she loved was with her.


     

Uninvited Guests

Immigration is in the forefront of news these days, parties vying with each other to prove to the paranoid majority that their policy is the most constructive - or destructive depending on which side of the population class/ line you are standing.

     Uninvited guests - what do they have to do to find favour, to be accepted?

     This was brought home to me forcefully when I got a fault in my boiler recently. The gas engineers come and go: 'Not much wrong with it,' they say. 'It's working, innit?' I am not convinced, so yet again I do a call-out.

     This time the guy who comes has a half-Chinese look, and a name to match. But his English is faultless and the accent pure East End. Second generation, I think. I sit on the hall chair waiting for him to come out in five minutes, dust his hands and ask me to sign the call-out slip. The boiler was working, so he could get away if he was so inclined.

     I had a cup of tea while I waited, read the previous day's Guardian, looked at my mail, had another cup of tea. Mmm. ??? I peered into the boiler area.

     The object had been completely dismantled, its innards spilling out over the utility room floor around the engineer. He spent hours with spanner and screw-driver coaxing it to do better. Off and on he went to his laptop to take readings. Then he went upstairs in search of the hot water system and the controls there. He fiddled for another half hour and fixed a valve that had jammed. He then called down to my daughter to put the thermostat up and down several times till he was certain the instrument communicated well.

     Then he came down and explained to me, in some detail, what he had been doing. I was amazed at his discipline and thoroughness.
     'The horrors of immigration,' my daughter said as he left. He hadn't learned the quick-exit methods. He was still carrying his newcomer's desire to impress.

     I thought of myself in this connection: when I worked in projects for the British Council I had a reputation for being the only Adviser who met deadlines. Other Advisers looked at me pityingly for this serious professional flaw - dead lines were meant to be ignored, weren't they? And why was I bucking the trend? Didn't I have anything better to do? Well, there was that too. I was a bit of a joke.

     Yet - I had come from a country where, if I slipped, there would be thousands to step into my shoes. I had to keep to the rules.

     I worked for the North Thames Gas Board briefly when I first landed in the UK. Fifty-nine pence for an hour, I was paid, and if I did well, I could be trained for a managerial role. God forbid - by the third day, I was fed up of connections and disconnections, of bills paid or in arrears. In my room at the lodgings, I had a gas meter, which ate 50p coins. Almost an hour's wage for three hours of heating. In my head also there was a serious disconnection.

     But times were good - there were plenty of jobs for the young - or even the not-so-young like me. At the big table where I fielded phone calls I was flanked by two Cambridge graduates. They were killing time till they decided how to save the world. This was 1974 and the world even then needed a quick save.

     Periodically they asked me to slow down with my files. 'You are showing us up,' one of them said. 'You work too fast.' So I took a Maths book in to read and when the supervisor was looking elsewhere. I caught up on the new Maths, which I hoped to teach. The floor manageress asked me to join the managerial trainees for the next year. I kept my head down and spent a lot of time hiding from her among the basement filing cabinets.

     Even then I knew: as an outsider I had to work twice as hard just to tread water. And so it is still with all the uninvited guests.

     
     

     

Terrorist Governments.

The Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Mr Rajapakse, clearly thinks he is on the up-and-up. And why not? He is visiting India soon, I hear, and no doubt, our very polite Prime Minister, Singh, he of the great mind (Isn't that what Manmohan means?) will fete him and  discuss mutual issues with him, including Sri Lanka and the Tamils there.

     I hope Mr Singh remembers all the events just before the civil war ended in the North of Sri Lanka.There were gruesome pictures and videos on Channel 4, but Rajapakse firmly believes that is just Channel Four’s obsession. Not worth engaging with the Press about. After all what did the Press know? They were firmly and cleverly kept at bay from where the action was: the murders, the mass killings in shallow graves, the women and children randomly destroyed in many inventive ways.

     Now I don't need Channel 4 to tell me what happens in Sri Lanka when the Singhalese go amok. I lived there for five years, part of the time in Jaffna, which was a friendly and peaceful place then.

     In early 1958, I was expecting my first child and living in the annexe of a palatial house in Cinnamon gardens. The owners had sectioned off the two ends of the house as two separate flats. A young English couple lived at one end and we at the other. Life was dull and predictable.

     But not for long. One day, without warning, my husband, Balan, rushed home from work early. He was trembling and in shock.

     ‘They beat Muni Aiyah up, no men!’ he stammered. ‘Rocked his car up and down and burnt it too.’

     Muni Aiyah was his long term colleague at Walker Sons, where they worked in the Engineering Department.

     

     Muni Aiyah, he said, had been lucky to escape with his life. Singhalese young men were out in force trawling for Tamils in the bus stand area near the Fort. Balan spoke fluent Singhalese, having been born in Ceylon. But, not being a Buddhist, he couldn’t recite the holy Singhalese jathas. This was the test they used to separate Singhalese from others. And I had no more than a dozen words in Singhalese.

   

   ‘I parked my car behind the building by chance, so I escaped,’ Balan said.

    

     After the weekend the engineers at Walker Sons crawled back to work with some trepidation. Muni Aiyah was at his desk. Apparently he said, ‘After being in Malaya during the Japanese occupation, I thought I had seen all the random cruelty I would see in a life time. Now this.’

     

     Tamils were beaten up and tortured wherever they were found in the way of those mad young men. I stopped wearing a pottu on my forehead as it would mark me as non-Singhalese. Tamil women wore pottus. I also stopped going out to the shopping areas in Pettah, and Balan shopped nearer home in the tiny Victoria store.

   

    Tamil refugees were gathered together in the huge playing fields of the Royal College and stayed there for months.

     

     By the time my son was born the ‘troubles’ had stopped. The government (Are governments terrorists sometimes?) did not take much notice of the events and the Tamils did not retaliate. It would be years before the victims organised themselves and put up a fight. They had a reputation for being ambitious for their children. They shone in the academic field and kept their heads down. Not unlike the Jews of Europe before Hitler. And they were famous for being non-violent.

     

     Now the Commonwealth Heads of State are planning to meet this year in Colombo. Rajapakse will strut with pride and all the atrocities will be nicely subsumed in the excellent Singhalese food and celebrations at the meet. How do the rest of the world swallow this?

     

     Recently I came across several novels written by Roma Tearne, who came to England from Sri Lanka as a ten-year-old.. They are all about the punishment the Tamils took at the hands of the Singhalese army. Young men were kidnapped by Tamil Tigers as well, to disappear forever in the killing-forests of the war zones.

    

     Every Tamil who could afford to, left Sri Lanka never to return. At one shot they lost their families, their country, their culture and their pride. And they lost the sun and the sea, which they had lived with all their lives. A holocaust of a kind.

    

     I know too many personal tragedies amongst my friends not to take this already forgotten war seriously. Roma Tearne brings back to me the sights and the smells, the feel of that lovely island. I remember the food, the beaches, the rain and the extravagant plant and animal life. And I remember the people, both Singhalese and Tamil, who welcomed me into their lives.

   

     When will the Tamils find their deliverance? Or will the war start all over again when the Tamils re-organise and put their considerable resources of intellect and wealth to reek revenge?

     
     The very least we could do is refuse to hold/ attend the Commonwealth Conference in Colombo.

Expatriate Surprises

 On the road in the countries where I worked in Africa, I used to identify safe pee spots. This was of paramount personal importance because there were no public toilets anywhere on those routes. And the bush could be lethal with all the creepy-crawlies slithering about. Friend of a friend in Uganda was killed doing just that.

     In Uganda, I sampled one or two Primary school staff toilets in desperation and came away with olfactory experiences I would never want to repeat. I remember coming out of the toilet one time to the staff welcoming party lined up to meet the visitor, Head Master ready to do the honours. When the first teacher put his hand out to be shaken I took a quick step back. Being Indian was my salvation. I brought my palms together and said a virtuous Namaste. Phew! I knew there was no water within walking distance of those toilets.

     Sierra Leone was no problem. On the routes I travelled there were many empty stretches, where I could get off the land rover and safely use the roadside. I wouldn't go into the bush because Sierra Leone had cobras all over the place. Freetown is still one of three capital cities in the world where cobras are endemic. 

     On my first day at work, I had to drive past the Ministry of Education; it was a scenic road with the land dipping away into the ocean on my left. At nine n the morning. there was a huge cobra stretched out  across the tarmac, clearly dead. A matatu had run over it and squashed its middle.

     When I was transferred to Freetown in my third year in Sierra Leone, one day, a baby cobra climbed into my neighbour's air conditioner. Kaba, my garden-boy, had to go over to deal with it. He brought it later to show me - a limp rope hanging on a stick.

     'What was the man of the house doing?' I asked. He was a British colleague of mine.
     Kaba grinned. 'Taking photographs,' he said.
In the process Kaba had got some venom spat into his eyes. I treated it with a coconut milk wash. Kaba took it all in his stride.

     Malawi was snake kingdom. One crawled under my 'fridge and freaked out the maid. It was many days before we could persuade her to return to the kitchen. My gardener killed nine snakes the day I moved into my house in Lilongwe - two of them on the trumpet creeper that climbed up the corner wall.

     Most of the countries I worked in were sparsely populated and one did not need three days of  planning to find a place to pee. But Zambia was impossible. This was a crowded country; on either side of the road, people lived and there were no quiet spots. You had to wait till dark and take some other risks.

     Perhaps the most unexpected hazard was the python in Ikot Ekpene. In the evenings we would sit out in front of our house, the only light coming from the moon and the Tilley lamp in the living room. When the leaves moved the shadows shifted in the half-light. Until one day, the dappled shadow moved forward.

     I shouted for the steward, Akpan. He beat it to death. Next morning the skin was hanging on the garage to dry. 
     'Did you bury the rest?' I asked.
     'We ate it,' he answered happily.

        

The Numilis

I came across the numilis two days ago when I was rearranging books on the shelf above my work-desk. They have been book-ends for a long time.They are quite ugly, these two little statuettes crudely made of soap stone. 

The big one, about nine inches high has a face more distorted than the small one. It is a he - the features are all merged into each other as though he has recently been cured of leprosy. The head is most of the statue, with the body a short stump below it.

The smaller one is darker, slightly more personable. Looks like she had crude plastic surgery , though, and the doctor gave up half way. She sneers a bit.

I collected them in a very different life in Sierra Leone. I didn't know what they were meant to be, but then Sierra Leone was a bit like that. You had to take it on trust and most times that worked. (But not the time when we had a shortage of diesel in the country and I stored a fifty- gallon drum of this precious fuel in a Lebanese friend's warehouse. I lost both petrol and friend.) Some you lose.

The numilis have something compulsive about them in their utter misshapenness. You end up looking at them for a long while. Malcolm Thompson, our Assistant Director of the British Council in Freetown, had a collection of these in his office and it was he who told me about them: Sierra Leonean women kept them under their marital bed because they were fertility symbols.

'What happened when they failed to conceive?' I asked. 'Oh, they smashed them up and threw them out of the front door,' my boss, Mike Chadwick offered. And I knew I would like those women immensely.

All this came up in my memory during the International Women's day snippets on the TV. We heard a lot about how badly the women in England got discriminated against, in the workplace. True, very true. But, does it compare even remotely with what happens in Asia, and to a larger degree in Africa?

In some African countries, women deliberately had children before marriage so that their fertility could be proved beyond doubt. Even though they had no means of supporting them. In a country where multiple partners was the norm, where would an infertile spouse stand in the hierarchy?

In the North of Uganda, after the boys were 'initiated', I was told they were advised to have sex as soon as possible after the event. The boys would be anything between four and fourteen years old. My gardener had AIDS by the time he was twenty and he was dead before twenty-five. These boys who were sent out to go forth and perform, I wonder what age the girls were that they practised on.

I once went to a Vodoo shrine near Gbendembu in Sierra Leone. It was hidden well inside the forest and there was no path to it. There was no way you would find it if you didn't know it was there. A Peace Corps friend extracted the information about this voodoo shrine from a local friend of his, who had to remain unnamed. We went there on a motor bike - I remember being hugely disappointed. A low thatch made of mud. What was there to look at?

Returning to Makeni, we saw a group of boys being led on the main road, by two men. The men had bamboo canes in their hand, which they used to keep the lines under control. The youngest looked under five and the oldest no more than ten or eleven. My friend stopped the motor bike and took his camera out. He clicked furiously. When the vodooo leaders noticed him they ran towards us, my companion powered up his bike, accelerated and got away quickly.

The friend who told the American about the shrine was a Catholic. 'Thank God,' I said to my friend. 'So, at least, his daughter is not going to get mutiliated.'

My friend smiled. 'I think he will hedge his bets. There is a lot of pressure on him to conform.' So the ten - year old was at the mercy of the elders in her community. Or the strength of her father's resolve.

I find it quite hard to get incensed about the women who don't reach the board rooms in the United Kingdom. Totally unfair, I agree, but if it's women of the world we are talking about, my sympathies are engaged elsewhere.

Modi for PM? Surely Not

Narendra Modi scares the life out of me. Some unthinking ignoramus recently compared him to Nehru in all but words. Now, Here's where I jump into action: Hands off Nehru, you sectarian cowards. You are talking about the man who had the vision of India as a secular country firmly fixed in his heart. And you dare compare Modi, with his history, to Nehru?

And now the EU is cosying up to Modi. All those horrendous deaths in Gujerat can be wiped out from our collective memories by someone saying it was a mistake?? Won't the West ever have a conscience where their investment interests are concerned? Shame on you, E U. Please go away and put your own house in order. Ours is a mess at the moment and we are searching for a way to that light  we used to have at the centre of our hearts. It's there. We'll find it in spite of our Nethas.

Having grown up in Thalassery, this sorry Hindu-Muslim non-question is beyond me. In Court Road, the centre of my child-universe, I was surrounded by large, ancient Muslim homes. They were not particularly wealthy and the little ones my age were my friends. The compounds were uncared for, slowly receding into decay.

To begin with Aliyumma did not wear a thattam. She went on errands for her family to the local corner shop and we talked to each other in front of my house. I would see her with a half- bottle of coconut oil with a paper cork. I think there was no money to buy a whole bottle. I don't think we got to a full bottle very often either.Some times Aliyumma came to the house behind mine to play.

The corner shop belonged to mammad, also a muslim. We hated him because he told on us to my father, about all our mischief on the road. We were not supposed to get on that road, where the Kunnoor bus hurtled past seemingly without brakes.

When I was around ten I noticed that Aliyumma had gained a cloth on her head. It wasn't much - just a thin long muslin cloth wound round the head twice and tucked into place. When she ran around it flowed behind her.

She was breath-takingly beautiful. So was her brother, mother, her entire family. I marvelled at their complexions, more Persian than Indian.

Soon Aliyumma disappeared totally behind that thattam. She stopped coming to the shop or to play. She must have been twelve then. Education had never been a big thing with the Muslims in our neighbourhood, not even for boys. 

Soon her Nikka was arranged. Before the ceremony I went to visit her ara - the room in which she would meet her husband. Later still, she showed me her collection of crockery and perfume bottles (attar, she called them) displayed on the shelves, gifts from her husband's family. I had a sense of disconnection. I was learning Wordsworth and Algebra and she was learning to be a Muslim woman.

On one of my recent visits to Thalassery I met her son, now the owner of a textile shop. We were delighted to meet up. His mother and father were long dead, but he remembered my house next door.

I wondered - did he get to school and college? I hope so. I have this theory that education is the only answer to sectarian problems, to Hindu-Muslim connundrums. But then, I would think that; I've spent half my life in education. I probably think a dose of Topology can cure Cancer. Wont it?

I remember the only Muslim boy in my College class -Savan Kutty, who later headed our Public Service Commission. He was then a member of the local youth congress. Not a single Muslim girl reached college in those days, the fifties.

Much later, when the first Muslim woman started College, the Government had to provide police protection for her. She went to College flanked by a uniformed policeman because the Mullas had threatened her.

And now, we are all educated - Muslims and Hindus in Kerala. How come then, we are more at at each other's throats than before? Is there a fallacy here somewhere . Have I got it all wrong again?