Morning Rituals from Shards of Sunlight

From Shards of Sunlight.  Morning Rituals

The list: nobody would tell Indu what this list was. Since Ahmed’s visit the women in the kitchen talked about nothing else. That and something called Swaraj. What was that?

‘What is this list, Ammammey?’ Indu asked in her deliberately winsome voice the next morning, when Devi was performing her dawn ritual of lighting the devotional lamp. Sometimes an answer slipped out by mistake. ‘Is it like the list you make when the dhobi comes?’

            Devi didn’t answer; she rarely had time for Indu’s many questions. She muttered prayers under her breath and pulled out the crumpled newspaper pushed into the neck of the coconut oil bottle in the puja corner. She sniffed at it. Then she tore up a piece of old mundu for wicks, and twisted three-inch strips to make points to light. She placed the wicks in the saucer of the lamp to soak and drew one end of each towards her.

            The bit Indu loved came next. Devi pulled out the usually damp matchbox she kept behind the plaster Krishnan’s shoulder and started her battle with the matchsticks. Three fizzled out before she got a flame on the fourth, and the room filled with the familiar dawn smell of sulphur and coconut oil. When Indu had got her fill of that comforting smell she went out to sit in her favourite place on the veranda edge, carrying the dawn benediction with her.  The sunbeams splintered into rainbow colours on the cracked cement floor. She put her hand over them and imagined she had caught the colours of the morning.

Devi came out a few minutes later with her pan box; this would be a good time to ask questions, Indu knew. Devi was always amiable when she was chewing pan.

‘What’s Swaraj, Ammammey?’ Indu asked. She smelled the green betel leaf smell and the sharp tang of chunamb, the white lime paste, which Devi put in minute quantities on the leaf, as she chewed.

‘Oh. It’s like – self-government.’ Devi said.

Just like adults. You ask them for the meaning of a short word and they give you a longer one. Indu gave up.

Book Signing at W H Smith, Croydon.

I must admit I am not confident about these events, but feel I am letting myself down if I don't go through the promotion processes. Strangely enough, once I get to my seat, behind that table, stacked with new-smelling copies of my most recent offering, I am full of enthusiasm and ready to go. This was the case again last Saturday.

   The manager at W H Smith, Whitgift Centre, Croydon, was incredibly helpful and kind. So was his assistant, Sara. To begin with, I didn't expect to even gain access to him. The last time, three years ago, with my first novel, I had to practically door-step to get to the assistant. I never saw the manager. I met instead a beautiful, young woman, called Ama who looked after me. She died last week, I am told, unexpectedly' and no one knows why. The unpredictability of human existence! I think of what her family must go through for a long time from now and have no words to make it easier. It cannot be made easier.

   This time, there was this wonderfully kind man, Nick, the manager, who had time to talk about book sales and indeed taught me a great deal about the process. He made it all sound simple. Sara organised the 'table, got posters up, pointed to essentials like loos and offered to help if I needed anything. I think I would have been happy even if not a single book got sold.

   I carried my flask of tepid tea and my cheese and ham sandwiches. A friend rushed off and got me a bottle of water. My daughter had already taken the books in on Thursday. I was ready to roll. My friend Tommaso was ready with his camera to take the photos, like the ones in this blog.

   'Are you good at talking to the people who come by?' the manager asked. If I wasn't up to  it then, I was going to be now. I thought of all the African countries I had worked in and all the tight situations, travelling, I had to get out of, (like the time, British Airways dumped a whole plane load of people like me in Banjoul, refusing to go further because airport fees had not been paid. I had to sweet talk the local porters to load my luggage into the small planes provided to ferry us to Freetown, where all of us were going.')

   So when the punters walked by and slowed down past me, I smiled my best smile, and gave them the spiel. Occasionally, when I saw someone who could not afford the money right then, I felt like giving them the book, with a hug. But I was not in charge of the buying and selling and let it go. 

   My daughter had taken thirty books in and twenty-six went that day. Smith offered to display my book on their shelves - what more could I ask? Last time I sold four, and three were bought by my son's friend, Jerry, bless him.

   My friends - my son's friends - bought many for Christmas presents. I suspect a Bulgarian and an Italian friend will have to search hard to find people to give them to, who actually read English fiction out of choice. Ah - well.

   Makes me think: I shall start my next book in earnest today. Seems worth while. I am thinking well. Thank you all - book-buyers, W H Smith, Raghu's friends, family. What a day! 

   

Cobra Land

Freetown is one of three cities in the world where cobras are endemic. I didn't know that until the British Council sent me a wad of familiarisation documents, before my first trip to Sierra Leone in 1983.

   The documents were amazing: they told me, among other things, how I should boil my salad before eating it to avoid stomach diseases and not buy food from the open markets. In Makeni where I lived there was no food sold anywhere else.They also urged me to attend an induction event at a manor house in Berkshire to learn about living in the tropics. In spite of the fact that my CV clearly said I was born and bred in South India. And yes, I should buy a hat; I would need one at garden parties when royalty came to visit. Garden party? I had never met one of those animals before and hoped to avoid them forever.

   I had not a seen a single wild cobra in India in the twenty-three years I lived there. The snake charmer occasionally brought some doped-up cobras around, which danced to his pipe. They looked harmless; my father said that the poison fangs had probably been removed.

   In Freetown, however, cobras were common - part of the landscape. My very first morning in Freetown, I drove to work to the Ministry of Education, at eight in the morning, feeling my way into the centre of town.The road descended from a hill-side rapidly into a cleft of land where the town nestled. The road to the Ministry was a mud-red ribbon which wound round the depression in the ground, with clusters of government buildings, in large compounds, on one side.

   Just before I reached the entrance to the Ministry, I saw a huge black rope stretched across the road. Lorries hooted over it and passed without stopping. It was only when I was nearly upon it that I noticed it was a huge cobra, squashed to brown-and-red pulp in the middle, and the rest of it intact. Thankfully, quite dead. Later, my colleague at the Ministry dismissed the event lightly. 'They come up from the low ground near the ocean,' he remarked. 'So much new building in that area.'

   In Makeni, in the North, where I lived from 1983-1985, there was a resident presence behind our flats. The women would see it sometimes near the outside cook-house when they worked there. Once, it was seen in the brick oven and no one would cook there for some time. 

   Things got interesting when a pet monkey tethered to a tree behind our flats died from snake bite. The men decided to take notice. One day they saw it crawl back into the brick oven. Two of them quickly made a fire from dry leaves. They waited outside until the poor snake came crawling out and beat it to death.

   It wasn't until 1985, when I moved back to Freetown that cobras lifted their hood again. One got inside our Assistant Directors air-conditioner and his wife came running to my house next door, with the baby. She was crying. 'Can't take any more of this,' she wailed. A few minutes later, Kaba, my young gardener, walked in to show me his trophy. A three foot, very thin cobra hanging dead on a twig. He was very amused at the crying white woman.

   She gave him ten Leones for his troubles. 'Where was the husband, Kaba?' I asked, after she left. 'Running around taking photos,' he said. He must have thought all of us Mzungus (foreigners) quite mad. My worry was that Kaba would soon begin to find little cobras to put in our AD's house to get more ten Leones.

   Kaba himself got attacked in my garden one day by a spitting cobra. He could not open one eye for a while, and I washed the eye with coconut milk as they did in India. I hoped he would not be tempted to go near them for a while. At least till I left the country.

Sierra Leone revisited

Sierra Leone’s present plight occupies my mind. You might ask, what about Guinea and Liberia? Well, Liberia is pretty much over the worst, and Guinea claims that the Ebola virus is not spreading, though information appears hard to come by. The fact is, I did not live for five-and-a-half years in Guinea or Liberia. I don't know any Liberian and the only citizen I know from Guinea lives in the United Kingdom.

   I started this blog account (Other Lands and Other People) when it occurred to me that many people from Britain know little about how people in Asia or Africa live. Apart, that is, from the bright spots like Thailand or Singapore. South America has become more familiar with some tourist spots becoming famous in that part of the world. But,Congo? Mozambique? I bet very few people in Britain know what those countries look like, how the people live, and what, in human behaviour, is taken to be the norm.

    Sierra Leoneans live with every-day deprivation that we could not dream about. A great part of Africa does. When I finished my fifteen years sojourn in various parts of Africa and returned to the UK, my first thought was, thank God for running water and absence of cerebral malaria.

    I had come up against both: in the Northern part of Sierra Leone, in 1986, I became ill without knowing what was wrong. My head and neck hurt a little all the time and my energy levels fell. My job required running around all over Sierra Leone like a mad monkey. I came to the UK at about that time on leave and became seriously ill with fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.

    The local GP in Basildon came around to my house (I was bed-ridden by then) and said he would do some tests. The test results took forever to come; in between he would not prescribe anything. I kept pleading with him to treat me for Malaria, but he could not see any evidence of it even in the blood. When I started rigours as in Malaria, he ordered another blood test, and I knew I would die if he did not give me medication soon. The second blood test showed I had cerebral malaria and I was carted off to the Billericay hospital, where I was isolated, in spite of my telling the doctors and nurses there, that Malaria could not spread without the mosquito.

   I remember the consultant from the School of Tropical Diseases who came to discharge me; he opened a small bound booklet and started searching for information on Malaria. This did not actually encourage my faith in him. So I said to him, 'The flukes live in the liver for a while. I need medication for three weeks to stop them from making me ill again.' He looked again in the book and prescribed another medicine. In Sierra Leone, many people live with Malaria until they die.

   Malaria kills a great number of people in some countries. More than Ebola, but it does not spread from person to person. I am sure malnutrition kills just as many. Infant mortality rates are high and the death of a child in small, remote communities is commonplace.

   The pharmaceutical companies did not get interested in producing a vaccine for Ebola until recently. When the WHO started making dollar signs. The question: do people from other countries have a moral obligation to actively promote health and the eradication of disease in other countries, even when we are not under threat?

Sierra Leone and Ebola

Today (21st October) on Channel 4, the journalist in Freetown spoke about the utter devastation caused by Ebola. Yesterday he was in Waterloo,but his videos couldn't get through. I was looking at a landscape I had lived in for five years. When I reached Waterloo, travelling from Makeni, I knew I was within touching distance of Freetown. I could almost smell the sea in between the transport that careened into the crowds, barely missing them.

   In my time there was no e mail, and in Makeni where I lived, there was no postal delivery.  The British Council, my employers, in their infinite mercy, would send a driver down with my mail every month. If I needed to phone my family, I would have to travel to Freetown, a good 5 hours away on the horrible broken-up road, and wait in a queue at the Telecom office. Diesel was not available in the garages, so that was something you didn't do for a phone call. The waiting room at the Telecom would be crowded with expatriates trying to ring home, and could become a whole afternoon's business.

   Things must be much better, I think, after thirty years. And it is. Or so I am told. There is the ubiquitous mobile phone after all. 

   So I am surprised that the conditions in the poorer areas of Freetown are not that better. There is no working water supply to the slum areas. How do you keep a virus that spreads through bodily fluids out without water? The toilets that cannot be flushed must be lethal.
   
   In the Primary schools I visited in 1983-'88 as part of my Primary Maths Project, I became aware that Sierra Leone, including Freetown, was suffering from unimaginable deprivations -there were no resources in the schools. They did this penance quietly without talking about it. It was a miracle that teachers and students were still amazingly eager to learn new methods of teaching, to practise them. The trainees turned out for workshops immaculately dressed - clothes starched and ironed to perfection. Hair in neat corn rows or combed out. How did they do that? The spirit of that country was unbelievable.

   Today, I wonder whether the outside world knows how Kono or Kabale or Port Loko - and all the places in between - are, in terms of light and water. Tending the sick, keeping yourself disinfected, become gargantuan tasks when the basics are missing. What is amazing is how life goes on as best as it can in spite of the death and devastation. That is so Sierra Leone.

   So I think they will get past this somehow. They will start again without fuss. I hope we SL lovers will all help.

Misplaced Respect for Marriage

My friend and mother's sister, Baby, got me thinking. She claimed that, in India, women have to be married to be respected. Now, Baby is a couple of years younger than me, so this is not a generational gap.

   I wondered whether it is my history of divorce and fecklessness that makes me disagree. Baby is one of the most gentle and 'spiritual' women I know. She is bright, articulate, well-loved, by me included. But not for being married.

   I think the arranged marriages in India are a huge gamble. I lost on mine. So, how do I find my self-respect? I have thought about this for many years.

   I like me when I am less self-centred, more caring and willing to engage with others afflicted in diverse ways. I don't always succeed. I like me when I make the effort to learn new things, find new friends, heal breaches within or without my family, consider myself and admit my mistakes.

   When I suffer loss in various ways, I remind myself of something my father said to me when I was in a very deep hole, in 1966. 'Look below you, at the people who are worse off than you! Not the ones happily above you.' At the moment the hole I am in is even deeper, but I summon that wisdom of his, back. The Iraquis, the Syrians, the severely disabled, the incurably ill. I cannot do much for anyone at near eighty years. But I make tentative steps forward. I try to help in small and hesitant ways. It makes me less self-centred, more part of the human community. And I am grateful for the support I receive from friends and my family. I depend on them. This is as it should be. What is there not to respect?

   This makes me feel worthwhile - respect myself. This is the only kind of respect that matters to me. But affection? I'll take it whichever way it comes.

   I like to think it is important that my life is about what I do as a person, the work I do teaching, the writing I do, the people I consider my friends.

   So, to the young people in my family, I must say - find your own way, work out your value systems independent of others and try to be as little self-centred as you can be. Husbands? They'll soon be dime a dozen even in India. Especially if the girl babies get killed off before they are quite born.

   

A very short story

For my friends in the Writers' Hangout, talking about the length of short stories.

For the Sake of Daniel

by

Anand Nair

Daniel put his latchkey in the front door and placed his satchel down carefully on the floor. He sniffed. It was that kind of house.

Stale cigarettes, hamburgers and burnt toast. Nothing new. He knew what to expect. His mum was sprawled on the sofa. He saw the sadness-lines on her face, clear as she slept, and the parcel at her feet. Shiny pink material and tassels.

Shit! Dad would go ballistic. There was no money for tops one size too small; his school trousers showed six inches of socks. When would she learn?

He went to the kitchen and found his dinner – burnt sausages and mash with peas floating in their yellow liquid. He threw the sausages and soggy peas away and put a fresh batch on the hob.  While the water for the peas boiled he emptied the ashtray near his mother and took her parcel upstairs to hide in her wardrobe.

Daniel looked at the clock. Dad would be home in half an hour. He ran to the sitting room and sprayed it with air freshener. Anything to take all those smells away before his father came in. He rushed back and forth laying the table for three and grabbed a packet of crisps from the larder to keep him going till dinner.

Suddenly he had an urge to leave them to it. Catch the Circle Line to somewhere? He could go round and round till he knew where he wanted to go. But who would stop his dad when he lost it and smacked his mother’s bewildered face? Brute! Wait till I get big, he thought. Bigger’n you.

Next morning, as he came down for school, his mother was at the fence talking to Sally next door. Nosy cow.

‘I would leave him, but for the sake of Daniel,’ he heard his mother say. You and me  both he thought, as he picked up his satchel and left for school.