My Alter Ego

 

My alter ego from Keralam

Posted on July 6, 2020 by anandnair78

This is a blog about my very Indian other self. Actually Malayalee, (from Keralam, speaking  the local language, Malayalam) because I probably have less in common with people of some of the northern parts of India than with crazy Croydon, where I have lived  since the late nineties, with occasional forays into Keralam to recharge my other self.  I started this site in 2013 and never pursued it. But now, senility combined with Covid Lock-down,  and the remorseless tick-tock (Rushdie style) of seconds, minutes, hours, days… persuade me that I must get this going, if my granddaughter is to have any idea about her fractured beginnings.

At fifteen years, she has a room and bathroom of her own, you enter there at your peril — unless your sneak in to pick up the daily debris, while she sleeps the sleep of the innocent. In our house in Thalassery, in the north of Keralam, I ponder, five of us females, aged between seven and fifty-five, slept in the puja room. Ammamma, the eldest had a narrow bed, the rest slept on mats spread on the floor. It was a small room; when the mats were rolled out, there was no walking room, so you stepped over the others if you needed to get out. I did not qualify for a pillow at my age, graduating to one only on my wedding night. I wonder what my new, just unpacked husband thought when he found his wife constantly slipping down a notch, in the bed, to escape the pillow. It didn’t help that some kind souls had covered the nuptial bed in jasmine petals. JESUS WEPT!

Men were considered superior to us; they slept upstairs on beds and mattresses. Indeed, but for the beds upstairs, the house was mercifully devoid of furniture. My father had two chairs in his office in the corner of the veranda. His clients sat on a bench, which was not trustworthy, as it had uneven legs and tended to go up at one end, when a weight came down on the other. My father also had a big table and a Dutch glass-fronted almirah. The almirah contained his law books, with The Indian Penal Code occupying pride of place. He was a lawyer.

We had a Planter’s chair too on the veranda, on which I used to curl up and sleep, waiting for my father to pick me up and carry me up to bed, when I was still little. It was a lovely object, that chair, until you got close to it. Most of the wickerwork had torn off on the seat and you had to stick to one little Strip, which had a few strands left. And look out for those sharp bits of unravelled cane sticking out!

For the rest, we sat on palakas and thadukkus , wooden stools and small grass-mats. These days, when I visit India, I see no stools or mats to sit on. The middle classes sit on sofas, while the poorer families sit on basic wooden chairs. Just as well considering the shape of my knees.

My Threadbare Kerala Home

 

MY THREAD-BARE KERALA HOME

Posted on July 12, 2020 by anandnair78

MY THREAD-BARE HOME

I rarely offer to empty the dishwasher as it requires bending and straightening up many times. There is no space in the cutlery drawer for all the armaments we accumulated over the last decade — it wasn’t too bad before that. Around 2007, my daughter returned to England from Kenya and I from India, bringing with us our households. So three households were now crammed into the small bachelor home of my long-suffering son. In the end, he bought a larger house, just to accommodate his unwieldy family.

When the spoons and forks spill over into the drawer, I remember our home in Thalassery. We had one metal spoon in the house, which was my father’s for use with his evening conjee. The rest of us had spoons made from the leaves of the Jack fruit tree. This was an adhoc arrangement. When conjee was served, one of us children would be instructed to pick a few jack leaves. This was no off-hand chore. The leaves had to be fresh but not too soft — they shouldn’t disintegrate in the hot conjee.  And they had to be shaped and held together by a piece of eerkili (spine of the palm leaf). I was never great at these feminine skills.

Once, my visiting aunt got so disgusted with my ineptitude, she asked me to go back to the jack tree and fetch better leaves. I had enough by then. I gave her my father’s precious spoon.

‘That thing that is sucked by all and sundry?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘I’d rather go hungry.’

This happy spoon-less state of affairs continued till I got married and went to Colombo to live with my in-laws. They were of a different ilk; I would call it faux-western. Proper china and a plenitude of spoons and forks and knives, not to mention sofas and sprung beds, and curtains in the windows. When I went home to India to have my first baby, I felt as though I could breathe again. I packed away my tooth brush and Colgate tooth-paste, and happily went back to an earlier oral hygiene — burnt husk on my index finger.

My husband threatened to visit after a few months. Now I would need to pander to a different food-protocol. He ate rice like the urban Ceylonese — with fork and spoon, the fork in the left hand, pushing food into the spoon in the right hand. And we,in Thalassery, had no forks or knives or spoons. The gofer was sent into town to bring back two spoons and two forks. He returned empty-handed. So I went hunting and unearthed some cutlery in a disused drawer in a small shop at the bus-stand.

‘From the time of the White Saives’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Who is this for, now?’ Emphasis on the NOW. I refrained from answering. The deal seemed almost a betrayal.

How far have the mighty fallen! My father grinned with great amusement, when I went home with my finds.

‘What are you going to do about the dry latrines?’ he asked. But that, as they say, is a whole other story.

At the back of my Retina

 

At the back of my Retina

Saris, magenta, indigo, saffron, emerald …, drying on a clothes-line, in bright sun, near a ‘dobhighat,’in Chennai; dark pink, silk umbrellas with silver trims, held over the image of Ganeshan at a temple festival, as the drums beat, the cymbals clash, and the elephants in the holy procession toss their ears;  the sindhooram powders for the dot on the forehead, in all the colours in creation, and some extra, displayed in front of an odds-and-ends shop in big bazaar in Thalassery; glass bangles shimmering in the sun, in a bangle-wallah’s basket; these are some of the colours of my childhood, and they survive in the back of my retina, to be called upon whenever I need a reminder of who I am.

  I recover this sense of belonging to my colourful past when I travel to India. During the months and years in between, the colours fade. When I come back to work in England after a summer in India, my colleagues are amused; they don’t quite know how to respond to this new Anand, who wears silk saris and chunky jewellery, as she swishes down the corridors. ‘Dressed up like a Christmas tree,’ one says, as I float past the classrooms, piles of books in hand. But it is all too much effort to be sustained as winter mornings get shorter, and I revert to my mongrel self.

   There are compensations. There is no green like the green of England, I think, as I drive from Laindon to Brentwood to drop my boys off at school. And it is everywhere, with no respect shown to urban areas. The small parks, the spaces full of trees and hedges -- it is as though the creator spilt huge barrels of green without discretion, all over the place and it spread willy-nilly. My visiting American friend is envious of this plentiful green.

   This green is a green all its own. Not sure about the ‘pleasant’ whenever I come across that other unmentionable intrusion of colour into my daily life. It is bad manners for the non-white person to mention it, but I often wished one of my ‘liberal’ friends in the staffroom would pick up the cudgels on behalf of Mo, Prashar, and myself, the three ‘persons of colour’ in a staffroom of ninety others. Persons of colour, my foot. Are all the others colourless, like see-through, pink plastic?

   I was lucky – I spent half a lifetime in Sri Lanka, Africa and India, and garnered a whole backdrop of ‘other’ to prop me up, through sundry episodes, which threatened to diminish me. I also carried that green in my head, that blazing, vivid, forest-green of Africa. When I am homesick, it is not India I miss, but the little towns of West Africa. I remember the multi-coloured Garra cloth in the market, rolled out on makeshift wooden tables, the head scarves of women saying boo to the limitations of their lives, and the family of yellow birds that made their home on a tree in front of my first-floor flat in Makeni in Sierra Leone.

Grow Up, Labour.

GROW UP, LABOUR 

I have a whole history of losing -- elections, boy-friends, keys... Was it in 1951, India had its first general election? My father was a candidate for the Congress Party; no one else would consent to be comprehensively beaten by the Communists, who practically 'ruled' the Keralam country-side anyway. So the Party asked my father to sacrifice his pride -- and he did. ' You'll lose big time,' I said to him. And he smiled his lop-sided smile. 'Someone has to, and I have a thick hide, he said.' But I didn't. When the victorious Communists came in bus-loads and danced on the road in front of my house, I put my face down on my bed and cried.

  So, I have experience of losing elections, first hand. And, in this year when Covid is killing people, almost at random, all over the world, a British election is hardly of world-shaking importance. Yet, I felt devastated to see the massacre of the Labour Party, on the first day , when the results started coming out. Labour recovered a thin strip of ground the next day, but all I could hear was the right-wing press gloating. AND GLOATING. Today, two days later, they are still salivating.

   The Press is right-wing these days almost by definition. Look at BBC, the news in India, Fox in the U S A. Half a century ago, the press stood for the small man; today it is owned by the oligarchs. The sight of BBC kowtowing to the Far Right Tory Government is nauseating. What is the point of them? They might as well start interspersing news with Tory Ads, paid for by the Tory Party, and stop asking the Public to fund them.

   At the moment, the only news in this country is about the internal disagreements within Labour.  It's absolutely wonderful that the Tories are so fond of each other, despite the sleaze, the corruption and the lying!

   We could all just stop watching BBC. Many of the other news channels are also right-wing, but not disgustingly so. I see a spectrum with BBC at one end and Channel 4 at the other, 4 not sure where it wants to stand. I could also enjoy Channel 4 just to look at Jon Snow, but that too is going soon.

   The Left needs to mobilize. We need to get to the voter; it is useless merely whining as I am doing now. I am fed up -- have been for a long time -- of the in-fighting within Labour --  causing the mutual destruction of both ends. If they must tear each other's hair out, please let them find a quiet toilet to do it, PLEASE.

   McDonnel should stop cashing in on every mistake of the Labour Right. There are many. Both sides should sequester themselves in a large room, where smoking, getting drunk and fighting with paper aeroplanes, are allowed, and not come out till they have settled rules of conduct, and who tells what to the Press.

  They should hide till the white smoke of compromise and clarity of purpose comes out of the chimney.

 And, then I might do some door-stepping for them, again, in the next election.

   

   

   

Age -- Has it Withered Me?

Age -- Has it Withered Me?

 I think getting old is like giving birth -- you cannot know it unless you are in it.

  I cannot believe I have lasted eighty-six years. The wear and tear are showing of course. Bits and pieces of me are definitely falling off. My family get exasperated at my lack of hearing -- they repeat words and phrases to accommodate me, but I can see the weariness in them. Small print in Maths books are beyond me, especially indices. The T V is occasionally less clear than I would wish. I blame my spectacles and clean the lens, without much improvement. Thankfully, I can still smell the lavender in my garden and the bees and wasps around the Lobelia are perfectly visible. Selective hearing, I know, but can I have selective vision as well?

  I have recently acquired a stair-lift. How the mighty have fallen! It is an ugly monstrosity, desecrating a graceful stairway. And, when I sit on it, it is one ugliness on top of another. But the choice was moving downstairs, out of my familiar bedroom and its familiar chaos. My cat, Pepper,would miss her place at the foot of the bed and the window ledge to sit on to survey the cat-world. I cling to the familiar.

  I should be glad my memory still holds, though names of people, with whom I don't  deal frequently, escape me. And the words too sometimes, that word I need for my writing, which fits perfectly in that phrase. The Maths I learned half a century ago is easy to recall. The formula for the solution of quadratic equations, the Cosine rule, all the mental acrobatics that schools inflict on unsuspecting children, they are fresh in my mind. But I tried to remember the lines of Milton's sonnet, On His blindness, and did not succeed. I had one phrase haunting me, but the lines were gone.  'They also serve who only stand and wait.'  That has been my excuse, in past years, for the garden full of weeds, the dishwasher not loaded... Now, of course I can plead age and senility.

  I am, at the moment, writing some pages on my life in Nigeria and Zambia, and I remember the taste of fufu and groundnut sauce, the music blaring in the drinking haunts, the colours of the Kente cloth in the market... My colleagues had names like Egwele and Nebedem, but they are still alive in my mind. But I forget the name of the Peace Corps lady who sat next to me in the staff room. We were good friends.

  As age advances, I become more and more of an attention seeker. Possibly because I am more ignored than before. I say I don't want birthday presents or wishes, and the sixth diary, the tenth T-shirt, are all surplus to need... All Oxfam fodder in a few weeks time. But I slip my birth-date on to Facebook and wait for my family and friends to spoil me. And they write in, so many of them, I am overwhelmed by their affection. I am lucky.

  So, I am writing this blog for that wonderful crowd of people who wished me Happy Birthday yesterday. Old age is a lot better than I thought it might be. And I am lucky to be allowed the years, one after the other. And thank you, my clan, my tribe, my friends. Thank you for the wishes; I am too lazy to thank each one of you separately.

 

This Impatient World

 This Impatient World

I have come to the conclusion that this world has long overtaken me -- I am unable to keep up. Thoughts fizz in my head and evaporate. I try to order them and they disperse, to return later to mock me.

We all know the status of black people in the U S. But, shooting them for target practice.?What has changed? What the hell, Mr Biden,is going on? What are you going to do about this? Why are there so many guns freely circulating in this rich land? 

The Floyd murder does not seem to have made any difference. Daunty, that boy, Adam, and many more. It is not the general population that is killing now (though that too happens predictably often); it is the police, who (cliche') are supposed to protect us. Who watches the watchers??

This is not the general view of America I had. I have not seen the picture clearly. My compassionate American friends will be just as bewildered as I am.

Here, in U K, the young struggle with the incarceration of lock-down. Some break the rules and spill out; others become progressively depressed, inward-looking, lost. What will restore them to their former ebullient selves? I say U K, but in India too, I speak with the mothers of teen-age girls. We are all in the same dark place. 

That Social Media world, which is their natural habitat is not helping them now. Its toxic fumes destroy their self-confidence. I remember the pouting girls on Tik-Tok and Instagram, pushing their boobs out and their bums. Many aspiring to reach that zenith of shape, which the media has instructed them to aspire to. Somewhere along the line they have imbibed the instruction that they have to please the BOYS. Boys who are just as lost as them now, but are learning some dangerous habits in their attitudes to the opposite sex.

I cannot see the schools doing anything to teach the youngsters self-respect. We need to find a solution for the willful cruelty of the social media world. I suggest creative enterprises to my granddaughter -- gardening, embroidery, volunteering to help others. They have to start looking outwards, realize that in helping others you help yourself. But none of these involve screens and are not attractive to them.

I remember my father's question to me almost daily, at the end of the day, when I was a teenager. Washed? Finished your homework? And what did you do for someone else today? 

The Jab War

 The Jab War

I have difficulty believing what I am hearing about the vaccine war between Europe and the UK. Is it a residual animosity from Brexit? I feel we, the rich nations, so to speak, are suffering from tunnel vision, in this case, turned inwards, so that we only see our needs.

A great part of the world has no chance of getting their people vaccinated any time soon. And, even if they get a supply from the WHO, will the vaccines reach the remote villages in Rwanda or Burkina Faso? I doubt even the remote villages in vaccine-rich India will get vaccinated, given how separated they are from the life of the country. I hope I am wrong.

I grew up in the war years --when Cholera, Bubonic plague and Small pox were endemic in Keralam. In front of my home was an abandoned, half- built house -- the owner was in Singapore and could not get back to India because of the war raging in Malaya. A family of beggars occupied the veranda. There was a pond in the compound providing them with water -- I learned my swimming in it, using dry coconuts as floats -- and they cooked on stones abandoned by the builders. Two years later an epidemic of plague killed most of them, until just two young men were left. The corpses were collected by the Municipal waste-van, and the men walked away.

Achamma, my paternal grandmother, filled coconut shells with cow-dung and lined the walkway to our house. She believed it kept the evil spirits and all infections at bay. The local Council sent the vaccinators around and they jabbed us with pen-like objects with a circular serrated edge. It was quite painful. Achamma had lost her eldest son to smallpox when he was twenty years old, and she was determined to protect us -- with cow-dung.

When Cholera happened, we started boiling our water from the well. In spite of all that, many in the poorer parts of the town still died. We held our breaths, said our prayers, and waited for the devastation to end.

Much as we do now? Except for the cow-dung. If there is a time to show solidarity, it is now. Yet, we squabble and threaten and make silly noises. Europe threatens us with a vaccine blockade. We forget that our world is now one -- we cannot really isolate ourselves very effectively.

I feel grace has absconded from our lives and a reminder is appropriate. If all of us start squabbling and grabbing, we are irredeemable. Our humanity is sacrificed to our selfishness. We need to regain our perspective of how minuscule we are in the larger picture.