by Nair, Anita
I’d met Sathi’s in-laws at the wedding. They had seemed to be a timorous old couple, as much in awe of the Maraars as we were. ‘But they live quite far from here, don’t they? Pathanamthitta or somewhere?’ I was genuinely curious.
‘Yes but they visit her and us about once every six months and they want to poke their noses into everything. I never speak to them politely if I can help it.’
I wondered how she got away with it. My parents expected me to be polite to everyone, even children. She was still talking, now getting quite animated. ‘Do you know, I refer to your father as “Air Commode”. Only air comes out on the lavatory. It always makes everyone laugh.’ She giggled loudly and looked slyly at me to gauge my reaction.
My father had worked hard to acquire the rank of Air Commodore and it hurt me deeply now to hear him referred to so rudely. I shot a look at my mother-in-law who was stringing flowers near by. She was laughing too, proud of her daughter’s clever wit. I looked down at my feet and wished I could be less sensitive.
Mother-in-Law, who I’d been told to address as Amma, was showing little sign of thawing towards me, although I did notice that she certainly wasn’t universally icy. She absolutely adored Gauri and was full of smiles whenever Sathi visited, which was frequently as she and her family lived just down the road. Amma was also a dedicated grandmother, full of treats for Sathi’s three little girls. The Ammumma was Amma’s widowed mother who lived with them and seemed to earn her keep by slaving all day to keep the kitchen gleaming, despite churning out vast quantities of food. I hoped that she got more of a holiday when she went to live with her son in Calicut once a year. Latha, the older daughter-in-law, was quite obviously not a part of the charmed inner circle, but, efficient and brisk, seemed to have gained some hard-earned respect. She and Suresh’s older brother, a college professor, did not live in the family home but in distant Madras. I was sorry to see them being driven off to the station the day after the reception and would see them again only about once a year.
The reception had been a confusing affair. I’d woken up that morning with an overwhelming feeling of excitement at the thought of seeing my family again … after four long days! I jumped out of bed to brush my teeth and prepare for the day, bumping into Suresh who was just emerging after his shower. In my joy I gave him an impetuous hug, startling him. Suddenly unsure of his reaction, I looked at his face and thought he looked pleased. He did not, however, ask me what it was infecting me so. He didn’t seem to notice at all—as I didn’t then—that there were hundreds of opportunities like that one, missed carelessly and without thought for the price we would have to pay later. Tiny little chances to ask each other how we were feeling. To talk and share our thoughts and learn to become friends. That morning, however, the thought of seeing my parents again was obliterating everything else. I hugged myself in glee, sitting down again on the edge of the bed to look out of the window, wondering how like sad fat babies the dumpy jackfruits looked, clinging helplessly to matronly tree trunks. Suresh carried on humming to himself, brushing his hair and carefully choosing a shirt from the wardrobe.
‘You’d better go with Amma to the bank locker to get out your jewellery and things for the reception,’ he said vaguely.
I nodded, ‘Shall I wear the necklace you had put on me at the wedding?’
‘I don’t know, you’d better check … there might be some traditional piece or something you’ll have to wear …’
‘Are you going to the motel today too!’
‘Of course. Business is not like an Air Force job where you can take leave. Always things to worry about.’ He was ready and about to leave the room. I was being a nuisance now, prolonging the conversation.
‘What? What sort of things to worry about?’
‘Oh you won’t understand, unions, accounts, tax matters …’
I could understand, I thought. I knew all those words and wanted to understand. But Suresh was now half out of the door, swinging his briefcase impatiently. Holding the curtain open he said, more kindly, ‘You’d better get ready soon, Amma and all the others would have had their baths by now. Married girls don’t create a good impression if they stay in their rooms till late.’
I was more keen on creating that good impression with the Maraars than with attempting to impress Suresh with my business acumen and hastily scrambled up to get ready for my bath. But baths before dawn, making sure I washed my hair each time and being first past the post in the kitchen wasn’t going to be quite enough. I could tell, fairly early on, that some of the things I needed to create that good impression were completely out of my control. Later that morning, I returned with Amma from the bank locker, carrying my small sandalwood jewellery box. She was staggering under the weight of numerous large maroon boxes stuffed full, no doubt, with beautiful Maraar jewellery. It felt safer not to offer help in carrying them, as it might have been seen as an eagerness to get my hands on Maraar jewels. I let the driver do the honours instead. In the house, my little box was opened up and the women of the house gathered around to decide what pieces I should wear at the reception. I could feel that familiar feeling of discomfort creeping in as it was clearly an exercise in ‘Let’s see what these Highly Placed Delhi Officials give their daughters’. I had heard that Sathi had been weighed down with gold when she’d got married some years ago and was fairly sure my parents’ scraped-together savings had not bought me enough in Maraar terms. I was right.
‘Oh look, Sathi, have you ever seen such tiny ear-rings? They’re like your jumikis, only ten times smaller.’
‘Well they’ll match the sari she’ll be wearing, but we can’t have such tiny ones. What’ll people think!’
Oh no, what were people going to think of me? That my father loved me less because he hadn’t been able to afford elephantine jumikis?
‘I … I’ve always liked small pieces of jewellery … I feel they suit me better …’ I stuttered, lying.
Amma was holding up a beautiful old layered gold chain. My father’s gift to my mother at their wedding. ‘Now, this is a nice one, is it new?’
Rare words of praise! I struggled briefly with a desire to lie again and, hopefully, look good. but this was something it was going to be difficult to lie about. ‘No it’s not new, it was the swarnamala put on my mother at her wedding.’
The chain was flung aside. ‘Can’t have her wearing something old at the reception. Sathi, go and get something out of your jewellery. Just make sure it’s something people in Valapadu haven’t seen before.’
The happy feeling I’d woken up with was dissipating at a rapid rate and got no better as, later in the afternoon, I had to start dressing for the reception. I was helped by Sathi and an aunt who did a ‘tiptop’ job, as they put it, in making me look like someone else. A plait of hair had been bought from the local Ladies’ Store and was firmly attached to my shoulder-length Delhi tresses with a multitude of pins that now dug into my scalp. A thick layer of black eye-liner was painted around my lashes, quite unlike the tiny smudge of kohl I was more accustomed to. A pair of pretend lips were outlined around my own smaller ones with a deep maroon pencil and then painted in, giving them a sultry Tamil heroine pout. By the time I’d worn Sathi’s jewellery and the brand-new Kanjeevaram sari that had been bought for me, I was somebody else!
When my parents arrived at the house, I was trotted out to show them how easy it had been to make me look like a Maraar. In a Maraar sari and make-up and jewellery. Maraar lips and Maraar eyes. Even a hip-length plait of hair to match the graceful Maraar tresses.
I stood in front of them, a counterfeit Maraar, hiding Delhi insides and a very heavy heart.
The Thief of Memories
Vijay Nambisan
At lamp-lighting time, when the elders had had enough of our running about and the noise we made, all of us children would be made to sit in a row along the narrow strip of veranda which extended towards the main gate. There we were urged to say our prayers, or as the Malayalam phrase literally ha
s it, ‘recite names’. ‘Rama-Rama-Rama-Rama’ becomes quite monotonous, and for variety and from the wickedness of our minds we would, like Valmiki, often say ‘Mara-Mara-Mara …’
The electric supply was fitful and unreliable then. I think only one or two rooms in the old house had electric fittings, and the light would wane and wax like that of an oil lamp. There was, of course, no TV; there was a vacuum-tube radio set. The house was older than my father, having been built about the beginning of the century, though generations of his fathers had been born in houses which had stood on the same site and one after the other been torn down and replaced. There was a sense of the continuity of the clan, especially when the house was full of cousins, which I was too young to understand then and only appreciate in retrospect.
As we sat there for as long as we could sit still, the darkness fell, such a darkness as city-dwellers are now unaccustomed to. The air was full of night-birds and night-insects, and frogs at the appropriate season. I was town-bred myself, and with the darkness a gloom would settle on me. There was nothing to do: I couldn’t read, couldn’t play, and night in an old house is always full of devils. I vastly preferred my eldest uncle’s town house in Trichur (now Thrissur), where there were lots of books and the sounds of traffic and electric lights. I could also speak English there and be understood by everybody.
My Malayalam is much better now—I never studied it formally, though my parents taught me to read and write—and my sensibilities are better educated. I go back to the old house in the village with a sense of passionate expectation, though nothing ever happens there. Both the uncle who lived there and his older brother in Trichur are dead, the town house was sold long ago and, as in most of Kerala, the city has come to the village. The roads are good; I have driven the 18 kilometres from Trichur in under 40 minutes, and there is no reminder of the two-kilometre walks we had to take across the paddy fields from the State highway. We had to walk on the narrow, often crumbling earth boundaries between the tiny fields, and in the rains it was always difficult for me to keep my footing. Once, when I was eight, I slipped and fell off the path into two feet of muddy water, and I vividly remember my consternation as I sat there and looked up at my smiling parents and hooting sisters.
The old house is very quiet now. My aunt is there, and her son and his wife; their daughter is in college. Not more than once or twice a year is it full of people, and there are no crowds of children to swell the corridor and the veranda with their riot. The last wedding there was my sister’s, almost ten years ago.
A couple of days after that wedding I sat with another cousin on the steps of the two-storied ‘gate-house’ across the yard from the main house and talked about such things. We both hearkened back to the old days, an impossibly romantic Gandhian dream which always overcomes me when I go back. Later I retailed the conversation, in a self-congratulatory manner, to my mother, who said, ‘It’s all very well for you men to talk like that. Just think what our life was like then, it was work all the time with hardly any time to rest. You may sneer at mixies and washing-machines, but they’ve made our life easier.’
I realized how far my sentimentality had carried me into folly. For me the ancestral house was a museum of memories (not only mine) which I wanted to remain just so. But for my cousin and his family, it was the house they were living in. How should I object to the fluorescent light in the ‘drawing-room’ (plain thekkini or ‘south room’ in Malayalam), or to the TV-watching for two hours after dinner? I, who spend no more than a week there in a year and am writing this by fluorescent light in my ‘study’ which is, coincidentally, also south-facing? In many ways, as we grow up and look out at the world, the only romance left to us is in childhood memories; and Kerala is a very skilled thief of those.
All Kerala is divided into three parts: the Church, the Party, and the Gulf. Going to the Gulf is, of course, escapism, not escape, as return is mandatory. But temporary escapee or returnee—or one of that irredeemable majority who’ll never have the chance—the Gulf is very much with the Malayali. Two generations of it have transformed the very architecture of the state, and most definitely its culture. Such gewgaws as rechargeable torches, emergency lamps and walking talking dolls are found in homes whence no one has been to ‘Saudi’ to work. Even the villages have ‘Duty Paid’ shops.
Our toys were very simple. We played, indoors, a game like Ludo, with certain shapely seeds for dice; outdoors we ran and shouted, played rude games with bat and ball, racquet and shuttlecock. Or we climbed trees or raided the mango orchard, and the feel of the viscous yellow juice of those country mangoes running down my chin is still with me. I remember Narayanan, my uncle’s factotum (he’s still there, much greyer on top, and has smoked my cigarettes) making me a beautifully pliant bow with steel wire for a cord. The arrow went simply miles. I still regret the loss of that bow—it was probably confiscated.
Malayalis used to be good at football, I think because of something in the genes. Now, however, as you pass the village maidans in the train you see only cricket everywhere. That’s where the money might be, and it’s certainly where TV is. Hardly anyone is seen playing ball-badminton, and I wonder how many kids play our old favourite, ‘Seven Tiles’. Certainly my nieces and nephews don’t. A little badminton occasionally (though not ball-badminton!) and even tennis, when living in the city. They may swim, but never in a river; they may hike, but for fun and not because there are no buses and indeed no roads.
Of course, the Gulf is not responsible for such wholesale changes in a way of life. Kerala’s prosperity—although the state is said to be in the red, and the government is being dunned by Indian Airlines—is in great part due to the redistribution of land which began in the ’50s. The equality of man (not quite, yet, of woman) and the assertion of equality, carried off with an assurance that would be fatal in a state like Bihar, is a creation of the Left. Though trade unionism has its abuses—such as the extortion practised by the ‘headload workers’—it is surely preferable to the crimes of caste. My father remembers a time when the shadow of a Dalit was pollution, and his mother was very sore at Gandhi for advocating what Arjuna called varna-sa kara, the evils of which she deplored.
The Naxalite movement must have been swelling when I was a child. However, we only went ‘home’ in the school vacations, and in any case it was not a subject to discuss in the presence of children. I don’t recollect hearing anything about it. I know now that many of my rural cousins were (and some still are) ardent Communists. Communism in power, in practice in a democratic system, has proved deserving of Gandhi’s comment on Western civilization: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ I can see that for myself, and stay away from any organization that would take me; but my sympathies tend my cousins’ way.
Perhaps one reason for this is a legend in our family concerning my mother and Mrs Gandhi. While on her campaign to bring down Namboodiripad’s government in the late ’50s, that stern daughter of the Voice of God passed through my mother’s village, near Sankara’s birthplace Kaladi. A sudden downpour drove her and her chamchas into the veranda of the village school, where my mother, home for a visit, was also sheltering. She had an umbrella but was in no hurry. Mrs Gandhi was. One of her aides drew her attention to the umbrella; she snatched it from my mother’s grasp; my mother very properly snatched it back. The glare she got!—luckily, however (for Mrs Gandhi), another umbrella had been procured, and the lady swept out.
So appealing is this story that I’ve never bothered to have it confirmed. Even in 1972, when the whole country applauded Mrs Gandhi as Shakti, as Durga, the remembrance of this story leavened our homage. And in times when the Congress is the party to get behind, we—or at least I—recall what they did to Namboodiripad, and get as far behind them as possible. Kerala is such a small state that many voters possibly have such personal reasons to vote against, or for, a party or a candidate.
As for the Church, I never studied in Kerala and so was fortunate enough not to have to attend a convent
school. I have known some very fine nuns, but in the mass—like any other mass—the sorority has a depressing effect. That goes for the fraternity too. I never knew how pernicious their influence could be until I lived in Kerala as a citizen. Those six months in Idukki district—the most backward region of the State—showed me how much in the Church’s interest it was to keep people backward. It was no longer possible to keep them illiterate; but I saw how distinct are literacy and education, news-consciousness and awareness.
Yet someone I know, who teaches English in a college run by the ‘Fathers’, speaks his mind on these and other subjects, and the Fathers are content so long as he does his job well. It is certain that the Church’s stranglehold on education has not been to the detriment of several very fine minds Kerala has produced. It is also certain that it’s dangerous to generalize.
All Kerala is divided into three parts, the Church, the Party and the Gulf; and thus divided also are the minds of most Malayalis who are not active participants in any of the three processes.
These were matters I never thought about when a child. Very naturally. The old house was simply a fact, immutable, and causes and effects left it unmoved. It always required an outside stimulus to make me think about them. Not studying in Kerala was a handicap. I don’t know why it is that the history of Kerala was always passed over in the NCERT textbooks. There was a mention of the Cheras, then nothing until da Gama’s landing. There were references to high literacy (ho-hum) and social justice (ho-ho). But when I was in school there was nothing about the matrilineal system, or such great men as Marthanda Varma and Kunchan Nambiar.
I remember being amused in my boyhood by an essay of Aubrey Menen’s, ‘My Grandmother and the Dirty English’. Menen’s mother was Irish, his father from a proud old Malabar family. On a visit to his paternal grandmother, Menen found all his notions of the superiority of the white race shaken by her calm, unassumed authority. His portrait of her is delightful, and one line has remained with me: ‘My grandmother thought any married woman who covered her breasts was aiming at nothing short of adultery.’ Of course that was the custom then, that married women wear only a cloth tied at the waist. I wondered until I remembered that my own paternal grandmother—old and stooped when I knew her—had only worn two cloths, one about her waist and one over her shoulders.
