166. In the Bleak Midwinter

Ganapati in the snow, kitchen garden

My best Christmas memory ever:  on the front verandah in Hijli, Christmas Day, at age 10 or 11, cutting out paper dolls all by myself, looking out at the pale winter sky above the scrubby forest beyond our bungalow on the outer edge of the campus, and singing  “The First Nowell” at the top of my voice.

We must have opened our stockings (pillow-cases, actually) in the morning, eaten our Christmas meal in the early afternoon, and then had the rest of the day to play at a leisurely pace. After all the anticipation and excitement I was contented and at peace, and there was a limited number of things to do: read our new Tintin book, learn how to walk on my new stilts, or cut out and dress the paper dolls. And of course, sing Christmas carols, every single one I knew.

Looking back now, I realize that those Christmasses of my childhood weren’t unlike the one described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie in their spareness—at least, relative to most Christmasses in the United States or Britain today. We had no television and were exposed to almost no advertising except in the newspaper and The Illustrated Weekly; and in any case, Christmas was not a widely-celebrated holiday in India, so there was no media hype whipping us into a frenzy for weeks in advance. With the exception of books or the bicycle which was the biggest Christmas present of my childhood, almost anything that we asked for, our mother and father had to make themselves. Although Sally and I received more than Laura and Mary’s tin cups, peppermint candy canes, white sugar cakes, and bright new pennies, we children found great joy in things that would now be considered very simple indeed. From early December we took pleasure in the carols we sang at no other time of year and in the arrival of every new card (see Across the Miles), waiting eagerly for Dad to bring the mail home every afternoon. We looked forward to waking up on Christmas morning to see the tree decorated (see Saint Nicholas’ Day) with the elf or sprig of holly on it that had arrived in the parcel from Auntie Angy. We delighted in the tangerines and whole walnuts that somehow made their way into our pillowcases, delicacies that we didn’t see at any other time of year.

As I look back in memory on Christmasses Past, what I miss most are the feelings of peace and wonder that I know my mother, with her own childlike delight in Christmas, made possible as she prepared our home for the season. Now, with no children in the house anymore and nothing but work and missed deadlines as far as the eye can see, I’m finding it  hard to cultivate the Christmas spirit. What I need more than anything is to clear a space for it.

Although I am not an adherent of any one organized religion, I love the Christian season of Advent. I love the quiet advent carols, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, and In the Bleak Midwinter, as they acknowledge the cold and dark, long for the prophecied birth, and prepare to welcome the blessèd Child. As children we had a slightly battered advent calendar that we took out again every year, and every year we anticipated anew the daily opening of each window or door, even though we had opened them all many times before and well knew what we would find in the wooden manger when at last we opened the stable door on the twenty-fifth of December.

It is now December the ninth, with Christmas a little more than two weeks away and less than two weeks before my own precious child’s birthday on the twenty-second. Besides the cleaning and decorating I must obviously undertake, my greater task between now and then is to make room for the spirit, should it grace me with its presence. When we go to the carol service on Christmas Eve, I hope to be able to sing O Little Town of Bethlehem with a quiet expectant stillness and an open heart, holding a small lighted candle to welcome the Prince of Peace:

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him still
The dear Christ enters in.

O Holy Child of Bethlehem
Descend to us, we pray
Cast out our sin and enter in
Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
Their great glad tidings tell
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel.

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165. What’s in a Name?

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, 1948

If you like-a me, like I like-a you and we like-a both the same
I like-a say this very day, I like-a change your name.
                                                                       Under the Bamboo Tree


Once, when I was about eight, I woke in the middle of the night crying my eyes out. Between sniffs, I explained to my anxious father, who had hurried to my bedside, that I liked our surname and didn’t want to lose it when I got married. Dad reassured me in soothing tones, saying that I didn’t need to change it, I could have a double-barrelled name. Satisfied with his solution, I went off to sleep quite happily, and gave the matter no further thought for another twenty years.

In the early 1980s, when it came time for me to get married, I raised the question of our surname with my husband-to-be. What tremendous change in less than a generation! He was even more amenable to negotiation than my father had been in the 1960s, even going so far as to suggest that he change his name to mine, since he liked it and besides, it was shorter and easier to pronounce. I didn’t think that he ought to do that, so we simply settled on the status quo, each keeping our own names.

Despite the rapid changes wrought by the Women’s Movement, I was in a small minority in deciding to keep my name, even in the United States, and certainly in England and India. All my female cousins changed their names upon marriage, and in India many changed their first names as well, chosen and conferred on them by their husband or father-in-law. (Whether or not they actually used those names is another matter.) Those who were medical doctors additionally acquired the distinctly Indian title of “Dr. (Mrs.).” And of course, many professional women the world over compromise by adopting their husband’s name while retaining their maiden names for professional use.

Some, though not all, of my relatives raised their eyebrows when I told them of our decision. I remember my cousin Kalyani asking me how people would know that my husband and I were related if I kept my own name, and that our children were in fact ours; my unconventional aunt Kumud, who had never married herself, pronounced me “as good as a son” to my father. Whatever I chose to call myself, many elderly relatives on both sides of the family simply assumed that I had taken on my husband’s name, and I didn’t presume to correct them. In fact, I rather enjoyed receiving their letters addressed to me as such, as I enjoyed answering to a traditional married name and title when phone salesmen called to speak to the lady of the house. Times had changed faster than feelings so although, in the event, neither of us felt it necessary for me to change my name, some part of me still liked the notion of adding his initial to my monogram.

When the birth of our child came around there was another decision to be made: which surname would we confer on him? It was an awesome responsibility. In this case, although a couple of my best friends had given their children their last names, I decided to return to the traditional practice. My husband and I considered my father’s solution of a double-barrelled name, but I thought that the Ukrainian-Indian combo looked and sounded ungainly, and didn’t want to saddle our son with it for life. In the end we gave him my husband’s Ukrainian surname, and I chose an Indian first name, taking a long time to find one that sounded right in combination.

Feminists will rightly note that, of course, in keeping my natal surname I was still maintaining a patriarchal practice, in that my surname was my father’s, not my mother’s. Indian feminists solve this problem by calling women, whether married or single, by their first names.

It’s tempting to dismiss these concerns. What’s in a name, after all, one might say, throwing up one’s hands and defaulting to Tradition. Still, I persist in believing that naming is important and has far-reaching consequences. I am under no illusions that my choice was better or worse than anyone else’s, but it was my personal solution to that nameless fear that woke me in the middle of the night all those years ago.

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164. Pheasants and Apple Chutney

A Brace of Pheasants (painting by Richard Ansdell, 1868)

Our closest roommate in the Tufnell Park flat that fall of 1973 was Linda, the American who, inevitably, had lived a block away from my parents back in Brookline (see Tell Me Another 3, The Horn Player in the Cupboard). Linda had an independent, entrepreneurial spirit and clear goals: to find ways to make money that didn’t cost money and to get Nigel, an aristocratic young Englishman she’d met at a party, to fall in love with her. One of the things I admired about Linda was that as soon as she had defined a goal, however unattainable it might seem to others, she set out systematically to achieve it. And so it was with these two goals, as you shall see.

Just before Andrew and I had moved in, some new English friends of Linda’s had invited her to spend a weekend in the country with them, sending her home with a bushel of apples and a brace of pheasants. Upon her return she hung the pheasants from a hook up in the attic, and although, thankfully, I never actually saw them suspended there, she gave us regular bulletins on their progress. Apparently pheasants are best dealt with in this way so that the meat starts to go off a bit—to get pleasantly high-tasting without going downright rotten. Connoisseurs describe meat in this desirable condition as “gamey.” We didn’t know; we had never eaten pheasant. In any case, we were both vegetarians at the time (though Andrew was the purist; I was one of those fair-weather vegetarians who would eat meat when it suited me).

While she was waiting for her pheasants to attain just the right degree of putridity—for they were a key component of her master plan—Linda turned to the apples. Here the project seemed to be a relatively straightforward one: to make apple chutney and sell it in jars to local health food shops, which were to be found in abundance in Alternative London of the early Seventies. Setting up shop in our small shared kitchen, she began peeling and cubing the apples with gusto (but scant attention to hygiene) on the cluttered kitchen table. After adding raisins, vinegar, and brown sugar she left the stuff to simmer for hours, using every pot in the house and filing our nostrils with the pungent acidity of vinegar and a slight smell of burnt sugar every so often, when Linda forgot to stir. Meanwhile, she scoured the neighborhood skips (dumpsters) for empty jamjars, which she brought home and washed in the kitchen sink. She spooned the chutney into the jars, screwed the lids on tight, and set about making labels: Linda’s Homemade Apple Chutney.

apple chutney in jamjars

Despite the nuisance of the kitchen takeover most of the rest of us were a little amused by Linda’s slapdash energy, but Andrew was appalled. When the jars started exploding on the shelves at one of the health-food shops, he was vindicated but Linda was unabashed. She simply brought them home, reheated the contents, transferred them into new jars, and returned them to the shop. Later, when Andrew went into canning for home use, as if to compensate for Linda’s travesty of hygiene, he religiously employed a scientific method that never lost a single jar to spoilage (see Tell Me Another 86, Bottled Sunshine).

By now, the kitchen floor was sufficiently sticky underfoot and Linda had determined that her pheasants were sufficiently gamey. Actually, she realized that she’d left them just a little too long, and this gave a little more urgency to the next stage of her master plan: hosting an elegant dinner party and inviting Nigel. Accordingly, invitations went out to a dozen dinner guests (in addition to us long-suffering housemates, for Linda was a generous soul), requesting the pleasure of their company at a pheasant dinner, and it was time to figure out the next step: how to prepare the pheasant. By the time Linda had plucked the birds and cut out the portions that were no longer fit for human consumption (I am grateful that my memory banks seem to have rendered those particular sights and smells permanently irretrievable), the only kind of dish she could conceivably make to feed the soon-to-be-arriving throng was pheasant stew, with salt, onions, root vegetables, and heavy lacings of herbs adding the necessary bulk and masking any excess gamey-ness.

Those of us who still wished Linda well by this time waited apprehensively as the time neared for the guests to arrive. She had asked people to dress for a formal dinner party, and after clearing and setting the kitchen table (the floor was past reclamation as I recall), she disappeared upstairs and eventually emerged, dressed to the nines and determined to win the heart (if not the stomach) of her intended.

Somehow we got through that evening. Again, thankfully, I remember it only vaguely. I can only think of the picture on the sleeve of Goat’s Head Soup, the Rolling Stones album that had come out earlier that year. I can see the formally-dressed dinner guests standing in line as if in a soup kitchen, while Linda, all elegance, served up the stew in large dollops. British politeness, and perhaps her own obtuseness, saved us all, since if the stew was well-nigh inedible, nobody would have dreamt of saying as much, and I think Linda had made a pretty decent apple pie with the remainder of the apples to round off the meal.

The amazing thing is, her plan worked perfectly! For whatever combination of reasons, she won the upper-class Nigel’s heart and, shortly thereafter, moved in with him. Andrew and I visited her in what seemed to us palatial premises in Leicester Square, a flat whose only feature I still remember was the gleaming black-and-white tiled bathroom, with a throne fit for a queen set on an elevated, similarly tiled platform.

We lost touch with Linda after that, but I hope she is happy and well. Whether or not she and Nigel lasted, I feel sure that her irrepressible spirit would have carried her forward to the successful execution of her next master plan.

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Some Stats at 50,000 Page Views

Tell Me Another has just topped 50,000 page views, so I thought I’d give you some more stats. Since the first story, on February 28, 2010, I’ve posted 162 more. To date, TMA has recorded visitors from 142 countries, has 69 followers (32 on WordPress, 37 by email), and now averages 100 page views per day. Here are 25 of my personal favorites; I’d love to know yours.

3. The Horn Player in the Cupboard

19. Lively Up Yourself

22. Mushrooming and Berry-Picking

26. Dolls I Have Loved (and Lost)

36. My Grandmother

37. Grandpa Victor and the Story of the Tomatoes

41. Eating for Four

42. The Times Tables

66. The Mango Room

65. Curb Your Enthusiasm: A Bedtime Story

71. Simply Paying Attention

73. Trouble

77. The Tea Tasting

78. October Rains

86. Bottled Sunshine

92. Cookbooks, Immigrants, and Improvisation

95. Sail On, Silver Girl

99. Paharganj, January 1984

104. Untangling

117. Personal Space, Indian-Style

123. That Funny Accent

128. The Kurta Joke

133. So Many Things Have Disappeared

141. The Yogi of Beals Street

149.  Get Me to the Church on Time

163. Servants, or Cleaning My Own D*** House

Everyone who came to stay at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram had to take a vow to clean the ashram’s toilets. No one was exempt from this chore, not even the Mahatma himself, in keeping with his deeply-held belief in the nobility of all work, no matter how menial. Making caste Hindus clean their own latrines was also part of Gandhi’s campaign against Untouchability, in which he sought to elevate the status of outcastes relegated to the job—although he never condemned the caste-based division of labor altogether. The late writer Mulk Raj Anand discusses this in his 1935 novel, Untouchable, which, though heavily influenced by Gandhi (Anand stayed in his ashram and sought his advice in revising the novel), shows the Mahatma helping to give the Dalit protagonist (as we would call him today) a new confidence in himself and pride in his work, but not promising to liberate him from the work itself.

Photo by Nita Jatar Kulkarni

Growing up in India a decade after Gandhi’s death, I found the revulsion toward toilet-cleaning very much in place. Our maidservant Lakshmi would wash the dishes and the floors cheerfully, but drew the line at the toilets. My mother had to clean them herself, but I never heard her complain about it.

When my mother first went to India as a newlywed, she balked at the idea of having servants. Deeply egalitarian and coming from a working-class background herself, she was against it on principle, but also for the practical reason that she didn’t trust anyone else with the hygienic preparation of food. Eventually she had to give way, when it was made clear to her by the neighbors that she was expected to have servants, but she insisted on paying them what she considered a living wage. That got her into trouble with the neighbors again, who complained that she was driving the wages up by spoiling her servants, that their servants would all start demanding parity. In the end she found ways to supplement Lakshmi’s and our mali’s wages in kind, with food and clothing. When we left the country for the last time my parents paid a pension to Lakshmi for the rest of her life, sending it to a neighbor to cash for her.

When I was nineteen I took a vow never to clean someone else’s house again and, in the future, to take responsibility for cleaning my own house myself. While at university I worked a number of jobs to help pay for my junior year in England, including catering, waitressing, pumping gas, and house-cleaning. At one particular couple’s house, I could not bring myself to enter into the Gandhian spirit and perform the work whole-heartedly. I was filled with resentment at the upwardly mobile couple, both young doctors. (Irrational, I know, since as residents they must have been working five times as hard as a lazy undergraduate like me.) I had just decided to become a vegetarian and, as if to spite me, the couple seemed to be particularly fond of eating meat. They would broil large steaks until they were black and leave the burnt-on, greasy mess for me, without even thinking to soak the pan so as to make it easier to clean. Why couldn’t they clean their own damn house? They expected me to clean their house at the same time as looking after their six-month-old baby, who, deprived of both his parents for long stretches of the day, would wail miserably for hours at a time. I could barely contain my irritation at the poor helpless little thing, since the only way I could get him to stop crying was to put him on one hip and play music on the record-player while simultaneously vacuuming the floor. (I do have a positive memory of the music, though. John Prine’s album Sweet Revenge had just come out, and I listened to his inspired Mexican Home again and again, wielding the vacuum cleaner with one hand and holding the baby balanced on my hip with the other.)

I have kept my vow all these years, but at the expense of subjecting my family and friends to a very messy house. What with work commitments and my dislike of housekeeping, something else always seems to take precedence over cleaning. By now many, even most of my friends—all of whom are extremely busy and some of whom have physical disabilities as well—hire someone to clean, and given that there are many people who need the work, I find myself wavering in my resolve not to do so, or at least having to recognize that I am in no way righteous, just plain stubborn. Nevertheless, I hold on to the idea of the nobility of all work, and can’t help but feel that once one has a regular servant, a master/mistress-servant dynamic necessarily develops. Before long, one is complaining to one’s women friends about the sloppiness, or dishonesty, or attitude of the cleaning lady and bemoaning her uppity demands for more money while doing less work. Remembering how I felt when I cleaned other people’s houses for them, I still maintain that I should clean my own damn house.

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162. “Heuch, Heuch!” (and other family lingo)

The Nung-Guama

I suppose every family has a private vocabulary, sometimes even a whole private language, in which to signal its secrets and share its own sensibilities—or structures of feeling, as the British cultural historian Raymond Williams called them. In India, when she wanted to silence me in front of guests, my mother would speak to me in Greek: oxi tora (“not now”) was one of her favorites, delivered in low, warning tones. At the other end of the spectrum was den peirazei (“it doesn’t matter”), which never failed to reassure.

I still use the greeting, “Heuch!” to convey an untranslateable sense of comfort and acceptance of things as they are. It came from a story called The Nung-Guama, a Chinese folk tale in Once Long Ago, a collection of stories from around the world that belonged to my sister. The Nung-Guama was a horribly ugly demon that lay in wait for an old woman on her lonely way home. Although she evaded it on the road, the Nung-Guama came for her in the night. But the old woman was ready for it and foiled its home invasion with ingenious, albeit rather gruesome, booby traps (reminiscent of the movie Home Alone). Heuch, Heuch! was the terrible slathering sound the Nung-Guama made, and my father, reading to us at night, rendered it with gusto. Funnily enough, when uttered in our private language it wasn’t threatening, but on the contrary, had a rather soothing effect.

We had the habit of picking up phrases from the books our parents read to us. One of Dad’s favorites was Uncle Blunder’s Studio, in which a black beetle, deciding that he wanted to become an artist, donned a beret and beatnik attire and set up a studio. The birds and animals in the neighborhood reacted according to type, including Freddie Frog, who asserted repeatedly, and with perennial good cheer, “Green’s a good colour.” (This long predated the Black Pride movement’s “Black is Beautiful,” not to mention Kermit de Frog’s It’s Not Easy Being Green.) We would repeat the phrase apropros of nothing whenever the urge took us.

We quoted another favorite book to rally a family member when he or she was feeling low. In The Magic Pudding, the Australian classic by Norman Lindsay, whenever things went wrong for Sam Sawnoff, the Penguin Bold, or Bill Barnacle the sailor (usually meaning that their magic pudding had been stolen by the professional pudding thieves), they would fling themselves on the ground in the depths of despondency, until the genteel but stout-hearted Bunyip Bluegum exhorted them to gird their loins and galvanize themselves into action: “Come, come, this is no time for giving way to despair!” He continued, in hilariously elevated language: “Let us, rather, by the fortitude of our bearing prove ourselves superior to this misfortune and, with the energy of justly enraged men, pursue these malefactors, who have so richly deserved our vengeance. Arise!” His oratory never failed to revive his rough-and-ready comrades (“those gallant words have fired our blood,” said Sam) and send them purposefully on their way, in pursuit of the thieves and their precious pudding.

The Tintin comic books provided us with hours of enjoyment, and we laughed out loud at Captain Haddock’s terror of Bianca Castafiore, the opera singer who was sweet on him. Madame Castafiore, “the Milanese Nightingale,” had a formidable bust and a voice that shattered glass. “Ah my beauty, past compare!” we would warble in delight. Later, in the States, when we were introduced to The Addams Family on TV, we revelled in Morticia’s slinkiness and breathed, “¡Querida!”, her adoring husband Gomez’s favorite term of endearment, as he ran delirious kisses all the way up her arm.

“¡Querida!”

Of course we revelled in insults too, as teenagers do, and for those we had Lost in Space, in which Dr. Zachary Smith had an an inexhaustible treasure trove of terms of abuse in which to address the robot. My personal favorite was “You bubble-headed booby!” but there were dozens more.

More satisfying than abuse is always sheer silliness, for which Monty Python’s Flying Circus had no peer. To this day we quote from the parrot sketch (“He’s not dead, just pining for the fjords”) and the Spam sketch (“Hush dear, don’t make a fuss. I’ll have your spam.  I love it! I’m having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans and spam”), and regularly echo John Cleese’s desire for “cheesy comestibles” in the cheese-free Cheese Shop.

Laughs aside, in the main family sayings served to soothe. When I was about eleven my mother organized a home production of Amahl and the Night Visitors over the winter school break; typing up the script herself, she made a small typo. Amahl reassures his poverty-stricken mother who has no food in the house at Christmastime: “Don’t cry, mother, don’t worry for me; if we must go begging, a beggar I’ll be.” Only, Mum’s typescript read, “Don’t cry mothre…” That little error had a long afterlife. For years I would repeat to her (though probably, given her nature, to no avail), “Don’t cry, mothré, don’t worry for me.”

And so into the next generation, from worry to wonder. When in turn I became a mother, I read my favorite childhood books to my son, who, quite naturally, didn’t care for some of them, but loved others with a far greater passion than I had ever done. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series for instance: I had read the first one and perhaps the second, but found myself tracking down all twelve for Nikhil and reading them for hours at bedtime as he pleaded piteously, “Just one more chapter!” (Not that it took much arm-twisting on his part; I enjoyed the nightly reading ritual every bit as much as he did.) Looking back, I see the beginnings of his love of poetry, as he pricked up his ears at the evocatively named promontory from which the children gazed at Wildcat Island. When I read him Keats’s poem, like “stout Cortez” and the Walker children (with their inevitably colonial imaginations), he found himself awestruck: “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

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161. Watching the River Flow

Watchin’ the river flow,
Watchin’ the river flow,
But I’ll sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow.
                                                Bob Dylan

As a child my favorite reading was set on rivers. In The Little Grey Men, the three gnomes—Little People—were happiest at home in their brookside burrow, but embarked on a long journey upstream to find their long-lost brother. Where Go the Boats? from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses still conjures up an imaginative space that soothes like nothing else.

When Nikhil was little we would go over to the little bridge across the Amethyst Brook and play Poohsticks, throwing our twigs in on one side and then running downstream along the bank trying to keep pace with them until one got caught in a tangle of branches while the other floated free, or until they both disappeared in the froth and foam.

Meera, the protagonist of Leena Dhingra’s 1988 novel Amritvela (that ambrosial hour before dawn, the ideal time to meditate), dreams of being on a riverbank watching the world go by at a safe remove. Ultimately, she takes the risk of wading out into midstream, where the flow is swift and dangerous, but where she is fully immersed in the struggle of life. Although I approve of the sentiment, if I’m honest it is not the maelstrom in the middle but the cool, quiet riverbank that calls to me.

In my hotheaded youth I remember arguing with a friend about Paul McCartney’s Let It Be, contending that it was advocating acquiescence at a time when it was action that was required, but I was wrong about the song; deeply restorative, it was imagining a time when there would be no need to struggle any more.

I suppose I am simultaneously driven to action and drawn to the riverbank. This is a trait in my father’s side of the family: Uncle Ted, my maternal uncle, tells stories of my lively and talkative father in his twenties, deep in a book in the midst of a party, oblivious to the music blaring and the dancing couples swirling around him. My cousins in Pune similarly tell of their father, Bhai-kaka, an army man, never happier than when at home with his large extended family, who showed his contentment by withdrawing quietly into an adjacent room with a book. I find myself doing exactly the same thing, but sometimes I must set aside my book and get out into Nature. I head over the road to the banks of the Amethyst Brook and just  watch the river flow.

Where Go the Boats?
Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating–
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
–Robert Louis Stevenson

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160. Dogfight

dogfight (Illustrator: Sam Weber)

I was eleven when India and Pakistan fought their second war over Kashmir, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, which lasted for five weeks and took thousands of lives before the UN mandated a ceasefire. My mother had also been eleven when the Second World War broke out; its duration of more than five years interrupted her education and brought her childhood to an abrupt end. Like many other children, she was wrenched from her family in a mass evacuation from London and billeted with a succession of foster families. Even after she returned, the bombs pounded away at the city night after night and she remembers going to the air-raid shelters and direct hits that killed friends and neighbors. By contrast, war was like a game to me, something that brought excitement to our quiet lives on the IIT campus in Kharagpur and created a feeling of community while it lasted. I remember the sense of self-importance drummed up at the meetings of women and children as we learned how to tape up and black out the windows and to perform simple first aid. Suddenly everyone was civic-minded. Married women were even donating their gold jewelry to the war effort.

A few more memories stand out from that time. Living in West Bengal, we were not terribly far from the border with East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh), close enough to receive Pakistani radio broadcasts as well as Indian ones. On All-India Radio, we heard again and again the slogan, “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” along with reports on the numbers of losses to both sides. Always, I noted, there were more enemy losses than Indian ones. Imagine my 11-year-old’s surprise when I heard the crackling Pakistani radio broadcast pronouncing with equal certainty that Kashmir was an integral part of Pakistan and reporting considerably more Indian losses and fewer Pakistani ones for the same time period.

There was a lone Muslim student in our class at St. Agnes’ School in Kharagpur. Poor girl, surrounded by whispers that her father was a spy for Pakistan. It never occurred to me to support her or to protect her from those rumors. We kept going to school for the duration of the war, but one day at tiffin-time we witnessed something so surreal that I still find it hard to believe that it actually happened: a dogfight between IAF and PAF fighter planes just above the maidan adjoining our school playground. We stared in disbelief as one of the planes sustained a direct hit and, stricken, begin to tip and trail smoke. The next day it was confirmed that the plane—the Pakistani one, as it turned out—had crashed, killing the pilot as well. People had already stripped it bare, taking home critical parts and accessories as war trophies, and the authorities had to issue orders for them to be returned.

In the aftermath of the crash, still more rumors circulated, reaching even the ears of us children. The United States had not been particularly friendly to India since Independence, particularly during the Cold War era, because of Nehru’s socialist leanings and willingness to take aid from whichever superpower was willing to offer it, notably the Soviet Union. In the black-and-white formulations of the 1950s and 1960s where one had to be in one camp or the other, India’s very nonalignment made it suspect. The U.S. had been providing military aid to Pakistan for years, but in this war, so we had heard, it had assured India that it would prevent Pakistan from using American arms. Nevertheless, the people who swarmed over the downed PAF fighter plane reported that it was American, along with everything in it, even down to the pilot’s gloves.

I was not old enough to understand much that was going on, but that air battle, fought right over our school playground as if it were a spectacle designed for our entertainment, helped to confirm my view that war is a bloody dogfight. Each side insists that its cause is just and honorable but in the end, the only ones who profit are the arms suppliers.

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159. Ordinary People

white picket fence (apartmenttherapy.com)

In the arrogance of youth one is apt to be dismissive, even contemptuous, of people who lead ordinary lives, imagining that in flouting convention and taking the path less trodden one is somehow being more courageous. I’ll never forget the day when, at age 23, it struck me all of a sudden how admirable householders were, those who took out the trash every week, weeded and mowed the lawn, scraped and retouched the peeling paint on the siding, cleared the gutters of wet leaves, kept those picket fences sparkling white. And all this while holding down a job and raising the next generation. I saw that far from being contemptible, the humble householder was in fact noble, even heroic, in his or her stoicism and grace.

I remember Nikhil as a teenager getting annoyed at us, his parents, for using the word “hero” too lightly, as in “Honey, you’re a hero for taking out the trash.” No doubt he was right that in this society there is a tendency to praise people lavishly for things that they should be doing as a matter of course. But who’s to say that taking out the trash isn’t heroic? There are those Sunday nights when it seems to take a superhuman effort to muster the requisite energy. And such tasks, like women’s work, are never done: they must be repeated again and again, in a seemingly endless cycle.

The 1980 movie Ordinary People, based on the novel of the same name by Judith Guest, depicted the dysfunction and discontent that seethed beneath the veneer of ordinariness in a wealthy suburban family. In it, “ordinary” was used ironically, to signify anything but. I agree with the film that the white picket fences of suburbia conceal worlds of pain, but I have also developed a deep respect for the energy and endurance of ordinary people in this rapacious world where even I, as a privileged and educated person, must constantly struggle just to keep my head above water.

At fourteen I was filled with dread at the thought that my whole life might be spent in a tedious job in which I killed time by counting the days to the weekend and the weeks to the next vacation. I vowed to myself that I would never live like that, and rebelled against the white picket fence that stood as a symbol in my mind for everything I rejected and feared. Now that I am a householder I marvel at my counterparts who manage to keep the house and garden neat and trim and the relentlessly mounting clutter under control—who, in fact, do what I used to sneer at: keep up appearances. It is all I can do to keep up with the dishes. That which I held at arm’s length is now my unattainable goal; in the words of the psalm—and Bob Marley—the stone that the builder refused will always be the head cornerstone.

Here’s to ordinary people—the salt of the earth!

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158. The Pagli and the Tramp

In general, contemporary society seems to have little tolerance for even the smallest deviation from behavioral norms. One has only to change one’s dress or grooming to be shunned, raise one’s voice to be ejected from a theater or a store, talk back to the wrong person to find oneself under arrest, or engage in what is deemed a “public display” to be locked away, out of sight. Both being a little too friendly or a little too brusque can get one into trouble, as can talking too much or too little, and even wearing too much or too little. It is as if “normal” is so fragile that a single, unarmed member of society could risk shattering it without even opening his or her mouth. It’s not as if they were opening fire. And it is because the field of acceptable behavior is so narrow that I treasure the memories of places and situations in my life when it was opened up a little more.

Two in particular come to mind: one in India when I was nearly ten, the other in the United States when I was just twenty. The first was in West Bengal in the early 1960s, in the little market on the Indian Institute of Technology’s Hijli campus. All it consisted of was an open rectangle with little shops on three sides, where one could buy anything from marbles and wooden tops to vegetables and fresh-killed goats. (One traumatic day my mother sent me to the market to buy two kg. of mutton and the shopkeeper turned around and cut the goat’s throat before I even had time to turn away.) It was in the central area of the square that the pagli was to be found, the madwoman with matted hair who tore her ragged clothes off again and again in blind anguish and showed her nakedness in the open market. I never learned the details of her story, but  it was said that tragedy had struck her one too many times, taking away her husband and son in quick succession, and eventually taking her mind as well. I was only a child, of course, and in any case wasn’t privy to the realities of her everyday life, but she was a regular presence at the market and I never saw anyone taunting her or even staring at her, let alone calling the police.  Nobody tut-tutted and said that something had to be done about it, nobody covered their children’s eyes, nobody locked her out of sight. She was simply the pagli, and people accepted her as she was and let her be. We children felt only pity and averted our eyes so as not to subject her to stares, though we couldn’t help stealing glances at her from time to time.

My second experience of social tolerance came in my senior year of college, while I was living in the Harvard Co-op House, by far the happiest living situation of my undergraduate life. Thirty-five students in two gracious old houses, comfortably dilapidated, blessedly uninstitutional, all cooking and eating together, sharing chores, generally looking out for one another. Thirty-five undergraduates and one irascible, misogynistic, unkempt, and decidedly high-smelling old hobo, Damon.

As legend had it, Damon had been invited in out of the cold one snowy Thanskgiving night, and simply never left. He had moved into a room that happened to be empty at the time and it was somehow kept out of the housing mix for students from then on. (The movie With Honors (1994)—in which a homeless man, played by Joe Pesci, changes the life of a Harvard student—was loosely based on him.) Damon became a permanent fixture at the co-op house, and was given the respect of his age and station, participating in the chores if, when, and how he chose to do so. He was of the last generation of the old-time hobos, and had worked all over the country from lumberjack camps to  prison kitchens. When the urge took him, he graced us with his heavenly dinner rolls, or helped to cultivate sweet, meaty tomatoes in the coop garden. He got a particular kick out of making fun of the students, passing loud personal comments, often salacious, especially in the direction of passing women, comments that couldn’t help but be overheard by their targets. (He also made sharply insightful observations from time to time, since he had all the time in the world to watch the behavior of the young people around him.) I remember the pleasure he derived from watching Andrew and Peter, zealous composting enthusiasts, barelegged and knee-deep in the compost pile as if they were pressing grapes. He was quite happy to let them get on with it and to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

Most of the time, the denizens of the co-op house took pride in Damon. After all, how many other college dorms could boast of counting a hobo in their company? Every now and again, though, an outraged student, usually one who had been a target of Damon’s taunts, would threaten to report him to the authorities, complaining that their parents weren’t paying good money to send them to college only to live with a bum. But they never followed through, because they dared not face the general opprobrium of their housemates.

If it had not been for Damon, few Harvard students were likely to have had the opportunity to live with a completely unreconstructed homeless man, grimy old overcoat and all. He was not seen as an object of pity or charity; rather, we were at his mercy. If we wanted to sit in the living room or watch television, we simply had to put up with Damon’s musky bulk and cynical running commentary. Exasperating and distasteful as many might no doubt found him at times, he became a part of our lives, and was accepted as such.

Damon lived on at the co-op house until death took him away. I will always regret that I was unable to attend his memorial, where a host of past and present Co-opers gathered together to mourn and remember him.

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