202. Tennessee Stud

For years my love of country music was a bit of a guilty secret in a group of friends who listened mostly to rock-n-roll, punk, blues, and reggae. I remember once in my twenties, while I was playing Hank Williams in our group house in Somerville, my housemate Charlie going up into his room and playing his saxophone at full blast to register his displeasure. I listened to real country, country blues, folk, and bluegrass. Besides Hank Williams (whom I had loved ever since 1970, when I had heard a nameless musician sing Jambalaya at the Nameless Coffee House in Harvard Square), my favorites were Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs; and my favorite, Doc Watson.

In December 1970, when I was sixteen and had been in the States for less than a year, Andrew took me to the Boston Tea Party on Lansdowne Street near the Fenway. The line-up that night was the Incredible String Band (pretty, but for me at least, forgettable), Mimi Fariña, who had a lovely voice and sang Pack Up Your Sorrows (though sadly, without Richard Fariña, who had died four years earlier); and Doc Watson, with his son Merle, whose performance that night instilled in me a lifelong love of his music.

Arthel “Doc” Watson (1923-2012) would have been in his late 40s when I saw him in 1970, Born and raised in Deep Gap, North Carolina, near the border of Eastern Tennessee, he was like no other American I had ever yet met. I did not know at the time that he had been involved in the American folk music revival and had played at the Newport Folk Festival back in 1963: he seemed to me to be the down-home authentic article, uncontaminated by outside influences—although I was to learn that he was eclectic and experimental, drawing from traditional and modern folk, country, bluegrass, and blues, and even throwing in the occasional rockabilly performance. His virtuoso flat-picking was so fast that it boggled the mind, and his voice was true and clear—I could listen forever and never tire, to Deep River Blues, Shady Grove, Banks of the Ohio (performed here with Bill Monroe), and so many more.

It was on that night in 1970 when I heard him play Tennessee Stud for the first time. I was to learn later that it was his most popular song, a big crowd-pleaser. Although it clearly wasn’t one of Doc Watson’s own favorites, he seemed to be resigned to delivering to the audience what they wanted. Immediately after his first song someone yelled out, “Tennessee Stud,” and although Doc seemed a little annoyed, he eventually obliged, hamming it up just a little (I whupped her brother and I whupped her paw), and, after the last There never was a hoss like the Tennessee Stud, there was such a cacophony of heehaws you would have thought that we were in a barnyard. If there’s anything more irritating than a down-home country boy saying heehaw!, it’s a highly-educated Bostonian saying hee haw! the way he imagines a country boy would; but Doc just maintained his enigmatic expression, nodded quietly to Merle, and went on with the show.

A few years later, probably in the late 1970s, we went to see Doc and Merle Watson again, at the Paradise on Commonwealth Avenue. Again those irritating young men started calling out “Tennessee Stud” from the very outset. As if Doc didn’t have a massive repertoire and a line-up of songs ready to perform. But those who didn’t know anything else by him, knew “Tennessee Stud” from the popular album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972). (Andrew, by the way, had no patience for the song. He found it intensely irritating that these country singers all seemed to love their guns and their horses more than anything or anyone else; much more, he said, than any woman.)

The whistles, interruptions, heehaws, and yells of “Tennessee Stud!” continued. Finally Doc Watson stopped playing and addressed the crowd in stern, admonitory tones.

“Since y’all seem to want it so much, I will play the song, but on one condition: you must keep completely quiet through the whole performance. Not one heehaw, d’you hear?”

Silenced, the callow youths nodded their heads dumbly, like chastened schoolboys. Having received the desired promise, Doc was as good as his word, and he and Merle gave the crowd a rousing rendition.

I was able to see Doc Watson three or four times more, twice in the late 1980s/early 1990s with Nikhil when he was little. The first time was in Memorial Hall in Wilmington, VT, the only venue on the tour that allowed children, and was Nikhil’s very first concert. In the intermission I asked Nikhil which songs he’d like Doc to play, and we took them up to the stage on a piece of paper. Someone must have read it out to Doc or else Nikhil’s favorites were Doc’s own, because he sang every single one of them, including, as I recall, Mama Don’t ‘Low No Musical Played Around Here. The second time was outdoors at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and was supposed to be Doc’s last concert before he retired. (Thankfully, he went on doing those “last concerts” for nearly 20 more years.) The line-up featured Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, not long before Bill Monroe passed away, with Doc Watson singing no more than a handful of songs. I asked Nikhil which songs he would like Doc to sing if he could choose, and he replied, “He’s in the Jailhouse Now and The Last Thing on My Mind.” I’ll be darned if Doc didn’t sing both of them!

The last time I got to see Doc Watson in concert was in November, 2006 at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. A living legend at 83 years old, he took us on a musical journey back to his roots and brought down the house. No one asked for “Tennessee Stud,” but he sang it for us anyway.

Rest In Peace, Doc Watson.

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201. Screaming Women

(from jollygoodshow.net)

In the evenings, after the storytime ritual was over and our son had gone to sleep, I would be faced with the choice between relaxing on the couch and grading student papers before class the next day. But no sooner had I settled down with a cup of tea and a sigh, than it would begin: the screaming women.

When I was first introduced to television in England as a child of nine, the government  was very strict about what could be shown on television during the daytime, when children might be awake and watching. Children’s programs were aired in the morning and afternoon, then the news, documentaries, and family programming—soap operas, comedies, music and game shows. It wasn’t until after 9 pm that adult programs were screened, including dramas, thrillers, mysteries, and anything with violent content. Even so, back in the 1960s the British rules governing TV violence were restrictive. Compared to U.S. standards British television was permissive about sexual content but much less so about violence. All that has changed now, of course; as much as I admire Helen Mirren, I had to avert my eyes again and again throughout the long-running crime series, Prime Suspect (1992-2006), and after just one episode I can see that it’s going to be more of the same with the new mini-series, The Bletchley Circle.

In the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s the television networks were encouraged to self-regulate when it came to  shows with graphically violent content, reserving the time-slot of 8-9 pm Eastern Standard Time for “family viewing.” But after 9 pm, violent programs would crowd the line-up on every channel without fail, and it only got worse in the 1990s. I’m not just talking about Miss Marple whodunits in which one family member after the other is poisoned in a stately home or Westerns with to-the-death shoot-outs in front of the saloon; these were films about sadists, psychopaths, and serial killers who invariably targetted women, predictably barmaids and prostitutes. Not content with one killing, it seemed, there had to be a sickening succession of them, each one more grisly than the last.

So the nightly onset of this programming would be signaled by the screams of members of my own sex. There was no way I could relax when one of those screams rent the air and my heart, and threatened to wake the baby to boot. The “screaming women,” our shorthand for that perverted category of entertainment,  were my signal to gather up my papers and retire to the study. It was positively soothing to grade error-riddled student essays when the alternative was bullet-riddled women’s bodies.

Nowadays, with hundreds of cable and satellite TV channels to choose among, one doesn’t have to wait until 9 pm; guaranteed, one can find a screaming woman on air at any time of day or night. Now that’s progress.

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194. London, My London

(from http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk)

I was born in London, a London of the 1950s just emerging from the ravages of the Second World War and the era of British colonialism, a new London with more educational opportunities and better health care and social services for the poor and working classes, greater cultural diversity as immigrants from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies came to find work in the “Mother Country,” a London where my Indian father and English mother met and married. Although I have actually lived in the city of my birth for only 5-6 years in total, they include periods in my infancy, in my nursery, elementary, and secondary school years, and while I was a university student. London, birthplace of my mother, will always be dear to me and, as cities go, is perhaps the only one where I could imagine myself feeling completely at home.

London from Parliament Hill (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

the Heath in Autumn (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

But my London is not the home of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace—in fact, after all these years I have yet to visit the Tower of London. “My” London is a city of neighborhoods, and specifically, of the neighborhoods of North London where my mother grew up, where my father lived as a student, where I was born, and where in turn I lived as a student—Kentish Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead, and Camden Town. When I return, I go straight to my family, infinitely more important to me than any monument. When my mother returns, she and her sister Bette head straight out to Castle’s pie and mash shop (not my cup of tea—I’m squeamish about eels) and then for a ramble over Hampstead Heath, ending up at Kenwood House for tea and a bite to eat.

Queen’s Crescent market (kentishtowner.co.uk)

“My” London is plaice, haddock, or cod-‘n-chips in newspaper, the thick, soggy chips salted and liberally doused with malt vinegar; crowded street markets with stalls where half the goods seem to have fallen off the back of  a lorry; corner shops run by British Asians selling fresh coriander and green chillies along with English sweets and tabloids; bakeries full of fresh crusty  loaves and squashy jam doughnuts; the Tube, double-decker busses, and black cabs (my Uncle Bill drove one–see Get Me To the Church on Time); and, of course, pubs, which can still be found on just about every street corner.

The Flask, Hampstead (tigergrowl.files.wordpress.com)

In my London, Cockney accents emerge quite naturally from the mouths of British Asian youth whose grandparents immigrated there from the former Empire—after the sun set on it. (See Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But…) Visiting a friend in Hackney back in the 1980s, I found the adult education booklet carrying night-class listings in eight languages, including Bengali, Punjabi, Greek, and Turkish.

My London is the London of Brick Lane and Southall, of the Royal Free Hospital and aging public housing estates; of pub food that features samosas as well as Cornish pasties and traditional English Sunday dinners; of the Bank Holiday fairs on Hampstead Heath and the Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival every August Bank Holiday weekend (by the way, given the importance of Notting Hill to Britain’s history of race relations, it infuriated me that they managed to make the movie Notting Hill without a single black character in it).

Notting Hill Carnival (demotix.com)

My mother married for love and had to leave her beloved city for most of the rest of her life; yet it has never left her heart and therefore it can never leave mine. Every seven years, when I watch the latest edition of  Michael Apted’s 7 Up series (Here’s the late Roger Ebert interviewing Apted in 2006), I wonder fleetingly what my life might have been like had my parents decided to stay there. But if they had, I wouldn’t be who I am now.

I leave you with the British Asian band Cornershop’s 1990’s hit, Brimful of Asha, and a rendition of Hubert Gregg’s sentimental 1940’s favorite, Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner.

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191. The Iliad at Bedtime

(theminiaturespage.com)

I don’t know who looked forward to bedtime more when my son was little, but I know we both did, because we could slow down, get comfortable, and read. I was an easy touch. “Just one more chapter,” he would plead as I made to close the book and turn out the lights, and that’s all it would take for me to settle in again with a sigh—of resignation or relief? There was a mere handful of the many, many books we went through together that I couldn’t wait to put down, glancing surreptitiously at Nikhil every so often out of the corner of my eyes in the hope that I would see his eyelids drooping and take that as a cue to say good night. One of those books was The Iliad.

It’s not the fact that it was a classical epic that made the going tedious. In fact, I had consciously decided to expose him to the epics from both the Indian and the Greek traditions. We started with an abridged children’s edition of my favorite, the wonderfully compendious Mahabharata—of which it is said that what is not in it, is not—followed by the Ramayana. Then, after a bit of an interval, we took up the Odyssey and eventually, the Iliad. I’d never read the Iliad myself, and what I’d heard of it hadn’t particularly pre-disposed me to it; still, I proceeded with it dutifully, if only to round out my son’s education.

Except for this one particular night I confess I don’t remember much of what we read; and, to be quite honest, I’m certain we didn’t finish it. This was entirely due to me: Nikhil would have been prepared to listen to it until long after the cows had come home, if only to postpone indefinitely the moment of actually having to go to sleep; in the end, it was I who didn’t have the stamina. But on this particular night, we were in the middle of what seemed to be an interminably long listing, contingent by contingent, of all the ships making up the army of the Achaeans (that is, the Greeks, also called the Danaans or the Argives in the epic) that had sailed to Troy. Here’s a taste of it:

Tell me now, Muses, who live on Olympus – since you are goddesses, ever present and all-knowing, while we hearing rumour know nothing ourselves for sure – tell me who were the leaders and lords of the Danaans. For I could not count or name the multitude who came to Troy, though I had ten tongues and a tireless voice, and lungs of bronze as well, if you Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, brought them not to mind. Here let me tell of the captains, and their ships.

First the Boeotians, led by Peneleos, Leitus, Arcesilaus, Prothoenor and Clonius; they came from Hyrie and stony Aulis, from Schoenus, Scolus and high-ridged Eteonus; from Thespeia and Graea, and spacious Mycalessus; from the villages of Harma, Eilesium and Erythrae; from Eleon, Hyle, Peteon, Ocalea and Medeon’s stronghold; from Copae, Eutresis, and dove-haunted Thisbe; from Coroneia and grassy Haliartus, Plataea and Glisas, and the great citadel of Thebes; from sacred Onchestus, Poseidon’s bright grove; from vine-rich Arne, Mideia, holy Nisa and coastal Anthedon. They captained fifty ships, each with a hundred and twenty young men. (from The Iliad, Book II)

And that was just the first contingent; it went on and on in this vein until I thought I was going to keel over from boredom. I hoped that Nikhil was getting as tired of it as I was and that I would soon be able to call it a night. But, inexplicably, it appeared to be holding his attention. I went on manfully, trying to muster up the requisite epic resonance in my voice, though in truth I was beginning to flag. Every few minutes I’d steal a glance at the reclining Nikhil, and finally, when it seemed that he’d been still and quiet for a long time, I stopped reading. In an instant, he sprang to life:

“Why have you stopped, Mom?”

“Oh, I thought you were asleep.”

“No I wasn’t; I was counting.”

“What?!”

“There are seven hundred and forty-four ships so far; I don’t want to lose count.”

So he had been listening intently all along; rather than counting sheep, he had been counting ships!

I learned only yesterday that this section is known as the Catalogue of Ships  and that the Greek catalogue alone  “lists twenty-nine contingents under 46 captains, accounting for a total of 1,186 ships.”

I guess my son and I don’t have altogether identical tastes in bedtime reading.

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189. Goodness Gracious Me!

By the 1990s, there was a sizeable population of Asian—specifically, South Asian—origin in Britain. In 1948, needing labor power to rebuild the country after the Second World War, Britain had opened its doors to all subjects of the Empire, or former Empire. In 1962, after the economy started slowing down, immigration was restricted, and that process continued with still more restrictive legislation going into effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, by the 1980s and 1990s, the mostly British-born children of the post-war immigrants were making their presence felt in the culture, and the BBC Two television skit comedy series Goodness Gracious Me (1998-2001) was a hilarious and influential example. The show started out on BBC Radio 4 (1996-1998), and the television series was a huge crossover success, followed avidly by Asians and non-Asians alike.

The show’s title came from a song of the same name in the Peter Sellers-Sophia Loren comedy, The Millionnairess (1960), in which Sellers, playing an Indian doctor, created a parodic Indian accent that was to become the definitive, almost the “authentic” accent required for anyone playing the part of an Indian on stage or screen, even if they were actually Indian themselves. The brilliant young ensemble cast, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, and Nina Wadia played on this irony, parodying the parody.

Written as they were by young British Asians, the skits’ irreverent humor more-or-less equally targetted white British stereotyping of Asians, and their parents’ generation of Asian immigrants. Many of them turned the tables on British ignorance or racism (see Jonathan, Going for an English, Authentic, and the fake Guru), while others comedically reinforced the stereotypes of Asian parents (see Muslim Boy Converts to Judaism, Typical Asian Parents, and the skits of The Coopers (Kapoors), who try to be more English than the English). I adored the show, because there was nothing nearly as clever or sophisticated in the U.S. at the time (the South Asian population being largely made up of post-1965 immigrants and their children). Still, I winced now and then when the jokes were at the expense of the immigrant parents, since, as a 1.5 generation immigrant born and raised outside of the U.S., I identified with the parents’ generation at least as much as that of the children.

Each member of the cast has gone on to even greater accomplishments, especially Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, who married each other after doing the talk-show parody The Kumars at No. 42 together. Meera Syal, MBE, who played Sanjeev’s grandmother in The Kumars, has acted prolifically in theater and film as well as in television, and is the author of two novels, Anita and Me (1996, made into a BBC film, 2002) and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999, made into a BBC mini-series, 2005). Besides acting in Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars, and playing numerous film roles, Sanjeev Bhaskar, OBE, has hosted the documentary series India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, written and starred in the ITV sitcom Mumbai Calling, and most recently, stars in The Indian Doctor (BBC One).

My focus on Syal and Bhaskar should in no way diminish the talent of Nina Wadia and Kulvinder Ghir. Wadia is perfect in her over-the-top parodies of Indian mothers (see Competitive Mothers: Sexual Prowess) and perhaps my favorite sketch of all is Ghir’s Buddhist Pest Control Man. I can’t imagine British culture without Goodness Gracious Me. If you haven’t yet come across it, and have even the tiniest funny bone in your body, you’re in for a treat.

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188. Finn Family Moonmintroll

photo by Oliver Weiss (from oweiss.com)

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, painter, illustrator, and comic-strip artist who is best known and beloved worldwide for having created the Moomin (Mumintroll in Swedish) books. They started off as comic strips and then developed into novels, nine of them. As a girl I read only three, Finn Family Moomintroll (in the Puffin edition above), Comet in Moominland, and Moominsummer Madness, but they were enough to induct me into Moominland for life.

Moomin Valley is a whole world, with a loving, closeknit family at its center, but also a long list of other characters, creatures who are not biologically related but are nonetheless welcomed into the family. Besides the home-loving Moomins—our quiet hero Moomintroll, Moominmamma, Moominpappa, the vain and rather empty-headed Snork Maiden—his kind-of sort-of girlfriend (not)—and her brother the Snork—there is the troubled Mymble’s daughter and her devilish sister Little My, the officious but doleful Hemulen, the electric-eel-like Hattifatteners, Sniff, Emma the eccentric and misanthropic rat and the terrifying but terribly lonely Groke. Whomper, the Muskrat, Misabel (as miserable as her name), the Fillyjonk, and Thingummy and Bob also make appearances at various times.

And then there is Snufkin: Snufkin the wanderer, Moomintroll’s best friend of all time. Snufkin is almost always away and Moomintroll misses him terribly, but he knows that his friend would not be happy if he were not able to leave the Valley whenever the road calls to him.

Writers like Tove Jansson who create worlds always embed values in them, and the values the young readers imbibe with the Moomin books are the very best, delivered with a light touch, but deeply humane. Just to list two that stay with me: the Moomins never take one another for granted, thanking Moominmamma sincerely after every meal. And they are never exclusive: they take in any creature who comes to their door, whether or not that creature is trustworthy or even likeable.

Little My (lechaudronfele.blogspot.com)

If you want to learn more about the creator of the Moomins,  visit Tove Jansson : virtual museum and life story, an imaginatively conceived and designed website not to be missed, and Brian Sibley’s illustrated account of his correspondence with her. It is a delight to scroll though Oliver Weiss’s design blog, where he has scanned the covers of his large collection of Moomin editions in several languages. Above all, if you haven’t encountered them already, find a copy of Finn Family Moomintroll and read it aloud to your children or grandchildren. Better still, read it yourself, no matter how old you are.

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181. The Silver Hairpin

In 1977 my father travelled to India for his first return visit since emigrating to the United States, after a gap of eight years. (He has only returned  twice more in the 36 years that have elapsed since, once in 1984 and the last time, in 1996.) Nowadays, with so much more back-and-forthing between India and the States, particularly among our children’s generation—not to mention the constant phone-calling, email, Facebook, and videochat contact—it is hard to imagine the fevered anticipation with which we awaited his return.

My parents’ generation didn’t use the phone easily, especially not for long-distance calls. Incoming calls were dreaded, as they usually brought bad news, and there was the additional anxiety brought on by the knowledge of how much one’s loved ones were spending to make the call. Outgoing calls were equally rare because of the cost, and because placing a “trunk call” from India in those days was quite a hoohah, going out to an STD booth, waiting to place the call, waiting again for it to go through and then, as often as not, having to conduct the conversation shouting through the static. It is only very recently that my dad has stopped shouting into the phone at full volume, loud enough for them to hear him in India.

But I digress. The point is, we had not heard from Dad ever since he had left for India, so when the time finally came to meet him at Logan Airport, our excitement knew no bounds. How we waited until we got back to the house I don’t know, but we still have the photographs to show how he opened the full-to-bursting suitcases and laid everything out on my parents’ big queen-sized bed, everything from cotton and silk clothing to stainless-steel thalis and tumblers to silver jewelry to messages conveyed from this or that cousin to a Marathi cookbook to my grandmother’s famous laddus, carefully wrapped to stay fresh for as long as possible. Then came hours of questions and stories and trying things on and more photos of one or another of us modeling the new outfits to send back to the aunts and uncles who had gifted them to us.

Of all those gifts brought back by my father so many years ago, the one I have used the most, practically on a daily basis, is a simple silver hairpin. It was originally one of a pair, and its partner is long gone, but for years, among the plastic Magic Grip hairpins I used to buy at the West Concord 5 & 10 (brilliant in their own right, to be sure), this one gleamed regally out of  the top of my bun.  It still does.

I have always preferred the elegance, the moonlit-evanescence of silver to the buttery opulence of gold. Last time I went to India I asked everywhere I went for another silver hairpin, but in vain. As the middle classes were growing richer even gold, traditionally the most highly prized material for women’s jewelry, was abandoned in favor of diamonds, for which I have even less appreciation, since they look like cut glass to me and put me in mind of men slaving and dying in the mines.

Finally Mandatya, my father’s youngest sister, took me into a little jewelry store in Vile Parle and spoke on my behalf to the proprietor, who rummaged under the counter for a while, eventually re-emerging, not with hairpins, but with an old box of assorted silver jewelry. Its tangled chains, black with tarnish, had obviously been lying neglected for many years. He called a young assistant to clean the one I selected and soon presented it to me shining like new and at a marvellously low price.

Although I love the silver necklace, I just keep it in a box and admire it from time to time. But the old silver hairpin is in everyday use. Just looking at it calls up India faster than a satellite phone.

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180. The Magic of Found Objects

Over the years, hundreds of small found objects—lucky stones, a plastic Highlander, a Swiss army knife—have washed up at my feet. Some of them have held a special symbolic value for me and I have endowed them with a talismanic power; until they have slipped from my hands and fallen somewhere, waiting latent and unseen for the next passer-by, who in turn will slip them into his or her pocket for a spell.

The first of a succession of lucky stones was my most beloved, fished for me out of a shallow cove in the Aegean Sea by a mysterious mer-woman (see Greece in the 60s: Expatriates & Other Animals), and borne by me to India, where I carried it to exams for years afterwards; until it was lost and in due course, another took its place. Thirty years later, on another coastline, I came upon the plastic Highlander washed up on the shores of the Arabian Sea near my father’s ancestral home and bore it back to the United States with me, where it occupies pride of place on a tray of seashells and stones in our bathroom.

The Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts (planetware.com)

Andrew and I found the Swiss army knife on a hillside adjoining the Old North Bridge over the Concord River back in 1975, on the historic 200^th anniversary of the American Revolution (see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn). The People’s Bicentennial Commission, which sought to commemorate and revive the spirit of revolution that had been killed by the wealthy landowning and monied classes, held a concert and campout the night before President Gerald Ford was to arrive by helicopter on April 19^th, the date of the battle that sparked the revolutionary war. (Ironically, their logo used the image on the historic Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake, bearing the warning, “Don’t Tread on Me,” re-appropriated a generation later by the extreme right-wing Tea Party, which seeks to revive a very differently-remembered idea of freedom.)

protestors at the Old North Bridge, held back by police (contrariansview.org)

I can’t remember much of the day except the large crowd, the celebratory spirit, and the 40,000 protestors surging over the Old North Bridge as the President landed. Afterwards, when the tidal wave of people had receded, we stayed behind to help with the clean-up of Buttrick Field, where Andrew picked up a knife from among the debris. It was a fisherman’s knife, with the image of a fish inlaid into the handle and an implement for filleting among its multitude of fold-out tools. We had no way of identifying its rightful owners, so we kept it to commemorate that day, and used it on many a camping trip. We may still have it hidden away at the bottom of a drawer somewhere, but I haven’t seen it for awhile now. Perhaps we accidentally left it behind on the banks of another river, and it has passed into the hands of new owners who treasure it as once we did.

White Pond, Concord (50swims.blogspot.com)

The last object was actually re-found: long given up for lost, it was miraculously restored to me. We were living in Concord, in my in-laws’ cottage perched on the steeply sloping shore of White Pond, a deep and ancient body of water mentioned by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, and reputedly connected to Walden Pond by an underground spring. The pond’s water level fluctuated over the years, so that sometimes the water lapped up under our boardwalk and at other times receded so that there was quite a wide strip of sandy beach. One year, after a swim in the pond, I discovered that I had lost my favorite necklace, a long steely-metallic chain hung with cascades of tiny sequin-like discs that I used to wear looped twice or three times around my neck. After looking everywhere for it, I concluded sadly that I must have dropped it in the water, where it would have sunk irretrievably into the primeval mud that lined the bottom, sixty feet deep in places. Years went by and although I looked for a replacement, I never found another necklace like that one. Then, late one summer, when the water was at a lower ebb than others, I was sitting idly on the boardwalk, dangling my legs over the edge, when I saw something glinting in the sunlight through a crack in one of its loose old planks. Prying up the board, I reached carefully in, thinking perhaps to pick out a jagged piece of broken glass. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found my beloved necklace, a little tarnished, but still amazingly intact after so many years! It had not been lost after all, but had been lying in the shallows under the boardwalk all along, where I must have walked over it a thousand times.

Perhaps I do know why these found objects mean so much to me. Each of them holds within it the luminous spirit of its time and place, and of the people with whom I associate it. My family, having moved so frequently and so far across three continents, has had to leave almost everything and everyone behind every time. Carried in on invisible currents to rest at my feet, these little things, the flotsam and jetsam of my life, are all the more precious to me because I know that they are likely to be swept away as unexpectedly as they came. But while I have them, I hold them close to my heart.

Caz from a Little Learning For Two (alittlelearningfortwo.blogspot.com)

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177. The Sugar Snow

photo courtesy of seedbud, leafandtwig.wordpress.com

When I first encountered the term “sugar snow” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, I had no idea what it meant, but how delicious it sounded! Living in the hot plains of West Bengal, I had never known the kind of snow that blanketed the deep woods of Wisconsin, and I was enchanted by it. Again and again I pored over the story of Grandpa’s maple-sugaring work party and the feast and dance that followed, in which Ma got to wear her dark-green “delaine,” Grandma jigged the socks off Uncle George accompanied by Pa’s tireless fiddle-playing, and the children were given pats of crumbly maple sugar made at just the right moment before the syrup started “graining.”

By the time I had a child of my own, just about the age Laura had been in that story, we were living in Winchendon, a town known for its unspoiled woods and cold, snowy weather. I read Nikhil all the Little House books but his favorite, not surprisingly, was Farmer Boy, the one book in the series in which the protagonist was a boy—Almanzo Wilder, who grew up, not in the American Midwest, but on a farm in upstate New York, and was to marry Laura Ingalls when he became a man. We saw to it that most of the rural pastimes that Almanzo and his siblings enjoyed as children, Nikhil and Eric did too in their respective seasons, from apple cidering, to skating on the frozen pond in winter, to maple sugaring.

maple sugaring, Little House in the Big Woods (illustration, Garth Williams)

Andrew, a walking Foxfire Book and Whole Earth Catalog, took the lead in the process. Having grown up and worked on a New England farm himself, he always seemed to know just about everything there was to know about the rural arts (despite having been born in New York City). When the time was right he identified the best maple trees in a reasonable radius of the farmhouse, taking four-year-old Nikhil with him to test the sweetness of the sap. Since there weren’t quite enough sugar maples on the property to ensure a decent yield of syrup, he tapped a number of red (or swamp) maples as well. Their sap was essentially the same as that in the sugar maples, except it was thinner; to make just one gallon of precious dark amber maple syrup, it would take fully forty gallons of fresh sap from a red maple, as against just twenty gallons from a sugar maple.

Andrew picked up the metal taps from Belletete’s Hardware in Winchendon, but rather than using the wooden pails Grandpa had made in the Little House books or the traditional metal cans seen throughout New England, he created his own buckets by cutting down one-gallon plastic milk jugs. He built a makeshift sugar shack out back, near the entrance to the woods, and he and the boys made daily rounds of all the tapped trees to collect the cartons and stockpile them in the shack, packed in snow, until it was time to build a fire and start syruping. Some of the cartons made their way into the farmhouse kitchen, where we mixed the fresh sap with seltzer water to create a delicate-tasting maple soda—which, in true American entrepreneurian fashion, the guys fantasized about mass-producing and marketing to make their fortunes.

When Nikhil was five, we moved from sixty acres in Winchendon to a less-than-half-acre suburban plot in this New England college town. We were eager to prove to him, and perhaps to ourselves as well, that we could still live the rural homesteaders’ life, so Andrew set about tapping the maple trees on the property and firing up the stainless-steel vat in the kiln house behind my in-laws’ house next door. Funnily enough, a fraction of the number of trees we had tapped in Winchendon yielded almost as much maple syrup, because all these were sugar, rather than swamp maples. Andrew would boil down the sap to a manageable volume out in the kiln house, and then bring it into the kitchen to finish the process in our largest pots. We were able to make enough syrup to meet our own needs, to soak stacks of Sunday pancakes lavishly for a whole year and to give as Christmas presents to the whole family besides.

We haven’t made our own syrup for twenty years now. The kiln house out back is collapsing, and these days all our maple trees produce are mountains of coppery-gold leaves in the fall, enough to use on the compost pile all year round. But I sure know, and from first-hand experience, what a sugar snow is. Every year, when the daytime temperatures begin to rise consistently above freezing while the night-time temperatures still reliably fall below it,  when the sap starts flowing in the long-established stands of maples around town, and the old-timers put in their taps and hang out their buckets again, I feel all warm inside in the knowledge that I too have participated in this quintessentially American ritual; and that my son has actually lived it rather than just reading about it, prancing fawn-like through the late-winter snow, to suck the sap straight from the tree.

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176. The Haircut

Medusa at the hairdresser’s (Chris Sharrock, sharrock.wordpress.com)

For years, hair-cutting in our household was such a rare event that whenever I told Andrew—who shares Samson’s horror of being shorn—that I was thinking of cutting my hair, he would ask, with his characteristic brand of humor, “Which one?” Recently, an old friend reminded me that I had once encouraged her to grow her hair long, and suggested that I might enjoy trying out a new look, putting me in mind of the last time I experimented with a hairstyle, way back in the old millennium.

When my cousin Sue’s daughter Oleen took me to a hair salon on one of my visits to London back in 1990, she told the stylist on my behalf that it was my first-ever professional haircut, and only my second visit to a hairdresser’s (the first, at age ten, having been to a barber’s in Calcutta for a hairwash). Since I was in my mid-thirties by this time, her announcement was met with incredulity and (I feel sure) stifled giggles. I was introduced as “our (weird) cousin from America” and the hairdresser exercised a great deal of forbearance, keeping a straight face and a sympathetic expression while I proceeded to tell her, anxiously and at great length, that I wasn’t used to this kind of thing and to explain that I wanted a different, but not too different, look, a significant amount cut off, but not so much that I would no longer be able to put my hair up into a bun, and bangs (a fringe), but not those schoolgirl bangs that would make me—to use one of my mother’s phrases—look like mutton dressed as lamb. She reassured me that she wouldn’t do anything drastic, and Oleen offered lots of moral support once I finally shut up and submitted to the shears.

A few words of explanation may be required to account for my odd behavior. I had been growing my hair since I was seven years old (see Untangling) when Mum, who had peremptorily chopped off my long hair at age four, finally gave me qualified permission to grow it back. Long hair was in fashion in the States in the 70’s, when we first immigrated, but even as I persisted in clinging sentimentally to my long hair as a marker of “Indianness,” many stylish young women in India were cutting theirs short. By the time I was a mother and in my thirties, long hair was an aberration in my age group, and, probably made me look older than I was, since I usually wore it twisted into a tight bun. My father had told me once, when admiring the 24-year-old me dressed in a sari for a classical Indian music concert, that a hairstyle like that was either considered extremely plain or extremely sophisticated. Flattered, I assumed he meant that on me, it looked ultra-sophisticated. Perhaps it did, back then; but a decade later, not so much.

On that visit to London in 1990, when I had finally screwed up my courage to make a change, my son was at the age where any change terrified him, especially in his mother. Having done the deed, I returned from the hair stylist’s that afternoon wondering if I’d made a mistake. As soon as I walked in my cousin’s front door with my up-to-the-minute scrunched-and-blow-dried shoulder-length cut complete with wispy bangs, my worst fears were confirmed by Nikhil’s immediate reaction, as he screamed—no, wailed, as only a five-year-old boy can wail: “Mom, what have you done? Go right back and make it the way it was before!” That did it: I was now officially a basketcase. It took many soothing words from Cousin Sue and the lure of a double batch of take-away Fish-’n-Chips before Nikhil became somewhat reconciled to having a different mom and Nikhil’s mom could be talked into venturing out of doors again.

Returning to the States and the Spring semester at university, I wondered whether my peers would notice my new look and what they would think of it. One or two of my female friends probably said something nice, though I can’t really remember. But I do remember one of my few male colleagues (in the English Ph.D. program men were at a premium, making it necessary for the single women among us to organize parties with the mostly-male Polymer Science department) coming over to me and saying, in all innocence: “When I looked across the room at Orientation this morning, I thought, for a moment, ‘Who’s that pretty girl?’ Then I realized, it was just you!” As soon as he realized what a back-handed compliment he’d paid me, his fresh, open face turned bright red with embarrassment as he stammered, “That c-c-c-ame out all wrong. I didn’t mean it like that, honest I didn’t!” I wanted to believe him, but I’m still not sure.

That hairstyle didn’t last long, and when the bangs grew out I simply reverted to my old one. Twenty-three years later, I’m seriously considering another visit to the hairdressers, though at the pace I move in these matters, no one ought to hold their breath.

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