208. Zee, Zed, Go to Bed

inhabitots.com

There is a famous song for learning your ABC’s, to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (You can listen to Mozart’s virtuoso variations on it here.) When I first came to the United States, American children used to sing the ABC song like this:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
QRS
TUV
WX
Y & Zee

Now I know my ABC
Tell me what you think of me.

But sometime in the 1970’s or 1980’s, or so I imagine, my generation of New Age parents felt that this version was too evaluative and could place an unacceptable degree of performance anxiety on their children. Their new version, now the dominant one, ended like this:

Now I know my ABC
Next time won’t you sing with me?

This child-friendly version presented the teacher and the children as equals, joining together in a shared learning enterprise.

The British version of ABCD that I was raised on was altogether different, so I searched YouTube for it. Aha! Surely the ABCD song on the British Council website would be the traditional version. But no, it was the new America version trying pathetically and disappointingly to preserve a thin veneer of Englishness:
 nothing but the American version with the British Zed tacked on.

In my childhood, children were taught their place in no uncertain terms:

ABCDEFG
HIJK
LMNOP
LMNOPQ
RST
UVW
XY Zed


XY Zed
Sugar on your bread
All good children go to bed.

No nonsense about sharing or equality. After reciting their lessons, good children will go off to bed as they are told to do, and without a fuss. No ifs, ands, or buts. Still, unlike the saccharine-sweet American version that now seems to have gained near-universal status, English children were compensated with bread, butter, and sugar. Delicious, and right before bed, too.  So crunchy and calming. So good for the teeth.

I searched the entire Internet in vain for my childhood version. The closest I could come was this bossy-pants of a little Indian girl who recited, sing-song style:

XY Zed
Sugar on the bread
If you don’t like it you can go to bed.

In India, as in Canada and many other ex-colonial countries, many people still say Zed, although Zee is gaining ground.

(from billcasselman.com)

In regard to the pronunciation of the last letter of the English alphabet, take your pick, but I know what I like. Zed is the older form, apparently derived from the Greek Zeta (which is the sixth letter of its alphabet, far from holding pride of place at the end), in its turn taken from the Phoenician Zayid. The U.S. Zee, it seems, is a late- 17^th Century English dialectal form brought over by early English colonists.

While I was looking all this up, I discovered that Izzard is an old form of Zed. This gives me an entirely gratuitous excuse to include Eddie Izzard, one of my favorite stand-up comedians, discoursing here on British and American English.

And while I’m on the subject of British comedians, what better way to close out the 2013 April A-to-Z Challenge than with the A-to-Zed of Monty Python?

CODA: In the The Apple Pie ABC, the alphabet doesn’t end with Z, but with ampersand. Taking its cue, as the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge comes to an end, I will do the same, and hope thereby to be granted a continuance. Thanks to the organizers and to all the bloggers I visited, and who visited me in turn. Do come again.

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207. The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

The first book I remember owning was Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. My mother must have bought it for me, along with a few other English children’s classics, like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, to take back to India with us when I was four. I still have the book today, countless moves later, and have read and recited the rhymes in it so many times that their deeply humanistic nonsense is an integral part of who I am. (By the way, my father told me just the other day that the Marathi folk tradition is full of nonsense rhymes, too, which I didn’t learn as a child because when in India we lived clear on the other side of the country and I went to English-medium schools.)

Picture books and board books were not as prevalent as they are now, so my first book was a beautifully printed hardcover, which I regret to say I drew and wrote on, though thankfully only on the end papers. But in so doing I made it all the more my own, by bestowing upon it special marks of my affection.

The two most well-known of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes are The Owl and the Pussycat:

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible [Lear's own neologism] spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

and The Jumblies:

Far and Few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.

These I soon learned by heart, including the song in the case of the former, although the tune has now escaped me. Just about every poem in that entire collection is weird and wonderful, including The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow, The New Vestments, and Mrs. And Mrs. Discobbolos. But perhaps the quirkiest, the most touching, and overall the most perfect of them all, the one lodged most deeply in my brain, is The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

First of all, the story is set on the Coromandel Coast. All I knew was that it had a certain ring to it; little did I realize that it was in fact the southeast coast of India, a Portuguese corruption of the original Cholamandalam. It was the saddest of love stories, not unrequited love, but love fully requited yet impossible because of the ridiculous strictures of society. At the same time it was hilarious, exemplified by the verse reproduced below, in which the Lady Jingly Jones reluctantly turns down the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s proposal of marriage.

That is all you need to know. It is patently obvious that the illustrations are inseparable from the text, both having come out of the zany head of Mr. Lear. Here’s a curiously English 1966 recording of David Davis reading it aloud, I leave you with another picture from my beat-up old edition, still holding together after all these years. Now just read, reciting it out loud, again and again, whenever and wherever possible; and, if you have any human feelings at all, shed a few tears for the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

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206. Xenophobia

hermanusrainbowtrust.blogspot.com

Xenophobia: an undue or irrational fear of foreigners or outsiders

Okay,  some will say, but this is a natural human fight-or-flight response, stemming from the days when outsiders were a threat to one’s very survival; for that matter, they still can be, and are.

Fair enough; but allow me to make just three points.

First, note the “undue” and “irrational” in the definition:  a natural instinct to be a little wary of outsiders at first encounter is understandable; but a paranoia that persists even after the outsiders are a known quantity is unreasonable.

Second, ask yourself if you know who these outsiders are. Do you mean the people who come from outside your community or country or who speak a different language from your own? I submit to you that any of us can feel like or be perceived to be an outsider, even if we share the same nationality and language as our peers and have lived in the same community from birth. Once you recognize the impossibility of knowing who the outsiders are, xenophobia becomes all the more irrational.

The third point is the kicker. I propose that the fear of foreigners or outsiders often stems from the secret knowledge that you are an outsider yourself.  A story from my own experience, not a pretty one, may serve to illustrate.

When I was at boarding school in India two new students, a brother and sister, thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old, joined us. It might have been mid-year, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that they had just come from England where they had been living for a time, their parents having returned to India. Naturally, everything was new and strange to them, and they couldn’t help but compare much of what they were encountering with their experience in England.  It seemed to us, though, that every five minutes they were saying, “In England this” or “In England that.” We claimed to find it intensely irritating and started jeering, “In England,” whenever they opened their mouths.

They were pleasant, quiet, and good-natured, those two. The problem was ours, not theirs, but we made it theirs by the way we treated them. Why were we so unkind and intolerant? The obvious answer is that in the 1960’s, barely 20 years since Independence from British rule, we didn’t take kindly to anything Indian getting compared negatively to its English counterpart. But if I search my own motives, a still more troubling—and telling—explanation emerges. I was arguably at least as much of an outsider as the two newcomers were, perhaps more, in that I was half-English, had been born in England, and, at 13, had lived outside of India for almost half of my life. Of all people, I ought to have had some empathy for them, to have been able to reach out and make them feel welcome. But I didn’t, however ashamed I feel about it now. If they ever read this story, I hope they will be able to forgive me.

I could attempt to justify my behavior with the protestation that at the time I was unaware of the personal motivation for it, for the fears about my own belonging that made me challenge theirs all the more vehemently. But that is precisely my point: I contend that many of those who engage in xenophobic behavior are unaware that what drives it is their own insecurity about their status as insiders.

We are all foreigners. And it is our human task to help one another feel a little more at home.

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205. Weeping Willow

There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

[Chorus] Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
Do not let the parting grieve thee,
And remember that the best of friends must part, must part
Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you,
I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.
— F. J. Adams, 1891

I don’t remember having seen any weeping willows in my childhood in India, and knew of them only through There’s a Tavern in the Town, a song my mother used to sing. Although she would never have said so to us children, she was probably homesick for England when she sang these old songs. That hidden emotion and the longtime association of the weeping willow with parted lovers imbued my image of the tree with sentiment, deep, but non-specific.

It was not until we immigrated to the United States that weeping willows became a common feature of the cultivated landscape, and not until we moved out to the farm in Winchendon and started homesteading ourselves that we learned of the practical dangers of planting them anywhere near a house.  Although the tree is beautiful—one of the first to turn a delicate yellow, then green, in the early spring—and useful for preventing erosion, it craves water, and its large, thirsty roots gravitate toward septic pipes and storm drains, work their way in through cracks and crevices, and soon block them.

When my parents moved into their current house, there was a small weeping willow down in the far corner of their back field, in the lowest-lying part of their property. It was well away from the house and its roots would be likely to gravitate down and ever farther away, so they let it be. It thrived there, and now, twenty years later, it has filled out the entire corner and grown up to its full, mature height.

The weeping willow (salix babylonica) is native to northern China. Being highly desirable, it was traded along the Silk Route to south-west Asia and Europe, and has now spread worldwide. The tree at my parents’ is now so large that it can be seen from the other side of the world. Here’s how we found out:

My nephew Pinakin came to the U.S. from India for his doctoral studies. When he visited us for the first time and I was driving him over to meet my parents, he asked me excitedly if he could navigate. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve looked you all up on Google Earth.” Sure enough, Pinakin gave me flawless directions across town. When we drew up at the house, he exclaimed with satisfaction, “It’s all here: the house, the fields, and the big tree in the corner!” That weeping willow can now be spotted from India via satellite! I can’t quite describe what that made me feel: the tree that has so long been a symbol of parting and loss is now a landmark that our distant loved ones can seek out, zoom in on, and find us by.

Earlier this evening, in the gathering dusk, when I gazed on that tree clothed in its delicate Spring green, with the last rays of the setting sun lighting the adjacent clouds on fire, I thought of my mother in India half a century ago, long before the days of satellites, singing of her distant loved ones.  When I was a child, I thought that the woman in “There’s a Tavern in the Town” was singing, “I’ll hang my heart [not harp] on a weeping willow tree.” I still think that my version describes best what we have hung on that tree, that continues to seek water and light wherever it is transplanted, regardless of the human heart.

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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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190. Hobson-Jobson

First published in 1886 by (Col.) Henry Yule and  A.C. Burnell (and re-issued in an augmented edition by William Crooke in 1903), Hobson-Jobson is still the definitive dictionary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases.

The term “Anglo-Indian” may require a little explanation. During the British colonial period when Hobson-Jobson was produced, it referred to the British in India, while since Independence in 1947 it has referred to people of both English and Indian descent, that community of Indians who have an English ancestor, usually dating back to the colonial period. When you hear, say, the very English E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1925) being referred to as an Anglo-Indian novel, the term is being used in the older sense. I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama (1988), on the other hand, is Anglo-Indian, as its its author, but it is also an Indian English (or Indo-Anglian, as it used to be called) novel. Confusing enough for you?

Back to Hobson-Jobson. The entries in it come mostly from India via Hindi and other South Asian languages (with a pronounciation all their own), but also from British colonial and mercantile adventures both further East, such as the Malay peninsula, and further West, such as Turkey.  However, its also has its English words, that, like its Indian ones, have distinct Anglo-Indian usages. “Home,” for instance: the entry reads, In Anglo-Indian and colonial speech, this means England. It goes on to quote an anonymous source in 1837: Home always means England; nobody calls India home —not even those who have been here thirty years or more, and are never likely to return to Europe (Letters from Madras, 93).

(from bbc.co.uk)

In her article, Hobson-Jobson: the Words English Owes to India  Mukti Jain Campion lists a few of them. Here is the portion of her selection from a to h:  atoll, avatar; bandana, bangle, bazaar, Blighty, bungalow; cashmere, catamaran, char, cheroot, cheetah, chintz, chit, chokey, chutney, cot, cummerbund, curry; dinghy, doolally, dungarees; guru, gymkhana; and hullabaloo.

Contemporary Indian English writers have had a heyday wth Hobson-Jobson. As Campion notes, Salman Rushdie used it to hilarious effect in Midnight’s Children (1981), delighting in the sing-song double-barrelled rhyming effect of words like “Hobson-Jobson” itself and coining such beauties as “writing-shiting.” Amitav Ghosh actually masters it as it is used by certain characters in his novel, Sea of Poppies (2008), as he similarly does Lascari in the mouths of other characters and Pidgin in the second of the trilogy, River of Smoke (2011).

People don’t speak this kind of English in India today, rooted as it is in the master-servant relationships of the colonial experience. But if you listen out for it, contemporary Indian English still retains something of its flavor and flair.

Check it out: this link here connects you the Hathi Trust Digital Library version of the dictionary, either for view online or for download as a PDF.

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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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187. Emil and the Detectives

As a child, one of my favorite books was Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. I read the Puffin edition which was a new English translation published in 1959. However, it had been originally published in German back in 1929, and the first English edition had followed just two years later.

I had been introduced to Puffins as an eight-year-old in the early 60′s, and have loved them ever since. When we lived in Athens my parents would let me collect the family’s small change, and when the lepta coins added up to 60 drachma, I could string them together and go out to the English bookstore to buy a Puffin book. Later, in India, I was allowed to choose several Puffins regularly from the latest catalogue, and when they arrived a few weeks later in a paper parcel, I would disappear into other worlds for weeks on end. Somehow through all our moves I managed to save all my old Puffins, and collected still more in the United States after my son was born. When I read all my old favorites to him, many of them became his as well, among them Swallows and Amazons, The Family from One End Street, The Children Who lived in a Barn, Stig of the Dump, The Railway Children (in fact, all the E. Nesbits), Friday’s Tunnel (an all-time favorite), The Silver Sword, and of course, Emil and the Detectives.

It seems to me that too many children’s writers talk down to their readers, something that Puffin authors never did (especially under the editorship of Kaye Webb, from 1961-1979). Erich Kästner dealt with subjects that might have seemed inappropriate for children, and his young readers so appreciated this. In Emil and the Detectives, Emil Tischbein is the only son of a widowed mother who works hard to support them and whom Erich adores fiercely, protectively, despite how much she fusses over him. As the novel begins, Mrs. Tischbein is preparing to send her beloved son to Berlin for a holiday to stay with his aunt, uncle, and Grandma and entrusts him with an envelope of her carefully-saved money to carry along with him. Kästner speaks directly to his young readers about why such a small amount of money means so much to Emi and his mother, and why Emil tries so hard to help his mother even though he certainly isn’t a goody-goody. Similarly, in his Lottie and Lisa (Das doppelte Lottchen in German, later made into the film The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills) he speaks frankly to his readers about divorce and how it affects children.

To me, the most terrifying scene was the one where Emil falls asleep alone in the train carriage with a strange—and ominously friendly—man and wakes up to find the precious envelope gone. Because it is unacceptable to him that he should lose his mother’s hard-earned money, he, his cousin Pony, and a gang of boys fan out into the streets of Berlin with a brilliant plan to catch the thief and recover the money, coming into contact with various  shady characters along the way. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens, but Kästner is a brilliant storyteller and knows how to capture a child’s imagination.

It was only as an adult that I read about Kästner’s own life. Emil was the most popular of his novels and the only one to have escaped censorship by the Nazis. Kästner was a pacifist and opposed to the Nazis, who burned his books in 1933, labeling them “contrary to the German sprit.” Like Emil, he was very close to his mother—in fact, it is thought that she was the main reason why he didn’t leave Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power.

Emil and the Detectives is still in print and has been written up as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month.

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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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