209. Retreat

temenosretreatcenter.org

Classes are over, the tulips are already blown, and the spring breeze carries with it murmurs of sultry summer afternoons—elsewhere.

The prospect of getting away is delightful but the reality is daunting. All the planning, booking, advance arrangements, packing—it tires one out just thinking about  it. I never understood those people who spent half the year planning their next vacation and the other half talking about it. Now I sometimes wish I had one of them to take care of it all for me. Surely it would be easier, and almost as enjoyable, just to set up a tent in the nearby conservation area or sling a jungle hammock between two trees in the back garden. Or, easier still, to swing my feet up onto the sofa on the front porch with a cold drink and simply allow myself to drift.

But no, getting away—really away—is imperative. Sometimes to establish the conditions in which to relax fully, one has perforce to engage in a period of planning.

It’s not that I want to escape from reality, but rather that I want to slip out of the rut of everyday thinking, making the time to come alive more fully in a setting where there’s nothing to do but to be. One doesn’t need to go very far from home, but sufficiently far to be out of reach of that never-ending To Do list and sufficiently close that getting ready to go doesn’t have to be such a big hoo-hah.

That place is Temenos, a retreat at the top of a hill just half an hour’s drive from home, but one whose remove has been attended to with such thoughtful, loving care that it seems worlds upon worlds away. Just bring yourself, a sleeping bag, food and drink in ice-filled coolers; the caretakers of the trust provide the rest, making themselves scarce so that a space opens up for you to step into, but giving you quiet assurance that they are close at hand should you find yourself in need. After dispensing with your car a sufficient distance away, you load your things onto a little wagon and trundle it to your cabin, where you will find already-cut-and-split wood in all sizes should you wish to fire up a woodstove, but a propane cookstove as well. A metal-lined, heavy-lidded box keeps your food safe from bears, and there’s bedding, a simple wooden kitchen table, a hurricane lamp for light—no electricity or running water—and a little writing desk complete with log book in which those who have come before you have written over the years. Everything is clean and simple, basic but well-stocked. Large screened windows open up to the woods all round for light, air, and insect-free communing with nature. A sufficient walk away, just down the path from the woodshed,  is the outhouse; but oh, what an outhouse, screened, sturdily constructed, scrupulously clean and fresh, with utter privacy and a view of the woods. There are no lights from the surrounding towns.

photo: Tiffany Hrach (hrachgarden.blogspot.com)

That’s it. Outside and down the road apiece there’s a pump where you can fill gallon jugs with a rust-colored minerally water (the spot used to be a health spa many years ago, and after all, it’s on Mount Mineral); a small pond where you can take a dip with the turtles in the heat of the summer; a small, homemade labyrinth for meditative walks; a bog walk, silence but for the rustling of the wind in the trees, and little red efts everywhere.

I’m gone.

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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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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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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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198. The Post Office

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
 —inscripton on the General Post Office, New York City, 8^th Avenue and 33^rd Street

Next to the public library, the post office is probably the public institution dearest to my heart.  Not only do I value the increasingly rare practice of letter-writing, but I think that postal workers, whether they are letter carriers, counter clerks, or mail room personnel, are the life-blood of the community; I hate to think that their days may be numbered. Two of my maternal uncles and my mother worked for the Post Office in England and one of my cousins was a post office employee in India. The cutbacks to the postal services in both Britain and the United States in recent years are sucking the life-blood out of an institution that in my opinion is one of the pillars of a functioning society. (I wonder: is that why British postboxes are shaped like pillars and named accordingly?)

Pillar-Box  (photographer: Oxfordian Kissuth, wikimedia commons)

postman with bicycle, 1940s (postalheritage.wordpress.com)

My Uncles Len and Ted started out as postmen in London, delivering the Royal Mail door to door on push bikes. Mum told me that when my dear cousin Lesley was born prematurely, Uncle Len raced back and forth on his bike between home and hospital delivering milk for his tiny baby girl. He went on to work at the Mornington Crescent Post Office while Uncle Ted went to work for the telephone and telegraph division of the Post Office (which, in 1969, became Post Office Telecommunications; in 1981, under Margaret Thatcher, was made independent of the Post Office as British Telecom; and, in 1984, privatized).

Hoddeson Post Office (photo by jelm6 on omnilexica.com)

In 1969, while my mother, my sister Sally, and I were living in Hertfordshire with my Uncle Ted while waiting for our U.S. immigration visas, Mum decided to apply for a position in the Post Office like her brothers before her. She was sent to London for six weeks of training, and then started as a  counter clerk at the Hoddesdon Post Office on the town’s high street. In those days the Post Office was the hub of the community. Everyone came in there for one reason or the other, and posting letters and parcels was only one of its functions. The elderly picked up their pensions there, mothers their family allowances and, at a time when most Britons didn’t have bank accounts, many maintained Post Office Savings accounts. As a result, Mum’s job was vital and varied, and she was soon familiar with the multigenerational cast of characters who came in on a regular basis.

Having lived far from both sides of our extended family for most of our lives, we’ve always looked forward eagerly to the daily delivery of the mail. Nowadays, though, instead of my heart lifting and fluttering in anticipation as I approach the mailbox, it sinks with dull resignation in the knowledge of the slew of bills and junk mail that will have to be sorted, shredded, and recycled. Letters, on the other hand, I treasure and keep, every last one of them. But it is a rare treat nowadays to receive a hand-written letter by “snail mail.“

photo by Roger Hutchings/Corbis
(guardian.co.uk)

It wasn’t always snail mail. In Victorian Britain there were six to twelve mail deliveries per day, so that two people could engage in several exchanges of letters in the course of a single day. In my childhood, there were still two deliveries a day in Greater London, so that a letter put in the morning post would reach its destination that same afternoon. Due to anticipated public opposition, the Royal Mail has not yet been privatized, but it has been restructured so that it could happen any day now.

When I worked as a feature writer for The Winchendon Courier in north-central Massachusetts, I learned that a hundred years earlier that sleepy, isolated town had been a thriving railway junction. As the New York-bound train came through every afternoon it would slow down and slide out an automated arm to receive the mail, which would be delivered in the City the following morning. This was amazing to me, since in the 1980s it could take a letter posted in Winchendon up to a week to reach New York City.

The process of defunding the U.S. Post Office has continued apace. Now the closing of small branch offices and sorting stations is looming, so that our mail would have to leave the state to be sorted and could no longer achieve next-day delivery to Boston. Though public protest is staving it off, the next service slated for the chopping block is Saturday delivery. The elimination of these services could be the death knell of the post office, leaving us with only private mail companies, and it seems to me that that is the very intent of the cuts.

minuscule mailbox outside Royalston, MA Post Office
(nomadwillie on waymarking.com)

When we fail to support and sustain a noble public institution like the post office, we impoverish our civic society as a whole. I cannot imagine a society where such an institution did not exist, and I hope I never have to live in one.

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195. Marathon

John Blanding/ Globe Staff (boston.com)

My parents moved to Newton, Massachusetts in the late 1970s, onto a street off Commonwealth Avenue just over the brow of the notorious Heartbreak Hill, the one that all Boston Marathon runners dread. The runner who first makes it over that hill is invariably the winner of the race, but just getting that far is an achievement. Actually, the first to crest the hill are the wheelchair entrants. In 1975, Boston was the first major marathon to include a wheelchair division.

mother and daughter set to run the 2013 Boston Marathon (observer.ca)

I remember walking out to Commonwealth Avenue on Marathon Day, stationing ourselves on the side of the road facing west, and cheering our hearts out. The winners sailed by early and, after a bit of a lag, the rest followed, old and young, men and women, many of them huffing and puffing alarmingly. But they persevered. I remember tears coming to my eyes as I cheered on young and middle-aged women, mothers and grandmothers running together. Some labored up and over that hill long, long after most of the pack had passed, but they made it over, and we cheered them until we were hoarse.

There are 29,000 people signed up to participate in the 2013 Boston Marathon,  so many that  it may be hard to remember a time when marathon-running wasn’t a big deal. But in 1970, the year we immigrated to the United States, there were only 1174 entrants, and in 1960, just ten years before that, fewer than two hundred. I remember the excitement when New Englander Bill Rogers won both the Boston and the New York marathons in 1975, and won Boston twice more in the late 1970s; suddenly jogging was all the rage. Apparently, interest in running marathons among the U.S. public had been sparked in the 1972 Olympics by the dramatic TV coverage of  American Frank Shorter winning the men’s marathon after an attempt to steal the race by an imposter was foiled.

Some of the female runners at the 1972 Boston Marathon (Image © Bettmann/CORBIS)

It may also be hard to remember, now that more than 40% of the participants are women, that although the Boston Marathon started way back in in 1897, it was not until 1972 that women were allowed in the race. Now that I think of it, that fact probably accounted in large part for my emotional response to the intrepid women of all ages who crested that hill, determined to finish the 26.2-mile course no matter how long it took. Now that I am middle-aged myself, I am in even greater awe of them.

I have never run a marathon myself, though one Sunday I set out on a stroll and ended up walking 23 miles (see Two at a Time). That was a long, long time ago; more recently, the closest I’ve come to a marathon is this A-to-Z April Blogging Challenge, not 26 miles but 26 entries in 30 days. It’s Day 15, and I’m already flagging, with Heartbreak Hill still up ahead.

Monday evening, April 15th, 2013: This day that dawned full of excitement and anticipation has ended in tragedy, grief, and utter bewilderment. Sending love and deepest sympathy to all those who were hurt and traumatized, and to the families and friends of those who lost their lives.

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192. Jam Today

In my mid-twenties I participated with many others in an effort to stop the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power station from being built. We did not succeed in Seabrook, although we did raise awareness about the costs and dangers of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement grew and flourished throughout the 1970s, but in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan, like that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, began a long period of what we called the clampdown (echoing The Clash’s prescient Working for the Clampdown on London Calling), and put a serious damper on the movement, along with so much else. Early in 1980, though, oblivious of all that was to come, we were making serious preparations for non-violent direct action to occupy the site, in a decentralized system of self-organization based on affinity groups and consensus decision-making. One of the affinity groups, friends of ours, called themselves Jam Today.

I never asked any of the members of Jam Today what lay behind their choice of name, but it seemed clear enough. They refused to go along with a society that demanded endless deferral of desires and their fulfillment to some indefinite future.

illustration by John Tenniel (from thevictorianweb.org)

The phrase “jam today” comes from the exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which the queen offers Alice a job with the promise of “twopence a week, and jam every other day.’ Pressed further, she reveals “the rule. . . jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

‘It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam today,”‘ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: today isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

Having been raised to believe in delayed gratification, part of me secretly found the idea of Jam Today a little self-indulgent. But my friends showed me otherwise: they combined concentrated hard work for a better future with an irrepressible joie-de-vivre. They lived in the moment and clearly loved every moment. And time was to prove them right: throughout those long Reagan years, as unemployment skyrocketed, unions were smashed, public services defunded, and environmental protections gutted, the rich only got much, much richer, while continuing to dangle before the rest of us the lying promise of Jam Tomorrow, a tomorrow that would never turn into today.

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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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