As a child, I noticed that the adults in my life seemed to break into song whenever someone used a word or a phrase that recalled one that they knew. Marveling at their massive repertoires, I conceived the idea that a grown-up was someone who knew a song corresponding with every single word in the language, and I longed to attain that enviable state.

As I grew older, I turned into that same kind of adult, who took every opportunity to break into song regardless of the setting, no doubt embarrassing members of the younger generation who, despite the fact that they had music piped into their heads 24/7, seemed to think that singing was an intensely private act that ought to be restricted to the shower. I sang a few lines of a song in class one day, purely to illustrate a point, and later that week a student of mine from another class asked, lowering her voice, whether the rumors circulating round campus were true.

Singing has always been the thread that has sewn together the disparate, far-flung fragments of my life. I’ll never forget an experience I had one summer back in the 1980s, while visiting my dear cousin Sue. Her friend Helena’s boyfriend had offered to drive us all over to my Auntie Bette’s house in his car, put the tape of Bob Marley’s Exodus into the cassette player. Six or seven of us, there were, from four to forty-something, jammed into the car singing Jammin’. As we all sang together, Exodus: movement of Jah People, we were united across differences of age, experience, ethnicity, and musical taste. For the duration of that short ride across North London I knew what it was to feel One Love.

Visiting London again in 1996, now in our forties, Andrew and I entered a quiz contest in a Hampstead pub with Sue and her then-twenty-year-old daughter Oleen, and won, acing every category because our collective musical knowledge ranged from the Fifties to the Nineties, and from pop to rock to reggae to house. Each of Sue’s three daughters and each of their five children in turn has different musical tastes, and Sue knows them all in addition to her own favorites from the Fifties and Sixties.

Unlike many other adults who define “their music” as the limited group of songs they came of age with, Sue has stayed young at heart by continuously refreshing and expanding her musical repertoire. In contrast, I realize that I have all the signs of hardening of the musical arteries. Where once I could recite the Top Twenty almost as easily as my ABCs, if I ask myself honestly when last I learned a new song I realize that I can hardly remember a single one less than five years old; to be honest, precious few less than ten, since Nikhil left high school almost a decade ago. It’s not that the new songs are necessarily any good, quite the contrary; it’s rather that every successive generation thinks music has gone downhill since they last had their fingers on the musical pulse of the times.

I’m thinking about music today as I look up the lyrics of songs to to adapt for my dear friend (and sister-in-law) Eve’s sixtieth birthday party, and realizing that although her musical repertoire is continuously growing as she learns new songs to perform in her band, my own knowledge of her favorite songs is sadly dated, ranging from Dominique (1963) to Sweet Black Angel (1972) to Mirror in the Bathroom (1981). For my part, the “new” songs I’ve found myself learning in the past decade have only been new to me, as I’ve been returning to folk, country, blues, old film songs, and bhajans, deepening my musical roots rather than trying to keep pace with what’s current.

By my childhood definition, I’ve almost achieved adulthood, since I can toss you back a few bars of a song for just about any word or phrase you pitch at me; but now I have a new formulation, this one of immortality. In the words of this round, which we sang at school in India in the Sixties:

In the original German:

Himmel und Erde müssen vergehn
Aber die musici, aber die musici
Aber die musici, bleiben bestehn.

and in English:

All things shall perish from under the sky
Music alone shall live, music alone shall live,
Music alone shall live, never to die.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

It’s hardly necessary to say that Valentine’s Day is overblown and over-commercialized, heralded by a barrage of advertising that peddles greeting cards, red roses, dark chocolate, sentiment by the truckload, love itself. In my childhood and youth, February the 14th was marked very differently, when it was marked at all. But I imagine that children and young teens have always had rituals that introduce them to the gender norms of their society and prepare them for courtship before it begins in earnest.

In my primary school in Athens I seem to recall a flutter of excitement accompanying the approach of the day, when a student might receive an anonymous Valentine in the internal mail, creating breathless speculation as to the identities of both sender and receiver—among the girls, at least; only dread and embarrassment among the boys, or so they let it be known. As children growing up without the influence of television (or even, in my case, the radio), we were effectively shielded from the incipient youth culture of the early 1960s, our innocent imitations taking their cues from romantic pop songs. Although my parents’ small collection of 45-rpm singles and 33-rpm EP’s contained next-to-no American records, somehow I learned a few songs, memorably Oh Carol (See St. Catherine’s and Miss Tutte), Wolverton Mountain, and perhaps my favorite, Sealed With a Kiss.

In boarding school in Darjeeling we didn’t mark the day at all, but nevertheless had our own year-round rituals and practices that signified to whom our hearts had been given, for the time being, anyway. Again, music gave words—inadequate approximations always, but words just the same—to the inchoate murmurings of our young hearts. I can still see the boys in The Strange Infatuation, our co-ed band at Mount Hermon, sending shivers down our spines with their performance of the Beatles’ Boys at a rehearsal snatched between Afternoon Study and dinnertime. We girls, not to be outdone, responded with a sultry imitation of Nancy Sinatra’s Boots.

In my year-long sojourn in England in 1968-69, I was mostly an outside observer of the strange courtship rituals of British teens. The kind of interaction with the opposite sex that I experienced personally was one at a double remove from the person in question. A boy who had his eye on me might send his friend to tell my girlfriend that he liked me. If I looked up and dared to meet his eye, he would look away hastily, pretending not to have seen me; and if I were to cross the boy-girl divide and actually ask him to confirm the truth of his friend’s message, he would certainly deny everything. Of course, the whole exercise was based on the unspoken understanding that I would never have the nerve to do so. Whether, and if so, how they celebrated Valentine’s Day, I honestly can’t remember.

By 1970, when we got to America and the avant-garde Brookline High School, dating was already considered passé, and teen rituals of the 1950s such as the Senior Prom and Valentine’s Day similarly retrograde. The cool thing to do was to go out in a large mixed group, and not to seem to have a preference for any one individual. But of course, we did have preferences, which we still whispered about with our girlfriends and recorded in our secret diaries. Though we could have friendships and carry on political and philosophical conversations with boys that were never dreamed of  in our Indian schooldays, our feelings were essentially unchanged: we were still unsure of ourselves and of how to interpret and express all that we were feeling. Ostensibly, all the rules had changed; in reality, we were as clueless as teenagers have always been.

Tweety-n-Sylvester Valentine (from valentine-cards.blogspot.com)

By the time Nikhil was in primary school in the States a generation later, it was obligatory for all students to make and distribute Valentines to all their classmates, so as not to make anyone feel left out. At first, I think, he rather enjoyed the process, taking trouble with each and every card in the intended spirit of inclusiveness, but as he got older, his interest progressively diminished (or so he feigned, anyway) until it was his long-suffering mother buying the Love Hearts candy and the Valentines and making sure that he inscribed and addressed them all. Still, I got the distinct impression that, despite the best efforts of the well-meaning authorities,  certain girls and boys inevitably received more Valentines than did others, and rumors circulated that so-and-so had been seen opening a top-secret envelope that was clearly a cut above the innocuous offerings bought in bulk at CVS or Woolworth’s.

The whispers and giggles of elementary school soon passed. In middle school Nikhil was more interested in film-making than in girls; the love song that echoes through the late 1990’s for me is Aqua’s Dr. Jones, to which he made his first music video starring all his best friends (in my maternal opinion much better than the official one here). The friendships deepened, love flowered all around, and my memories of his high school days are characterized by a heap of leggy teenagers piled on the couch in our den during a study break, melting into the ultra-romantic Come What May from Moulin Rouge or Enya’s May it Be in Lord of the Rings.

You may notice that I have skipped over a quarter of a century, between my young adulthood and that of my son’s. What happened in-between? Just about everything. What was all that Valentine’s stuff all about? Little more than nothing. A rehearsal for a rehearsal. Love, the real thing, remains as mysterious as it has ever been.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

and the object:

from theimage.com

Children see things differently. Remember the opening of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the narrator discussed his Drawing Number One and Drawing Number Two (below)? In Drawing Number One, what was obvious to him as a child was opaque to the grownups, so he created Drawing Number Two, in which the meaning was transparent. Still the grownups were not satisfied and advised the boy to stop wasting his time with such nonsense. But when, as a grownup himself, he met the little prince and showed him Drawing Number One, the boy recognized it at once.

Drawing Number One: a hat?

Drawing Number Two: not a hat, a boa constrictor digesting an elephant

When I was about eight one of my school friends showed me the drawing below and asked me what it was.

Like the little prince, I gave the correct answer without hesitation:

“A pen nib in a box.”

“Yes, it is,”  replied my friend, seemingly unsurprised by my penetrating eye. Perhaps she, too, felt that it was the obvious answer.

Do children play such simple games anymore, games that require no money, employ no electronic devices or equipment of any kind, and have no special effects? Even if they did, would they even recognize some of those objects, little more than a generation later? What’s a bath plug? What’s a pen nib? I pray that a generation from now, children will not have to ask, “What’s an elephant?”

Those games taught us not only how to see but different ways of seeing. Close up, or seen from an unfamiliar angle, the most ordinary household objects could be unrecognizable. We found that we needed to re-focus, to change our perspective, in order to see them anew. The drawing my friend showed me counted on most of its viewers seeing the cozy picture of a light in a curtained window. They wouldn’t generally expect to see into a dark box, revealing the pen nib lying within. Somehow, I did, although I’ve always been more of a verbal than a visual person (perhaps I had just filled my pen: see My Ink-Smudged Youth); but asked the same question today, I might not trust my first thoughts; instead, I might be more inclined to say what I knew most people would expect me to see.

We learn to hood our eyes, to blinker our vision, so that the world becomes opaque to us. The little prince, in his clear-eyed innocence, reminds his young readers how precious their fresh perspectives are, and—unless they remain very attentive—how short-lived.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

Student engagement? Active learning? Office hours? Pshaw!

In the Spring semester of my freshman year of college I took a course on British intellectual history of the Victorian period. I knew nothing at all about the subject but it looked interesting, so despite the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday (you heard right—Saturday) schedule I signed up for it. A couple of the books I bought for that course still gather dust on my shelves—The Victorian Frame of Mind (which I have consulted since) and The Utilitarians (which I have not). No selling back textbooks at the end of the semester in those days, let alone renting them.

Our professor was impossibly old—or so he seemed to me—and utterly inaccessible. I’m quite sure that I never exchanged a single word with him in the entire semester. Neither did anyone else; there was no class discussion, even though the enrollment couldn’t have been more than thirty.

This was his modus operandi: he swept into the classroom just  before the period was to begin, raised his head so that it angled up at some invisible point just over our heads, clasped his hands behind his back, took off his spectacles (without which he was almost completely blind), closed his eyes, and began to speak in an uninterrupted sonorous drone. He lectured nonstop for the entire class period, at which point he gathered up his things, restored his specs to his nose, and hurried out of the room without looking to left or right. I’m certain he never even made eye contact with me.

For my part, I never sat in the front of the class or ventured to raise my hand during any of the split seconds when he must have had to pause to catch his breath. Did his syllabus list office hours? He was probably required to keep them, but I wouldn’t have known. Not in my wildest dreams would it have occurred to me to make an appointment to meet with him outside of class.

I had only the haziest idea of the content of the course, most of it going right over my head. To be fair to him, the professor was probably brilliant, and no doubt I was a callow youth with only a fraction of my attention on the work at hand. Still, looking back at the experience through the lens of contemporary pedagogy, I’m appalled at what passed for teaching forty years ago. I don’t remember having to write a paper for the course, and so didn’t get any written feedback beside the marginal notes on the mid-term and final exams that served to evaluate the sum total of what we had absorbed; which, in my case, was very little.

Harvard Student Strike. Apr 9, 1969 (dipity.com)

In my freshman Spring of 1972 my friend (and now my sister-in-law) Eve, a graduating senior, complained about having to sit for the final exams. Each of the previous three springs, starting with the student strike of 1969, had been so turbulent that finals had been cancelled. I bemoaned my belatedness. Having immigrated to the States in February, 1970, I had missed the Summer of Woodstock. Just a few months after we arrived, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. On those somnolent Saturday mornings it seemed as if the Sixties had never taken place. We might as well have been in the Victorian era.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

from Annie Mole's london-underground.blogspot.com

On my periodic visits to England, I’m always impressed by the highbrow stuff Londoners read on the Underground—besides the ubiquitous newspapers, more often than not open at the crosswords, they can regularly be seen deeply absorbed in literary classics, fiction by Nobel Prize-winning writers from around the world, and dense works of politics and philosophy. I enjoy looking over people’s shoulders to see what they’re reading—surreptitiously, since the British seem to find it intrusive. If they’re reading a newspaper and sense that someone is reading over their shoulder they will bury their faces in the centerfold and draw the pages tightly on either side, like curtains.

Tube etiquette (Derek Berwin/Getty, guardian.co.uk)

Visiting England on the way home from a trip to India in the summer of 1998, I was intrigued to see adults on the Tube hunched over hefty hardcovers in discreet brown-paper wrappers similar to those we used to cover our school textbooks with in India. Of course I jumped to the conclusion that they must be concealing pornography, but I was quite wrong. In fact the contraband reading was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second in the new series that was taking the country by storm. (I suppose their guilty pleasure may have been akin to ours as children when, made aware by the school authorities that Enid Blyton, that earlier author of super-seductive, wildly unrealistic boarding-school fantasies, was not considered “good literature”, we were ashamed to admit openly that we enjoyed them nonetheless.) It turned out that in the early days of Harry Potter, the publisher issued an edition for adults who would have been embarrassed to be seen reading a children’s book. This was before the series went viral and became a global ambassador of Tony Blair’s New Britain.

The last time I had encountered the brown-paper wrapper was not in primary school but in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was the Spring semester of 1989 and I was taking a course on modern fiction with Gauri Viswanathan, whose reading list included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s latest novel, The Satanic Verses, which, since its UK publication in September 1988 had been banned in India and burned in Britain, was about to be published in the United States. We were all awaiting eagerly the brilliant writer’s campus visit on his American tour, when we heard the news—on Valentine’s Day, as it happened—that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for Rushdie’s execution as the blasphemous novel’s author and for the execution of anyone associated with the novel’s publication. As a person who has always revered books, a student of postcolonial literature, and a lover of Rushdie’s work, I was shocked and bitterly disappointed, and my fellow-students and I followed the rapidly-unfolding events closely in fascinated disbelief as Rushdie was forced into hiding (his campus visit cancelled, of course), American bookstore chains removed the novel from their shelves, and bookstores and publishers’ offices were firebombed.

I determined that I would read the novel as soon as I could and write on it for my term paper  in Modern Fiction. Since the hardcover edition was rather too expensive for me as an impoverished graduate student, I borrowed it from my parents, who bought every new novel by Rushdie as a matter of course, and read it from cover to cover, looking for the controversial passages more avidly than I had looked for the racy bits in Robert Graves’ I, Claudius on my parents’ bookshelves as a girl. Speaking for myself, I did not find the blasphemy that the violent reaction to the novel had led me to expect; instead, I found a profound exploration of how the experience of migration changes a person, and in particular, the experiences of South Asian immigrants and their children in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. I did write my paper, “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: Reality Flies in the Face of Belief,” but reading it turned out to be another matter.

Diane Schmitz, Brown paper wrappings, whitematters.wordpress.com

Alarmed at the almost-daily evidence that the threats against the novel’s dissemination were in deadly earnest, my father warned me not to present papers on the novel at any academic conferences. When I protested in utter disbelief at such words coming from my liberal father, he reminded me that I was no longer just an individual, but had a family to consider, especially my small child.  He further insisted that I allow him to wrap the offending novel in a brown-paper wrapper. I was outraged, but it was his book, and I acquiesced. Although I did present a paper on the novel at a conference some time later, I believe that our family copy still wears that badge of my shame.

I retell this shameful story now because, after having had to live ten years of his life in hiding, Salman Rushdie is again facing threats of violence for having written The Satanic Verses, and so are writers at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival who read from that novel, which is still banned in India after all these years. I have signed a petition calling upon the Prime Minister of India to reconsider the ban, and would encourage anyone who believes in democratic freedom of expression to do the same. I would also urge you to join and support organizations like English PEN, who are working to uphold the precious freedom to write and read. If those of us who do not face censorship directly do not speak up for those who do, and if we go a step further and pre-emptively censor ourselves, we become complicit in the censorship of others.

At convent school in India the nuns would wag their fingers at us and say, “Shame, shame! Have you no shame?” I have indeed, but in this case it comes not from having flouted the rules, from having enjoyed a banned book, but from having clothed that enjoyment furtively in a brown-paper wrapper.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

britannica.com

In a 1957 essay, Doris Lessing—the writer whom I love the most in the whole wide world and admire with a non-critical, unacademic passion and an utter lack of detachment—wrote, “the novelist talks as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice.” Doris Lessing (or DL, as I refer to her affectionately) is one of a handful of writers (Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai being a couple of the others) who, when I read them, seem to be talking directly and personally to me. As I read her work, I enter a state of total identification, even in the rare cases when the critical side of my brain registers a tiny bit of dissonance.

I first encountered Doris Lessing in 1974 when I was 19, living on my own for the first time and taking a year off from university in the U.S. to be an “Occasional Student” (yes, that was an official category) at University College London. A large part of my motivation for studying abroad that year was simply to have a reason to be in London. Besides reading every contemporary novel I could get my hands on, I spent hours just walking through the city at all hours of the day and night (along the way picking up and working my way through a hot soggy packet of chips, sprinkled generously with salt and doused liberally with malt vinegar). Later, when I read her 1960 memoir, In Pursuit of the English, Doris, newly arrived from Southern Africa, walks through London in the same way, seeking to understand her parents and to make the city her own. Although London—North London, the borough of Camden, to be precise—was my mother’s native place and the place where my parents had met and married, I had never yet lived there as an adult; neither had Doris Lessing, who was 30 by the time she first set foot in the land of her parents’ birth.

Among the novels I read in 1974 was The Summer Before the Dark. Still a rebellious teenager, I was unable to fully take in the weariness and frustration of a middle-aged housewife, but I recognized something in the novel and sought out more. When I spoke of it to Lily, my mother’s best friend from babyhood and a voracious and discriminating reader, she scoffed at it, saying that it was nothing compared to Lessing’s 1962 masterpiece, The Golden Notebook; which I read, dutifully, and again, took in only partially at the time. But I kept returning to DL, gravitating toward her 5-volume bildungsroman, Children of Violence—especially, at first, the four volumes set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when the young protagonist, Martha Quest, was growing up and establishing her independence. (Later, the fifth novel in the series, The Four-Gated City, set in London, would catch me in its grip and I would return to it again and again.)

Back in the States, I decided to write my senior thesis on Doris Lessing. A mistake, no doubt, given my wildly partisan passion for her work, her own deep distaste for academia, and my university’s complete cluelessness about contemporary fiction (at the time their English department taught nothing written after the Second World War and very little written after the First).  As a result, although I read just about everything by DL down to the last review (and that was a tall order, given that since 1950 she had supported herself and her son entirely through her writing) and the few bits of criticism that existed on her by that time, I was not equipped to write a critical essay on my idol, especially since my ideas kept getting wider and deeper the more I delved into the body of her work, through Briefing for a Descent into Hell and culminating in her 1974 novel-cum-spiritual-autobiography, The Memoirs of a Survivor. (Incidentally, 1975, the year I was writing my thesis, had been declared International Women’s Year; rumor had it that the Nobel Prize for Literature was going to be awarded to a woman, and that DL was on the short list. As it turned out it was not until 2007, thirty-two years later, that she was to be awarded the prize.)

The final weekend before my thesis was due was my own personal descent into hell. All week long I had burned the midnight oil night after sleepless night. Then, literally at the eleventh hour, I arrived at a new insight into DL’s work culminating in The Memoirs of a Survivor, which, although it did not invalidate my thesis up to that point, superseded it and to my mind rendered it inconsequential. I was faced with the choice of delaying the completion of my degree by six months in order to write a new thesis or finishing up willy nilly, with an inferior product that would merely get me through. To my shame, I chose the latter.

That last night took on a nightmare quality. As I wrote wildly, scrawling more and more illegibly, my friend Leighton typed and another friend, Joel, proofread, editing freely as they went. After some time Leighton, in his understated, mildly amused way, registered a note of concern that I was “starting to ramble.” Sure enough, as I was writing my vision had become blurred and, as if mimicking Memoirs of a Survivor itself,  the walls of the room had become fluid and were dissolving and swirling in a pattern that I could not quite grasp. I pushed on, disregarding Leighton’s cautions, and the next morning found me proofreading, whiting out, and correcting before running to Gnomon Copy in Harvard Square to get the thing photocopied and bound before the noon deadline. Just before I left the house I realized that I didn’t yet have a title. In desperation, I snatched one out of thin air: “Vision and Division in the Works of Doris Lessing.” That inspired title was probably the best part of the thesis, which I haven’t been able to bring myself to read since.

In the decade that followed, I read each of her novels as soon as it was published, devouring it like a starving person. I loved her space fiction series, Canopus in Argos: Archives (five novels, like The Children of Violence), more than anything that had come before; and while people who had cut their teeth on The Golden Notebook bewailed the death of the old Lessing they had loved, I delighted in Lessing’s old themes swirling ever-wider, out, out into the universe and back inwards deep into the human psyche and the collective unconscious. My favorites in that period were, and still are, Shikasta—in my opinion her masterpiece—and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five.

photo by Linda Haas

In April, 1984, just before I realized that I was pregnant with Nikhil, Doris Lessing came to Boston. I went eagerly to BU to hear her speak with my friend Linda, who photographed her for a local feminist magazine (Sojourner, I think it was): she did not disappoint. A few people, though, appeared to be disgruntled, and asked a variant of the question so many had asked before and have gone on asking since: “Why did you stop writing all those lovely novels about the relationships between men and women (and the unspoken, “Why don’t you return to writing them again?)? Her bemused reply: “But I never stopped writing them. What was The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five if not a novel about the relationships between men and women?”

Thirteen years later, in 1997, when I had completed my graduate studies and had taken up a teaching job, DL came to Boston again, to a packed auditorium at the Boston Public Library. I made the pilgrimage from New Hampshire to see her and to hear her read from Walking in the Shade, the second volume of her autobiography. At the very end of the long question period, someone asked her which of her more than fifty works was her favorite. Looking completely bewildered, she replied: “I don’t see them as separate works. In my mind, I’ve only ever written one book.”

In Walking in the Shade, DL writes of buying her first house in Somers Town, a working-class neighborhood of North London between Euston Station and Mornington Crescent. I know Somers Town as the neighborhood where my cousin Susan lived for many years and where my maternal grandmother was born. Later, as her writing brought her financial stability, DL was able to move to the house where she lives now, in the West Hampstead/Kilburn area within walking distance of Hampstead Heath, where my mother and her brothers grew up, and, as I said earlier, where my parents met and where I was born. In 2002 my parents took a rare trip to London together to visit family, and stayed near Parliament Hill, just a few blocks from the Heath. Upon her return, Mum presented me with a tea cozy from Kenwood House and told me that she was sure she had seen Doris Lessing striding over the Heath with a younger man—perhaps her son? I am sure it was she, for one of her stories, “Sparrows” (in The Real Thing) is set at Kenwood, and in a 1999 interview with Jonah Raskin, she said that she went for long walks on the Heath three or four times a week. I like to think of DL and my mother almost-meeting on the Heath, that part of London Mum loves best (and therefore, that I love best as well, one of my earliest memories being rolling down a long grassy slope that must have been Parliament Hill). I like to think, too, that she has walked many a time by my Aunt Bette who, her agemate at 91, still likes nothing better than her weekly ramble over Hampstead Heath, ending up at Kenwood House with a bite to eat and a nice cup of tea. (On second thoughts, Auntie Bette may like her Sunday roast better, but if so, the Heath comes a close second.)

Like my very dearest friends, DL shows me the way not only by treading the path before me but by her example, exposing my hypocrisies, daring me to do better work, reminding me to be true to myself. Dear Doris Lessing, fear not isolation in your old age, for you have given expression to the Substance-of-We-Feeling through which all human beings are joined in one great endeavour; and fear not that you have been forgotten, for you are already an Immortal. Your glorious oeuvre tells the story of my life, and that of many, many others.

nobelprize.org

In 2008 at the age of 89, Doris Lessing  published Alfred and Emily, which she declared to be her last book. It is eloquent, experimental, of a piece with everything she has ever written. For in it she first tells the sad story of her father and mother, the one she has been telling and re-telling in one way or another all along, and then generously imagines for each of them what their lives might have been like had it not been for the catastrophe of the Great War. Generously, I say, for in imagining happy lives for her parents, she does not envision them marrying each other, and therefore, she, Doris, is not born. Selfishly, I am deeply grateful that her parents did meet and marry. Whether they were happy or not, I maintain that the day they met was an auspicious one, for it gave us one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

Of course, parents everywhere seek to bring their children into the presence of greatness, and mine were no exception. My mother had loved ballet ever since she had taken classes at night school in post-war London. While we were living in Athens in 1962, the opportunity arose to see the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn dance with the great Rudolf Nureyev, an occasion not to be missed. The setting was the 1800 year-old Herodes Atticus outdoor theatre at the Acropolis on a summer’s night; the performance, the sublime Swan Lake. But there was one problem: I was too young to appreciate it.

At eight, I was old enough to know that I ought to have been loving every moment, but, looking down the steep stone steps at the lighted stage with the tiny figures flitting across it, I struggled to stay awake even as I admonished myself to pay attention and remember this evening. Half a century later I do remember it, and am proud to be able to say that I once saw the great Fonteyn and Nureyev dance together, but at the time I couldn’t make much sense of what I saw. To tell the awful truth, I was bored. Normally, I begged to be allowed to stay up with my Greek friends, who, having taken siestas in the afternoon, were able to play late into the long summer nights.  And here I was out with the grown-ups having the experience of a lifetime, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Halley's Comet 1986 (spacestationinfo.com)

When I became a parent, I too longed to share with my child the things that I valued, to give him the opportunity to see awe-inspiring sights or to benefit from coming into the presence of beauty and wisdom. In the Spring of 1986, when Nikhil was little more than a year old, Halley’s comet came around, a visitation that occurs only once every 76 years. Since we were living in Winchendon at the time, removed from big-city lights, we could expect to get a good view of the comet on a clear night. We woke one bitter-cold night at the appointed time and dressed in our warmest clothes. Although Nikhil was sleeping soundly, I couldn’t bear to let him miss this experience, so I bundled him up in layer upon layer of woolly all-in-ones and blankets and carried him out to the car, still sleeping. We drove to the best spot and all stood looking up as long as we could stand it, with me holding the sleepy Nikhil aloft and pointing out the comet to him. Does he remember that historic night? Of course not. But did he benefit from turning his gaze upward on that late-night excursion? I would certainly like to think so.

Fast-forward to 1999, when Nikhil was 14 and the eminent postcolonial scholar Edward Said came to Amherst to speak at Hampshire College on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, Out of Place. Said was one of the scholars I most admired, so I was eager to introduce Nikhil to his work. Unfortunately that day Nikhil happened to have come down with a streaming cold, and he was in no condition to attend the talk. But I would not take no for an answer. I was determined that Nikhil should take the chance to see the great man and to hear him speak, so I more-or-less overrode his protestations and administered an anti-histamine that was advertised to dry up his teary eyes and runny nose for 12 hours. Hustling him into the car and to the lecture hall, I managed to bag two seats right near the front.

As soon as Professor Said entered and began to speak I was transfixed, listening with rapt attention, and only glancing at Nikhil periodically to see whether the antihistamine was taking effect. To my mortification, Nikhil kept nodding off throughout; every time I looked over, he seemed to be tipping slowly sideways, until he would catch himself with a start and jerk upright again. I kept shooting him stern looks, but to no avail. When the lecture was over and I demanded to know the meaning of my son’s rude behavior, he returned my demand with another: what on earth had been in that pill? Back home, I learned the awful truth: it was a sedating antihistamine whose label warned that it would cause drowsiness and should be taken only at night; in my eagerness for him to receive darshan of the great Edward Said, I had drugged my own son! Needless to say, he has no recollection whatsoever of that particular historic event; still, I tell myself that he nonetheless derived some benefit from the experience.

I was not destined to become a ballet dancer, despite my mother’s best efforts. As a child I was agile, but as likely to be found up a tree than on the ground. As a girl one of my more embarrassing moments was the May Day maypole dancing performance at St. Agnes in Kharagpur when I skipped in the wrong direction and tied my entire group in knots around our maypole. Still worse was the evening when, visiting my friend Preet in Gangtok, Sikkim, some of the royal family came to visit and each of us girls was asked to pair up with a prince for a dance. I had neither learned a foxtrot nor slow-danced with a boy before, and in my awkwardness, I’m afraid I stepped all over his feet. Somehow we got through the dance, but that evening I learned what it felt like to want to sink through the floor. Even so, even if it did not bestow physical grace upon me, I maintain that, in time, my darshan of the divine Fonteyn and Nureyev will turn out to have given me something of lasting value. You never can tell.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

Coppersmith in Pune (Chandana Banerjee, indiacurrents.com)

So many things have disappeared. The coppersmiths, for instance. There was a whole lane of them in Ratnagiri.  And the men who would come around to the house, and sit there, fluffing up the cotton batting in your pillows and making fresh new covers for them. 

My father is remembering his childhood in Ratnagiri, on the Konkan coast of India. By all accounts his was a blissfully happy childhood and, although Ratnagiri had excellent schools and Dad can quote in almost equal measure from Sanskrit, Marathi, and English literature, it seems that school and studying somehow happened on the edges of existence, not to be mixed up with the real business of living. Dad doesn’t talk very much about his childhood, but when he does he recalls energetic and creative play: swimming with his elder brother, climbing coconut palms, making and then flying his own kites. He was the fifth of eight children and the third, the Arjuna, of five brothers. Like Arjuna, the Renaissance Man of the five Pandavas from the epic Mahabharata, he was athletic and adventurous. He also had a passion for painting, studied art, read voraciously, laughed a lot, and loved life.

Sir J. J. School of Art

When his father ruled out a career as an artist, my father enrolled instead in Bombay’s famous Sir J. J. School of Art and took a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture. As a student, he took great pleasure in his architectural drawings, and even much later, in the States, by which time these tasks were delegated to draftsmen and computers, he insisted on drawing up all his own blueprints.

Dad was the first—and for a long time, the only one—of his siblings to go abroad, thanks to the generous help of his eldest brother, who paid his fare from Bombay to London for further studies. The British Nationality Act of 1948 enabled all “Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” including citizens of British Commonwealth countries, to travel freely to Britain. Dad set out alone in August, 1949 on the P. & O. steamer, the S.S. Maloja (port of departure, Brisbane), whose ship’s log of British passengers lists him as a student and records his age as twenty-five. (Thanks to my sister’s friend Doug, who found the records on ancestry.com.) He was not to return for five years, this time traveling with an English wife and a six-month-old baby.

Those steamers, too, have disappeared. I had the opportunity to travel by ship between Britain and India three times in my infancy and early childhood, and, according to my mother, first learned to walk on board ship. But by the time I was nine, the days of steamships for passenger travel were over, and it was cheaper, though far less satisfying, to fly. (See The Bay of Biscay and the Gully Gully Man.)

It is easy to say that nothing ever disappears; that “nothing’s over, ever,” as one of Anita Desai’s characters says in her novel of family and memory, Clear Light of Day; but in fact, whole ways of life, like those of the coppersmiths, customs, even languages, are disappearing every day. When Dad speaks in his mother tongue, which he rarely gets the opportunity to do nowadays, it is “chaste Marathi,” hardly spoken in India anymore, where young people in particular liberally intersperse their Marathi with English words. But at least it is not dying out; it is not “pure,” to be sure, but then, what language is? Not pleasing to some ears, perhaps, but nonetheless serving the needs of a lively new generation.

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh (from tampabay.com)

On one of my visits to India, Tara-kaki told me that there were so many songs that were no longer sung these days, songs that mothers sang to their children on particular festivals. She recalls singing them to my cousins in their childhood, and making certain foods that were only eaten on those days. Those too are rarely eaten today, or even remembered. I remember her saying, with a laugh, that the electric grinders that are to be found in every middle-class Indian household today, so welcome to the busy working woman because they save hours of arduous hand-grinding, have been responsible for millions of Indian women running to fat, since their everyday lives no longer include physical exercise. She also recalled that there were special songs that women used to sing as they ground the grain together—for the larger grinding jobs were two-person operations—those too now largely forgotten.

Tara-kaki’s words put me in mind of these lines from the late Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, The Dacca Gauzes:

. . . “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,

“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

And yet what has been lost can be recovered in memory and passed on through storytelling and artistic re-creation. Perhaps that is why so many of these stories in Tell Me Another recall times long gone. My hope is that they can convey even a little of the feel and flavor of those times. Am I living in the past, I wonder? I carry with me nearly six decades of living memories and, through the stories that have been told to me, records of times even earlier than my own. Like the Ancient Mariner, I feel compelled to tell and re-tell them, lest they disappear altogether.

At the turning of the light, with the Winter Solstice just a few hours away, perhaps this is a time when one inevitably and equally looks back, to recall people, places, and practices left behind, and forward, to welcome those yet to come. While I remind myself that nothing is really lost as long as we carry it within us, my new yoga teacher reminded me today that some things, those that no longer serve us well, must be let go if we are to move forward with renewed energy. As I look within and honour the past, I hope I may release things whose time is over without fear of losing what is precious and will always endure.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

53. Sucking Lemons and Quoting Shaw (G)

36. My Grandmother

70. Party Pieces (G)

33. A Nice Bit of Spanish (G)

17. Chickens on the Pot

111. Strawberry-Picking Camp (G)

94. My Uncrowned Queens (G)

133. So Many Things Have Disappeared (G)

20. The Bay of Biscay and the Gully Gully Man (G)

26. Dolls I Have Loved (and Lost) (G)

75. The Long Journey (G)

18. Songlines

44. Greece in the 60s: Expats and Other Animals (G)

96. Learning to Swim (G)

34. His Master’s Voice (G)

104. Untangling (G)

11. The Napkin Collection

120. I once was lost (and wish I still were) (G)

138. Learning How (Not) to See (G)

81. St. Catherine’s and Miss Tutte (G)

134. Darshan, or You Never Can Tell (G)

45. A Lurid Imagination?

59. Childhood Scars

107. Kalo Paska (G)

25. British TV, Fall of ‘63 (G)

62. Regulation Underwear (G)

32. My Wrestling Career

109 Hindi Lessons (G)

7. The Comic Shed (G)

112. Хоттабыч in India (G)

113. Riding Like the Wind (G)

12. Following the Elephant Spoor

28. Pre-dawn Adventures (G)

16. Tree Elf

63. Secrecy and Velvet Bugs (G)

49. Making Sense of the Movies (G)

35. The Nation (G)

46. My Ink-Smudged Youth (G)

48. Jaggery Coconut, Nectar of the Gods (G)

68. Frittered!

71. Simply Paying Attention

52. Himalaya (G)

24. Hidden Places (G)

60. Cod-Liver Oil and Malt (G)

38. Study Halls and Cinchona (G)

27. Rumpelstiltskin (G)

54. Flash

119. Top of the Pops, 1968-69 (G)

67. Fiasco on the 715 (G)

47. The Paper Round (G)

125. My Autograph Book (G)

83. A Clear, Cold New England Day

95. Sail On, Silver Girl

6. Morse’s Supermarket

84. Feasting or Fasting? (G)

4. The Tree House (G)

8. Bad Role Model

92. Cookbooks, Immigrants, and Improvisation (G)

40. send my roots rain (G)

137. A Victorian Frame of Mind (G)

31. Gas-Station Shirts (G)

89. Make Love, Not Clockwork Devil-Doggery (G)

88. Sisters, Pick Up Your Sisters (G)

55. Quick-Change Artist

57. Toughening Up

3. The Horn Player in the Cupboard

5. Idolizing Princess Anne (G)

41. Eating for Four (G)

110. The Party (G)

1. Letting Go of the Clutch (G)

23. Brackish Water and Cherry Soda (G)

72. Learnin’ the Blues (G)

135. Doris Lessing and Me (G)

39. Two at a Time (G)

2. The Leather Welding Jacket

22. Mushrooming and Berry-Picking (G)

114. Food for People , Not for Profit (G)

14. Everett the Ice Man (G)

29. Incident at the Donner Pass (G)

116. Medicinal Herbs (G)

37. Grandpa Victor and the Story of the Tomatoes

128. The Kurta Joke G)

30. Land of Enchantment (G)

102. No Nuclear News (G)

61. Burma-Shave Signs (G)

9. The Golden Boy

82. What’s Your Bag? (G)

127. Going Up the Country (G)

69. Wonders in the Woods (G)

10. Ghosts of New Boston

43. From a Railway Carriage (G)

108. Climb Over the Wall! (G)

99. Paharganj, January 1984

21. The Highlanders (G)

77. The Tea Tasting (G)

86. Bottled Sunshine (G)

65. Curb Your Enthusiasm: A Bedtime Story (G)

13. Paradise Lost

50. Learning How to Fold (G)

42. The Times Tables (G)

91. Tunneling (G)

19. Lively Up Yourself (G)

85. St. Nicholas’ Day (G)

100. My American Epiphany

139. Sealed with a Kiss (G)

118. Racist Bracist (G)

117. Personal Space, Indian-Style (G)

76. Say it Again (G)

87. Thanda Thanda Pani or, You Never Miss Your Water… (G)

79. Baths, Bathing, and Hot Water Bottles (G)

103. Holi, Water Play, Rites of Spring (G)

98. Oral Culture (so to speak) (G)

15. Humans—What a Bummer! (G)

80. Who Are You? (G)

58. Southbound

90. “Almost a Dude” (G)

73. Trouble (G)

51. Getting Out of Silver City (G)

64. Concert Collage (G)

93. Snowed In (G)

97. Sick in Bed (G)

129. Good Morning, Rainy Day (G)

132. My Muddle (G)

130. Orwellian Jingles (G)

105. My Garden of Forking Paths (G)

126. Word Choice: Does it Matter? (G)

74. Three Towers, Three Coincidences

101. The Japan Syndrome (G)

122. The Land of the Free—Really? (G)

124. A Meditation on Money (G)

56. International Arrivals (G)

123. That Funny Accent (G)

115. An Immigrant’s Reflections on Independence Day (G)

66. The Mango Room (G)

131. Across the Miles (G)

121. The Taste of Home (G)

106. Slow: Salamander Crossing (G)

78. October Rains (G)

136. The Shame of Self-Censorship (G)

140 Music Alone Shall Live (G)

Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964, 1970) features a piece of conceptual art that has always fascinated me. “Laundry Piece” proposes that one entertains one’s guests by going through a pile of as-yet-unwashed laundry and telling them how, when, and why each item got dirty. I suppose this  interested me so much as a teenager because it was a story I recognized as mine. As each day’s clothes, books, and papers piled up, both literally and figuratively, their successive layers were sedimenting into the archaeology of my  life.

In my senior year at university I lived in a cooperative house with 40 other undergraduates. My room was a large octagonal one on the top floor with a semicircle of bay windows. One morning following a late, late night, I sat with a couple of friends watching the sun streaming in through the windows and motes of dust wafting their way down, down, down, to settle at last in a fine layer upon all my things, already accumulating at an alarming rate although I was as yet barely twenty years old. I saw then, with the clarity of youth, how life went by: dealing with the continuous influx of things, things that accumulated willy nilly, so that one’s whole life could be, would be, occupied just clearing them out and dusting them off. It was just like that scene in Alice Through the Looking Glass where, as the Red Queen tells Alice, she has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place.

It has turned out as I foresaw then, only I have not been able to run fast enough to keep up with, let alone get ahead of, that continuous influx, to sort through, dust off, and clear out at a pace that maintains a modicum of order in my living spaces. What I have instead, is a muddle. Sometimes it triumphs over me, as on Nikhil’s third birthday, when I was perfectly capable of cooking, organizing games, and making party favors for a dozen or more toddlers, but lost my nerve when I came up against a mountain of unsorted clothes that needed to be folded and put away. I remember throwing up my hands in despair and allowing Maureen and Andrew to move in and work their way through it expertly, in no time at all. No wonder Yoko Ono’s “Laundry Piece” appealed to me: it turned a liability into a distinctive asset. Rather than clearing up my muddle, I could transform it into art!

Turning a liability into an asset. from facebook.com/AuthorToniBlake

I suppose that most of my life since then has been characterized by a kind of strategy of accommodation. Rather than running as fast as I can to keep up, I make a virtue, even a bit of a mystery, of my messiness. (And yes, like E.M. Forster in A Passage to India, I’m well aware that a mystery is “only a high-sounding term for a muddle.”) My home may be a muddle, but it’s my muddle. I remember a younger sibling of one of Nikhil’s friends  coming over to our house to play and looking around him wonderingly. “Nikhil’s Mom,” he said, “Your house is so interesting!” If I hadn’t loved him already, he would have endeared himself to me for life with that innocent appraisal of my messy home.

Sometimes, though, my home gets too interesting, even for me, who has a high tolerance for things of interest. When that happens, the walls start to close in on me and I am thrown into a frenzy of cleaning and clearing that lasts until I collapse with a cup of tea to rest for a moment and survey my handiwork. But alas, not for long enough; to quote my favorite proverb from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, “Eneke the bird says that since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching.” In this topsy-turvy looking-glass world, one pauses at one’s peril, let alone standing still.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents