204. Victory V’s

Old poster for Victory V’s

During the  year or so that I lived in England in the late 1960s I became something of an expert on English sweets (or candy, if you’re from the U.S.). I always maintain—and this from a person who takes pride in eating all organic—that the English (who have long been featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest per capita candy consumption)  make the best artificial flavors for their sweets. Barratt Sherbet Fountains, sherbet lemons, Trebor Refreshers, Maltesers, Maynard’s Wine Gums, Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, Crunchie bars, Bassett’s Jelly Babies, I loved them without reservation, and strove—always in vain—to emulate my Auntie Bette, the Queen of Sweets, in her expertise on everything related to confectionery and in the sheer volume she managed to put away.

I’ve written in an earlier story about how I was introduced to English sweets and to television advertising at the same time. Some of the advertising slogans and jingles are burnt into my brain. “Opal Fruits: Made to make your mouth water,” for instance. Victory V’s were old-school: no TV advertising for them. But their slogan was unforgettable:

Victory V: It’s got a kick like a mule

Victory V’s were not very prepossessing in their appearance: flat, rock-hard brick-like lozenges the color of dirty khaki. Their decidedly acquired smell and taste was no better: it was more than mildly medicinal, and seemed to shoot straight up your nose and into your brain. One might well ask why anyone would want to subject herself to such an ordeal, and it might have remained a mystery to me had I not read the ingredients list. That is interesting in itself, since most British food products weren’t required to have an ingredients list until quite recently. But Victory V’s did have one and when I read it I discovered why the product had such a “devoted band of asbestos-mouthed fans”: two of its active ingredients were chloroform and ether!

Yes—you read it right: chloroform—the stuff in which comic-book no-good-niks soak a rag to overpower their victims—and ether—the stuff that anesthetists administer before their patients go under the knife. No wonder so many schoolchildren consumed the nasty-tasting throat lozenges as if they were candy! After you had sucked your way through two or three of those babies, breathing deep all the while, you were guaranteed to feel no pain.

Remembering Victory V’s a little while ago, I wondered if perhaps I had misremembered about the chloroform and ether. If it were true, then surely they would not have sold these things over the counter in sweetshops, and to schoolchildren. Some quick research gave me a bit of a history lesson. Apparently, Victory V Lozenges started out in the mid-1800s as a patent medicine, Victory Chlorodyne Lozenges with the original ingredients of pulverised sugar, linseed, liquorice, chlorodyne (a soothing mix of cannabis and chloroform) and pure acacia gum. They was later renamed Linseed Liquorice V Lozenge Victory and sold as a confection. They acquired their current name, Victory V lozenges, back in 1911, even before the First World War, long before Churchill popularized the V sign in the Second.

My research also confirmed that my memory of the active ingredients had been correct, although it also revealed that the Victory V’s of today no longer contain them, just simulations of their original flavor, and that their sales have plummeted, most likely due to the public’s preference for natural ingredients over synthetic ones.  The new slogan is “Victory V: Forged for Strength”; but it just doesn’t have the kick that the old one did.

Note: Several of my favorite English sweets now have versions with natural favors and colors and, to my surprise, they are delicious. There is such a thing as Progress.

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133. So Many Things Have Disappeared

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.

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75. The Long Journey

Anant Nivas, Ratnagiri (photo by Josna Rege)

In the early days we could get to Ratnagiri only by boat or by rickety State Transport bus over the Western Ghats. The journey took three long days across the country by steam train, followed by a choppy trip down the coast from Bombay by steamer. Ratnagiri had no deep-water harbor, so the steamer anchored offshore, and we had to climb down ladders into little rowing boats. My memory of those boats is of a night-time arrival, with streaks of phosphorescence in the dark water as we were rowed to shore. From there the only mode of transport that was available to take us to the family compound was a bullock cart that carried us, swaying and lurching, up to the front of the house.

During the monsoons the steamer trips would be discontinued due to dangerous conditions, and the passes over the Ghats were subject to landslides, so Ratnagiri was very nearly cut off from the world. All that has changed now, of course, first with the luxury buses left over from the 1982 Asian Games and then in 1998 with the Konkan Railway, which runs down the Arabian Sea coast from Mumbai all the way to Mangalore, and has opened the town to development as never before. But our Ratnagiri house was all the dearer for its unreachability. Stepping over its threshold was entering another era, the world of our childhoods and our parents’ childhoods, a place where everything remained exactly the same, and the very smell of the place—wood smoke, ripening mangoes, bookworms, damp cotton saris hanging on the back verandah—recalled instantly all former times there.

The compound has a wall, now crumbling, with a narrow opening in it for people cutting across it on foot to slip through. Where once there may have been a main gate there has been no gate as long as I can remember, just an opening to the long driveway which curves around to the front portico. There every morning, rain or shine, when the earth-red tile floor had been freshly swept and decorated with rangoli, a steady stream of townspeople would begin arriving, supplicants seeking the help of Mai-atya, my aunt Kumud: a woman with marital troubles, a widowed man seeking a new wife, the director of the remand home, the head teacher of the childcare center. When she had bathed and done her morning puja, Mai-atya would step out of the front doorway, sit at the heavy teak table and meet with each one in turn. That old table had belonged to Thibaw the King of Burma, who had been deposed by the British in 1895 and exiled with his family all the way to the west coast of India, living and dying under house arrest in Ratnagiri. When the family sold off the furniture my grandfather bought the table, which has held up magnificently in all weathers this half-century and more.

My grandfather purchased the estate in 1939, on the brink of the Second World War, when the British still had not relinquished their colonial control of India. The house had been built for a high-ranking British civil servant and was designed in the grand old style, with a ceiling nearly twenty feet high in the main hall (so high that we could play badminton in it during the hot summer afternoons) and a roof made of the red Mangalore tiles found all along the Konkan coast. In recent years that roof has sprung numerous leaks, as monkeys displaced by development have wreaked havoc on the tiles. But inside the house, the monsoon damp notwithstanding, nothing is ever lost.

When, as a newlywed, I made the journey back to Ratnagiri for the first time since we had left India more than 15 years earlier, the same familiar smell welcomed me, and I walked Andrew round the house and compound showing him all the familiar sights—the framed photographs of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my eight-year-old sister Sally playing the recorder; the letter from the President of India to Bhai-kaka when he was awarded the Vir Chakra; drawings by my father in his youth; the magnificent old chaffa tree we used to climb as children, each of its fallen flowers a sacred offering.

And the books. I showed Andrew my grandfather’s edition of The Arabian Nights, translated by Richard Burton, my eldest uncle Anna-kaka’s collection of English books (like me, he too was a student of English literature), and the old Penguin paperbacks my father had bought in London. But as I looked further I started to find others, ones that I had almost forgotten and never thought I would see again: American and British children’s books, some of which we had carried with us all the way from Greece, and a small blue hardcover volume with tissue-thin pages, a little damp but miraculously free of bookworm tracks, The Complete Works of Robert Burns. The flyleaf bore an inscription to my mother from her childhood best friend, Lily, a gift to her before she left for India. With permission from Mai-atya—the zealous guardian of the house who acquired next-to-nothing herself, having taken a vow of Gandhian simplicity in 1942—I carried that little book back to my mother.

I try to count the number of times I have made the journey to Ratnagiri but cannot be sure, since some of the trips were made when I was very young. Amazingly, the total cannot be much more than I can count on my two hands. How can it be that a place in which I have spent so little time can mean so much to me? But it is not just me; my grandparents spent their married lives there and died in Ratnagiri, and my father and his seven siblings were born and raised there. At least four of my cousins, my eldest aunt Tai-atya’s children, were born in that house; and Shubha and Meena, my eldest uncle Anna-kaka’s daughters, lived and went to school there for many years under the care of Mai-atya and Aaji, our grandmother. Now Mandatya, my youngest aunt, is looking after Mai-atya there, while the sale of the house is being arranged at last.

It is sentimental, no doubt, to cling to things, but it is human nature to become attached to places. Coming from the branch of the family who had traveled the farthest from India, the homecoming to a place that had never been my own home always had a special poignancy for me. Since almost everybody in Ratnagiri seemed to know or know of our family (until recently, at least), I could never be anonymous there and I loved it. Complete strangers to me, rickshaw-wallahs, shopkeepers, passers-by, would stop me on the street or in the bazaar to tell me that I looked like one of my aunts, or to ask if I was the daughter of “the one who left.” Now I must build an image of the Ratnagiri house in my mind’s eye, and find home there—here, that is, within.

(For another story of our family home, see The Mango Room.)

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52. Himalaya

photo by Karl Hagen

For three years in the mid-to-late 1960s, I went to boarding school in Darjeeling, six thousand feet above sea-level in the Himalayan foothills. Every March I would take a small plane from the plains down in Calcutta (Kolkata) to Bagdogra airport in Siliguri. From Siliguri it was six hours of winding vertiginously up into the mountains by jeep or bus or, for the lucky ones, narrow-gauge railway. Our school’s main building was an unheated stone castle, wreathed in mist most of the time. We slept under three blankets throughout the school year, which lasted until November, when the school closed down for the winter months and most of the students made the long journey back down to the plains. For a month beforehand we all sang GHD (Going Home Day) songs rich with school slang; one of our favorites, sung to the tune of “The Camptown Races”, went:

Going Home Day has come at last, doo-dah, doo-dah/Going Home Day has come at last, Oh, doo-dah day/We travel all the night, we travel all the day/We spend our money on the DHR (Darjeeling Himalayan Railway), doo-dah doo-dah day.

Down from old Mount Hermon, on a rutphut (ramshackle) bus/After nine months mugging (studying), back to home, to fuss/Teachers are so bucky (trouble-making), prefects are the same/Everybody’s happy, waiting for the train.

Ghoom, Sonada, Kurseong, all are left behind/Though our journey’s very long, I’m sure we do not mind (all shout: We do!)/When we reach Sealdah (railway station in Calcutta), hail it with a shout/Paan, bidi, cigret (the cries of the station-vendors), kick the teachers out!

All the English-medium boarding schools in Darjeeling were run by Christians of various denominations, on the model of British public schools. There was St. Joseph’s and St. Paul’s, both boys-only schools, and the all-girls’ Loreto Convent. Mount Hermon, the youngest of the four, was unique in being coeducational and was run by Baptist missionaries from Australia and New Zealand (although it had been founded by American Methodists). The schools had been established during the days of the British Raj, when Darjeeling (originally Dorje Ling) became a summer getaway for wives and children of the British civil servants stationed in the sweltering plains. Twenty years after independence,  the quaint little town was inhabited by Indians, Nepalis, Tibetan refugees, Sikkimese, Bhutanese, and a few Britishers who had stayed on. There were still vestiges of the colonial days in the Mall, where tourists could get pony rides, buy cakes and milk-shakes at Glenary’s, go for a drink at the Planters Club, and—if they could afford it—stay at the elegant, old-world Windamere Hotel, where afternoon tea and sandwiches were still served in the British style. By our day, though, one could just as easily find salt-and-buttered Tibetan tea in Darjeeling.

Despite our school’s mostly-non-Indian staff and its British boarding-school traditions such as the house system, school ties, and the tuck shop, the students themselves were mostly Indian, with a few each from Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet, Thailand, Australia, England, and the United States (three American exchange students from Chicago who initially shocked us with their cigarette-smoking but became good friends). I still remember our lively discussions about Christianity with our missionary teachers, coming as so many of us did from Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist families. Isolated on the school grounds (except when we “bunked” to Hafiz’ shop at North Point for momos, steamed meat dumplings, or to Black Rock*, the spot among the tea bushes where as teenagers we once arranged a secret—and completely innocent—meeting with our boy- and girl-friends), we were far removed from the turmoil of the outside world, from the Marxist-Leninist Naxalite movement exploding nearby in our own Marxist state of West Bengal, from the Nepali separatist movement that would erupt into violence in Darjeeling just a few years later, and from the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and Flower-Power movements flourishing in the United States.

photo by Karl Hagen

Surrounded by swirling mists and tea estates terraced on the steeply sloping hillsides, our one immovable frame of reference was the mountain range. On days when the mists cleared, we looked out of our dormitory windows upon the snows of Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world. We were told that it was fully fifty miles away, but it appeared to be just across the valley. Since our headmaster’s wife was a passionate music-lover, Mount Hermon was known as the singing boarding school. We sang our hearts out morning, noon and night: in morning chapel, in daytime music classes and choir practice, in evening rehearsals for the annual—and legendary—school musicals. When the choir sang the anthem, “Lift thine eyes, Oh lift thine eyes, to the mountains, whence co-meth, whence co-o-meth, whence co-o-meth help,” we lifted our eyes and souls to the Himalayas alone. The song must have been written with other, faraway mountains in mind, but for us there were no others. When we were taken into Darjeeling town to see The Sound of Music, Maria’s echoing hills were, naturally, the Himalayas only. And when we learned a song called, “Oh India, Mother India,” our hearts swelled with pride at the natural beauty of our country, a beauty that we could not fail to see around us wherever we turned our heads. The words are engraved in my mind:

O beautiful for azure skies, for amber waves of grain/For snow-capped mountain majesties, above the fruited plain.

O India, Mother India, God shed his grace on thee/And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Later, when my family emigrated to the United States, I encountered another version of this song, which the Americans had had the cheek to rename “America the Beautiful.” The mountains in their version were not snow-capped, but bare and purple with cold.

Today I have little use for nationalist sentiment, but the thought and even the sound of the word Himalaya remains powerfully evocative for me. Himal Southasian is an e-magazine that, like the mountains themselves, spans and defines all of the subcontinent across national boundaries. Himalayan—as in the often-used Indian English phrase, Himalayan blunder—has passed into the English language as an adjective of extremes. Abode of the snows and the Everest-climbing Sherpas, the Himalayas are the source of the River Ganges, place of myth and legend, danger, awesome beauty and unimaginably lofty heights. For me they are still the only real mountains.

photo by Karl Hagen

I took my husband to Darjeeling with me after our marriage in 1983, my first time back since I had left India fifteen years before. We had to get a special permit to travel to Darjeeling, because of the Gorkha separatist unrest. Our pilgrimage took us along my annual route up to the town, down the Lebong cart road from North Point into the cold stone building which housed the dormitory I had shared for three years with 24 other schoolgirls. We toured a tea factory together as I had in social studies class so many years before, and re-visited Black Rock. We even woke up before four on our last morning to take the trip up the 10,000-foot-high Tiger Hill, from where on rare sunrises one could catch a glimpse of Everest. Although I had not succeeded in catching it in all my years at Mount Hermon, as a newlywed I hoped that my husband and I might be blessed with the sight. It was a fairly clear morning, and I thought I saw a tiny white speck just a bit more substantial than a cloud—or so I told myself.

Back at Bagdogra airport at the base of the mountains, we boarded a return plane for Calcutta. As the plane circled west to turn south, I happened to take a backward glance out of one of the windows. Framed there as if by magic shone—Everest? Unmistakably the highest peak in the range, the Everest I had never once managed to see in all the years I was living in Darjeeling. I stared until it was out of sight. Whether or not what I saw was actually Everest, Himalaya, abode of the snows, still stands supreme, there and in my mind’s eye, the fixed point to which all else refers.

As a child I had met the mountaineer Sir John Hunt, who delighted us schoolchildren by giving the famously enigmatic answer to the question of why his team had attempted that treacherous peak: “because it’s there.” But the mountain itself makes no demands, throws out no challenges. It is simply and majestically there.

* While preparing to write this piece, I looked up Black Rock on the Internet, and learned, to my sorrow, that in November 2009 Mount Hermon student Romel Ropuia fell to his death from the rock as he and two schoolmates, bunking from the school grounds, were returning for dinner. My deepest sympathies go out to his family. According to the current Principal, plans are now underway to fence the entire 74-acre school campus.Other Tell Me Another stories set (either wholly or in part) at Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling:

Other Tell Me Another stories set (either wholly or in part) at Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling:
24. Hidden Places
38. Study Halls and Cinchona
109. Hindi Lessons
125. My Autograph Book
129. Good Morning, Rainy Day
179. And he laughing said to me

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48. Jaggery Coconut, Nectar of the Gods

It was not until my sister and I were grown and out of the house that our father took up cooking in a systematic way, following the recipes in a Maharashtrian cookbook that he picked up on his first trip back to India, seven years after we had emigrated. By all accounts he had improvised to great acclaim during his bachelor years in England, and when we were growing up in Kharagpur he conducted occasional but memorable experiments with the fruits and vegetables he grew in our big home garden.

One concoction was bhel juice, which Dad mixed up in a large jar and presented to us as if it were nectar of the gods. (Bhel, also known in English as Bengali quince, I have learned since, is valued for its medicinal properties, particularly in treating constipation.) The juice looked promising, deep orange in color like mango juice, but turned out to be sour, watery, and without much flavor. Since Dad insisted that it was extremely good for the health and was evidently very pleased with it, we drank the tumblers he filled for us and made polite noises; but we didn’t ask for seconds.

A outstandingly successful experiment, and one that Dad carried out only once, did indeed produce nectar of the gods, a creation so delicious that it has assumed a near-mythical status in my mind. He took a green coconut, at a stage when it is still chock-full of water and the inner flesh a creamy pulp, cut through the outer husk, and drilled a small hole in the top. Then he poured in jaggery or gur, unrefined sugar that he must have pounded and melted on a low flame, sealed up the hole, and hung it in our dark pantry, safely out of reach of the ants. I don’t know how long it hung there, but we had forgotten all about it by the time he deemed that it was ready, lowered it ceremoniously, and broke it open.

Inside, it was like a geode. The coconut water had absorbed the jaggery and had itself been absorbed into the flesh of the coconut as it hardened, creating an indescribably delicious natural fudge of jaggery-imbued coconut meat. Dad passed it around in pieces and this time, he didn’t have to ask if we wanted more: we couldn’t get enough of it, and it was soon gone, leaving only a hallowed memory.

I have never heard of this preparation before or since, but perhaps it was something my grandmother used to make, since there is a large and prolific coconut palm growing outside the kitchen in Ratnagiri, which Dad says he used to climb as a boy. In preparing and serving us that wondrous coconut confection, he gave us an ancestral memory that has become part of us forever.

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46. My Ink-Smudged Youth

Until I started using the computer more than the pen, I had a knobby callus on the end joint of the middle finger of my left hand. And until I came to America that callus was permanently ink-stained, because I am incorrigibly messy and because I used a fountain pen.

As primary-school children in Greece we were issued a supply of ink and a new postcard-sized square of blotting paper every week. I don’t remember exactly what kind of pens we used, but I think that we must have been issued them as well, because I can’t remember having my own. Our desks still had inkwells built into them, but they were already vestigial by my time, since fountain pens allowed us to fill and write for a long time without having to dip the pen repeatedly into the ink.

No matter how modern the mechanism, filling a fountain pen was a tricky operation for me, which I could never perform without getting my fingers and clothes covered with ink. The school-issued ink seemed to be impervious to soap and water, and when I started buying my own along with my other school supplies, I was glad to be able to use washable ink (Quink was my favorite, blue or blue-black); not that it helped much.

Along with covering our textbooks and exercise books with brown paper, a  pleasurable ritual of preparing for a new school year was stocking our pencil boxes with a filled fountain pen, a ruler, compass, and protractor, brand-new lead pencils, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser.  (Of course, we didn’t call them erasers, but I learned to do so almost immediately after coming to America when, at 15, I innocently asked a boy in my class for a rubber. It took me a long time to live that one down.) At school in India, where we were responsible for purchasing our own fountain pens, I gained some cultural capital by developing a method of marking my classmates’ pens with their names. Using the tip of a pin, I would prick their initials or their full names into the barrel of the pen with a series of dots, and then rub chalk into the holes to bring the letters into relief.  It caught on, and for a short while I was in demand, with everyone bringing their pens to me for “engraving.”

When I got to secondary school in England in the late sixties, ball-point pens—or biros, as they were known, after the company that produced them—were catching on, but the headmaster of our comprehensive school disapproved of them as an American import that led inevitably to the deterioration of handwriting—and, it was strongly implied, to the degradation of culture more generally. (He felt the same about the gum-chewing, which he described as “chewing the cud,” and abhorred as a foul American habit.) So we used only fountain pens at the Broxbourne School. I needed all the help I could with my handwriting, which had always been one of my weakest subjects in primary school (second only to needlework), so perhaps it was just as well that I was forbidden to use a biro.

Being left-handed and bearing down hard distorted my nibs into what eventually became a workable shape for me, but not for anyone else who tried to use my pen. I favored a fairly thick nib, because I was liable to rip through the paper with a fine-tipped scratchy one. Thick nibs also lent themselves to medieval-style calligraphy, which became a teenage obsession that involved creating thick, double-walled letters with large, spiky serifs and using diamond-shaped dots on the i’s as in Goudy type (akin, perhaps, to today’s teenage girls replacing the dots on their i’s with big chubby hearts).

As we got older and experimented with our handwriting as we experimented with our identities (mine imitated my mother’s, my father’s, and my boyfriend’s until it more-or-less settled into its own mongrel scrawl), our pens became signature possessions, dear to our hearts and to our idea of ourselves as scholars and writers.  When Gail Inaba’s father gave me a Sheaffer fountain pen as a college graduation present, I treasured it for years, and now I do the same for the children of my friends at graduations and bat/bar mitzvahs.

It’s interesting that many young writers of this generation seem to be returning to the fountain pen as they are returning to the manual typewriter, an instrument even before my time, for the trusty Smith-Corona that saw me through my undergraduate years was already an electric model.  Filling and using the fountain pen becomes a kind  of ritual, perhaps, forcing one to slow down and take greater pleasure in the process of writing itself.  Of course these instruments coexist with the laptop and the iPhone, allowing for the high-stakes pleasure of creating  an unerasable original text and the high-speed practicality of editing, copying and disseminating it.

Today, I have a few old fountain pens knocking about, but use them only sporadically; when I do, somehow I still never fail to get my fingers covered with ink. My family says that I hammer the computer keys as hard as if they were the keys of a manual typewriter; that’s probably about as hard as I used to grip my fountain pen, giving me that characteristic inky callus that was a badge of my childhood. I miss it.

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44. Greece in the 60s: Expats & Other Animals

Greece in the early 1960s was a haven for bohemian expatriates, who could make a little money go a long way in a perfect Mediterranean climate among friendly, easygoing people. We lived in Athens from 1960 to 1963 while my father was working as an urban planner with the visionary Doxiadis (who coined the term Ekistics for the study of human settlements), during a peaceful interlude for the Greek people when the hardships of the Second World War and its aftermath were over  and the military junta of 1967 to 1973 was not yet on the horizon.My parents’ friends were an international crowd, and many were wonderfully eccentric. They all came bearing food and gifts and stories for my sister and me, and left a little of themselves in us as well. They were lovers of animals, of music, of life,  mellowed by the sun, the climate of acceptance (the favorite Greek phrase was den pirazi, or ‘it doesn’t matter’), and the plentiful Greek wine.

An artist with few material needs could live gloriously in Greece in 1962.  Retsina, Greek red wine, flowed like water and was sold by the barrel. Food—apricots, figs, fresh bread, yoghurt, feta cheese, and juicy red tomatoes—was cheap and abundant. Rents were affordable, presumably, for I was never aware of scarcity and my father must have been drawing a modest salary. And the Greeks loved children: when my parents were apartment-hunting and the landlords inquired how many children they had, we were a positive asset, especially my baby sister. (The Greek love for babies saved us when we were hauled into court for having accidentally overstayed our visa’s time limit. The judge was about to order our deportation when Sally started crying and he did an immediate turnaround, telling us gruffly to get out of there, quickly: Case dismissed.)

Friends were always flowing into our home and we into theirs. We used to visit a  Turkish friend and sit with him in his walled garden with mulberry bushes and a fig tree. Our German friend Ursula had a little Volkswagen, and drove us all around the countryside in it. (Unfortunately, I had bad carsickness as a child, and all I can remember of our outings with Ursula were the Volkswagen pulled off the road and me vomiting into a ditch.) There were Valerie and Barry Unsworth: Barry must have kept himself busy writing most of the time, because I remember Valerie better. Years after we left Greece we began seeing Barry’s name in print as a Booker-Prize winning novelist, and Greece has figured in more than one of his works. Another friend, Peter—I don’t remember his surname—first introduced me to Tolkien with a copy of The Hobbit, which he presented to me with great seriousness as a work of major importance; Paul, a mate of my Uncle Len visiting from Africa, brought me Little Women, and I identified completely with Jo, the bookworm; and when we returned to India the Plattens, whose father had worked at Doxiadis with mine, sent us a copy of the Australian classic, Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, which became a family favorite. To this day I can reel off large chunks of it by heart.

Every summer we used to travel just 20 kilometers out of Athens to Vouliagmeni, by far the pleasantest and most well-appointed public beach I have ever seen, before or since. One summer we rented a cabin in the area for a week or two, and got to know a fascinating cast of characters, all European expatriates driven to Greece by the War. The leading lady was a large, imposing figure of a woman, an artist with an air of tragedy about her, who had been some kind of aristocrat, perhaps a countess, back in Austria. She took us to the little coves around Vouliagmeni, where she collected shells and stones to make her striking jewelry, and gave me a beautiful grey-and-green striped lucky stone, worn smooth by the Aegean Sea, that I kept for many years, taking with me to exams in three countries until it was finally lost. There was a gaunt, graying, older man on the scene with whom she had an undefined relationship, but of whom I can remember nothing else, perhaps because his place in the household seemed distinctly secondary to that of her cats, all 32 of them.

Cats occupied every surface of the house and spilled out of every space, including the kitchen cabinets, as I recall. It smelled overwhelmingly of cats, of course, and if one was a friend of the Countess, one simply accepted it. Many expats left their cats with her when they finally left Greece, knowing that they would be safe, for she did not have it in her to reject a single one. Did we leave ours? I can’t quite remember.

The cabin we rented during that week by the sea was owned by Anna, a thin, straight-backed German woman—a painter, I think—who lived in the adjacent cottage with a dog, three cats, and a donkey. The most remarkable feature of the cottage was the sun room open to the sky where one could sunbathe in complete privacy. The cats and dog ate freely off Anna’s plate at mealtimes, and the donkey freely ate everything in sight out of doors. He munched regularly on the thatch of the cottage itself, chewed up one of my rubber flip-flops, and, one afternoon during siesta time, devoured half of my mother’s bikini as it hung on the line to dry.

Although the Greeks religiously took a long siesta after lunch every afternoon, with children coming home from school and fathers from work, I was chronically unable to sleep in the daytime. (This meant, among other things, that I had to go to bed earlier at night, while my Greek peers were allowed to play in the streets long into the warm summer evenings, while their parents sat outdoors talking, laughing, and drinking retsina.) On one particular long, hot afternoon at the cabin my parents and Sally were sleeping soundly while I sat outside restlessly, watching the donkey at work on the cottage roof, and looking for a playmate. But there was no one in sight except for the dog, who roused and shook himself and looked at me pointedly, as if to say, Okay, let’s go. So I followed.

It was a fascinating experience to be walked by that dog. He took me on a long circuit which obviously hit some of his favorite haunts, but also seemed to be courteously moderating his route and pace for my sake. When we reached the big tarred road that I had never crossed without holding one of my parents’ hands, he actually looked left, then right, then left again before he stepped off the kerb, with me following obediently behind him.  Eventually we doubled back down a desolate country lane and into a dry streambed, or perhaps an abandoned quarry, which some people seem to have used as a dump. My companion nosed around for a while, sniffing at an old boot, but politely aware that I might not share his interests.  So after some time we strolled out of the dump and he delivered me safely back home by another path, one I had never taken before, and perhaps one that was unknown to humans. We never went on a walk together again, and I never told my parents about it, but it was an afternoon I will never forget.

Come to think of it, our time in Greece was like one long summer afternoon. Hearing of the economic crisis there now, and the spirited response of the Greek people, who, celebrated Oxi (or No) Day every year to commemorate their rejection of Mussolini and Fascism, I wish them well, and a return someday to those golden times a half-century ago that they shared so freely with foreigners like us.

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43. From a Railway Carriage

Kasha-sathi pota-sathi/Khandala-chya ghata-sathi

Kashasathi potasathi/Khandalachya ghatasathi

In some of my earliest memories my father is patting me on the back to the beat of this Marathi nonsense rhyme, sending me off to sleep to the sound and rhythm of a railway train riding through the Western ghats. Ever since, I have found the sound of a passing train soothing and soporific, whistle and all.

Train journeys have punctuated my life, starting with our early cross-country family marathons from West Bengal to Maharashtra. How to write about memories that, for me, seem almost to stand for India itself? They flash by like scenes from a railway carriage, “each a glimpse and gone forever” (as in Stevenson’s poem),  and yet they endure, returning to me again and again.

We lived in the East of India while the rest of my father’s family lived in the West. In preparation for the three-day train journeys to visit them in the late 1950’s and 1960’s,  my mother would make a dry, spicy meat dish, long-lasting and easy to eat with chapattis. We would reserve a coupe, or private cabin, which we opened by day to other passengers but locked at night. Every few stops my father would leap off  to buy snacks and tea, sold in (disposable, biodegradable) earthenware cups by loud-voiced vendors on the platforms. We waited on tenterhooks lest he should miss the train and be left behind forever, and he always maximized the suspense by waiting until the train actually started pulling away from the station, running beside it and leaping on, often several carriages behind ours.

When the train paused at Nagpur in the middle of the night, Nanakaka and Tarakaki were waiting to greet us on the platform with a basket of oranges, that district’s specialty. I have a fleeting mental snapshot of my uncle, aunt, and cousins standing on the platform; as I have a snapshot of the Taj Mahal, seen across the Yamuna River from a railway carriage. Long before I ever visited the Taj, I happened to see it, as in a dream, while staring half-hypnotized out of the train window on one of those cross-country journeys. No one else was awake; I fancy the vision was mine alone.

By journey’s end my face was black with the smoke and soot of the steam engine.

Kashasathi potasathi/Khandalachya ghatasathi

In the early 1980s, as a newlywed returning with my husband to India for the first time after many years, I booked the Rajdhani Express from Bombay to Delhi, second-class AC two-tier sleeper, offering luxuries I had never encountered in my childhood. We were issued blankets and freshly laundered sheets, thermoses of tea that fit into handy brackets on the walls beside our berths. We were served three-course meals as delicious as any I remembered from childhood, in large, deep stainless-steel platters with their neat compartments filled with rice, dal, vegetable, curried chicken, yoghurt, pickle, and even a tub of Kwality ice cream for dessert. The air-conditioning was a feature I had not experienced before, certainly welcome in the heat of the summer, but it meant that the windows were covered with smudged sheets of plexiglass, no longer open to the outside; keeping us cool and clean, no doubt, but at a further remove from it all.

Still, other trips on mail trains and locals allowed us more direct sensory experience with the world outside. We saw, through the barred carriage windows, station names in three languages as we sped by; bullock-carts stopped at a level crossing; peasants bending over the crops in the early-morning mist; ponds choked with weeds and waterlilies; women filling their brass pots with water at the well; small boys playing in the river. We smelled incense, cow dung, diesel fumes; bartered with vendors plying their trade from the platforms; engaged in deep conversations with idiosyncratic fellow-travelers who regaled us, at great length, with their theories of life; and, upon arrival, were besieged by red-uniformed porters who fought over our suitcases.

Kashasathi potasathi/Khandalachya ghatasathi

We have had hair-raising experiences on trains. On our honeymoon trip, Andrew and I booked a private coupe for a Delhi-Kanpur journey. The day before, I happened to read in the Delhi newspaper that the very train we were scheduled to take had  stopped inexplicably between two stations in the night, where “miscreants” had boarded and robbed the passengers at knifepoint. That snippet of news set us on edge to start with. As soon as we had consulted the passenger lists and found our carriage, a swaggering group of students entered and piled onto the benches beside and across from us. Although we officially had the compartment to ourselves, we were unsure of what to do, since we thought perhaps we were expected to allow other passengers in during the daytime. Emboldened by our hesitation, the young men began staring at us brazenly, nudging each other, and snickering—especially their leader. He inched closer and closer along the seat, until we were pressed uncomfortably together and he was almost rubbing up against us. The atmosphere of menace thickened. All at once the leader got up, went over to the window, and jerked it down shut. Instantly Andrew was up and over at the window, heaving it open again. A tense standoff ensued as we waited to see what would happen next. Finally, the young men decided to go out for a smoke, and as soon as they left the compartment, Andrew bolted the door behind them. They hammered on it, but we did not let them back in.

Now it was dark, and the train stopped between stations with no warning or explanation. The previous station had been the very one mentioned in the newspaper story the day before. Suddenly we heard people boarding the train and filling the corridor outside our compartment, shouting and jostling and pounding on our door to be let in. Fear and guilt mingled as we weighed the pros and cons of doing so, but fear won. When the pounding stopped and the noise subsided, Andrew peeked out for a second and saw a crowd of people settled down on the floor; doubt arose again, since there was lots of space in our nearly-empty compartment. But again, caution prevailed. Before long I was desperate to use the toilet, but could not bring myself to venture out and push through the crowds of people pressed up against our door, their bodies, bags, and bundles carpeting every inch of the way.

We never did learn whether those night-train passengers were in fact the “miscreants” we had read of, or whether they were simply poor villagers trying to catch a free ride to the city.

Kashasathi potasathi/Khandalachya ghatasathi

So many more train trips. Riding for twenty-two hours from Calcutta on the Madras Mail with a rib-wrenching cough, calmed only by copious spoonfuls of codeine-laced cough syrup sold over the counter by a Howrah Station druggist. Being dragged along by relentless rush-hour crowds of Mumbai commuters desperate to exit at their station, and nearly losing my sari in the process. Traveling in joyous holiday spirits to Ratnagiri on the new Konkan Railway, plied every few minutes with new and ever-tastier treats—steaming hot tea and coffee, bunches of tiny bananas, salty roasted peanuts, fresh chikki (peanut brittle)—and drawing every minute closer to our family home.

Kashasathi potasathi/Khandalachya ghatasathi

When I think of trains, inevitably I think of India. But there have been memorable train trips outside of India as well. There was another three-day journey, from Greece to Belgium in 1963, on a train packed with friendly, boisterous college students, passing through Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the terrible Skopje earthquake, being stopped at every border by grim, grey-overcoated guards demanding to see our papers.

Arriving in the United States long after the railroad’s heyday, I still loved what was left of its romance: the goods trains that hurtled toward our cabin in Concord in the night, their whistles shrieking through my dreams, narrowly averting disaster every time as the track veered away and past us; the old-timers’ stories of Winchendon when it was a thriving railroad junction, when letters dropped in the outstretched mail sack of a passing train would be delivered in New York City the next morning; and the railroad songs I sang to Nikhil at bedtime: The Wabash Cannonball, The Freight Train Boogie (Oh Lord, how the man made the whistle whine), The Old ’97, The Greenville Trestle High:

But the whistles don’t blow like they used to/Lately, not many trains go by

Hard times across the land mean no work for a railroad man/And the Greenville trestle now don’t seem so high.

Last week, Andrew read in the newspaper that in India, too, fewer and fewer people have been riding the trains lately. But with hard times here again, and an inevitably-approaching oil crisis, perhaps the railroad is due for a  comeback.

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38. Study Halls and Cinchona

photo by Karl Hagen

At boarding school in Darjeeling back in the 1960s we were required to sit through three study periods a day: morning study, from 6:30 to 7:30 am—tantalizing because the study hall was adjacent to the kitchens and we could smell breakfast being prepared; afternoon study, from 4:30 to 6 pm—also hard to sit through before dinner, since, as growing adolescents, we were perpetually hungry; and evening study, a mercifully short hour after dinner, followed by a precious hour of free time before Lights Out.

During these tedious sessions I would while away the time daydreaming or passing notes furtively back and forth between the rows of desks without attracting the attention of the teacher monitoring from a dais at the front of the hall. (In a box somewhere I still have a little stack of these notes, many of them written in Thai, which my boyfriend was teaching me.) I was grateful that I was studying the piano, because it allowed me to excuse myself legitimately from morning study for a daily half-hour of peaceful music practice—from which I could sneak out for a few minutes to race back up to the girls’ dormitory if I had not had time to make my bed between the Rising Bell at 6 am and the beginning of the study hour. (I was a slow riser at the best of times,  especially on cold, misty mornings in that unheated stone building, where we had to keep three blankets on our beds throughout the school year.)

We were required to keep a log in which we accounted for our study time and which was checked periodically by the teacher on duty. Because I never kept mine up, I was obliged to reconstruct several weeks’ worth as each review loomed. This was a faintly enjoyable creative exercise, with an element of danger involved if the subterfuge were to be found out; for the study hall was a place of punishment as well as of mere boredom. As we accumulated demerits for this or that infringement of the rules, we would have privileges progressively suspended, starting with our monthly pocket money, followed by the movie shown in the chapel every Saturday night, and finally, the highly anticipated Saturday every month when we were free to go into town for the day. On at least two occasions I had to sit writing an essay alone in the study hall while my classmates were watching the weekly movie upstairs or treating themselves to Keventer’s legendary milk shakes in Darjeeling.

I won’t dwell on the nightmarish exam periods that stretched over a very long week three times a year, when we would have to take two to three exams a day in the study hall. They instilled the principle of delayed gratification in me, because the only thing we had to look forward to during the seemingly never-ending rigors of exam week was the prospect of the school holidays beyond. To this day I find it hard to justify taking a vacation without undergoing a period of intense hard work beforehand.

photo by Karl Hagen

One of the small pleasures that made the study hall bearable was our classmate Sonia’s cinchona. Her father had a cinchona plantation a few miles down the mountain in Sonada, and she used to have supplies of the fibrous stalks which she would distribute for us to chew on like sugarcane. The bitter principle—the very substance, I suppose, from which quinine is made—had a distinct tonic effect, and to this day, I love drinking tonic water on its own because it has the same pleasantly medicinal taste.

How is it that my feelings about these experiences are ones of fondness, even nostalgia? Perhaps it is because our school was sited in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, six thousand feet high in the Himalayan foothills, with a view of Kanchenjunga from our dorm windows on clear days; perhaps because we were known among the Darjeeling schools for our music, and sang our way through the days and weeks that would have been unbearably regimented if they had consisted solely of work and more work; perhaps because we were all in it together, like one big family (albeit dysfunctional at times), students and teachers alike. Or was it simply that we were young, full of life, and determined to enjoy it, rules or no rules? As my classmate Bina wrote in my autograph book before I left, “May you live all the days of your life!”

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37. Grandpa Victor and the Story of the Tomatoes

Black Krim tomatoes from the Ukraine © Dana Velden (thekitchn.com)

As soon as Andrew’s Grandpa Victor arrived on one of his visits, he would start repairing everything in the house that needed attention: a wobbly chair leg, a loose doorknob, a shaky newel post at the bottom of the stairs. He would enlist Andrew as his assistant and get right down to work. Andrew, with his infinite patience, was the perfect helper, passing him the tools that he needed, lifting things that were too heavy for him, allowing him to work in his own slow and methodical manner. I particularly loved Grandpa Victor’s visits because I never had the opportunity to get to know either of my own grandfathers, and he told us so many stories from his long and eventful life.

In 1905, as a boy of nine, Grandpa Victor had immigrated to New York with his family from the Old Country, Ukrainia. He and his brothers were born back in the Ukraine, but his younger sisters were all born in the USA.  He had worked, among other jobs, as a ship’s engineer in the Merchant Marines, and as a skilled mechanic in New York’s garment district where he was in charge of all the elevators for several buildings. He was a staunch union man, and Andrew’s father remembers the victory that won workers a paid half-day off on Saturdays. From then on, Victor would take little Ted on an outing every Saturday afternoon, just the two of them.

Grandpa Victor was extremely active in New York’s Russian Orthodox community, and had helped to re-settle hundreds of new immigrants from the Ukraine. Photographs of Grandpa posing with the Metropolitan, the highest figure in the Orthodox Church (and different from the Catholic Church’s Pope in that he is not considered the agent of God on earth) were proudly displayed in his and Grandma Olga’s home, and he was always busy fundraising for a church-rebuilding project or organizing a regional or North American event (there were lots of Ukrainians in Canada). He wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he was a born organizer, and his involvement in the church provided him not only with his ethnic community but also with scope for his considerable leadership skills.

Always courtly in behavior and immaculately dressed, Grandpa Victor did everything in moderation, and perhaps this was the secret of his longevity—besides the bowl of oatmeal that he required without fail every morning for breakfast. After he had completed a job to his satisfaction, he would sit down to lunch at the stroke of noon, enjoy his 7-ounce “one-gulp” can of beer, and smoke one—just one—pipeful of tobacco. Then he was ready to tell us one of his stories.

And the stories he told—92 years’ worth of them! There were stories of elevators hanging by one strand of frayed cable and boiler rooms on the verge of disaster, in which he, Victor, arrived to save the day at the eleventh hour. Then there were stories of the journey by ship to Ellis Island from Europe, where a young passenger—himself—dove off the pier into the harbor at Trieste; and of the old country, Ukrainia, where the soil was as black and as rich as chocolate cake and the rivers deep and majestic, where as a boy he had owned a beautiful horse, who grew bigger and sleeker in the telling and retelling, especially in Grandpa Victor’s old age when his dreams and memories of the Old Country were clearer and more vivid than his immediate surroundings.  I remember one in particular, the story of the tomatoes.

photo from greenworldorganics.com

Grandpa loved the tomatoes that Andrew grew: large, meaty, and deep-red. He ate them with great relish, and always with a knife and fork, salt and pepper, and a napkin to protect his suit from the juice. Tomatoes were natives of the New World, and it was his own mother, Paraskevia, who had first brought them to their small town in the Ukraine. She had gone ahead to America before taking her family there to join their father, but had not been sure if she liked it, and had returned to the Ukraine for a time before making the decision to migrate. On that return trip she brought seeds back with her, which soon produced a harvest of large, juicy, deep-red tomatoes.

News of the luscious new crop spread rapidly, circulated by the wives and servants of neighbors and town officials. One after another would send a servant over to inquire about the tomatoes, and Paraskevia would be obliged to pack a basketful to send back. In that feudal society one dared not refuse the request of an official, however petty his position might be. One day the Postmaster rode up in a horse and carriage. He alighted with dignity and had to be welcomed with all the respect due to a man of his status. A chair and a table spread with a fresh tablecloth had to be brought out into the garden, in the shade of an arbor, where the Postmaster had a white napkin tucked into his collar and sat down, licking his lips in anticipation. A bowl of the best tomatoes was served to him, along with a knife and fork, salt, and fresh-ground black pepper.  He carved them into thick slices and ate with great enjoyment, while Victor’s family looked on. And of course he had to be given a large basket to take home to his wife, with the compliments of Victor’s mother.

That was not the end of it. Once the Postmaster’s wife had aroused the envy and curiosity of her friends and neighbors, the wives of every public figure in town sent their servants over with baskets to be filled and returned, with the compliments of Victor’s mother. And in the end, as Grandpa told it, the servant of a very, very important person, the Governor himself, came to announce the arrival of his master, who had to be served with all possible pomp and ceremony right there under the arbor, and sent home with the biggest, most overflowing bounty yet. Fortunately they had had a good harvest that year, or there wouldn’t have been any tomatoes left for their own family to enjoy.

When Grandpa Victor’s visit came to an end, we packed a box of tomatoes for him to take home to Brooklyn. On the day before he left he wrote a batch of postcards to send to his friends and fellow-Church members, saying that he was enjoying his visit so much that he had decided to stay an extra week. When Andrew asked him why he had told such a fib, he replied that this way he would get two weeks’ vacation, one with us in Massachusetts and another peaceful week back home without people pestering him for favors.

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