148. Avoiding the Plague

smallpox vaccination scar

The bubonic plague! The very name conjures up ghoulish images of the medieval era, but my Dad remembers two outbreaks of the dreaded disease in the twentieth century, during his own childhood in Ratnagiri. He can date the second one fairly accurately to 1939 or 1940, because the outbreak coincided with his matriculation exams and, due to the danger of infection in the district town of Ratnagiri, he had to travel all the way to Kolhapur to sit them. (He recalls, too, that he left his geometry set (remember those?) at home and had to lose valuable exam time waiting to borrow his friend’s compass and protractor.) The first outbreak must have been about five years earlier. Since the plague is spread by rat fleas and rats frequent built-up areas, his whole family moved to the edge of town and camped out for the duration. Dad remembers it only as fun, but I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for his mother to manage a household of eight children and a husband who had to get dressed for court  in the morning while living in tents. But it worked: no one in the family was stricken with the plague, and our grandparents successfully raised all eight of their children to adulthood, no mean feat in the days before antibiotics were available to treat infections. In the early twentieth century, the plague killed an estimated 10 million people in India.

It’s hard to remember that it was not until the Second World War that antibiotics became available, not until 1942 that penicillin was being mass-produced. Before then, a host of childhood diseases were seriously life-threatening. My paternal grandparents were lucky enough not to lose a child, but my maternal grandparents were not so fortunate. Two of their eight children died of diptheria before 1920, and although a vaccine became available in the mid-1920’s it wasn’t until 1940, when my mother was a teenager, that a nationwide vaccination program was established in Britain. In-between, 2,500 children died from diptheria every year.

Even in my own childhood vaccinations were still fairly new, and our annual trip to the doctor for a series of injections—smallpox, cholera, polio—was serious business. Those of us who grew up before the World Health Organization’s smallpox radication campaign, which started in 1967 and was finally successful in 1980, all bear the lifelong scars of our injections; until then, smallpox epidemics raged around the world . My father came down with the disease as a young man—a mild case, thankfully—and still carries a few marks from it. My father-in-law was not so lucky, and came down with polio in 1953, when Andrew was a baby, just months before Jonas Salk developed his vaccine. He still suffers from post-polio syndrome.

Not surprisingly, injections loomed large in our young minds. Our instincts told us to avoid them like the plague, but reason reminded us that we needed them to avoid the plague. We steeled ourselves to face them bravely, but they certainly weren’t any fun. One day in the early 1960s, when I was about eight, I arrived at school in Athens to the announcement that everyone in the whole school was going to be vaccinated—for what, I don’t remember, but I think it was chicken pox (for which a vaccine was not to be available until the 1990s). Our collective heart sank, but we all lined up dutifully to walk one by one into a classroom set up as a makeshift infirmary and walk out by another door. When it was my turn, I screwed up my courage and stretched out my arm to a teacher who prepped the area with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball. As I prepared myself for the needle, I was greeted with, “April Fool!” It was all an elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax.

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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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66. The Mango Room

photo by Josna Rege

Our family home in Ratnagiri has a mango room, an attached shedlike chamber accessible not through the house, but only from the outside. There, in my father’s childhood and youth in the 1930s and ’40s, the crop of mangoes from the trees in the compound, many of them the prized hapus, or Alphonso, would be heaped, spilling out to the entrance and reaching up to the rafters. For Ratnagiri is the home of the Alphonso, the richest, deepest-orange, longest-keeping, most delicious variety of mango there is. Just ask anyone.

In those golden days, when, in a good season, there was such a glut of mangoes that even our large family couldn’t absorb them, people would slip into the Mango Room and eat to their heart’s content. The story goes that sometime in the 1950s, at the age of three or four, my cousin Jayant went missing for several hours, and was eventually discovered, curled up in a sticky stupor in the Mango Room. He had gorged himself on that king of fruits until his little belly was as round as a ripe Alphonso, his skin had taken on an orange hue, and he was in serious danger of turning into a mango himself.

That era of plenty was before my own, and though I may once have seen the room filled with its ripe and ripening bounty, I cannot remember it. In my childhood in the 1960s we lived on the other side of the country, more than a thousand miles away, and couldn’t necessarily plan our trips to coincide with the mango season, though most people do if they possibly can. In my memory the room lies empty, and  the mango crop is stored in baskets in the ante-room off the kitchen where we also shell the roasted cashews. Later still, when I had a child of my own, most of the mango trees in the compound were leased out and the family share of the crop had dwindled, and Mai-atya, my Aunt Kumud, stored the best of the ripening Alphonsos under her bed, saving special ones for the infrequent visits from her grand-nieces and nephews.

In advance of one visit in 1993, when Nikhil was eight and we were planning to spend a full month in Ratnagiri, Mai-atya kept pressing us on the phone about when exactly we were planning to arrive. We thought that she was simply being over-anxious, as is our family’s wont, but when we arrived we found out why; she had picked a few special Alphonsos early with Nikhil in mind, and was ripening them to perfection in a basket under her bed. Thankfully, we arrived in good time, and when Mai-Atya produced them with a flourish, Nikhil amply fulfilled her expectations and his own. In fact, he ate amost nothing but mangoes during our entire stay, partly on account of dear Mai-atya’s culinary idiosyncracies, but that’s another story.

By the early 1990s, with the anticipated Konkan railway bringing more and more development to Ratnagiri, hordes of displaced monkeys were sweeping through the compound daily, pausing to wreak havoc in the mango trees. All that month, it was Nikhil and Andrew’s daily task to drive the monkeys off the trees, where they would be frolicking en masse, baiting the humans by taking one bite out of each green mango before tossing it carelessly to the ground. Mai-atya would send Nikhil and Andrew out to the shops in the bazaar for firecrackers, which they would set off in hopes of scaring off the simian marauders. But after the first couple of times they got wise to the trick, and simply laughed maniacally while hurling the precious fruit at their frustrated foes.

We recently received word that the old family home in Ratnagiri is to be sold at last. Then, like everybody else, we will just have to buy Alphonsos, now available in the United States as a strange by-product of President Bush’s nuclear deal with India, and the Mango Room will soon be just a memory. But oh, what a memory!

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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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