205. Weeping Willow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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173. Multi-Timing

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
from Bed in Summer, Robert Louis Stevenson

As my day is winding down, a new one is beginning for our family in India, as they carry out the morning rituals of teeth-cleaning, tea-drinking, poha, and private prayers at the kitchen shrine. As I get ready for bed, too late as usual, my California friends still have their evening ahead of them and are ready for long phone chats. Of a morning I wake in anticipation of news from England, since by the time I am sitting up in bed with my first cup of tea my English family and friends are well into their workdays and their fourth or fifth cuppas. With childhood friends in Australia and New Zealand and dear Alysha in South Africa this year, as I brace for a February nor’easter I am aware that the Antipodeans in my life are enjoying fresh garden vegetables and harvesting early summer fruit (all the more tormenting because they will keep posting photographs of them on Facebook). The diurnal and seasonal rhythms of yesteryear, each in its own time gradually and gracefully giving way to the next,  are now overlaid with the contrapuntal motions of multiple time zones, all competing simultaneously for space in my crowded consciousness.

(from redlegsinsoho.blogspot)

This is my constant condition, now delightful, now dizzying. How much more so when my loved ones are on the move; waiting for the email or text message announcing their safe arrival, I am keenly aware, in every moment, of what time it is there. I read nineteenth, even twentieth-century novels in which travelers or family members working or studying abroad must of necessity remain incommunicado for months, sometimes unable to make a visit home for years on end. Those left behind at home, most of them women, sit down at their writing desks and immerse their whole selves in long, beautifully handwritten, artfully composed letters, pausing periodically to dip their pens into the inkwell and gaze into the middle distance.  In their position, I turn to my laptop, and Tell Me Another.

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108. Climb Over the Wall!

January, 1984: Andrew and I were on our honeymoon trip to India, visiting each and every one of my relatives, who welcomed Andrew into the family with open arms. We were now trying to meet up with Tai-atya, my father’s eldest sister, who we thought was in Delhi, staying with my cousin Jayant. But when we reached Delhi, Jayant was out of town and so, it seemed, were Tai-atya and Banawalikar-kaka. So instead, we got a hotel room in Delhi, visited the family of our dear friend Subhash, and made train reservations for Kanpur (not an easy task back in those days), where our elders would be staying with my cousin Vijay. Everything was set, and Vijay-dada was to meet us at the station; but that night everything seemed to go wrong.

The train was late. We arrived at Kanpur Central Railway Station quite late at night and couldn’t find Vijay-dada anywhere. (Later, it turned out that he had been there looking everywhere for us but in vain.) Wearily, we hailed an auto rickshaw, whose driver, upon hearing the address, had to be talked into accepting us: apparently, the Sales Tax Office was in a distant suburb several kilometers away.

Indian addresses, many-layered palimpsests of history and culture, can be difficult to decode. Even now, nearly sixty-five years after Independence, there is often the British street name, paired with the new(er), or newly restored Indian one, followed by a nearby landmark, such as “behind Odeon Cinema). In this case it was “opposite Sales Tax Office.” Some half-an-hour later the rickshaw-wala, tired and visibly irritated at the prospect of his long return journey, told us that we had arrived at the address we had given him. We were in a pitch-dark residential neighborhood with high walls enclosing the compounds. He made to offload our luggage, but we pleaded with him to wait until we could be sure that we were at the right place. He pointed impatiently to the Sales Tax Office and then to the walled compound opposite, but there was no sign of life anywhere and no identifying names on the gate—or indeed, any of the gates of the adjacent compounds. By now the rickshaw-wala was skeptical about us. I had told him that my cousin-brother lived here, but since neither I nor my husband looked Indian to him, he seriously doubted my word. He just wanted to get paid and out of there as soon as possible. Finally he threw down the gauntlet: “If you really are his sister, then climb over the wall!”

I looked helplessly at the forbidding wall with nothing but silence and darkness on either side and then back at the rickshaw-wala, but he was adamant. If we were not to be abandoned with all our luggage on an empty street in a remote neighborhood of a strange city, there was nothing for it but to take up his challenge. So I screwed up my courage, throwing fear, caution, and womanly modesty to the winds, and climbed.

I dropped to the ground on the other side, fully expecting to be lunged at by a pack of snarling dogs. Thankfully, dogs were nowhere to be seen, but neither was anything or anyone else. As I began to get my bearings and my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw a flickering light beside and to the back of the big house and made my way towards it. Finally I came upon a small group of men, servants probably, squatting comfortably round an open fire, chatting. I stepped out of the shadows and spoke to them in my halting, schoolgirl Hindi, explaining that I had come from Amreeka, naming my cousin, and asking if this was his house. They all started in terror as if they had seen an apparition. It  must have seemed to them that I had just materialized from nowhere—perhaps straight from America itself. At first they seemed unable to process the sounds emanating from my mouth as words, but finally one of them recognized Vijay-dada’s name, led me to the big house, and hammered on the front door. Eventually my cousin and his wife opened it, rubbing their eyes in sleepiness and surprise, but welcoming us lovingly nonetheless. After a light meal and a warm, milky drink, we dropped into the bed that had been made ready for us and fell asleep instantly. What a relief!

RBTB Hospital Compound, Delhi

It turned out that Tai-atya and Kaka were not in Kanpur after all but back in Delhi. So in the morning we made reservations for a return journey to Delhi the very next day, where at last we met up with them and had a lovely visit. Tai-atya plied us with her delicious home cooking and Banawalikar-kaka regaled us with stories over endless rounds of tea (I am a teetotaller, he chuckled jovially—totally tea!).

It turned out to have been fortunate that we returned to Delhi at that time, because soon after our return to the United States, dear Tai-atya passed away, carried off by a sudden brain fever. I remember the visit in every detail, from the terror of facing the climb over the compound wall to the tiny smudge of turmeric on my sari blouse from Tai-atya’s haldi-kumkum blessing, hastily pressed on my forehead as we took our leave from her. In this case I am grateful that turmeric leaves a permanent stain: I would not wish it otherwise.

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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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20. The Bay of Biscay and the Gully Gully Man

P & O Steamship Maloja (from ancestry.com)

My memories before the age of seven are a collection of dreamlike images rather than stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Between 1955 and 1958 I traveled three times between India and England with one or both of my parents, and in 1960, from India to Greece with both parents and my baby sister Sally.  All these passages were by ship, through Suez and the Mediterranean and across the Arabian Sea, a mode of travel in which the journey itself was a pleasure to be savored. As I return to these fragmentary dreamscapes in my mind’s eye, I catch glimpses of a much earlier era.

London to Bombay, P&O ocean liner, 1955: Bombay to London, 1956; London to Bombay, 1958. Travel time: twelve days.

A big, bare rock, presumably Gibraltar. Do I see monkeys, or is that another memory crowding in? A rough night passage through the Bay of Biscay, rolling and tilting on the empty wooden deck, passengers huddling below in their cabins. Someone vomiting over the rail. Everyone and everything green.

Loud roared the dreadful thunder, the rain in deluge showers/The ship was rent asunder by lightning’s vivid powers/The night was drear and dark, a poor denuded bark/

There she lay, till next day, in the Bay of Biscay-O.

Calm day dawns; fair weather and gracious living on deck. Bathers toss quoits back and forth in the pool. Passengers lounge in deck-chairs. Parents dress for dinner and evening entertainment, while the nursery organizes meals and activities for the children. My father still has a printed dinner menu from our first passage to India.

Navigating the narrow, high-banked Suez Canal. Calls at Port Said and Aden, where some passengers disembark, shop, and explore. The  bulging, jocular, slightly sinister Gully Gully Man boards the ship, producing baby chicks from everywhere on his person and yours.

A house is on fire, flames raging out of control against a backdrop of darkest night. I see my very first movie on board ship, but only this once-terrifying scene remains, now faded and harmless.

And a lasting memory of standing on deck looking out to the horizon, with nothing but ocean and sky as far as the eye can see.

Bombay to Naples, Lloyd Triestino Italian passenger ship, 1960: No separation of children from adults at mealtime for the child-loving Italians. Sally and I order spaghetti bolognese every night for dinner, and the chef comes out to gaze on us fondly, missing his own children back home. He is impressed by Baby Sally’s spaghetti-eating prowess and pronounces her an “Italiano bambino.”

Our father accidentally jams his fingers in the thick, steel door of our cabin. It is terribly painful and the only time I have seen him cry.

Two days in Naples, and two memories: the most delicious, doughy doughnuts, and a store with sawdust on the floor, swept up and replaced daily. Again, we children are made a fuss of by the Italians we meet.

Naples to Piraeus, Greece, on an American ship: a short trip of which my sole memory is my first encounter with grapefruit juice, served at breakfast in a little can.

The era of ocean liners for passenger travel was nearly over. Our next overseas journey, three years later, was to be by air, as they have all been ever since.

 

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13. Paradise Lost

Cousin Jacky, Andrew, and I were in the Scottish Highlands with 20-month-old Nikhil, picnicking in a secluded glen on a perfect summer’s day in July. I was in a state of bliss as we traveled down the songlines of The Road to the Isles. Sure, by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go,/By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles;/If it’s thinkin’ in your inner heart braggart’s in my step,/You’ve never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles.

And now here we were, in the tangle of the heather with Baby Nikhil, taking a wee rest on the way to Mallaig and the ferry to the Isle of Skye. Andrew had already discovered wild blueberries on the banks of the burn that sparkled down the glen. Jacky had pulled off her shoes and was cooling her feet in the clear water. Nikhil was beaming like a little Buddha in the midst of all this beauty. Paradise.

Suddenly out of nowhere came an ear-splitting roar, louder than anything we thought possible, and then louder still. Jerking my head up the valley, I saw an incredibly low-flying military aircraft heading straight for us at tremendous speed. I flung myself over Nikhil to protect him from the sight and the sound, and as it swooped and swept over us, we felt that we were being strafed. When it was gone, leaving a cloud of foul exhaust in its wake, we managed to remain calm so as not to frighten Nikhil, packed up the picnic, and got back on the road. But our former peace could not be recovered.

I have since learned that many locations in the Highlands, including the valley where we had picnicked unawares, were and continue to be regular practice sites for low-flying (even “ultra-low-flying”) supersonic Royal Air Force and NATO aircraft, and that these practices were particularly frequent in the mid-1980s when we took our trip to Scotland. Decades of civilian complaints have been to no avail, as the RAF insists that the practice is militarily necessary.

At the time, I raged against the RAF and vowed to write a letter to The Times; before long, though, in accordance with the song, the far Cuilins were putting love on us again. We traveled on over the sea to Skye, where we enjoyed a rare 36 consecutive hours without rain, with Nikhil prancing down the peat-covered Cuilins like a lamb. Apparently the number and frequency of these low-flying military exercises has been reduced somewhat since the end of the Cold War; but for me, the song’s sentimental image of “pluck[ing] bracken for a wink on Mother’s knee” now evokes not only golden slumbers but a bombing raid.

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