596. Restless in the Suburbs

Yesterday, by invitation, I attended an event at the New England Visionary Artists Museum in Northampton, a poetry reading by a brilliant former colleague, Heather Treseler. In her new collection, Auguries and Divinations, she curated the pains and absurdities of growing up the wealthy Boston suburb of Newton, her flight from it, and her return as an adult. Strangely enough, I had just bought a copy of How to Make Your Mother Cry, a new book of linked stories by another old friend, Sejal Shah, in which she charted the pains of coming of age in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, a young woman’s escape, and her return. One friend, and her narrator, was an outsider by class and religion, the other by ethnicity and skin color; both rebelled, furtively, feverishly, sometimes self-destructively. In time, each found new ways of coming home to herself.

I too lived for a time in the Boston suburbs, like Heather. (Well, perhaps “lived” is too settled a word; I had one foot in, unsteadily, the other ready to make a run for it.) I too came as an outsider, a child of immigrants like Sejal. I too fled, but eventually came home. One way or another, that is the arc of many lives and most stories. How that arc is lived, and how those stories are told and re-told, is an art that can take a lifetime to perfect—or at least, to make peace with.

Both collections spark sharp memories for me; all the more so since both writers’ lives overlapped with mine—one when I was just starting out as a junior faculty member and she was a graduate student in my old department, the other as I neared retirement and she was a junior faculty member, also in my department. Our stories intersect both gently and jaggedly; the arcs of their lives—in the suburbs, in academia, in writing—call up auguries of my own, most of them unheeded at the time, and tears that I too must have made my dear mother cry.

Just two of these intersections: 



In “Ghostology” Heather Treseler writes,
The first rule here is do not disturb the peace

or permit parking. . .

A memory: Mum telling me, when she and Dad had just moved to Newton, more than a decade after I had finished college and left home, that she had approached a woman outside a house down the street to introduce herself. The woman cut her off unceremoniously: We don’t do that here. Mum never tried again.

Another intersection: 

A couple of months ago I was rifling through bankers’ boxes full of old files, searching for the senior rail passes Andrew and I bought in England last year, and in the process turning up—not the passes, but old letters, never-published conference papers, and a copy of an essay presented to me by my friend Sejal Shah a couple of decades ago, when she was in graduate school. It turned out to be “How to Make Your Mother Cry,” the original version of the title piece in her just-published book!

At this stage in my life everything feels retrospective, as if there is no future except perhaps to make the arc of my life more complete, in writing if not in reality. But I’m afraid I never learned, after taking up and then growing tired of a piece of knitting, how to cast off. It stayed on the needles, neither turning into a finished, usable item nor unraveled and made ready to begin again. My mother blamed it on the number and frequency of our moves: “no wonder she never finishes anything she starts.”

* * * * *

I wrote the above early this afternoon, just before going out to a book sale in a local park organized by our friends, Valley Families for Palestine, with all proceeds going to support Palestinian children who have been forcibly displaced from their homes again and again. The energy of the young parents and children gathering in the sunshine combined with the bouncy walkways of the children’s playground (and, it goes without saying, the purchase of a couple of books) brought a spring to my step and a new attitude toward my perennially unfinished projects. Of course there is always more work to be done, and it is not up to me alone to finish it all.



One of the books I brought home was published by Restless Books, a publisher that has recently opened a bookstore in town. The book, aptly entitled, Between This World and the Next, had been awarded the 2022 Restless Books Prize for new immigrant writing. It made me think of my own peripatetic childhood, of which new friends often asked, Why did your family move around so much? Was your father a diplomat? No, I would reply, he was just restless.

The British would say, “the natives are restless,” when colonized peoples protested against colonial rule. I am okay with that kind of restlessness. It has a noble tradition. Restless Books calls itself an international publisher for a world in motion. Given such a world, we must refuse to settle for the contrived peace of the suburbs. Perhaps we must refuse to settle altogether, at least, those of us who have the privilege of doing so.

Heather Treseler. Auguries and Divinations. (Bauhan Publishing, 2024)

Sejal Shah. How to Make Your Mother Cry. (West Virginia UP, 2024)
Praveen Herat. Between This World and the Next. (Restless Books, 2022)

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595. Hanging Washing on the Line

I’m afraid that I’ve forgotten how to write, it’s been so long. So many experiences since my last post more than three months ago that I must reflect upon before they are swept away beyond recall. What to say about our recent month-long stay in England, where we were lucky enough to return to the same beloved neighborhood for the second time in a year?

It was our longest visit to the UK since the Summer of 1986, when we took our 20-month son there for the first time. Staying any longer would have risked making me feel that I was actually living there rather than simply visiting, meeting family and old friends on the spur of the moment, riding the buses and trains, swimming at the Lido, a legendary open-air swimming pool, taking daily walks on Hampstead Heath, and staying mostly in one particular part of North London, my happy place, as it’s called in the United States.

Andrew and I went supermarket shopping by bus (where we are now so old that people routinely offered us their seats), compared Bramley apple crumbles from both M&S Foodhall and Sainsbury’s (M&S’s was definitely better), picked up free compostable food waste bags at the local public library, and generally settled into everyday life there for a whole month. My challenge now—as always when I return from a visit to India or the UK—is to find ways to integrate my disparate worlds.

One of the everyday activities in England which isn’t done much in the US is the deeply-satisfying task of line-drying laundry. Of course there are Americans who eschew automatic dryers and make a point of hanging out their laundry, but they are few and far between. According to Project Laundry List, only 8% of Americans line-dry—and that too, for only five months of the year. In fact, in many parts of the country line-drying is actually banned, considered unsightly and down-market. By contrast, in the UK, even for those who have automatic dryers, line-drying or airing is the norm, despite the notoriously changeable weather. 



I do have a folding drying rack which I use on sunny days, but most of the time I’ve been too lazy to lug it in and out and load and unload it. Although it does take quite a lot of laundry, it can’t accommodate large items like sheets, towels, or tablecloths. We had a washing line in the garden of our old house, but I commuted long distances for work and hanging the washing out was a rare luxury rather than an everyday occurrence (See TMA#171, Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron). Finally, after a long period of disuse, the grass under the line was invaded by a healthy crop of poison ivy. Now it was downright dangerous to hang out my laundry. Over the years I have accumulated a number of excuses for not having done so, but ultimately their only purpose has been to rid me of guilt.

After our return from England, I found my attitude wholly changed. Why shouldn’t I start doing what everyone in both India and England does, and hang my washing out to dry? Before we had even unpacked, I was searching the internet for different designs of line and wondering out loud where might be the best place to set one up. And, typically, while I was building elaborate castles in the air, Andrew was digging through his rope and twine collection for a suitable clothesline, measuring the right height for me, and before I knew it, there it was out in the courtyard, ready to accept its first load.

I can’t tell you how happy this simple addition to my everyday life has made me. Despite the cool weather since our return, my first load dried in no time, and so did the second. Today, as I write, a third load is watercoloring the courtyard in spring green and pale yellow as it sways gently in the breeze.

As I hung out my first load, the clothes we had worn for the flight back to the USA, I recalled a moment a short week before, in my cousin Sue’s back garden. Her daughter Jess and I were hanging out the washing, and as we pegged each item Jess murmured, “tops from the bottom, bottoms from the top.” The very lesson Sue had taught me when I was an undergraduate during my junior year in London fifty years ago! A wave of happiness washed over me as the memory crossed decades, generations, and oceans to become part of everyday practice. This is what integrating my worlds felt like.

P.S. Did anyone else recite this piece of schoolyard doggerel in their girlhood? Perhaps as a skipping (jumping rope in the US) chant?
What’s the time/Half-past nine/Hanging knickers on the line/When the policeman comes along/Hurry up and put them on.

P.P.S. I picked up a packet of 50 wooden clothes pegs (clothespins in the US) for $1.25? Almost unheard of!

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594. My Brilliant Mum

                       Mum, reading (painting by Dad)

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and mine was on my mind all day. Although it has now been more than six years since she passed away, I still have not been able to sit with my memories of her and write anything that does her justice. In the evening I pulled out two manila folders of her writing, mostly essays she wrote when she was taking courses toward her B.A. at Harvard Extension School—while working at a full-time day job, mind you. What I found in them was humbling. 



I hadn’t always realized how seriously Mum took her learning—from independent reading, courses, lectures—and retirement made no difference to that seriousness. For a few years she was a member of a reading group in which the participants took it in turns to choose the book of the month. When it was Mum’s turn she took copious notes, read interviews with the author and on the historical setting, pored over critical essays on the book, and anxiously prepared—no, over-prepared—an introductory presentation. Invariably she chose an author her group were unlikely to be familiar with—Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie were two that I remember—and felt that it was her responsibility to help the group understand and appreciate their work. But she was invariably disappointed. She would come home telling me that the host had been more interested in showing off her best china tea set than in discussing the book or that several people hadn’t even finished reading it.

academic snobbery

Mum’s other disappointments with the book group came from the fact that many of the participants were academics or had advanced degrees and would discuss the text at hand using obscure academic jargon that effectively excluded and humiliated her, as someone who was wonderfully well-read and worldly wise but not a literary scholar. Eventually the combination of the lack of seriousness and the academic snobbery led her to quit the group altogether.

Besides her participation in the book group Mum volunteered as an ESL teacher to wives of international graduate students, volunteered as an aide in an ESL after-school program, was an active member of a group called the Third Age, and took several Learning in Retirement courses taught by retired college professors that were as rigorous as any college course. I regret now that I was so preoccupied with my own work that I didn’t take the time to appreciate hers, thereby reproducing the behavior in others that hurt her the most.

Every Which Way – Maurice Bilk PPRBS. To Remember the evacuation of millions of British children separated from their families during WWII (Photo: Tim Ellis)

As a brilliant girl from a working-class background, Mum was in love with learning and with life. She aced the eleven-plus exam and won a scholarship to grammar school, but her secondary school experience was badly disrupted by the Second World War when she and her school, Parliament Hill School, were evacuated out of London and she had to live with a series of foster families who were neglectful at best. After school she went out to work and while she went out dancing and to the movies with her best girlfriend, she also furthered her education with night classes.

There was no opportunity for Mum to further her formal studies in Greece and India while we were growing up, but she continued to teach English to children—in India, to Dalit children who lived on the outskirts of the campus—and to learn languages herself. It was only when my sister was in college and I at work that Mum started taking night classes again, two every semester until she earned first her Associate’s and then her Bachelor’s degree. Looking now at the piles of term papers she wrote over the years, I am overwhelmed. How has it taken me so long to read them?

Here are some of the titles: 


• Control: A Classless Condition
• The Evolution of Discipline in Early Childhood: Development and Social Policy 

• Summerhill: For and Against
• Depression: Classification, Etiology and Treatment—A Brief Overview
• Caste and Hinduism: Dominant Themes and Modal Personality

Knowing Mum, the topics above make perfect sense. She had always been an advocate for loving, child-centered models of education that fostered creativity. With her working-class background and strong sense of justice, she had always been interested in the effects of class and caste in society. And working as she did for a psychiatrist who had taken a leading role in studying treatments for depression and schizophrenia, she was interested in how treatments for depression had evolved, developing drugs that both held considerable promise and had serious limitations.

But what humbled me the most were these two papers:

• The Politics of Nuclear Power and Our Health

Mum wrote this for a course on The Sociology of Medicine with Elliott Krause (author of Power and Illness: The Political Sociology of Health and Medical Care) in January 1988, when, at 23, I was passionately involved in the anti-nuclear power movement. Clearly, Mum, who was always supportive of my pursuits even as she worried about my future, had set out to study the nuclear industry for herself. Just flipping through the sections of the paper I can see that she investigated the nuclear fuel cycle, corporate investments in uranium mining and processing, studies on the health effects of radiation, attitudes of the medical profession toward diagnostic radiation and nuclear power, and political interventions. Wow. If only I had listened to her more, actually talked with her, rather than just holding forth, talking at her. She could have taught me a thing or three.

• The Role that China Played in Changing the East India Company’s Relationship with India

It was only relatively recently, through reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2015) and his non-fictional Smoke and Ashes (2024), that I became acquainted with the Opium Wars and what drove them. And here was Mum, back in 1986, before I even started my graduate studies, taking a course on India Under the British with the eminent historian of South Asia David Washbrook and writing a paper on the causes and effects of the opium trade.

Mum was so intelligent, passionate about learning, socially committed. As a mother, she built me up. Listened to me patiently, even as I talked incessantly. Was full of admiration for my work, my intellect. Said nothing about her own. I still find slips of paper in books she borrowed from me or read because I had recommended them, with her own thoughts on them. Did we sit down and discuss them afterwards? Probably not, because when I went to Mum and Dad’s house, she would insist that I put my feet up and relax while she simultaneously brought me tea, played with Baby Nikhil, and prepared dinner.

Oh, how I long to listen to her now! All I have is her papers. But I will read them with deep gratitude and remember my brilliant mum.

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