459. Householder

This is the eighth entry in a month-long series, Fifty years in the United States: An immigrant’s perspective, as part of the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Householder.

I can’t remember anymore what my parents gave us for our wedding present back in 1983, on the farm in Winchendon; perhaps they helped pay for our honeymoon trip to India, my first return trip since we had left in 1968 and Andrew’s first time ever. What I do remember is my mother’s personal present to me: a box of at least two dozen beautiful high-quality tea towels, every single one of them different. (In the States they are called dish towels, and nobody knows what they are because nobody uses them. And don’t ask me what a tea towel is because if you don’t know I’m not going to tell you. Look it up!) It was at that moment that I knew I was really a householder, and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction, as if my mother was passing part of herself to me to carry forward.

I used those tea towels sparingly over the years, not bringing them all out at once, but keeping some back so as not to spoil them. More than 36 years later, there are still a couple left. They represent many bountiful meals cooked for our immediate and extended family and circle of friends, countless dishes washed and dried companionably, table settings laid out and cleared away. They call to mind recipes passed down from our families and made our own; feasts for special holidays; and, after Eric and Nikhil were born, children’s birthday parties with lots of wiping-up of spills and sticky hands and faces. And of course, they remind me of Mum, and her hard work and cleanliness and caring.

My family in India also welcomed us into the life of the householder, that stage of life most central to the functioning of society. This was before the era of economic liberalization, when, at their wedding, couples were given one set of stainless-steel thalis to last their whole married lives. We still have ours, with our names engraved on the underside and on some the name of the person who had bestowed them upon us. After preparing an Indian meal and laying out the gleaming thalis with the little stainless steel katoris arrayed around the edges, I feel loved and nourished.

Being a householder wasn’t just cooking and cleaning but carrying out traditions, old and new. It was hanging a garland of mango leaves over the door to the house; painting eggs at Russian Easter; hosting and attending family gatherings, in the years when our parents were still active and the undisputed heads of the extended family; visits back and forth to Newton to visit my parents and to California to visit Andrew’s parents and grandparents; going out mushrooming with Andrew’s mother Anna and his Grandma Pauline; helping Anna put up her wild cherry brandy (“it cures what ails you”).

Being a householder meant repairing frozen pipes with numb and chilblained fingers, trying in vain to save a bird that flew down the chimney into the wood stove and getting a raccoon out of the chicken coop; it was paying bills, doing taxes, getting our two rooms in the shared farmhouse ready for the birth of the baby; making sure that every piece of furniture was child-safe; and finding a place near his cradle to hang the mobile of a thousand paper cranes that Andrew’s sister Vera made to welcome him into the world.

Most of all, being a householder was becoming parents. The first five-and-a-half years of Nikhil’s life on the farm in Winchendon passed by in a blur, as parenting for those years before kindergarten was all-absorbing. It was venturing out in sub-freezing temperatures to cut a Christmas tree or help build a snowman when every fibre of one’s being cried out for a nice hot cup of tea and a good book by the fire; cross-country skiing through the woods to our friends’ house, pulling the babies behind us on wooden sleds; play-acting King Arthur and Good Sir Lancelot; mediating fights. It was dancing to old vinyl records in the evening before bed to tire the boys out; allaying childish fears with words of comfort and reassurance; reading aloud to Nikhil for hours (“just one more chapter!”); singing him to sleep with his favorites and mine: The Skye Boat Song, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean (with the saddest lyrics changed); Morningtown Ride; Doc Watson’s Freight Train Boogie; Donovan’s Epistle to Derroll, everything by John Prine.

Somewhere in there we found time for more-or-less gainful employment, that too an integral part of being a householder: Andrew holding the fort at Whetstone Press in both Boston and Winchendon; my job as a stringer for The Winchendon Courier, the local weekly; and, when Nikhil was nearly three, teaching at UMass a couple of days a week.

Forgive me if my tone is little elegiac. I’m sitting at the dining table writing this in the biggest and most modern home I’ve ever lived in as an adult, yet ironically, at a time when the household is at its smallest ever. Of the four stages of life in the Indian tradition, the householder or grihastha (“occupied with home”) is the most active, passionate, socially engaged. Now I hover at the brink of the next stage, that of vanaprastha, or retiring to the forest, alternating between longing to withdraw and needing to keep the home fires burning. After all, if people like Bernie Sanders, at age 78, can run a punishing presidential campaign and, without missing a beat, go on to advocate tirelessly for the most vulnerable, then who am I to withdraw from the fray? Retiring to the forest may not be an option, although in this time of stress and uncertainty it is becoming a necessity to take time out just to breathe.

Bernie Sanders [Rebecca Cook Reuters]

In closing, under the current Stay-at-Home Advisory to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus, all but those designated as essential workers are confined to their homes. My students are understandably claustrophobic, especially those who had just begun living away from home for the first time, now cooped up in the house with the college and the dorms closed, unable to go to the gym or to hang out with their friends. Some of them, along with their parents, are essential workers in the health-care professions or service workers, having to care for elderly people in nursing homes or running cash registers at supermarkets or delivering pizzas and packages door to door. They must return home, change their clothes and shower so as not to risk exposing their grandparents, parents, or children to the virus. Despite being under tremendous stress they are pulling together with their entire household, determined to make the best of a terrible situation as they care tenderly for frail grandparents, treasure the unexpected time they now have to play board games with their family, and even help younger siblings with their homework. They are in the student stage of their lives, too young to be bearing the burden of householders, but bearing it nonetheless, and cheerfully. If they must do it, so must I. In a situation that requires all hands on deck, vanaprastha will just have to wait.

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