90. “Almost a Dude”

illustration by E.H. Shepard

By the time my dear nephew Tyler (now 14) was two, he was keenly aware that he was 12 years younger than his Nikhil-dada (big brother), and was eager to outgrow his status as the baby of the family, which, he already understood, he was in danger of remaining indefinitely. Incidentally, he called Nikhil Nikhil-dada until he started going to pre-school, where they taught him American kinship terms and he came home and announced that Nikhil was not his brother but his cousin. On one visit, when I called him Babycakes, one of the many terms of endearment I bestowed on him unthinkingly, he corrected me with great earnestness: “Not baby cakes, medium-sized cakes.” A few months later, when Sally observed admiringly how tall he was getting, he replied with pride, “Yes, I’m almost a dude.”

This brings to mind Sally’s own pronouncement (reminiscent of A.A. Milne’s James James Morrison Morrison*) when she was about the same age and chafing under supervision by grown-ups. She too sought to fast-forward to adulthood, demanding coffee instead of milk (and getting “milky coffee”—a cup of warm, frothy milk with a teaspoonful of Mum’s coffee mixed in). Deciding to take charge of her life with a complete role reversal, she told our mother: “When I was a big lady and you were a little baby, I used to push you around in your pram.”

* Disobedience

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he;
“You must never go down to the end of the town, if
you don’t go down with me.”

—A.A. Milne, in When We Were Very Young

Tell Me Another

89. Make Love, Not Clockwork Devil-Doggery

from posteritati.com

Back in the early Seventies, Andrew and I used to go out to the movies almost every week. The legendary Orson Welles Cinema on Mass Ave. in Cambridge always had a terrific line-up of independent and foreign films, and I particularly remember delighting in the French ones: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, and Louis Malle’s Phantom India and Murmur of the Heart. We also watched Philippe deBroca’s The King of Hearts, which had a four-year run at the Welles, and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, which broke all records with a continuous 10-year run there.

In general, I found these films full of joie-de-vivre and a pleasure to watch. Whatever their sexual and sensual content—and they were certainly not prudish, as many Hollywood films are—it was consensual. But then something changed—something perhaps in the times, and certainly in the films we started seeing. For me, three extremely violent movies, all of which came out in 1971, were responsible for that change: The Devils, Straw Dogs, and A Clockwork Orange. I heartily wish that I had never seen the first two, and am glad I chose not to expose myself to the third.

from nightmarerevue.com

Andrew and I went to see the British director Ken Russell’s The Devils because we had heard that it was based on a novel by Aldous Huxley (The Devils of Loudun). Unfortunately, the film—or all I remember of it—was one unrelieved succession of sadism and perversity involving nuns, sexual repression, and religious persecution. It didn’t seem to have much of a point, and certainly gave me no pleasure at all. I think I may have walked out and asked for my money back, something I have never done before or since; in any case, I remember being extremely upset and having a terrible argument with poor Andrew afterwards, who became the target of my righteous wrath simply because he happened to be a man.

The gratuitous violence in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs had already created a stir before we went to see it, and I ought to have known better. However, it had been filmed in a small community in Cornwall, England, where our old family friends Mag and George lived with their three children, and because I had heard that some of them were extras in the film, I decided to go anyway,  hoping to catch a glimpse of them in one of the crowd scenes. I’ve regretted that decision ever since. Not only was there an extended rape scene in the movie—in fact, two, not one—but its female victim was portrayed as enjoying it, thereby perpetuating the myth that women “ask for it” and “say no when they mean yes.”

After that film, cinema-going was spoiled for me for a long, long time. In fact, Andrew’s and my regular outings to the Orson Welles came to an abrupt stop. I felt personally violated by the vicious attacks upon the heroine in Straw Dogs, and came to believe, not without cause, that most screen violence (for which I had a low tolerance at best) was sexual violence (for which I had zero tolerance). It seemed that Straw Dogs had inaugurated a new era in the movies, one that made all earlier violence seem tame. But then Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange swaggered onto American screens (it was banned in Britain, as was Straw Dogs), and introduced ultraviolence.

This time I took precautions, read the reviews in advance, and made a firm decision that seeing this movie was out of the question for me. Not only was it packed with violence perpetrated by young men upon defenseless elderly men and women and underage girls, but it was violence for the sake of violence, meaningless and entirely without motive. But when A Clockwork Orange came to the Harvard Square Cinema, my college suite-mate Sheila went with her boyfriend, and I witnessed the fallout. Later that night she came home shaken and distraught: on the way home from the cinema, crossing the Cambridge Common in the dark, her boyfriend had suddenly seemed to lose all control and attacked her. Watching the movie had somehow set something off inside him—something waiting to go off, perhaps, with A Clockwork Orange serving as the catalyst. Even though I regularly teach the Anthony Burgess novel on which it was based, I still have not seen the film, and intend never to do so. (Interestingly, the version of the novel on which Kubrick’s film was based was the American edition, which has a completely different ending (and thus, a completely different moral) from the British original.)

Since 1971, moviegoers have been exposed to increasingly more violent films (Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers come to mind, neither of which have I seen), and each time the acceptable level of violence shifts, setting a new norm for the future. Perhaps America has always been a violent place and the movies are all of a piece with the general ethos; probably a causal relationship between cinematic and “actual” violence in society at large will never be able to be established; but I know that I was harmed by the movie violence to which I unwittingly exposed myself as a teenager, and that it destroyed my innocent enjoyment of sensuality as loving play.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

88. Sisters, Pick Up Your Sisters

vermontguardian.com photo by Christopher Parker

Hitchhiking was a way of life for young people in the Sixties and was still a fairly common practice in the Seventies, when we were old enough to do it. Andrew and I had many memorable experiences hitchhiking around England in 1971, the summer after we graduated from high school and, back in the States, we regularly picked up hitchhikers in our old milk truck, whose bench seats could—and often did—accommodate up to eight passengers as we trundled up and down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston on our way to and from work.

Both as hitchhikers and as drivers, our rides were overwhelmingly enjoyable. When people picked us up they shared food and fellowship with us, and, in the privacy of their vehicles, also shared their hopes and dreams with perfect strangers. We did have one hairy experience, though. Once, in that Summer of 1971, a lorry driver picked us up on a cold, rainy afternoon somewhere in Cambridgeshire, after we had been waiting for a long time. Overjoyed to be taken in out of the rain, we bundled into the lorry’s cab with him, dripping wet, and listened politely as he talked.

Or rather, ranted. As he got into full spate, we became progressively more uncomfortable, since he was soon on the topic of “these long-haired layabouts,” all of whom ought to be taken out and shot. I stole a look at Andrew, who was squeezed right up against our hospitable hippie-hater on the front seat, and was relieved to find that his long, damp locks were safely tucked into the collar of his turquoise corduroy shirt. Still, it would only be a matter of time before the jig was up and we could only breathe freely again when he dropped us off at last, his run taking him in a different direction.

As the decade wore on, horror stories about the dangers of hitchhiking took hold of the popular imagination. Strangely enough, although I would have thought that the dangers for hitchhikers themselves, especially women, were far greater than the dangers for the motorists who picked them up, most of these stories featured attacks on hapless motorists and people became afraid of picking up travelers thumbing a ride at the side of the road. Whether or not they were urban legends (and in those days before the Internet, there was no snopes.com to verify or dismiss such rumors), stories circulated in which motorists stopped to pick up a lone woman only to be jumped by her male accomplice hiding behind a bush, and these deterred many people even from giving rides to women. In many states, laws were passed prohibiting hitchhiking on all public roadways, and even in liberal Massachusetts it is now illegal to hitchhike on turnpikes and highway ramps. In many states with particularly tyrannical car cultures, just being a pedestrian renders one suspect.

In this increasingly forbidding climate, the women’s movement in the mid-Seventies came up with an inspired campaign to protect both female hitchhikers and female motorists: a bumper sticker campaign with the slogan, “Sisters, Pick Up Your Sisters.” If women picked up women, the reasoning went, both parties would be safer, since the perpetrators of violence on either side were almost exclusively male. I don’t know how widespread the campaign was, but for several years the bumper sticker was quite a common sight around the Greater Boston area. It was a terrific idea, and one that I would like to see revived.

One would think that with gasoline prices rising again, hitchhiking would be making a comeback, along with carpooling and ridesharing, but after all this time it would require a change in our individualistic culture. I still pick up a woman occasionally, if there’s room in the car, if it’s safe to pull over and stop, and if I’m not in a hurry; a lot of ifs, but every time I take the trouble to do so, the experience turns out to be such an interesting one that I ask myself why I don’t do it more often.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

87. Thanda Thanda Pani or, You Never Miss Your Water…

In May, 2010, there was a panic in Massachusetts when an emergency Boil Water Order had to be issued after a water main burst. For just a few days, millions of Boston-area residents were told to boil their tap water before drinking it. What a to-do! Panic ensued, there was a run on bottled water, and inevitably, in the aftermath of the scare, law suits were filed. But in much of the rest of the world, boiling or filtering the tap water is a normal part of everyday life  (as is chronic diarrhea from untreated drinking water). It certainly was so throughout my childhood in India, when the day was organized around the water supply: collecting, boiling, cooling, and storing it.

First of all came the collection of the water. The mains were only turned on for short periods a couple of times a day, so we had to be prepared for the water when it came, filling and then covering the tanks and the tubs and all the large containers in the house. This was to be used for washing, bathing, and cooking as well as for drinking, and during times of water shortage it might not come at all, so we collected as much as we could in order to ensure that we would have enough to last, even if the supply failed for a day or so.

After collecting the water my mother boiled the day’s drinking supply on our two kerosene-fueled primus stoves. When it had been actively on the boil for several minutes (and my mother always erred on the safe side), she poured them into earthenware jugs and set them on the shady back verandah to cool. The unfired clay promotes cooling, and by late afternoon it was ready for drinking or for further chilling in three or four one-litre glass bottles in the door of our small refrigerator.

One hot summer afternoon my father came back from the Institute with a terrible thirst. He made a beeline for the fridge, grabbed one of the glass bottles and glugged half of it down before he started spluttering and dashed wildly to the bathroom. Before he realized his mistake he had chugged nearly half a bottle of gin, thinking it was water. Boy, was he sick that day!

In the heat of April-May, nothing was—nothing is—more refreshing than a cold glass  of nimbu-pani, water with a wedge of lemon squeezed into it. In India whether one goes to a restaurant or to a friend’s house to visit, the first thing one is offered is a tumblerful of ṭhanda pani—cold water. As children, we were put into awkward social situations at friends’ houses by our parents’ strict instructions to ask everyone, when offered a glass of water, whether the water had been boiled and, if it had not been, either to request boiled water or to decline politely. But despite our embarrassment, their vigilance kept us healthy, and I don’t remember coming down with diarrhea more than twice throughout my entire childhood.

When we lived in India for six months in 1993, the big hit song was India’s first indigenous rap number, Baba Sehgal’s Thanda Thanda Pani, with its homespun lyrics and its subject that reached across the entire social divide: cold, cold water. Everywhere we went, loudspeakers and boomboxes were blasting out the beat of the catchy chorus, with its lead-in: “kya aapko chahiye (what would you like?)” Reply: ṭhanda ṭhanda pani (repeated ad nauseum, fifty times a day). I remember, on an auto-rickshaw ride across Pune, the delight of the driver when eight-year-old Nikhil joined in the chorus as it blared tinnily out of his vehicle’s radio.

Some years ago our friend Hayat presented us with three beautiful water glasses of hand-blown glass ringed with blue and turquoise. Her name means Life, as in Muhammad Husain Azad’s famous Urdu work Aab-e Hayat (Water of Life), and whenever we drink from those tall, cool glasses we remember to be grateful for the gift of life-sustaining water, and never to take it for granted. In the words of Peter Tosh, you never miss your water till your well runs dry.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

 

 

86. Bottled Sunshine

the tradition continues: Eric’s harvest 2010

As we enter the darkest days of winter, I find myself recalling past summers and the bounty of Andrew’s vegetable gardens. Having lived and worked on the only farm in Brookline as a boy (first learning to drive on a tractor), he has the wisdom and the work ethic of an old New Englander. Pete Hill, the manager of Allandale Farm, who after the Second World War was a GI-Bill graduate of Mass Aggie (before it became UMass Amherst), imparted to him not only his vast knowledge of farming but also his stoic approach to the vagaries of wind and weather; his mother Anna passed on to him her passion for gathering and gleaning and her horror of waste; but Andrew taught himself how to put food by. For years and years he not only grew much of our food in a series of large home gardens, but preserved it as well, freezing, drying, and mostly, canning it in dozens of Mason jars which we broke out through the winter like bursts of sunshine.

Andrew approached canning as he approaches everything else, scientifically. He read the instructions thoroughly and followed them meticulously, taking extra precautions so as to minimize the risk of spoilage. He washed and prepared the fruits or vegetables, selecting only the best specimens for preservation; unpacked, re-washed, and sterilized the previous year’s quart and pint jars; and got out our largest and heaviest stainless-steel saucepans: strictly stainless steel for canning, absolutely no cast iron or aluminum. Then he got the stove going, having laid in a good stock of both kindling and larger logs so as to be able to control the temperature; since for many of those years we were using a woodstove. (Andrew’s brilliant stove design using a 55-gallon drum is another story, especially its built-in griddle that could cook ten pancakes at a time.)

Our biggest pot was part of  an old milking machine; it was massive and held several gallons. It did your eyes a treat to see the ripe red tomatoes simmering in it, their level rising as we added each new batch. Andrew was careful not to overcook them,  and after they had cooked for their appointed time, he put them through the hand-cranked tomato mill to remove their skins and seeds. Then, using a heavy funnel (also stainless-steel, from that milking apparatus), he filled the jars to precisely the proper level, screwed the lids on, not too tight, and processed them in a pressure-canner or boiling-water bath, seven quarts at a time, for exactly the requisite number of minutes. He took them out to cool on a clean surface, and then we waited to hear the caps make that satisfying click, somewhere between the sound of a cricket and a bullfrog, which signified a successful vacuum-seal.

Besides the quarts of tomato sauce, Andrew would cook down some of the sauce into Andrew’s Special Ketchup, rich and dark and flavored with spices, which he stored in Grolsch beer bottles, the green ones with the ceramic stoppers. He also perfected a recipe from our old Penguin Indian Cookery (the Sardar-ji cookbook, my father called it, because it was written by one Dharamjit Singh) for brabarr tamattar chutney, made half-and-half with red and green tomatoes, and delicious on cheese sandwiches.

Tomatoes were easy to can, Andrew always said, because of their high acid content; he was even more meticulous, if that is conceivable, when preserving low-acid produce. He made jam, too, with raspberries, blueberries, and Concord grapes, sealing the tops with wax; a tricky procedure, but such was his care that not a single one ever spoiled. We all benefited from his insistence on erring on the safe side, because every time he wasn’t one hundred percent certain of the seal, we could start eating the jam right away.

I haven’t mentioned the drying oven that Andrew made, with a built-in thermostat-operated fan and stainless-steel mesh racks; in it we dried apples and pears, tomatoes, peppers, and even eggplant, which we stored in glass gallon jars and used in sauces and stews throughout the winter. And of course, we wouldn’t have had all that food to put by if he hadn’t grown it in the first place.

Nowadays we are members of a CSA (community-supported agriculture) at a local farm, and Andrew restricts his gardening to things we can’t get in sufficient quantities there: mostly blueberries and garlic. We now have a chest freezer and he washes the fruits and vegetables, blanching some before packing them in heavy plastic freezer bags, each one labeled by year and batch.

What has been my role in this process, you may ask? Over the years I have harvested, washed, chopped, stirred, followed instructions, waited impatiently for a chance to have a taste; and time and time again, in the deep dark of winter,  I have reached gratefully for another jar of Andrew’s bottled sunshine.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

83. A Clear, Cold New England Day

Friday, February 6^th, 1970 was a clear, cold New England day, typical of the time of year, I would later learn. My mother, my ten year-old sister Sally, and I arrived at Logan Airport and took a taxi to Brookline, where my father, who had been in America since the previous September, had moved from his Cambridge bachelor pad and rented a two-bedroom apartment. The schools were known to be good in Brookline, and the apartment, on Longwood Avenue near Coolidge Corner, was almost immediately opposite the Lawrence School, where Sally would be entering the fifth grade more than halfway through the year.

But on that February afternoon all I knew was that it was extremely cold and yet the sky was unbelievably clear. In my experience, clear sunny skies were associated with heat: blue skies and frigid temperatures did not compute (as the robot would say in Lost in Space, my favorite American television show during our long eighteen-month sojourn in England, waiting for our Green Cards). Only later would I learn that it was precisely when there was no cloud cover that it was the coldest. Until that day, when reading the phrase, “not a cloud in the sky,” I had always assumed that it was an exaggeration; but here I was witnessing for the first time a wide open sky with not a wisp of cloud in it. (Later, in 1973, studying in England for a year, I would find the close grey skies suffocating and long to return to America’s Big Sky, suddenly symbolic of an American openness that I had not appreciated before.)

We had a beautiful view of the Boston skyline from the taxi, and the cabbie cheerfully stepped into the role of a tour guide and host, welcoming immigrants to a new country. I remember him pointing with pride to the Prudential Tower; did he mention Fenway Park, too? I think so, but can’t be sure. What did we know of baseball? Strangely enough, I can’t remember whether or not my father was with us on that cab ride, even though he must have been; we had been separated from him for a year and a half. Perhaps he was sitting uncharacteristically quietly up front with the loquacious driver, waiting to show us the apartment he had picked out for us and hoping that we would approve of it.

We did approve, though we didn’t have much time to look around and get our bearings. Mum would have to start looking for work on the Monday, and Sally and I would have to venture into our respective new schools. The apartment was nearly empty when we arrived, but Dad soon built elegant and serviceable new furniture for it, as he had done every time we moved to a new place. This was to be our family’s last big move. Today, more than forty years later, we are still using some of the furniture that Dad made for our first home in America.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

79. Baths, Bathing, and Hot Water Bottles

Public Baths, Prince of Wales Road (photo: justinc)

Growing up in North London before the Second World War, my mother and her family had an outhouse in the garden and used the public baths down the street to bathe and do their laundry. The Prince of Wales Baths, built in 1900, are in use today as the newly renovated Kentish Town Sports Centre, run by the London Borough of Camden. For at least a couple of decades after the War, there were many Londoners who did not have full bathrooms in their houses. They washed at the kitchen sink, shared a single lavatory on one of the landings, and still went down to the public baths.

Renting rooms as college students in London during the 1970s, we had to feed 10p coins (still called florins or two-bob bits despite the new decimal currency) into the gas meter for hot water, paying as we went. We had to keep a stock of them handy at all times, because it is one of the worst experiences imaginable when the water suddenly goes stone-cold halfway through a bath. The housing stock was old, and few homes were centrally heated, so we counted on a hot bath at night, followed by a running jump into sheets pre-heated with a hot water bottle.

Living in the United States, I have succumbed to the speed and efficiency of showers. Luxuriating in a tub bath is a once-a-month treat, if that. But I miss this relaxing evening ritual and enjoy it whenever I am visiting my family in England. “I’m running your bath, Jo,” my cousin Sue will say, “and then we’ll snuggle up and watch Ghost, with Patrick Swayze and a nice cup of tea.”

People accustomed to showering, particularly Americans, tend to look askance at British bathing as an unhygienic practice, and perhaps it was, rather, in the past, when several members of a family in succession might use the same bathwater to economize on hot water (and on florins). But it is always possible to rinse off with fresh water after one’s soak in the tub, and my cousin Lesley told me that her mother always made her rinse with cold water, “to close the pores.” To this day I try to follow this sound—and bracing—advice, but I must admit that I usually lose my nerve and settle for a cool or lukewarm rinse.

In India the bath is a mandatory morning ritual, and the day cannot properly begin until one has had one’s refreshing and purifying bath. Certainly one cannot break one’s fast before bathing. Most middle-class Indians—at least until recently, when more people have showers—would bathe with one bucket of hot water from an on-demand water heater called a “geyser.” My favorite morning baths have been in our family home in Ratnagiri, where, at first light, Mai-atya’s young companion (she never considered the young women who lived with her to be servants) would light a small wood fire in the old copper boiler to heat just enough water for everyone’s baths, if we were economical. That boiler has been there since my father’s youth, and is still going strong today. I would wake to a cup of tea and the smell of wood smoke, and when my turn came, would step out of the house and into the attached washroom, where I would fill a stainless-steel bucket with the desired mix of cold water from the 55-gallon drum and hot water from the boiler, and, sitting on the low wooden bath stool, soap up and rinse with a plastic pouring mug dipped into the bucket.

In Delhi’s intense summer heat before the arrival of the moonsoon rains, the trick was to bathe, dry, and dress oneself before getting into a sweat again. The strategy I developed was to rinse with cold water, and then dry off and dress under a fan. Inevitably, though, one was soaked through within minutes of completing the whole procedure, so one had to take two or three baths a day, especially  in late May and June.

At boarding school in Darjeeling during the worst times of drought before the monsoons, the school swimming pool had to serve as our water supply. We were rationed to one mugful for our faces and teeth in the mornings and two three-minute (cold) showers a week, with an older girl standing outside to make sure that we did not linger past our allotted time.

The sheets were so cold at night in the stone building that housed the girls’ dormitories that we needed hot water bottles to take the chill off them. To fill our bottles we had to venture down into the cavernous kitchens, where water for the next morning’s porridge was bubbling in massive industrial-sized cauldrons. I was always losing things, and my hot water bottle was no exception, so I had to beg a dormmate in a neighboring bed to lend me hers just for a few minutes to save me from the excruciating plunge into those icy sheets.

Our own bathing practices today are a hybrid. Our hundred-year-old farmhouse bathroom still has its original clawfoot tub, with a retrofitted shower head. Most of the time we shower, American-style, but we keep a stainless-steel bucket and a plastic pouring mug in the bathroom and use them from time to time as well. When Nikhil was little, he looked forward to his tub bath—boats, rubber duckies, and all—as part of the nightly bedtime ritual, insisting that I sit and read to him while he played.

Years ago, when we visited Michael in New Mexico, Michael’s high-power housemate would come home from her demanding job and, never one to do anything by half measures, would drink cups of chamomile tea while soaking in a hot bath filled with chamomile flowers, a recipe for calming herself inside and out. My friends send me bath salts with labels like Ginger/Mint Aromatherapy Foam Bath: Warm and Replenishing: not-so-subtle hints, perhaps, that I need to slow down and unwind more often. This chilly October day, I am sitting on the bed with a hot water bottle as I write, and a nice cup of tea on the bedside table. The bath will have to wait until after I have finished my taxes.

Tell Me Another

 

76. Say it Again

I am telling this story for two reasons: because it has a happy ending and because I like the feel of a certain word rolling around on my tongue.

Cast your mind back to your childhood self at eight—or, if you are a parent, to your child at that age.  It was 1993 and Andrew, Nikhil, and I were living in India for six months while I did my dissertation research. For the first month or so we stayed in Delhi with “the four J’s”—my cousin Jayant, his wife Jaya, and their two children Jyoti and Jatin, respectively a little older and a little younger than Nikhil. We went on to Kanpur, Bombay, Pune, Ratnagiri, and Karwar, and then wended our way back to our Delhi family again before taking off for the States in June. Although it had been our original intention to live independently, we wound up living with and being taken care of by different members of our family the whole time, and so tried to fit as smoothly as possible into the daily rhythms of their households.

Often, while Jayant and Jaya, both busy physicians, were at work, Andrew would organize a game of cricket in the courtyard with the three children. Nikhil and he had bought a book on the rules of cricket and had been studying it carefully. They worked out an elaborate system of scoring depending on whether the ball stayed in the courtyard or was hit all the way up to the terrace. Of course, in that limited space, the pitch had to be considerably foreshortened, with the runner scoring when he or she reached the courtyard wall and tagged it with the bat.

On this particular day I seem to recall that we were preparing to travel and Nikhil was getting in one last game with his cousins. I didn’t see the fateful hit, but I do know that Nikhil gave the ball a mighty thwhack, charged down the pitch at full tilt, and was stopped short only when his head rammed straight into the rock-hard courtyard wall.

All I saw was my son being half-supported, half-carried into the hall with a hideous lump the size of a cricket ball starting out of his temple. You have all seen lumps like it, on the heads of characters in comic books. I was beside myself. But Jaya, the pediatrician, remained completely calm. After looking into his eyes and asking him and Andrew a few questions, she produced a tube containing a mysterious unguent called Thrombothrob (you heard it, Thrombothrob), rubbed it gently into the affected area, and put him straight to bed, where he fell instantly into a deep sleep and continued sleeping soundly all evening and the whole night through.

By morning he was cured. The hideous lump had completely resolved itself, and there was hardly a trace of the injury of the previous afternoon. O happy day! To me it was nothing short of a miracle. But dear Jaya was unsurprised, and I realize now that she must have ascertained immediately that, horrifying as it had looked, it had not been a serious head injury.

Thrombothrob. Say it again.

postscript, 9/29/10: In response to a subscriber’s letter challenging the very existence of said  mysterious unguent, I wrote to my cousins for confirmation. They have now written back with good news and bad: the good news is that, yes, this ointment does exist, the bad news is that I had got the spelling wrong. It’s not Thrombothrob but Thrombophob—just as effective when used for the purposes described (external use only), but not quite as delicious a word to roll around on the tongue. So thanks for keeping me honest, but I’m sticking to my original story!

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

73. Trouble

a-z-animals.com

He was an eighteenth-birthday present to Nikhil from his old schoolfriend Kathy. Andrew and I had withdrawn discreetly after the cake and candles so that the teenagers could enjoy themselves alone; when we came downstairs the next morning, half a dozen sleeping bags were sardine-packed side-by-side in the den, their teenage inhabitants unlikely to stir for hours to come, while a tropical fish, turquoise with streaks of jet-black, was darting back and forth agitatedly in a tiny bowl perched amid the debris of the party.

Immediately, of course, Andrew and I began emoting—or rather, I did, while Andrew set about finding it a more livable habitat. Poor little thing, I wailed, and thoughtless girl, however well-meaning; couldn’t she have asked permission before giving a living creature as a gift? Nikhil made it crystal-clear that he had no intention of taking it to college with him, so Andrew and I, who had always resisted bringing dogs or cats to live with us because we didn’t want to be tied down, were now to be held in thrall to a fish.

But now that we had it (or rather, him; only the males of  his species were so brilliantly appointed) in our care, we had to do right by him, and we did. We found someone in Easthampton selling a fish tank with all accessories, and Andrew went over and picked it up, along with a couple of books on tropical fish. It was Andrew, once again, who read up about how to set up the tank, what kind of fish he was—a Beta, or Siamese fighting fish—and what to feed him. After a couple of false starts—a pet-store plant that turned out to be contaminated and filled the tank with thick green slime, and a period during which we overfed him and the uneaten fish-food particles clouded the water—we settled into a routine and Trouble became part of the household.

I can’t remember who named him. Perhaps it was Kathy herself, a little apologetic about her unasked-for gift, or perhaps it was Nikhil, with a wry nod to the parents who would be taking care of him. For it was Andrew and I who were left with Trouble when Nikhil went off to college. It was a stressful period for me and I found it soothing, almost hypnotic, to sit in front of his tank and watch him swimming to and fro; at times he would get uncharacteristically listless, and I would worry, but when I approached he always perked up and swam to the surface expectantly. When I told Nikhil this he shook his head pityingly, sure that I was going off my rocker now that he had left home and compensating for his absence by projecting my pent-up emotions onto the fish. “His brain is smaller than a pea, Mom; in fact, he doesn’t even have a brain, just a few nerve endings. He can’t possibly know that you are going to feed him.”

But I knew better. Despite his diminutive size, Trouble always managed to look endearingly fierce, rather like Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street. I was sorry that we couldn’t provide a companion for him, since he was a scrappy little fellow and longed for a mate, I felt sure. We had read that Siamese fighting fish will kill just about any other fish sharing their tank, even a female of their own species, so that if we wanted him to fulfil his biological destiny we would have to get a separate tank along with a female Beta (Why Beta? The very name was dehumanizing), and put them together in Trouble’s tank only for the purpose of mating, watching them like a hawk and then separating them before his killer instinct took over.  Ultimately, we found the prospect too daunting, and so Trouble grew to fiery male adulthood alone, and declined into old age alone as well.

Although I knew that goldfish could live for ten, even twenty, years,  I didn’t know the life expectancy for a Siamese fighting fish. In the second semester of Nikhil’s first year away at college, Trouble began to slow down. His glossy turquoise scales grew dull, and I fancy that the black ones turned a little grey, along with his whiskers. Instead of shooting up, down, and around, he took to hiding behind a cave-like rock Andrew had thoughtfully placed in his tank to give him shelter and privacy, not emerging even at feeding time. We worried that he might not be getting enough oxygen or that the water had become contaminated again, but try as we might, we could not restore his earlier vitality. The last time I sat in front of his tank, there was nothing to be seen but some creeping slime, a cloud of uneaten food, and a black tail fin sticking out from behind his favorite rock.

The next morning he was gone. Andrew is an early riser, and so it was he who found out that Trouble was no more. Before I had even come downstairs, Andrew had dug a small grave under the birch tree outside our kitchen, and quietly buried him there, with a white rock to mark the spot.

Perhaps it was us whom Kathy really bought that fish for, since her own mother had just gotten herself a large, lively puppy in anticipation of her leaving home, who attacked their guests—Nikhil among them—and was so much trouble that she had eventually had to take him back to the breeder. (The mother of another of Nikhil’s classmates had gotten a donkey.) Trouble was never any trouble at all. We didn’t mean to use him to fill our empty nest; it just happened that way. He couldn’t have had much joy in his short life, but he brought a flash of color into ours at a time when we needed it most.

Tell me another!

71. Simply Paying Attention

We always knew that our mother was psychic. When the phone rang, she would announce who was calling before picking it up. She knew in advance when she was about to receive a letter from one of her brothers or sisters. When I grew older and moved away from home, she seemed to sense when I was in distress and would call to ask how I was, saying that she had had “such a terrible dream.” But if we suggested that she had ESP, she would deny it stoutly.

When we lived in Kharagpur in the 1960s, Mum was thousands of miles away from her family and friends in England, with no Skype, video-chat, or email, of course, and even long-distance phone calls reserved for the direst of emergencies. She had to spend much of the day at home in relative isolation, with us children off at school and our father out at the Institute, so naturally she looked forward eagerly to Dad’s return. As he entered the house, she always asked, “Any-letters-any-news-any-money?” On one particular day, though, she said nothing as he came in. When he inquired as to why she hadn’t asked her usual question, she replied quietly, “I don’t need to ask; I know you’ve got something.” And indeed he had. He had finally received a long-awaited check for some work he had completed months before.

But Mum is and always has been a rationalist. She pooh-poohs the notion of extra-sensory perception, explaining her many instances of uncanny foreknowledge as perfectly natural, not supernatural at all. Just because science has not yet explained a given phenomenon, she insists, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t accessible to the senses. Just as a trained and observant eye sees things that others fail to notice, someone who has learned to pay closer attention can pick up signals that others may miss or dismiss. This explanation has always made eminent good sense to me.

On several occasions—in fact, quite often—I have had similar experiences of foreknowledge, particularly with my son. Time and time again I have just been thinking of him when he calls. (Yes, yes, I know—what mother isn’t thinking of her child much of the time?) In one instance, I answered a question that he had been thinking to himself but had not voiced out loud. Like many people, I frequently get a certain feeling, a quiet inner warning of how to act or not to act in a given situation. But unlike my mother, I have not learned to honor, even to recognize, such warnings and tend to rush on, letting them pass unheeded. Later, I find myself picking up the pieces after an accident which could have been averted had I simply been paying attention.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents