White
Elephants
Anita
Mathias
In
My grandmother said so. My mother said so.
“But what are brothels?”
“Never you mind.”
(And never mind that Nana never left her Catholic suburb of
Bandra for big bad
In
my grandmother’s house—which was Bombay as far as we were
concerned--almost everything: sliced beetroot, tomato, pineapple,
melon, rice, mutton curry, pancakes, or buttered toast was served with
a frosting of the sugar forbidden her, a diabetic.
In Bombay, Uncle Mervyn appeared with a gigantic brown paper bag
from which, with a magician’s flourish, he
produced chocolate—Krisp, Five Stars, Gems,
Caramello, Bournville, Cadbury’s Raisin, or Fruit and Nut which,
beaming with the pleasure of magnanimity, he bestowed on us, voila,
responding to my little sister’s delirious delight—“Wow,
Uncle Mervyn!”—with an almost eternal “There’s more, baby doll!” until
finally, almost incredibly, he came to the last loaf, the last fish,
and even our gluttonous eyes realized, without sadness, that there was
no more.
On
And the sea, the sea! Across the road, shimmering corrugated silver,
sea-gulls screeching on the wings of the wind, breakers and waves
crashing as in the scarcely noticed background of a dream.
Sudden breezes brought the acrid, exhilarating hors d’oevry tang
of the fish, “
Saturnalia! A
Roman holiday!
“Come on, Pa, you have
leave. Let’s go.”
“Leave!” he snorted. “Of
course, I have leave. All my six weeks. And most of last year’s, and the year before
that, and...”
“Pa, how meeeean. Why don’t you stay at home and play with us?”
“Huh!” he snorted.
But, we gathered,
*
* *
“Well, if we are going to
“Mangalore!” my mother
said. She was “a Bombayite,” proud of her
citizenship in the metropolis. “Never! I am never going to set foot in Mangalore
again. Petit pays, petite gens. Everyone thought the Japanese were behind the
Port Dock Explosion of 1942” and so like Blitzed London children, the
Bombayites who could evacuate did so. No Narnia though.
“When we cried in Mangalore and said we missed our mummy, those
Konkani speaking girls asked, ‘And do you miss your puppy?’ ”
“I am a persona non grata
in Mangalore,” my mother said, with a pleased, twisted little smile. The Latin, or…? The
ill-fated visit. Twenty years ago. My
soft-spoken father, Noel, the longed-for son, first-born after “a
plague of girls,” five pretty maids all in a row, had returned after
eight years in England, with a professional degree, F.C.A., Fellow of
the Institute of Chartered Accountants, England and Wales; an accent;
rumored romances, never confirmed, never denied; urbanity; high
culture—Malcom Sargent’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall! Laurence
Olivier as Lear at the Old Vic! Joyce, Woolf, Camus, Gide! and rich
experience: fruit-picking vacations in Europe; young communist camps in
Poland; cricket matches at Lords after which, he said, triumphant West
Indians raced onto the field, tossing their cricket bats in the air and
singing, “Crick-et, lubberly crick-et.” As
far as his mother, grandmother, and sisters were concerned, any bride
must necessarily fall short of his glory. My
mother, dissenting, never returned to Mangalore, nor met her mother or
sisters-in-law again, winning the Pyrrhic battles between mother- and
daughter-in-law scripted by centuries of Indian tradition by ignoring
as thoroughly as she was ignored, a simple, overlooked strategy (if you
can get away with it)!
“Pa, I’m going with you,”
I said desperately.
“No!” my mother said,
equally desperately. “Your hair will look like the wild woman of
“I’m not a donk.”
“If the cap fits, wear
it,” she sang out gleefully.
“Oh, let her come,” my
father said. “Or you two will fight all the time. Already
next-door, that Gupta, cornered me at work, and said, ‘I hear Anita’s
back.’ ”
“Well, she’ll be Mary,
Mary, quite contrary in Mangalore too. She’ll say, ‘I’m known as the
naughtiest girl in school.’ And they’ll
say why, and she’s such a donk, she’ll explain--proudly--and there’ll
be a new series of stories, and…” my mother squawked.
“But I want to see Saint
Francis Xavier. All the nuns at school said I should since Goa is
between
“And since when have you
had a devotion to Saint Francis Xavier?”
All Indian Catholics
talked about The Decennial Exposition of the Sacred Relics of Saint
Francis Xavier in
* * *
I had a special reason for
wanting to go, and my father always game for explorations of the
supernatural--Sai Baba, Yoga, the charismatic renewal, glossolalia,
palmistry, table tapping to summon a recently dead aunt’s spirit--had
agreed to take me.
All last winter, I had
read all the Greek mythology I could find. The loveliest magic, yet
real, the characters vain, vengeful, tricky, greedy, funny, human,
criss-crossing, intertwining, popping up in one another’s stories; it
felt like the
And then: an era-dating
idea. The wind chilled ancient people, I
read; the earth withheld crops; the sun scorched them, potent,
unappeasable. So they named these capricious forces Boreas, Ceres,
Apollo, Poseidon and tried to pamper and flatter them into beneficence.
I understood.
Was not all religion an attempt to control with carrots the wild
horses of the universe?
And why should
Christianity be any different?
It wasn’t.
I am an atheist, I said
proudly.
Free.
No need to be God-fearing. No God. No heaven. No
hell. I could now do anything I liked. I organized a gang, “the bandits,” to raid
Modern General Store; “Mr. Modern” cheated us year-round with his high
prices, I rationalized.
An atheist.
I could no longer walk through cold, flagstoned school corridors
on the eve of a Math, Physics or Hindi exam, saying to every nun I
passed, “Sis--ter, pray I pass.” My
favorite nun, Sister Josephine, used to, in reply, piously quote Thomas
More, with a twinkle in her eyes, The things, good Lord, that I pray
for, give me the grace to labor for, a bleak functional atheism I had
now to adopt. Here I was all on my own. An orphan in “the eternal silence of the
infinite spaces.” And when the tumult and
opprobrium of being “the naughtiest girl in the school,” wearied, I
could not pray for a water-to-wine, road-to-Damascus transformation of
the deep structure of my personality. No
supernatural consequences imposed by an all-seeing Eye, wonderful!, but
no golden deus ex machina, no supernatural rescue from consequence. No miracles. The world seemed bleaker,
lonelier. I shivered.
I woke one night to a
Presence standing by my bed, golden light. The ghost of my grandfather,
I decided. Or could it have been Christ himself, who walked, mysterious
and unrecognized with Abraham, wrestled with Jacob, stayed the blaze of
Nebuchudnezzar’s flames for the faithful three. Something more. A smiling magic beyond ourselves.
Wow! If I could see a miracle, I
might believe. If this body did indeed
miraculously refuse decay—“Thou shalt not let thy holy one know
corruption”—then there might be a miracle-worker, a God.
And life could be a true fairy tale; pumpkins, coaches; mice,
stallions; the impossible, possible; dreams, reality.
“If I take you, will you
behave?” my father frowned severely.
“Oh yes!
Prom--ise!”
“Behave! She’ll be quite
horrid!” my mother snorted.
* *
*
That done, a packing of
best clothes, letting out of seams of what I had outgrown, my mother
and the cook in the kitchen all day, crafting sweets, or on the
terrace, sun-drying prawn and pork pickles for Uncle Eustace who would
eat no sweets. We gave each relative we
visited a
So, once again, The Mill
on the Floss, read into the night, lying on my stomach beneath the
yellow globe of the bulb, with its protective steel mesh and doomed
moths. “Over your shoulder on to the book”
my father said fiercely, quoting Aldous Huxley who recovered from near
blindness by Better Sight without Glasses exercises.
Her mother and aunts again carp and
harp on the massy shaggy locks of Maggie Tulliver.
She impulsively self-shears her long black hair.
Jaggedly. Each attempt at evening
it renders it more odd. Frying pan, fire.
Across the floor’s
surreptitious debris--banana peels, peanut shells, wooden ice-cream
spoons, soft drink straws-- crawled the inevitable fat dark baby, eyes
black-ringed with (reputedly) enlarging kohl, all cheek, on which,
judiciously drawn: a black dot to ruin perfect beauty, a safeguard
against the envious nazar, evil eye, praise which might provoke the
malignity of the universe. With the
delight of young children in the even younger, we reflexively cooed,
“cho chweet,” a currently “hep” boarding school expression. The mother muttered “Wo mutt bolo. Usko nazar mutt do. Don’t
say that. Don’t give her the nazar.” “More beautiful than Juno” was the boast that
launched the sea monster against Andromeda, my father explained
(showing off: his bete noire); as a safeguard, a slave ran before
Caesar in his triumphal processions saying, “Remember: thou too art
mortal.”
Fields of brilliant yellow
flowering mustard; ponds smothered by the deadly beauty of purple water
hyacinths; a man doing surya namskar at the edge of the fields; women
squatting, brass lotas at their hands; children in scruffy underwear,
standing, legs apart, gawking at the train: the old hypnotic tableau. And then, the slow, grey, grimy approach to
the great city: Inventive shacks of tarpaulin, boards, and plastic
sheeting--and then, towering walls of tiny apartments, balconies
crowded with bicycles and drying clothes.
Bargaining
with red uniformed coolies at Victoria Terminus; an “I’m smart, I’m
tough” bluff. Take licensed taxis, not
moon-lighters. A glare at the taxi meter:
Turn it on—then to Bandra where my mother grew up, in which, like an
enchanted sleeping kingdom, fashions never changed.
Christian women wore one-piece dresses ending just above the
knee, a length unchanged from the Raj—right though the fifties when
most grown women, my father’s sisters, for instance, shed their anyway
unbecoming dresses for saris, for now exposing your legs (“bacon and
eggs,” the cognoscenti said in Cockney rhyming slang) suggested you
might be Anglo-Indian, (who, the British gone, morphed, in popular
imagination, to progeny of the Saturday flings of British Tommies and
Indian maids).
*
* *
The Coelhos rushed out as
we entered the long shell-strewn yard. My
tall, lanky, straight-backed grandfather, Stanislaus, wearing the small
black-rimmed glasses and baggy tweed trousers and jacket which were the
trademark of old gentlemen of his school; he had the long, sunken,
suffering face of T. S. Eliot, to whom he bore an uncanny resemblance. “And here comes The Ma-ha-ra-ja,” the middle
brother Mervyn drawled, rolling the syllables in gleeful mockery, his
voice suave, resonant, rich-timbered as port or Christmas cake, the
voice of a born priest! His oldest
brother, Eustace (an anomaly in that family of the worried) approached
us grinning, raffish as Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone with the
Wind, whom he resembled down to the ironic glint in his languid,
heavy-lidded, deceptively sleepy eyes and his debonair mustache. The nick-name--with the truth encrypted in
nick-names that take--was a not inapt description of Eustace’s
free-spending care-freeness and careless largesse, his flamboyance, his
popularity, his indulgence of his family, his friends, and himself. It was however inspired by the logo of Air
Ironically, Mervyn, the
middle brother, larger each year, physically resembled that Maharaja. His big, round beaming face had a polished
sheen; his large, lustrous, slightly squinted eyes sparkled at his own
sardonic murmurings; he was always at home, comfy in his trademark
T-shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts, shrouded in the mysterious nimbus of
the “self-employed.” The youngest brother,
Reynald, a Chartered Accountant, sweet-natured, gentle, smiley, was
everyone’s favorite, the frequent prerogative of the youngest; the only
brother who did marry, late, he still, straight after work, visited his
old home, where he was loved-up, lapped-up, listened to before he
dragged himself home, tired and talked-out,
on the days he had the energy to. The
never-seen characters of his office, like his lame polio-stricken boss,
Patrick Saldanha, who never missed a day’s work, transport strike,
monsoon floods, or riots and their fires, provided vivid,
extended-life, soap-operatic gratifications to my grandparents and Aunt
Joyce, whose dress was the precise deep-frozen length we had laughed
about in the taxi, we realized as she emerged.
Her
hair hung lank, her make-up was perfunctory, her figure had thickened;
as a young girl, however, she had been pretty. At proposals from the
most eligible bachelors, she sobbed, “but I don’t want to leave Mummy.” Others came from rich men who, when the
Portuguese began to convert our ancestral town of
Slowly, very slowly, my
grandmother, Molly, emerged, whom we called Small Nana, not just
because she was as diminutive and cute as a doll which—timid and
diffident, four feet something, in her perennial mid-calf batik
dresses--she was; but to distinguish her from Big Nana, Alice Rebello,
her mother, my great-grandmother, frail,
mild, with a constant, faint, gentle smile who,
miraculously on every visit, slipped my mother an exquisite piece of jewelry for us “when we grew up,”
delicate confections of diamonds, pearls and tiny rubies, or large
Burma rubies with deep gleaming depths set in rings and earrings bought
for her, in Persia, by my great-grandfather, a veterinary surgeon,
attending the British army, or, more precisely, its horses. (“Horse-doctor’s granddaughter,” we’d tease my
mother, forgetting our two degrees of connection.)
Big Nana slipped these to us when unobserved by her son and
daughter-in-law, who had moved in with her, an ex-nun of whom my father
said, “She’s a virago.” (“What is a
virago?” “Oh never mind.”
Another word for my childhood Kabbalah: What are Free Masons?
What is a Cabaret? –the flashing neon words over pictures of dancing
girls divesting, whispered by my classmates: Daddy went to the cabaret). Jewelry so beautiful, and atavistically
desired in a culture in which, traditionally, jewelry was a woman’s
only inalienable possession, yet with the power to rend relationships
as it rent the earth in its emergence--for one might have children in
multiples, but not jewelry, so every piece given to Petra renders
Paulina bitter, for jewelry—like food—often equals love in the heart’s
secret algebra.
“The drivers these days,
maniacs! Probably bought their driver’s
licence with a bribe; couldn’t be bothered about pedestrians; expect
you to run out of their way; how can I run? It’s
no longer safe to cross a street in
The final exception: the
perilous Sunday morning crossing of the street to the massive St.
Andrew’s Church, directly opposite her house, its floor, gravestones of
glorious mismatched marble—deep peacock purple; onion circles of pale
green; dark red tree-rings, or the calm beauty of the sheerest white--a
paving of crazy geometry, color and good intentions, bleating belated
praises to generations of Coelhos, Rebellos, Lobos, Saldanhas and
Noronhas, all of whom, apparently, were dearly beloved paragons,
exemplary husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, and if those
engraved lauds and laurels were a quarter-true,
the final musing would be all too true, “The earth shall not see their
like again.” And in the courtyard, amid
amiable huge-winged marble angels and antique urns, the
On Mondays, I returned to
St. Andrew’s, with my aunt Joyce and her friend Laura, to count the
Sunday collection, tens of thousands of rupees, the mite of widows,
paupers, princes, golden lads and lasses… The
gleam and chink of money! Engineering
feats: symmetrical towers of pentagonal five paise coins; hexagonal
twenties with Asoka’s lions; round rupee coins, and eleven-sided twos. I counted in paise, my aunt in annas, six
paise, a superseded unit my mother’s family clove to, despite our
decimalized post-Independence currency, counting in four and eight
annas rather than twenty-five and fifty paise, to the confusion of
children and vendors whose sweet transactions entailed such change. And when the Parish wanted money: Housie: jaldi
five; two fat ladies, 88; one and six,
sweet 16; all the sixes, 66; hockey
sticks, 77; top of the house, 90, and
sudden jubilation—Housie!
In dawning enlightenment,
Nana realized she need never leave home. Within
it, she had all she wanted: husband, children, and friends who’d drop
in with the sweets she craved, delectable hemlock. And so she lived
contentedly, in narrowing circles, a life-long voluntary house arrest,
gradually renouncing parties, visiting, church, shopping, cooking, her
world shrinking to ever fewer rooms.
And in this small world of
family, in an odd transmutation, she became the child to be petted and
indulged. My sister tricked Nana so often
that surely she was counter-tricked. Eating
a delicacy specially prepared for her, brain cutlets, tongue curry,
she’d say, “Nana, this food is not nice.” “And
Nana’s face fell,” she’d recount, “And then I said ‘It Is Delicious.’” (She’d wave her hand in front of her mouth in
agony, crying, “It’s hot.” “Fire-hot or
chili-hot?” they’d all ask, leaning forward solicitously). And so,
protected, Nana floated, so passive she could never remember to cut her
toe-nails; they grew, long, yellow, ridged, gnarled keratin, until the
doctor paid a home-visit to cut them for her.
51 Chimbai Road: The front
door, spirals of wrought iron over wood with flaking paint, opened onto
a foyer where, behind those screens with which Indians, like Japanese,
create new rooms, my Uncle Mervyn, a self-employed stock-broker,
worked—not entirely an overstatement, for, sporadically though the day,
little old Catholic ladies in their immutable Bandra shapeless flowery
dresses, visited with anxious portfolios, inherited from fathers,
bachelor brothers, or dead husbands: tenuous lifelines, everything
hinging on the prompt passage of their dividends through the chancy
arteries of the mail. The mail, the mail
man, objects of sad, strained aquiline eyes; Bandra’s Boggart took the
form of bags of mail floating on monsoon flooded streets, washed out
from alley refuse heaps into which they’d been dumped on bored and lazy
days. (“Has TISCO sent you your dividend?” “I
haven’t received my dividend from Glaxo.”)
A commute down the
corridor, work from home, set your own hours—glamorous, alluring lures.
Once a month however, Mervyn, scrubbed and
glowing, in his dazzling starched terrycot shirt and pants, a strand of
long hair pulled over his balding head; his huge, hazel eyes bulging
with importance as his briefcase was with paperwork to be filed in
person, and in triplicate--got ready for his tram trip to the Stock
Exchange at Bombay while his mother and sister clucked admonition
around him. Though Bandra was Bombay to
us, to my grandparents, inveterate homebodies, the commute from the
safe suburb to Bombay, den of iniquity, nest of vipers, sepulcher of
the righteous, great Gomorrah was nasty, fraught, rare, dreaded in
inverse proportion to its frequency: goondas, accidents, murders,
muggings. “But Nana, everyone doesn’t get
murdered, robbed or kidnapped,” I reasoned, reasonably.
“Why should we?” “Why shouldn’t
you?” they asked, their bleak law of probability. And the fact that my
father was pick-pocketed—three times—when he went to Bombay, and that
we, invariably, got ourselves lost, and that once, in our haste to
catch the subway, jumped into a first class compartment with a second
class ticket, and were heavily fined—unreceipted—did not increase her
confidence in us, or in the monster city.
Sanctity, they say, has
an aroma, the fragrance of roses around the corpse of Francis Xavier,
or Padre Pio; so too does sadness, so too does failure. Molecules of
its mournful cologne mouldered on Uncle Mervyn. Perhaps
this scent of sadness came from the leaching of life’s romances—both
minor: the romance of reading everything, the romance of travel, of the
achievement of ambition, of, say, “writing a book,” and major: parent
love, erotic love, the love of God. When his siblings mocked his early
yearning to become a priest, his secret celebration of improvised
masses, complete with missal, bell, candles, censer, and liturgical
Latin, he gravitated towards the most common default romance: Money,
the bracken, the brush, the wilderness, the weeds that so often chokes
our saddest ruins—abandoned dreams.
Food and money, ancient
Biblical idols. Money, the commonest
collection; food, the easiest comfort. Steaming
savory mirages drifted into Mervyn’s memory; he dialed one of his
genteel neighborhood friends with more time than money.
At lunch, for a small fee, his fantasies lay incarnated before
us through the conjurations of Edith, a serious, middle-aged lady, with
a neat shoulder-length perm, cat’s eyes glasses and tight-sashed floral
dresses: the Anglo-Indian cuisine we thought of as English, but which I
have never encountered in England (or anywhere else): “potato
chops”—mashed potato croquettes, fried in egg and bread-crumbs, stuffed
with spicy minced beef; or “pan rolls,” crepes with a minced meat
filling, fried golden with bread crumb bristles, an East-West fusion
for our mildly Westernized palates.
Or sometimes, sarpatel,
archetypal Mangalorean delicacy, chunks of pork beneath inches of fat
and chewy, rubbery rind, simmered in a sauce of spices, wine and blood.
A shibboleth. “Is
your father Mangalorean?” a wedding hostess asked as I got him food
while he chuckled over the lyrics floating from the house where the
bride was bathed in coconut milk for her roce, her wedding shower,
while her friends sung the saddest, oddest dirges, until she cried,
which meant: Good Luck! “Oh, you poor
thing,” they sang. “That mother-in-law! When
you visit her, she’ll be vegetarian; when she’s visits you, she’ll be
non-vegetarian. Her visits will be almost
eternal. And when she leaves, so will your most precious possessions.” “Oh, good, he’s Mangalorean,” the hostess said,
freely loading his plate. “Then he loves
sarpatel.” My near-vegetarian father
nearly wailed. He eschewed pork:
free-ranging, gutter-feeding, its tape-worm spreading meningitis, its
round worm causing the recent epidemic of encephalitis.
Mervyn eschewed water with
equal rigor, drinking only Mangola, expensive, sweetened bottled mango
juice. When the neighborhood’s illiterate Koli fisher-families sent
their sons to the house for help in getting a job or decoding their
bank passbook, he’d say, “Fetch me a crate of Mangola,” his voice
full-bodied, luscious, ripe-fruity, and slip an extra fiver into their
hands, noblesse oblige. “The lakhpati!” my
aunt Joyce exclaimed sarcastically, “He behaves like a lakhpati. Give
me what you give them; I’ll be a lakhpati too.” (A lakh, a hundred
thousand rupees--like a crore, ten million--is a specifically Indian
unit in an inflationary economy. For all Joyce’s teasing, Mervyn, who
never worked a regular job, died with a collection of them.)
My father and Uncle Mervyn
twirled crystal Maharaja-engraved champagne goblets of Mangola over
lunch, inhaled the bouquet of fizzy wealth, drunk deep of it. I listened—stocks, bonds, dividends, while the
accountant regions of my mind calculated along: double your money in
seven years at ten percent with Binny’s, but with Larsen and Toubro,
double your money in five years at fifteen percent, but with more risk.
I planned, importantly, to explode my own
little nest egg with the miracle of compound interest (100 rupees, 110,
121, 133; ten percent at the rule of 72, too slow, let’s try…) hearing
the tick-tock of money being fruitful, implacably increasing and
multiplying. Oh, I’d become a millionaire
off the abundance encoded in creation for the diligent and
imaginative—encrypted in a single tomato seed (plant, plants: farm); an
egg (a chicken, eggs: a chicken empire). “I
know what, Ma. I’ll have a fudge stall at
school; you cook the fudge and I’ll….” “Your
head I will.” But, always, I’d back off
from this obsession, heady in its wild mathematics, its astrophysical
immensity--but, for what? So what? Oh, I’d be a millionaire too, I decided. All things are possible: childhood’s
birthright.
Food and money,
ancient idols, food, money and the news. As
the cocky pre-dawn crow of backyard chanticleers competed with the
muezzin to awake the dawn, Mervyn’s radio’s purred while he monitored
the world with The Blitz, The Bombay Herald, The Times of India and the
morning coffee, each addiction equally potent. Bribery,
corruption, politicians and other crooks, and the unnerving rise to
power of the Shiv Sena who wanted Bombay called Mumbai, for heaven’s
sake, and a Hindustan for Hindus-- as if those rooted in the land
through race, and immemorial residence should belong any less to it
because of a private faith adopted fuzzy centuries ago by fuzzy
ancestors.
The griefs of the world
unfurled over the newspapery breakfasts Mervyn masterminded. From the
neighborhood’s only cold storage, the Koli boys fetched, in waxy
cerements, the not easily obtainable luxury meats of my childhood, ham,
bacon, sausages, salami, luncheon meat. These were served with “Nana’s
scrambled eggs,” the only thing she personally cooked, fried rich
golden in ghee, with onion, coriander and mint. Eustace surveyed this
gastronomic indulgence coolly, while he ate, or rather drank, standing
up, his unvarying breakfast—two raw beaten eggs, which I found
impossible to swallow despite my great admiration of his jauntiness.
All morning, in his office
cluttered with cherished typewriters, and an expanding universe of
shortwave radios, Mervyn twiddled knobs with fingers as compulsive as
those bewitched by Rubik’s cube, extracting flickering stations, the B.
B. C; the Voice of America, and, most of all, jazzy Radio Ceylon so
that he knew the lyrics of ABBA, Cliff Richards, or Simon and Garfunkel
as well as the coolest girls at school. And in the naked night, I
saw/Ten thousand people, maybe more. /People talking without speaking,
/People hearing without listening, /People writing songs that voices
never share/and no one dare/Disturb the sound of silence.
And now and again: Scoop! He knew, before the news, of the rescue of
Israeli hostages in those ninety minutes at Entebbe, and, closer to
home, late one evening, he heard of the 757 wrecked on the beach three
minutes away, and, of course, we scrambled over slippery algae-covered
rocks and fishing nets spread out to dry, arriving at the scene with
the rescue workers, and behind the ropes that cordoned off the
treacherous rocks and the sea from the curious and the greedy, watched
them haul in the wrecked suitcases and bodies and the jaunty rubber
doll that bobbed above the waves among other fragments of dreams.
Always, across the road,
the savory ocean, washed gold-silver by the setting sun, battered the
sea-wall, beckoning, summoning. Obstat,
verboten, anathema. Couldn’t go without
them: kidnappers, speeders, and the never-voiced danger of rape. Couldn’t go with them: inside, somnolence
reigned. So, silver bells and cockle
shells, we played in the long barren front yard, its soil, shells from
ages past when it had all been ocean-floor, or the
Shells of mystery, shells
of marvel, sirens of forbidden seas; we carted them into the house,
returned, and still there were more, numberless as the descendants
promised to Abraham—“as the stars in the sky and the sand in the
seashore”—the latter the most staggering metaphor for infinity, for in
the sultry summer nights when we slept on the verandah, I, every night,
attempted to count the stars to seduce sleep, and it seemed a doable
enterprise, if one had patience and a system. Time moved slowly, the
timeless time of childhood. When the sun
made us head-achey and dazed, we drifted indoors to gaze absently at
the pretty-pretty ceramic tiles on the window sills: an English cottage
near a watermill; a plump-cheeked English girl, her hair spilling from
her headband, framing her face, her cheek against a puppy; or we sat
cross-legged in the dark, lace-curtained living room examining the
treasures in my grandfather’s display cabinet, an ostrich egg, a
delicate blue and gold doll’s china tea set for play tea parties, bowls
of rose-colored Bohemian crystal, or monogrammed, filigreed
silver—while hours passed in the deceptive eternity of childhood. And at my back, I did not hear time’s winged
chariot drawing near, and had I—I would have leapt into it.
Among the antiques, the
beloved, soon-captured book of Master Plots, which I read and
re-read--supplanted classics, The Cloister and the Hearth about the
parents of Erasmus, for heaven’s sake; Lavengro, Lorna Doone; sad
French novels, Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet full of the misery of
miserliness, an apt derivation, and Madame Bovary dead, vomit of black
arsenic streaming from her lovely mouth. I
desultorily picked up others, entrenching a habit of dipping: G.K.
Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, my grandparents’ wedding present; and
Victorians, eminent and otherwise: a biography of Albert, Lord Tennyson
by his son, Hallam; Lord Macaulay, William Cobbett, (who’s he?),
undergraduate best student prizes in English literature that my
grandfather, Stanislaus, had won at the Jesuit Saint Aloysius’ College
in Mangalore in 1912, 1913, and 1914.
Stanny, like my father,
could quote long passages of poetry, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Keats or Tennyson right into his seventies, when he died.
Inheriting their ability to memorize easily, almost
unconsciously, I learnt snatches of poems, which were then, to me, mere
words and music, sonnets such as one of their favorite sonnets, The
world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given
our hearts away, a sordid boon! Milton’s
majestic periodic music was also indelibly imprinted; Once my father
started reciting, it flowed, mellifluous honey: Of Man's first
disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,/ With loss of Eden…/
Sing, Heav'nly Muse.
But that mortal
taste--entropy, the path of least resistance that makes men and streams
crooked, the blight that drives to forbidden fruit--caused what Emerson
calls a crack in creation, exiled us from the magic kingdom of heaven,
interplanted thorns and thistles in the Champs Elysees of work, our
sweat dripping into the cursed recalcitrant dust unto which,
unoriginally, we shall return.
The traditional trio of
Biblical tempters: the flesh, the devil, and the world that is too much
with us, insidiously choking with busyness and distraction the life of
the mind, no less than of the spirit. In
another world, another time, my grandfather, gentle, unworldly,
nervous, would have been a scholar, but he had twelve siblings, and his
father, a land-owner, had lost much of his land after standing surety
for a friend. A man in such a position was
expected to earn his living after a first degree (like my
too-early-orphaned father, decades later, who did time decoding
classified telegrams in the British Embassy in Afghanistan, before
England and his professional degree.) So
Stanny bartlebyied his way to the Customs House, eventually becoming
Collector of Customs and a chased-after expert in the arcana of the
Customs Law of the British Empire, and then of independent India.
And so, overwhelmed by the
sad necessity, before women worked, for even the most impractical man
to provide for his wife and children--my grandfather who could sweetly
and wistfully recite, In Xanadu
did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome
decree, perhaps with the grief that precludes being “just friends”
after a shattered romance--gave up reading, abandoning the struggle to
find a quiet spot, a quiet hour, in a house with a wife and five
children, and tides of Porlockian friends seeking help and solace and
to beguile an empty hour--his creativity now confined to long spidery
letters with funny pen and ink drawings, and kid-proof recipes like
chocolate snowball surprise: melted chocolate, condensed milk,
desiccated coconut. Though seeing me leaf
through his books--“I’ll teach you to love poetry,” he’d say happily.
The living room: lace
curtains drawn, dusky, drowsy with lotus-eating languor—“a land in
which it seemed always afternoon. And all
round the coast, the languid air did swoon.” Trying
to get something done was like swimming through treacle.
So, naturally, one never got around to ridding the corners of
rooms of dust-striped, tigerish paper piles of delusive good
intentions, clippings clipped who knows when; who knows why; and for
who knows whom, and half-read Eve’s Weeklys and Feminas, and skimmed
letters to be re-read and destroyed, whose illicit siren enchantments I
rarely resisted, and, besides, the layered midden of generations, old
silver, old china, old cut glass, fragile old jewelry, too treasured,
too precious to use, all fearsomely tagged—“of sentimental value.” When he wished to destroy, the King of Siam
sent a glorious white elephant—too sacred to work, an insult to give
away--whose upkeep devoured one’s life. White
elephants, white elephants everywhere.
The integrity of my
grandfather was commented on in the Catholic and secular press after
his death, so there was not the blind eye, the murmured word, the
friend-of-my-friendship which oils the wheels of Indian life, just
honest advice on honest circumnavigation to friends, and the friends of
friends—who remembered him at Divali with gift boxes of dried fruit and
chocolates, ties and tie-pins, crystal vases and clocks, and at
Christmas, when my grandfather’s house was the place to be. These gifts, in their original boxes, piled up
above cupboards, under beds or lacy table-cloths, full measure, pressed
down, flowing over from heaps and stacks, until my grandparents were
cornered by their own abundance. Like the
hobbits or Japanese, however, they indefatigably exchanged gifts, white
elephants, mathoms in Hobbitish. Electric
sandwich-makers and cuff links, ash-trays and tea-trays, vanity cases
and brief cases recirculated around the inner circle, or—awaiting
resurrection at wedding, christening, or birthday—moldered in large
steel almirahs along with their carefully folded wrapping paper, bows,
and ribbons. Abundance can be as
oppressive as poverty, but neither compare with the guilty oppressions
of thrift.
I returned to Jamshedpur
with a old suitcase, given by Uncle Eustace who had given up traveling,
full of old books, with fading cloth binding but still inviting gilt
titles, over which I wept, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, or
off-the-beaten-track Hardy, The Trumpet Major and Two
on a Tower, prize books, text books, the books of their youth, given to
me by those who had given up reading, my aunt’s friends, Laura and
Chrissie (along with guilty advice: always look up an unfamiliar word,
and you’ll have an astonishing vocabulary) and--a college degree in
English literature being a tradition in my
mother’s family--books ex libris my mother’s brothers and sisters, her
cousin, Marjorie Coelho, her father, Stanislaus, and my grandmother,
Molly, who, surprisingly for one so timid, was among the first Indian
women to study at a co-educational college, the Jesuit St. Xavier’s in
Bombay, (achieving, at one learned colonial leap, the college education
to which English proto-feminists had recently won the right).
In Bandra, I was known as
“the girl who’s always reading,” “who writes so beautifully,” and much
faded hope and withered longing was displaced onto me by family and
their friends who out of their Saharas of shriveled ambition, the sky
now out of limits, cheered me on as they pointed to bright and morning
stars they no longer pursued. Most people
we visited, confronted by the megalopolis, had made peace with small
lives, and with an apparent lack of restlessness, and a sad surrender
of aspiration, lived to live, each tomorrow the same, creeping in a
petty pace from day to day.
Is ambition indeed “the
last infirmity of noble minds,” as the ambitious
One still had ambition. My grandfather’s nephew, Albert. Everyone had a
back-story, painted with a fine brush on two inches of ivory, rosetta
clue to everything; Albert’s was the story (true? false?) of his irate
mother marching in to the office to scold her husband in front of his
colleagues. And he, highly-strung, too
shamed to return, wandered daily by the river, by the weeping willows,
an objective correlative. A slip of the
foot, of the will? Those are pearls that
were his eyes. Of his bones are coral made.
Auden, in a complicated
genetic diagram, shows how a nephew can be the true descendant of an
uncle in temperament, physique, gifts, all that matters.
That was certainly true of my grandfather and Albert, who,
brilliant and spiritual, as none of his own sons were, was sent, by his
diocese to study in the Pontifical Seminary at
He returned to pay his
beloved uncle a surprise visit. Surprises!
A self-indulgence, cheating the putative beneficiary of the joy of
anticipation. Sometimes dangerously.
My grandfather shuffled to
the doorbell. Albert!
His hand to his heart. A mild
stroke; a heart attack? The doctor, summoned, said, “You’ll have to
have an ECG , Mr. Coelho.” “An ECG.?” he protested.
“I had one in 1954.”
“The doctor looked at him
quizzically,” my grandmother said. “They knew he had a very good sense
of humor. You could never tell if he was joking.”
“Mr. Coelho, that was
twenty years ago,” the doctor said firmly. “The
heart changes from minute to minute.” A
new much-quoted “famous last word,” like the
My father and I would go
into
Soon after Albert’s visit,
my grandfather died. Albert returned to
* * *
Uncle Eustace
burst into the kitchen each evening demanding, “What musti have you
been up to? Have you created a shindy? Want to see the new Boeing 757? The
In the evenings, Edward
captured me to fizzy Bandra evenings with his gay (in its primeval
sense) crew of friends, whom age seemed to have by-passed: Hector, who
painted, and his sister Hilda, an amputee, swollen with elephantiasis;
Lourdes with dyed orange hair; Helen--of Troy, inevitably--with a white
poodle and a crisp pseudo-English accent which slowly faded; and giggly
Dennis, his best friend and drinking partner—“Dennis the Menace,” of
course. His friends, though sometimes:
“What’s your net worth, Edward? How much have you saved?
What man, let us invest it for you,” they said as his eyes grew
dreamy, benevolent, cat-and-creamy. Or
“Can you lend five hundred rupees? Unexpected
expense...will return soon.” All evening,
banter--“Oh come off it, men,” arm-pushing, back-slapping hilarity,
until your cheeks ached with the continual smiling at the continual
badinage--except when you escaped into sparkling wine-red depths, which
everyone, including I, did.
Except at Lent, when
Eustace and his friends, all Catholics, together went on a preached
retreat, thought of God, their souls, and the fires of hell, and
renounced the sparkling spirits, which brought them sparkle and
relaxation, and were the bedrock of their friendship, forswore all
spirits but the Holy One, for the forty days of Lent and forever and
ever after that--or least until bubbly Easter.
Eustace’s tall, skinny
father all too well remembered the dusty gloom of Ash Wednesday, the
holy day of fast and abstinence, first of the Lenten forty. So:
anticipatory pangs well before Shrove Tuesday, when he returned,
freshly shriven, to Mangalorean pancakes filled with freshly grated
tender coconut in a date-palm jaggery syrup-- which preemptively used
all the butter, eggs, and milk in the house, increasing the odds of a
spartan Lent.
Stanny said, “Oh Molly,
make a few sannas for Shrove Tuesday,” (fluffy, palm-sized, discus
shaped, steamed rice-flour dumplings, with no Western correlative). “Oh, and a little sarpatel with that, Molly,”
and (forgetting he had asked for sannas) “appas,” (toddy-risen
flatbreads) “and your mutton and lentil curry, Molly, the godachi mutli. And coconut and bimli (a uniquely tasteless
squash—one of
* *
*
“And
so,” he continued, “His colleagues own huge beach houses, but he still
rents”—the lower floor of the rambling two storey house facing the sea,
in which my mother was born. Their
formidable old spinster landlady, Cissy (Cecilia) Valladares, still
lived in her lair on the upper floor of this house she’d inherited
which—despite Bombay’s rent control laws—provided her with a
comfortable predictable income, and the consequent ironic fate of
becoming one of those un/fortunate people whose days are black holes of
infinite space with no Jacob’s ladder of work across them.
When the Coelhos talked
about her, as one talks about land-ladies, they metonymically spelled
out UP, and so, with smarmy traditional
manners, I called her Aunty Youpee, and a new code had to be invented. She had once blocked my path, her face, a
scatter of warts and wens beneath her Medusa curls.
“What mischief did you do that you got those?” she pointed at my
violet-indigo tom-girls’ face. I pointed
up in turn, and asked, “What mischief did you do that you got those?” She gasped, my grandfather gasped, pulling me
away, though he, shy, correct, unfailingly polite could barely conceal
his merriment. “Anita!” my mother,
grandmother and Aunt Joyce criedout , shocked. My
grandfather said--proudly--“See what answers she gives at five. What
answers will she give at twenty-five?” My
father laughed gleefully.
Youpee stalked out
increasingly infrequently until she no longer could. When
I went up with Mervyn--her sole visitor—to read her the daily paper,
the fearsome witch of my childhood lay helpless in her own excrement. Her around-the-clock ayahs malingered,
squatting in the purer air of the balcony, absently sieving rice, far
from her faint old woman voice. Her only relatives, three nieces, were
invisible. We hollered, the ayah turned her over; the bed-sores on her
bottom and back were chasms of pink raw flesh, almost reaching the
bone.
She died, leaving the
sprawling house to her now-visible nieces (that old, strange,
stronger-than-water business) who in the Gotterdamerung that made the
landscape of many childhoods the landscape of memory, pulled down 51
Chimbai Road—a plummy location, opposite both the beach, and the huge,
popular St. Andrew’s Church, nucleus of the suburb’s Catholic social,
cultural and religious life. Bayside went
up in its stead (making them instant multi-millionaires)---twenty
floors of apartments, no room now for quirky mansions with flaking
paint; the old order yielded to lego block
symmetries, boxy flats, to the left, to the right, on top of, below
each other,
two hundred families living in a patch of
earth which had housed two. And in this
world where neither the good nor the evil get what they deserve, the
aunt, shunned alive, gave them, dead, munificence they could never have
dreamed of, growing up in sleepy Bandra.
And, as compensation for
their torn down rented house, my grandparents were given a free flat in
the posh new Bayside: a seaside residence, like their peers--through
the interventions of providence and the current socialist legislation
which protected long term tenants against unreasonably raised rents or
evictions—but without the stress, humiliations, and
subterfuge of dishonesty. The wages of
honesty: not so bad after all.
It was easy for your mind
to change from minute to minute in gay Bombay, the polyglot music of
its streets familiar from “Trade,” the Indian Monopoly--Marine Drive,
Chowpatty Beach, Cuffe Parade, Churchgate, Flora Fountain, Apollo
Bunder, Nariman Point, Malabar Hill; Bombay where we bought a year’s
supply of shawls, Punjabi gaghra cholis, churidars, shalwar kameez,
jeans, mini, then midi shirts, shoes, nightdresses, and jewelry (for it
had India’s widest, wildest range from understated elegance to
show-offy garishness). Bombay, to which all roads led, the country’s
delight, excitement throbbing through it like
the Bollywood and Beatles songs from little stores with
over-the-counter almost any food of the appetite’s desiring: north
Indian kulchas, south Indian uttapams, western Angels and Devils
prancing on Horseback, tiny black seeds of caviar—and under-the-counter
smuggled almost-anything in the warrens of smuggler’s
paradises like Bori Bunder or the covered Crawford market, with its
Norman architecture, and famous frieze, designed by Lockyard Kipling,
Rudyard’s father, into which my mother, without warning, vanished while
my father sighed, wry, resigned, “An overpowering desire has seized
her.” I quickly carpe-diemed him into
letting me buy books, second-hand but putative classics I had not yet
ticked off on the long lists at the back of those I had read (first
oppressions of the heavy weight of unread literature!) while he, free,
bought the penknives he loved, with a Ripleyesque array of ingenious,
just-in-case-I’m-marooned attachments; and inventive kitchen gadgets
that never worked for long, and similarly doomed coasters with
henpecked husband lamentations, My wife is my life, my life is my wife.
What a wife! What a life!
As December unraveled,
scruffy neighborhood boys gathered at street corners, singing,
Christmas is coming; the geese are getting fat; please put a penny in
the old man’s hat, as they fanned a twiggy, wavering fire. Pointing at their scarecrow in his faded shirt,
they jauntily asked, “A penny for the old guy?” Guy
Fawkes, I suppose, morphed into the old guy, the old year.
Eat, visit, shop, explore.
Days devoted to pleasure reveal their hollow core sooner than days of
work. Can pleasure pall? By mid-December,
it did.
“Okay, let’s go to
“You’ll have to have
diphtheria, typhoid, and cholera shots before you go to
“I don’t want to go,” I
said promptly.
My terror of shots was a
family joke, since the morning of my surgery for appendicitis, when, as
the nurse appeared with a long fat syringe of purple fluid, I leapt out
of bed and raced down the hospital corridors, the nurse huffing and
calling plaintively after me, at which proof of vigor, I was summarily
discharged, to the chagrin of my mother, who was convinced I needed
surgery. My father composed a litany based on my annual ejaculations as
the syringe appeared, each year adding new phrases, “Doctor-be-gentle,”
and then the agonized, “Takeitout, takeitout.”
“But you have to have
shots in March before you return to Nainital,” my father said.
“But it’s December now,” I
countered.
My terror prevailed.
“That’s so silly, having come all this way to see Francis Xavier and
To Mangalore we went.