For people of Arundhati Roy's class, India was a small place. Everybody knew somebody who knew your Mummy or Daddy or Granny or Aunty. Still, in the pre-internet age, you could blackguard your family to your heart's content in books for the foreign market. Sadly, my own bildungsroman titled 'Lust of the Leprechauns' which depicted my gang-rape, decapitation, and expulsion from Iyerland by various leprechaun ladies in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies of the last Century, failed to find a publisher even though I depicted my father as Jack the Ripper and my mother as Joseph Stalin. I need hardly say, this was the fault of Neo-Liberalism as propagated by evil Iyengars who falsely claim I put garlic in the sambar.
By contrast with my own horrendous sufferings, Arundhati Roy- by her own account- had an idyllic childhood as I discovered in this excerpt from her latest book published in today's Guardian.
A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be,
She ended up establishing and running one of the highest ranked schools in India. But she didn't start off as a teacher though her degree was in Education. Her first job was as a secretary for Metal Box, a British Company in Calcutta. She married the brother of a colleague whose grandparents had settled in England. His grandmother was a leading suffragette. His father, after a British Public School and Oxbridge education, and service in the British Army during the Great War, joined the Railway Service in India where he did much to promote amateur boxing. This was a highly anglicized family where the sons attended the Doon School. By comparison, in Kerala, boys who attended local schools were not disadvantaged in any way in getting scholarships to study abroad or standing high in the Indian Civil Service exam. In other words, Educational excellence was not linked to imitating an English mode of life.
It must be said, Anglicized men enjoyed the outdoor life of the tea-planter but wives felt rather cut-off from Society. Perhaps, becoming a mother motivated Mary Roy's interest in teaching. Later, she was particularly impressed by the creative educational methods used by Missionaries for their own children as opposed to the rote-learning and Examination preparation which Indian parents wanted.
what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away.
The way to fulfil your dream to be a teacher is to get a job as a teacher in some nice nearby school. Marrying a dude who lives in a remote part of Assam isn't going to help you realize your dream.
It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realised that her husband, like many young men who worked on lonely tea estates, was hopelessly addicted to alcohol.
Not so hopelessly as to get the sack. After his wife left with the kids, he carried on there for a decade and did very well till about 1973 when he quit the Tea business. There was a good reason to get out of that line of work which had to do with pest infestation and the opening up of rival plantations in Africa with lower costs. Also, India was going down the toilet of Socialism. The smart thing to do was to go somewhere Whites still ruled the roost.
When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border districts. We moved to Calcutta. Once we got there, my mother decided that she would not return to Assam.
This was at a time when married women- especially those with small children- were unlikely to be hired by 'box wallah' Companies even if they were very good at their job.
From Calcutta we travelled across the country, all the way south to Ootacamund – Ooty – a small hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC – Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy – was four and a half years old,
in other words, just the age when getting him into a good English Medium School became a priority. It would give him a 'head-start'. Moreover, the high social status of both the mother and the father's family would get him into one of the best school- one where Whites or 'Anglos' still did the teaching. That's the only way you can be sure your kids will have a 'pukka' accent.
and I was a month away from my third birthday. We did not see or hear from our father again until we were in our 20s.
It must be said, the isolation of the Tea Estates took their toll on many a marriage. Ooty would be a good place to settle because of the abundance of good schools for the kids. The problem is that the climate doesn't suit everybody.
It may be, if the mother had landed on her feet, the penitent Dad would have turned up. Maybe he could be a coffee planter in the Nilgiris instead of a Tea-planter. What was certain was that a Dosco boy would land on his feet.
In Ooty we lived in one half of a “holiday” cottage that belonged to our maternal grandfather, who had retired as a senior government servant – an Imperial Entomologist – with the British government in Delhi.
There were Government servants on both sides of her family tree. What is interesting is that the kids preferred to rise in private enterprise. This shows they were very fucking evil.
He and my grandmother were estranged.
She was a strong woman. She set up a pickle business in which her Rhodes Scholar son joined her after acquiring experience working abroad and in India for prestigious foreign firms. They built it up into an innovative and quite successful brand. Arundhati's elder brother is a successful businessman- I believe in the frozen food line. These are people who create wealth and enrich their own ancestral homeland.
He had severed links with her and his children years ago.
Fuck him. They did well by their own efforts.
He died the year I was born.
The maternal family was Syrian Christian and thus did not have a tradition of matrilocal inheritance. Arundhati's mother fought a famous court case against her brother so as to gain equal intestate rights for daughters. In other words, there was a property angle to the family returning to the South. When she died, Mary Roy was hailed by the Chief Minister of Kerala for fighting the court case which benefitted women of her religious sect in her ancestral homeland. That Chief Minister may have been an Atheist but in 'God's own country' any person who does anything concrete to advance any section of the indigenous population is hailed as a patriot. It is a different matter that people in Kerala are educated enough to write wills and thus preserve ancestral property or ensure the survival of a family business.
I don’t know how we got into that cottage. Maybe the tenant who lived in the other half had a key. Maybe we broke in.
There was an inheritance claim and 'possession is nine-tenths of the law'. What Mary Roy did was perfectly sensible though this would not have been obvious to kids. Still, kids grow up. They can find out about such things. It is odd that Arundhati has chosen to remain in ignorance of these matters.
The cottage was dank and gloomy with cold, cracked cement floors and an asbestos ceiling.
Back then, asbestos was considered a good thing.
A plywood partition separated our half from rooms occupied by the tenant. She was an old English lady called Mrs Patmore. She wore her hair in a high, puffy style, which made us wonder what was hidden inside it. Wasps, we thought, my brother and I.
Who thought? Was it our waspish Arundhati or was it her older brother? It may be that Arundhati's whole personality is a vestige of that of her older brother at a time when he was very young. In 'God of Small things'- which is an ultra-feminist version of the 'return of Orestes' (or Freudian 'Electra complex') and which ends with brother-sister incest- the girl is the smart one while the boy is a hebephrenic blank. Yet, it is the brother who is a wealth creator in his native Kerala. The sister has done well for herself, true, but only by shitting on her family and her country.
At night she had bad dreams and would scream and moan. I’m not sure if she paid any rent. She might not have known who to pay it to. We, certainly, paid no rent. We were squatters, interlopers – not tenants.
No. There was a property claim deriving from the grandmother who was alive at the time. This was covered under the Travancore Christian Succession Act. The fact is 'streedhan' (dowry) was part of Syrian Christian custom. It may not have been paid at the time of marriage.
We lived like fugitives amid huge wooden trunks packed full of the dead Imperial Entomologist’s opulent clothes – silk ties, dress shirts, three-piece suits.
The mother had taken the first step to making a legal case to inherit from her father who had died intestate. At the time, most people would have assumed that since Christians are a minority, the Indian Succession Act would not apply to them. But there was a lot of wriggle room (e.g. issue of 'streedhan') . The sensible thing would be for the family to come to a settlement. Why did this not happen? I don't know. I can only speculate. The fact is, us 'Southies'- at that time- felt North Indians were vulgar and materialistic. Also, they were as greedy as fuck. Was Mary acting under the direction of her husband? Maybe not. But there was another consideration. There was a son. If the mother's side takes unfair advantage of the father's absence to establish emotional hegemony over the boy, they could be suspected of having a mercenary motive or else of behaving in a high handed manner. My point is, for Indian readers like me, Roy's book means the opposite of what she intended. Still, back in 1998, we were pleased to see the Kerala Communist party held up to ridicule, hatred and contempt. But, whatever mistakes that party may have made, it has learnt from them. It is meritocratic. 'Teacher' Shailaja, as Health Minister, earned plaudits for her handling of COVID. This made Indians- no matter how Right-Wing or Modi-bhakt- feel pride. More importantly, it made Indians want to do better. Just because we don't speak bejewelled 'manipravalay' Malayalam, doesn't mean we should be utterly shit.
We found an old biscuit tin full of cufflinks. Later, when my brother and I were old enough to understand, we would be told the legendary family stories about him: about his vanity (he had a portrait of himself taken in a Hollywood photo studio)
I suppose he might use this in a book he published.
and his violence (he whipped his children, turned them out of the house regularly, and split my grandmother’s scalp open with a brass vase). It was to get away from him, our mother told us, that she married the first man who proposed to her.
But she was already away from him. She had a job and a life of her own in Calcutta. Her husband is described by contemporaries as a dashing 'Public School' chap of good family. From the social point of view, this was not a mesalliance by any means.
Quite soon after we arrived, she got a teaching job at a local school called Breeks. Ooty was, at the time, swarming with schools, some of them run by British missionaries who had chosen to stay on in India after independence.
This explains why her Mother settled in Ooty. Sadly, the climate did not suit her.
She became friends with a group of them who taught at an all-white school called Lushington, which catered to the children of British missionaries working in India.
Mary Roy says that Lushington was less academic in its approach and more holistic. The children of Missionaries would be returning to England where they needed to display intelligence not their fucking Degree Certificate. I noticed, when I switched from the Indian to the English education system, that exams got a lot easier. The burden of rote-learning was greatly reduced. I suppose Mary Roy succeeded so well because she took the English approach. I think, she also kept class sizes small. Maybe, if Arundhati was a bit troublesome as a kid, the pay-off was that her Mum became a better teacher and teacher of teachers. Thus, at least as a child, she too made a contribution to 'God's own country'.
She managed to persuade them to let her sit in on their classes when she had time off from her job.
She was a darkie. They were White. Yet she 'managed to persuade' Christian Missionaries who had purposely come to a place where there were a lot of darkies to preach the Gospel, to let her sit in on classes where fucking Proddie bastids were spreading their poisonous heresy. I'm kidding. South Indian Christianity has been ecumenical for three centuries.
She hungrily absorbed their innovative teaching methods while being simultaneously disturbed by their kindly, well-meaning racism towards Indians and India.
Her ancestors had been Christians while the Anglo-Saxons were still dying themselves blue with woad. On the other hand, India wasn't doing well in the Sixties. It could neither feed nor defend itself. England, on the other hand, was rising in affluence. The sons of ICS officers- like Sir Raghavan Pillai- were settling in the UK.
A few months into our fugitive life, my grandmother (the Entomologist’s widow) and her oldest son – my mother’s older brother, G Isaac – arrived from Kerala to evict us.
or simply to defeat a claim of 'adverse possession'.
I hadn’t seen either of them before. They told my mother that under the Travancore Christian Succession Act, daughters had no right to their father’s property and that we were to leave the house immediately.
But the daughter was in possession of the property. If they started a court case, it would drag on for decades. The smart thing to do was reach a settlement. Why not invest in setting up a school? The thing would soon become very profitable. Perhaps, back then, people thought manufacturing industry could do well in India. Sadly, the country took a Socialistic turn. Non-tradeables- i.e. Service industries- could rise because public sector provision turned to shit. Interestingly, Singapore forces all locals to send their kids to Government schools. But standards are high. It is more difficult to get into a Government University in Singapore then to get into Ivy League. The result is that the population is globally competitive in high value adding Knowledge based industries.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that we had nowhere to go.
If it is really true that her mother and brother were evil cunts, it seems Mary Roy had been smart enough to go to a place where she would have to be paid off munificently to leave.
My grandmother didn’t say much, but she scared me. She had conical corneas and wore opaque sunglasses. I remember my mother, my brother and me holding hands, running through the town in panic, trying to find a lawyer.
This is a confabulation.
In my memory it was night and the streets were dark. But it couldn’t have been. Because we did manage to find a lawyer,
five year old boys can manage to find lawyers and inform them of the nature of a complex property dispute.
who told us that the Travancore act applied only in the state of Kerala, not Tamil Nadu, and that even squatters had rights.
The party in possession has rights. In this case, the grand-mother had a superior right but it would be costly to enforce it. The domicile of the deceased was what mattered. Since it was in Kerala not Tamil Nadu, Kerala law applied. The problem with Arundhati's lies is that they are stupid. They can only take in people as stupid and ignorant as herself. Still, if she makes a bit of money off those suckers, no great crime has been committed. The thing is merely unsavoury.
He said if anyone tried to evict us, we could call the police.
Anyone can call the police. Alternatively, you can just scream and scream till the police show up of their own accord. There is no need to run here or there or consult a lawyer.
We returned to the cottage shaking but triumphant.
The mother was educated. She had been a secretary in a very good Company in Calcutta. She must have known the law. The mother and brother might have thought that the mother's interest in the property would be extinguished with her death as that was how the law was understood at that time. Mary Roy, represented by Indira Jaisingh, was able to find grounds to overturn it retrospectively and thus bankrupt her brother. This was a good thing because the bastard was an entrepreneur. He was creating jobs. This violates HUMAN RIGHTS! Since Indians are fascinated by inheritance law, the details of the case are known to many. It is vitally important that public spirited lawyers- not just legislators or Trade Unionists- help ruin the country by driving entrepreneurs out of business.
Our uncle G Isaac could not have known then that, by trying to evict his younger sister from their father’s cottage, he was laying the ground for his own downfall.
Isaac was a successful entrepreneur, founder, along with his mother, of the Palat brand in 1959, and did mortgage some ancestral property to expand his operations. He was a public-spirited man and was aware that the success of Syrian Christian family businesses could be imperilled if the 1925 Indian Succession Act was applied to his community. The difficulty was 'streedhan'- i.e. dowry given to the daughter at the time of marriage. If this had been omitted (by reason of the marriage being 'out of caste' which means 'patharam' to the Church would not have been recorded) the law, even as then understood, was less clear.
It would be years before my mother had the means and the standing to challenge the Travancore Christian Succession Act and demand an equal share of her father’s property in Kerala.
The father had died intestate. Had he made a will, this problem would have been avoided. Perhaps he was a bad tempered man who didn't get on with his kith and kin. Let his wealth get consumed in lawyer's fees.
Until then, she would shield and safeguard this memory of her mortification as though it were a precious family heirloom, which, in a way, it was.
It is Arundhati's heirloom. But the story behind it is more interesting than her confabulation. Mary Roy was smart. She may have been in poor health and had other sorrows in her life at the time. But she wasn't a crazy lady up to something shady.
After our legal coup we expanded into the cottage, made ourselves some space. My mother gave away the Imperial Entomologist’s suits and cufflinks to taxi drivers at the taxi stand near the market, and for a while Ooty had the best-dressed taxi drivers in the world.
Suits of 'pre-war' quality could be sold for a good price as could cuff-links. Thankfully, taxi-drivers were above the lure of filthy lucre. When not wearing cuff-links, they were busy screwing monocles into their eyes while their valets wound cummerbunds around their waists.
Despite our hard-won but still tentative sense of security, things didn’t go our way. The cold, wet climate in Ooty aggravated my mother’s asthma. She would lie under a thick metallic-pink quilt on a high iron cot, breathing great, heaving breaths, bedridden for days on end.
We sympathize. Asthma is a terrible affliction. I suppose the mother suffered so her kids could get an educational head-start in life.
My brother started school before me. He went to Lushington, the white-people’s school, for a few months. (It must have been a favour to my mother from the missionaries.) But when he began to call local children like ourselves “those Indian children” she pulled him out and enrolled him in Breeks, the school that she taught in.
At that time, the two schools shared staff. Breeks was classed as an 'Anglo-Indian' school. It seems to have had a lot of very posh Hindu students all of whom did very well educationally and career-wise. No one could say the mother hadn't done her best by her two children. Sadly, Mary Roy's health deteriorated. Still, even a village school in Kerala gives a good education. Sadly, being able to speak English as a mother tongue remained a passport to privilege in Independent India though this was less true in Kerala.
Eventually my mother grew too sick to hold down her job.
This must have been agonising for such a smart and autonomous person.
Even the steroids she was on didn’t help.
Sadly, they can have side-effects.
We ran out of money. My brother and I grew undernourished and developed primary tuberculosis.
Thus they lost their employment as chimney-sweeps. Mr. Bumble, the beadle, beat them savagely.
After a few more grim months of fighting on all fronts, my mother gave up. She decided to swallow her pride and return to Kerala, to Ayemenem, our grandmother’s village. She was out of options.
Her concern was the welfare of her two young children. She wanted the best for them. If her health had held up, the educational future of both would have been assured. As things were, both attended excellent schools. That itself was the proof the Mother was a good teacher. The wonder is that the school the mother set up became, in time, just as good- if not better than British 'Chieftain's Colleges'. An Indian woman had shown herself equal to Nineteenth Century White Missionaries or Viceroys! This shows the spirit of 'God's own country'- Kerala.
We arrived in Ayemenem uninvited and manifestly unwelcome.
I doubt that. The whole point about family is that it would be rude to be too effusive in welcoming them. It is fundamentally un-Indian to say 'please' or 'thank you' or, yet more inauspiciously, 'delighted to see you!' Only God should have such sentiments regarding His creatures for, where blood binds them, any achievement of propinquity is but by His Grace and Favour. In other words, it's like first time you cuddle baby. There is ineffable awe. But there is something more. It is that for which Creation occurred.
The house whose doorstep we appeared on with our invisible begging bowl
What fucking begging bowl? This was a woman who had held down a job with a top Company in Calcutta. She had married into an excellent family. Now she was returning with a son who would be all the better for having a little sister. This is a fucking bonanza mate! The only thing missing is a 'ghar jamai'- e.g. a reformed drunkard of a husband who turns up and adds to the family's man-power.
Beggars can't add to your wealth. A daughter of the family, returning with her young ones, does so- provided she aint a fucking whinging parasite. But Mary Roy had never been any such thing. BTW she didn't personally benefit by winning her court case. It would take decades before any disbursement occurred. Moreover she had already proved herself when the Case began. Still, her court case may have had a good effect on her community. People realised the importance of making wills and setting up trusts.
Thus, there is a story here which all Indians could learn from. True, Arundhati quickly shat on it. But, long term, shit is a fertilizer, not a nuisance simply.
belonged to my grandmother’s older sister, Miss Kurien. She would have been in her 60s then. Her thin, wavy grey hair was cut in a style that used to be called a pageboy. She wore starched, papery saris with big, loose blouses.
Kurien is a name Gujarat associates with the 'White Revolution'- i.e. greatly boosted milk production. It is a sacred name. It is said that Kurien wanted to use his American qualifications to do something useless like mathematical Growth or Social Choice theory but, constrained by the terms of his Government Scholarship, he was forced to raise up his own motherland by causing milk to more copiously flow. I doubt this story. I know plenty of people surnamed Kurien. They are patriots. They aren't Sen-tentious shitheads.
Miss Kurien was far ahead of most women of her time. She was single,
all women should aspire to be single. That way you are less likely to have kids. Arundhati is wrong. It is worthless men like me who should be single. Women, if they wish to be mothers, should avail themselves of either good quality sperm or men worthy of love.
held a master’s degree in English literature and had taught at a college in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).
So, this was a family with a long tradition of high education and self-reliance on the part of women. But. the poet Shelley, who had read 'The Empire of the Nairs' written by a fellow Old Etonian- already knew two centuries previously of the excellence of 'God's own country' with respect to freedom and equality for women. Western Christianity was playing catch-up with Hindu Kerala throughout the long Nineteenth Century.
My mother assured her that we would stay only as long as it took for her to find a job.
Which was only fair. The older woman mustn't get too attached. The priority was the children's education. True, you may point to plenty of IAS officers who studied at the local school- but their English accent wouldn't be 'quite, quite'. Still, at least in the South, nobody gives a toss about such things.
Miss Kurien, who prided herself on being a good Christian,
how wicked of her!
agreed to let us stay, but made no effort to hide her disapproval of us and our situation.
because, by rights, the kids belonged to her younger sister. If she showed signs of attachment, she would be imposing an obligation or, worse yet, cunningly working an usurpation.
She did this by ignoring us and showering her delicate affections on other relatives’ children who visited her. She gave them gifts, played her piano and sang to them in her quavering voice.
they were guests. Those who lived under her own roof-tree were her own- for the moment. It was obvious that a talented person like Mary Roy would get a job in Calcutta or Madras. It was only fair that she should be allowed to advance in her career. As for the children, the mother was determined that they would have the best English Medium education India had to offer. She succeeded. What is remarkable is the kids first went to their Mum's school in a small place in Kerala- not 'Holy Angels' in Madras or some other such 'Convent School' in a 'Presidency' Metropolis.
Even though she made it clear that she did not like us (which made us not like her),
she didn't kiss and cuddle the little ones. I admire her restraint. Clearly, she was a better man than, yours faithfully, Gunga Din.
she was the one person who helped us out and gave us a roof over our heads when we most needed it.
The older lady may have been attached to them but did not want to show it and thus create an obligation. Anyway, to usurp the affections of your own younger sister's offspring is a ghastly sin.
My grandmother lived with her, too.
So, this lady looked after her younger sister and made no attempt to supplant her in the affections of her daughter or her grandchildren. This is an old fashioned sort of rectitude which is not without its pathos.
She was almost blind by then and still wore her dark glasses. Even at night. She had a ridge that ran across her scalp – her famous brass-vase scar. Sometimes she let me run my finger over it. Every evening she would sit on the veranda and play her violin. She had taken music lessons when her Imperial Entomologist husband was posted to Vienna. When her tutor told him that his wife had the potential to become a concert-class violinist, he stopped the lessons and, in a fit of jealous rage, smashed the first violin she owned.
Something similar happened to me when my tutor told Queen Victoria that I could become the next Beyonce because of the excellence of my booty-shake. On orders of her Imperial Majesty, I was repeatedly raped by Mary Poppins.
My uncle G Isaac lived in an annexe attached to the main house. At first, I was terrified of him. I only knew him as the tall, fat, angry man who had tried to turn us out of our home in Ooty.
This is a confabulation. It may be the mother made the mistake of talking to the kids in a manner they could not understand. Still, she had unwittingly provided her daughter with the requisite intellectual capital to make her way into the 'Grievance Studies' industry. But, the 'efficient cause' for Arundhati reaping that reward, was Mum's commitment to English Medium- i.e. deracinated and more than somewhat shite- education for her progeny.
In Ayemenem, though, I grew to love him after he began to take my brother and me down to the river and teach me to swim.
Not 'us to swim' but 'me to swim'. Everything is about Arundhati. The Sun revolves around her. I guess her elder brother spoiled her and made her feel special after Daddy disappeared. That's why 'God of small things' ends in incest.
G Isaac was one of India’s first Rhodes scholars. His subject was Greek and Roman mythology. At the dining table he would suddenly say things like: “Isn’t it wonderful to have a god of wine and ecstasy?”
Dionysius conquered India non-violently with lyre, lute & the vine.
Everybody would look at him blankly. And he would tell us about Dionysus, or whoever his god of the day was.
After teaching for a few years in a college in Madras, he gave up his academic career to return to his roots and start a pickle, jam and curry powder factory with his mother.
He had worked for Metal Box (which supplied canning technology) in the UK. The same firm employed his sister as a secretary in Calcutta. Back then, this was a prestigious and highly desirable type of employment.
It was called Malabar Coast Products. They ran it out of the Imperial Entomologist’s family home in Kottayam town, which was a short bus ride away.
Uncle was an 'entrepreneur'- i.e. a Capitalist. He created jobs and boosted small industries in Kerala. What an evil cunt!
(This was the house that would become the centre of the dispute when my mother challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act.) G Isaac, notwithstanding his keen interest in inheritance and private property, was a Marxist.
i.e. he believed labour, not lying, was the source of value. What a bastard!
He said he had given up his career to start a factory to promote small industry and generate local employment. Fed up with his nonsense, his Swedish wife, Cecilia, whom he had met in Oxford, left him and returned to Sweden with their three young sons.
He had worked for the Scandinavian Bank in Stockholm. I suppose, it would have been difficult for his wife to move to rural part of Kerala.
In these strange and manifold ways, this constellation of extraordinary, eccentric, cosmopolitan people, defeated by life,
because life in Kerala isn't real life and doesn't involve the labour of starting your own business. To win in life you must move elsewhere and get ahead by telling stupid lies.
converged on the tiny village of Ayemenem.
There was a strong entrepreneurial streak in the family. Arundhati herself has entrepreneurial elan in marketing herself as some sort of Slumdog or street urchin.
Life there was like living on a ledge that we could be nudged off at any moment. Even Kochu Maria, the cook, would tell me that we had no right to be living there.
Similarly, Mary Poppins would tell me that she would hand me over to the tender mercies of Lesbic leprechaun unless I renounced my claim to the throne of Iyerland. Then she would ride me ragged while yodelling. The Sixties were an eventful time for me.
She would mutter and grumble about the shamefulness of having fatherless children living under the same roof as decent people. Every few days the Cosmopolitans would quarrel. When they fought, the whole house shook. Plates would be smashed; doors broken down.
But Mary Poppins did not rape the occupants of the house. Neo-Liberalism can be quite negligent in that respect.
As soon as the shouting began, I would flee. The river was my refuge.
Not, sadly, the river's bottom.
It made up for everything that was wrong in my life. I spent hours on its banks and came to be on intimate, first-name terms with the fish, the worms, the birds and the plants.
By contrast, I always insisted that birds refer to me by surname. It doesn't do to let them get too familiar. Otherwise, they shit on you.
I became close friends with other children (and some adults) in the village. I picked up Malayalam quickly and was soon able to communicate with everybody quite easily.
especially the worms. Some plants, however, tend to be stand-offish.
They inhabited a different universe from mine.
No. It was the same universe. Knowing English doesn't mean you live in a fucking parallel dimension. Only shite writers in English- Nayantara Sahgal, Anita or Kiran Desai, Arundhati etc.- inhabit different dimension or have otherwise 'seceded' from that India-which-is-larger-than-the-world.
Most of them worked in nearby paddy fields and rubber plantations, or picking coconuts or working as house-help. They lived in mud-and- thatch-roofed houses. Many of them belonged to castes that were considered “untouchable”. I didn’t know much about this horror at the time, because everybody in the Ayemenem house was too busy fighting with one another to bother about indoctrinating me.
They had already told her she was shit. That's what mattered.
One young man who lived in Ayemenem but worked in Kottayam in Malabar Coast Products became my most beloved friend. We spent a lot of time together. He made me a fishing rod out of a culm of bamboo and showed me where to find the best earthworms to use as bait. He taught me to fish; he taught me to stay still and be quiet. He fried the tiny fish I caught, and we ate them together as though we were feasting at a banquet. He was the inspiration for the character called Velutha, Ammu’s lover, in The God of Small Things.
Arundhati was deprived of the opportunity to kill even one or two Dalits. It was only in her fiction that she was able to complete this essential rite of passage for one of her caste and class.
Within months of being in Ayemenem, I turned into a part of its landscape – a wild child with calloused feet who knew every hidden path and shortcut in the village that led to the river.
Sadly, she was not shown the proper method of killing Dalits or even skinning them alive. Life can be very unfair.
I lived outdoors and went home as seldom as possible.
I lived on one of the rings of the planet Saturn. Mary Poppins would often visit and rape me there.
In the non-human category, my closest companion was a striped palm squirrel who lived on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. We shared secrets.
It was a Naxalite spying out the lie of the land.
She wasn’t my pet. She had her own life,
as a senior member of the Politburo
but chose to share it with me. She would disappear often because she had things to do. At mealtimes she would appear, perch on my plate and nibble at my food.
Mary Poppins expected much more from me.
She was constantly watchful, eternally alert to every possibility of looming danger. She taught me things.
Arundhati's deep knowledge of economics and political science was acquired from a squirrel.
My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure on to my brother and me. We were the only safe harbour she had. Her temper, already bad, became irrational and uncontrollable.
Any yet she was a great success as a teacher who created one of India's finest schools.
I found it impossible to predict or gauge what would anger her and what would please her. I had to pick my way through that minefield without a map. When she got angry with me, she would mimic my way of speaking. She was a good mimic and made me sound ridiculous to myself. I clearly remember everything about every instance she did that.
These were confabulations. By contrast, my memories of rape at the hands of Mary Poppins are veracious.
Even what I was wearing. It felt as though she had cut me out – cut my shape out – of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.
The mother set up a school in 1967. It succeeded so well that by 1972, she was able to raise the money to buy 5 acres of land. Laurie Baker was the architect. As time went by, more land was purchased and more buildings were erected. Mary Roy was hailed as a great educationist who had enriched her ancestral town. It may be that she was bad-tempered. But it may also be that she was a woman of great determination who wasn't ashamed of creating a successful private school. Tuition there is only about 2,000 dollars a year. It is very highly ranked.
It is entirely possible that Arundhati's family weren't always gracious and affectionate and even-tempered. But they were hard-working and enterprising people who did something with their lives without having to resort to telling stupid lies. I, on the other hand, suffered innumerable rapes and decapitations at the hands of Mary Poppins. I remembered the one time I made the mistake of mentioning the matter to Joseph Stalin- my beloved 'Ammadorai'. Stalin was initially polite and suggested that perhaps I had been drinking too much vodka. But when I persisted in my tale, Stalin lost her temper and suggested I get a fucking job you lazy piece of shit. This broke my heart.
