Tavistock Square and Translation Studies

That year. April of 1997, I sat in Tavistock Square watching the cherry blossoms fly this way and that in the breeze. It seemed the delicate flowers had a life of their own, and when I went closer to the tree, I saw that it was dedicated to the Hiroshima bomb victims. Just a single tree, with its seasons of foliage and flowers. The Gandhi statue was always filled with flowers, strewn on the Mahatma's lap. Often when there is discord I think that the two ways are juxtaposed, that of extreme violence and the other of extreme detachment. Non-violence is  not the way of the weak, it is the way of fulfilling one's desire for freedom, equality, liberation, community through active dialogue.
Much of the 19th century was about the process of industrialisation, which in the end created the societies of the west we know now with its hausmannism, and its significant decline in population. The inter-racial ghettos of the workers  proliferated side by side.
However, for those who studied and lived in the west, as many of India's bureaucrats and politicians have done,  they must know that the dream of imitating the west was never intrinsic to the people of India,  themselves. They cannot afford to imitate the west. Because they remained the way they were, caught in frugality and poverty, the art traditions and the craft traditions survived. People like Dashrath Patel in the early 1980s made films which showed how in Saurashtra, people said No to plastics. Even the village tailor said he would only make buttons from cloth for the garments, he would not use plastic. It's interesting that today, while India's rivers are clogged up in plastic, the new drive depends on people not throwing their marigolds in plastic covers into sacred river, and that river mining has to cease, and the governments of every state have to make sure that waste does not flow into the rivers. The West has had success with the rejuvenation of rivers, and in the broad dialogue set up between nation states, we need to learn from them. Sure.
However, when Delhi University sets up a baccalaureate system, without assent from its teachers, how does it expect the constitutional ideas of Legitimacy before all, to function? It seems very odd that students have to do an extra year in college, when the entire economy depends on the young feeling that there is a future ahead of them in terms of receiving an education in the first instance. When I taught 1st year students in Hindu College for one year, I was aghast at how ironed out their brains were when they came to us from school.  I quickly asked to be given 3rd year classes, because I realised that teaching 1st year needs a special skill which seasoned teachers have.The Board Examinations were exhausting, the general proficiency required on all fronts had left them quite ennervated. Honours courses gave them the sense of doing what they really wanted to do, and the specialisation was a skill which they came to with great enthusiasm. Over the years, voluntary choice of subsidiary courses has given the students a sense of larger Social Science interests, and with none of the reforms dealing with internal assessment and with innovation in subsidiary courses did the teachers of Delhi University complain. So clearly, when the Honours courses are mitigated by two years of compulsory foundational courses, and an additional one year to boot,  the teachers do have something to say.  Basic infrastructure is lacking, and to extend teaching to a fourth year has to receive funds which have to be allocated after the basic needs are first met.
The University has a function, and that is to liberate the mind. Tying it in with occupational courses is to give it a new dimension. If Delhi University wants to generate polytechnic functions it should do so with the permission of the UGC, and in due process,  in parallel spaces,which draws in communities of teachers. Indira Gandhi Open University has educated thousands of young and old people by merely sticking to the rules, and drawing in specialists from all Universities which take upto two years and six separate meetings to formalise and pass a course.
 America has its contract labour force, and the feminist discourse on this, such as the work of Sylvia Hewlet  is extremely useful to understand its limitations. Loyalty to the institution is decimated  when teachers are treated as if they are not of consequence. Once Salman Khurshed visited Hindu College as a chief guest and said laconically to the students, " I was in the College across the Road, and got 45 percent, and see where I am, and see where your teachers who were toppers are!" By these words he shattered the academics occupying the first row. How could he have been so boorish in front of the students, in a public platform, on a podium? Did we take him on? No, we just went back to class and taught the way we always do, carefully and with our politics outside the classroom. Right wing intervention was as specious, but  Delhi University survived decades of changes in Government by just sticking to its daily routines. A lot of the present governing elite from all parties, may have got their degrees abroad, yet,  the yardstick of an institution's success in India, has come from people who were swadeshi. Because Midas rules doesn't mean the people have to accept it.

Delhi University

I was sixteen when I joined Delhi University. It was the most beautiful campus, with a season of flowers, heady in the late winter, early spring. Miranda House, where I studied had a great ambience. The arches of the college were persuasive, that we were as young women, embedded in some one else's dream. I spent three years taught by Dr Khadija Gupta and her team. They left us alone to grow, teaching us everything they knew, ambitious for themselves and us. My fellow students were from  Kamla Nagar and Kashmere Gate and its environs, traders' daughters who had been given a chance to get an education. There were others who came from Boarding Schools in the hills, who communicated both languor and urgency. There were people like me, who were middle class to the core, who either caught the  University Special at 7 am, or the Mudrika, a circular route bus which had just been started in 1974. It made commuting tedious but easy. It took me an hour and a half to get to college during rush hour, and forty five minutes before the traffic jams happened.
Our syllabus  in Sociology was interesting. We had eighteen case studies to master in three years. And we read the classics in the originals in third year. Some students did better than others, but we all got an education. One of the young women who sometimes asked for advice from me,  before the exams, in her broken English, shared a lift in a hotel in Madras with me in 1990, quite  by chance.  We had not met since 1977. I was going to my cousin's wedding, she was travelling from USA, with her husband. They were both computer trained scientists. We were delighted to see each other. She remembered our Sociology classes at Miranda House, and all our friends with delight.
 Delhi University has always had a very tightly run academic system. It went through several syllabus changes. Sometimes these were unaccompanied by scandals. Sociology for instance, always drew in the entire undergraduate teaching faculty, when there was syllabus revision. I remember Prof Amrit Srinivasan (now at IIT) and I were called in to advice the Department of Sociology on curriculum change, since we both taught at Hindu College for more than a decade each, and we had very strong opinions about what we wanted for our students.  Amrit would have taught from 1974 to 1990, and I taught from 1983 to 1997 at Hindu.The suggestion  that year, when we both represented our college, was that we teach excerpts from the Classics, and we flatly refused the suggestion, because we believed that at 19 and 20 years of age, the students were perfectly capable of reading and discussing the Founding Fathers of Sociology, (that is Marx, Weber and Durkheim.)  Several decades have passed since then, and the syllabus that the students now have at the Honours level, is even more interesting and demanding than it was when we taught it in the 1990s. The students who chose this are well able to cope with the 21st century, because they might choose different streams, but there might be a handful who actually go on to do reseach, and make a contribution to academic debates when they grow up. We don't know which that handful is, because all are treated equally, but the B.A Honours is designed for potential research force, and the Human Resources Ministry surely understands that.

The assumption that the Baccalaureate will change the University for the better, and that students want simplification and job orientated courses is something that will always be debated on. Maybe its a good idea, and only ten dissenters were to be recorded when the new syllabus was passed. However, the real question is, can one rush through syllabus change, without making amendments at the level of Parliament. Can one slam changes at the rate of two revolutions, administratively placed,  a year, without wondering what it does to the community? India is not America, and we don't need to be like America. We are a country where eighty percent of our people are rooted in the countryside though they may migrate for work elsewhere. That is the reality that Social Science works with. Industrialisation and the Greens Movement have always had a dialogue in India, and law court cases sufficiently represent the nature of that interaction.
 JNU did very well with the semester system, it does wonderfully with  varieties of levels of teaching material, because for forty years it made its cause celebre, the politics of integration  of the deprived communities, without being heavy handed about it. Policies and changes in the system included the students  and teachers at every level. How can Delhi University even imagine that it cannot take the teachers into account before making changes? There is a whole new generation which has tremendous potential. To have treated them as non entities is what makes the Elders so mortified. The next step no doubt be will be legitimation of contract labour in the next two and a half years, because America does it. Teachers come into the system with a great deal of energy and hope. To suffocate that resilience before it even expresses itself in young adulthood, is to negate the system totally.

It takes about a year or two to ask people their opinion, to work with local communities, and larger universalising ones, including human rights ones, before a decision is taken. Privatisation is not the only goal, though some people may think it is the answer. To make education freely available, the first step is to go through due process, which is clearly given in the statutes.  Delhi University belongs to the Nation, so whatever happens, there will be keen interest in the nature of change as it is planned or promoted. Keep the Honours system intact, and let the other parallel developments build around it slowly, with the right inputs from the teachers, who will be involved in teaching it. Ofcourse, the real vitality will come from the young teachers who will push Delhi University to its new vocation, that of integrating the communities who were deprived of education, whether they were  traditionally rich or poor. Education is the most liberating of vocations. One never loses it, however demeaning the tasks one might be forced to take for reasons of livelihood.
Academics do not become slaves because they have been paid equivalent to their needs. Most academics take four hours to prepare one lecture in the early years, and even towards the end of their careers, each lecture takes a minimum of two hours to prepare. All the bureaucrats who believe that a 9 to 5 job is the index of a good day's work should try holding an undergraduate student's attention for one hour, using the syllabus as his or her guideline. "150 pages per course", how can one teach with such a prescription on length? It is unseemly.

The success of Delhi University can be understood only if one takes the research paper quotient in to account. Delhi University has produced some of the best writers in the country. To oppress them with odd reforms which don't include their opinion is really a form of cultural destruction, and with the death of the University as India has known it, will come the death of free thought. First  the academics, then the peasants......it's not that easy to commit intellectual genocide.
We thought that the opening up of hundred universities was a new step in the right direction, and that the hierarchy between metropolis and hinterland would dissolve, since academics are comfortable in all worlds simultaneously. Such is the Life of the Mind.
With the crushing of the teachers of Delhi University by taking their Honours syllabus away, and distracting Honours students with  myriad parallel interests, (all to be graded!) humanities research in India will be cordoned off to the elite, who can afford to stay in college till they are 22 labelled as Undergrads, or go abroad. The intelligentsia of the people will be stifled.  My grocer's shop assistant has a daughter who studies Hindi Honours, hoping to be a journalist one day. My street sweeper's son  in JNU, studies Sanskrit Honours because his education in Central School allowed him to score highest in Sanskrit. Maybe he will become a Sanskrit teacher himself one day. Education was the last Socialist bastion, in India ( we are Socialist in practice and by  the Constitution, whatever the Politicians or Industrialists might think!) and by dumbing it down, or generalising it to create a platoon of people who will serve the scions of Industry and Telecommunications, the real world of the University as a site of scepticism, creativity and freedom will cease. To be free, one must be able to question the structures and policies of the State, and the hegemony of those who believe that reforms can be imposed without dialogue or debate.

Rejecting AFSPA: Peace by any other name

I was a Visiting Fellow in Belfast in February and March 1997. It was
before the Peace Process was well in place, and tanks rolled through
the city everyday, cutting up transit points and streets and shopping
places with their basilisk and muted presence. The silence was
interminable, and I shall always remember Belfast for its great
beauty, the cherry trees in bloom and the intellectual atmosphere
heady with conversations and friendship which transcended the battle
lines between catholic and protestants. I wrote about it in a text
book which Oxford University Press has reprinted in paperback called
"Structure and Transformation."  Since we are comparitive Sociologists
we often use case histories from other societies to explain our own.
What does AFSPA mean for individuals in Kashmir and the North East?
The evidence is very vivid and for decades now, we have seen the
photographs and the reports. Is there a solution? Yes, give the people
an opportunity to express their views. Allow the intellectuals and the
artists to mediate on their behalf. Respect the commission which calls
for the withdrawal of the AFSPA. Ask why soldiers from the NE are
called in to quell the Maoists and why internecine tribal warfare is
used as an arm of the state. As a mature democracy, we have every
right to ask that the people should tell the State what it wants. If
Modi demands that his crime of protecting lumpen proletariat and
organised communalist should be seen in the light of the past, then
allow that Dostoevskian privilege of repentance and regret to others,
once justice has been served. The Supreme Court should not be
devalued, and the jurisdiction of citizen obligations should be
imposed upon the soldiers. This can only be done, if AFSPA is removed.
In 2004 I spoke at University of Warwick in a Conference on War. The
speaker with me was a woman who spoke on the rapes committed by
Russian soldiers on citizens of Poland, so many that the children born
of these violations were without a father when the army vacated their
country. Coincidentally, in a cherry grove, picking fruit, in the
company of visitors to a Benedictine Abbey, (for one of the nuns had
written a thesis on Advaita and The French Monastic experience,) a
student of Sociology from Paris told me she did not know who her
father was, because her mother had been raped by a Russian soldier.
How utterly traumatic and coincidental. She told me this because I
asked her about her family back home.
I have had many students who have come to us in JNU from Kashmir and
the North East. They believe that their education can make a
difference to their people. They have sometimes described the
conditions in which they live, sometimes in Phd thesis which have to
be cleared by the surveillance and ethics board of the university. I
know that Jamia Millia and Delhi University also have such an archive
of people who have lived under surveillance for decades. One of my
students from Arunachalpradesh told me that there are people who wake
up in that part of their house which has a boundary that runs through
their abode. So he wakes up in India, and has his breakfast in China.
I can only say that these valiant scholars bring to the class room the
wonderful sense of their jubiliation and their right to life and a
future. My happiest memories are of my visit to Kashmir,  when I was
seventeen,where I went to all the places tourist most wish to visit,
including Anantnag, Sonarmarg and Gulmarg and Srinagar, in the company
of my cousin and his family who were holidaying from Quwait, Syrian

Christians who lived and worked and studied in the Gulf, but saw
Kashmir as their ultimate idea of visiting Paradise.   That was 1974,
and I had accompanied them because none of spoke Hindustani, being Malayalis living abroad. Thatwas the first time I saw the saffron flower, delicate and violet,embroidered onto their firens and their shawls. How I longed to own afiren. Now, that the return to Kashmir for the Pandits is foregroundedby the acceptance of history as a time keeper, let the people be free,without reference to religion or race. Give us all a chance to visit
these so called zones of fear, without anguish. Let the young girls
sing without fear of baton,or mufti, for that is the only way we can
defend our country and the constitution.

National Museum

My students and I went to the National Museum yesterday. It is one of my favourite places, and the Mohenjodara and Harappa section absolutely amazing, with its relics from India and Pakistan, providing a clue to our similarities. Now the exhibits for that civilisation extend to Rajasthan and Karnataka as well as Kutch and Punjab and Haryana. The beads and toys, the bowls and the figurines are exquisite, the weights and measures still communicating an aesthetic dimension, which five thousand years later appear as contemporary as any designer's workshop. In the coin and currency section, we saw the ancient coins of the Mauryas and the Guptas with their fine dramatic inscriptions and portraits, as well as the mohurs of the Southern kings and the Mughals and the East India Company. And in another gallery, we saw the Gandharva statues, with their Greek robes and finely curled hair.  Kanishka and the Kushans were less intimidating than the statues in the Mathura circular museum. One of the Mphil scholars asked me if Museums were a colonial construction, since he had been to Tribal Museums in the country as well.
The syncretism of our common past reasserts itself through trade and literature, and the mystics call to music and prayer across centuries. We had apple jam from Safal, and cheese slices from Amul to put on our white bread, which we ate on the lawns of India Gate, and on this, one of the students got out Oregano from her bag, in a small sealed pouch to sprinkle on our cheese...leftover perhaps from a pizza fast food counter, which had been saved for such a moment like this. Did the students of my"Historical Methods in Sociology" course know Afzal Guru had been hanged without an opportunity to say goodbye to his family? Probably not.

A Death in Due Time

In Shobha and Suresh's lovely house in Bangalore, my mother gasps her last. She is in agony. The days have gone by very slowly. I reached here on 13th January morning, unannounced, because I had this gut feeling that my mother was hurrying to her death. I arrived by the Island Express, a name no longer used for a train, which tragically broke over a bridge many years ago, killing many people. My friends in Pallakad had got me an unreserved ticket since I had communicated incessant panic, and then managed to get me a reservation on it as well. Before catching the train to Bengaluru I spent one day calming down at my father's brother's house, and he and my aunt took me to Thalavadi, where my father's cousin had died. So I attended a funeral in an obscure village before leaving for Bangalore. I had not anticipated my mother's death, but I was being propelled to her bedside by a magnetic call which could have been the vestiges of the umbilical cord. She was 95 when she died, and I am 55.

When the end came, her breath started to rattle. It was like a gurgling sound in the lungs. For three days, I had kept her company. It was slow time. I would wipe her face and put cold cream. When On the last afternoon, I put Lacto Calamine, she became pleased, like a cat, for she had always used it in Delhi. I put her on the phone with my children and my son in law, and with a few of her friends. She could not speak with them as she used to even two weeks before her death, but she said "I am so happy to hear your voice." She said each of their names clearly. In the end, the unbearable pain was the only thing that was evident, the person, whom we knew had gone. My mother was tall, strong, vibrant and beautiful. Age made her cranky and autocratic occasionally. When she became bed ridden for two months, her desire to live dwindled completely. My sister and brother in law kept her very clean, and focussed their total attention on her, for her the physicality of the body was very important. She could not bear to be untidy or dirty. With the maids and my sister cleaning her and changing her, she felt her life had ended. She used to scrunch her eyes with the humiliation of it all, changing sheets, clothes, adult diapers. You could sense the anxiety and the tension twice a day when this was happening: powder, cream, ointment. Once the cleaning was done, everyone would rest, relieved it was over for a few hours. My sister would rush to school after the changing was done, for she is a principal of a school, then at 4 pm she would return and clean and change my mother again. Radhika, a Nepalese woman would massage my mother, and that calmed her and made her sleep during the day. She had in the last week started to refuse food and water, and when my sister called the Doctor, he told her that she would have to eat and drink as long as she was alive. She obediently ate half an ethika (those long yellow bannanas that Malayalis boil for breakfast) and mashed potato for milk for lunch, but it was too much of an effort.

When the end came her breath started to rattle. It was like a gurgling sound in the lungs.She was in pain. It was terrible. It was slow time.  Just two months ago after a fall she had been checked at the hospital, and all the tests showed she was normal, no damage to brain or bones...but she had never walked after that. The Director of the clinic came to see her the evening before she died. He took her pulse, checked her blood pressure, everything was normal, but he told Shobha that the end was nearing. We could see that, her bones were jutting out, her face was taking on the mask of death. How we remembered the mother who had brought us such love and comfort when we were small children. We used to wait for her and when she would return from office, she would have a cup of coffee and lie down and read a novel, before cooking the evening meal. Often when we were small, we would cuddle up with her. As we grew older, she would try to throw us out, saying "Girls of marriageable age!" but my sister's and my adulation of her was total.

At quarter to seven blood and  mucus started to flow from her mouth and nose. It was beyond us, we called the ambulance. She sat up in bed, quite alert, quite cool and with eyes oddly ablaze, she  said "Bye Bye!'. She seemed happy, not at all regretful, that she was dying. Her skin was warm and soft, decades of using cold cream and oils had kept it that way...even as death circled her, it was as if being anointed was important for her - a full life, a life without betrayals, or so she said.
The person who lay there dying was she really my mother? I had begun the process of detachment by staying away for a year, I had too many duties and obligations in Delhi. Yet, when the end came I could only appreciate the courage with which my sister and brother in law had met every physical need that my mother had, giving her food that she was used to, and enabling her to keep in touch with her clan members by telephone, and providing her with books and clean sheets and a constantly running tv.
The driver of the ambulance arrived at 7 pm, we were at Koshy's clinic in fifteen minutes, and with the oxygen mask on, my mother was rushed to the ICU. My sister and I waited downstairs. Then at 8 pm, they invited my sister and me to say goodbye. They had laid her out like Da Vinci's perfect human. Those bones which had become crooked with age and arthritis were now straight, her beautiful face in the oxygen mask, her chest expanded and contracted with every breath, her eyes open. We had hoped that she would die at home peacefully, but the last rattling breath went on and on, and I knew I wouldn't be able to handle it, witnessing this last bloody hour, as the lungs began to collapse and fluid began to pour out of her body. My mother knew what was happening to her, and she was aware that my sister's and my adoration was sufficient to tide her across to the next stage, called the afterlife. She had planned it all, to the last detail, including the  metabolic synchronisation, which had got me to Bangalore in  a second class sleeper coach from Kerala five days before  I was due to arrive. She had left a kashava sari, with incredible motifs of flowers woven in gold ( I have never seen a kashava so beautiful) and two lengths of separate gold bordered cloth) in her cupboard and these we gave to the Superintendant who promised to drape her in them for her funeral.

So we said goodbye to her on the 15th evening at 8 pm. It was Pongal the harvest festival, she was always a person who we associated with nature. Everything about her communicated a rurality, a vibrance, a great sense of order. When she was dying, those three days that I kept her company, she always had the clock with her. My sister says that the clock, the torch, the white handkerchief were her constant companions. When on the 14th night, I went to check on her at 2 pm, she had the light on, and the clock held close upto her eyes. The clock (Demeter and Chronos) meant everything to her. It was as if the Real lay in Time as measured. How much longer? She needed to know the time of her death, and yes, she needed to go to hospital, to die in comfort to hear the nurses running about, a doctor who understand that metabolism was a measurable thing, to  be able to give the final verdict. It was as if that chronometric world gave to her the sense that she was human and rational at the same time. Ofcourse the priest had given her final benediction the previous week, and my father's clan members with a newly married couple had sung prayers and hymns, so the last days of her life were completely clear of fear or anxiety.
At the hospital, she continually breathed in steady energetic lung pulling gasps till she died at 10.45. The hospital called us at 11 pm. I felt only gratitude that her suffering had ended. When I told her nephew in Kerala that she had suffered four hours, he said gently, "Four hours is nothing when it comes to suffering." My cousin had served his bedridden wife for twenty five years without a moment's regret.
When we reached home, after leaving her in the ICU at 8 pm, my brother in law was aghast when he saw we came without her. He wept for all of us, on behalf of all of us, since he had kept guard over her for three and a half year, both of them reading books from the same circulating library, and eating their meals together. For him it was the loss of a serene and constant presence in the house. Chippy the dog, wept and didn't eat for two days. After the funeral, which happened a day later, since my father's brother was insistent that he wished to be present with the other clan members in Bangalore, my sister went back to work and I went to Ramanasram for three days to recover.

Brown Paper Bags in Massachusetts

Six months in Massachusetts was a learning period in my life. I had always been a loner, and though I enjoy gang life, the real test of the loner is when he or she is separated from the familiar. So there I was, with a six year old who went to school in a yellow bus, with the fat winter squirrels who are warriors in the snow, watching as we put her in with a pack of other cheerful tiny children. Then Shiv and Sandhya and I would have bagels with soft white cheese with coffee in one of the many cafes which dotted the street, and after that, Shiv went to office, and Sandhya, who was not yet two, and had a few words in her grasp, would diffidently ask me "Key?" and I would say, "Yes, I have the key", and together we would let ourselves into the old wood house.
My identity card said "Spouse" and I would look at it sometimes in a puzzled way..I was married for thirteen years at that point, (1992) and the word "spouse" had an unfamiliar twang to it. The babysitters would come in the evening, and for two hours, I would head out to the Forbes Library, which was immediately next door,  for only a hedge divided us, and there I would immerse myself in 19th century mission records, and keep my commitment to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library that my six month stay in USA was to further my research archive on mission history for South India as a Fellow of the NMML.
It was in that small town that I learned to wash dishes, and to clean house and make beds, for we were without a servant. Sandhya helped me by following me around, and it was here that I discovered that I was pregnant for a third time. The physician who saw me at the hospital was a charming man, who said " There she is, sucking her thumb. I have one like that at home." I was completely startled, and grew fatter by the day, and wondered what people would say when I returned to Delhi. Malli is now twenty, and has a distinctive love for pizzas.
So there I was, winter in Massachusetts slowly turning into spring, the first buds shooting through, friends dropping in continuously, since Shiv was gregarious by nature, and when I had time, I wrote not just on Mission History, but I wrote a novel too ( the so called failed novel in The Visiting Moon was written in Massachusetts. I was following a Bernard Shaw principle there, the play within a play). My neighbour was a kind Bavarian woman, who taught at the College, and who went out her way to make us comfortable in our university house. And Frederique Marglin and Kathryn Pyne Addleson, both well known feminist scholars and collaborators in a course Shiv was teaching, introduced me to the practical aspects of Feminism. Frederique loaned me a very  valuable collection of jailhouse blues, and presented me with an african violet which kept me company for all those six months, blooming consistently in the hot radiator environment of a New England winter, which in January 1992, was blizzard weather indeed.
And there were the corner shops from which we got our groceries. They were lovely. Going to a mall, for a pedestrian family like ours, was out of the question, since we could not have got the rare bus that went on to the high way. The corner grocery shops had fresh vegetables and fruit, since these came in from the tropical zones, with their name tags attached. A mango from Mexico, in a shop in  the college street, which stood shoulder to shoulder with bookshops and restaurants and music shops.....we just looked past the curious mango, and bought tomatos and apples and beans and potatos and since I eat a lot in winter, the brown paper bags were always heavy, and we would carry our grocery shopping back in Sandhya's pushcart. The green apples were a delight, they were sour and crisp, and I loved them. Sometimes Shiv's cousin who taught at the same college would take us for a long ride, and we would see the Malls from where we had bought our Chinese windcheaters, and our shoes, which were also sheep lined from China. "Communism feeding Capitalism", I would wonder, but the shoes were really comfortable ( we each had only one pair and they did not flap apart, but allowed us to walk in the snow without skidding). Those malls too each had their distinctive appearance about them, and were a congeries of shops put together, but our visit was only that once to buy our jackets at a sale, since the winter was so bitter. Meera still has her red one, and  I wear my olive green with the navy blue piping even now,  well worn though it is.
Those brown paper bags in which we brought our daily groceries  were my mnemonic for the corner shops which each had their distinct character, for we got to talk to people, and sometimes the customers were very old people who would buy single things, for their ability to purchase was limited: and it would be just a yogurt and cucumber, while we lived like the middle class always do in India, with  lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, everyday. Once I  asked "Do you have milk?" and the student doubling as a salesman said, "As much as you could possibly want!" which I thought was a very odd answer indeed. We ate pizzas for dinner, in a place where the owners spoke Italian, and only one member spoke English to deal with the collegiate clientele. They would talk to each other as they made the dough, and cut the vegetables and put it all on a spade which went into the log oven. For some reason, it was called Harvard Pizza, though we were three hours journey from that University.

Fallow Land

I went to Kerala in October for a few days. The billboards confused me, so many of them. Gold and Money Deposit seem to be the only interests the Malayalis have these days, seemingly. No wonder Mr Tharoor thought IPL would do well for the Gulf diaspora as entertainment. The  advertising bill boards are so huge that the dwarf coconuts are quite hidden. One just cannot see Kerala anymore, the Kerala one knew. We are often told to Adapt or Die. I am not sure that's an ideological option. Because of commercialisation, the Malayalis were quick to see that their future lay in professional careers and that is an option that many of our families chose in the early 20th century. Why we expect slavery  and rice agriculture to continue is anybody's guess, except that a new generation of Agricultural officers in Kerala are interested in red rice and biodiversity.  Agriculture and love for nature are still ingrained in many of us, and the job of the farmer is one of the hardest that we can imagine.

When I first shifted to my new house in JNU after ten years in a very tiny cozy flat on the highest point of the Ridge called Poorvanchal, I was delighted by the garden the previous tenant had left behind, following a twenty year stay. Mrs Rao, wife of Prof D.N. Rao the economist, had planted hibiscus, (for her pujas perhaps) and drumsticks, tamarind, curry leaves, lemons, plantains, mangoes, neem....That garden delights me even now, and when some plant dies from old age or termites, I quickly replace them. Mrs Rao visits the house once every year, out of nostalgia though she lives in Canada now, and it's always lovely to see her because she has lots to say about gardening. And ofcourse about the Snake which would visit the house on 23rd September every year. "He just slides in and looks around, he never harms anyone." I looked basilisk at her and said "Yes, I noticed the large snake holes in the garden, so I blocked them with large rocks, and planted garlic all around the house, singly in pods..I heard him say " I live here" and I replied to him  "Ofcourse you do, but now we do too, so don't disturb us." Sometimes I hear the kindly snake at night, and the squeal of the dying mouse he has caught. If I did not hear voices would I be a novelist?

Gardening and farming are completely different exercises. The fact that Logan's Malabar extolls the Malayali's passion for gardening is a historical phenomenon. Where ever they find even a small pot, they will immediately set about to plant something, whether it is a grain of mustard seed, or coriander or mango or curry leaf. They do this in New York and in Dubai, and very likely in Brunei. Intensive Agriculture has depended on this imagination of the Malayalis, which makes co-existence a natural part of life.
And ofcourse Malayalis like all other peasants in India famously went to their fields to defaecate. Fukoka wrote about it, Indians practised it...organic manure was readily produced every morning by agriculturists and their labourers.