At my Grandmother's-I

I have been staying home for long spells on this visit and the quietness of the suburbs on week days has been surprising. The places I live in are admittedly tucked away, yet even on a short drive you turn into a lane and it will be silent. There is something slightly schizophrenic about leaving behind the chaos of the main roads to enter these streets.

At the moment I am at my grandmother's place and while she is in better cheer than I expected, at times she's like the lines of a poem I wrote for her - small, sorrowed, a crumpled heap. Life is a small room, her walking-aid, a chair to watch the lane below -but she also listens to my chatter-her "bedtime story" for today was my reading of Country Style. 

I have been loitering around the back of the house today - once a getaway and a splendid spot for childhood games - now more sedately I shot a few pictures (the camera has been with me everywhere on this visit documenting little else than domestic minutiae). The painters were around for awhile but not of late - their tools have been left behind till they return. The cobwebs are on our neighbour's grill, there is a certain gloomy satisfaction in seeing this - its the companionship afforded by the impossible housekeeping required of the large houses here.  

But the strongest memory of my childhood lay in this wall. I found it appalling as a child that people would keep out intruders by way of embedding glass and it still makes me uneasy.  And it is still around, albeit dressed up by a lick of paint. 

Equally, "servants" are bemusing.  There is complaining, bullying, wheedling, parsimony and the companionship of idle chatter in the relationship.  And though much has changed, the occupation is by no means a professional one and the underlying master-supplicant relationship remains with all its attendant stereotypes.  A harshness and discontent often exists on both sides.  My grandmother has had the same help for twelve odd years and is on good terms with her.  But a one day notice will suffice on both sides.  

 

Though I have been home for long spells, I haven't done much by way of reading or anything else. In Friedan's words, housework expands to fill time. And so it does, a few largely useless tasks occupy my entire day.  Perhaps this repetition is also soothing in some way, there is something vaguely Zen about the silence and the mundanity.  This is also because I am largely free of the tyranny imposed by a functional household, that peculiar insistence that tasks be done a particular way.  This morning while drying the clothes, I wryly remembered the oral instruction manual issued to young girls of my time entitled On the Proper Drying of Saris.  Girls obeyed, girls rebelled.  The situation was worsened by marriage. But after a proper and decent amount of time with the in-laws, young women could always go on to their own domestic tyrannies (I believe The Proper Stacking of Dishwashers is quite popular these days).