“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”.
So goes LP Hartley’s oft quoted opening sentence from The Go-Between. The future is unknown, the present is what it is but the past is rich, known, unknown, and complex and can be endlessly rearranged for meaning at different stages of life. Mining one’s own past is not just about memory and nostalgia but also curiosity about the lives of those who lived before us, the things they did differently.
A set of photographs taken in the mid 70s made me think of my great-grandparents.
My mother’s grandparents had lived in Bombay for a long period of time. My great grandfather had worked as a surveyor with the British but at some point the great grandparents moved to Tiruvidaimarudur, a tiny village on the Kaveri. The sprawling village house they lived in was almost the last in a lane that was exclusively Brahmin at the time. The lane tapered off into fields that led down to the river. My mother and her brother spent their early years here, my mother was therefore especially attached to her grandparents and we predisposed to like them.
This village house had served as a centre for many family functions, my parents had got married here and in ’74 so did an uncle. My parents took us to the wedding and we stayed on. The wedding had resulted in a full house and us city rats - my brother and I and relatives down from Chennai spent most of our time on the large swing in the house. When they left, the days became silent and long. Still my great grandparents did much to keep us amused as did our parents.
Opposite the village house was a pathashalai. For a large part of the morning we would hear lessons being recited but later in the day the boys would come out to play and my father and brother would join in a game of cricket or the like. One such game had resulted in a gash on my brother’s head, duly and efficiently stitched up by the local doctor. Much was made of my brother’s bravery because of the lack of anaesthesia of any sort. Though at that age I would often disrupt and join in my brother’s games back home I didn’t join them in Tiruvidaimarudur. Instead I spent a great deal of time in the garden of the pathashalai which was fragrant with flowers or roaming around the gardens and fields behind the houses on the street, my botanical impulses all afire. Part of the reason for my “feminisation” in the village was my great grandmother whose methods of coercion were gentle and therefore highly effective. I was thus put to work on making a kolam every morning, plucking flowers (I was given a sweet little steel basket which made me a happy girl) and the like.
I recall my parents being very happy here. My mother as I said was very fond of her grandparents and she was relaxed in their presence and her independent questioning streak was sublimated by the daily tasks of cooking with her grandmother, washing up and the like. This was in spite of the fact that her tales of village life were sometimes sordid, she never failed to let us know that everything good and evil in human life was there in that tiny patch of earth under southern skies. The saddest of these tales was of a childless aunt who had indulged her as a child but had borne more than a few taunts and would often cry herself to sleep. For my father, the air, the fresh produce, the milking of the cows, all this suited him. He would give us a bath in the mornings, we squealing with delight at the buckets of cold well water poured on us. For the rest of the time he occupied himself in several ways, the chief of which consisted of teasing an overtly orthodox great uncle with tales of his Army life and his renunciation of caste to become a Kshatriya.
Bullock carts and a sole Ambassador cab were the only modes of transport in getting around the village. We had arrived in a bullock cart and would leave in one. For the rest of the stay we would walk everywhere. A visit to the temple would mean a walk and my brother and I would peer down the long dark passageways in the temple, do our pradakshinams and always always harbour the fear that the Brahmahathi in the temple was waiting for us and we would never return to Delhi. Once we were taken to see some kind of temple procession. And sometimes we would be out late at night, once to see a movie in the open air theatre, and the return journey would be through ill lit lanes. The houses on the side would have flickering oil lamps, my great grandmother whose hand I held tightly would cry out a soft greeting once in awhile. The lanes were not lonely though; I can still see and smell the shuffle of people as we wound our tired way home. At the point where we turned into our lane lay an unsecured pond and I lived in fear that I would inadvertently drown in its inky night waters. By day though the pond held no fear for me, it was like something in an enchanted tale right out of Amar Chitra Katha partly because of its many lotus blooms. But I was also a child of my environment, I wanted very much to put them in a vase in our drawing room at home.
Though we were young and knew how to while away the hours, my brother and I would often long for books. My great-grandfather, a spare erect man who dressed in crisp clean clothes, was a diligent reader. He was a member of the local library and would take us there. I can still recollect his voice on our walks this many years later. It was a small library and my brother and I, ravenous readers, had finished with its contents in a week or so. Nevertheless we would reborrow the books and let me just say that I knew Russian Folk Tales better than any lesson I had swotted in my school term. In retrospect it is amazing that the library had any English books at all. My great grandfather himself wrote precise English and his writing style tended to the epistolary, we would get detailed letters on occasion when we returned home.
At the end of the lane as I mentioned lay the river. Sometimes my father would take us there though we were forbidden to swim in its waters. My mother and her brother, less supervised, had however mucked around in its waters as children. We would drag our feet along the edge of the water and occasionally a fish would nibble our toes but that was as far as it got. Here the river did not look imposing but we had been taken to Kumbakonam once and the river was far more grand there though not more so than a few that we had passed on our long journey south.
In spite of the idyllic nature of our visit, village life ran its usual course. My great grandparents help, Visayam, was forbidden to touch anything or enter certain places. Everyone enquired as to the caste of our help back in Delhi. A girl aged ten got married on our street; my great grandmother went for the wedding and pronounced that never had a bride looked more charming. This was one event that agitated my mother. On a much later visit I learnt that the girl had run away and returned to her natal home. There were unsavoury rumours about the pathashalai vadiyar. And there was just a hint that the demography of the village was changing, this was much more apparent on our later visit a decade later.
In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (an excellent book that I recommend), the narrator returns at the end of his studies in the UK to his grandfather’s village at the bend of the Nile. To the narrator his grandfather stands for a past that is timeless and reassuring even as things change. Of course, as the narrator realises, this world is not as pure as he imagines. Much as my mother explained. My own grandparents lived in the city; in spite of their house being on its fringes we in fact came to a bustling metropolis on most of our holidays. Yet in Asian life everywhere our roots seem to lie in the idea of a village much like my great grandfather’s. Writing this made me feel that I am no different, that the past that is timeless and reassuring to me is not my grandparents life, it is the life of a small infrequently visited village on the Kaveri.
In picture above from L to R: My grandmother (who doesn’t make an appearance in this piece), my mother, my great grandparents and the overly orthodox uncle. In front, brother and me.
