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The Things My Father Said (From my Memoir: Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias

(This is Part IV from a memoir of my Father, Noel Mathias.  Parts I to III are:

  • Polyphemus, the Cyclops
  • A Memoir of My Father, Noel Mathias. In England, in the Forties & Fifties
  • At Play with my Father)

 

Shake and Shake the Ketchup Bottle

We were never certain if the stories my father told us were truth or invention.

He claimed he responded to an advertisement in The Illustrated Weekly of India: “All mosquitoes eliminated from your house and garden in a day.  Guaranteed to work, or your money back.”  He sent in his ten rupees and waited.  He received two small rocks.  Take the mosquito, read the instructions, place it on the lower stone.  Cover with the other stone.  Crush mosquito.

Another story: A country bumpkin arrives in Bombay, craning his neck at the skyscrapers.  A city slicker marches up, “It’s my building.  You have to pay me a rupee for every storey you look at?”  The bumpkin hands over fifteen rupees, then conspiratorially confesses to the bystanders.  “I gave him fifteen rupees, but actually–I looked at the whole building.”

Yeah, his humour leaned towards the verbal though silly. A man leaves his wife. As he crosses the threshold, she wails, “You said you wouldn’t leave, and you’ve left.” He, “I promised to cleave, and I’ve cleft.”

* * *

 

“Was that really Professor Mathias?” one of his students asked, observing him joke with us on a train.  “I have never seen him smile.” “You can only talk to him soberly on sober subjects,” my cousin Dorothy lamented.  However,

within the sanctuary of family, my father relaxed into silliness.  He’d stroke his pronounced nose and boast, “I have a Roman nose.  An aquiline nose.”  He was my younger sister, Shalini’s, passion.  She sat on my parents’ bed, while my father was at work, and my mother did her mending, and told tales of my father, each ending on a crescendo of exultation–“Dear Pa,” “Silly Pa,” “Swee-eet Pa!”

For instance, Shalini would say, “Do you remember when Pa heard me sound out G-nome,” and claimed, ‘I’m actually a gin-nome.’  I said, ‘Okay, if you are a gin-nome, what’s your name?” and he said, ‘Pixie Silver Cloud,’ so happily” And then, I heard her voice rise in her delighted litany, “Dear Pa!  Sil-ly Pa!”

My father’s humor inclined towards the genre of “famous last words,” deflating pretension. He laughed at the family who returned from a trip to England to boast, “Oh the tins we had!”  (Canned foods: meats, cheese, fish, generally imported, were a luxury in India and virtually unavailable except for Amul Cheese, made in India.)

On their return from England, the family suddenly eschewed mangoes.  My father’s morning routine was to sit on the front verandah and work through a basket of freshly picked mangoes from the six mango trees in our garden, bowling the seed right across the large front lawn into the bushes outside the garden walls, where they served as compost, a trick we greatly admired, along with his ability to peel an apple, without breaking the skin, producing a single triumphant spiral.  Now he ate mangoes, mimicking the family’s pseudo-British accent, Oh, mangoes are so messy.

He repeated old jingles with such gusto that we thought he’d invented them.  When we struggled with a bottleneck of ketchup, he’d say, Shake and shake the ketchup bottle.  None will come and then a lot’ll.  I discovered that jingle I thought my father invented in a textbook on writing poetry when I was 25, attributed to Richard Armour, not Noel Mathias.

“I thot I thaw a putty tat cweeping up on me,”  “You thot you thaw a putty cat.  The putty tat was me,” our father would say with gusto, in high-pitched baby tones.  An example of his dearness and foolishness we thought, as we teased him, mimicking the jingle we thought he had made up, ignorant of the provenance, until, one day in America, I saw that tag of doomed innocence on a child’s sweatshirt, and realized, astonished, that my father hadn’t invented it after all.

* * *

 He interpolated himself into the stories he told us: He was either the hero or the sidekick.  It was, thus, his cousin, Paddy, who rode his bike recklessly, saying, “Look, Ma, no hands.  Look Ma, no feet,” and then, deflated and bloodied,  “Look Ma.  No teeth.”

Once, required as a forfeit in a game of Passing-The-Parcel to tell a joke, Vatsala Khanna told the assembled school this old chestnut, “Once Anita Mathias’s father saw a boy ride a bike…” “Nice joke, Vatsala,” Sister Josephine said later, “But why bring Anita Mathias’s father into it?”  Both Vatsala and I looked equally betrayed.

* * *

He had the silliest sense of humour—and it often got me into trouble. Whenever I mentioned my Hindi teacher, Miss Kispota, from India’s Adivasi tribes, he’d murmur “If you want to kiss, kiss Pota.” I said it aloud in class, aged seven, and everyone burst into laughter. “I have taught for seventeen years,” she screamed, as the class giggled, “and I have never seen such a gundi ludki, dirty girl.” And the phrase gundi ladki also became a family joke.

* * *

The rhymes he taught me

King David and King Solomon

Lead merry, merry lives,

With many, many girlfriends

And many, many wives,

And when old age overtook them,

With many, many qualms,

King Solomon wrote the Proverbs,

And King David wrote the Psalms.

 

Or

“There was once a friar from Siberia,

For whom life grew drearier and drearier,

At last with a yell,

He said “What the hell?”

And eloped with the Mother Superior.”

And, of course, when I went to boarding school, aged nine, I repeated these to my classmates, And, of course, the tattle-tales told the nuns. And so, of course, I was always in trouble.

“Anita Mathias has brought the baad speeret into the class,” Sister Secunda told the girls she hurriedly assembled into the fifth grade classroom.  “Who taught you such things, Anita Mathias?”  “My father,” I said with perfect truth. They acted horrified, and misbelieving—but in retrospect, they surely believed me!!

* * *

 My father invented a wonderful, capacious nonsense rhyme to tease my sister, Shalini: “Shalini, Balini, big fat Shalini,/ High-Bald, Low-Bald, bald-headed Shalini.” It could be twined around any name, I realized.  The senselessness of it tormented the victim who suspected a hidden meaning she did not understand.

I ran after the school captain, Setha, a senior, chanting “Setha, Betha, big fat Setha, high-bald, low-bald, bald-headed Setha,” followed by a crowd of little girls, reciting the jingle, until Setha cried and we desisted.  With a slightly more awed crowd, I followed Sister Veronique, the Principal of Sacred Heart Convent, my first school, softly rapping the chant, “Veronique, Beronique, big fat Veronique, high-bald, low-bald, bald-headed Veronique.”  She spun around.

Unlike Shalini, she was large, and it was rumored was, like all nuns, bald-headed beneath her veil.

“What did you say?” she demanded.  A little cowed, I  repeated the chant.

“What a filthy rhyme.  Who taught it to you girls?”

“My father,” I said.

* * *

 

More from my site

  • Palaces of Peace and Dreaming (Chapter from my memoir, Mind has Mountains)Palaces of Peace and Dreaming (Chapter from my memoir, Mind has Mountains)
  • I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood (Chapter from my memoir-in-progress: “Mind Has Mountains”)I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood (Chapter from my memoir-in-progress: “Mind Has Mountains”)
  • Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born (From my memoir-in-progress, Mind Has Mountains)Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born (From my memoir-in-progress, Mind Has Mountains)
  • In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel  (The first chapter of my memoir, “Mind has Mountains.”) In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel (The first chapter of my memoir, “Mind has Mountains.”)
  • Brutus, the Honourable Dog (From my memoir-in-progress, Up to the Hills)     Brutus, the Honourable Dog (From my memoir-in-progress, Up to the Hills)
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Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: india, Jamshedpur, memoir, Noel Mathias

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anita.mathias

Writer, Blogger, Reader, Mum. Christian. Instaing Oxford, travel, gardens and healthy meals. Oxford English alum. Writing memoir. Lives in Oxford, UK

Images from walks around Oxford. #beauty #oxford # Images from walks around Oxford. #beauty #oxford #walking #tranquility #naturephotography #nature
So we had a lovely holiday in the Southwest. And h So we had a lovely holiday in the Southwest. And here we are at one of the world’s most famous and easily recognisable sites.
#stonehenge #travel #england #prehistoric England #family #druids
And I’ve blogged https://anitamathias.com/2020/09/13/on-not-wasting-a-desert-experience/
So, after Paul the Apostle's lightning bolt encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he went into the desert, he tells us...
And there, he received revelation, visions, and had divine encounters. The same Judean desert, where Jesus fasted for forty days before starting his active ministry. Where Moses encountered God. Where David turned from a shepherd to a leader and a King, and more, a man after God’s own heart.  Where Elijah in the throes of a nervous breakdown hears God in a gentle whisper. 
England, where I live, like most of the world is going through a desert experience of continuing partial lockdowns. Covid-19 spreads through human contact and social life, and so we must refrain from those great pleasures. We are invited to the desert, a harsh place where pruning can occur, and spiritual fruitfulness.
A plague like this has not been known for a hundred years... John Piper, after his cancer diagnosis, exhorted people, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer”—since this was the experience God permitted you to have, and He can bring gold from it. Pandemics and plagues are permitted (though not willed or desired) by a Sovereign God, and he can bring life-change out of them. 
Let us not waste this unwanted, unchosen pandemic, this opportunity for silence, solitude and reflection. Let’s not squander on endless Zoom calls—or on the internet, which, if not used wisely, will only raise anxiety levels. Let’s instead accept the invitation to increased silence and reflection
Let's use the extra free time that many of us have long coveted and which has now been given us by Covid-19 restrictions to seek the face of God. To seek revelation. To pray. 
And to work on those projects of our hearts which have been smothered by noise, busyness, and the tumult of people and parties. To nurture the fragile dreams still alive in our hearts. The long-deferred duty or vocation
So, we are about eight weeks into lockdown, and I So, we are about eight weeks into lockdown, and I have totally sunk into the rhythm of it, and have got quiet, very quiet, the quietest spell of time I have had as an adult.
I like it. I will find going back to the sometimes frenetic merry-go-round of my old life rather hard. Well, I doubt I will go back to it. I will prune some activities, and generally live more intentionally and mindfully.
I have started blocking internet of my phone and laptop for longer periods of time, and that has brought a lot of internal quiet and peace.
Some of the things I have enjoyed during lockdown have been my daily long walks, and gardening. Well, and reading and working on a longer piece of work.
Here are some images from my walks.
And if you missed it, a blog about maintaining peace in the middle of the storm of a global pandemic
https://anitamathias.com/2020/05/04/a-mind-of-life-and-peace/  #walking #contemplating #beauty #oxford #pandemic
A few walks in Oxford in the time of quarantine. A few walks in Oxford in the time of quarantine.  We can maintain a mind of life and peace during this period of lockdown by being mindful of our minds, and regulating them through meditation; being mindful of our bodies and keeping them happy by exercise and yoga; and being mindful of our emotions in this uncertain time, and trusting God who remains in charge. A new blog on maintaining a mind of life and peace during lockdown https://anitamathias.com/2020/05/04/a-mind-of-life-and-peace/
In the days when one could still travel, i.e. Janu In the days when one could still travel, i.e. January 2020, which seems like another life, all four of us spent 10 days in Malta. I unplugged, and logged off social media, so here are some belated iphone photos of a day in Valetta.
Today, of course, there’s a lockdown, and the country’s leader is in intensive care.
When the world is too much with us, and the news stresses us, moving one’s body, as in yoga or walking, calms the mind. I am doing some Yoga with Adriene, and again seeing the similarities between the practice of Yoga and the practice of following Christ.
https://anitamathias.com/2020/04/06/on-yoga-and-following-jesus/
#valleta #valletamalta #travel #travelgram #uncagedbird
Images from some recent walks in Oxford. I am copi Images from some recent walks in Oxford.
I am coping with lockdown by really, really enjoying my daily 4 mile walk. By savouring the peace of wild things. By trusting that God will bring good out of this. With a bit of yoga, and weights. And by working a fair amount in my garden. And reading.
How are you doing?
#oxford #oxfordinlockdown #lockdown #walk #lockdownwalks #peace #beauty #happiness #joy #thepeaceofwildthings
Images of walks in Oxford in this time of social d Images of walks in Oxford in this time of social distancing. The first two are my own garden.  And I’ve https://anitamathias.com/2020/03/28/silver-and-gold-linings-in-the-storm-clouds-of-coronavirus/ #corona #socialdistancing #silverlinings #silence #solitude #peace
Trust: A Message of Christmas He came to earth in Trust: A Message of Christmas  He came to earth in a  splash of energy
And gentleness and humility.
That homeless baby in the barn
Would be the lynchpin on which history would ever after turn
Who would have thought it?
But perhaps those attuned to God’s way of surprises would not be surprised.
He was already at the centre of all things, connecting all things. * * *
Augustus Caesar issued a decree which brought him to Bethlehem,
The oppressions of colonialism and conquest brought the Messiah exactly where he was meant to be, the place prophesied eight hundred years before his birth by the Prophet Micah.
And he was already redeeming all things. The shame of unwed motherhood; the powerlessness of poverty.
He was born among animals in a barn, animals enjoying the sweetness of life, animals he created, animals precious to him.
For he created all things, and in him all things hold together
Including stars in the sky, of which a new one heralded his birth
Drawing astronomers to him.
And drawing him to the attention of an angry King
As angelic song drew shepherds to him.
An Emperor, a King, scholars, shepherds, angels, animals, stars, an unwed mother
All things in heaven and earth connected
By a homeless baby
The still point on which the world still turns. The powerful centre. The only true power.
The One who makes connections. * * *
And there is no end to the wisdom, the crystal glints of the Message that birth brings.
To me, today, it says, “Fear not, trust me, I will make a way.” The baby lay gentle in the barn
And God arranges for new stars, angelic song, wise visitors with needed finances for his sustenance in the swiftly-coming exile, shepherds to underline the anointing and reassure his parents. “Trust me in your dilemmas,” the baby still says, “I will make a way. I will show it to you.” Happy Christmas everyone.  https://anitamathias.com/2019/12/24/trust-a-message-of-christmas/ #christmas #gemalderieberlin #trust #godwillmakeaway
Look, I’ve designed a journal. It’s an omnibus Look, I’ve designed a journal. It’s an omnibus Gratitude journal, habit tracker, food and exercise journal, bullet journal, with time sheets, goal sheets and a Planner. Everything you’d like to track.  Here’s a post about it with ISBNs https://anitamathias.com/2019/12/23/life-changing-journalling/. Check it out. I hope you and your kids like it!
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