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The Eccentricities of my Father (From My Memoir-in-Progress, Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias

Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J / Noel Joesph Mathias

My Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J. (left), Noel Joseph Mathias (right)

(I am continuing a memoir of my father. The previous parts are

  1. Polyphemus, the Cyclops: A Memoir of my Father, Noel Joseph Mathias (Part I)
  2. A Memoir of My Father, Noel Mathias. In England, in the Forties & Fifties
  3. The Things My Father Said
  4. At Play with my Father, Part III )

My father claimed that each of his thirty-two teeth, denture or otherwise, was sweet.

At buffets, he went first to the dessert table, even at the posh Taj Intercontinental or Oberoi Sheraton in Bombay, Delhi, or Madras, where—along with his brother, Theo, who was the Director, and his brother Eric–he interviewed applicants to The Xavier Labor Relations Institute at which he taught.

It was only after he had eaten trifle and Black Forest gateau and chocolate eclairs that he ate a little roast beef to refresh his palate. (Probably alone of all inhabitants from Mangalore, his ancestral town, he would not touch pork.  He and his Jesuit brother, Theo, were convinced they would contract encephalitis from the tapeworm-ridden pigs that freely roamed around town, their snouts in the open fetid drains.)

And after this token attention, he went back to his now properly “earned” dessert–meringues; macaroons, and pistachio burfi, fudge, until, sweetly tranquilized, he could eat no more.

* * *

Our friend, Father Durt from Belgium, visited him at his office with a box of Belgian chocolates he had bought on furlough.

(My parents had stayed with Fr Durt’s family in Belgium when they visited on my father’s work. After dinner, they reported the little blonde Belgian children washing up, and saying, “We wish we were Indians. We would eat on a plaintain leaf with our fingers, and throw it away. There would be no washing up.”

My father kindly agreed that he did not wash up, not adding that we, ever so westernized, ate with the correct knives and forks, on imported English china, and the cook and maid washed up.)

Each week, as we met the kindly Jesuit at church, his smile grew more strained.  Finally, he asked, “Did you enjoy the chocolates?”  “Chocolates?” my mother, my sister and I chirped in unison.

“I…I…I…” my father said, flushing, “I have them in my office.”  He had eaten a conch just to sample it, he confessed, and then a wentletrap, just meaning to nibble it, and then, slipping, a limpet and a triton and a volute and a periwinkle and the moonshell and scallop until, well, the box of chocolates was… just a box.

Another time, when I was very little, they returned from a party, having quarreled on the way home, My father handsome in his “Madam Know Best” suit, so called because when his tastes differed from hers, the salesman said, “Madam knows best.”

“Baby, baby, look in Pa’s pockets. He has a cake for you,” she said. I looked in high excitement. And wailed, “Pa, why you ate the cake, and brought the papers for Atta?” which because a family “famous last word.” He had brought cake for me, but it had vanished on the way home.

 

* * *

Despite my mother’s cautions and precautions, my father was regularly pickpocketed when we traveled. Before he and I set off to Mangalore to visit his mother, or to Calcutta, Delhi or Lucknow, where I joined other parties of schoolchildren travelling to Nainital, my mother pinned a confining safety pin over the wallet in his trouser pocket.

We succumbed to the seductions of the journey: Laddoos, sweet orange globes studded with raisins and cloves; pakoras, vegetables deep-fried in chickpea flour; comic books; and deep sapphire peacock feather fans, shimmering with iridescent moons.

And, then, in this midst of our giddy the-cat-is-away-the mice-play spending, as he reached for his wallet on spotting another banyan-leaf, twig-threaded container of gol guppas: light crisp deep-fried spheres, punctured and filled with spicy tamarind water, my father smote his forehead.  Walletless!!

As we arrived in Calcutta or Bombay, we’d ask someone on the platform for twenty-five paise to phone my mother’s sister in Bombay, or to my father’s brother’s wife in Calcutta, whose rich cooking I enjoyed, and who my father was unsuccessfully determined to avoid, because of this rich cooking. But there we were, shame-faced, pickpocketed, needing to borrow money for we were pickpocketed, and of course with Indian hospitality, she treated us to a rich meal.

“We look scruffy,” he said on one occasion when we were in Calcutta, and not pickpocketed, “but there are seventeen million people in Calcutta.  We’ll never bump into my sister-in-law.”  Like all children, I was curious about my relatives and wanted to visit them, so I was sad.

And then we meandered into a bookshop on College Street, where, to my triumphant amusement, we noticed, within minutes, my decidedly unbookish aunt, browsing, and were soon eating delicious batter-fried chicken at her house to the silent annoyance of my father who had taken up yoga, vegetarianism and general health-freakishness at the age of 59.

* * *

As he approached the mandatory retirement age from The Tata Iron and Steel Company–sixty–my father suffered from lumbago, backaches, and hay-fever, and responsible now for two young girls, suddenly cared deeply and passionately about health.

And so, aged 59, my father learnt yoga from, ironically, an Australian yogi, who gave lessons at work to Tata executives.  And he persevered in this discipline of an hour of daily yoga until he died–a robust eighty-nine year old.

Our mornings became dramatic, punctuated by the unnerving roar of the lion pose, simhasana, or we would come upon him, legs in the air in a shoulder stand, or apparently dead in savasan, the corpse position of deep relaxation.

He gleefully described the position in Surya Namaskar in which the guru had the executives lie on their bellies, thrust their bottoms in the air, and then release the gas in their systems; and the sulfurous stench as the officers of the Tata Iron and Steel Company farted in unison.

He became a vegetarian, unaccompanied in this heroism by his family, eating a large bowl of crisp green salad for lunch everyday.

My father would not allow the cook to make his salads, as he feared that Durga would not wash his hands with soap, before touching the raw vegetables. My mother would not make them, and so everyday, when he returned home between sessions at his office for lunch and his midday siesta, he first made a crisp cucumber and lettuce salad with fresh squeezed lemon juice, while Durga told him the scores of the morning’s Cricket Test match against the Marylebone Cricket Club, to which he listened on his radio as he cooked our chicken, pork or lamb curries, for all of which my father now professed disgust.  So fatty.

I am today inspired by the determination with which he took responsibility for his own health. He quietly ate his own totally healthy, totally savourless ragi, millet porridge each morning, while we ate bacon, sausages and fried eggs–So fatty, he said—which necessitated a trip to the only “deep freeze’ in town, at the westernized Beldih Club.

                                                                                       * * *

Though a rationalist in many ways, my father was not immune to superstition.  “Seven years of bad luck,” my parents lamented whenever a mirror broke, and, incredibly, seemed to almost believe it.  They were reluctant to buy those gorgeous fans of peacock feathers, also meant to be unlucky (providentially for the peacocks!).

My father smiled uneasily when I used the white lie of his illness to escape from a social commitment.  “He’s sad.  Now he fears he will get sick,” my mother said.  He shook his head when I boasted that I never got sick, having developed robust health through the spartan regimen and mountain air of St. Mary’s Convent, my boarding school in the Himalayas: “Don’t say you never get sick, Anita.  You will get sick!”

He similarly shuddered when he overheard the boasts of his younger brother Theo, an energetic and brilliant Jesuit (whose assignments ranged from Chaplain to the Allied soldiers in Germany after the Second World War; advisor on restructuring the educational system of Papua New Guinea after its independence; India’s representative in the General Assembly of the United Nations in the seventies; and Director of an elite Jesuit Business School)

“Retire?” Theo said when asked about his plans as he turned sixty.  “Retire?  I am good for another twenty-five years,” Theo declared (and he indeed was.) “Theo shouldn’t show off,” my father said.  “Who knows what could happen?”  And, sure enough, Theo suffered a retina detachment, and was required to lie motionless at the famous eye hospital in Aligarh, across North India, where my father went to read to him and to spoon-feed him.  “I don’t know why Theo said that,” he said, “I shuddered when he said that.”

A common dread in India: that if you boast of a ship not even God can sink, God will sink it; where people touch wood whenever they mention a run of luck to placate any listening deity who may be offended by their hubris; and people are offended if a child is praised effusively, fearing that jealous people are trying to give them the nazar, the evil eye, so that malevolent listening deities, jealous of the rosy child’s beauty, would pinch the bud in its prime.  The parents quickly touch wood, or in its absence, in self-mockery, their own heads.  (The sense of a malignancy in a universe is universal.  When Cassiopeia boasted of her daughter Andromeda’s beauty, Aphrodite sent a sea monster to ravage the town.  A slave ran before the Roman Emperors in their triumphal progress, proclaiming, “Remember that thou too art human.”)

* * *

I thought of my father while reading of the French-Canadian described by Thoreau, “so quiet and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes…cousin to the pine and the rock.  He never tried to write thoughts–no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him.”

“I sweat blood when I have to write a letter,” my father claimed.  Every letter he wrote was drafted in long hand, pondered over and corrected, before he copied out the final version.  Though he took upon himself the Gethsemenean duty of writing to his mother once a month when he sent her a support check, from my teens onward, he often talked me into drafting it for him, so that he had but to mechanically copy it out.  “Write me a draft, Anita.  I’ll tell you all my news.  Just write it in my style.”  And so I did, unconsciously developing the art of observing and mimicking style.

 

Goals

 

Start Date—August 27th, 2012

Completion Date—August 31st, 2013

 

Word Count Goal-120,000

Words per day Goal—550 words a day

 

Progress (Aiming to write 6 days a week, excluding Sundays)

Day 64—27805 (7395 words behind, whoa!!)

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Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: memoir, Noel Joseph Mathias, Up to the HIlls

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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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