Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

A Teenager at Faculty Housing at XLRI, Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur (From my memoir in progress, Mind has Mountains)

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I am slowly writing a memoir of my Catholic Childhood in India. Scroll to the bottom for the chapters I’ve already written. Thank for reading along as I share the first version.The final one, no doubt, will be shorter!

A Teenager at University Faculty Housing at XLRI, Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur.

When my father retired as Controller of Accounts at Tata Iron and Steel, Jamshedpur, at the mandatory age of sixty, full of experience and vigour, I was at an expensive boarding school, St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital, and my younger sister Shalini was just eleven. We were, unusually, born in his late forties, and he had little wish to retire,

He was, providentially, offered a job as Financial Controller at Xavier Labour Relations Institute, XLRI, a prestigious American Jesuit-run post-graduate business school, one of South Asia’s oldest and highest ranked–serendipitously located in Jamshedpur–with, surprisingly, an increase in salary. My father loved his new job, a combination of Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Internal Auditor—haphazardly making enemies as he queried fanciful expense accounts. We lived in Faculty Housing on the XLRI campus for eight years.

* * *

Jamshedpur, a small town in Bihar, was not an entirely quixotic choice for a Business School. The Tatas, Zoroashtrian industrialists, had settled there, drawn by iron ore, and Jamshedpur hosted two of India’s largest companies, Tata Iron and Steel, TISCO, and Tata Electric Locomotive Company, TELCO, which attracted executives from all over India; few managers were born there!!  Our sleepy provincial town was a business hub!

Xavier Labour Relations Institute was founded and largely run by missionary priests, American Jesuits from the Baltimore province, though as to be expected from the International Society of Jesus, there were priests on loan, like Father Arroyo from the Jesuit Gujarat province, a missionary project of the Spanish Jesuits, as well as Mangalorean Jesuits from India’s Karnataka Province. (The Jesuits, like the Catholic Church, were an early and great multinational!) However, though XLRI was then largely staffed by American priests, my father’s younger brother, Father Theo Mathias, a Jesuit, was the Director during the eight years that we lived there. My father held Theo up to us as a role model of productivity and perfection. “Lolling? Wasting time? I don’t think Theo ever wastes even five minutes.”

The genial American Jesuits on campus, Fathers Keogh, MacGrath, Moran, Father Tome, and Father Guidera referred to Theo as “your kid brother,” when they spoke to my father, which amused us; both dignified gentlemen were in their sixties. “Here comes Noel and his harem,” the American priests sang out as they saw my father walk through campus with my mother, my sister and me in tow. “XYZ,” they’d say, eyeing his fly, which my father worked out as meaning “Check Your Zip.” He was as absent-minded as I am.

* * *

East and West! Culture shock–all the time. Father O’Brien, good-natured, dreamy, noticed his student had a mundan, shaved head, a custom of conservative Hindus mourning relatives.

“Hey Ravi,” he slapped him on the back with easy friendliness. “How you doing? Why have you shaved your head?”

“My mother died,” the student said, mournfully.

“Great, great,” Father O’Brien patted his shoulder, walking on, quite obviously not having heard a word.

* * *

When we were invited to dinner at the Jesuits’ house, peacocks strutted, manifesting iridescent moons– pets, food, mewling alarm-raisers–and alarm clocks!). The sweetest caged rabbits provided free and delicious meals, and the house was guarded by glorious pure-bred Alsatians, parents of our Brutus.

Some of the priests were radical, left-wing, and I listened, open-eared and fascinated, as they openly criticized the Vatican for censoring Hans Kung, and patiently explained Liberation Theology to me. These idealistic men had come to India, probably expecting to serve the poor, but puzzled, often piqued and restless, found themselves education ambitious go-getting business managers-to-be, while hoping to transmit Christ’s values to them, so the Christian ethic might trickle through society, like salt, like light.

I used to attend the weekday student masses on the XLRI campus in my late teen very Catholic phase. The wind of the Sixties–a post-Vatican II liberation–had finally blown to India. We sat on the floor on cushions, and sung toe-tapping folksy songs, accompanied by guitars–“Make God your guru,” “Honey in the Rock,” “He is my Everything,” a far cry from the soulful, formal hymns of my German-run boarding school in the Himalayas. At Mass, we sung “Kumbaya,” and “Blowing in the Wind,” singing protest songs against Vietnam and for Civil Rights, oblivious of their origins.

How many times must the cannon balls fly,

Before they are forever banned?

An’ how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

And how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,

The answer is blowing in the wind.

And on and on it went. How soulful it all sounded, how many calls to action, too many, blown away before any took root in conscience.

* * *

XLRI offered an MBA in Industrial Relations and Business Management, drawing students from all over India, and countries including Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Iran, and Malaysia to Jamshedpur, my sleepy little hometown. It was ranked fifth among India’s eight hundred business schools.

Since fewer than one percent of applicants were accepted, Professors on the admissions committee, as my father every year was, were offered myriad bribes. My father scanned the letters, then flung them in the waste paper basket. I retrieved one. “Why are you torturing me?” and then, “Okay, I can offer an additional five thousand rupees.” Wealth, emigration to the US, better marriage prospects for men, a cheaper dowry for women–a lot hinged on the right education.

My father’s secretary, sorting the mail, once snorted “This bloody fool thinks he can draw green hearts on the envelope and get into XLRI.”

“Show me!” my father said uneasily. And then, shyly, “It’s my daughter.” Attempting to assert my individuality at boarding school, I used brilliant inks: turquoise, emerald, bright pink, and magenta, idly covering the envelope with hearts.

Every year my father, his brother Father Theo, and their younger brother Eric interviewed short-listed applicants in Bombay at the Oberoi Sheraton or Taj Intercontinental, exclusive hotels which then catered to foreigners or the very rich. Eric and my father had unregenerate sweet teeth, and–still boarding school boys at heart–attacked the buffet first, eating black forest gateaux, trifles, knickerbocker glories, and eclairs before they considered, well, real food. Though my father had become health conscious in his late fifties, his resistance crumbled when confronted with twenty Western desserts. (I myself used to start with the dessert at buffets all through my twenties and thirties and even forties, but now avoid sugar–which would astonish the child who looked forward to heaven as the country of unlimited condensed milk, jaggery and Cadbury’s chocolate.)

* * *

Living on the XLRI campus provided more cultural and intellectual stimulation than usual in a small Indian town, especially when XLRI hosted Kaleidoscope, an annual national inter-collegiate cultural festival. Student teams from all over India competed for a few frenzied days of competitions—music, debating, drama, quiz, based on the B.B.C.’s Mastermind; elocution competitions: strutting forth purple passages of poetry or prose, and “Just a Minute” impromptu oratorical competitions in which one was given, well, just a minute to argue a point, starting the instant a topic was announced. (I introduced this to school, and was rather good at it!)

We watched Of Mice and Men at XLRI performed by a visiting American theatre troupe, and  I remember a chilling production of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little N*****s by XLRI students, who, in that innocent age, did not realize that the word was considered offensive; interestingly, the American priests didn’t tell them. When I loved a play, I’d get my father to ask the students for the script, and take it up to boarding school where I directed them as fundraisers for our Social Service League, which I ran—Moliere’s The Miser when I was fourteen and Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg when I was fifteen. Overtones has feral shadow selves voice their thoughts, while the social selves shallowly smile; it shaped my perceptions of social life: the scowling shadow self behind the smiling face.

Unusually for Indian libraries then, XLRI’s library was well stacked with American classics, absent both from the local Club libraries and from my school library which had–almost entirely–British authors. Besides, being on faculty in an American-run institution enabled my father to borrow books for me through inter-library loan from the United States Information Service in Calcutta. This was the era of the Cold War; we received a glossy magazine Span from the USIS, a dreamy representation of America and American writers like Eudora Welty and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Sputnik from Russia, on cheaper paper, with hagiographic stories of the childhood of the sainted Vladimir Iliych Lenin, for instance.

I read T. S. Eliot for the first time here in a volume borrowed from the XLRI library, included because he was American–enchanted by the rhythm and resonance of the words long before I worked out the meaning. I memorized Gerald Manley Hopkins–who was here because he was Jesuit; like Eliot, he spoke to me, pulse to pulse, heartbeat to heartbeat. I was learning the magic language of poetry. I read St. Augustine’s Confessions, who was there because he was Catholic, enchanted by his sense of the dual plots and stories in our lives. You acted with malice: he addresses the teachers of his youth, but God was active too, shaping it all for good.

I read the writers the priests suggested, and sobbed through the stunning final scene of “The Grapes of Wrath.” One winter, I checked out Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and then Ibsen from the XLRI library, reading play after play. I read rapidly when I was home, a book a day. We had a live-in cleaner and cook, so there was no domestic work. There was no TV; except for the three movies we went to each week at the Clubs, I had nothing to do but read.

During the three month winter vacation from boarding school, I checked out The Hundred Greatest Speeches, and memorized speeches for elocution competitions at boarding school: Frederick Douglas on the Fourth of July, Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions; Martin Luther King’s resonant and alive, “I have a dream” and “The Gettysburg Address.” Decades later, I still remember them; their rhythms beat in my veins.

* * *

The students hosted marketing festivals to test-market new products, guinea-pigging their relatively affluent and educated visitors into market research in the form of games. My mother played intently and came home with tote bags of Lux Supreme Soap, Bianca Toothpaste, Five Star Chocolate and canned Utterly Butterly Delicious Amul Cheese. My father watched from a distance, quietly amused.

We often had students, faculty, and the Jesuit priests over for dinner, and unconsciously, the romance and magic of business and wealth-creation seeped into my artistic blood during those eight years on the campus of a business school. I borrowed the books the students read in their Organizational Behaviour course from the XLRI library—introductions to psychology, to Transactional Analysis—”I’m OK; You’re OK,” listening intently to conversations on business, thinking I’d be rather good at running one, though fearing I was too literary and poetic to do so. I now do own my own; perhaps those years in faculty housing of a Business School indirectly inspired me to see the world in business as well as poetic terms, untapped wealth-generation ideas blushing unseen everywhere.

* * *

My mother invited particularly bright, charming Catholic students to dinner. They asked us to dance at Christmas dances, bestowed our first kisses on us. Coolness was prized; the cool were “hep,” or the “hep cats”; those who tried too hard were the “pseuds.” In retrospect, there was probably little difference between them.

XLRI had foreign students from all over Asia and the Middle East, but only one African, a Nigerian called Charlie. Charlie fancied Indian woman. Undaunted by repeated, almost inevitable, and sometimes horrified rebuffs, he assiduously proposed marriage to fellow students, stenographers and telephone operators. My father said his secretary burst into his office, wailing, “Charlie asked me to marry him.” The entire college community would now tease the latest intended…until Charlie proposed to someone else.

My mother once invited Charlie to lunch with other students. He talked about women, marriage and weight!  In Nigeria, he said, brides were sent to fattening parlours before their wedding day. Being hefty was sexually attractive, he implied, a status symbol. My family claimed Charlie looked straight at me, as he said that. I was five feet two and weighed a hundred and sixteen pounds to the despair of my parents who wanted me to weigh a hundred. They teased, “Well, you could diet, or you could marry Charlie.”

* * *

Autodrivers and rickshaw-wallahs called the leafy, secluded campus of Xavier Labor Relations Institute set in a sylvan setting on the outskirts of town “Jayber-Laber.” “Jayber-Laber please,” we said. To the English-speaking, it was XLRI, or serendipitously, XL, Excel, an acronym much milked.

The priests built faculty housing in an enclave adjoining the University; like our house at Tata Steel, housing came with the job, and was surrendered with it. Providing housing helped employers attract talent in a developing economy in which banks did not offer mortgages. (The provident saved, and bought houses with cash, often after retirement; many never did.). Besides, non-taxable perks like housing—TISCO provided medical care, telephone service, and cafeterias–kept the taxable salaries of businessmen in company towns low.

I liked strolling on the quiet, peaceful road which encircled Faculty Housing, two storied apartments, each assigned to two families, on one side of the road, and brilliant red-flowered flame of the forest and bottle brush trees on the other. Each house had two balconies; oases where I sat and gazed at the fiery parasol of the Royal Ponciana trees across the street. The flat was much smaller than our large house at Tata Steel, and laid out on a more open floor plan than most Indian houses, each area glorified by an imprecise American name.  When it was decided that we would move about ten miles across town to XLRI, a professor visited us to describe the house.  “There are two balconies, and a lobby,” he said. “What’s a lobby?” my mother cheeped up. “And then an alcove.” “What’s an alcove?” she said plaintively.

The faculty and staff of XLRI worked together during the day, and lived a few yards apart in the evenings; almost every family had domestic help, a maid or a cook, who hung out with each other in their off-hours. What was whispered in living rooms, virally transmitted through the servants, reached the rooftops where families relaxed in the evenings. Any illusion of privacy was illusory.

In his hours off, our cook Durga sat in the sun outside the campus gates with other off-duty servants and the Gurkhas, indomitable Nepalese watchmen, who were guards at XLRI and the Jesuit residence. He returned with juicy gossip–which members of the faculty hated each other; whose wife was going quietly insane in the privacy of their house; whose secretary was shamelessly flirting with her boss–who just happened to be a priest. And probably, our secrets left the house by the same channels that other people’s secrets entered it.

* * *

While an acre of garden encircled our Tata Steel house with an oasis of privacy, at XLRI we were assigned the top floor of the apartment building. There were neighbours beneath us. According to campus tradition, families on the upper floor used the rooftop terrace to eat dessert or relax in the cool of the summer evening, or sit and read, soaking up winter sun. We hung out laundry, spread shrimp, meat, ginger, and vegetables on dishcloths to sun-dry for pickles, and even slept up on the terrace on sweltering summer nights; it functioned as an extra room. The people on the lower floor traditionally had the small garden to hang out their laundry, and cultivate.

Moving from a bright airy twelve large-roomed house with an additional outdoor kitchen and quarters for two servants to a three bedroom house with one outdoor room for a servant and no garden was a huge transition. I disliked the apartment, finding it too small, dark and gardenless, and affording less privacy to read and think than our previous house–and my mother pined for a garden, having grown her own flowers, fruit, vegetables and herbs all her married life.

Eating from the garden was a way of life for us. We used to have crisp freshly-picked lettuce and fresh radish, tomatoes or peppers for breakfast layered in cheese sandwiches; made pestos with our own mint and coriander; and my father made himself a garden-fresh cucumber and lettuce salad for lunch, not liking to eat raw food that the cook had touched, for he suspected him of not washing his hands.  On seeing cultivable land lie overgrown and unused right beneath our windows, my mother’s green thumbs itched. She had our cook dig out a little plot, and planted vegetables, herbs, flowers, and mulberries bushes. The little garden bloomed.

The faculty wife downstairs, Mrs. Gupta, was a recluse, made strange and half-crazed by loneliness within her yellow-walled house. Less-educated than her respected professor husband (as often happens in arranged marriages where parental life savings “buy” a better educated husband, whose salary, would, perhaps, support both sets of parents in old age) she was out of her depth in the University environment. Though this indolent, eccentric woman rarely stepped outside her house, and had done precisely nothing about planting a garden in all the years they had lived there, she was furious to see my mother plant a garden on what, by campus tradition, was her land.

One day, as my mother was pruning and harvesting, Mrs. Gupta rushed out of her house with a packet of seeds, flinging them over the hard unbroken weed-choked ground, almost dancing in her rage,  like the multi-armed goddess Kali over battlefields.  “Mrs. Mathias,” she yelled.   “This is my garden.  See, I am using the garden.  See, I am planting my seeds”

There were interventions. Both soft-spoken dignified husbands managed the families’ foreign policy, and my mother was given half the garden, in which she densely planted flowers, vegetables, herbs, papaya, banana, and mulberry trees; and perennial fruiting shrubs like roselle. Mrs. Gupta, it was agreed, could use the terrace, though being reclusive, she never did—for then we might have seen her. In the eight years we lived there, I saw her just once.

The families then, more or less, co-existed, an uneasy truce, confining themselves to snide barbs.  When I returned from boarding school, and my mother and I were left alone while my father was at work and my sister was at school, the decibel level soared as we screamed at each other, every interaction ending in intense drama.  When my father returned for lunch, both my mother and I rushed to him, the one getting there first having the first shot at a recitation of woe.  “She did this.  She did that.  All I did was this, and she…,”.  Professor Gupta on encountering my youngest sister as they entered the building, said dryly, meaningfully, “I hear your sister’s home.” And so he must have.

* * *

The next salvo. Mrs Gupta hired a “jungli” (as the Adivasi forest dwellers who belonged to the scheduled or “backward tribes” were then colloquially called) to dig her half of the garden, and prepare the hard, compacted, rocky, never cultivated laterite soil for planting. This was iron country; the red soil was riddled with murram, pellets of iron ore. He laboured, day after day, from dawn to dusk. And when, each evening, he presented himself at her door for payment, she inspected the plot and said, “No, it’s not deep enough; it’s not wide enough.”

The man continued the exhausting digging with the dumb accepting air of a sad animal, afraid of quitting and not being paid for the work he had already done. However, when she kept commanding, “Dig deeper. It’s not deep enough. I will pay you when it is finished,” our cook Durga told him to quit. “She’ll never pay you,” he warned. And, sorrowfully and reluctantly, the man finally did leave. Never paid. It was the first time I’ve observed someone who made a game of power and exploitation.

Mrs. Gupta never did have a garden. Little was planted on that cruelty-cursed earth, and little grew. Her half of the yard was soon weedy, overgrown and neglected, but it was hers, and she had it.

The faculty flat came with an outdoor room for a servant. Mrs. Gupta let hers to a woman who, well… Durga said men on motorcycles came at night, stayed a while, and then left. During the day, Mrs Gupta worked that woman–no fixed hours or half-day off as our servants had. Sweep, scrub, cook, wash up, do laundry, iron. But when she said, “Ma, hum jata hai,” “Ma, I’m going,” the parting greeting of the servant going off duty, Mrs. Gupta would say, “Wait.  Massage my feet. Massage my daughter Kalpy’s feet; massage my daughter Archy’s feet,” keeping her on, keeping her on, exploiting that woman’s weak position and vulnerability.

* * *

Somewhat ironically for a University which taught Industrial Relations and Business Management, XLRI had a strike–endemic in India, a common way to negotiate wage increases or better work conditions.

“Labour,” the staff: secretaries, telephone operators, and clerks, struck against “Management,” the administration–the Jesuits, including my father’s brother, Theo, the Director, and some faculty, such as my father, the Financial Controller.

Some of the bleeding-heart liberal, almost radical, American Jesuits sided with the staff; this was to be expected, given their temperament and politics. They were children of the sixties. They were forgiven by the other priests. An Indian Jesuit from Mangalore, however, sided with the staff, to be cool, to court popularity, the other Jesuits said in disgust; and he was never forgiven. (Eventually, he was moved to the University of Detroit, and his archenemy, the fiery Spanish Jesuit who, quite properly, took the side of the administration and thought this betrayal of his Jesuit brothers was inexcusable was moved to St. Joseph’s, Philadephia. To the Jesuits, the world was a chessboard.)

The strike was a game for the students. It had an air of gaiety and unreality, an unexpected foretaste of big boy life, making solemn, pompous armchair ethicists of them.  The students sided with labour—the charms of the underdog whom you don’t have to feed!  They were playing at being liberal, but this would change once they became management, my father snorted. The more radical people were in youth, the more conservative they became at the scent of money, he said, recollecting the hot-air talk of the young Indians he knew in London in the forties and fifties, who returned to India, made money, and became pillars of the establishment, forgetting youthful idealism and patriotism.

We felt under siege during the strike, waking up to see the air released from the tires, and long gashes in the silver paint of my Father’s beloved Fiat. He insisted that we stay at home during the strike, lest the student comment rudely on us–and so we did.

However, since keeping secrets was not my father’s forte, he eventually let slip that posters saying, “Director, get rid of your inefficient retired brother,” were plastered over campus. Too punctilious to be inefficient, and persnickety about the strictest honesty, my father was, if anything, too competent. As he had at Tata’s, he challenged creative accounting, and imaginatively padded expense accounts. “And he’s billed us for a stay at the Oberoi Sheraton, when I know for sure he stayed with his brother-in-law. And six meals a day? Even five I could accept.” And so, he discovered the truth of Emerson’s saying, “He who has a thousand friends has not one to spare; he who has an enemy shall see him everywhere.”

I was surprised to hear my father say that he prayed every day. Like many neophyte believers, I considered spirituality my own private domain.

“You pray?” I said. “What do you pray for?”

“I pray for you and Shalini and Dan.”

My father detested Dan, an unpleasant clerical worker who was the ringleader of the strike, taking advantage of the gentle, fair-minded, generous and out-of-their depth American priests to demand concessions unusual for India. Dan was responsible for those offensive posters.

“For us and Dan?” I was almost offended. “Why Dan?”

“Because Jesus said we should pray for our enemies,” he said–adding hastily, “Not just our enemies.”

Ah, never underestimate the spirituality of your parents!

 

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

Jamshedpur: The Steel City where I was Born

Rosaries at the Grotto: The One Holy Catholic Church in Jamshedpur, India,

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

Visiting: When People were Entertainment

The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur, when All was Magical

Polyphemus the Cyclops: A Memoir of My Father, Noel Joseph Mathias. Part 1, My father as an immigrant in England, At Play with my Father, The Things my Father Said, The Eccentricities of my Father

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming: The Libraries of my Childhood

Brutus: The Honourable Dog

My Grandmother, Small Nana, Molly Coelho; My Grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja; My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt, Joyce; Youpee or UP, my Grandparents’ Formidable Landlady; Decembers in Gay Bombay

Travels with my Father; Mangalore: My Ancestral Hometown, Dreaded Family Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House; My Great-Uncle Norbert, a Pious Crook, My Grandmother, Josephine, and My Grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, My Father’s Sisters: Ethel the Grand Duchess, and Winnie, the Duchess; Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to All our Nun Relatives; And Mandatory Visits to Everyone Else, My saintly great-aunt Rosie, and her rebel daughter Marie; Arranged Marriages and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding.

Rosaries at the Grotto: The One Holy Catholic Church in Jamshedpur, India, where I grew up (From my memoir “Mind Has Mountains”)

By

Josephschurch22

May was the Month of our Lady, when Father Jesus Calvo, the Spanish parish priest, corralled the entire Catholic community of Jamshedpur to say the rosary standing outside the grotto of St. Mary’s Church, a man-made cave of rocks and mortar, overplanted with vines and flowers–modeled on the grotto at which the Virgin appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes.

“Hail Mary,” “Holy Mary,” the words rose and fell, hypnotic as the sea, 50 repetitions, punctuated by the mini-relief of the Glory Be, and the Memorare at the end, like the promise of better things: “Remember, Oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided.”

My mother bowed over her rosary, her long-lashed eyes closed, an image of fervor and devotion. My father prayed rapidly, head down, frowning, as if his own rapidity would hasten the conclusion.

 

Decades later, adults recalled how I slipped away, climbed to the top of the grotto, and squatted there, monkey-like, surveying the crowd. Giggles rose.

My father, hearing them, instantly looked for me. It was a reflex. There I was, on top of the grotto, the eyes of every Catholic in Jamshedpur on me.

“Anita, come down,” he hissed. I remained there, grinning. Behind my bravado was the secret I always remembered too late: I was afraid of heights.

“Anita come down,’ he hissed between clenched lips as children giggled and adults prayed, laughter in their voices. Finally, my dignified father, senior management in that company town, fifty-two years old to my seven, squeezed through the crowd, past the amputee Mrs Watkins, past Mr. D’Costa who owned Boulevard Hotel, and Mrs. D’Cruz who owned a nursery school, and crawled up the grotto, and then inched down, half-carrying me, while around us the laughter-speckled rosary rose and fell, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

* * *

Catholic social life in Jamshedpur revolved around the Parish Church of St. Mary’s, the Catholic Family Movement, and the Mangalorian-Goan Association.

Goa and Mangalore were both colonized by the Portuguese, and four hundred years later, traces endure in the names–Mathias, Coelho, Mascarenhas, Gonsalves, Rebello, Pinto, Saldanha; the imported religion, Catholicism; and the language, Konkani, only spoken only by Goans and Mangaloreans, a patois of Portuguese and the Kannada and Marathi spoken by the indigenous communities before colonization. Konkani was officially my mother-tongue, but I have never learned it; neither did my father, who as the son of an upwardly mobile surgeon, was only taught English.

Mangalorian-Goan food too was distinctive–sarpatel, a pork curry, thickened by added pig’s blood, eaten with sannas, fluffy steamed rice cakes, fermented in toddy. Kube, a curry of clams or cockles, was breakfast at my grandmother’s house. Fish cooked in coconut milk was ubiquitous, while at teatime, people ate patolio and patrade, dumplings or pancakes stuffed with fresh grated coconut and jaggery, unrefined brown sugar, and steamed in plaintain leaves,

At the Mangalorian-Goan Association dinners, people danced the waltz, one-two together, one-two together, the fox trot, or the polka to Joan Baez, Elvis Presley, or Jerry Lewis. I flung myself between my parents in shock and a fury of jealousy the first time I saw them waltz, trying to separate them. They continued waltzing, laughing.

* * *

 Mangaloreans and Goans of all social classes met at Mangalorian-Goan Association meetings. Though they were mainly professionals, there were a few Goans drawn to town as laborerers in the factory, whose children through industry and the good education provided by the Jesuit-run Loyola School—and the fair-mindedness of the Parsee-run Tata Iron and Steel company, started as manual labourers or clerks and ended as managers in a classic arc of upward mobility

I held the hand of a child of the large Andrade family who all moved to Jamshedpur from Goa, drawn by the jobs in TISCO. “Why is your hand so rough?” I asked. “Because I help my mother wash clothes,” she said. My mother had an ayah to do the washing, as I supposed everyone’s mother did. It never occurred to me that children might do the washing. “You help your mother wash clothes?” I said, genuinely shocked. Sabina, embarrassed, avoided me for the rest of our childhoods; her mother never forgave me, and neither did mine.

* * *

 An American Jesuit, appropriately called Father Love, founded the Catholic Family Movement in Jamshedpur, which brought together Catholics of the same socio-economic class, an insular tight-knit group.

There were the Saldanhas, the Fernandezes, the Diases who had six children, all of whose names started with D, Denise, Danielle, Douggie, Diane, Denzil, and David. There was an Anglo-Indian family, the Thompsons, whose daughter Paula my sister Shalini adored down to her freckles and long, brown ringlets. My father claimed Shalini’s Litany of the Virgin went “Paula most pure, Paula most amiable, Paula most admirable,” and whenever I misbehaved, my father would say of Paula’s handsome brother, “Anita, if you’re so naughty, Jeff will never marry you, but he’ll marry Shalini without hesitation.”

 

The adults gathered together for spiritual instruction about which we felt no curiosity; we played together in the host child’s bedroom, until everyone crowded around the potluck, an innovation of the American priests. The Indian way would have been for the host to say “Oh, please don’t worry. I’ll just prepare a little something,” and then spend a week commandeering a lavish banquet.

Everyone competed to produce the most delectable dishes; we tasted, we begged the recipe. Unless it was brought by Blanche, wife of the local Mangalorian doctor, Bert Lasrado, British-trained as my father was. Blanche was the first woman in town with a self-contained freezer; its potential exhilarated her. While others brought freshly-cooked aromatic dishes, she announced the provenance of her offering–prawn balchow: three months old; chicken indad: six months old; lamb vindaloo: eight months old, to general consternation and withering of appetites.

We served what we called “western food”; rather to my surprise, when I immigrated to England, I found nothing like the delicious “English” food I had grown up with–“pan rolls,” crepes, fried in egg and bread crumbs, filled with spicy ground beef we called minced meat. “Potato chops,” mashed potato patties with the same spicy minced beef filling, pan-fried in a batter of egg and bread crumbs. “Cutlets,” like hamburgers, except that they were cooked with onions, green chilis, coriander and mint. “Meat puffs,” crisp hot pastry stuffed with curried minced lamb and onions.

After dinner, Dougie Diaz or Benny Fernandez produced guitars and led us in “Jamaica Farewell,” “Old Man River,” or “Banana Boat Song,” the blues being particularly popular, or “Clementine,” “Silver Dollar,” “Country Roads” or “Una Paloma Blanca.”

The lyrics were mysterious, but we sang along

Met her on the mountain,
Swore she’d be my wife,

But the gal refused me

So I stabbed her with a knife.

 

Hang down your head Tom Dooley

Hang your head and cry,
Hang down you head Tom Dooley

Poor boy you’re gonna die.

      We similarly sung along to the Beatles song,

                 Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace

Molly is a singer in the band,

Oh bloodee, oh blood-dah,

the chorus striking us as deliciously naughty.

My father had been to America, but most of us hadn’t. Still we sung the nonsense rhyme knowledgeably,

I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee,

I’m going to Louisiana, my true love for to see

It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry

The sun so hot, I froze to death, Susannah, don’t you cry.

 What did all the lyrics mean? Who knows? But it all felt magical…Daylight come and I wanna go home.

~~~~

We rented a beach house in Puri, Orissa, with the Diases, Thompsons, and other CFMers, one of whom brought his gun, and shot doves, pigeons and even sparrows, which we roasted over an improvised fire of bricks and sticks–delicious. Their son was allowed to handle the gun, and I, aged seven, seeing it left unattended, picked it up, looked through the sights and pulled the trigger. The safety catch was off; bang!! I was terrified and exhilarated, though I did not shoot a bird (or myself). The father ran out and cuffed his son, and I felt ashamed and guilty for it had all been my fault.

 

Many Catholic families began to emigrate in the early seventies; the Diazes, the Thompsons and D’Costas to Canada; the Gomes to Australia, and the Fernandezes to America. We implored my father to emigrate too, but he refused. He had been an immigrant in London in his twenties and thirties; there was no way he was going through that in his fifties, and there was no budging him. With the emigrations, the C.F.M changed, and we stopped going.

* * *

The Catholic Diocese of Jamshedpur was a missionary project of the Jesuit Maryland Province in Baltimore; it was run by hearty, good-hearted Irish-American priests: Father McGauley, Father MacFarland, Father Guidera, and Father O’Leary, the Parish Priest. There was a scattering of other priests from the world-wide fraternity of the Jesuits–Father Durt, a Belgian, who built St. Mary’s Hindi School for underprivileged children, and, on loan from the Spanish Gujarat Mission in Ahmedabad, Father Calvo, a kindly Spanish priest, who helped me develop a magnificent stamp collection, by asking everyone to send me stamps from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.

 

The Jesuits were respected, even loved, by Jamshedpurians, Catholic and non-Catholic, for they also ran Loyola School which turned out well-educated, achieving boys, and the local Business School, Xavier Labor Relations Institute (at which my father was a Financial Controller and Professor for eight years) whose very competitive course in Business Management and Industrial Relation drew students from all over India, as well as Iran, Malaysia and Nigeria.

We had the American Jesuits over for meals and parties, and ate at the Jesuit residence, particularly when my father’s brother, Father Theo Mathias, was Director of XLRI. My father could not get over the fact that, unlike Indian Jesuits who, at that time, came from upper or upper-middle class educated families, among American Irish Catholics, one son became a priest, one became a cop, and one a crook, or so the priests told us! When Father O’Brien told us of his father, the butcher, who distilled and sold moonshine in Baltimore during Prohibition, my father marveled. “Can you imagine, Anita? Father O’Brien is a butcher’s son! And his father, though a pious Catholic, had no compunction about breaking the law!”

* * *

The priests returned from furlough with coveted American brand names–Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Smarties, Jello, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Danish Butter Cookies, cans of Spam, squeezable tubes of icing, everything foreign having cachet. These they gave to their favourite Catholic housewives who compared their loot, apparently carelessly, “Oh Father MacFarland is so sweet; he got me lovely Devil’s Food Cake mix,” happy if their loot was the most and best, and secretly cross about Lola or Deidre’s Angel’s Food cake.

From America too came boxes of lightly used clothes that had been collected for the poor in India; these were given to favourite parishioners, or sold at jumble sales to middle class Catholics, the proceeds used for the poor. Some of my loved clothes came via America—my fuchsia winter coat for my Himalayan boarding school, a red plaid coat with a fur collar; an shimmering silk blouse with mother of pearl buttons that I passed off as school uniform; a pale blue silk dress, red galoshes.

From boxes of donated books shipped from America, I acquired precious, influential books: Catherine Marshall’s “Beyond Ourselves,” and “Something More,” “The Cross and the Switchblade,” and “Run, Baby Run.” Boxes of old magazines arrived: Chatelaine, McCalls, Family Home Circle, and Good Housekeeping, in which we found the recipe for walnut brownies, adding a new much-imitated item on the party circuit. I leafed through the glossy pages, craving dolls that walked and talked, doll houses, walkie-talkie radios one could receive by sending in a postcard; glossy magazines of dreams, never gratified in my childhood, though my Uncle Theo did buy me a Barbie doll on his annual trip to the States even after I entered my teens and was more interested in make-up than dolls.

The more radical Jesuits’ sympathy with the Adivasis, oppressed tribal peoples, was in advance of the political sensibilities both of the government, who were suspicious of the priests and hassled them at visa renewal time, and of other Indian Catholics, who wondered what the fuss was about. “Damn histrionics,” the men muttered at our parties. I wonder if they were disappointed to be sent to India and end up educating the children of the upper classes and aspirant middle classes.

* * *

 The Catholics from Mangalore, Goa and Bombay (all converted by the Portuguese) traditionally visited each other between Christmas Day and the 6th of January, the feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi visited Jesus.

Weeks before Christmas, my mother began creating the distinctive Christmas food, kushwar in Konkani, offered to visitors, and given in little boxes to my father’s colleagues, and to nuns, teachers, priest, and friends, Hindu or Christian. And at Diwali (with much jubilation), we got little boxes of Indian sweets from our Hindu friends.

We made Christmas cake, of course, crammed with candied peel, cherries, raisins and nuts; chocolate nankatis, like Danish butter cookies, soft, buttery, sugary; light, crisp, “meringues”; crunchy coconut macaroons; fudges, halwas and barfis, made of milk, sugar, clarified butter, and coconut, carrots, beetroots or pumpkin.

Kulkuls were another Mangalorean specialty, dough curled on a fork into shells, deep-fried, then dipped into a thick, simmering sugar syrup, until they were lumpily, unevenly, deliciously coated.

We hand-crafted the sweets, sitting together around the dining table, pouring ‘milk toffee,” made from condensed milk, into our buttered red rubber seashell mould to create cockles, mussel, wentletrap, shrimp, seahorse, oyster, shrimp and snails.

The piece de resistance was home-made marzipan we handcrafted into exquisite cherries, apricots, oranges and pears, painting a blush on the peaches, shading the apples in red, denting the strawberries with toothpicks, completing the verisimilitude with a little wooden stem, and a cloth leaf, bought from a confectioner in Calcutta, and reused each year.

* * *

How foreign Christmas was when I was a child, how imported. We lopped the top off one of the two scraggly fir trees in our garden, hauling it indoors to deck it with cotton wool or popcorn snow. We sent each other Christmas cards of robins in snowy fields and sleighs in an entranced Snow Queen landscape, though the sun blazed all December as it might have done in Bethlehem. We carolled outside all the Catholic houses, singing Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer; Freddy, the Little Fir Tree, and Jingle Bells–a Nordic Christmas transplanted to the tropics.

Congregations that barely knew English sung Gloria in Excelsius Deo in Latin at midnight mass. And then we returned home to eat Christmas fruit cake, and drink the very sweet homemade wine made from raisins or jamun and mulberries from our garden that we never considered alcoholic, so much so that, decades later, I was amazed to see people smile when I sat at a party, a glass of wine in my hands, and declared I was a teetotaler!

And what did all this have to do with the sweet, humble birth in a manger? Generations of westerners had successfully transported the husk of Christmas to Indian homes, while the kernel lay forgotten, in India, as elsewhere, as elsewhere. Still, glor-ooo-ooo-reeaa in ex-cel-sius Deo, we sung, though many would have been nonplussed if asked to translate.

* * *

This is a slow-growing memoir, but here are the chapters I’ve written

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

Jamshedpur: The Steel City where I was Born

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

Visiting: When People were Entertainment

The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur, when All was Magical

Polyphemus the Cyclops: A Memoir of My Father, Noel Joseph Mathias. Part 1, My father as an immigrant in England, At Play with my Father, The Things my Father Said, The Eccentricities of my Father

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming: The Libraries of my Childhood

Brutus: The Honourable Dog

My Grandmother, Small Nana, Molly Coelho; My Grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja; My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt, Joyce; Youpee or UP, my Grandparents’ Formidable Landlady; Decembers in Gay Bombay

Travels with my Father; Mangalore: My Ancestral Hometown, Dreaded Family Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House; My Great-Uncle Norbert, a Pious Crook, My Grandmother, Josephine, and My Grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, My Father’s Sisters: Ethel the Grand Duchess, and Winnie, the Duchess; Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to All our Nun Relatives; And Mandatory Visits to Everyone Else, My saintly great-aunt Rosie, and her rebel daughter Marie; Arranged Marriages and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding.

 

Visiting: When People Were Entertainment (From My Memoir-in-Progress)

By

The latch on the green steel front gates clanged, heralding a visitor; and we children and the dog ran to the verandah to check them out; and the cook or ayah ran to open the gate for the car; and my mother ran in to change out of her “house-coat,” a buttoned dressing gown which most Mangalorean housewives wore all day, into a saree.

Visits were unannounced. To say you were coming was considered rude. The host would then be expected to stay home, and provide respectfully nice snacks for you to eat, whereas if you just showed up, you would be served a tray of delicious food which the hostess would present, apologetically, as if she had just rustled it up.

Most upper-class women did not work. “Our wives don’t work,” my father said flatly, when I inhaled feminism, and insisted that my mother (and we) would be happier if she had a job. For a woman to work implied that her husband had failed, and could not adequately provide for his family–so my father and his brothers believed.

Domestic help was available and affordable; our three servants for a family of four, was lavish, though not terribly unusual. So women had time for sociability and gossip. On an impulse, housework supervised, they jumped into the car, with their children in the mornings, or their husband and children in the evenings, to see who was in. If their friend was engaged on a similar errand, they tried another house, and another. There was no television in Jamshedpur. People were the entertainment.

If we were bored, or liked the visitor, my sister and I sat in the living room during the visit, reducing the women to sharing information in a code of widened or rolled eyes; innuendoes; “you know who’s”, and “You know how so-and-so is…” (and if one did not know before, now, of course, one did). My sister and I listened with heightened attention—our first stories, first introductions to the adult world.

“I sat behind her in church,” Lulu said, “and poor thing, poor thing, you could see dirt behind her ears!” “Who?” I asked. “Nobody,” both ladies said, hastily and improbably.

* * *

 The latch clanged. My mother darted in for lipstick, saying, “Oh I do hope it’s not Mrs. Domingo,” a plump, kindly, good-natured woman, my mother’s best friend. “She stays forever.”

Well, well, guess who it was?

My mother emerged smiling, fresh lipstick, fresh saree. “Oh Marie Domingo!” she said, “How lovely to see you. I was hoping it was you.”

What?

~~~

In Catechism class, Sister Laeticia explained the difference between mortal and venial sins. “White lies” were venial sins, harmless (as opposed to “black lies,” I suppose).

I raised my eyes from Sister Laeticia’s hands, swollen, empurpled, clawed and misshapen with rheumatoid arthritis.

“When my mother says, “I hope it’s not Mrs Domingo,” and then says, “ Oh Marie, how lovely to see you,” is that a white lie?” I asked, still shocked by the abrupt change in the story.

And do you know what that kindly nun did, she who used to smile at me so fondly, and laugh at all my sayings (though I often could not figure out what was so funny)?

Mrs Domingo appeared again. “Be careful what you say in front of her, Celine,” she warned my mother. “She tells Sister Laetica everything. She said…”

Ah, the betrayal, each betraying the other.

* * *

 After a polite interval of small talk, my mother excused herself and vanished. If she explained her errand, the guest would insist, “Oh, we’ve just eaten; please don’t worry. Oh stay and talk to us. We’ve come to see you.” So, the guests, abandoned, talked to us children brightly, kindly, until my mother re-appeared with a tray laden with fresh-squeezed lemonade and snacks, which varied according to the status of the guest, and whether it was imperative to impress them—or not!

People who visited us in gratitude for past favours–a job my father hired or recommended them for–or in hope of future favours were served a tray with parthecums, crisp, deep-fried banana chips; chaklees, deep-fried spirals of spiced flour; or, worse, bought food—sev or ghatias, savoury lentil snacks, or ginger biscuits, which none of us liked, and so could be safely reserved for unexpected visitors.

If the visitor was wealthy, or wealthier than us, or uneasily suspected to be classier, or just a really good friend, then oh those trays!! From the recesses of her large walk-in pantry, a windowless room, my mother produced home-made sweetmeats: chocolate fudge that melted in the mouth; russet guava halwa; pink coconut barfi, or bright red beetroot barfi. There were plates of cold meats we’d cured ourselves: slices of hearty beef we called “corned beef;” slices of pink, home-cured pork; delicious salt tongue, served with a little imported Colemans’s mustard and homemade mayonnaise. And little triangular plates of “cheeslings,” tiny airy cheese crackers, expensive, reserved for guests; or salty Monaco biscuits, served with a dainty topping of imported goodies: little black grains of caviar; laughing cow or baby bell cheese, or sliced pimento olives, with their cheerful red core.

A successful recipe made a woman famous— Daphne’s fudge, Mrs Domingo’s Midnight Chocolate Cake; orMrs D’Costa’s nankatis (butter cookies). My mother was famous for her kidney toast: fried chopped lamb’s kidneys with tomatoes, and onions, served with grated Amul Cheese on fried toast. Or her triple-decker sandwiches: a green layer of mint chutney, a red layer of tomato, and a yellow layer of egg mayonnaise.

When guests asked for a recipe, the hostess was hesitant and evasive. My father suspected that the recipes were deliberately garbled in the transmission, so that the imitation never tasted as good as the original, and each woman continued to be famous for her distinctive dishes.

* * *

Coca-Cola closed down its Indian operations in 1977 after the nationalist Janata government required it to be 51% controlled by Indian investors. The government introduced a nationalized substitute in its place, named–after a national competition–Double Seven, 77, commemorating the Janata governemnt’s year of power.

The Catholic housewives of Jamshedpur, believing that they could do whatever their government did tried to duplicate the formula for Coca-Cola; they experimented, shared recipes, experimented again, and once “successful,” guarded their recipes as carefully as the original in a vault at Atlanta.

My mother invented a dark viscous formula of sugar, coffee, vanilla, lime, orange essence, cinnamon, and nutmeg served in soda water. When I arrived home from boarding school in 1977, she asked me and our guests proudly, “Would you like some of my Coca-cola?” It may not have tasted exactly like Coke; there was none to compare it with anyway, but it was good.

* * *

Our hearts sunk when we saw “Masterji” shuffle up the driveway, an elderly, turbanned Bihari gentleman who had taught my parents Hindi when they moved to Jamshedpur, the Hindi-speaking heartland, from Bombay and Mangalore in the South. The second language in their English-medium schools had been French, not Hindi.

One Christmas, my parents offered “Masterji” exquisite marzipan fruits we had handcrafted out of ground almonds and sugar, painting a red blush on the peaches, shading the apples in red, denting the strawberries with toothpicks, completing the verisimilitude with a little wooden stem, and a cloth leaf, bought from a confectioner in Calcutta, and reused each year.

Masterji looked dubiously at the tiny fruits, grabbed a handful, stuffed them all into his mouth, little wooden stem, cloth leaf and all. We watched open-mouthed, collapsing in laughter after he left.

~~~~

Another time, Masterji arrived just as we returned from the market with a huge bunch of leechis, sold freshly plucked off the tree, leaves and twigs included, expensive coveted fruits, which had just entered their brief season. My mother hurriedly put the bunch on a plate, and offered them to him, expecting him to detach a few. My sister and I watched helplessly as he took the entire bunch as tribute as he left, and shuffled out with it. We burst into tears, for we loved leechis. “We’ll buy you more,” my father promised ineffectually.

* * *

Since families moved in packs, children were dragged along on visits; my sister and I most certainly were, since my parents hated anything unusual.

Little spies, we listened in. “Sssh, Big Ears,” adults said as they whispered about the boy-crazy, scandalous teen, Geraldine, though they generally pretended we were the proverbial monkeys who’d hear or speak no evil. Ha! I listened, I listened, decoding, analyzing, mentally recording as I now record on paper.

~~ ~

During dull patches in the conversation, or while my mother brightly told the same stories, we made repeated trips to our hostess’s centre table laden with snacks. When she thought no one was looking, my mother frowned, made her face small and disapproving, and shook her head emphatically, which meant: “Stop.”

Her grimaces, frowns, and vehement head-shakes were swiftly replaced by a smile when the hostess looked her way. She could not tell us aloud not to have third helpings of the fudge, because the social contract required the hostess to both say, “Oh let her,” and then to effusively and forcefully offer it to me herself. Generosity, natural or feigned, was a virtue, much admired.

“Oh, you ate so much fudge,” my mother reproached me in the car. “I am sure she was very sad. You could see her face fall as she watched.”

~ ~ ~

During these visits, parents bragged about their genius children, prodigies all, who could sing, dance, paint flowers on water glasses, barbecue, and were absolutely brilliant (if they would only work harder) and “stood first in class,” each of them, all of them–if the parents could plausibly get away with the claim.

The other parents listened with broad, admiring smiles, murmured praise, and passive aggressive encouragement. “Anita writes well? Perhaps she will win the Noble Prize.” “Your son can do mental maths. Perhaps he will win the Fields Medal.” “She’s good at Bharat Natyam. Well, she should tour Europe!” they said.

Were they encouraging your ambition or putting you in your place by suggesting unachievable ambitions? Who knew!

~ ~~

And then the dread moment—to all but the parents of the performing child. “Oh Shalini, do you want to do your Bharat Natyram dance for the Saldanhas?” my mother would say. “Yes, dooo,” the victims declared with feigned enthusiasm, “Do!”

And, if we were at home, my sister put on her gungaroos, little belled anklets, poised her legs in the traditional diamond pose, put her hands together, forefinger and thumb joined, other fingers splayed out, and flinging out her arms, danced Bharat Natyam, the ancient temple dance, thaam-thut-thaam; thaay-tut-thaay; thaam-thut-thaam; thaay-tut-thaay; her lips fixed in the large, bright traditional smile; making ritualized seductive eye-movements, pupils swerving to and fro. She danced without music, or music heard so deeply that it was not heard at all.

“Oh Shalini sings and plays her guitar so well,” my mother said brightly, and Shalini took out her guitar and sung “LA International Airport,” or a Paul Anka song, “Every night my papa would/ Tuck me in my bed/Kiss me on my head/
After all my prayers were said./ Your children live through you.”

~~~

Shalini, not having gone to boarding school, had acquired all the feminine accomplishments, painting, batik, singing, dancing, playing guitar. I did not sing, I did not dance and I did not paint, but I did recite. The first Shakespeare speeches I memorized, when I was eleven, were “Friends, Romans, Countryman,” or “Pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,” from Julius Caesar followed by “Is this a dagger I see before me?” from Macbeth, or the perfect iambics of “To be, or no to be.” I recited “If I were lord of Tartary” by Walter de la Mare, “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright,” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” poems which have become part of my inner rhythms, the buried treasure of words within me.

~~ ~

And, believe me, the guests earned every square of their fudge and milk toffee as we in turn earned ours when we listened to them boast about their prodigy children, boasting, boasting until all were busted by adulthood when the golden boy or girl became perfectly ordinary, in Yeats’ phrase, a sixty year old smiling public man.

Parents of only children were particularly galling. Admire Nicolette’s handwriting; read the letters she’d written home; listen to her sing, admire her light skin colouring and her curls… We did so, all the while, secretly suspecting that we were smarter and more gifted.

My father rarely participated in the general showing off. “I’ve achieved much more in school and you never mention it,” I’d grumble. He shrugged. “I just don’t like to show off” he said quietly. His eight years in England had heightened his natural reticence.

When I got bored, I pointedly looked at my watch every few minutes.

“Poor thing, she wants to go,” the hostess eventually commiserated, probably when she was entirely of one mind with me on the subject.

* * *

 This is a slow-growing memoir, but here are the chapters I’ve written

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

Jamshedpur: The Steel City where I was Born

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur, when All was Magical

Polyphemus the Cyclops: A Memoir of My Father, Noel Joseph Mathias. Part 1, My father as an immigrant in England, At Play with my Father, The Things my Father Said, The Eccentricities of my Father

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming: The Libraries of my Childhood

Brutus: The Honourable Dog

My Grandmother, Small Nana, Molly Coelho; My Grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja; My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt, Joyce; Youpee or UP, my Grandparents’ Formidable Landlady; Decembers in Gay Bombay

Travels with my Father; Mangalore: My Ancestral Hometown, Dreaded Family Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House; My Great-Uncle Norbert, a Pious Crook, My Grandmother, Josephine, and My Grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, My Father’s Sisters: Ethel the Grand Duchess, and Winnie, the Duchess; Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to All our Nun Relatives; And Mandatory Visits to Everyone Else, My saintly great-aunt Rosie, and her rebel daughter Marie; Arranged Marriages and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding.

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood (Chapter from my memoir-in-progress: “Mind Has Mountains”)

By

article_Underwood_1130I have been writing a memoir of my childhood in India in a desultory fashion, but have now decided to work on it almost every day, and get it done.
And here is the latest chapter, on the Clubs, the centers of social life. I have linked to all the completed chapters at the end of this post.

I’ve Seen the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

The astronauts walked on the moon–in other worlds–and everything seemed possible.
“Will we soon have picnics on the moon?” I asked. My father considered it. “Yeeees,” he said, thoughtfully. “I think so.”
I looked at the moon, silent, luminous. It wasn’t too far. Yes, he was probably right.
* * *
In 1970, a travelling exhibition of Apollo 11 souvenirs came to the United Club. We filed through.
In a glass case was a rock that looked like … well, a rock.
As we left, we were given a fluorescent yellow and orange sticker: “I’ve seen the moon rock.”

I stuck it on my vanity case, for I was soon to go to boarding school at St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital–where I showed it off. I was the only girl who had seen the moon rock.
* * *

Community life in Jamshedpur revolved around the two clubs we belonged to–The United Club, walking distance from my house, and the more expensive Beldih Club, formerly the European Club, which required recommendations from members to join.
There were stamp exhibitions: microcosms under glass—triangular stamps, circular stamps, 3-D stamps; series of stamps on butterflies, birds, flowers, Christmas; stamps of countries that no longer existed, or had just begun to. The smaller the country, the bigger and brighter the stamps, the more unusual their shape.
* * *

Once a year, for ten nights, there was a one-act play Festival, open to schools, colleges, and troupes of friends, which presented gripping plays—“The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Bishop’s Candlesticks,” “Overtones,” “Mutatis Mutandis,” or “Mice and Men.” I loved the plays directed by Perin Mehta, the sister-in-law of the German Jewish Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who dwelt in the Elysian realms of real fame and real art–Booker Prize winner, and part of the Merchant Ivory triumvirate.
* * *

And there were quiz competitions– inter-school, family, couple, mother/daughter or faculty/student. The secret of success was getting hold of the books the quiz master used: BBC Mastermind or Quizmaster. My mother and sister prepared feverishly, almost memorizing the book—all our family have an excellent memory—and won.
What was Woody Allen’s real name? Allen Konigsberg. What was the world tree in Norse mythology which ran through the nine worlds? Yggdrasil. What was the cornucopia? The horn of the goat, Amalthea. Whose epitaph was “Here he lies where he longed to be/ Home is the sailor, home from sea,/And the hunter home from the hill.” Robert Louis Stevenson. Where is Timbuktu? Mali.
The quizmaster played snatches of The Jupiter Symphony, The Moonlight Sonata or The Ode to Joy. He projected slides of the Parthenon and Pantheon, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and Monet’s Water Lilies. Quiz preparation involved a quick listen of my father’s magisterial collection of classical music, and leafing through art and architecture books–surely educational, and not a complete waste of time as my father grumbled when he saw me read quiz books. True knowledge came from reading widely, he said, books, not quiz books
* * *

Every summer, my mother submitted her roses, gerberas, and whimsical ikebana arrangements to the annual flower and vegetable shows. The flowers were over-bred to magnificence–dahlias as big as a dinner plate; chrysanthemums with twirled petals; snapdragons, delphiniums, lupins; exquisite roses hybridized in back gardens into indigo, purple, magenta: most unroselike colours, for every lady gardener had mastered grafting.
After a long period of experimentation with her flower snippers and rags, my mother finally bred an almost black rose, she called The Negrette Rose.
A charming African-American, James Greer, who was visiting TISCO spent a week with us. Both my sister and I were fascinated with our black visitor (and I corresponded with him for years while I was at boarding school, and he returned to the States). As we showed him the garden, my parents froze, their hands to their mouths, as they heard my little sister confide, “My mother calls this a Negrette Rose.” But James Greer observed her love and innocence, and just laughed.
* * *

In 1972, the United Club hosted Dr. Bolar who offered “a nature cure” to reverse myopia. And so everyone became obsessed with the health of their eyes; read Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing; looked at green at every oppotunity; palmed their eyes after half an hour of reading; ate bowls of grated carrots and drank carrot juice at every meal.
Dr. Bolar and his wife, an ill-educated, crude, smiling couple, became the saviours, the Rasputins, to every family whose children had poor eyesight; and there were many in town, dominated by Zorashtrians, an inbred community. They were feted, invited to dinner.
My parents too placed their faith in Dr. Bolar. My father was worried about his own eyesight, but, particularly about my younger sister’s, who had wore thick glasses from the age of six, and had had eye surgery aged ten.
Dr. Bolar entered our living room, looked around at the souvenirs from my father’s years in England, and his travels in Europe, Japan and America; stared at the built-in fireplace (our house had been built for British executives); settled deep into the sofa, and sighed, saying, “Oh, this is just like an English house,” thus endearing himself to my mother.
Dr. Bolar and his wife checked our eyesight at the start of the course, and weekly, declaring remarkable improvement. Then Mrs. Surti took her children to an independent optician. The original readings had indeed been correct; the rest were hopeful inventions. She threatened to sue unless he returned the fees. The “doctor” had typed out eye exercises and dietary recommendations from Bates’ Better Eyesight without Glasses and was no more a doctor, and no more or less knowledgeable than anyone else who had read that book. He returned our money, and slunk back into the outer darkness of Bombay, from whence he came.
* * *

Every Christmas, after a party, at which children gorged on jelebis, laddoos and pastries, Santa appeared in a red fur-lined cape. Ho-ho-ho.
At the Beldih Club, Santa gave presents to all children, choosing the same age-appropriate gift for every girl and boy up to twelve, and impartially wrapping all of them in the same paper. The winter I turned twelve, the end of childhood in India, all the girls got a make-up set, a coveted palette: eye-shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and “blush-on.” However, my mother had perhaps Freudianly recorded my age as two, and while toddlers processed up in their frilly dresses, I heard Anita Mathias called on the loudspeaker, and got a large teddy bear to my tears and mortification.
In the United Club, however, the dues did not cover children’s Christmas presents. Parent bought their own presents, gift-wrapped them, and delivered them to the Club office before the party. The poorer children got cheap rip-off Monopoly, Ludo or plastic badminton sets; the nouveau riche got massive presents, bedecked in tinsel and bows and ribbons; the sophisticated got hardbound editions of The Children’s Classics or Illustrated Encylopaedias.
I looked around. Why would Santa give rich kids rich presents, and poor kids poor presents? It just wasn’t fair. An outrageous thought: was the Santa Claus of song and story who knew if we’d been good or bad, and sleighed in from the North Pole, hauled by Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer; the Santa Claus whom Enid Blyton and my father told us about—was he, incredibly, incredibly–a giant conspiracy by the entire adult world to fool trusting children, a secret even the meanest adult managed to keep?
“There is no Santa Claus?” I asked my father. “Oh really? Why do say that? I think there is,” he said lamely.” Huh!
“There is no Santa Claus,” I informed my sister. “Of course, there is,” she said passionately. “As if Ma and Pa would lie!”
“There is no Santa Claus,” I told my classmates. “It’s our parents.” “Of course, there is,” said those who got a present at the club. The rest were silent.
Logic prevailed. Santa died and I turned seven.
The clubs were the centre of community life— Charminar, a cigarette company sponsored “Made for Each Other” Ballroom dancing competitions, with prizes for “the most charming couple”. There were classes for housewives: Ikebana, Batik, Tie and Dye, oil painting, all of which my mother took; Bharat Natyam Indian dance classes for girls; billiard tables, golf courses, basketball courts and swimming pools.
Magicians sawed a volunteer woman in two, performed mysterious card tricks, produced doves from hats and scarves from sleeves. “How did he do it? How did he do it?” we whispered.
A visiting travelling hypnotist claimed that those who resisted hypnosis most vigorously were the first to succumb. “Who doesn’t believe in hypnosis?” he asked.
Young brash company workers waved their hands. “There’s no way you can hypnotize me,” a young man blustered.
To our horror, we saw those very men raise their hands in the air and keep them there until the hypnotist gave the word. They were given raw potatoes and told they were eating apples; they pronounced them delicious. The trance broken, they spat them out in disgust.
There was a ventriloquist whose art I was determined to learn. I turned my head in delight as his voice, subtly altered, emerged from nooks and crannies around the hall. And I practiced, barks, mews, and wolf calls, projecting my voice while barely moving my lips, and later disrupted physics lessons and music lessons at school by these cat mewls, barks, wolf howls and lion roars.
* * *

In those days before TV, which crept to Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras, but not yet Jamshedpur, the throbbing magnet heart of the Clubs was, of course, movies.
The love of film united the nation. People passed around their copies of Filmfare and Stardust, the intimate gossip magazines about Indian film stars, who were public property, known by their first names, Dimple, Amitabh, Rishi; their families, marriages, affairs and divorces, all public knowledge. It was not called Bollywood for nothing.
The Beldih Club showed three English language or European films a week, with a children’s film every Friday during the winter when the swimming pool was closed, an offering duplicated by the United Club, which also showed Hindi movies, which no one admitted to liking or seeing–though, in fact, every seat was taken. The clubs staggered days, so you could drive to a movie seven days a week, and we occasionally did!

The movies were shown out of doors on a screen the height of a house, with a covered balcony for the old and cold. Children sat together in the first rows, in bright starlight amid the night chorus of crickets.
The triumphant crow of Woody Woodpecker: Cartoons came first. I did not like them: Bugs Bunny hanging by the ledge while his arms grew longer and longer; Wily Coyote flattened by cars only to pop up again; the heart-pounding chases, ever-present pain and danger, while the audience cruelly laughed.
I looked at the insects flittering in the beams of projected light. And then the MGM lion tossed its mane and roared, transporting us to the African veldt, or downtown Manhattan.
Children’s films were screened again and again. We knew them thoroughly especially The Sound of Music, the English language film for our generation whose songs we knew by heart. “These are a few of my favourite things.” “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” “I am 16 going on 17,” and “Edelweiss.”
Other favourites: Mary Poppins. “Chim, chimney; chim chimney; chim chimney; chim chim.” I used to hold an umbrella and jump down from my dresser, hoping I’d be able to fly. My Fair Lady: Lots of chocolate for me to eat. I will make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe. Chocolate Factories! The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. To Sir with Love: “Those schoolgirl days, of telling tales and biting nails.” The Man who Knew too Much. Elsa the Lioness who was Born Free.

Movies were either A, Adult, or U, universal. If we wanted to go to an Adult movie, which wasn’t too violent or, well, adult, we wore a saree, and slathered on make up. Mr. Bhardwaj the kindly membership secretary occasionally stood at the entrance, and challenged people, letting me through when I was below 16, but sometimes challenging me when I was older, and I never knew if I should be flattered or offended. We had no ID; they assumed that we, or our parents wouldn’t lie, in full view of the community who had a shrewd idea of our age.
There were Holocaust films and World War II films, during which I fled to the library on the premises, and westerns and thrillers which I disliked. We watched Woody Allen and Truffaut and Bergman: the films were, in a word, eclectic.
Long past our bedtime, we watched Shakespeare beneath the stars; Anne Boleyn laid her lovely head on the block; Mammy crunched Scarlett O’Hara’s waist to seventeen inches, and the Scarlet Pimpernel kissed the earth where his disdainful wife had walked. The sun, a blazing orange ball sinking below the horizon, when we left for the Club was replaced by the gleaming moon.
I drifted to sleep on the back seat amid a lingering after-glow of images: Hera and Zeus settled the Trojan War in a game of chess, and Christ—in one of the frequent Bible movies screened–stretched his arms across the screen: “Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.”
* * *

INTERVAL: giant yellow words flashed across the screen. We darted to the tables with the carbon-leaved pads.
Across the lawn, the white-uniformed bearers in their bag-shaped white hats were mobbed by a crowd. Everyone brandished their chits over other people’s heads, yelling orders for pakoras, slivers of vegetables deep-fried in chickpea batter; or dinner rolls filled with “Beldih Spread” (my mother cajoled the recipe out of the chef to the envy of her circle): shredded chicken, cooked with onions and coriander in a sauce of mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup.
We hollered for the golden, crisp, freshly fried, salty potato “chips,” as they are universally called in Indian English. The management of the Beldih Club, however, craftily decided to officially dub the potato chips (or crisps) which sold for 0.60 paise “potato wafers,” and christen “French fries” which sold for Rs. 1.85 “potato chips” in the British style. From force of habit, both we children and our father signed a chit for “potato chips;” the bearers, understanding what we meant, gave us the crisp chips, and we were billed Rs. 1.85 for the French fries, to the irritation of my mother.
* * *
My sister and I realized the semi-illiterate and harried bearers never looked at what we’d written, just gave us what we yelled for. Also, they had no means of checking our signatures.
Ah-ha! Using the think-differently gifts we both later used in (legitimate) business, we ordered wildly, and at the bottom, tidily wrote our neighbour’s name, Mrs Cherian.
“Are you sure we won’t get caught?” my sister occasionally asked anxiously. “How could we?” I said.
We sipped ice-cold Fanta, had fresh potato wafers and potato chips. “Mrs. Cherian” signed.

“Celine,” came an irate cry, at the end of the month. It was irascible Mrs. Elsie Cherian–an American Jew, who had married a quiet, conservative Indian University student at Berkeley, and followed him to India, becoming completely Indianized, wearing sarees, and cooking traditional Malayali food.
Mrs Cherian, six feet tall, stood at the hedge that divided our house from hers, into which she and my mother had cut a path, through which the children could pass back and forth. She held out a wad of chits.
At the end of our bloated month, Mrs. Cherian opened her bill to discover that, apparently, all month, she had gorged on Coca-Cola and Fanta, and every snack on the menu, all signed for in childish handwriting, Mrs Cherian (instead of Elsie Cherian, as we hadn’t realized she would have signed).

“Oh, if the ground could have opened and swallowed me up.” My mother groped for metaphors
Mrs. Cherian paid the bill; my parents repaid her.
We just had chips (sorry, potato wafers!) now and again, and, sometimes, ice-cold bubbly Fanta, then the taste of heaven, but the days of entire menu were over. And so too was our career as master forgers.

Completed Chapters

1 In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

2 Jamshedpur, The Steel City where I was born

3 The Garden, Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood, when All was Magical

4 Polyphemus, the Cyclops, A Memoir of my Father, Noel Joseph Mathias, Part 1, Part 2, 3, 4, 5,

5 My maternal grandmother, Molly Coelho, “Small Nana;” My grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja;  My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt Joyce; Youpee; Decembers in Gay Bombay.

6  Travels with my Father. Mangalore, my ancestral hometown. Dread Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House. My great-uncle Norbert, a pious crook; My grandmother, Josephine, and my grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, OBE. Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to all our nun relatives. My aunts, Ethel, the Empress, Winnie, the Grand Duchess, and Joyce, the Duchess. Mandatory Christmas visits. My saintly Great-Aunt Rosie, and her Rebel Daughter Marie. Arranged Marriages, and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding

 

The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur When All was Magical

By

Tatanagar_Jubilee_Park

Jubilee Park, Jamshedpur. (credit)

“You wake and hear the birds cough,” according to a BBC documentary on Jamshedpur. Pollution? We never considered it. For us, it was the city of parks and gardens: the Locomotive Park in the neighbouring company town, TELCO, (named after The Tata Electric Locomotive Company), with the locomotive, we’d “drive,” saying Locomotive, locomotive, put on steam; the airplane in Aeroplane Park we “flew;” the Clock Park, with a clock made of flowers, whose massive moving flower-planted hands accurately told time.

 

Rose Garden, Jubilee Park, jamshedpur. (credit)

Rose Garden, Jubilee Park, jamshedpur. (credit)

And, above all, magical Jubilee Park, JubliPark, often pronounced as one word, created to celebrate Tata Iron and Steel’s fiftieth anniversary. We wandered through its mazy rose gardens, inhaling the ecstatic fragrance of whimsically bred elegant roses, violet, blue, even black.

 

After dark, the fountains were floodlit by chameleon lights, continually changing their peacock display: ruby, sapphire, sunflower, then mixing, emerald, violet, orange, and, finally, as the eye wearied, white again.

Bridges arched over streams; I stared down until I felt dizzy. “Perhaps you suffer from vertigo,” my father said. Vertigo, vertiginious.  New treasured words.

 

From little wheeled carts, we bought peanuts, which we sometimes called groundnuts or monkey nuts, heated over coals with salt and chilli powder. As I chafed off their red wispy coats, I read the handmade paper bags, made of old magazines or scrap paper.

Like everyone, we sold our old exercise books and scrap paper to the vendors who came door to door, and I hoped to read secret love letters, or our friends’ household accounts on my peanuts bag; or that someone would say, “I read your school essay on my peanuts bag. It was brilliant.” Fame, at last!

* * *

In the evenings, my father walked with me in the ribbons of moonlight around the lake, now glazed silver, until a stitch sliced my side and I begged for mercy. “Keep walking,” my father said. “The lactic acid will dissipate. Your second wind will come.”

“Impossible,” I moaned. “Impossible.”

And then the blessed second wind came.

 

He imparted basic training, survival skills.

“When goondas, bandits, waylay you, and say, ‘Your money or your life,’ always say, “Take my money.”

“Huh, and what would you say, Pa?”

“Take my wife,” he grinned.

 

My father allowed me to take the carved dagger, the kukri, he had bought on his honeymoon in Kashmir to protect us. As shadows loomed, I ran towards them, whooping war-cries, my kukri carving circles in the air.

The shadows turned out to be rejas, female manual labourers, balancing wicker baskets on their heads, in which they carted away the still hot discarded slag from the works of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, sifting it for refinable bits of iron ore.  “Bacchao, Sahib, Bachao,” they yelled, good-naturedly. “Save us, Sir. Save us.” Everyone laughed.

Except I.

 

In their baskets were a few mushrooms. At dawn after rainy nights, my mother went to the market to snap up these wild long-stalked mushrooms, the earth’s secret gifts, which the forest-dwelling Adivasis, the tribal people who had not yet been assimilated into India’s mainstream culture–junglis, they were called–had gathered at the first brightening of day, trudging with them into the city to squat in the market, spreading their precious pickings on an old saree. We fried these with butter, onion, garlic, coriander and mint, still a favourite meal, serving them on hot buttered toast.

We competed to buy them with the tribal rejas, who, homesick and self-exiled from their dense green forests, a grief compounded by their hot, monotonous work at the steel factory, bought a few of these expensive mushrooms, knotting them in the corners of their sarees to cook with onions for their dinner.

* * *

On an island, in the center of the lake, clever impracticality, was a restaurant, over-priced, so a treat. Row, row, row your hired boat there.

And there: golden brown masala dosas, South Indian delicacies, restaurant food, two foot long crisp rice pancakes, protruding far beyond the stainless steel plate, oozing with mustard-seeded, oniony, tumeric-bright potatoes, served with little stainless steel bowls of coconut chutney, and sambhar, black-mustard-seed -flecked lentil sauce.

It’s perverse not to eat dosas with one’s fingers: a multi-phasic ritual. Crack the crisp crust at the centre; pour the sambhar into the opening over the potatoes; spoon in some coconut chutney, then tear corners of the dosa and use them to scoop up fingerfuls of mashy potato; hot, spicy sambhar sauce; and cool leaf-green coconut chutney, a magical mouthful of flavours.

I had my own ritual in the restaurant. I seized the pepper shakers and sniffed and sneezed, sniffed and sneezed, chanting like Lewis Carroll’s mad duchess, “Speak roughly to your little boy/ And beat him when he sneezes/ He only does it to annoy/ Because he knows it teases.” “Stop it,” my mother eventually said. But I only did it to annoy, because I knew it teases.

* * *

  Occasionally, when my parents craved South Indian food, we drove miles to the town’s only South Indian restaurant in Sakchi, dark, crowded and scruffy, my father, looking around, frowning and furtive. He was Controller of Accounts at Tata Iron and Steel, Senior Management, and, Jamshedpur being stratified and class-conscious, did not want to be spotted at so down-market an establishment by the clientele: manual labourers, clerks and secretaries from South India, who also worked at TISCO.

However, the dosas, so delicious and near-impossible to mimic at home, compensated for his embarrassment as being seen among the throngs of voluble working-class South Indian families out on a Saturday morning treat; bachelor workers who ate all their meals there; or the man of the family, splurging his earnings on himself.

My parents nostalgically ordered the tastes of their South Indian childhood, which have now become the tastes of my North Indian childhood: idlis, ovals of ground steamed rice, that compensated for their own blandness by being doused with spicy sambhar, and coconut chutney. Other exercises in nostalgia: upma, semolina, fried with nuts, split peas, and vegetables; uttapam, a spicy rice flour pancake; and vadas, lentil donuts, tastes which pale when described in English.

 

The waiter brought scalding, very sweet coffee to our table which he cooled by pouring the brown fragrant steaming river from one outstretched hand to a steel “tumbler” three feet below,   tumbler to tumbler until it was drinkable. Coffee by the yard, my father said, soto voce. Coffee is the drink of the South with its coffee plantations while North Indians, with their tea plantations, drink tea, chai, for breakfast, and at tea; and grab little clay cups of tea from dhabas, shacks, or roadside carts with their always-bubbling brass cauldrons of sweet milky tea, doctored periodically with more milk, sugar or tea leaves.

* * *

But the restaurant of my heart was Franks, the oddly named and only Chinese restaurant in town, run, equally oddly, by Chinese Catholics. It was green-walled, green-lit by  little dim  hurricane lamps on tables with, like promises of better things, cruets of soya sauce and  red chilli sauce in which seeds still swam.

We looked at the old greasy menu, whorled with soya-sauce thumb-prints, and read it, flirtatiously, like Dennis the Menace and Joey, who, claiming,“I can’t read” get the waitress to read all the 97 flavours of ice-cream; listen in sheer bliss, then, chose again–plain vanilla. And the waitress sighs, “They always do it.”

 

But I knew what I wanted, and I wanted nothing but it: “Franks’ Special Chow Mein” and “Franks’ Special Fried Rice.”  When perfection comes, the imperfect fades away. They were Chinese food for me, and I had to have both.

“You always order the same thing,” my mother said, “We need a main dish to go with it.” She ordered spring rolls; sweet and sour pork; and too sweet, too crisp chop suey which I refused to touch. Things should be either sweet or sour. Laodicean in-betweenness was heretical!

 

Then the restless, intolerable wait. The sound of steel on wok, the scent of soy, focused my senses with hunger and  anticipation, reduced all thought and conversation to a single sentence, “When will it come?”

And with a flourish: steaming platters of wriggly noodles, glistening with flecks of oil and soya sauce, rainbow-flecked with… Our forks explored: pork, beef, prawn, chicken, mushrooms, peppers which my parents eccentrically called capsicum and black membranes of mushrooms like jellyfish, slippery unctuous pleasure.

And there was fried rice, with the colours of a pastel spring: green onions, green peas, carrots, pink shrimp, red bacon. We flecked the whiteness with soya sauce.  I ate rapidly, silently, ecstatically. Everyone, including my mother, liked shrimp best, and so she offered hers around, on fork tip and we accepted, greed conquering guilt.

And then, I could eat no more. And always, the same wonder: I entered the car satiated, fell asleep, and realised as our car pulled into our driveway that I was hungry again. How could it be?

Links to all chapters:

Chapter 1:  Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born

Chapter 2: The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur When All was Magical

Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born (From my memoir-in-progress, Mind Has Mountains)

By

Jamshedpur

Jamshedpur (credit)

I am working on a memoir of my childhood in India. Here’s a chapter on Jamshedpur, the small town in which I was born. It probably will not get into the final version in exactly this form, but for now, here it is!    

Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born

 Symphony in Steel, a silver gyre soared at the town’s heart in the market district of Bistapur–dazzling, twisted steel ribbons that joined midway, then spiralled and twirled upwards in the sunshine. 

Symphony in steel; symphony in steel, I murmured with inward delight as we entered the raucous streets of Jamshedpur.  I loved the words.

 

My vocabulary had evolved from my first word, “Ijit,’ which my father claimed I muttered whenever he slammed the brakes—and seconds before he too muttered: idiot. A cow shambled across the road, chewing straw; pedestrians cut in front of us, chatting, animated, oblivious. My father told us horror stories of his first driving days in Jamshedpur: the sacred cow whose leg he’d crushed, the slaughtered golden goose, the goat who… until we howled, begging him to stop.  He did.  Temporarily. But the next version grew gorier with keeping.

 

Iron and steel: magnets which drew us to Jamshedpur, through The Tata Iron and Steel Company, one of the world’s oldest, largest steel behemoths at which my father worked for 22 years.  Jamshedpur was developed in 1907 after Jamshedji Nusserwanjee Tata, a Parsee industrialist discovered that the laterite-red soil was rich with iron ore.  Indeed, the very gravel in our garden was made of murram, tiny balls of iron-ore or slag!

The company was proud of the jagged industrial skyline it stamped on the city, a tableau of cooling towers and mighty blast furnaces which huffed blackness into the skies, a skyline familiar from the company’s goodwill calendars and diaries.

The coal mines at Dhanbad; the Works at Tata Iron and Steel; the massive blast furnaces which worked night and day: the industrial backdrop of our childhood. We showed our houseguests around them, feeling immensely grown-up, for our father ignored company rules which banned children from the Works. He did, however, ensure we swallowed the compulsory salt tablets–an offering to the God of Steel–before we entered the Works, lest the dehydration and minerals lost in drenching streams of sweat made us faint, and tumble into great glowing rivers of orange molten iron, hypnotic and terrible, flowing from the furnaces into which shirtless, sweat-drenched men pitched coal.

* * *

Jamshedpur, fondly called Jampot, proudly called “The Steel City,” was India’s first planned industrial city, laid out by Julian Kennedy of Pittsburgh, with parallel streets, unimaginatively named from A to Z, East and West. Our company house was 6 C Road East, walking distance from the company, across the road from a lush little park with bougainvillea, canna, and jungle gyms, one of the parks the enlightened company nestled between city blocks. Across the road, too, were the Director’s bungalows, with bored guards at the gates, and magnificent Alsatian watchdogs, whom we befriended, charmed, and betrayed into bounding to the gates with unprofessional joy as we summoned them, “Jai. Jai. Jai.”

* * *

Jamshedpur is the world’s largest and oldest still-existing “company town.” It does not have a municipal corporation; TISCO provided electricity, sanitation, and even a free telephone service for all its employees, a white phone which sat beside the old black rotary dial Post and Telegraph phone, a colonial survival. They had different ring-tones; “TISCO” we’d call out, perkily, or “P and T,” with less enthusiasm.

All employees received free housing, the luxuriousness, size and location varying according to the job. We had a large sixteen roomed colonial house with a one acre garden, whereas some Catholics we visited who were manual workers in the Works had tiny, clay-walled, dark houses on the outskirts of town

The large houses of executives faced each other across broad tree-lined streets, swept daily, shaded with mature trees, lit with company street lights. At the back of each house were the servants’ quarters which also faced each other across dirt alleys.  Each servant family was given a room, though no toilets or bathrooms. They used the street.

I never ventured to the lane at the back of my house, until as a volunteer with Mother Teresa, I went there in the mobile dispensary to hand out medicine, and was shocked by the faeces, the flies, the rubbish (our rubbish!) in heaps in concrete dumps waiting to be burnt, the fetid drains. This shadow lane had always been there, behind my house, but I had never peeked there.

* * *

Tata Iron and Steel drew ambitious executives from throughout India; indeed, almost everyone was from somewhere else. However, it was founded, and dominated by Parsees, followers of the Prophet Zoroaster who moved to Gujarat in the West Coast of India, in the tenth century, fleeing Islamic persecution in Iran. They worshipped fire in their Agari, Fire-Temple, which non-Parsees could not enter– as mysterious and fascinating to us as the local Freemason Lodge!

Parsees were an educated, Westernized, relatively affluent minority and Zoroashtrianism was a unique faith, ethnically based; indeed many Parsees did have distinctive sharp features, were larger-nosed, and lighter-skinned. One could not convert to this patrilineal faith, and the children of women who marry out of the faith were no longer considered Parsees.  This, in addition, to late marriage, low marriage rates, low birth rates and low fertility (possibly influenced by inter-marriage  for centuries within a limited gene pool), means the community is facing extinction, deaths each year outnumbering births.

* * *

My father watched three waves of international influence on TISCO, British managers being followed after Independence by Americans, such as J. L. Keenan, the General Manager–after whom the international, company-owned Keenan Stadium, site of enthusiastic  cricket–was named. However, in the seventies, India swerved towards Russia, and Pakistan towards America (though both nations were technically “non-aligned”).

And so Russians began to show up, giant hulking men, blue-eyed and blonde, passionate about basketball, to which they challenged the town. The community gathered every evening at the United Club, subsidized by the company for its employees, to watch their sleight of hand and wizardry, and cheered, even when, inevitably, the  Russians won.  “It’s because they are seven feet tall,” we explained, though our dazzled eyes probably added some inches.

* * *

TISCO’s benevolent management practices  were influenced by Xavier Labour Relations Institute, across town, a business school run by liberal, fairly radical American Jesuits (my father taught there after he retired from TISCO). My father and other executives were sent to study the management culture and technology at steel companies in Pittsburgh, Britian, Europe and Japan, with TISCO adapting what was practicable, sometimes even going further.

They  ran a state-of-the art hospital, Tata Main Hospital, at which I was born, which provided free medical treatment to all their employees and their families, and free medical treatment for life to any one who had worked for TISCO for 25 years. Retirees frequently came down to Jamshedpur from Bombay, or Bangalore for surgery or chemotherapy.

Russi Modi, the Managing Director, a character, had extraordinary people skills, and prided himself on knowing the names of every employee from management to the workers manning the blast furnaces, the steno-typists, “punch operators,” and peons.

* * *

The TISCO cafeteria sold delicious food at radically subsidized prices so that every employee, no matter how straitened or debt-ridden his circumstances could have inexpensive meals at work, and take something home, and no employee family would go hungry.

We wheedled my father to bring these hot, fresh-cooked snacks home for tea, but he generally refused, too proud to be seen among the clerks, sweepers, and factory hands. No senior management went, or so he said, (though how could he have known, if he did not)? Appearance mattered in our honour- and shame-based society. Being suspected of poverty, of struggling financially, or of stinginess was as disgraceful as the fact of it.

On rare occasions, we prevailed. Setting pride aside, my father sent his peon to pick up snacks from the canteen, and came home, frowning and grumpy-faced, with banyan-leaved containers of hot bondas, pakoras, samosas, jelebis or ladoos, India’s heavenly snack foods, on which we pounced to general jubilation.

* * *

Once a year, the company whisked its entire labour force on a picnic to a “beauty spot,” like Dalma or Dimna Dam, with lunch cooked out of doors, chicken biriyani, parathas, and freshly cooked jelebis. Everyone we had heard of, we now saw: all my father’s colleagues and subordinates; the company doctors; all our school friends’ fathers, with their wives and children. Wives and children, I say, for the management was, pretty much, male; the female employees were secretaries, steno-typists, punch-operators, or telephone operators.  No wonder my father snorted when I spoke of working. “Not in business,” he said.

* * *

In Jamshedpur, my father said, you were your job. People bowed and scraped to were ignored once they retired. He vowed to leave town the moment he retired, and so indeed he did–after his second retirement from Xavier Labour Relations Institute!

 

Tata Iron and Steel used to be the largest steel company in the British Empire, which meant something in the days when the sun did not set on; it is now the seventh largest steel producer in the world. Now and again, I see iron plates covering storm drains in Central Park, New York, or in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I lived, or here in Oxford with the legend, “Made in India,” and I smile, for I know they were almost certainly made not just in India, but in Jamshedpur.

Links to all chapters:

Chapter 1:  Jamshedpur: The Steel City Where I was Born

Chapter 2: The Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood in Jamshedpur When All was Magical

 

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel (The first chapter of my memoir, “Mind has Mountains.”)

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This is the first chapter of the memoir I am writing. I hope you enjoy it, and I would be grateful for any feedback 🙂

I was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar, India, where the great Gangetic plains lope up to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Buddha was born here, six centuries before Christ, as was Mahavira, founder of Jainism, though syncretic Hinduism later absorbed both.

But my birth in Jamshedpur had nothing to do with it being the birthplace of great religions. I was born there because of steel.

The soil was red with tiny balls of murram, iron ore, visible signs of the hidden lodes which in 1901 drew Zoroastrian industrialist, Jamshedji Nusserjani Tata, to found Jamshedpur, The Steel City.

There blast furnaces daily belched blackness to the bleared skies, and you woke and heard the birds cough as iron ore was refined to shining steel by The Tata Iron and Steel Company, one of the world’s largest steel companies, which, in 1952, lured my father, a Chartered Account, from still racist London: “Our accountant is Indian; is that a problem?” his boss had to ask, and sometimes it was. Now, he was the Controller of Accounts, and–as he ambitiously installed computers which hogged a wall– Manager of Data Processing.  And “What is  that?” everyone asked.

He then married, aged 38, and after a decade of infertility and the death of their infant first-born son, I was born, hovering between life and death, ill with the dysentery which killed my brother.

And so, in an emergency baptism with rapidly blessed hospital water, in Jamshedpur, the heart of the Hindu heartland, I was christened Anita Mary Mathias, daughter of Noel Joseph Mathias and Celine Mary Mathias, the incongruous surname given our family when the Portuguese occupied my ancestral town of Mangalore on the coast of the Arabian Sea in 1510, converting the population to Roman Catholicism with the carrot of government jobs, and the stick of the Inquisition, Counter Reformation fires reaching  even the tropics.

Which explains why a child born in the Hindu heartland, had grandparents called Piedade Felician Mathias and Josephine Lobo,  and Stanislaus and Molly Coelho and great grandmothers called Greta Lasrado and Julianna Juao, though on my mother’s side,  everyone was a Coelho, for Coelhos, as the thirteen  branches of that family observe proudly, Coelhos, if possible, only marry Coelhos.

 

A few years later, when I was known as the naughtiest girl in the school, the nuns asked, “Why are you so naughty when your sister is so good?” Flummoxed, I guessed, “Because she was baptized by a cardinal, and I was baptized by a priest?” The amused Cardinal summoned me when he next visited the school and explained that I could not be baptized twice, but I could receive a special blessing, and to that blessing he later attributed everything good which ever happened to me.

 

 

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

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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. [Read more…]