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“Don’t come too close,” our normally affectionate grandmother would beseech us. (மேல படாதே, மேல படாதே was the refrain in Tamil.) Once she had showered, no one --not even a toddler-- could touch her till she had finished her morning prayers.  Unquestioningly, she followed these rules of ritual purity, which had been handed down to her as a teen bride -- till disease robbed her of memories. When Patti died, earlier this year, at the age of 96, she had been suffering from dementia for nearly a decade. A kindly South Indian grandmother, she wore a pair of asymmetrical nose rings favored by women of her generation. Forget Kanchipuram silks, she looked elegant even in her everyday white-dotted sungudi saris: a standout and a stereotypical Patti at the same time. I loved her classic paal payasam and delicious instant mango pickles. When those 2-minute noodles first appeared on the market, she said, “Maggi is just plumper semiya,” and proceeded to make a slurpy upma of it. Puzzlingly, Patti made her own “tastemaker,” a signature blend of spice powders. We claimed her unused spice sachets for use in all manner of savory dishes. With cardamom and varying combinations of saffron, nutmeg, and tricky green camphor, she conjured up a variety of sweets for our birthdays. Patti’s birthday, which fell on Children’s Day, was easy enough to remember, but we know precious little about her childhood. In 1942, when Singapore, a British bastion, fell to Japanese forces in World War II, Patti’s family in Nemmeli received visitors. It was her paternal aunt and her brood from Madras. An official order had encouraged residents of the city, who were not essential to its functioning, to leave immediately. Even the eldest of Patti’s visiting cousins, a 16-year-old, was about as non-essential as they come, and so they left for the countryside. By the time the authorities declared Madras safe again, my grandmother was married to this teenager. In the city, her cousins went back to studying. The aunt-cum-mother-in-law trained Patti in the skills needed to run a household. In independent India, the family moved up in the world. Their good-sized home earned a reputation for hospitality. House guests staying there for varying lengths of time, including young women who enrolled in colleges, could always rely on Patti for hot meals and a kind word. Patti, with her pleasant smile, served daily visitors excellent coffee. Good coffee, connoisseurs will tell you, begins with good quality milk. ‘The milkman comes with the cow at 4.30 in the morning. Someone must watch him otherwise he will add water,” says the elderly woman in R. K Narayan’s ‘The Painter of Signs.’ This aunt is now about to leave for Benares. The protagonist, the painter, realizes that if his milk and curd had been pure and creamy all along, it was thanks to the invisible labor of this elderly woman. She had stood watch beside the cow at dawn, watching the milk pail in dim light to make sure the milk remained undiluted. The jar of gingelly oil she has stocked now had to be aired once a week, and he has to ensure that insects don't get into the jar when the lid is open. And oh, there was enough stock of dried vegetables for two years; the rice in the jute bag had been picked clean of chaff and stones. “Don’t waste any of it,” she tells him before embarking on her journey. Forget all their prayers, fasting, and other rituals, a zero-waste policy seems to have been the one true religion of women of that era. Housekeeping was serious business for people like Patti. The physical and emotional labor put in by the women in charge of feeding a multi-generation family in those days boggles the mind.  And beyond the kitchen, they forged the family's future—buying gold and nurturing social networks. In a crisis, they quietly did whatever was needed to prevent the household from descending into chaos. Patti had very little leisure. In the little downtime she had, a younger Patti crocheted cute purses, drew floral-geometrical kolams or did delicate needlework. Middle-aged Patti would doze off in the middle of browsing through some Tamil weekly. Overall, she did not seem to have a lot of time and energy left for reading. After Patti had passed on, the items she had collected over a lifetime were divided among appropriate relatives. On that occasion, they handed me a thin sheaf of articles I had written for The Hindu. I burst into tears. The fact that Patti had cared to save my writing over the years was, to me, the very best keepsake. Some memories came rushing back. I recalled that Patti, the mother of six, had learned the English alphabet through a Tamil-English correspondence course. When her children left home, she wrote to them in chatty Tamil, printing just the address in English, in her neat hand. How my mother looked forward to those thin blue inland letters, crammed with news about family! At some point Patti seems to have gotten into the habit of organizing the letters she received, along with cherished photographs and newspaper clippings, into an archive of her own. A picture of my mother, her eldest, in her rented graduation robe. A full-page article about her youngest daughter’s boutique. An invite to a granddaughter’s Bharatnatyam debut. Letters from me, and my brother, as graduate students in the United States. My condolence letter when Patti’s nonagenarian mother had died in Nemmeli. (Clearly, longevity runs in the family.) And there was more. I am yet to find out what she saved of my aunt’s, a graduate of the College of Engineering, Guindy. Perhaps it will be a letter from my mother-in-law praising me when I was a new bride, the engineer jokes. Even at first glance, Patti’s curation tells a story. Women of her generation had little opportunity to study or participate in life outside their homes. So, she was delighted that her daughters were educated, and happier when the world acknowledged their work. Clearly, she saw her ten grandchildren as individuals, though she treated each of us the same. If she had a favorite, we did not know it. Patti’s best qualities – kindness and patience – we took for granted, and as for the smaller things about her, mostly, we never thought to ask. I am left with no idea of the times, the people, or the place that shaped Patti -- a first-person account of that different way of life is now lost to me. She did not seem to question ritual, husband, or hierarchy. Seismic changes in women's liberation have happened since, so there things I will never understand. How did Patti see the changing world? What was Patti’s first phone conversation? What was it like to talk to her aunt-cum-mother-in-law through this instrument? What did they chatter about? One evening, in recent years, when I held up my phone for a selfie, and asked her to smile, she responded with, “Who smiles without any reason?” I found this funny and began to laugh. The laughter must have been infectious because Patti began to smile. Soon, we were like a pair of giggly American preteens inside a photobooth at the mall. And I caught a fleeting glimpse of pre-dementia Patti.   In a Peanuts cartoon strip, the usually crabby character, Lucy, tells her class about her grandmother who used to work for the defense plant during World War II. When the men enlisted to fight, there were gaping holes in the industrial labor force, and women stepped in to fill the gap. The bandanna-clad fictitious character, Rosie the Riveter, became a powerful recruitment tool and an American cultural icon. These women recruits were expected to leave their jobs after the war ended. Those who stayed were paid less than their male peers, but men could no longer claim that women were unfit for jobs outside the home. The women had proved their worth. In the post-war era, more women entered the workforce. Rosie the Riveter, in effect, turned the tide for American women. Talk to your grandmother, ask her questions, and “you’ll find out she knows more than peanut butter cookies,” says Lucy, who had just discovered that her grandmother was a wartime riveter and the employee of a telephone company after the war. “My grandmother helped to make this country great,” she declares, and demands applause from the class. Perhaps some of our grandmothers too went to jail around the time of World War II, heeding Mahatma Gandhi’s call to women to participate in India’s freedom struggle. Managing everything at home, while the men participated in the freedom struggle was a no less valiant thing to do. We don’t know much about the personal histories of our grandmothers, and how they adapted to difficult situations. So, how best can we remember our doting grandmothers? The cartoonist Charles Schulz was reminding all of us, self-absorbed grandchildren of the world to be more curious about older women in our lives. To acknowledge their contribution. If your Patti is still around, ask her questions. You will, no doubt, be surprised and delighted by what you learn about her. Best of all, you might even catch a fleeting glimpse of your Patti as a little girl before she became what the world asked her to be. **

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We had reached the theater late that day. A temple procession on the main road made it impossible for our scooter to pass. Daring shortcuts brought us to the theatre a few minutes past the official show time.  Fortunately, the show had not sold out. The usher turned on the flashlight and led us to our seats solicitously with his “paathu vaanga sir.” After all, Perippa, my uncle, was an old regular.

On screen, Mussolini invaded Libya. Omar Mukhtar, a bespectacled schoolteacher led the resolute local resistance which had few resources. Tanks rolled in the Sahara. The warm sands made me thirsty. Perippa bought me a bottle of soda with a marble stuck in its throat. I took nervous sips because I was convinced the marble would come unstuck and lodge itself in my throat.

After twenty long years of struggle – little less than an hour in movie time – the Libyan forces lost. The fascists executed the Lion of the Desert in the public square. A little boy bent down to pick up the dead hero's glasses. I furtively wiped my eyes before the lights came on.

"That boy is their next leader. He grows up and leads his people to victory," Perippa said in his usual boisterous manner as if he had watched the sequel. Strangely, I felt reassured. Years later, when I read the Boston Globe column that mourned the passing of Anthony Quinn, one thought flashed through my mind. “Omar Mukhtar is Dead.”

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Every summer we went to my father's hometown, Madurai, to spend our vacations with our grandparents. Just as we thought we'd die of the heat and sheer boredom, Perippa, my father's older brother, would make good on his promise to take us to the movies. Local films were not good enough for us, it was almost always a Hollywood film. Cowboy Westerns, thrillers, and the occasional martial arts films by way of Hong Kong -- we saw them all.

Back then, films were not dubbed, nor did they have subtitles.  What use were subtitles anyway? Many filmgoers could barely read Tamil. Perippa had taught himself American English from paperback novels and with help of a pocketbook edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. He read everything he could about the movies as well.

But for Perippa, my brother and I would not have watched anything except films shown on Doordarshan. My father seemed to dislike movies as much as his brother liked them though he did make a concession for Tamil film songs. He, however, would not be caught dead talking about anything related to films. “Even if he knows something about actors or films, he won’t let on” Perippa would say of his brother, with amusement. “It is below his dignity.”

When we went to the movies, Perippa had an entourage of five – three sons, my brother and me. As the youngest, my brother and I got on the scooter with Perippa. My cousins took the rickety silver-gray downtown bus. Our theatre excursions were spontaneous. Perippa did not believe in the concept of advance booking. If we got fewer than six tickets, the cousins would be sent home. We always got to stay.

Going to the theatre was quite an experience. How do you hold seats for your cousins, or for Perippa, if he had to step out for a minute? If you left your handkerchief on the seat, they’d know it was taken -- you didn’t have to say a word. (Watching a rerun of the Seinfeld episode reminded me of this. Elaine Saves Seats At The Movies.) This was code which all moviegoers in Madurai understood. Even the ones who whistled at the family planning ads. Or those who read every word on the screen out loud for the benefit of their less-fortunate brethren. Before the movie started, the slides- ads for local businesses - came up one by one. After that came the newsreels. The opening credits would be greeted with applause and loud whistles.

Perippa would give us a quick rundown of the plot if the movie had been reviewed in The Hindu. Otherwise, he would keep up a steady narration -- so we could follow what was happening on screen, after a fashion. Those in the nearby rows also turned to him for clarifications. Sitting right next to Perippa, I basked in the glory of this interpreter of foreign films.

The martial arts flicks were the easiest to follow, but here too we got off-screen outtakes. "See, it is like this. If you kids lift a calf every day, why, as it grows, so will your strength. One day you will effortlessly lift the cow off the ground", Perippa had told us. "Devoted practice is key." For the longest time - before a knowledge of physics spoiled it after all - I believed it was possible for me to carry a cow. I just had to be diligent about the whole thing.

As we got older, the boys went to the movies on their own. A couple of them went to study outside Madurai, so did my brother. But Perippa kept our summer tradition just for me. I realized, by then, that his telling deviated from the script. If the onscreen version was different, it didn't matter - a parallel narrative made everything more interesting. Our trips to Madurai finally came to an end when my grandparents died.

Perippa himself passed away in his seventies – till the end, he went to family gatherings, enjoyed books and, of course, watched movies. He missed the age of Netflix and subtitles, yes—but what I miss more is watching a film beside him, hearing his asides in the dark, his voice weaving a world within the world on screen.

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One December, on a visit to my hometown, I impulsively rang up the man who wrote those well‑researched pieces about Madras institutions, personalities, and neighborhoods. Sitting at my desk at MIT in Cambridge, MA I’d read S. Muthiah’s Madras Miscellany during lunch breaks. I loved this column in The Hindu because it explored every aspect of life in my hometown — mostly its past. It felt like stumbling on a story from my mother’s girlhood — one of those small, vivid details that altered my understanding of her because it revealed who she had been before I ever entered her life. I meant only to mumble my thanks and hang up, but he asked me to drop in if I was free. That invitation changed the course of my life, and for the better in every way.

I met this legendary chronicler of Madras in his home in a quiet cul-de-sac in T. Nagar. He welcomed me not as a fan or a visitor, but as a friend. I was not one of the people who came back to Madras for the Music Season, I hastened to tell him. I was just escaping the cold.  He too had known the frigid winters of Boston as a student at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). His father, the Mayor of Colombo, had sent him abroad to become an engineer, but tinkering with machines never appealed to him.

Writing had saved the day back then. In the lab, three students were teamed up to run experiments. While the other two did the work, he observed the proceedings and wrote reports which his instructors praised. It won the team good grades. A flyer on campus caught his eye: the student newspaper was looking for recruits. He showed up at the office to be greeted with, “You can write in English?” W.T. Keble, author, founder and headmaster of the St. Thomas' Preparatory School in Sri Lanka, had encouraged him to read widely, and also to write. So, he wrote for the college paper in the US, just as he had written for the school paper in Sri Lanka. Even in engineering school, with its machine shops and dreary labs, he found great stories.

He had a knack for making history personal. When I took my husband to meet him, he asked him, not me, “How is old Scollay Square?” From our blank stares, he realized we hadn’t heard of the place, but he didn't explain. So, I had to dig up this fairly recent piece of Boston history on my own. Back in the day, the square had pulsed with nightlife -- burlesque marquees and cafés ripe with impropriety, Susan Orlean writes in Red Sox, Blue Fish.  Scollay Square, seedy and outdated, was razed to make way for the staid plaza, Government Center in the early 1960s. When I got to the city at the turn of the century, people had forgotten about this nightlife district where sailors on leave, college students, and working-class locals mingled in bars and theaters.

It is not just the history of Madras -- he has made me curious about where I live, to dig into the forgotten corners of my city.  And, of course, I was delighted Uncle Muthu had gone to Scollay Square as an undergraduate!

Be Alert, Be Alive

In a 2011 interview with The Hindu, he had said “Work keeps me going, so does good life. I still love my drink; I still love to gossip.” He mentioned that he always had a couple of drinks before dinner. “It’s a habit I got from my father,” he said. “The only difference is that while he drank only Scotch, I drink only Indian whisky. The best thing about Indian whisky is that no matter what brand you drink -- it tastes the same.” The prudish in Madras can outdo the original Puritans of New England, and I wonder how some of the conservative readers processed this information.

“All my old girlfriends are still in Colombo,” he used to say. It was a line he repeated often, always with a twinkle. But one afternoon, he said something that haunts me: “I don’t have that many friends in Madras.” Of course, his best years were in Sri Lanka where he worked as a journalist after he got a graduate degree in International Relations from Columbia University in New York. He came to Madras only when he was 40. We make most of our best friends when we are young. But so many people in Madras were happy to be associated with him in any capacity. Wasn’t that enough? Conversely, can it ever be enough?

He had regaled us all with so many stories about Madras, my favorite was the one about Ice House, a landmark building, across from Marina Beach. In the 19th century, ships carried crystalline ice cut from frozen ponds around Boston to a few tropical ports. Chennai is the only city where the ice storage facility lives on, though it has been remodeled extensively. Unlike Scollay Square, the name Ice House lives in public memory. The frozen water trade is not mentioned in our history textbooks. To others, it may be nothing more than commerce, but the journey of ice appears extraordinary to me, connecting as it does my two hometowns, my two emotional co-ordinates. I believed he would always be there in Madras, whenever I visited from Boston. In some sense, of course, he still is. And he taught me, and countless other readers, to be curious and engaged wherever they find themselves, to find the stories in every street -- to be alert and alive.

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I am an early riser. In the dark winters of New England, I am up even before the sun, and that, you’ll agree, takes some doing. But though I am up, I am, usually, not about. Venturing out before the neighbors have had a chance to shovel the sidewalks is unwise, I’ve discovered, and I don’t bother getting out before 8 AM. In my South Indian hometown, Chennai, getting a head start on the day made practical sense because the sun could turn the outdoors into one giant oven, well before noon. Strangely, that land of three seasons – hot, hotter and hottest – once benefited directly from the frigid winters of Boston. It received a precious cargo of ice.

In the latter half of the 19th century, ships carrying crystalline ice went from Boston to select tropical ports, including Chennai. The blocks were hewn out of the many frozen ponds that dot our New England landscape. In the 1830s, Frederic Tudor, “Ice King,” had found the perfect insulating material for this precarious cargo: sawdust, a waste product of Maine’s timber mills. The ice survived the four-month voyage to India and arrived gleaming and improbable at the equator’s edge. No museum in New England exhibits the paraphernalia of the frozen water trade, ice-harvesting tools, as its centerpiece. Nor will you find prominent plaques by the sources of frozen water – some like the Fresh Pond Lake are reservoirs now – to remind us of the fantastic voyage of packed ice.

Except for a wedding cake of a building in Chennai called the Ice House, there is no other surviving architectural remnant of the trade either. The structure went up in 1842, when the city was called Madras. The British ruled India back then. The building has, of course, been remodeled extensively, but because of its location, right opposite the Marina Beach, you can easily picture loin-clothed workmen dragging ice across that wide road on wooden rollers. The trade declined by the 1880s with the rise of ice-making plants and mechanical refrigeration. 

Currently, Ice House is a publishing office and is named Vivekanada House, after an illustrious Indian thinker. But ask an autorickshaw driver to take you to the Ice House and chances are he won't swear at you for calling it by its non-Indian name. Though he doesn’t speak English, has probably never heard of the frozen-water trade – local textbooks don’t mention it – chances are, he will take you there without a fuss. It is a minor miracle how the place name lives on in the city’s collective memory, two centuries later.

Though I like to visit my hometown briefly in the winters, nothing will make me budge from New England during the summers. In those warm months when the sun doesn’t go down till late, I walk around Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. When he stayed in the log cabin as an experiment in simple living, the philosopher must’ve created his own water supply from thawed ice or by melting snow. Of the ice trade, he’d written: The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. To others it may be nothing more than a forgotten bit of commerce, but the journey of ice does appear extraordinary to me, connecting as it does my two hometowns in such an unexpected way.

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This essay is part of an anthology of essays inspired by New England. The book was published by Paige M. Gutenborg, the book-making robot/espresso book machine, at the Harvard Book Store. 

This essay is featured in The Drum Literary Magazine for your listening pleasure.

 

 

From an old article in Scientific American:

... that the commerce in ice but recently commenced in the "burning climate" of India and the Indian Archipelago, has already become to the United States, who principally carry it on, one of their most lucrative articles of export. In a climate the temperature (which is almost constantly from 26 to 28 degrees of Reaumur, they have ices ; they drink ice! champaign in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Batavia, Manilla and Canton , where the alcarazza was lately the only refreshment in use .) To give some idea of this new equatorial commerce and its importance, we need only mention one house in Boston which in a single year has sent to Asia 101 vessels with cargoes of ice, which have yielded eighteen millions of florins. This is almost as much as the product of the whole wine harvest of Bordeaux. 

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