Walt Whitman and the Professor – Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
It was the day of the final exam for the American literature ‘paper’ (we called it that those days in Bombay), for my Master’s degree. I was extremely nervous. The Bombay heat was stifling, what was even more stifling was my sense of panic. I had studied hard for English Literature, which I was majoring in, but for some reason not so much for the Minor, which was American Literature. I preferred to sing in the St Xavier’s college choir, and skipped classes at the University by the professor teaching American Literature. He happened to be Nissim Ezekiel, my father, and my absence from class had not escaped his notice. He would ask me about it in the evening and I would mutter some sort of evasive response. He was not particularly fond of prolonging arguments and remained calm in all circumstances. He took my explanations in stride.
Anyway, that morning, I mentioned to daddy that I was not at all prepared for the exam, but I would take the bus, and go to the location and ‘sit for the paper.’ Those were the kind of expressions we used for appearing for an exam! Perhaps it was a dialect of English called Indian English! Daddy looked more than a little sceptical, and said he would take me to the exam himself, and drop me off before going to his work. Each time I raised a problem, no matter what the issue, taking a cab and chaperoning me to my destination, was daddy’s usual solution.
So we crossed the street and hailed a cab. Once we were seated, I sheepishly confided in daddy that Walt Whitman was part of the prescribed syllabus (now spoken of as curriculum) and I did not know much about him. I told him that I did not have time to ‘cover that portion’ (another very Indian expression)! In other words I had not studied Whitman, and there would definitely be a question on the exam about the poet.
To my amazement, daddy did not reprimand me (he rarely did) and started calmly narrating important details about Whitman’s life and works. Daddy used to prepare his lectures meticulously, often spending two hours on a lecture he was going to deliver. He told me that the secret to good teaching was thorough preparation. Then, to my utter delight, he started reciting large chunks of ‘Song of Myself,’ from Leaves of Grass. His eyes twinkled, his hands made those familiar poetic gestures, and he seemed to forget I was in the cab with him. He was wrapped in Whitman’s world! The cab driver kept looking in his mirror with a puzzled look on his face. Mercifully, he didn’t know English. Thanks to the Bombay traffic in the crowded streets, the cab took a long time to reach the ‘exam hall.’ Thankfully too, I was blessed with a good memory and out of sheer desperation, I had paid careful attention to daddy’s every word.
Eventually, we got there. I waited anxiously as the question papers were handed out, my hands and my pen placed strategically in position, ready for the attack. The supervisor called out the order to begin. My eyes went straightaway to the question on Walt Whitman. Everything daddy had told me came tumbling out and I wrote furiously, shaking the desk in the enthusiasm that I had unlocked the secrets to Whitman. I passed the exam, not sure whether it was with flying colors, or not. But I passed! I think I thanked daddy only after the results were declared. He simply replied that Whitman was one of the greatest American poets and I should read him carefully, if I wanted to be inspired to write good poetry.
In 1988, while living at my grandmother’s house for our annual vacation from the school where we worked, my husband was cleaning one of the rooms. He remembers vividly finding an old trunk. He cleaned off the dust and opened the top. It was full to the brim with handwritten notes in Dad’s meticulous hand-writing on lined sheets. The title page on one of the sheets read ‘Leaves of Grass’ by Walt Whitman. We marvelled at the rigor with which Dad approached his work in dissecting Whitman’s writing. This treasure, to our regret, like so many other personal belongings, has been lost in transition.
Scorpion Encounters.
A Personal Essay.
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Scorpions might sound like a strange choice of subject to write about, but somehow, this creature has had a way of crawling into my life story. For such a small creature, it occupies a larger-than-life position. Some things just are like that, and so I feel compelled to write about them. My late father’s best-known poem ‘Night of the Scorpion’, which I am currently translating into Spanish, is what really got me thinking about my different scorpion encounters. Another reason I started sensing the hidden dominance they occupied in my thought process was when a fellow poet from Israel sent me a Hebrew translation of ‘Night of the Scorpion’. Each time I read that poem, or someone mentions it, I am reminded of the many scorpions I have encountered. My memory of these encounters is still fresh, vivid as the day they occurred.
In my father’s poem, he recalls how his mother was bitten by a scorpion one rainy night in the village where they were staying at the time. The poem begins: ‘I remember the night my mother/ was stung by a scorpion/’. Conjecture has it that since there were no facilities in the house, my grandmother had gone outside the home, into a grassy area in the darkness, where who knows what dangerous creatures lurked and hunted. Fortunately, she was stung by a scorpion, instead of being bitten by a venomous snake. The poem describes how the peasants came and searched for the scorpion in the darkness, but he could not be found. It describes the various cures they tried to get the sting of the scorpion and all their beliefs and practises are portrayed. My grandfather too participated in the painful event in his own way as he was a ‘sceptic’ and a ‘rationalist’ and did not believe in the superstitions of the villagers. The poem ends with the lines, ‘Thank God the scorpion picked on me/and spared my children.’
By the way, Scorpions is also the name of a German heavy metal band formed in 1964, in Hanover, by Rudolf Schenker, which I am certain is pure coincidence, because my father wrote the poem ‘Night of the Scorpion,’ in 1964, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Leeds. I do not believe either of them had heard of each other! I wish now that the band had set the poem to music or written a song about the events described in the poem! That would have been an interesting composition.
The first scorpion entered my consciousness when I got a job in a school in the hills of India, an eight-hour bus ride from Bombay, just after I got married. These places were called hill stations. Our neighbourhood was inhabited by plenty of snakes, scorpions and even a mongoose and a peacock.
We were allocated a small house facing a beautiful lake, and neighbors to one side of us. It was a scenic setting. There was just one big challenge: In order to get to the house, one had to tiptoe past a large tree with two large ‘rat’ snakes, dangling from the topmost branches. We had human neighbors too, just in case you’re wondering. A family of four lived beside us; husband, wife, their young daughter and a toddler.
One day, the toddler was busily playing with something on the ground, outside his house. He kept calling out to his father excitedly, saying that he had found a snail. He was playing with whatever it was, with his bare hands. He sounded as though he was in trouble and needed help. So, I stepped out of the house just in time to hear his father asking him to drop what he was playing with and come inside at once. The father told him it was not a snail but a scorpion, and that scorpions in those parts were poisonous. The toddler went inside howling in fear and disappointment at the top of his lungs! He could be heard protesting to his father, saying that it was ‘just a scorpion.’
On another occasion, at the same place of work, we were invited to the house of the Vice-Principal for supper, when their toddler took my husband’s hand and told him there was a scorpion behind the geyser. In those days the geyser was used to obtain hot water for bathing. The little girl kept pointing at it and insisting it was a scorpion. My husband ventured further into the washroom and to his horror, discovered that it was a snake neatly coiled at the top of the hot water geyser! In her lexicon, the snake had just been given a new name!
Moving on from snakes and back to scorpions, felt like a kind of see-sawing movement in time.
I was introduced to the second scorpion on my first day at the International school (for a job teaching English to High school students) nestled in the foothills of the Himalaya mountains, where we were allocated campus housing in an older home with wooden rafters and no running water in the taps. There was a rainwater tank outside, and we fetched water from it for our first baths. I arrived there with my husband and nine-month-old son. It was July, and the monsoons were in full swing. After a long journey from Bombay (now Mumbai), first by train to Delhi and then by taxi along winding mountain roads to Mussoorie, we were quite exhausted. At the house I laid the baby on the bed and proceeded to put on a clean diaper, when suddenly a smallish scorpion fell right beside the child, narrowly missing the baby itself. My gaze went up immediately in a kind of reflex action, and I was horrified to see six or seven scorpions crawling in the wooden ceiling above. We were not the only inhabitants of the home! The scorpions were there before us and were staking out their territory! We had exchanged snakes for scorpions and found little comfort in being told that these scorpions were not poisonous.
We requested a change of housing and were moved to a duplex house on the other side of the High school. A few years later our daughter was born in the Landour Community Hospital built atop a steep slope further up the hill from our house. There were no scorpions in the labor room, though it rained heavily and continuously that night, and I remembered lines from my father’s poem ‘Night of the Scorpion’: ‘Ten hours/of steady rain had driven him/to crawl beneath a sack of rice’. There was no sack of rice that was visible, at the hospital either! She would encounter some scorpions as she played on the hillside and had learned to keep at a safe distance from them at all times.
We had nicknamed that first house, where we lived for just a week, ‘Scorpion House’, not sharing that name with anyone else, but keeping it to ourselves.
In our home of sixteen years, there was a crawl space under the staircase where the children kept their toys. On one occasion, they came running out from their play area screaming, and pointed to a smallish scorpion tucked away in the corner. From that day on, we had them thoroughly shake out their basket of toys before playing and the empty basket, before putting the toys back in for the night. The cleaning man was given strict and repeated instructions to place the basket on the living room carpet, and clean rigorously under the stairs. The children, all grown up now, still recall that there was something under the stairs, though they are not able to say whether it was a scorpion, or some other insect! The only thing they were certain of was that it was not a snake! As for me, I had a greater fear of cockroaches than scorpions.
I was raised on idioms and proverbs by my mother. She had one for every occasion. Also, since my father was a poet, I grew up with words of wisdom from poets and philosophers and positive thinking books. When I had my own children, I raised them on idioms and proverbs, as my own mother had done, and pearls of wisdom I had gleaned from my poet father. However, central to my own upbringing was my paternal grandmother, as I lived with her, since the age of eleven. Grandmothers, as we all know, are repositories of wisdom. Sometimes, people dismiss some ideas as grandmother’s tales or merely superstition or legend, but I always took my grandmother’s words very seriously. I recalled a story my grandmother told me to illustrate the importance of instant obedience, without questioning the reason why you were being asked to do something.
Here’s where another scorpion enters the picture. One of my aunts was at my grandmother’s home with her toddler. She had washed his diapers and hung them out to dry on the clothesline in the long passageway, open to the roof above. There was plenty of sun that came onto the clothesline as there was nothing to block it. She was about to retrieve a freshly sun-dried diaper, when my grandmother noticed a scorpion crawling on it. She yelled out, ‘Taak’. In Marathi, this means ‘drop it’. My aunt did not exactly know what had happened but dropped the diaper immediately. She watched in horror, as a scorpion quickly crawled out of the diaper and disappeared somewhere into the crevice between the floor and the wall. My grandmother said it was my aunt’s immediate response of obedience that saved her child from being bitten. She said you could always ask why you were being told to do something later, but first you must respond at once without any hesitation. Back then we were expected to obey an elder as a sign of respect. It was understood that they were giving sound advice. This did not mean that we could not ask questions or have discussion on matters of which we may have had doubts or differing opinions.
Now, here I am in a country free from ants, cockroaches, snakes or scorpions, in the home. An occasional shrew has taken shelter from the cold in winter, entering through the garage, but our cat, Salt used to bother it to death. I think the cat believed it was simply a toy. And one summer, I found a line of red ants from the basement to the living room. An occasional wasp has also flown in through an open window in summer. Most of all, I love the moths that stay determinedly wherever there is light, though if they flutter all over the place, perhaps searching for that perfect light spot, they drive the cats wild. We’ve had a badger in the backyard, rabbits, squirrels, and gophers under the patio cushions, but no scorpions to date.
Last month, a black bear wandered through the neighborhood and was seen eating the Halloween pumpkins on the doorsteps. Finally, he was trapped by Fish and Wildlife Services and released where he belonged, far away into the wilderness! A small price to pay for living close to a Nature Reserve!
Copyright Kavita 2020
‘Nobody gives up a job for a Sari’
Affectionately dedicated to my father Nissim Ezekiel whose Birth Anniversary is on December 16.
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Dressing fashionably to attend St Xavier’s College in Bombay where I did my undergraduate degree, was a big deal. It was a ‘hip’ place and then there were the boys! Coming from a girl’s school, I was less excited, but more embarrassed and intimidated, very self-conscious even, all at the same time. The one thing I struggled with apart from the presence of boys, was my extremely curly hair, aggravated by the heat and humidity of the Bombay weather. So I wore it in two braids, one I flipped to the back over my left shoulder, and the other I kept in front. Once in a World history class, a boy placed his hand hard on the back braid, and when I leaned forward my head fell back in a kind of swinging motion. Those were the days of Flower Power and I had worn flowered hair clips at the ends of my braids, which flew to the back of the lecture hall. Anyway, he caught my attention, and we became good friends for the rest of our college days. I had plenty of boy cousins, so that was not my first exposure to the male sex. Yet all those emotions were in so much turmoil in a sixteen year old. I fell in and out of love easily, to some professing my undying affection and they to me, which was such a thrill. Perhaps I was in love with the idea of love. We went to college so young in those days. I don’t know if I was sweet, but I was sixteen!
Next stop was the University of Bombay, where I got a little more serious about my studies, but went back as often as I could to St Xavier’s College to sing in the choir, missing some of daddy’s lectures on American Literature, much to his chagrin. His eyes searched the room for me as he passionately explained and recited Walt Whitman to the class, but there was no sign of his daughter in the filled-to-capacity lecture hall. Those days I enjoyed singing more than Literature and I understood music better than the lofty thoughts of poets.
Upon graduating with a Master’s degree, my father and I debated the next steps of my life. He took me to a publishing house to meet a friend who was interested in hiring me. On the walk there he explained the publishing business to me and I remember breathing hard in sheer panic and confusion. The room was stacked with shelves of dusty manuscripts and I felt totally overwhelmed at the sight. The owner was a kindly woman who gave me information about the job and wanted to know when I could start. By then, I had already decided that publishing was not for me. Didn’t give myself much of a chance to learn what the publishing job would entail.
On the way out, daddy started to talk about teaching and how it was the noblest of professions. I was sold! Actually, I had always wanted to be a teacher. I got my first lessons in teaching from my grandmother who ran a school for disadvantaged children in a slum district of Bombay. When I was much younger, many afternoons, I would teach the leaves in the garden outside my mother’s ground floor flat and hit them with a ruler when I thought that they were not listening to me! My grandmother explained to me that this was not the way to teach, and that love, patience and kindly explanations would help a child learn better than corporal punishment. My grandmother had been trained by Maria Montessori, but love and kindness were already in her blood. My father and mother were both teachers, my mother of the stricter variety (teaching Math as opposed to Shakespeare required firm handling), my father, poetic and patient.
I began to interview for teaching positions and obtained a job in the English Department in an Arts and Science College. At the end of the interview the principal looked me up and down (I thought I might not have succeeded in getting the job), and said, ’you have the job, but you will have to wear a sari if you want to teach here.’’ I had gone to the interview dressed in bell bottoms and a kurta, a sort of longish shirt with, what I believed to be of a modest design for the interview.
I had never before worn a sari. And the job was to be an initiation into its intricacies. An aunt who lived with me gladly took me to the sari shop and we purchased three or four saris and some readymade petticoats, and blouse pieces to be tailored to my measurements. She then proceeded to sew on the *falls on the saris. What would I have done without my aunt? She was the essence of kindness and understanding. She also taught me how to drape the sarees with unimaginable patience.
The first days of the job in my new garb, were challenging, to say the least. Standing on a high podium reached with the help of a wobbly step, in a sari, with 150 students in front of me, calling out the roll (attendance by number) for 20 minutes of a 45 minute English class was definitely not what I had signed up for. English was a second language for most of the students and there were often students waiting for me after class for more explanations of concepts they had not understood during the lecture. I prayed the sari would hold on until I got back to the Staff room. The biggest highlight of my two years there were the teaching staff. They were such genial personalities, laughed a lot, and treated each other with love and respect. I was the youngest member of a fourteen-member English department, with a wonderful Head of Department who took me under her wing with lessons in life and in teaching. If I wore a green sari one professor would greet me with a ‘How green is my valley!’ There was a famous Marathi poet on the faculty, and she used to quote lines from her poetry that matched the mood my sari created for her. What a treat! Other compliments followed, but always they were humorous, kind and gracious. I began to feel a little more comfortable in my sari. Also, there were friends to help with redoing the pleats of the sari in the college washroom, which was the tiniest of places two girls could squeeze into, but it did have a standing mirror. The class started promptly at 7:15 am so the sari must be in place on time. I was teaching, what they called, Morning College.
However, there were two unnerving incidents which turned me off saris forever. The first one occurred when I was waiting for my bus to arrive in my freshly-washed and ironed white sari. It was a double decker bus and a man sitting on the top deck suddenly spat out the blood red betel juice of the **paan he had been chewing. I watched him in horror, but was helpless to stop the spitting. I looked down at my sari at the rapidly running red betel juice as it blotched the right side of my sari with a large blood- red stain. Luckily I had a late lecture that day, and could run back home to change into a different sari that was hanging in the cupboard. I got to work and narrated the unhappy incident to my fellow colleagues who replied that spitting was common in our country! They said I shouldn’t be surprised if it happened again. The stain on the sari never went away and the sari had to be discarded. Subsequently, I always first looked up when the double decker bus arrived to see if there was a paan-chewing man who would shower me with the juice of his paan. I was so haunted by the experience, in fact I was quite traumatised.
The second incident occurred when I was in the bus on the way to take a seat. The bus was very crowded with construction workers and somebody stepped on my pleats. All of them came cascading down onto the floor of the bus. Much embarrassed, I quickly gathered the falling material and tried to tuck as many pleats back into my petticoat as I could, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. When I got off the bus I ran to the college washroom and proceeded to re-do the sari. I was in tears, of course. It was so hot, the saree clung to my skin which made it even harder to drape. I hoped that neither any of the staff or students would see my flushed cheeks and ask if anything was wrong.
When father got home that night I told him that I was going to give up my teaching job. He looked a little puzzled and asked me why I wanted to give up, as I had just started the job. I narrated the two incidents to him and said that it was all because of the sari I had to wear to work. I could not do the job any longer if it meant I had to wear a sari to teach. I found it hard not to cry while narrating my challenges.
My father laughed in amusement. His delicately balanced glasses shook a little.
‘Nobody gives up a job for a sari,’ he announced.
I don’t think he understood my plight. He said he would walk me to the bus stop, as if that would help. But, that was daddy! He said, if it were necessary (his favorite phrase) he would even take the bus with me all the way to the college, but on no account was I to give up teaching. Again that was daddy for you! Imagine taking your grown up daughter to her place of work. If anyone saw him (he was easily recognizable), what would they think of me?
So I bought a large safety pin and pinned all the pleats together before tucking them into my petticoat and I also pinned the ***pallu of my sari to my blouse to prevent it falling off my shoulder. I taught in that college for two years, and always wore a sari to work, pins and all! My next two jobs also required me to wear a saree and I continued to struggle with the six yards to be wrapped around my tiny frame.
Now, I wear a sari only on very special occasions. I prefer to wear the Salwar Kameez, a long shirt with loose pants, which can be easily slipped on. I know that saris are graceful and beautiful but perhaps just not in my destiny!
Copyright Kavita 2019
*falls a long piece of fabric sewn on to the bottom of the sari to keep it from fraying and give it the right fall
**paan Betel leaf (Piper betle) filled with chopped betel (areca) nut (Areca catechu) and slaked lime (chuna; calcium hydroxide), to which assorted other ingredients, including red katha paste (made from the khair tree [Acacia catechu]) may be added. Paan is served folded into a triangle or rolled, and it is spat out or swallowed after being chewed. From https://www.britannica.com/topic/paan.
***pallu the usually decorated end of a sari that hangs loose when worn.
Copper Sulphate Crystals
A School Memory…dedicated to the class of ‘69
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
My school in Bombay (now called Mumbai), was located below a bridge where the train clattered by noisily every now and then. The bridge was called Kennedy Bridge. Its name fascinated me for some unknown reason. It gave my school an aura of mystery, perhaps which was just for me alone. The train, the keen vendors selling affordable snacks with names that would trip on a non-Indian tongue, like Variyali and Aam papad, for example, added to the atmosphere. We would put our hands out of the school bus windows and buy the snacks to eat on the way home. Growing up was hard…we were always hungry. The clamour of the girls tumbling out of the school buses was also exciting. I was always so proud to be going to that school. It was, and is, one of the best schools in Bombay. I wore my school uniform and badges with pride, especially my Prefect badge (for some reason I was called a Full School Prefect), in my final year. This meant I got the opportunity to sit on the stage during assemblies with The Principal, The Head Girl, The Games Captain, the House Captains and other Prefects. Of course I was both shy and nervous (nobody but I knew that) as we parted the curtains and walked on to the stage from either side of the ‘wings’. I have often felt I heard The Lord say to me,’ you are shy, now go forth and be a teacher, so you will be standing in front of an audience every day that you teach a class.’ A pleasant reward for my shyness! He has taken me in hand at other times too, meaning turned my flaws or weaknesses into strengths, for which I continually thank Him. Plenty of irony there.
My father had purchased a second-hand Ford Prefect from a friend. He had no knowledge of cars whatsoever, but would do anything to oblige a friend. He always had a hard time saying no to someone. Of course, the car didn’t work well, especially at crucial times. My mother was the only driver in the house, and she would drive my sister and myself to school. Inevitably, when we were only a very short distance from the school, the car would get stuck and refuse to move, as it started to climb the bridge from the road below. It made strange spluttering and groaning noises which frightened us. The street urchins would appear from nowhere, as they do in India, and start pushing the car, hoping for a few coins for their services. So many of them seemed to come out of thin air, more than even what was needed to give the car a push. The car groaned and spluttered again and came to life but too late for us, which I will explain later. I don’t know how my mother got back home. I am sure more street urchins would magically appear and push the car with mother in it to safety. Perhaps I forgot to ask after my hectic school day, or being young, nothing mattered more than getting to school on time. I think there even was a teacher posted at the gate to record students who were tardy, though I cannot be certain of that at this time.
I went to school decades ago, but my memory surrounding certain events is as clear as daylight, and I have hope it will remain that way. I recall scrambling up, trying to join the tall girls on the highest risers during choir, and the Music teacher calling out in her deep voice, ‘Come down, little one,’ as I was a tiny girl, and we had been arranged in height order, with the smallest right at the very front on the floor of the hall, and the tallest girls on the high risers. All the girls took up the cue and recited in unison, ‘Come down, little one,’ in deep voices in imitation of the teacher. I also recall singing the song ‘I’m a Shrimp, I’m a Shrimp, and I live in the sea,’ for a House Choir competition, again standing in the very front row of the choir. Perhaps, being so small in stature, I might have made a silent connection with the Shrimp!
Back to Kennedy Bridge.
We could hear the school bell ringing with all this drama unfolding, and we quickly got out of the stalled car, ran down the steps of the bridge, and into the school in the nick of time. Sometimes, during the monsoons, it rained heavily, but with the newly purchased raincoats and galoshes mum bought from England, we arrived at school flustered, but quite dry.
There were many things about school that I loved, English classes, French classes, Music, Physical Education, Indian History, but the thing I loved the most was the one time when we went into the Science Laboratory to make Copper Sulphate Crystals. We marched into the Lab in a perfect line, as we did for Assemblies, and almost every other activity. Order and discipline were the hallmarks of my school days, as was good grooming and perfect obedience to authority. I was all into Literature and Languages those days, but I loved Chemistry and did very well at the subject. I could balance equations perfectly, which was kind of surprising, since I was very poor at math (much to my mother’s chagrin).
Once in the Science Lab we were assigned to our work stations by the wooden tables on which all the equipment for the experiment was set up. I think we worked in pairs, ‘partners’ as it was called in those days. Sometimes, we had to pull things like beakers, test tubes and glass rods out of the wooden cupboards below the tables and handle them with great care so they wouldn’t break. Then we listened carefully to the instructions. This time we were making Copper Sulphate Crystals. I was so excited because the Science teacher said that these crystals would eventually be blue in color, but that they would take time to form, and must be left overnight or, if I remember correctly, even a day or two to form. However, this could only happen if the solution would remain still and undisturbed. If there was any shaking or movement around the crystals, they would take a long time to form, or the experiment might even be unsuccessful. So we tip-toed around the liquid once the experiment was complete.
I was afraid of the flame of the Bunsen Burners but enjoyed putting the powdered copper sulphate into the clean beaker, adding distilled water into it and stirring it well using a glass rod. Then, we added a couple of drops of concentrated Sulphuric acid and heated it up to a certain temperature and added some more copper sulphate till it was completely dissolved. I always stood at a distance from the Bunsen burner.
Suddenly, the lab shook with a huge rattling sound. A train had just rumbled by quite unaware of the experiment going on above in the lab. The lab was situated at the far end of the school floor, and the train tracks were right below the lab. Much to our disappointment, the solution we had carefully made to rest shook violently. The teacher announced that if more trains went by, the crystals would take longer to form, or they may not form at all. You can imagine the emotions of all the girls. We had invested so much in forming those Copper Sulphate Crystals. Seemed as if our future depended on it.
If I remember correctly, the next day we were allowed into the lab to check on our crystals. Even more disappointment, the crystals had formed for some of the girls, while for others the blue liquid failed to take shape. My Copper Sulphate crystals did not form and I even cried a little, making sure nobody was watching.
While writing this piece, I wanted to know more about Copper Sulphate Crystals, so of course I turned to Google to do some investigating. I found out that you could actually get or grow your own seed Copper Sulphate crystal, and if you used those you would eventually get bigger Copper Sulphate Crystals. That has truly fascinated me, and I can’t wait to try it someday with those seeds. I thought seeds were only for plants.
To this day I love Copper Sulphate Crystals. The image of their utter blueness has captured my imagination. Someday I would like to go back into the school, head straight for the Lab and make those Copper Sulphate Crystals. I know the school stands proudly in the same spot as when I was a little girl, and I am sure the train still clatters by noisily.
I wonder if they still teach the girls how to make Copper Sulphate Crystals.
Copyright Kavita 2019
Banana Lane: A Childhood Memoir
[A Portrait of one Grandmother’s home]
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Introduction
Grandfather’s book
My grandfather’s book travelled with me a long way, from India to my adopted home overseas. His name, Principal Moses Ezekiel (J. & J College of Science, NADIAD B.B. & C.I.RY). Its title, ‘History and Culture of the Bene-Israel in India’. The book documents the history of the Jewish community into which I was born. The slim volume was published on October 4th 1948, on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. My copy is very old and the first page is torn. I think the back page, or pages, are also missing. My grandfather has dedicated it to his sister, Sarah, and in the preface (where he makes several confessions) he says that ‘this book is merely a labor of love.’ I am struck by the simplicity of his writing and the personal touch he gives to his account of the story of our small, but significant community. The humility with which he writes the Preface strikes me each time I return to reading it.
This memoir is a portrait of the home of my paternal grandmother and about the Bene-Israel community of Jews, to which I belong, and in which I grew up in the city of Bombay, now Mumbai. Sometimes, being the only Jewish student in my school and college, made me a kind of curiosity. I felt like little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop, the novel by Charles Dickens. Besides, though not an orphan in the strictest sense of the word, living without my mother, for complicated family reasons, while she was still alive, often made me feel like one. I was nick-named ‘Shylock’, when we studied Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in school, and accused of killing Christ, even though I protested I was not there when his Crucifixion happened. And almost always, the question I asked my father was, ‘Are we Jewish Indian, or Indian Jewish.’ My father would reply that we were both! And overseas, in my adopted home, hardly anyone has heard of an Indian Jew, and people express much surprise at my identity.
———
Chapter 1
Banana Lane and Penny Lane
[One lane separated the two houses where my parents lived. Destiny walked that short distance, bringing them into that union, humans call marriage.]
I loved the Beatles and I loved the song “Penny Lane”. It has remained one of my favourites. My father had gifted me a book of their song lyrics which he had purchased on one of his trips to New York, with an inscription on the first page, ’To Kavita, with faith in her potential’. It is taking me a lifetime to try and fulfill that potential, and the book has been lost in transition between the many homes and places I have moved to, over the years. If anyone discovers its whereabouts, I would be willing to offer a small reward!
My father, with whom I lived in my paternal grandmother’s home, was a unique man; kind, generous to a fault, ‘unpractical’ and totally unworldly. He was an intellectual, totally dedicated to his craft—a true poet at heart, writer, teacher, and dreamer, always calm, cool and collected. I rarely saw him angry, but when he lost his temper, he pronounced my name by biting his lower lip, Kavitam, not Kavita. Then you stood at a distance, and timidly asked what crime you had committed. You trembled to think what the consequences could be, but usually it was some kind of gentle admonition with a touch of philosophical advice.
At ‘The Retreat’, my paternal grandmother’s house, was a magical place with old-world charm, a creaking wooden staircase, gleaming brass pots to store water in, Jewish cooking at its very deliciousness, and warm, larger-than-life personalities, the dozens of pigeons in the high rafters that made their nests and raised their young. Sometimes, an egg fell to the floor beneath with a young dead chick, lifeless and still. At such times, I wept not just for the chick, but for its mother. My grandfather said it was nothing to worry about, as the cycle of life includes such small setbacks, but to a young child, the sight of the lifeless little bird was devastating.
It was here at ‘The Retreat’ that I was raised by my grandmother, my aunt Hannah, her kind and loving husband, who passed away too early, and whom we called ‘Brother,’ and my father. I spent most of my childhood and youth there. They were religious and observed all the Jewish customs and traditions. My grandfather was present for some of the time too, but he was mostly away, being the Principal of a college in Nadiad, in Gujarat, a state in Western India. Friends, neighbors, aunts, uncles and cousins gave me their time and companionship throughout this difficult phase of my life. I went to live at ‘The Retreat’, when I had turned just eleven.
Perhaps, ‘The Retreat’ contained a kind of symbolism as the name for my grandmother’s home, which would be inextricably woven into my life story.
I would look forward to Sundays. My mother spent the day with me, bringing some treats to be stored in the fridge for the coming week. The pigeons were my constant companions. Their cooing was a backdrop to my daily life. Sometimes, bats flew through the open windows and got so confused, they didn’t know whether to call this place home, or fly to a different spot. We had a saying that if a bat flies in, a baby would follow. I did not have a baby till many years later in life, but the saying stuck in my mind, as did many other of my grandmother’s words and sayings. A white kitten even managed to stray in through the front door, but my grandfather (“papa”) would not let me keep it because he said cat hair was not good for health. I have never had a home without cats after marriage! Sorry papa! I could have titled my memoir ‘My family and other Animals’, but that title has already been taken and I don’t want to be accused of plagiarism!
The small trip down Banana Lane, as I nick-named the street between the two grandmothers’ homes, was a balancing act. From one grandmother’s house to another’s, it was a ten-minute walk on broken sidewalks filled with hawkers, beggars, taxis and a never-ending sea of humanity. This was a veritable Banana Lane. My mother hoisted up her saree to her ankles, held our little hands tightly as she made her brisk, determined visits each Sunday to both grandmothers’ houses, with my younger sister and I. She had decided to kill two birds with one stone. We tried to struggle free so we could skip along, as little girls are wont to do. However, since the lane was crowded with men in lungis (a kind of sarong) loading green and yellow bananas in various shapes and sizes, bound for the local markets, the street often became slippery with banana peels in varying states of decay. I remember vividly the big, stone warehouse, stacked with bananas from floor to ceiling, and the half-clad men tossing bunches of bananas onto the trucks, calling out loudly to each other in the local language. We were tempted to eat the bananas too, but were denied by my strict mother, saying that it was important for us to reach our destination quickly, and return home quickly by a bus we could not miss. “Another bus will take a long time to come”. That was a repeated chant whenever we ventured out from our own home. The image of the men balancing themselves on top of the mountains of bananas on the banana truck, is still clear to this day. If I were an artist, I could sketch that picture.
Now back to ‘The Retreat’…
The paternal grandmother’s house was where my parents took me directly from the hospital when I was born. It was my first home. The hospital was called New Hospital for Women, or as I mistakenly called it, Hospital for New Women. Looking back now, I am quite confident that my mother was transformed into a new woman after I was born. Some family secrets must be kept, so I will not elaborate on the significance of my statement. She always said that I was daddy’s girl, had his curly hair and unworldly traits, much to her chagrin. That left her to be the only practical person in the household. I have inherited my father’s unworldliness and share some of his ‘unpractical’ nature.
My parents shared a partitioned room with my father’s brother, his wife and his young son. My grand-mother was a very kind, compassionate, and gentle woman, soft spoken and with gray-green eyes. We called her Aai, which means mother in Marathi, a language we spoke at home, the language of the Bene-Israel of Bombay. Aai was calm and collected, and founded and ran her own school for poor and disadvantaged children, in a very poor neighborhood of Bombay called Dongri. The school was called Vijay Vidyalaya. My aunt, Hannah, who lived with us at ‘The Retreat’, also taught at the school.
My grandmother loved every one of her grandchildren equally, and believed in eating the “First Fruits of the Season”, because “the Torah said so”. The cost was a consideration, but not of great significance, and the famed Alphonso mangoes were especially sweet! She believed in comforting a crying woman whose alcoholic husband had thrown her out of the house in a drunken rage. Often, it was midnight when the front-door bell rang, but she put a pot of tea on, and counselled her gently in the large stone kitchen, sitting with her at the square Formica-topped dining table, till the crying woman calmed down and returned to her home, relieved of her burden, at least temporarily. It was never too late, or too early, for her to help someone in need whether she was exhausted from a day’s work or fast asleep at midnight. When she died, there were forty buses hired to ferry the crowds of people who loved her and wanted to attend her funeral. There was no room on the street she lived on, so the drivers had to park on other streets as close to the house as they could. I watched from the window as people boarded the buses in a sort of silent procession.
It seems I was destined to watch life’s events from windows.
Every evening my grandmother, my aunt Hannah and myself would take three chairs from the house, place them on the verandah, and sit and watch the world go by. Both my grandmother and my aunt would dress immaculately in their sarees with their jewellery adorning their necks and ears, and smelling of the fresh flowered gajras (jasmine garlands) in their hair. Both believed in dressing for the occasion, as if they were about to go out to a fancy event for the evening. We all sat there until it turned dark. During the evening both aunt and grandma expressed their hopes about my meeting a ‘nice young man’ to marry. They kept repeating the fact that I should not be sitting with two ‘old ladies,’ but insisted the man must be educated so my grandma would have educated grandchildren. Later, I was to fulfill her wish but she did not live long enough to see either the husband or the grandchildren. My aunt did meet my little son, if ever so briefly. She had left to make Aliyah to Israel and had come to India with her sister-in-law for a brief visit.
My grandmother’s house was aptly named ‘The Retreat’! I did not know then, that from the age of eleven, I would spend the remainder of my youth, retreating from the tragedies of life, until a man would come and sweep me off my feet! She and my aunt had constantly prayed for a good husband for me. The definition of ‘good’ was that he should care for me, and give me educated and beautiful children, as I have mentioned earlier. ‘The Retreat’ was a metaphor for my childhood that only those who were a part of it, will understand. ‘The Retreat’ was where we all congregated on special occasions or simply to visit our amazing grandmother and another aunt and uncle. Aunts, uncles, cousins and even our friends would eat “red” or “green” mutton or chicken curry with coconut rice, made according to Jewish culinary tradition, and large potato-covered patties with a ground meat filling. It was bewildering how the kerosene stove could cook for so many people, balancing the large pots on the glowing flame. Later we cooked with bottled gas on a cooking range with two burners. During mango season, my grandmother would purchase kayris (raw mangoes) and make sweet mango pickle, we called Muramba. The pickle would be stored in large earthenware jars, and each family was given one jar to take home and enjoy.
We celebrated Malida, a kind of Thanksgiving ceremony for special occasions such as the birth of a baby, or before a wedding or a housewarming. When I moved into my new home overseas, my Jewish friends came to the house, and we prepared Malida (sweetened Poha — flattened rice – with jaggery and slivers of almond and ground cardamom, and fruit) together, and they recited the prayers in Hebrew. Passover was a very important festival. Its significance was well known to me, and we ate the specially unleavened bread with treacle at this time. Hanukkah (the festival of lights and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), were festivals I particularly loved as a child. The silver Menorah in my mother’s home had pride of place in the same corner of the living room shelf for all of my childhood and youth. On Fridays and Saturdays, before sundown, we lit the Sabbath lamp and gathered around while a prayer was recited. At the end of the prayer, it is customary to put both your hands towards the flame and then bring it to your lips in a kiss. This is called Hathboshi, which literally means ‘hand kiss’.
Everything that was significant, happened at the Retreat. Lots of music from cousins who had their own rock bands, to poetry readings from my father, and lectures on nutrition from my grandfather, who was ahead of his time in the field of health and nutrition. He ate garlic raw and took long, brisk walks. My father did that too, despite the pot-holed and crowded streets, including a large horse stable across the street from the house. When there was a fire, the horses would run wildly down the street, neighing and whinnying frantically. A fleeing horse, or two, would enter the compound of ‘The Retreat’, and I watched the majestic creature from the window. At night, a man would be mercilessly beating his escort, a prostitute that made him angry or disappointed, or simply dissatisfied. My father would immediately want to venture out onto the dark street in the middle of the night to stop this ‘inhumanity’, as he called it. The largest Red-light district in the city, was on the street parallel to my grandmother’s house. Perhaps also, this was why it was called ‘The Retreat’. Built in the days of the British, it was a collection of seven one-storey bungalows with a large wrought-iron gate and a mud compound running through it, where we took our walks with friends each night at 10 p.m., and where a boyfriend walked his dog on rainy nights, throwing love notes at a special silhouette appearing at the window. We had to wash our feet before getting into bed, they were so muddy! The space between the roof of our house and the neighbor’s was open to the sky and the stars that peeped through at night were especially beautiful.
‘The Retreat’ adjoined a girl’s school on one side, another girl’s school in front, and a large mosque next door. Down the lane, past the bakery and turning right was the synagogue, where another very sweet aunt lived across the street. She made the best Ghasacha halva (a dessert made from China Grass) in the world. It was a kind of a sweet Indian dessert. My poem ‘China Grass Halwa,’ is a tribute to her love and her culinary skills.
Some nights though, I would climb into my aunt’s bed at ‘The Retreat’ as the ghostly apparition of a man, dressed in white, would appear to me. Although the door was tightly latched, he managed to come in and stand beside my bed. To this day, I do not know who he was. Perhaps he was the prophet Elijah, come to protect and watch over me. I later wrote that experience into a poem called, ‘The Man in White’.
I learned most of the Jewish customs and traditions from my sweet and loving Hannabai Aunty. She was actually my father’s cousin. She loved me unconditionally, prepared ‘Batate Pohe,’ a sort of savory Indian cereal potato snack whenever I was hungry or not, and diligently read all one hundred and fifty psalms every Saturday. Her husband, whom we called ‘Brother’, loved me too and allowed me into their room at any time of night or day, when I was a very little girl living at ‘The Retreat’, much to my mother’s dismay. Hannabai enlisted my help in squeezing the grapes for the grape juice for the Sabbath prayers and taught me how to pray ‘The Shema.’ During an earthquake in 1991, in the mountain town where I lived and worked, I recited The Shema a “million” times, and was convinced that it stopped the ground from shaking. Faith is a wonderful thing. I can even sing ‘The Shema’ to this day and love the faith it gives birth to in me. Again, I later wrote that experience into a poem. It was called, I Still Sing ‘The Shema’. The poem is awaiting publication. Hannabai Aunty had very long hair which she coiled into a tight bun at the top of her head. She said that her father would not allow her to leave it loose, and that girls in those days were not to be seen or heard when visitors came to the house. She told me that on several occasions, she was challenged by doubting Thomases, to uncoil the bun and prove how long her hair really was. My mother too, had very long hair and wore it in two braids. Hannabai aunty rubbed oil into my long curly hair each Friday night, and on Saturdays she sat on a low stool and helped me wash my hair with Shikakhai (Shikakhai soap pods had been previously soaked and made into a frothy shampoo). Hannabai Aunty self-studied English and Hebrew, and immigrated to Israel in her early sixties.
It was her dream to make Aliyah, but it was my loss to be left behind. I silently mourned her leaving, and was informed that she had settled happily in the Promised Land. What a woman! I felt she had nerves of steel, along with her heart of gold…
Tribute to my father, the late poet Nissim Ezekiel
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Shalom, and greetings from Canada!
What should I say about a poet father, so much larger than life, and such a colorful character? By ‘colorful’, I mean interesting and rich and a veritable intellectual, simultaneously. As my personal memories came flooding back, as they do almost daily, particularly while I am writing my own Poetry, I knew that the starting point would not be my father as the well-known poet, but a man I simply knew as ‘Daddy’, a father with whom I had a very special bond, a man with a huge heart, twinkling eyes, and a live-and-let-live attitude, which embraced life in all its complexities and challenges. Anything I write falls short of doing justice to an amazing human being, a man, totally dedicated to his passion for Poetry, both creating it, and mentoring those who wanted to create it, who cared little about worldly things, and would give the shirt off his back, to even a stranger. In the words of Dom Moraes in an article on my father titled ‘A Word for the Wind’ published January 26th, 2004 (shortly after my father’s passing), in Outlook Magazine, ‘He had the gift, given only to a few people, of being happy with small and humble things.’
The first and most precious link with daddy is my name Kavita, which means Poetry in Sanskrit (my grandfather spoke Sanskrit). I describe this in a half-written poem called ‘The Poet’s Breath.’ My grandmother would have liked me to have a Jewish name, because it sometimes created difficulties when I donated a couple of rupees for lighting the big lamp in the Agripada synagogue, and the caretaker asked in whose name the receipt should be made. So, she called me Elizabeth, solely for that purpose. I didn’t really care for a receipt, but the caretaker insisted. Over the last few years, I have begun to think that my name might have been prophetic. Combined with my last name ‘Ezekiel’, some sort of double prophecy might be unravelling! That’s just my interpretation. But, it is obvious that he had put careful thought into naming me, and my mother seemed to be in agreement with the baby’s name at birth.
I once attended a poetry reading, where my father was asked if, among his poems, he had a favorite poem. He smiled, and with that characteristic twinkle in his eye replied ‘my daughter Kavita.’ I remember feeling an immense pride in the fact that he had named me thoughtfully, and meant my name to have special significance. That I was the special poem, so dear to him, made me humbled and proud. There were other occasions, like after returning from New York’s East village, when he privately told me how much I meant to him in life, and what he deemed to be my special purpose and role, which I must fulfill. I have held this close to my heart.
Sharing some adjectives to describe my dad, as a person and as a father, I felt, would be a fitting way to begin my tribute. There are so many scholarly articles written about him, that it would be repetition to turn my tribute into one of those. He was calm, cool and collected, and put a priority on these qualities. Teaching me to respond calmly in all circumstances has stood me in good stead, especially in these strange and trying times. He was a firm believer that one’s response to adversity is a determinant of one’s resilience (another quality which has helped me tremendously in life). Resilience has become almost like a mantra, for me, now. He was patient, kind and compassionate, fun and entertaining, with a great sense of humour, a philanthropist who gave when he had not much to give and when he had the means, socially-minded, and an indulgent father. My mother often complained that he spoiled me and could never say no to me for anything! But then, he could never say no to anyone else either. He was a storyteller par excellence (dinner times were where we all looked forward to his tales), and favored the idea of letting me have Life experiences although the cost in monetary terms concerned my mother, and rightly so. If I wanted to go to boarding school, or on those Lala (the organizer of the trips) School Tours, his words were always ‘let her have the experience.’ Daddy loved his grandchildren, loved peace, was health conscious (turned totally vegetarian after age 45), loved The Beatles, loved classical music and Nature… and so much more. He was a voracious reader and liked to experiment with everything. During the latter part of his life, he became very interested in Jewish mysticism, and had begun reading the Kabbalah intently. I clearly remember a thick book with a blue cover on his bed. He wanted me to read it too, so at some point, I will definitely do so.
Some images of him are absolutely unforgettable… dancing (with his arms up in the air, like Topol the actor in the film ‘Fiddler On The Roof’) to the song, ‘If I were a rich man’ in the middle of the living room, or singing softly and dreamily, in a lyrical mood, the song ‘Trees’ by Joyce Kilmer, emphasising the last line ‘Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.’ And wrapping my mother tightly in an embrace, in the middle of the living room, singing ‘Give me five minutes more in your arms.’ The song is still on YouTube and I love listening to it, and remembering them. An unforgettable experience is when he would toss me playfully into the air, and call me ‘the apple of his eye.’ I wrote that feeling of joy into a poem… can’t quote it, as the poem is awaiting publication at this time.
He wanted to celebrate life, no matter what challenges he faced. He would take me with him on a brisk walk to the local store, to fetch a bottle of Vino Royale, much to my practical mother’s chagrin. She wanted to know what we were celebrating. He would promptly reply, ‘Life!’ He didn’t really drink, he said it was a ‘pick-me-up,’ which meant it would boost his spirits.
A favorite story about my father (and there are so many competing for this in my memory), was how he worked as a deckhand on a ship carrying coal to Indo-China to pay for his return passage from England to India and earned the certificate of ‘Able Seaman’. Just find it so hard to imagine and visualize daddy doing that! He was quite delicate physically, and with his delicately framed glasses balancing on the end of his nose, he always appeared like a true intellectual.
Professionally, he wore many hats. He was a Poet, Playwright, Art critic, Editor, Columnist, and wrote some wonderful prose and critical essays too. He was best known for being a poet and published seven volumes of poetry. He won the Sahitya Academy award in 1983 and the Padma Shri award in 1988. What I love about him was that he remained humble throughout all these accolades, and wore his fame lightly. An Excellence award was also given to him by the Jewish community of Bombay. He achieved all this by being single-minded in his goals, dedicated to mentoring younger poets, to whom he magnanimously gave his time, going so far as to tell them where commas should be placed in the poems they wanted him to read and critique. He helped many of them publish their poems in magazines, and I receive several messages acknowledging his help in giving them a head start in the field of poetry. He read long manuscripts from writers late into the night, after a whole day’s work, and despite his own writing commitments.
Whenever I went to meet him at the PEN, there was always a crowd of people surrounding him, and I had to wait my turn patiently, since we had a lunch date at the vegetarian restaurant across the street. He put others before family, and that’s just the way he was! When I started writing poetry, he said if he gave me the kind of help he extended to the other poets, there might be a perception that he was promoting his own daughter. I graciously respected his belief, he was indeed a man of principles! I never received any help in my formation as a poet. It was a great loss for me though, and one that I would feel keenly, in my later years.
My father, the late poet Nissim Ezekiel, has been recognized as the father of post-independence verse in English and had a deep and natural commitment to Bombay. He was often called the ‘Poet of Bombay,’ and to quote his very own words in his poem Background Casually (1965) ‘I have made my commitments now. This is one: to stay where I am…
As The Guardian Obituary described it so well… Ezekiel once described India as too large for anyone to be at home in all of it. However, after tenures as visiting professor at Leeds University (1964) and Chicago (1967) plus lecture tours and conferences, he always gravitated back to his native city. Though a natural outsider, he still felt Indian albeit ‘’incurably critical and skeptical.’’ Again, as he wrote in Background Casually: “Others choose to give themselves/ in some remote and backward place. / My backward place is where I am.’’
My father’s most well-known poem was “Night of the Scorpion.’ It was written in 1964 when he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds. It has been included in many school and college textbooks in India and overseas. There are so many of his poems I love, but my favorite is ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’, particularly the line ‘The best poets wait for words.’ The line echoes in my mind whenever I feel I must rush to write something, simply out of a compulsion to write. If I haven’t written for a long time, the line telling me to wait is my guide, the voice of my father’s conscience and mine. The Indian English poems are popular, but they are gently satiric and do not mock Indians in general. Among my other favorites are the Latter Day Psalms, The Egoists Prayers and the Poster Poems, to name a few.
Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
Nissim Ezekiel
To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering –
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.
The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart’s dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.
No tribute to my father would be complete without the wonderful connection between Shimon Peres and my father, the late poet, Nissim Ezekiel. Shimon Peres was the eighth Prime Minister and ninth President of Israel and a Nobel Prize winner. He always had a copy of my father’s poems on his desk. My cousin had travelled to Israel as part of a team, led by Prime Minister Sharon and the Palestinian Authority, working to create economic revival and development following the Israeli withdrawal. The team had met with Mr. Peres. When he discovered that my cousin was also named Nissim Ezekiel, he asked if he was related to the Indian poet. When my cousin replied that Nissim was his uncle, Mr. Peres said, “your uncle is one of my favorite poets in the world and when I need peace myself… I always turn to his poetry.’’
He particularly liked the poem ‘’Acceptance’’. It goes, ’I am alone, and you are alone, so why can’t we be alone together.’’ He used these lines in major public events, such as welcoming Jewish athletes from around the world to the Maccabiah Games. What an honor for my father and for us as family! I heard a few months ago that my father actually met Mr. Peres personally on a trip to Israel in 1995.
To conclude my tribute I thought I would feature one of the poems, among the many that are either about my father indirectly, or directly, like this one. The poem was published in the May/June 2020 issue of Muse India.
The Many Things My Father Loved
Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
My father loved the sun
I think the sun loved him back
Unrequited love from the sun
Would have been a hard thing for him to bear
After all he had no complaints
About the hot Bombay sun
He wrote poems about it
Loved the sun and the city.
My father loved the moon
Its reflection shone in his eyes
He saw no man or rabbit in it
Only poetry, lines of poems
Floating in the moonlight for him to catch
Transport them to his earthly pages
Paint them with the artist’s touch.
My father loved the stars
There was a surge in the twinkle in his eyes
Like a gently rising ocean tide
When he spoke of the stars,
Shooting stars were his favorite
His gravestone told of shooting stars
Across the sky, and how they were a sight to behold
He didn’t want to ‘burn up, but be seen,’
‘That would make sense to him’,
His poem on the gravestone said.
My father loved the sea breeze
He wanted to be buried in the garden
In our home by the sea
So he could feel the breeze on him
Under the earth,
He would be thankful for the coolness.
Above all, my father loved us, his children
Celebrated us in verse and in rhyme
Named me prophetically
So I could write about him
And the many things he loved
It’s my turn now, returning in full circle
To declare the things he loved
As I too love the many things he loved
Because it is he who taught me to love them.
Copyright Kavita 2020
Nissim used to eat lunch every day at Sanman, a restaurant next to the American Center, the American library in Bombay. I knew him as a college student (I studied at Sydenham, which was nearby). And during those long summer months from March to May, when we went daily to the library to revise our coursework in the weeks leading up to our university exams, some of us would go to Sanman for lunch. (Sanman used to make better sambar than Satkar, which was closer to Sydenham).
I would meet Nissim often then – he had read my early poems, and we often talked about literature. If my staple diet was idli sambar, his was boiled vegetables with mayonnaise.
One day, he was seated at the table next to ours, and we greeted each other – I was with a bunch of classmates, and we were probably discussing the film to see that evening, instead of some calculus problem baffling us. I saw some activity around Nissim’s table. It turns out, along with Nissim’s boiled vegetables, the plate included a caterpillar. Nissim wanted to send the plate back.
He did this politely, without making any fuss, without alarming other patrons, realizing this was an accident – Nissim ate there daily for decades – and he had a long, symbiotic relationship with Sanman. When we looked at him silently, the plate having been taken away, Nissim winked at me, smiled, and said: “It was a very hungry caterpillar.”
To see humour in something that would outrage any other patron, to be forgiving of an obvious mistake, and not to make any fuss – this little incident is quintessential Ezekiel.
But he could be sarcastic when he wanted to! In late 1980s, I went to interview him (I was a correspondent with India Today, and writing a piece on the novel-writing boom in India – Penguin had set up shop, and new writers were emerging from everywhere). I asked him what he thought of that. And he said: “There are novelists and there are people who write novels. “He did not have to say more.
A poet always, a clown – gentle, and sometimes – but never a rascal. I miss Nissim.
Salil Tripathi
The floodgates have opened,
The dam has burst,
The words pour out
Like raging water, un-muddied and clear,
Carrying everything in its path,
My particular past, present, and future,
(‘The Poetry of Homes’) Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (2019)
In 2019, I wrote a poem titled ‘The Poetry of Homes.’ In the opening lines, quoted above, the metaphor of the burst dam had an exhilarating feeling for me as a poet. The raging water was ‘unmuddied and clear’, referred to words that flowed powerfully. The floodgates, that had blocked the waters of creativity, opened, bringing a release of hope and joy, as poems came pouring out. When my inner dam burst that year, what poured out did not destroy anything. It built me up, and my family shared my elation. People in my home or the natural environment remained pristine and unharmed. The burst dam was life-giving. The words that created poems were life-affirming. I was able to record my memories of the different homes I grew up in, in verse.
The burst dam in my poem was a vastly different kind of dam, from the tragedy reported in the news. It was in stark contrast to the metaphor in the poem. On February 7th, 2021, I read with horror, that a chunk of a Himalayan glacier had broken off and caused a dam burst, accompanied by devastating flash flooding in North India, in the State of Uttarakhand. It trapped workers, working on the hydroelectric project, in deep tunnels, and leveled homes in the area. Many were still missing. The loss to life and property was significant. A lot of sheep were also washed away. When animals suffer, whether in the Australian bush fires, or in the floods that happened here, their lives are precious too, and they must be remembered in our prayers. Villages downstream and along the banks of the Alakananda and Dhauliganga rivers had to be evacuated. Many other safety measures had to be taken for those in case of the possible repercussions that might ensue. Rescue efforts were still underway at the time of writing this article. Many experts say that the breaking of the glacier was due to global warming.
As I posted the news of the event on my social media page, many people reacted angrily along with their prayers for the loss of human life. They felt that dams were being built despite knowing the Himalayas were an ecologically sensitive area. That is the theme of a poem I have just recently written. titled, ‘The Mountain has a Voice.’ I have been reading warnings given to the Indian Government about the strong possibility of such a scenario given by experts. The Himalayan ecosystem has been deemed ‘fragile’, by many who study the impact of man-made dams and roadways that cut into this mountainous area.
I am prompted to write this piece, as my mind went immediately to the poem which ironically expresses the very antithesis of the event. Also, since I worked at a school in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, not too far from the scene of the tragedy, I felt compelled to share my feelings. I checked the map of the scene of the tragedy and found the location to be the village of Raini, in Chamoli district. I have heard mention of Chamoli many times, as some of the laborers working at the school, often spoke of having family and friends there. Emotionally, the tragedy felt closer here, by association with my memories, though at present, I am on a different continent.
The Himalayas are replaced by the Rocky Mountains, but I cannot see them from the house. It is winter where I am, and icy winds are sweeping through the city. Our home has central heating but back at the school, if the wood for the Bukhari (the woodstove) was finished, you could feel the cold in your bones. I have no cause for complaint, only gratitude for family and food and a warm home. My thoughts turn constantly to the lives lost and those left behind to mourn. I feel helpless. There is nothing I can do but pray. I try not to look at the images, but they haunt my mind.
My poem ‘The Poetry of Homes describes the objects in the various homes I have lived in. These are not mere objects; they carry deeply emotional associations with them. The Yamini Roy painting of the two elephants, and the silver Menorah in our first home, and in the home to which my mother moved, were special. I cannot imagine them taken away by floodwaters. I think of those homes where the gushing water carried away objects that meant something far more than just things. Those homes, built by years of hard work and love, gone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps, precious memories like a wedding photograph or an irreplaceable heirloom swept away would also be mourned, along with human life.
One year, the retaining wall outside our home in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, started to collapse. As the groaning sound of the metal railing and the falling rubble awoke us from our sleep at past midnight, I found it hard to think of the ‘pushta’ taking our home to the valley below. My poem calls it ‘the abyss below.’ We woke up the children, dressed warmly, stood outside and prayed. My husband took pictures of the crumbling wall and the saved home, as a reminder of God’s Mercy to us.
When the dam burst, the people probably did not even have a chance to pray. There was little or no warning for the ones in the immediate path of the raging waters.
I read in the news that people in the vicinity of the flood reported seeing and hearing something that seemed like a cloud of dust as the water rumbled by, and the ground shaking like an earthquake. Having lived through an earthquake in 1991 while working at the school in the Himalayas, and experiencing a landslide firsthand, my mind replayed those images vividly. The news report from Reuters on February 7, by Devjyot Ghoshal and Manoj Kumar, called it a ‘Himalayan Tsunami.’ the CBC news report of February 7th described the scene in these words. ‘The flood turned the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.’
Two days before I made the move to settle down in a different country, it rained continuously for two nights and two days. Following the rains, there was a landslide. We had flights to catch, three flights, to be specific, and so we had no choice but to leave. We hired some laborers to carry our luggage on their heads and holding hands, boots sinking in the mud, we crossed over the landslide where a couple of taxis were waiting for us. We had to hire two taxis as there was way too much luggage to fit into one taxi. My husband, one of the men, and I sat in one taxi, while my son and two other men followed behind us in another taxi. We were stopped by a policeman telling us that we were the last vehicle he would allow to pass on as the road had been completely washed away. We pleaded with him to allow the other taxi through as our son was in that one. We spoke in Hindi and finally convinced him to let the second taxi pass. For the first time, I saw a road that was washed away. I can never forget the sight of the sunken road.
The memory of that landslide brings home the drowned-out people and animals that were not able to get to safety. Nature is unpredictable and man has little control over the randomness of its unpredictability. I cannot but help reflect on the irony, that a ‘dam burst’ in my mind, led to a joyful explosion of words, whereas a real dam burst in the Himalayas caused so much terror, anguish, and destruction. They did not have the luxury of working things out in the mind, as I did, of revising, and perfecting the output of a dam burst not of their making.