Ocean In My Yard

Saleem Peeradina

Description

It was easy becoming a voyeur. Saleem Peeradina, poet, artist, teacher and compulsive people-watcher gets extraordinary views of neighbourhood life from the twelve windows of his Versova Road house. From the age of four he has been drawn into the thrills of a voyeuristic life, a passion that was nurtured in his young adulthood by his interest in poetry and painting. In The Ocean in My Yard he gives us rare and exclusive pictures of the dramas he witnessed almost unobserved, sketching the interior landscape of hearts and heads. In lyrical prose interspersed with his own poems, Peeradina brings to life the vitality, as well as the predictability, of suburban Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s, where cycling down narrow lanes with school buddies, or peering into a film studio to catch a glimpse of a movie star, or having a ball of shaved ice was heaven itself. All of this is offset, of course, by run-over animals rotting at the neighbouring garbage dump. With passion, tenderness and sometimes detachment, he lucidly captures the experience of growing up Muslim in a large joint family: the adoring grandparents who light up his life all too briefly, the trio of eccentric uncles who confer on him the most favoured status, a difficult doctor-father against whose strong will he pitches his own, and a self-effacing mother whom he begins to appreciate only late in life. He also exposes religious and class issues and reveals how, even as a boy, he stood up against the ingrained sexism of Indian society. As Saleem candidly serves up anecdotes of his sexual awakening massaging his aunt s body to ease the tension after a long day in the kitchen and trips to Anchor Cabins where his uncle conducted photography sessions that were to inspire his own nude paintings, we realize all too well how easy it is to become a voyeur, and how easy to fall under Peeradina s spell.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184225
• Langue: English

Extrait

Saleem Peeradina


The Ocean in My Yard

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preamble on My Feet
Tommy
Moon in The Rafters
40-Watt Days
A Song Break
Nooruma
The Next One
The Scent of Chameli
Andheri
A Voyeur is Born
Garbage
The Garden of Delights
Food and More Food
Home Remedies
Another Hero
Death of A Well
Gallery of Originals
Erasing God
Initiation
Pani Kum Chai
Idd
Disenchantment
Postscript
A Precocious Sensuality
Heartlocked
Massage
Fall from Grace
Premonitions of Doom
Doctor Saab
Man of The House
Tyrant
Everybody s Favourite Uncle
Haji Malang
Nudes
Story Books!
Put-Downs
Pappa
The Renegade
A Student of Wounds
Finale
Kabaristan
Missing Person
Springboard
Bevda
Open Door
Love Story
Two Systems
A Gift or Two
Studios and Stars
Dilawar, Rama, Anthony
Girl-Watching
The Fist of Logic
A Calling
Misgivings
Sighting A Poet
Release
Losing Face
Self-Disclosure
Shabnam
Shampa
Camilla
First Touch
A Room of My Own
Making it, Almost
Dilruba
Breaking Up
Flight
Flight
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE OCEAN IN MY YARD
Saleem Peeradina is the author of three books of poetry and editor of a widely used anthology of Indian poetry in English. He is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Siena Heights University, Michigan, USA.
To my parents whose love and sacrifices continue to carry me forward
To everyone who plays a part in this story
And especially, to the new and future residents of Andheri and Versova who can reimagine the place they call home
Finally, in memory of that other resident of Andheri Shama Futehally (1952-2004)
Preamble on My Feet
Tommy
I WISH I could say this is my earliest memory: Tommy, my Anglo-Indian aunt, an unfocussed blur, bending over the newborn. Tommy asking to have me unswaddled so she could examine my feet. Exclaiming with a grin of approval, The boy has good feet.
But it is my mother s memory, my mother s shameless recital of my virtues in which the preamble is about my feet. I heard it with predictable monotony all through my childhood. Tommy s line pleased my mother no end and worked wonders for my imagination whenever I gazed at my feet.
The truth was that all my father s family had funny feet-flat and outward turning in the case of females, and somewhat deeper instepped in the case of males. Common to both were hooked, knobby toes that made for a shaky, unstable foothold, especially on uneven ground, making the walker prone to abrupt stops or involuntary swaying.
Like colourblindness, the genes for misshapen feet worked selectively, but unlike those for colourblindness, these genes were not distributed along gender lines. Among the children of my paternal aunt and those of my eldest uncle, two out of three children inherited the tendency; in the case of our family, my sister was the unlucky one. My brother and I, though, both turned out colourblind. My eight-and-a-half-size feet are actually small, wide at the toes, with deep insteps and firm, strong heels that feel as if they are sculpted out of wood-heels I ve often used for snuffing out cigarettes.
What Tommy actually said when she said the boy has good feet must have gone something like this: Thank God this boy has normal feet. And when my mother reported the words, she must have faithfully repeated Tommy s comment, but I heard it differently. Good feet meant lucky or charmed feet. Every time I overheard the words or they drifted in my direction, I was seized by powerful, swelling emotions in which my feet became protagonists in outlandish adventures. In my fantasy, my feet were more like wings.
But while Tommy s comment made a deep impact on my imagination, living with my feet was another matter. I had started out with a misshapen vision, rejecting my feet as not quite aesthetically correct. I convinced myself I had peacock s feet. This metaphor capped my adolescent years perfectly as I groomed and preened myself after the latest fad: the Dev Anand hairpuff and upraised collar when that was the rage, the crew cut or sideburns when that was in style, drainpipe or bellbottom pants as they came and went. But through it all, I kept my feet out of sight.
Earning the title of footwear wrecker was the unkindest cut. I had no idea what I did, but I wore out slippers and shoes at an alarming rate. Any new pair of slippers coming into the family that needed to be broken in was passed on to me for a day! I had to be shod with specially built pairs of chappals-thick, heavy leather with a half-inch sole and inch-high heel. They seemed to work-at least in saving the recurring expense on footwear out of my father s meagre earnings. By this time, my feet had developed a tendency to knock against each other while walking. And starting with skinned ankles, the bruises eventually turned septic, getting all the more painful when the raw wounds got grazed again and again by the heavy footwear. Dr Vasant treated and bandaged the ankles on a regular basis. The burden of walking around with self-inflicted wounds was not unmixed with its attendant pleasures, especially in the satisfaction it afforded for scab-picking. Wounds that were not quite dry, but which sported a dead top layer, were the most enticing, requiring delicacy and daring in turn, promising delicious stabs of pain and relief, uncovering a moist, pink crater with a reddish centre underneath. This episode must have lasted about a year, ending as inexplicably as it had started. But the scars visibly blemishing my feet made me even more self-conscious, and I continued to regard my feet as a secret to hold back, as a flaw that the kindness of strangers would overlook.
As if this silliness were not enough, I was even more miserable with my nose contributed by my mother s side of the family. The feet could successfully live a subterranean existence, but what could one do with an abnormal nose? Worse still, the ridge veered, from its starting point between the brows to its destination above the lips, towards the left side of the face. The chin went in the other direction, dividing the face into unequal halves. This lopsided view turned into a horror show: I noticed an identical phenomenon on the faces of the four Peeradina patriarchs! I felt as if my face had been laid on the genetic printing block, and stamped with the Peeradina mould. It became installed as a mocking icon in the mirror of my adolescence.
Actually, it was the mirror that heightened the distortion and pronounced the judgement. A lifelong student of the silvered surface, I was locked into an agonizing self-scrutiny that magnified my imagined flaws and kept me awake at night.
Over the years, I have come to acquire enormous respect for my feet. I can face them squarely, show them the light and muse upon their giftedness. They are sturdy, compact and have never let me down. Now I have come to appreciate their inquisitive (occasionally prying and meddlesome) nature, which, combined with my curious nose, has provided me with the widest range of pleasures in a world of limited choices. Restless as they can be, always itching to go, they have infinite patience. Initiated at the age of four in the red mud of Andheri, they found the sand of Versova and the stones of Haji Malang companionable. Forced between travels into a settled existence, they became pensive, turning me into a compulsive pacer.
I have always had hot feet-a symptom that homeopathy identifies as exhibiting a certain kind of humour calling for a certain line of treatment. I kick off shoes and blankets, prefer to air my feet in sandals and slippers and bathe them alternately in warm and cold water when they are tired. Anything as thick skinned as my feet never tickles, but they respond pleasurably to stroking, particularly with fingernails; feet are the way to my heart.
Tommy, in her intuitive wisdom, was right about my feet, but in ways she could never have foreseen.
Moon in the Rafters
AMONG THE ARTEFACTS in my grandfather s house was a clock with a golden dial, Roman numerals and spidery arms. As it aged, the golden gilt of the face began to peel off like crumbling plaster. And, from its position under the rafters of the deep ceiling, the dial resembled the stained face of the moon. It rang the hour with a soft chime clearly heard all over the house. Nobody could be trusted to touch the clock, and winding it was father s Sunday night ritual-a task he accomplished standing on the armrest of the sofa.
The time was always set fifteen minutes ahead-a curious practice followed, as we learnt later, by some other families as well-which bred in us an obsessive punctuality. The secret of being on time was to be early; being late was simply bad manners; making others wait, a lack of consideration for their time. The fifteen-minute margin thus allowed for snags and delays. Of course, the fact that everybody knew the real time and calculated backwards if they were running late made the whole thing a joke. But most times we assumed that home time was real time and it always gave us extra minutes when we stepped into street time . The annoying part was guessing how much faster home time was on any particular day, since the clock had a tendency to lose time as it wound down and my father had the habit of making up the difference by moving the minute hand forward to compensate for the daily loss. This he did at his whim. On Monday mornings, the clock could be ahead by twenty minutes because of the previous night s weekly winding and updating; by Saturday it could be only ten minutes ahead. In between, there was no stopping my father from sneaking up any time he felt like to push the minute hand five or ten minutes ahead. And he always conveniently forgot to tell us. So we would rush and hurry thinking the clock was ten minutes ahead when it was actually twenty and then have to cool our heels