Vadas rule the roost

Vadas rule the roost


Kiru Naidoo

(Published in the Sunday Times Extra - Johannesburg, 24 November 2013)


Hot out the oil, golden crisp and crunchy. The real treat of the afternoon “flesh” prayers was my granny’s vadas. Speckled with red and green chillies, she deep-fried them in a wok-type cast iron kadai. The cooking ritual is etched in my memory and the pride of my lineage. 

My paternal grandmother, Kanniamma Govindarajulu, was a matriarch of silent majesty. Barely four feet ten and of the same navy blue complexion she bequeathed me, she rarely let anyone near the kadai. Her sari hitched and gathered between her thighs, she sat on her haunches over the leaping fire in our  Chatsworth backyard. 

In one hand she held a little square of banana leaf. In the other she balled the pungent wet mixture of stoneground dried peas, onions, chillies, coriander, cumin and a host of other spices. 

Everything was hand ground on a block of heirloom granite, the revered ammikal. The  spicy ball was slapped onto the banana leaf to be flattened into a plump little disc. The final flourish

was sticking her ring finger into the centre to poke a hole right through. The delicate formation was  then slid off the banana leaf into the crackling oil. As half dozen batches cooked they were theatrically scooped out with an enamel sieve-type ladle to form a growing mountain in a dish
alongside. 

Not even the favoured grandchildren were allowed to touch until the vada had been offered to the Goddess in the afternoon prayers. The morning ritual was the “pouring” of the sour porridge along with vegetable curries to honour the Mother Goddess who had rescued the faithful from a smallpox plague. 

The prancing roosters we slaughtered as offerings to the Mother were cooked for hours on open fires for the afternoon feast. The vada however occupied centre stage.

The crispiness outside gave way to a moist core bursting with a spicy, nutty, salty sensational crumbliness that overwhelmed the eager mouth. The matter of the hole still stokes fiery debate.

Some put it down to religious, ethnic or even sexual symbolism. (The hole is distinguished from other clans who use a three closed fingers indentation similar to the forehead ash markings of Saivites.) 

In my unlettered granny’s greater wisdom I suspect that it served only to cook the vada right through like the hole in a doughnut. 

The one mannerism where the Govindarajulu bloodline easily stands out is that the vada is eaten pressed by thumb and two fingers against a fried globe of sweet flour paste we call oorinda or to use my mother’s tongue, goolgoola. It’s our version of the sweet and sour. 

The vada also appears on other occasions like Purtassi, Kavady, when we pay homage to our ancestors and sometimes even Deepavali. Now and then it is doled out on cold winter afternoons with piping hot tea. Compliments have always poured in for my granny’s vadas.

The Govindarajulu’s freely share the recipe - minus a few ingredients of course.


Granny’s recipe from my sister, Ravathy Naidoo’s recollection (the five year old in the middle of the picture)

1kg dried split pea dhal soaked overnight

1 bunch dhania (chopped)

5 green chillies (finely chopped)

5 red chillies (finely chopped)

1 bunch spring onions (finely chopped)

2 onions (finely chopped)

2 tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon jeera

Sunflower oil


Method

Grind dhal on a stone to a rough pulp. (A food processor will do but it won’t make for a good story!) Fold the rest of the ingredients into the dhal and grind further without getting the mixture too fine. Extract in golf ball sizes and pat into a small disc on a square of banana leaf. Fry in batches in deep, moderately hot oil until golden brown and crisp. For best results use a cast iron kadai and open fire. Serve hot on a platter lined with paper towel. Quantity obtained depends on the temperament and generosity of the cook. Recommendation to serve with goolgoolas for which a vetkoek recipe should do the trick. Mainstay optional.

White Peter and the Mariannhill tumblers

Dialling the Life of Kiru
Kiru Naidoo

BlackBerry is an absolute pain. I remember being thrilled with them a decade ago.

I once commended one to a higher up who could barely get their podgy fingers to punch the numbers. In the years since, I have relished and reviled them. They have just not kept pace with the competition nor kept their house tidy. These viruses that pop up are infuriating and as for that clock dial!

I was at dinner with a Frenchman the other evening on a rather posh North Coast estate. You know the type that talk with their hands and eat salad with their fingers. He threatened to throw both his Blackberries into the braai. They had gone down on him twice the same day and not at a good time either.

I don't know what I am still doing with this Rosetta stone of communications. The seduction of the new generation Samsungs is hollering at me. That would take me to the top end with telephones again.

Reminds me of forty years ago in Durban’s Chatsworth township when my home had the only telephone for miles. It was one of those Bakerlite monstrosities in ebony with a cup for a mouthpiece and an enormous dial that double-clicked endlessly.

It was an advance on the ones where you picked up the handset and someone on the other side said "Nommer asseblief?" before they listened in for onward transmission to all the neighbourhood.

I also remember the tickey box at the "Off the Hook" fish and chips shop in my neighbourhood Westcliff Shopping Centre. A shiny 5c coin could connect one to Timbouctou. You notice I write it in the pompous French way in deference to my swish French teacher, Madame Ooh la la. I adored her style but I wonder why we never noticed her breaking the academic boycott of apartheid. That will go down as one of the mysteries of my political universe.

Phoneless Chatsworth folks would give our number 436351 to all their friends, relatives or indeed anyone they wanted to impress. When a call came the party would be asked to hold while the handset was gently placed on the white doily. We even had a special imbuia telephone stand. The next twenty minutes or so was straight out of Monty Python. (Life of Kiru, geddit?)

Someone from my household will shout next door that there was a call for so and so. And so the message ran from attached neighbour to kitchen door neighbour to front house to back house to opposite neighbour to corner house to top house. Soon the whole neighbourhood knew that so and so had a phone call. Getting the message to so and so became everyone's priority.  If so and so was not at home they could be frog-marched even from miles away to take the call. The bush telegraph worked brilliantly.

The ritual didn't end at getting the message to so and so that a call was waiting for them. So and so once reached would start running on the spot catching her breath for a few moments at the kindergarten, Moon Roy's spaza and shebeen, GP Naidoo’s manicured bourganvilla hedge, Cavendish School Gate, Rent Office Ganas’s broken down vintage on bricks, Ken's shebeen, Number Ten Aunty’s Gate, Salim Moosa's palm tree, Corky's shebeen and Fathy Aunty’s to announce that they had a phone call.  

Eventually breathless, so and so would make it to the sitting room of House 51 Road 320.  After exchanging prolonged pleasantries and offering thanks to the householders so and so would eventually shout "Hallo" in that lilted Indian-accented English now instantly recognisable from Vancouver to Sandton Square. One had to speak louder for long distance calls because the caller was far away.

An audience would soon gather at the kitchen stable door and at the tin post box at the top of the stairs. All expectant that something juicy was in the offing. Had Lucky Boy sent to bible school in Cape Town found a new love somewhere between the pages of the Old and New Testaments?  Was Kantha and her brood coming by steam train from the Amatikulu sugar barracks for a short visit for Christmas, New Year and then hanging around for three months after?

Was it George Annamalay's second wife saying they will be coming Sunday lunchtime bringing the eldest daughter's arangetram dance invitation that will be at SCIFIDA Hall at 3pm on the Sunday after Purtassi ends with chicken breyani supper served immediately afterwards and so and so and family must come because Carnatic singer Sunny Pillay and his sons were performing?  With the cost of phone calls being what they were you had to say as much as possible as fast as possible with scant regard for commas or even a pause for breath.

Had Monica’s twins run away again to go stay with their alcoholic father in Merebank where they will get wheezing from all the pollution from the oil refinery and that so and so should send her policeman husband to have a word with the alcoholic father to send the children back?

Was it to say that Subatri had sent a telegram to say that she reached Kanyakumari in the deep south of India safely and that she was writing her name in Tamil on a conch shell right from where the two oceans meet and that granny must keep a special place in the Philips radio display cabinet for it?  Just what did that long telegram cost?  Was cat-eyes Kessie’s father discharged from King Edward VIII Hospital after they amputated his left leg above the knee and did the Joburg nurses frighten him enough to take his diabetes tablets?  

Did silent night Mukesh get registered in the Mariannhill magistrate’s office to Miriam, his Zulu sweetheart since pre-school because his father said he was going to take him out of the will and boot him out on his arse if he didn’t marry his Hindu first cousin?

Did the dagga rooker Morgan eventually plaster and paint the Unit 3 house with the money he saved in Bommie’s (stokvel) lottery?  

Was Benjamin, the security branch monster harassing Shanthi again about hiding Robben Island people in the back room of the Silverglen house and will so and so keep the politicals for a few days without telling anybody? Did Pastor JF Rowlands really have tea at Radha Akka’s house to tell her all about his India trips and did she really take out the new Johnson Brothers china wedding set with the gold trim? 

Was so and so aware that they were taking disability grant applications at the Indian Affairs Department in Unit 5 and that the closing date was next Friday and that she must take the parents’ and grandparents’ ID cards and an affidavit which she can do in the charge office at the Bayview Police Station? 

Did so and so know that White Peter re-classified his light-skinned son with the curly hair from Indian into Coloured so that he could get an apprenticeship at Sasol and that the personnel office from Secunda sent a postal order for him to buy the 3^rd class train ticket to come for the trade test?  

Was Zaiboonisha’s daughter pregnant by the taxi man’s son because it was very suspicious that the family took the child out of Summit Government-Aided Primary School when she was getting double promotion and sent her to stay with the coalmine people in Glencoe?

Salacious stories aside, often it was just the receptionist from Dr Bux saying that the blood test results arrived or Clerk Siva from Tollman Brothers, the furniture shop on West Street to say come pick up the certificate of good payment and the four glass tumblers Christmas present.

And so it came to pass that so and so eventually rang off. The news content of the call with a few embellishments, curses or both was carried back the same animated route. Those were the days long before Radio Lotus, SABC2 or a subscription to the The Witness. 

Calls were not only received. People would also come to ring people in centres near and far. So and so would just pop their head over the kitchen stable door and ask to use the phone. A nod from my mother was enough consent. So and so would do their business. When done, a silver coin was silently left on the doily. Olde worlde courtesy.

Nowadays when your BlackBerry is borrowed for a quick call they even scroll through your pictures and bbms.

Khanyi Mbau cried tears

Khanyi Mbau cried tears

Kiru Naidoo

This flu has flattened me. I am toying with the idea of drafting my obituary. 

My first thought is whether I will die owing any living person money.  Banks and other institutions will get their pound of flesh anyhow.  Let me tick that box as clear. 

Just imagine Kenny giving my glowing eulogy in the packed Clare Estate crematorium hall and Nondi from Unit 3 in the cheap seats stage-whispering I only paid him half for the suit he stitched me in 1985?  Pestilent tailors billing for something long after you have ceased to wear it!  I stole that line – from Saki or Oscar Wilde I can’t be sure now.  What with death so much on my mind this is not the time to be original. 

I am not too keen on medication.  That’s my Chatsworth breed.  Only go to the doctor when you at death’s door.  What’s the point in wasting money otherwise?  Besides the first question the doctor asks is, “How are you?”  For #@$* sake if I was hale and hearty, I wouldn’t have rocked on the broken globe chair in the waiting room for two hours catching other people’s germs and reading ancient Reader’s Digests. 

For all the speeches I wrote for Kenny at Glenover High School I hope he gets this one right.  Imagine if he had a Digger’s moment and stopped halfway to ask Rajkumar Nundkumar how to say that word.  That’s an insider joke which will be understood by half the crowd who will come to the funeral. 

My old and dear friends won’t believe the funeral message and will come just to check that I am really dead.  The other half being strangers will come to be photographed by Ranjith Kally and interviewed by the Sunday Times Extra about what a loss I will be in the local Indian community. 

Mine will have to be a low budget celebrity funeral. Khanyi Mbau will be there.  Aunty Saroj will suspect we were lovers.  Now why else would Khanyi cry tears? 

The matter of my dispatch will create some serious confusion but lesser conflict I hope.  For one, my nursery rhymes were along the lines of “if you happy and you know it and you really want to show it”.  The first lines I read in Church of the Nazarene (next to G Motors) at age four were from John 3:16. 

I also held the wings and feet of the Frankenstein roosters my granny slaughtered for Mathra Veeran, sang the whole Thevaram in the wrong key and blew the conch at the head of the Barrack’s Temple kavady. 

In adult life I continue to meticulously observe Ramzaan and every now and then I prostrate before the tomb of the saint, Badsha Peer (less frequently than my mother used to take me as a child). 

If I pull till January I want to make the pilgrimage up the Holy Mountain, Nhlangakazi.  My good friend Aziz Hassim who got on the earlier train to the great yonder often joked that times were so tough that you needed more than one god. 

Let me perish all these thoughts about death and dying.  It’s time to get out of bed and go to work.  The public service doesn’t accept sick notes.  Only death certificates.

Cycling past the buffet

Cycling past the buffet

Kiru Naidoo

The pilates instructor has some meat on the bone.  I am not in the class but I appreciate that the gym hires beyond the size 28 dress size.

On increasingly frequent mornings I take up my position outside the glass doors.   The cycle arena is packed like schoolgirls at the YDE sale but it has the vantage point of neighbouring the pilates class.

Lest I be construed a voyeur let me confess that may not be strictly correct.  I draw inspiration from the core exercises. I can only take it in twenty minute bites though.  Well that's when the cycling machine chucks me out and summons the next punter.

In gym-speak I migrate from cardiovascular to the weight training upstairs.   Even though I am a master of the overstatement that is rather rich.   Being of fairly portly disposition and reluctantly trudging uphill to middle age, I am more rumour than danger.   Let's just say I potter around mental knife in hand.

The guy doing forearm curls next to me had a transplant.   Tree trunk for thigh.   I stab him bloodlessly.   The strength in my arms coming from years of lifting Homer, Austen, Dickens, Achebe and Naipaul.

I was a legend in my own mind in my native Chatsworth.  No one worked the aisles and shelves of the Unit 10 municipal library like I did.  It got to the obsessive point where I even knew when an obscure book had been checked out. I would harass the librarians to know when it would be back. I would even know how overdue fines on the said item would tally up.

I spent a lot of my life in that library.   In between reading I would chat up girls. Let's just leave it at the fact that I had enormous success with the reading.

This was the earlyish eighties - a time of raging teenage hormones and of intense anti-apartheid political activity. The Unit 10 library was one of the sites of mobilisation.   Des of the green eyes rarity was one of the librarians.   He would organise a bus to take 50 or 60 of us to the gumba. This was usually at the Rick Turner Student Union on the Howard College campus of the then University of Natal.

My mates among whom were Daniel, Seelan, Neville and Clive, especially Clive were all eager for the ride.  After rousing speeches by the likes of Desmond Tutu, Bheki Cele and a host of other political firebrands we were treated to a sweaty disco in the hall named after the assassinated anti-apartheid hero.  

And there-in lay the greatest attraction. We could gyrate with girls of all hues, tongues and physical locations.   In a rigidly racially segregated society you have no idea of the thrill of that.   Hormonal relief aside, those gumbas were remarkable baby steps in building a non-racial society, of a nation turning to each other rather than on each other.

The dance parties usually lasted until the security police viciously broke it up.   We would scatter in panic in every direction with the leadership all the while appealing for us to be calm and directing us to our buses home.  

Hats off to the theorists of the South African revolution who conjured those ideas of organisation and conscientisation with a mix of dancing.   Regrettably in the twenty years since freedom was won we have not come full circle in building a truly non-racial society. We must each shoulder a morsel of blame for that.

Some of us have spent too much time getting fat at the buffet and I am not talking about the pilates instructor.

The hiss of the tissue nobility

The hiss of the tissue nobility

Kiru Naidoo

No one from Chatsworth has won the Nobel Prize yet. I am certain it will happen one day. When it does I hope it will be for someone who invents a silent toilet spray. Nothing announces the nature of your business more loudly than that condensed hiss of strawberries and cream. 

Now these are middle class woes.  In days of yore we had no such trouble.  The toilet was either a distance from the house or facing outside.  In Unit 3 the toilet was outside the kitchen door with yet another door to shield from the elements.  In Unit 2 the toilet was attached to the building but outside altogether. 

  

Nuclear emissions gently wafted off into the yard or in the direction of the neighbours.  If matters got overly offensive, I bunch of strong incense and a few curses were hurriedly procured. 

Lavatory duties were a defined part of my childhood chores.  Let’s just say I had oversight of the mopping up unit.  Usually it was every second party who had need for my services.  The older generation made do with a chomboo of water and a deft left hand.  I dealt with the paperwork for the rest. 

These were days long before double ply Baby Soft with little puppy patterns.  Old newspapers had to be chopped up in even squares and hung on a nail behind the toilet door.  Those with scant regard for abrasions used the squares as they found them.  The more sensitive types splashed a slash of water.  Annually there was the little luxury of the expired telephone directory which came in the softer white and Yellow Pages. 

It was the weekend business that I especially looked forward to.  My maternal grandfather, Vasantharajulu Naidu, Thatha, lived with my mother’s sister, my delightful Big Amma about three kilometres away in the renting scheme part of Unit 3. 

He was also called Jumbo Naidu.  I recall him removing his hat and stooping to get his head under the door frame.  To my little skinny self he looked all of seven feet tall.  He was always in a suit with a waistcoat.  In the waistcoat pocket he carried a little square tube of Kiltys.  These sweets came in pinks and mauves and were usually in a sickly musk flavour.  Whereas other kids got whole packets of sweets or Simba chips from their grandparents, all my younger brother, sister and I got were fingernail portions. 

My grandfather had these steely grey eyes whether on account of his age or his colourful ancestry I cannot be sure.  Suffice to say that he had a command and correct way about him.  Whenever our mother left us in his care to go off to the market, there was no bouncing on grandad’s knee.  He directed us into shorts and vests. We lined up for physical training.  Extending our arms, touching our toes and the like.

To the less kindly, Vasantharajulu Jumbo was also known as Patches.  That needs little explanation.  He patched everything.  Everything. In fact his clothes had so many patches it was hard to work out what was original.  

Now coming back to the lavatorial element of this story.  On Saturday when Thatha visited we felt like the nobility.  My grandfather walked through the vegetable market.  He had friends there. He was an old farmer himself, dispossessed, depressed and destroyed by the Group Areas Act. 

William pears and starking apples were among the prized fruit at the market.  His connection kept all the soft tissue papers that were used to wrap these delicate fruit. 

And so it came to pass that all weekend we alighted the throne in considerably greater comfort. 

Bondage to freedom

Kiru Naidoo | 15 November, 2010 23:52

Sunday Times Extra (published 16 November 2010)

The Big Read: My family was shipped as human cargo. A hundred and fifty years ago today, a paddle steamer, the SS Truro from Madras, docked in Durban harbour. On board were 342 Indian coolies destined for the sugar plantations and eventually the mines, railways and domestic service of colonial Natal.

This history is depressing. But it tells of the triumph of the human spirit. Indenture was a bizarre instrument - bondage by contract. The British had outlawed slavery in 1834 yet many of their colonies hungered for cheap labour. The Zulu kingdom held the British at bay until its eventual conquest in 1879. Wage labour was a strange idea to King Mpande kaSenzangakhona's subjects.

The vast Indian subcontinent "convulsed by the British occupation" was a ready reservoir. The Industrial Revolution dumped its cheap manufactured goods, ruining the Indian village economy. Millions fell on hard times. Debt and drought ravaged the land. Add to this mix the bitter internal tensions in Indian society. Centuries-old caste and kinship laws held particularly the poor in a stranglehold. In a curious way bonding oneself for five years in a foreign land represented some kind of escape.

If the notorious recruiting agents were to be believed there was gold under every chilli bush. They were soon to discover there were no chillies in Natal, let alone gold. This "coolie catching" system beguiled the naive. It also tricked and coerced many others. It was to do so from 1860 right until 1911 with 152184 persons entered on the indenture register. Among them were "potters and clerks, herdsmen and boatmen, . undertakers, barbers, warriors and priests", painters and prostitutes.

Natal was not the only destination. Indian indenture spanned the globe from British, Dutch and French Guyana to Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Ceylon, Fiji and Mauritius.

In contracting to Natal, Fatima Meer noted that Indian workers had unwittingly chosen one of the worst conditions of labour under the indenture system. While some complied, most planters routinely breached their obligations to provide suitable lodgings, food and medical care. The Coolie Commission of 1872 enquiring into the discontent on the plantations found illegal floggings, withheld wages and sexual assault common.

Acts of resistance were not uncommon. They were, however, isolated and unco-ordinated and met violent retribution. It took a young British-trained Indian lawyer, MK Gandhi, arriving in Natal in 1893 to organise mass-based resistance. He came on a legal brief to represent an Indian merchant but was soon caught up in the throng of South African politics.

Sensing trading opportunities, Indian merchants followed their indentured countrymen from as early as 1869. Largely Muslim, most were at pains to keep their social distance from the ragged plantation coolies and styled themselves as Arabs.

In 1860, the Indian worker was the colony's saviour. Sugar exports in 1863 stood at £26000. A year later it was £1000000. But their political agitation turned them into a nuisance. Worse was the competition that Indian merchants as well as those freed from indenture presented to white commerce. Among the conditions of indenture was that those who had served out their contracts and opted not to return to India could obtain a small plot of land.

Soon Indian market gardeners were undercutting white greengrocers. Vegetables, poultry, butter and grain became plentiful in the colony. Not only was there food security, but prices fell to the lowest levels. Others sold their plots and headed for the diamond and gold fields of Kimberley and Johannesburg. Yet others fanned into the Cape.

The once impoverished planters and politicians who had campaigned for indentured labour bristled with racism ranting about "a restless people and a thieving set of vagabonds".

In 1891, the Free State shut its borders. In 1897, the Transvaal forbade marriages between Indian men and white women. By 1903, Indians could no longer enter the Transvaal without a permit.

A barrage of taxes and restrictions followed. While Inkosi Bhambatha was raising an African rebellion against the hut tax, Gandhi was challenging General Smuts on the passes imposed on Indians. The famous act of peacefully burning the passes and inviting arrest was to evolve into Gandhian passive resistance and satyagraha, a strategy that eventually drove the British out of India.

In 1913 the £3 poll tax imposed on indentured Indians saw 2000 coal miners strike in Newcastle. They marched to the Transvaal border to break the law by crossing without a permit.

The state called out the army and deported them back to the mines, which were facing ruin. The mining compounds were fenced and declared jails. White workers were drafted as warders and flogged Indian miners who refused to work. These acts of non-violent resistance led to serious injury and even death. Sixty thousand workers went on strike in solidarity with the coal miners and the Natal economy wobbled on the brink of collapse.

The might of a violent state eventually prevailed, but the die was cast. The descendants of the indentured workers and the Indian merchants featured in every major act of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance to follow, from the trade unions of the 1930s and 1940s to the defiance campaigns and treason trials of the 1950s to the armed struggles from the 1960s and incarceration on Robben Island. They were in the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s and the mass defiance of apartheid laws in the remaining decades of the 20th century.

This coolie odyssey lays a just claim to the joys of a free society.

The Brace Command

The Brace Command

Kiru Naidoo

After Kumi Naidoo and a few thousand others I think that I am Chatsworth’s most frequent flier.  That brings the very real possibility that I may die in an air crash.  I am not too worried about that.  It’s the events leading up to the crash that bother me.

This morning on an early morning flight out of Jozi I was sandwiched in between the great unwashed.  Those hordes who do the cheap ticket long hauls between New Zealand or some other end of the earth place and Durban via Dubai.  They travel over two or three days all the while avoiding the sniff of a bar of soap.

I am an aisle seat specimen.  I do that for various reasons.   One is that I get my jollies from my arm being repeatedly brushed by hurrying air hostesses.  But the aisle also has the “extra strong” risk.  Those heavily burdened strangers to soap with excess luggage to stuff into the overhead compartment.  They linger longer than most with their overhanging armpits.

Extra strong to the uninitiated comes from that old Chatsworth favourite Wilsons Extra Strong mints which come in the black, white, green and red paper tubes.  Their legend comes from sitting with Chiefs’ supporters from the hostels who raise their arms in unison every time their team scores.  It’s the reason I have always been a Pirates fan. ( I am ready to cross the floor if one of those dishy Motaung girls asks nicely.)   There I go digressing again – taking the N2 when a short left will do.

Let’s call her Janice.  Caucasian parents given their daughters such uninspiring names.  Janice was the partner, biblical or Mickey Mouse Club or both I am not quite sure, to the unwashed Jason in the middle seat next to me.  Caucasian parents err in the same way with their sons.  “Is this your bag?”, she squealed.  I smiled a half second acknowledgement and returned to my nostril defence barrier technique.

Well she got my consent to stuff her furniture over my dainty hold-all.  Janice was in the opposite aisle seat.  “Would I mind swopping?”  I unclipped, unhitched, folded tray table, grabbed newspapers – everything in one samurai manoeuvre to the other side.

And that’s where I met her.  A stranger to both soap and toothpaste.  Mrs Moonian was coming from Sydney.  She was on the same flights with Janice and Jason.  Such a nice couple.  She shared her meal vouchers in Dubai airport with them because she can hardly eat because of her short breath.

She went to help her grand daughter who had a baby but she had to leave after five months because the visa was expiring.  This was her sixth trip.  So nice the place is.  Big garden and no crime. Hardly Africans.  Few Aborigines but not much where they staying.  They got no burglar guards.

Her grand daughter’s husband is accountant.  “Immigrated” because his neighbour in the Mount Edgecombe Golf Estate was hijacked.  So nice townhouse he had to sell for next to nothing.  Now he bought a second house in Sydney which he is giving for rent to one nice Chinese family who can hardly speak English.  They got one teenage child because their country policy like that.

Grand daughter had second baby after fifteen years. Child is so lovely like one doll.  Big great grand daughter wants to be a nurse.  Parents are saying doctor but mind is made up about nurse. “Where you formerly from?”  “You working in Joburg?”  “All our fellas gone that side.”

Grand daughter was a teacher but not working anymore because husband doing so well.  They doing sideline with three pizza shops they bought.  Grand daughter’s husband says one day they will be like Debonairs in Sydney.  One shop they have a Bangladesh manager, another shop a Malaysian girl and another shop his brother is running.  They suspecting the brother is stealing.  Not nice to have connections running business.

Just then the plane hit some turbulence.  I pricked my ears for the brace command.  I have never wanted to put my head between my legs more desperately.

Naming a tall story

Naming a tall story

Kiru Naidoo

Arianna. She's called Arianna Hope Pillay. The little princess announced herself into the world almost three months earlier than she should have.

We absolutely love her name but I mischievously call her Rhianna because she is like a diamond in the sky. (That sounds like the corny lines I deployed at the Unit 3 bus stop in Chatsworth in the late seventies. They were as unsuccessful as my Percy Sledge haircut.)

By the grace of powers spiritual, medical and parental Arianna is doing fantastically well. Last night I noticed that she has sprouted a dimple and cleft to match mine. That confirms our blood relationship. She translates into my grand niece. Go figure.

I have grown up in a culture where we claim and create relationships that we cherish. That is in sharp contrast with the Anglo-Saxon world view and its gardening of linear family trees.

In Chatsworth we claimed the kitchen door neighbours of our third cousins twice removed as our connections. It was a good entry point to eat in their houses and to land a date on a slow Saturday night.

Conservative Indian mothers happily sent their daughters out with their "cousins". It was not really incest because all agreed that we "came connection" in a roundabout way.

Now returning to the diamond of our eyes. I am going to take her to soccer matches. She will be a Pirates supporter. Once a pie-rat always a pie-rat. I can hear her taunt Amakhosi fans on the school play field with missing front teeth.

Fortunately her father supports the right reds. One day we will take her to our Church of England at Old Trafford.  I don’t know if United jerseys come in prem but we will have to get her kitted out really quickly.  There’s a lesser branch of the family where the other reds lurk and they are always recruiting the unsuspecting.

It's also read in her fortune that I will drag her to political meetings like my father did, like his father did unto him and like I have done with my sons. Our blood runs black, green and gold.  No quarrel there.

Right now she barely sleeps in her cot.  Every moment woken or sleeping she is carried in one arm or the other.  It’s twelve years since we have had a baby in the family. One stamp collecting ballerina Gabrielle Teria being the last.  No guessing that she will be spoiled rotten like her mother was.

As I was passing around Arianna’s dimpled picture on my Blackberry bbm in the wee hours of this morning, one mate asked her name.  She followed that by asking “wut happened to Goindamma, Muniamma, Saraswathi & all?” 

My retort was that her full name is Muthumarianna and that Arianna is her ‘house name’.  For a better explanation of that you will need to refer to Professor Rajend Mesthrie’s entertaining Dictionary of South African Indian English.  Lest I get into trouble with Arianna’s grandma, let me confess that the house name business is a tall story.

Now names are a minefield.  My first class friend Solly was christened Solomon Ananthan Kuppan.  The choice of his family was to take one name from the Bible and the other from their ancient Tamil heritage.  I am at a loss to explain Darren James Raoul Gangapershad whose name I once heard hollered by an austere nursing sister in outpatients at the RK Khan Hospital!

We are fond of abbreviating too.  I for instance was christened Kirunavavalakarasu Thirunyanasambandarmurthi.  My mother called me Louis.  But then I am a teller of short stories, long stories and tall stories.  By the way my sister is really called Thirupurasundri.