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Hello Mum;
How are you? I know you are all right because I have been checking with June, though I know you must be wondering why I have not called. Normally, even I don’t
leave it this long. But there is a good reason! You see, I wanted to write you a letter, to tell you a few things that I don’t think I have said before,
I was in bed the other night, unable to sleep, probably because I had eaten too much dinner , and it was one of those warm, sticky nights we are having so many of recently. I got to thinking about the problems we are having with Martin, his not having a job yet, and in general about the worries our children give us. I was feeling quite sorry for myself! Until I progressed to thinking about my own childhood, and the problems I had given MY parents! My own problems rapidly faded into insignificance, and I never did get any sleep that night. I recalled as many of the major incidents as I could, I think in the order they occurred:
I was only about three or fours years old, if I remember correctly, when I spilled the container of boiling water over myself. Young as I was, the memory of that is quite vivid, though the aftermath, mercifully, is a complete blank. You have told me since that I was just one big blister, and you and dad must have had one hell of a time seeing me through that. I swear I can sometimes still see the faint ripple marks from the scars it must have left on my body, and I tried to imagine just how I would react if something like that happened to Martin or Kelly. I had to stop thinking about it, because it made me cringe with fear!
That happened in Pahartali, Assam, also the scene of my next trick, when I fell into the waste pit at the back of our house. I think I have these two events in the right sequence, though I cannot be sure. I must have been about five years old, at the most! What I do know is that the pit was used to dispose of all the waste from the house, the bones, offal and all the unwanted bits from the deer and wild boar dad used to shoot. I’m sure that the odd vulture used to fall in from time to time, adding a little “body” to the filthy soup in the hole. Mickey jumped over the narrow opening, and of course I had to follow. As we know, I did not make it. That is another vivid memory, if a little disjointed, that I have. I wish my short- term memory was as good as it is long-term. I remember dad, who had raced across the field from the house, pulling me out by my hair and running back with me in his arms, over the fence into our back yard, where you took over. You stuck me under the tap, almost completing the drowning process I had just escaped from! You forced glass after glass of heavily salted water down my throat to make me bring up the filthy mess I had swallowed in the pit. It must have worked, because here I am, all those years later. You pulled me through, though you and dad must have spent the next month or so expecting me to keel over and die from some deadly disease. Chalk up another nightmare, courtesy of me!
The next few years must have passed relatively quietly, because it was not until I was about nine or ten years old, and we were in Asansol, Bengal that I notched up my next accident. Mick’s kite, not mine, got stuck up on the roof of the block of houses we lived in, and he talked me into going up after it. You cannot blame him, because I was always much better at climbing then he was. So I shinnied up the lightening conductor rod that ran up the side of the building, which of course had to come loose just before I reached the top. As it arched back, it threw me about forty or so feet to the ground, almost exactly on the spot I had started climbing from. Amazingly, I would have been completely unharmed, except for the fact that my thigh fell directly across the lightening conductor where it ran across the drain at the foot of the building. Snapped my thigh clean as a whistle! No blood, just a sharp bend in my thigh, like I had two knees! I suppose I was ‘lucky’ to get away with a broken leg. I could have broken my neck. It was you and dad who were the unlucky ones, having a disaster-prone son like me.
After falling, I remember the rickshaw ride to the hospital, and the anguish on your face as you held me and tried to make me comfortable. Me with my leg grotesquely
bent at the thigh. That must have been a long, long rickshaw ride for you. When we got to the hospital, you refused to accept the doctor’s verdict that I would have a limp for the rest of my life, and I ended up at a hospital in Calcutta. I am unable to remember what happened between, because there was no way I could have travelled by train to Calcutta with my leg bent the way it was. Anyway, they fixed up my leg so well that I can no longer remember which one I broke! That’s something else I owe you, mum! A limp that I don’t have. Thank goodness too! With all my other handicaps, I need a limp like I need a hole in the head! But that hospital!!! I have spent time in quite a few hospitals, what with one thing or another, but compared to that one, they were five star hotels! One bowl of tepid water used to sponge down ten or twelve patients! And I was always ten or twelve beds down the line! Bedbugs were just something you lived with, and the head lice were so overcrowded in my hair that every now and then one would take a walk down the side of my face, just so he could be on his own for a while. It makes my flesh crawl, even now. I recall your reaction to all this when I came home. You shaved all the hair off my head, and burned it along with all the clothes I had worn in the hospital. I’m certain that if it were possible, you would have burned off the top layer of my skin as well! I was in plaster from my waste down to the toes of one leg for quite a while, which made climbing trees quite difficult. But I managed, which earned me a clip across the ear from you.
The last of my major accidents happened a few years later, when I was in my ‘teens. In some ways, that was the most gruesome of all! I nearly decapitated myself
by running into the dhobi’s wire washing line while being chased by one of my friends. I even remember his name. It was Mickey Khan, him with the prodigious mother and sixteen or seventeen brothers and sisters! I often wonder if the rumour that his father had two wives is true.
I ran into the wire at an angle, and sliced my throat to within a fraction of an inch of my windpipe. Even now, it makes my hair stand on end when I think about it! I could have bled to death, or choked my life away right there! But with Mickey Khan’s help I managed to walk home, with my blood running down my shirt and pants and squelching in my shoes. When I walked into the room and saw the shock and horror on your face, I burst out crying with the realisation that I had done something awful to myself. I cannot begin to imagine what YOU felt!
I remember the hospital, the crude anaesthetic administered direct from a bottle onto a cotton-padded tea-strainer like mask over my face, and screaming in fear before I mercifully went under. I believe you fainted out there in the waiting room, from hearing my screams. They stitched me up, and I was left with a thick, raised weal of scar tissue on my neck, which stayed with me until I was well over 20 years old, and which I used as a distinguishing mark on my first passport. It’s gone now of course, and thinking about it, I am remarkably unmarked, considering all the injuries I have inflicted on my body. You used to say that I had nine lives, like a cat. And that I had used up eight and a half of those. Well, here I am hanging on to that last half, and generally enjoying the life which, in so many ways, I owe to you!
Well, there it is mum! A catalogue of horrors guaranteed to make the average mother curl up and quietly go insane. Thank goodness you were always way above average, or I for one would not be here today writing this letter to you. I wanted to write it all down, to remind you, and myself, of all the stuff I put you through, and to make sure you know that nothing of what you did is taken for granted. Of course, in between the incidents I have listed here, there were all the one-hundred-and-one ‘little’ things you had to put up with. The numerous bites from almost certainly rabid dogs, broken or sprained limbs, and snake bites, near-drowning, etc., that my sister, four brothers and I suffered in the course of growing up in rural India. We all came through, largely because of you. But how you survived without going crazy is beyond me! And so mum, from June, Ron, Mick, myself, Ken and Les:
THANK YOU MOTHER!
So that’s the reason I have not been in touch for a while, and you must admit, its beats all the other excuses I have come up with. See you soon, your loving (and grateful) son.
Tony (July 1989)
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