Nothing Left to Escape From
Preeta Samarasan returns with Madam S. Vallipuram and the winter installment of the Object Permanence Series
I lost an hour today, and if you, like me, are living in the U.S., you most likely did, too. I hate the lost time while I love the later light; so, it might be a toss-up, a wash, if it weren’t the case that in between the love and hate, lies an imposition of power that doesn’t sit right. I can’t abide it. The disruption of deep rhythms by a wholly avoidable need-to-recover from something arbitrary and beyond my control gets me every year.
I read yesterday that they are calling tomorrow Sleepy Monday. I’ll call it Seething Monday, because that’s how I always feel on the Monday after the annual switch to Daylight Savings Time. It seems like such a small thing, but to me, it’s the tip of a very dark iceberg. I won’t bore you with a tour, but suffice it to say that springing forward brings to the surface anger and feelings of powerlessness akin to what I might feel if I were aboard the Titanic, safe and cozy in my first class berth and all that signified, when bam!
I want to believe that if we tied our rhythms to something less arbitrary—the sun and moon, for instance, like the tides do, or the seasons like the birds and trees do—then everything would be okay. Profoundly okay. I do believe it, but I don’t know how to get from here to there. Springing forward just reminds me that I’m a puppet on the string of misguided human systems and structures, manipulated by a guiding hand I neither trust nor respect, when all of me knows the moon’s pull is right, the sun’s angle is true.
For company in this terrible moment of seething, I am grateful to Madame S. Vallipuram. I can relate. I hope you will, too. Across time, distance, and difference.
Big love, Ashley
Madam S. Vallipuram, 88, Widow of Retired Estate Manager, Kajang
What a house, I tell you, what a house. To me it seemed as big as those European palaces one reads about. Rooms after rooms after rooms. And each room vast, you stand inside you’ll feel the air blowing right through because we had not enough furniture to fill it. We had what? Wait I’ll tell you: our big bed, my dressing table, a single bed for each one of the children, the study table they had to take turns to use. One settee, two three chairs, and the curio cabinet in the front hall. In the dry kitchen, the crockery case and the old meat safe. On top of the huge rooms there were all those neverending corridors with the grey shadows swishing up and down them all day. In one of those corridors I had another settee, a cheap shiny affair upholstered in PVC, where I used to sit and stare whenever I needed to escape from everybody. Because it wasn’t just the six of us.
Where you can have just and your own family in an estate manager’s house those days? All sorts of people will be going in and out all day long: the normal servants, the enterprising relatives who will tag along sometimes for a bit of extra cash (slightest excuse they would say “I’ll bring my sister, I’ll bring my niece, I’ll bring my son”), the tappers my husband would drag home by the scruff of the neck whenever extra hands were required for some out-of-the-ordinary task: slaughtering a goat, feeding a funeral crowd, harvesting and cutting up the green mangoes from the half dozen trees for oorukai. There would always be some stray tapper woman you had never seen in your life, suddenly squatting there gutting the fish or cleaning the goat intestines. Most of them would keep their respectful distance but every once in a while you came across a chatty one and then I would need to withdraw to my Drawing Settee. You see I had read that the vellakarans had Withdrawing Rooms which they later shortened to Drawing Rooms, so I thought, I also can have at least a Drawing Settee if not a full room.
I was not made for life with a husband and four children and a house with traffic to rival the Grand Bazaar’s. In our time one was not supposed to talk about all that though. If you were a woman you were never allowed to admit you got tired of them every now and then, let alone that you sometimes wished they didn’t exist. You were supposed to be grateful for a good husband who came home sober every day, didn’t beat you or the children, and wasn’t sowing his stale oats among the poor tapper girls. I used to hear of some who would even claim the prettiest woman for themselves, no matter if she was married. They would pay off the husband or threaten him and that was that, there would be a houseful of small fry who all looked a hell of a lot like the big fish. I didn’t have anything like that to complain about. I had no excuse for running away, so I didn’t run away, I just sat.
I sat and sat, some would say I spent my whole life sitting instead of doing. I must have looked frightfully lazy to other people, sitting and leaving the doing to all the servants and the strays. I didn’t even have a hand phone like people have nowadays to pretend to be doing something, I must have looked like a bloody goldfish I tell you. But how much I saw and how much I thought while just sitting there. Don’t believe me means don’t believe lah, I don’t owe anybody an account of my days what. I saw the big silent feuds between the men, I saw the small-small noisy fights between the servant girls, I saw the children working out who was on top and who was at the bottom of their own ladder. Ten fifteen years before they left the house to live their own lives I already knew what kind of people they would be. As we say in Tamil, from the first sprout itself you can know how the bean plant will grow. This one openly ruthless, that one quietly scheming and laying her cunning plans behind the scenes. This one a hopeless crybaby begging for sympathy from all the wrong quarters, that one you cut off his leg also he’ll be unable to show his feelings in front of other people.
And what did I do with all the sights I gathered? You would think I would have somehow used them to my advantage. A bit of threatening and blackmailing to get what I wanted out of people, why not. But no. The problem is, I never wanted anything out of people at all.
There was a miller, hale and bold
Beside the River Dee
He worked and sang from morn till night
No lark more blithe than he
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
“I envy nobody, no not I
And nobody envies me!”
Learnt that song at school eighty years ago, you see, it must have stuck with me because it was just exactly how I was too. Didn’t need anything, didn’t want anything except my own freedom inside my own head, no need to go very far to get that.
I thought I’ll spend the rest of my days sitting on that settee as it got moved from manager’s bungalow to manager’s bungalow, I thought if they can move it while I’m sitting on it better still, like the sedan chairs of old. Everything comes to an end of course but for all I was so proud of myself for seeing everything, my attention was so riveted to the small stories that I failed to predict the end of the big story. I’d been watching the ants scurry about, naming each one, learning which one had a crushed feeler and which one a missing leg, congratulating myself for being able to gauge the weight of each one’s burden when all the while I never even noticed the shadow cast by the giant foot poised to crush them all at one go. As if I would have understood even if I had noticed – don’t dream that anybody was going to sit and explain the stockmarket to a woman like me. All I knew was, one morning the world woke up and the government had bought up everything and it was supposed to be a great nationalist victory over the British, at least that’s what they were saying on the news. But for us that was the beginning of the end, or maybe it was the end of the end, at any rate one by one the Indian managers were kicked out and their kind brought in because it turned out that’s what nationalist meant. Everywhere they were doing the same thing it seems, in the mines, in the government departments, even in the schools, or at least that’s what my husband said, and myself forced to hear him blather on for the first time since I had been permanently evicted from my Drawing Settee.
I mean, of course we could have kept it, but we had too much furniture for the house he had built for us. First time we were moving into our own house, I should have been excited but I could not summon up the required excitement. Ownership has never excited me. Anyway who can sit around relishing the pride of ownership when decisions have to be made? We kept the crockery case but not the meat safe. The dressing table but not the study table, as by then there were only two children left studying at home. The front hall settee but not the Drawing Settee. I thought, where will I escape to now? But in the new house there were fewer people. Two fewer children, no more servants’ relatives looking for odd jobs, no more stray tappers running in and out. A great quiet descended. What nonsense, no it didn’t, I just felt like saying that line though I can’t even tell you where I picked it up. It didn’t descend, it crept up on me bit by bit until finally one day I found myself in a life in which solitude was no longer a luxury. But I’m not like all the other old coots out there, you know, I don’t sit around wishing my children were small again and climbing all over me and pestering me with questions that other people find cute and whatnot. People like to say one day you’ll miss all this, but I’ll tell you what I miss, it’s that feeling of escape. All the hubbub around you and the small hands grabbing at your sarong and you just saunter off without a backward glance. Priceless, I tell you. Nothing like it, and I’ll never feel it again now that I have nothing left to escape from.
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