Object Permanence 2: Mr. M.K. Kumaravel
Preeta Samarasan serves seconds from this FED-exclusive fictional nonfiction series
You know it’s special when you head back for seconds, and FED is pleased to serve up the second installment of Preeta Samarasan’s Object Permanence series—a concept cooked up specially for FED. To learn more about the series and the concept, be sure to check out “Object Permanence 1: Nappy Pail” and “Madame Rajambal’s Garlic Chicken,” both from our inaugural season, the spring feast.
And now, with no further ado, let’s meet Mr. Kumaravel…
Big love, Ashley
Mr. M.K. Kumaravel
82, retired telecommunications worker, Peterborough
I know what you all are thinking: Wah, bugger landed up in England only, straightaway managed to buy himself a radiogram and all, must have had a nice cushy job waiting for him but now coming and crying his crocodile tears about discrimination it seems.
Well it was not like that. First of all, the radiogram was not mine. It was the landlady’s, just like the bamboo furniture set, the carpet, the silver-framed clock, the photos, all what you see here. Now you must be thinking: What the bloody hell was going on between the fler and his landlady, that he could be lazing around in her living room in singlet and sarong?
Even though all that is none of your business, I will get to it later.
The story I want to tell you is the story of how I landed in that front room.
You see, I was happily teaching at a boys’ school in Teluk Anson. Had all sorts of boys in my class, many from poorer families. Their fathers were labourers, tappers, factory workers, the type of parents who don’t have the strength to run after their children when it comes to schoolwork, so these boys will fool around and fall behind, you know how it is. Slightest thing they won’t come to school. My sister sick sir, my aunty came from outstation sir, my cousin’s wedding sir, yesterday raining sir. I used to tell them, we are living in a rainy country, if raining means you won’t come to school, better you let your parents save money on the school uniform.
You cannot rescue all of them, but you actually never know which ones you can rescue. All you can do is to keep pushing them to buck up, pull up their socks, remember that they are Indian so nobody is going to give them a damn thing for free. If you want to climb out of the shit, I used to tell them, you will have to hoist your own weight out of the sewer. Some unlikely cases, the ones who will scratch your car and puncture your tyres because you caned them for misbehaving, all of a sudden they will attain enlightenment like Buddha under the bodhi tree. Others will try their damned hardest and last minute something will happen to scupper their dreams: father will go to prison, mother will die, like a bloody Dickens novel I tell you, it used to break my heart. You had to keep going, rescuing one at a time, blasting them as necessary, caning, pulling ears, telling them the hard truths. I’m proud to say that in my time I did rescue quite a few. Over twenty-five years I slogged for those boys.
One fine day I heard about a degree course in the UK. Because you know I was not a graduate teacher, only had teacher training. After teaching so long I always thought no point going to university just to get a degree in what I have already been doing. But this course was specific to working with troubled youths. There was a whole write-up and looking at it I thought, surely nobody can deny that all these boys from rough families need somebody who is an expert in all this type of thing. On top of that I felt I myself could use a break, sit in a nice classroom for a few years with people who were not going to puncture my tyres.
None of this will shock those of you who know our great tanahair, but after I tumpah-ed my blood sweat and tears for more than twenty-five years the Ministry of course refused to approve my leave application. Supposedly the course had nothing to do with my job as a teacher, so cannot take leave for that purpose it seems. Yet, surprise surprise, less than six months later two Malay teachers from my school were given leave to take this very course that I had discovered on my own, and all expenses paid courtesy of our government.
Whose stomach won’t burn? All I could do was to douse the fire with Eno’s Fruit Salts and keep my nose to the grindstone.
Then few years later, somehow or other the British Council came to hear of me through a quiz show for which I had prepared a few boys. Our team won first prize so naturally people sat up and took notice, Wah, how come those type of boys from that type of school also can win trophies, what magic is this teacher working, and so forth. One fine day I got an offer to accompany the team to a youth conference of some kind in Birmingham. How excited the boys were, you can imagine. I took the offer letter and went straight to the Ministry, where I was informed by a lady officer that only the Ministry gets to decide who gets what and who goes where, and that furthermore the conference spot had already been taken up by a team from one of the Malay-only residential schools. Within five minutes I was shown the door.
That day I really saw red, I tell you. Not only did I know that ninety-nine percent of the boys they would be sending would be tunku this and tengku that, all from families going on annual world tours and shopping trips to London, but I understood once and for all that the bastards couldn’t give a damn about me and my pitiful ambitions, whereas for their kind, no need to have ambition also, the top prize would always be handed to them on a silver platter.
On that day I decided, never mind if I have to start over from scratch, at least I will live with dignity.
Go ahead, you can blame me for having abandoned all those boys about whom I claimed to care so much. Fair enough. But the sad truth is that for every one of those boys one can save, there are a hundred more -- nay, a thousand, a million, ten million if we start poking our noses into other nations’ business too and why not, it’s not as though a boy or girl is no business of ours just because they happened to be born in another nation – that one will never even hear about, let alone be in a position to save. You could sacrifice your whole life to the cause and still the number of lives you will have saved will be able to dance on the head of a pin, to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas or whoever the hell it was. What I mean to say is: lives ripe for the saving are plentiful everywhere, so you may as well station yourself somewhere where you yourself can have a shred of dignity and respect while saving others.
Don’t think there haven’t been days when the accusations get to me: Oh, so you took the easy way out; oh, as though anybody in England can be as desperate as our Indian boys here; oh, if that’s how is, if you buggered off to a comfortable life of carpets and radiograms then shaddup your mouth lah, you forfeited the right to pretend to care about Indians in the tanahair.
Fine. Maybe when push came to shove, I cared about myself more than I cared about anyone else. Who can blame me for being seduced by the promise of equal opportunity? Not that England in the 1980s was a bastion of equal opportunity either. Colour bar everywhere, getting called a bloody Paki left right and centre, genteel grannies getting up to sit somewhere else if I sat next to them on the bus. I didn’t get a teaching job here either, don’t worry. I had to take what I could get just to keep body and soul together, start from scratch as I said, and for all my talking big about dignity, of course I had to swallow my pride and make my peace with menial jobs, clerical work and all the rest after being a bigshot vaathiyar back home. But the crux of the matter was, I had the same right to anything as anybody else I passed on the street. Here I could at least dare to hope, I could dream and draw up plans. And for every five blows to my pride there was a balm somewhere. Viz.: the landlady, owner of the pictured radiogram, she who introduced me to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and A Flock of Seagulls and dono what else, while I introduced her to M.S. Viswanathan and T.K. Ramamurthy, hahaha, don’t laugh.
Of the two of us she was definitely the more glamorous. I say ‘landlady’ and you picture a stout upstanding matron in an apron, stiff perm, face that looks like somebody kneaded it out of pink clay, huffing and puffing, dropping her h’s here and slapping on unnecessary h’s there as she announces that dinner is served -- yes or not? But my Ruby was nothing like that. Name notwithstanding, she did not have that boiled red complexion. Stylish as a film star she was, first time she opened the door, hip cocked and cigarette in one hand, I had the shock of my life, where the blazes have I landed I thought. Back home people would have pegged her as a Woman of Loose Morals. But Ruby had the highest morals of all: nothing doing, she said, I don’t care what other people say, I rent to anybody whatever colour they may be. It didn’t take her long to understand that I had had to descend a few steps down the ladder I’d climbed to come and live in a white country. Quoting Shakespeare and checking old ladies’ mutton chops out for them at the supermarket, eh, she said wryly. First we were friends, and then we were special friends. By the time I was lounging on her carpet being served cheese spread in a Pyrex dish we had been married fifteen years. Never had any children of our own. I didn’t feel bad about that, by my calculations I’d saved enough boys born to other men to count for bringing up at least five of my own. Ruby may have been a little wistful about it but she was a chin-up, get-on-with-it type of girl and never liked to dwell on anything she couldn’t fix. All this talk about positive thinking nowadays and all I see is sad, woeful people drooping through their lives, chanting meaningless lines about staying positive. No one has ever fooled me because I had the genuine article, someone who knew how to weigh her sadness against her blessings with all the honesty of your regular mutton fler at the wet market.
And now you know all my far away and long ago stories. All disappeared now: Ruby swallowed by cancer, carpet chewed up by time, silver clock kaput, cane furniture used to within an inch of its life and replaced with a modern set Ruby never sat on. Photos are still up, of course. And the radiogram – I could never bring myself to evict the old radiogram, not even after it lost its voice. All those songs we listened to on it, all those news broadcasts, Indira Gandhi shot dead, the Challenger exploding in the sky, the poll tax riots, the whole world came to us through that radiogram I tell you, and now look at it, a piece of furniture on which I can put a fruit bowl and a basket for my keys. But sometimes when I look at it – you will say I am talking nonsense of course – I can still hear the voices. It’s 8:15, and that’s the time that it’s always been, and Ruby’s voice underneath the singer’s, singing along, singing quietly as she dusts, cigarette hanging from her lips as usual.
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For more goodies…
Learn more about Preeta and FED’s entire Summer 2024 global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, and be sure to check back for Mr. M.K. Kumaravel’s Late-Night Homesickness Emergency Noodles recipe. It drops Thursday, 11 July.
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