CHAPTER 8

CHILD LABOUR

“Joy to the World!” Unconsciously I sing out loud as the tune wafts towards me from the church. Then I stop, embarrassed. They’re singing different words.

“That’s Konkani,” says my companion. “The choir is practising for Midnight Mass.”

I follow the tune singing the English words in my mind and Christmases past come flooding back.

“Christmas comes but once a year / And when it does it brings good cheer / And when it goes it leaves us here / So what shall we do for the rest of the year?” Like weeds in a manicured lawn, the old rhyme popped unbidden into my mind and with a will of its own, pushed its way out, over and over and over again. It was determined to be noticed and irritate.

With heroic self-control and barely concealed patience my mother suggested, “Can you find another rhyme?”

“Can you chant a bit softer?” from my father, with love and hopeless hope.

“Can you chant not at all?” in exasperated unison from my sisters. “In fact. Shut. Up!”

But I couldn’t. I loved the rhythm of the rhyme. I loved the rhythm and the rhyme. I was powerless within a force more powerful than anything I had accumulated in my thirteen years. I was as excited as a child at Christmas. Probably because Christmas was under two months away.

The smell was in the air so I knew the first steps had been taken to commence the business of the festive season. Succeeding months would see the pace quicken, strengthen, become more determined, more definite, more urgent.

That morning I’d woken quivering with excitement, knowing I’d felt the same anticipation the previous year and the year before that, and probably the year before even that. As my conscious mind caught up I knew the first fruit for the Christmas cake had been delivered and was now stored in the pantry. In the stillness of the night its perfume had hitched a free ride on the air and invaded the entire house. By morning it ruled my brain.

Our pantry, different from other houses, was more than just a food storage cupboard. It was a large, airy room with big windows, built-in cement shelves and a gas stove. A small wooden door led to a galley way and the three kitchens for the khansama’s use. Before the advent of electricity and air-conditioning, in hot climates kitchens were always built a little distance from the house to stop the smell and heat of the cooking food from pervading the living accommodation. It was, unquestionably, quite acceptable for servants to breathe in raw chilli fumes and spice-laden air but it wouldn’t do for the family to have skin and clothes stinking of pungent odours.

Tightly sealed metal dabbas that stood on the pantry floor were lined with greaseproof paper and used to store the Christmas fruit. The operative words in this arrangement were tightly, sealed and metal. We all knew the story of my mother’s first Christmas in Kanpur. Being a new bride she was supremely aware of her inexperience at her “job” of managing a complex household. At the back of her mind was the suspicion that the critical eyes of her in-laws were watching her every move, ready to pounce. So to protect herself she took a politically savvy action and sought friendly advice from her mother-in-law.

Among the tips she was given was to ensure food containers were firmly secured to keep vermin at bay. Imagine her horror when, on going to the pantry to start breakfast one morning, she was surprised by a well fed rat scurrying across the floor. Its ample proportions didn’t prevent it from escaping under the external door before my mother could do more than gasp. Further investigations revealed a trail of rat droppings that led back to the dabbas.

The greedy and clever rat had managed to squeeze behind the fruit boxes, chew a hole through the tin and help itself to an expensive gourmet meal. What was worse, if anything could be, was five tiny, blind, wriggling rat pups nestled in the fruit.

My mother’s initial reaction of horror and disbelief was dwarfed by her fear that once the story got around she would be labelled a lazy wife who ran a dirty, pest-infected house. Once a reputation had been created by a malicious third party, the no smoke without fire attitude would prevail, tainting everything about her, including her children. It took all my father’s tact and affection to persuade her it could happen to anyone and to chalk it up to experience.

Whether she hadn’t been told or had missed the point, my mother could never decide. She realised though, that communication, even when people speak the same language, can be fraught with difficulties. What may be blindingly obvious to one person can easily be missed by another, resulting in a tsunami of misunderstandings. What one person assumes is common knowledge and therefore not worth mentioning, can be totally outside another person’s experience.

In subsequent years my mother stored all the Christmas fruit in containers that stood in splendid isolation from each other and the wall.

The Christmas cake recipe was a treasured heirloom handed down from mother to daughter. Most women strictly adhered to it as they would to the letter of a law. But by the time I was thirteen my mother had grown her confidence and demonstrated a mind of her own. Speaking aloud as though she were in conversation with an invisible person, when all she was actually doing was convincing herself of what she wanted to believe, she said, “I didn’t like the orange peel last year. Hmmm. Perhaps we won’t use it,” and orange peel was consigned to history.

And, “We didn’t get enough rain this year so the almonds will be bitter. We’ll use cashew nuts instead.” And that year cashew farmers grew richer.

Some changes were adventurous, experimental. “I wonder what the taste will be if we substitute lemon peel with lime rind?” But fortunately she never followed the example of Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and exchanged sugar for that other white condiment found in all kitchens.

“The aunts will taste the difference,” Lorraine, Lily and I teased in a singsong chant “and you know what’ll happen then!” But my mother waved dissension aside, thereby role-modelling to us that being controlled by other people’s opinion is merely a form of voluntary slavery. “If they don’t like my cake they don’t have to eat it!”

In spite of these ad hoc, untested embellishments, our Christmas cakes always looked and tasted marvellous so the secret component must have been in the making – which in itself was an industry. Indeed, the whole paraphernalia of Christmas added up to a production, planned and executed with military precision, field-marshalled by my mother. Long before there were project plans and Gantt Charts my mother had her preparations down to a fine art.

Every year the house kitchens produced eight cakes, each weighing two pounds, almost a kilo. Since the vast amount of ingredients were not common fare, shopkeepers had to be allowed enough time to source them. It was a matter of timing and, as always, attunement with the weather. Though planning began in late October, the fruit was never received until the third week of November when we could be confident the storage area in the pantry would be cool throughout the day.

“Why does it matter when it arrives?” I asked, irritated at the continued attention to such miniscule detail. “It’ll still taste the same.” But my mother was afraid that warm days would cause the fruit to ferment and we’d all get tipsy on Christmas cake.

Preparing ingredients for the cake was an enormous task so my mother wasn’t above using unpaid child labour.

Ours.

From the time each of us was old enough to help, the first few mornings of our winter holidays were devoted to preparing fruit for the Christmas cake. Collecting under the garden umbrella we were each handed a loaded tray with instructions. “Make sure you pull the stalks off and take the seeds out of the raisins, sultanas and currants. Crack open the almonds and cashew nuts and check for worms. Make sure the fruit peel hasn’t grown any mould.”

Sometimes acerbic words were added: “Eat as much as you like – but if you make yourself sick, you’ll have to look after yourself. I don’t have time for silly girls.”

Being ill meant everyone, but everyone, would know we’d been greedy. That was deterrent enough. And of course as soon as the element of forbidden fruit was removed, the attraction vanished.

Except for the odd digression.

One year, as a very young child I squawked out loud, “Mummy! Lily’s just eaten a fistful of raisins.” But before I could elaborate my mother jumped in with pretend-concern in her voice. “Is that tittle-tattle in your mouth, I wonder? Perhaps you need to see a doctor.” Subsequent years I kept my mouth shut. I had learnt the futility of indulging in punitive behaviour.

Recognising that the work was repetitive, mindless, similar to a factory hand’s at a conveyor belt and not something in which young girls would willing participate, my mother was astute enough to make it fun. While our hands were busy she engaged our minds. We played word games.

“I spy something with my little brown eye, something beginning with ‘t’.” Lily glowed with triumph every year as she pointed an accusatory finger at me and shouted, “Tittle-tattler!” She had a long memory.

“That’s not a real word.” As I grew older I was ready to argue but the referee stepped in and allocated a turn to Lorraine, eliciting a groan from Lily and I. We knew from experience that Lorraine would introduce a level of intricacy to the game and come up with words like “b” for “blade of grass” or, if we guessed that, for “brown eyes”.

My turn to choose a letter was met with howls of protest since my spelling ability, particularly when I was very young, went beyond the creative to wallow in the realms of adventurous. I’d been known to insist “clock” was, understandably, spelt with a “k” and photograph with an “f” but the one that capped it all invoked universal exasperation.

“Of course it’s spelt with a ‘p’. It’s a plastictable!” It was the years when artificial wood was a novelty for us because all the furniture we’d ever seen was uninspiring Victorian mahogany and rosewood. The advent of a new, lightweight table called for explanations and somewhere in the convoluted twists of my mind “plastic” and “table” had become one word. But, in playing I Spy no one was persuaded by my logic and I was banned from the game.

Though the idea was to entertain ourselves during the tedious, brainless work of cleaning the mavea, the mixture of nuts and fruit for the Christmas cake, it was a time of great camaraderie and fun. And prodigious learning. Our vocabulary grew as did our inventiveness.

Once the cake ingredients were prepared (raisins destalked, sultanas and currants destalked and deseeded, worms sent scurrying, fruit peel inspected) it was time to mince.

“I’m the strongest.” Lily flexed her biceps to lend credence to her statement. “I’ll mince the almonds as they’re the hardest.” The strenuous physical work was camouflaged by fun so we all wanted to have a turn – showing off to each other about the amount we could get through before muscles objected.

I soon worked out how much fruit would make the machine sticky and just before this happened, yelled out, “My turn! My turn to mince now.” And sure enough, a few minutes later a call was made for stale bread, collected for this precise purpose, to be put through the mincer and clean the threads.

Stale bread is so much easier to mince than either fruit or nuts.

“What do people do when they don’t have a mincing machine?” I asked.

“They cut by hand,” replied my mother. “Chotto cutto,” she explained, using a mixture of Hindi and pidgin English to mean cut into tiny pieces.

“That’s primitive!” I tossed my head with arrogance as though I had a God-given right to our privileged life, as though I had earned our comforts, as though mincing machines were state-of-the-art technology.

In mid-December that year, as she did every year, Lorraine sang out, “The black face monkey is back,” and three pairs of eyes swivelled towards the calendar. Sure enough the date was 14 December.

In her turn, my mother exclaimed, as she did every year. “It’s uncanny!”

We were accustomed to little brown monkeys living in the Imli and Khatta Kurounda trees around the garages 100 metres away from the house. For the most part, they showed perfect manners, though on occasion could get rowdy if friends dropped in to party. That’s when they would chatter noisily or giggle in little groups. They didn’t bother us and we had enough sense to give them a wide berth.

However, every year at roughly the same time, the monkeys silently slipped away, leaving the coast clear for a lone, grumpy, black-face ape to take up residence. He was a nasty old rogue who spent his day sitting upright on the garage roof shooting visual daggers towards the house, accompanied by periodic angry hissing. When that was ignored, he’d jump onto a slim branch of the tamarind tree and shake it with the force of an elephant. Or he’d leap through the air to unerringly catch what looked like a thin twig and swing from it intentionally exposing his ventral surface in all its (supposed) male glory.

Sometimes he’d jump from the garage roof and shoot up to the top twigs of the Khatta Kurounda tree, pick berries and throw them at us. Other times he’d hide among the foliage and hollow, loudly imitating twenty of his kind.

Perhaps he believed a demonstration of aggressive male swaggering and hostile, artistic aerobatics was a sign of his superiority to which we were expected to surrender.

And all because the maeva was minced, mixed and ready for drying. This was the easy part of cake-making as the sun and dogs did all the work. The mixture was spread out in shallow porcelain dishes on the tea trolley, covered with fine netting and wheeled into the sun.

“Where’s that dog of yours?” asked my mother, and called, “Reg. Reg. Here boy.” Reg appeared silently, as was his way, out of nowhere. Guard; on guard he was told, and we could safely remove ourselves, leaving him in charge.

As soon as our backs were turned the other house dogs appeared, ready to scavenge, but one look at Reg’s deceptively sleepy manner was enough to send them packing. The black-face monkey was a different matter and the year I entered my teens he presented me with an unusual gift – a display of his finely tuned war strategy.

Deviating from his usual pattern of watching from the safety of the garage roof he indulged in a long, patient glare designed to intimidate. From his aerial vantage point it said – I hate you. You are a stupid dog if you think I want your maeva. I have choice pickings of all the fruits in the forest.

I don’t know who he thought he was kidding.

Reg yawned scornfully, stretched himself to his full length and lay down to enjoy a lazy snooze in the sun, occasionally yelping happily to tell us he was enjoying his dreams.

A little while later the posturing began. With head thrust forward the monkey said: Be careful. Be very careful. I’m bigger than you. I’m vicious and mean. I’m wicked and cruel. I’ll shred you from limb to limb. He challenged Reg to walk away and leave the maeva unattended for a split second.

Reg rolled over onto his back and mockingly displayed his vulnerable underbelly, then stood up, stretched again, shook all over and sauntered off. This monkey business was boring, he had better ways to spend his time.

The afternoon wore on. The threat of attack wore off. The atmosphere relaxed, became placid, soporific, fluid, easy to breathe.

Lulled into a false sense of security our attention was elsewhere when suddenly the black-face monkey was half up the driveway. Noting the maeva was unattended, in one swift, streamlined, almost graceful move, he was within striking distance when, with a howl that was nine parts surprise, he soared into the air in a maniacal leap.

Doing his usual trick of materialising out of thin air, Reg had leapt onto the monkey, giving a whole new – reversed – meaning to the expression, having a monkey on your back. Knowing instinctively he had to protect himself from nasty claws and germ-ridden teeth, his first bite said it all. Attaching his razor-sharp canines to the monkey’s right ear, he could only be dislodged if the monkey rolled over.

Using speed and agility for both attack and defence, in a split second Reg jumped to one side and crouched a few yards away, disdainfully spitting out a bloody flap of skin. Quivering in unblinking eye contact he telegraphed threatening messages to his foe. There was nothing somnambulant about him now.

The two adversaries sized up each other, evenly matched for weight and height. But not for brains. We were petrified, frightened into statue-still terror. As my mother said later, she was sorry she hadn’t the airgun handy.

Reg was a mixed breed animal with predominantly Australian cattle dog features. His ancestors came from the unforgiving, arid plains of outback Queensland, so managing herds of cattle many times the size and weight of this creature was in his genes. And though cattle may be more compliant and amiable than an aggressive, thwarted monkey, Reg wasn’t about to be intimidated. Or insulted.

He stood his ground – or more precisely, crouched it, ready for anything but more prepared to frighten than fight. Why go into battle and risk being injured when one can panic an enemy into cowering submission?

The monkey didn’t cower.

He didn’t submit.

He backed off. Hissing ferociously while keeping his eyes on Reg, he waited until he was a safe distance then turned tail and hared back the way he’d come. Though he moved fast, the dog moved faster. And silently. Each way he turned, Reg was there before him, at a non-provocative, safe distance, herding him on.

The tactic paid off. Soon the monkey had no option except to race straight into the relative safety of a dense thicket of bougainvillea – a creeper that had swallowed trees and bushes as it diligently obeyed God’s command to grow and multiply.

The poor monkey sped straight into elongated, spiteful, flesh-hacking thorns. It was a surreal moment in time, one that changes a person forever. There are definitely two types of homo sapiens. Those who have experienced a bougainvillea come alive and those who haven’t. One moment the bush was a mass of splendid, vibrant magenta, the next it was a shivering, tortured, tormented thing. Howls of pain, fury and frustration told a tale of their own while Reg watched on, ever alert, ever ready for action, until the time came when he could safely retire, intact in hide and hair.

Our parents were more alarmed than they wanted to acknowledge. “That’s not funny,” my father exclaimed on his return from work when we excitedly regaled him with the story. “It could’ve been worse. Reg could’ve been badly injured, even killed – a painful, horrible death. Or one of you could’ve been bitten and that’s serious.” But we didn’t understand. We were so well protected that the prospect of a monkey bite was beyond our grasp.

However we’d learnt our lesson. Following this episode, every year the airgun and pellets were kept within easy reach while the maeva dried. We were all taught to use it and took turns in firing prophylactic shots just to make our intentions abundantly clear.

The one-eared monkey learnt nothing. For the remaining years that we lived in Kanpur he continued to turn up year after year, going through the same routine from a safe distance, never venturing closer. The two adversaries grew older together, across the 100-metre span between the house and garages. And as they grew older, one thing never changed. Year after year Reg contemptuously ignored his old foe.