The Afternoon Visitors

Legacies

“Our” people had been on the Indian subcontinent for millennia, my grandparents told me when they thought I was old enough to understand the concept. I must have been about four or five. Ever since I could remember, I would go into their room whenever I felt like it but it was most often as soon as I woke up. As a young child, I would awaken early, eager to begin the new day, like my grandparents, probably around 5:30 a.m. and find that my parents had no intentions of starting their respective days yet. I think that one of them probably carried me sleepily into my grandparents’ room or my grandmother came to take me there in the beginning because it became a daily habit that slowly dissolved as my sisters came along, I started school and our family routines adapted to our new priorities and changing schedules.

Sometimes I would play off in a far corner of my grandparents’ large room under the high clotheslines, where the drying laundry would serve as a high canopy to sit under and pretend different play-scenarios and which became a special play corner for my sisters and me over the years. Or I would jump onto my grandparents’ beds which were pushed together in the center of the room and watch my grandfather play solitaire with his special pack of cards, laying the cards out in neat rows on the flattened woven bedspread.

At other times, I would peer over his shoulder as he sat in his  easy-chair rocker near the window where the early morning sunlight poured in over the gathered half curtains, and read that day’s newspapers, penned an inland letter or postcard to one of his three of his out-of-town children, wrote in his day journal or balanced his daily household accounts register with his angular spiky handwriting.

My grandmother would come and go with cups of hot tea or coffee for my grandfather and milk, fruit or biscuits for me while supervising the cook and the making of breakfast in our old-fashioned stone-floored kitchen. At times, I would find her sitting quietly with eyes shut and praying, her much-used japamala of rudraksha beads in her hand and her mouth moving silently, cross-legged in front of the her treasured idols and pictures in the small shrine nestled in the corner next to the mammoth teak almirah and diagonally across the room from our play-corner under the clothesline canopy.

Sometimes, she would join us sitting on the bed, her back resting against the headboard, her book of scriptures written in Sanskrit open on her lap, alternating between reading, chanting a familiar prayer silently, listening to my grandfather tell me stories or explain something, interjecting occasionally with additional details or her side of a story.

Occasionally, one or the other of them would pull me onto their lap and I would listen, my hands absently  traveling to their faces or ears or hands to trace their shapes, or hug them, resting my head on a shoulder or nestling against their necks, smelling their familiar comfortable smells.

Sometimes, they told me stories and show me painted pictures from the old scriptures, from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the story of the Bhagawad Gita. At other times, they would tell me about the legendary prophets of the world and about the various religions and faiths followed by peoples of the world, or the more recent contemporary Indian saints and spiritual seekers of our times and from that region, like Eknath, Namdev and Tukaram that my grandmother was especially drawn to.

And then there were the times they would tell me about the great migration south from Kashmir that “our” people undertook over several centuries. On these occasions, their voices would be seized by a tangible excitement and an urgency that I could sense even at that early age. As they spoke animatedly, I could see people and events they spoke of in my mind’s eye, see nameless and faceless people, hundreds, thousands of them across centuries living on the banks of a great river that was both the home and name of the legendary goddess Saraswati, some thousands of years ago, in or near what is now Kashmir. Then, after countless generations and centuries of living happily off the largesse of the land and the river, so the legend went, the Saraswats, as they were known, began to face a new challenge as the water in the river and its smaller tributaries began to dry up.

After many years, perhaps decades, of trying to cope with the uncertainties of the seasons and the river, small groups began to pack up their belongings and move up and down the banks of the dwindling Saraswati and along the connected riverine valleys, looking for hospitable places to live in. Some settled where they found conducive conditions, others went on, some looking for the perfect place from where they or their progeny and following generations could let down roots and would never have to move again in their lifetimes.

Some stayed back in the old places to keep the family deities safe near the now almost non-existent river until the foreign invaders came from across the Hindukush. It was probably around the 11th century, c.e. With no other option before them, they packed all that they could carry, including their deities, the holy scriptures and valuables, and left too. To protect their precious cargo, their peoples’ heritage, they moved further and further south, away from the waves of foreign invaders and usurpers of power in the north.

For a few more centuries, life went on and some groups settled in different places as they went, but every time there was talk of proselytizing invaders, they went further and further south along the west coast, some striking out inland across the jagged, convoluted, richly vegetated mountain ranges, the Western Ghats. Their day-to-day lives went on, settled for long periods, broken by flight, upheaval, more migration and resettling as the Mughal influences, the Portuguese occupation of Goa on the Konkan coast and the British consolidation of power and control of India played out relentlessly on the subcontinent.

It had been passed on to us, my paternal grandparents told me, that many of “our” people left Kashmir and went southwards through what is now Saurashtra and the rest of Gujarat, along the long Konkan coastline, through the region that is now the state of Maharashtra, to Goa where they paused for a time before the Portuguese arrived. My grandparents said that our family deities were installed there but that many from our particular community continued on their way, spreading east and south to settle in small hamlets along the riverine coast. By the late 1700s, they now identified more with their new habitats than with Kashmir, which had been left behind many centuries ago or other places that they had passed through in their southward journey. Nevertheless, the now-mythic river was still a powerful icon in their minds and essential to their sense of identity, they began to think of themselves as Saraswats. That was when the more recent story of our particular family seemed to begin.

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By the very early 1800s, my paternal grandfather’s grandfather had built their family home in a small town near Udupi, in South Kanara in the state of Karnataka. Over time, as rooms were added, it became an L-shaped house in the midst of a large tropical garden, edged from the rear by cool shady groves of mango and coconut trees. Many generations were sheltered and grew up in that house. Built around an open courtyard, with doors, windows and pillars sculpted from dark teak wood, deep red floors, and a terracotta-tiled roof, that house stands to this day, occupied by one of the families from the spreading branches of our mammoth family tree.

When I was about seven, we went on one of the epic road trips that I recall taking as a family. All of us went, my sisters and I, our parents and our grandparents in our gray Ambassador. We were headed towards our mother’s ancestral home near Mangalore. On the way, we stopped at our father’s ancestral home near Udupi in the same larger region of South Kanara. I remember our turning off the main highway and onto a smaller road, driving up to a dignified old house with a sloping tiled roof set amidst large mature tropical plantings, going inside and discovering for the first time the deep red floor and old decorative pillars. As the grownups talked and my sisters fell asleep after being cranky and tired, I walked about the house and garden, trying to imagine my grandfather as a baby and a boy and later a young man living there. My grandmother and our hostess, the lady of the house from the branch of the family that lived there now, brought me a steel tumbler of steaming hot milk to drink and warned me not to stray as there could be snakes around.

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As I grew into my teens, my mother and I often had long discussions about topics that involved scientific phenomena and social history. With her deep background in the sciences, she was an avid discussant, formulating arguments and hypotheses and then explaining and refuting or accepting the inferences.

I remember our talking about the ancient folklore that I had heard about from my grandparents in my childhood. I remember my mother dismissing these as “old legends” that could not be either proved or disproved, and therefore, a question of belief rather than of established and verifiable knowledge. “But…” she conceded,”… it gives us a sense of knowing our history, about how we came to be here. We need to have that knowledge deep down and so it is better than not knowing at all.”

I was reminded of these conversations that my mother and I had when, decades later, satellite images confirmed the past existence of the Saraswati River in the very regions that featured in our folklore, in the Hindu-Kush region starting from a Himalayan glacier in Uttarakhand, flowing through Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan; Gujarat to finally merge into the Arabian Sea.

Living on opposite sides of the world, my mother and I talked about the exciting implications of this. Her voice, coming through the phone, sounded girlish and animated. “So those stories that you heard were probably true. We just didn’t have evidence earlier. Now it’s there… isn't that exciting?”

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(c) 2017, PRB
My Indian Childhood