An Inheritance of Loss

I was talking to my mother over the phone the other day. I had been telling her about the pandemic and what financial insecurity it may lead to people like us when she interrupted and said, “Well, you will just have to live within your means.” I responded with a small laugh, but I was a little stung by it. A mild irritation remained with me for a few weeks. Now here I am bringing it up in this article.

What did she mean by it, I wondered? Was she being naïve, uttering a simple catchphrase without giving it much thought or was this a small rebuke dressed up as a homily?

I often find myself worrying if I’ve made myself ludicrous in one way or another, and now I began to wonder if I hadn’t done so, in the overbearing way I spoke, in front of my mother. Perhaps she really was imparting a piece of enlightened advice? To live within your means: a phrase so simple that your first instinct is to discard it.

And then it occurred to me why her words had so rankled me. I recognised its familiar reproach. It was something from my childhood. I don’t recall my mother ever telling me this; perhaps I didn’t need to be told this then. But this was one such phrase among several on living with what one had that was repeated again and again in households such as mine.

I recall how old wiry Tibetan momolas (grandmothers), their figures bent forward to meet their young wards, a finger of authority raised in the air, as they issued forth this dictum. And when transgressions were discovered, these warning fingers wrapped themselves around the ears of these errant children, and a ‘What-did-I-tell-you’ issued forth. I had felt in the phone call with my mother, I realised, a momola’s familiar turning of the ear.

I’m certain ideas of living within one’s means is common among several communities and religious groups. But, I’ve found in the recollections of my childhood, that there is a particularly strong and insistent push among Tibetans. I suspect there is a commingling here of the force of a religious doctrine (the Buddhist ideas on acceptance) and the real lived experience of loss, that of one’s country, material possessions and loved ones.

Yet everything in my–and your adult life–has told us the exact opposite. We should live life in surfeit. Not less, not just enough; but in excess. We move in a world of 24-hour online shopping and same-day delivery. We should buy more, party more; we should travel internationally because that is the only way we can collect real life experiences; we are to max our credit cards; take out loans for holidays and daily appliances. We are to live more. Anything less would be a lesser life.

And yet as the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown continues, it is becoming clear that most of the world will go into an economic recession like we haven’t witnessed for some decades. Businesses will shut down, livelihoods will be lost, money will get sparse. And we will all have no alternative but to listen to our momolas. We will all have to live with less.

I grew up in a place where there was no option of living with more. This was a small town that stood at the edges of several international borders, and whose ideas of identity was always mixed. Everything was slow and delayed here. Even the day’s English language newspaper arrived (from a nearby city) only the next day.

The building that I grew up in–which modern architects would hesitate to call a building–was now, I recall, filled with the families of tailors. Each of the fathers would stand, measuring tapes around their shoulders so long and loose that they resembled suspenders, on a floor filled with pieces of snipped cloth. Most of them, I remember, were also poor.

When the gifts of the 1991 economic liberalisation came, like the newspapers, they arrived late. Prosperity arrived slowly, and every new item in a household had to be shared. I answered telephone calls in the only prosperous shop in the neighbourhood. Meat was preserved in a neighbour’s refrigerators. I remember my father carrying a television antenna as though it were such a precious commodity as he sought permissions to plant it on the terrace of the tallest building nearby. And I recall the fears that gripped the town–once the great novelty of the colour TV set had arrived in a few homes–of how radio transistors if switched on close to such TV sets drained these wonderful new devices of its most precious quality, its colour.

It fills me with incredulity when I walk the town’s streets today. Those memories of making do with less have no echo in the town of today. Old houses have been razed down and replaced by towering structures with cold marbled floors; tailors no longer appear wear measuring tapes around their shoulders; and the narrow roads are now forever choked with vehicles.

When I was reading Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise during this lockdown, her remarkable novel about the Nazi invasion of France, as much as I want to resist lazy comparisons with wars, I was struck with just how some of the passages read today. Holding an electronic copy of the book in my hands while looking out at the empty street from my window, the early parts of dread and uncertainty before Paris was invaded could so easily be used to describe the world outside my window.

Suite Francaise consists of two parts (Nemirovsky only managed to complete these two in her planned five part novel before she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died). And the ones I kept returning to were those in the early sections when it becomes apparent to people that Paris is about to fall and that they must flee. They are then faced with a decision – what to carry and what to leave behind.

“Panic obliterated everything that wasn’t animal instinct,” Nemirovsky writes in the book. “Grab the most valuable things you own in the world and then . . . ! And, on that night, only people — the living and the breathing, the crying and the loving — were precious. Rare was the person who cared about their possessions; everyone wrapped their arms tightly round their wife or child and nothing else mattered; the rest could go up in flames.”

And yet the book is filled with people who are unable to leave their possessions behind. One woman carries her box of lace and ironing board and frets over the linen that hasn’t been delivered by the launderer. Another carries an evening dress so she has something fit to wear later. One rich man who mothballs his carpets and hides them in his cellar and whose heart aches because he has to leave a dressing table behind, fills his car with all sorts of items, from Nankin cups and vases to porcelain, all of which he caresses through the straw and tissue paper and worries if he has packed enough wood shaving and tissue paper to secure them.

Leaving one’s possessions behind even when their life is at stake, the author seems to suggest, is incredibly difficult. We cannot give up on anything easily.

When I visited my hometown some years ago, and had retired to my room remarking to myself as I always appear to do of how much the town had changed, I discovered a small item that once belonged to my grandfather.

It was his mani or prayer wheel, one of the few things I know he had brought with him from Tibet. A mantra lies scribbled at the core of these prayer wheels, and every turn is meant to be equivalent to the reciting of the mantra. One of my earliest memories is of him sitting erect on his bed, most of what he owned hanging from a nail behind, his mouth mimicking a silent mantra, as the whir of his spinning mani filled the room.

In my hands, the mani did not turn. Decades of neglect had accumulated over it. I took it apart. I cleaned the metal frame. I greased its cylinder with oil. Slowly the exterior revealed itself. And when I tried it again, that once familiar whir returned reluctantly.

CoronavirusCovid-19first personlockdownpandemic