#7 The Whole Shebang with Clare Macrae
Clare Boyd-Macrae is a professional writer whose work regularly appears in The Age.
"Boyd-Macrae knows how to take ordinary events and moments - camping with one's children, the experience of walking around one's suburb, a chat with the washing-machine repairman - and weave them into memorable meditations on the complex emotions, values and dreams that underpin daily life..." Fiona Capp The Age
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Moreland Library Talks Episode 7: The Whole Shebang with Clare Boyd-Macrae
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Transcript: Clare Boyd-Macrae, The Whole Shebang
Clare: Thanks for coming to hear me tonight. Thanks to Moreland Library for having me a second time, and especially to Christine, who sets these things up beautifully. And what I'm going to do tonight is speak for about half an hour. I'm going to read a piece from “The Whole Shebang”, that’s my second book. I'm going to take briefly about the writing process and about the … I suppose the artistic endeavour and what I, as a writer, am hoping for and trying to do. Then I'm going to read another short piece, so probably, you know, 10 minutes or a bit less. I'm happy to answer any questions, I'm happy to read more if anyone really wants me to, but you know, if you all want to go home, I won’t be remotely offended. It’s past jammies time for me.
So I will start off reading a piece called “Eulogy for a Washing Machine”.
Our washing machine was already old when we got it. Well, not old exactly, but second-hand. Pre-loved, as they say. I've no idea whether or not its first owner loved it, but I certainly did, or grew to over the years. When we had our first baby, we lived in a town of less than 2,000 people and used cloth nappies. We badly needed a washing machine, but had no money. We’d never had money, but somehow things always seemed to work out, and this time was no exception. Our neighbour up the back was the local postie, and he wanted rid of his machine. He was getting a better, flasher model. His was a Simpson Delta. Top loader, noisy, capacious; just what we needed for the nappies and the baby clothes, the sheets and towels and breast pads and all the paraphernalia. He sold it to us for $100.
We had a second baby 20 months after the first; two in nappies. We moved right across the state and the washing machine came with us. We had two more children. A friend of mine who also has four kids tells me that each baby uses about 7,000 nappies. “That's 28,000 nappies we’ve changed, you and I,” he says proudly. “28,000 that this old Simpson Delta has washed, rinsed and spun.”
About eight years ago, 15 years after we bought the beast, it got sick. A man came to diagnose it and said we needed a new motor. “I could tell you to chuck it and get a new one,” he said, “but they don't make machines like this any more. Get a new motor in this, and it’ll do you another few years.” I agreed with alacrity, keen not to make more landfill in this built-in, obsolescence-crazed world, but mainly because the washing machine felt almost like a member of the family. It’s a long time since we had nappies, but it still works hard.
Talking to a single friend of mine once about what he did at the weekend, I was incredulous when he said, “I did the washing.” “Don't you do that every day?” I asked. “Nope, just on Saturdays.” At our place, it’s a rare day when there's not a full load of clothes to be processed, and if the wash basket looks emptier than usual and I decide, against my better judgment, to give it a rest for a day, I always live to regret it because by next morning, the clothes seem to have exacted their revenge for being ignored by multiplying three-fold. Plus the socks. If ever I miss a day in wintertime, there are 24 socks waiting for me; mismatched, more often than not, stinking, inside out.
I'm not the only one who does the laundry, of course. The kids can do it. One of them has the daily chore of bringing it in. And my husband is a great clothes-washer; way more conscientious than I'd ever been about washing delicates by hand, washing runners and moccasins and, his specialty, doing the washing in the evening and getting it out at night so that there's one less thing to do in the early morning rush.
It’s a great idea, but I don't like hanging clothes out in the dark. Plus, I love the early morning checking out of what the weather is doing. Connecting with the day, surrounded by the lemon smell of laundry. Hanging out the clothes has never been one of the arduous chores for me.
A month ago, our trusty workhorse leaked nasty grease all over a favourite white shirt. A smear of inky black lay on the bottom of the machine, and we couldn’t work out where it had come from. I called the machine repairer. He arrived when I was out, and by the time I got home to pay him, he was sitting up at the kitchen bench having a cup of tea with our older son. I could tell by the look on their faces that the news was grim. “It’s the gear box,” he told me. “Fine,” I said. “What’ll it cost us to get a new gear box?”. “Set you back $400,” he said, “and it won’t cost that much more for a new machine. But the thing is, they don't even make those gear boxes any more. You’ll have to chuck it.” Never one to muck around, my husband got on the Net right away researching the best deal. Two days later, another man called around with a good-looking little front loader on a trolley; slimline, elegant with lots of lights and buttons. He must have caught the dubiousness of my look. He began to tell me how much less water and soap powder it used, how gentle it was on the clothes. I would not be consoled.
To the delight of my husband, who’d have had a trip to the tip otherwise, the man said he’d take our old machine away for an extra $20. Just like that. No warning. No mourning. I patted it gently in farewell as he hoisted it onto his trolley and wheeled it along our passageway, down the steps and into the back of his van. I felt as though I was watching a beloved old aunt being taken to an asylum by men in white coats. My older daughter asked the machine man if most people became mortal and sentimental and sad when he took their old machines away. “I can’t say they do,” he said with a chuckle. It felt all wrong, letting it go just like that without some sort of ritual ceremony.
The Celts, if we can believe the lovely old books of Celtic prayers, said little prayers of thanks every day for their tools, for their milking stool and pail, and for the cow that gave them milk, for the kindling and the wood and the spark that lit their fire in the morning. They surrounded their tools and their daily chores with prayer and gratitude, making sacred the profane, and bringing the eternal into the daily and mundane. A big ungainly old washing machine doesn’t have quite the romance of milking a cow or lighting a peat fire, hoeing a field or even sweeping a floor, but I wanted so much to say a little prayer of thanks to someone for my trusty old machine that had made my life so much easier over two and a half decades. I wanted to bless it on its way, let it go to its rest knowing how much I appreciated it. If people love their cars and warriors their swords, I don't see why I shouldn’t mourn the death of something that has helped to keep me sane for most of my adult life, and honour one of the last inanimate links with that young woman struggling with four small children and a sea of nappies.
I wanted to read in something that I wrote in an article in a magazine called “Zadok Perspectives” that came out just a couple of weeks ago about how I write.
The truth of the matter is that it is very, very, very rare for me to know when I sit down to write not only how the piece is going to end, but what is going to happen after the first sentence, or sometimes even after the first word. One of the things that makes me write is the fact that I rarely know what I think about anything until I've written it down. This is more fundamental than the phenomenon many people share of working out a problem through writing about it in a personal journal. I do that too, of course, but I almost don't have opinions until I've written them down.
Actually, I don't write them; they write themselves out of me, emerging somehow half-formed through my hands and becoming something real only when they hit the page and I have read them back.
In the same way, I never know what I'm going to write until it’s out and down; out of me, down on the page, up on the screen. I don't plan pieces of writing, I just write. Sometimes I have a word or a phrase or an image that sets me off. Other times there's nothing in my head, and yet something flows out of my fingers. Sometimes I'm convinced that I think in my hands, or at any rate, through them, as I can’t express things verbally with any kind of conviction. It’s all in the physical act of writing down.
I was very influenced about 10 or 12 years ago, when I was just beginning to write seriously, by a workshop. I went to a week-long writing workshop on Dunk Island, which is pretty horrible. Had a terrible time. It was the first time I'd left my children and it was absolutely fantastic, just me and Dunk Island and writing for a week. And the woman who took that workshop, her name was Barbara Turner‑Vesselago, she’s a Canadian writing teacher, and she teaches a method called “freefall”. And there are several sort of precepts for freefall, but the one that I keep coming back to again and again is this thing that … she's not the only one, but she said in a very fresh way that you don't edit anything you write; you just get your first draft down. Like, you sort of almost vomit it out and you don't correct anything. Now, there's sort of a resting image that she gave us, or trick, she suggested that … she went so far as to suggest that we hang a tea towel over a computer monitors so that we couldn’t see what we’d written, because if you can see it, you're tempted to edit it, even if it’s just to correct a typo. And she maintained - and many other writing professionals and good writers maintain - that the writing process, creative writing process and the editing process are both important but completely separate, and that if you are stopping every sentence or two, or even every paragraph or two, to correct what you’ve written, it’s just going to completely stifle your voice and the authenticity of your way of expressing things.
Now, probably not everyone writes that way, but I certainly do. I get a first draft down very quickly and then of course I sleep on it and I come back and I tweak and I do all sorts of things. But just getting it down, trying very hard … I don't actually hang a tea towel on my monitor, but I probably should sometimes … trying very hard not to go back and correct things, even spelling mistakes, even minor things. And often you find that it feels like … you know, it feels pretty crappy, but that is a fresher, more authentic voice if you’ve just bunged it down. That’s my experience, anyway.
And I think … I mean, obviously I'm not a journalist. If you're writing hard news or if you're writing a PhD or if you're writing an academic paper, you have to make plans and arguments and introductions and conclusions and so on, but the kind of things that I write, that seems to work; that I just have an image or something I've heard on the tram that tickles my fancy, or whatever it is, and I just sort of launch myself in and it takes me somewhere and it comes out the other end. Not always, but generally it seems to work.
That's sort of the writing process in a nutshell for me. I don't know if you call it “the artistic endeavour”, that sounds a bit pretentious. But again, I want to read a short passage from a novel by Tracy Chevalier called “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, I don't know if anyone’s read that. It’s a good movie, but it’s a better book. And it’s about the Dutch artist Vermeer who painted a lot of Dutch interiors in the seventeenth century, and it’s told from the point of view of a young girl who went to his house to work as a maid, as a housemaid.
And he sort of took her … he realised she had a bit of an eye for colour and so on, and took her into his studio to help him mix the paints and so on. And in this short passage, her name is Griet, G-R-I-E-T, and when they talk about “he” and “him”, it’s talking about Vermeer.
“Come here, Griet.” I set my rag on the sill and went to him. “Look out the window.” I looked out. It was a breezy day, with clouds disappearing behind the New Church tower. “What colour are those clouds?” (That’s the artist speaking to Griet). “Why, white, sir.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are they?” I glanced at them. “And grey. Perhaps it will snow.” “Come, Griet, you can to better than that. Think of your vegetables.” “My vegetables, sir?” “Your turnips and your onions; are they the same white?” Suddenly I understood. “No. The turnip has green in it, the onion yellow.” “Exactly. Now, what colours do you see in the clouds?” “There is some blue in them,” I said after studying them for a few minutes. “And yellow as well. And there is some green.” I became so excited I actually pointed. I had been looking at clouds all my life, but I felt as if I saw them for the first time at that moment. After that, I could not stop looking at things.
I love that passage because to me, it speaks of what artists ideally, at their best, do and what I guess I, as a writer, hope to do occasionally, which is to cause people to see familiar things in a new light or at a new angle. And I think all artists, be they photographers, musicians, visual artists, poets, novelists, playwrights; most of them … not fantasy writers … but most people are writing and painting ordinary things. I mean, Vermeer painted very ordinary things, a woman with a bowl of fruit, things like that. But to make people think, “Oh, I've never quite seen that clouds have all those colours,” or, “I've never quite seen that whatever it is.” And to me, this kind of … I think in this piece, I called it “Revealing the Sacred in the Profane”, which maybe sounds a bit religious, and I am a religious person, but I think it’s not necessarily purely a sentiment of a person … a believer. It’s something about revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary, and revealing the profound in just the everyday mundane things. And I suspect that not only Christianity, but all the major world religions, have this strand in them. Certainly it’s part of the Buddhist religion, that ultimately we find contentment and satisfaction and fulfilment in very ordinary things if we can look at them in a slightly different way. And I really love that piece in “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” because it just captures it so beautifully and so visually. I'm not a visual artist at all, I just love it.
But I mean, maybe it all sounds a bit highfaluting, the reason that I write is because I really love to write and I feel compelled to do it, and it’s just something I need to do if I'm to stay kind of psychologically healthy. So although I've said all that about revealing the sacred in the profane and all that sort of thing, that’s the sort of outcome, but really what drives me is the fact that I just love to write and as I said, I don't really know what I think about things until I've written them down.
A little PS about writing the first draft quickly; I've found I do write with longhand, particularly when I'm journal writing, but almost exclusively, apart from journal writing, I write with the computer. And I think one of the reasons it works is because it’s quicker and you can just get it all down really quickly, that seems to work better because it’s more spontaneous, I guess, and I'm not labouring over it.
I'm going to read another short piece, but a little bit shorter, this one, I think. And apologies to those that were at my book launch, because I read this piece there. But again, it’s about seeing familiar things and trying to see them in a new way, and I particularly like this piece because I tend to be …
I could be typecast a bit as writing about family suburban life, the bush and God and India, but this is about the CBD so I'm sort of fond of this piece. And it’s called “Eureka Tower”
About this time last year, deep in winter but with a few spring flowers just starting to make an appearance, I spent a morning showing a visitor from California around Melbourne. We didn't have long, so I took her to some of the bits of my town I liked best. We caught a tram to Federation Square and wandered over the lovely pink stone. We watched pleasure boats on the Yarra, took in the Arts Centre, strolled along South Bank and over the footbridge, had cosy coffee in Degraves Street. But what kept catching our attention all morning was the Eureka Tower; or rather, the nimbus of luminosity surrounding her crown. At first, I was reminded of nothing so much as photos of the Twin Towers on September 11th, flame pouring out of them, except that then there was black smoke and here, on a cold but sunny Melbourne morning, there was only this ethereal golden light. And it changed every few minutes as the sun moved, as the morning mist surrounding the top of the tower burnt off or blew away. An ever-changing, unpredictable light show. We’d be walking along, admiring something, the water, the people, a shop window, a gallery, and suddenly, one or other of us would cry, “Oh, look! Look at it now!”, and we’d crane our necks and stand there gaping, in the middle of the busy pavement, marvelling that everybody else wasn’t doing the same.
I can be embarrassingly unobservant. Construction of the Eureka Tower started in August 2001, but I wasn’t aware of its existence until I started working in the city two years ago. As I walked in from Brunswick every morning, I caught tantalising glimpses of this extraordinary building. I'd see her as I walked through the Royal Park Golf Course and then coyly, flirtatiously, she would disappear, only to pop up again when I hit Poplar Avenue. Like all towering things, she’s harder to see the closer you get, as the smaller buildings that cluster around block the view. But then, she makes her queenly appearance once again, rising above the inferior constructions around her.
Most the skyscrapers are obviously, defiantly phallic, but Eureka is definitely a woman. She has a high bust and long-line skirt flaring elegantly out at her ankles. She has smooth flanks. From some angles, she is almost frighteningly slim. She has that vertical stripe of lipstick red, there for no apparent reason than to look sexy. She is swoonily beautiful, and you can see her from all over our sprawling city. Coming in on the Eastern Freeway, she stands aloof and proud. I rarely have cause to travel on the South Eastern, but did recently and heading city-wards, miles out, there she was again, making all the other skyscrapers look stumpy, overweight and inadequate.
She has impressive vital statistics, Ms Eureka. Melbourne’s tallest building and the world’s tallest residential building, containing 560 apartments. Three hundred metres and 92 storeys high. One hundred and ten thousand tonnes of concrete were used in her construction. And the summit, the top few storeys, are sheathed in golden glass, hence the captivating effect of flames issuing from the building on a sunny winter morning, especially if there are a few wisps of cloud caressing her top-most parts.
The thing is, I don't even like tall buildings normally. I go for wide open spaces, long empty beaches, rivers deep in the bush, tents and camping, old-fashioned cottages and long, solitary walks in unpolluted air. Even if I'm being treated and want a bit of special occasion luxury, I choose rustic over sophisticated every time. But Eureka has seduced me utterly.
I'm told you can go up the Eureka Tower and look at the view. There's even a bizarre little glass box that juts out from the tower way, way up, and you can pay big money to be scared out of your wits, standing in the box, suspended at a terrifyingly high altitude above Melbourne streets. And maybe one day I will do those things, but not for a while. It might ruin the mystery. For now, I think I’ll just worship from afar.
That’s all that I've planned. That's my half hour done, but as I said before, I'm more than happy to answer questions, if I'm able to, and … or read more, whatever, whatever you like. I've also got my two books here to flog, but there's no pressure. So, you know, I feel I have to do that wherever I'm going. So over to you.
Female Speaker: So in your current book, do you talk about India?
Clare: Yes, I do. In fact, I didn't … the reason I didn't read any Indian pieces is because they're quite long; they’d be about 15 minutes to read. But there are quite a number of India pieces in there, but they're a bit longer. Yeah.
Female Speaker: How long since you’ve been to India?
Clare: Not very long. I've been back … I was back there in January with Tess, with my oldest daughter, yeah. So I've been back … I grew up in India and I've been back three times in the last six years, having sort of not been back for 20 years prior to that. It’s becoming a bit of an addiction again, so …
Female Speaker: So it’s just the place, like Dharwar or Mumbai? Or do you just travel around or do you go to other places?
Clare: No, there are a couple of particular places. I go to the city of Ahmenabad which is in Gujarat which is in north-west India, which is not a spot frequented by tourists at all, because I grew up there so I've still got a lot of friends there. And not because … I mean, it’s a long time since I lived there, but society is a lot more static, so a lot of the people that live next … the people that lived next door are still next door. And I also tend to go down to the south where I went to boarding school in the mountains in south India, and I usually do a bit of a tripping around as well. So it’s a combination of re-connecting with people and places and being a tourist.
Female Speaker: What sort of things would you do? Like, go to bazaars?
Clare: Yeah.
Female Speaker: Do you do photography?
Clare: No. I mean, I do take photos. I do this a lot; sit in a bazaar having cups of chai, that’s sort of my favourite thing to do. Spend a lot of time visiting friends, because that’s sort of what people do over there. It’s very … it’s still, you know, quite traditional in that sense, even in the cities. A lot of wandering around the markets because I just like the colour and the bustle. A lot of time on trains, which I love, travelling up and down the length and breadth of the sub-continent. And just hanging out, really, with people and in the bazaars. I've been back twice with kids. My two daughters have been back with me, and we did go and look at castles and forts and all that sort of lovely stuff as well, in the more touristy areas. So a bit of touristy stuff.
Female Speaker: Do you do a lot of shopping there? Like, you can barter and specialities like embroidery and …
Clare: Yeah, yeah, quite a lot. Yes, I do. I am very good at bartering. I’m very good at bartering in India; I wouldn’t dare in Melbourne, but I'm very much more assertive there.
Female Speaker: So is there a particular thing you go after, like textiles or jewellery?
Clare: Not really. I mean, I don't … I actually don't buy heaps of stuff any more, I just like going to be there. I think I'm at that stage in my life where I'm trying to not accumulate more stuff, yeah.
Female Speaker: Do you miss here at all when you go?
Clare: Remarkably little. I've been very, very struck with the whole recent issue of the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne by the fact that when I … I've spent so many years travelling in India, many … quite a number of times travelling on my own as a middle-aged woman, but also as a younger woman, and have rarely experienced anything but welcome and friendliness, and overwhelming hospitality. So it makes me very ashamed that we treat Indians, in particular, in that way, or anyone really. But no, I've been surprised at … I think it’s harder for Indian women travelling on their own, and they don't, but I've had no … I’ve felt very safe. Like, much safer than I would travelling here on my on, put it that way. Yeah, but things can happen like they can happen anywhere, yeah.
Female Speaker: If you could choose your five top reads, what would you choose?
Clare: That’s a good question. I’ll have to have a look. Yeah, I actually … as Chris said, I've found it very hard to choose five top reads because I love a lot of things, and it took me so much … it was such a drama trying to choose these two years ago, but I just said, “I’ll use the same ones again.” But I did glance the list, yes, I'm happy to say they're my favourites. Helen Garner is probably the only non‑fiction. It’s funny, I only write non-fiction. I do write fiction, but I've never had any success and I don't think I'm very good at it. But I never read non-fiction; I'm a fiction addict, so I have to force myself to read non-fiction like “Taking Medicine”, except for Helen Garner. I love Helen Garner’s non-fiction. And “The Feel of Steel” is a collection of non-fiction essays, and I really can barely put it down. “The Secret River”, a fabulously written … a beautifully written book by Kate Grenville that all Australians should read. Philip Pullman, probably the best fantasy trilogy for young adults I've ever read, incredibly profound. Very anti-church, that sort of interested me because I go to church, is … yeah, just a fantastic book. “The Poisonwood Bible” is also critical of missionaries, and I grew up in a missionary family, beautifully written book. And I love detective fiction. I just love it; that’s my relax … sort of total relaxing read. And Elizabeth George is one of my favourites, she's American who writes about an English detective and you would swear she was English; she’s just so English. She writes great big, fat books.
Female Speaker: No Indian writers, I noticed.
Clare: No. And I do read a lot of Indian writers.
Female Speaker: They're good.
Clare: They're very good, and they win a lot of bloody Booker prizes too.
Female Speaker: They do, yeah.
Clare: Yeah, that’s a big omission.
Female Speaker: It’s really quite a strong one.
Clare: But next time, remind me to put some Indian writers down, because I do read quite a lot.
Female Speaker: Because I've seen your five before and I'm thinking, “She’s not giving those Indians.”
Clare: I read “The White Tiger” while I was in India, which was quite sort of surreal.
Female Speaker: Maybe you could read from your Indian stories?
Clare: Yes, yeah. Let me see. It’s called “Love and Marriage Indian Style”. Do you want me to read it fast? If you’ve got to leave, just go. I won’t be at all put out. It would be nice to read an Indian one, because I get a lot of my inspiration from there.
Love and Marriage Indian Style. The thought of having an arranged marriage, or moving in with parents-in-law, sends a shiver down the spine of the average Australian. Spend a little time in societies where this is the norm, however, and you start to examine your prejudices. During a recent trip to India, I spent many happy hours observing families and talking to them. This wasn’t hard for me to do.
Is this the piece you're talking about?
This wasn’t hard for me to do. I know plenty of families there, most of whom ask me over for a meal, and I spent a lot of time on public transport, including three days and two nights on trains.
Actually, my trip subsequent to that, I spent six days and nights on trains, so it’s … I do love it.
Trains are where Indian families travel, and on any Indian public transport, everyone is up for a chat. Before I even land in the sub-continent, I'm thinking about Indian families and how we in Australia treat people from different generations. On the plane from Singapore, I am seated next to a young Gujarati university student going home for the holidays. Unlike many of his Australia counterparts, he is courteous and chatty and appears genuinely interested in this middle-aged Australian. We talk at length. When he hears that I was born and grew up in Gujarat, that both my grandparents and parents lived there for decades and that I speak some Gujarati, he says, “Well, you are certainly unique. I've never met anyone like you before.” I keep noticing this in the days that follow. Children, adolescents and young adults appear to enjoy talking with the middle-aged and elderly as much as with their peers. On a 36‑hour train trip from Ahmenabad to Chennai, I share a compartment with six members of an extended family.
With their reasonable English and my smattering of Gudjarati, we can communicate with ease. I enjoy watching them because of the way they interact. I try and work out the relationships which, once we start talking, they explain. The oldest lady has her son and daughter with her. The son’s son is also there with his young wife and their seven year old daughter. They treat each other with such courtesy. They are so relaxed, and all the adults are obviously potty about the child. Her grandfather, in particular, takes infinite time to talk to her, be with her. I see them sitting at the open door of the train compartment when I pass to go to the toilet. His legs are dangling out, she’s wedged securely in his arms and he is singing a low, sweet song. He sings in the morning and evening too. They light sticks of incense around our compartment and he chants Hindu prayers, accompanied by the clashing of tiny brass cymbals. The rest of the family listen with their eyes closed. It’s so plaintive, haunting and contemplative, I start praying to my own God.
The two older women have the skin disease one sees a lot in Gudjarat, where the pigment starts to disappear and the sufferer’s skin turns pink in gradually increasing patches. The older lady’s condition is so far advanced, she looks completely pink, like a European. She is round and smiley and has no teeth. The young woman is so beautiful that if she lived in the West, she’d be snapped up as a model. Everywhere I go in India, I see this, poor and middle class women who are breathtakingly lovely and appear unaware of their beauty. This young mother is dressed in a traditional orange salwar kameez, ideal garb for train travelling, and a navy blue Lee beanie. Her face has the calm of a Madonna, especially when she sits in the seat opposite mine with her daughter on her lap, looking through the window and pointing out things that are different from what they would see at home.
The family are touring southern India, right down to Kanyakumari (that’s the southernmost point) … at the southernmost tip. I wonder how many Australian families would travel four generations together. I wonder why families in public in Australia often seem to be either silent or squabbling. Like everyone else I meet in India, they are blatantly astonished by two things about me; one, I am travelling by myself, and two, I have four children.
I ask the middle lady how old the child is and she tells me, “Seven.” Something in the sadness of the way she adds, “Their only daughter,” makes me think they would like more children. If they do, this is unusual. When I was growing up in India in the sixties, there was a campaign called “(34:43)” which means “two children are enough”. Then there was the horror of enforced sterilisations in the worst of the Indira Gandhi years. These days there is less compulsion, but the government is encouraging people to have one child, and most of the young couples I meet have one, and no plans for more. I'm told that the poor people still have big families, but among the middle classes nearly everybody has one child, occasionally two. And here am I, obviously educated and not poverty-stricken, with four children. Whenever I tell people this, I get the same reaction; stunned silence. They stare at me as though I've said something obscene.
There's an irony here; in theory, I'm the one from a nuclear family, and yet at our place, with two parents and three, almost four, teenagers, usually with friends in tow, grandparents who visit regularly and many friends with whom we share meals and life in general, there can be a dozen people at any one time around our table. Maybe this is why Indian families look so calm, I think. One child with grandparents, aunts and uncles later on could have a lot going for it.
There are other ironies too. On my last night in Ahmenabad, I had dinner at the home of a young friend called Mirmitha. She lives, as is the custom, with her husband’s family. The household consists of her mother and father-in-law, her husband and their five year old son, and her sister-in-law and niece. When I arrive at their place, the dhobi is just dropping off the day’s laundry, clean and neatly pressed. After our meal, a young man arrives to wash the dishes. He also cleans the house, they tell me, and another man does the gardening. “Some people have live-in staff, they say, but we prefer it this way. They come and do a job and leave.” Granted that Indian cooking is far more labour-intensive than ours, I want to ask Mirmitha what exactly she does all day, with one child at school, domestic staff to do the chores, and a mother and sister-in-law to share the household cooking. I can’t help thinking of my own crazy life; working four or five days a week, four children, no domestic help at all. I start to wonder about the stereotype of a liberated Western woman doing exactly what she wants and her poor Indian sister living this life of slavish devotion to her husband.
Mirmitha tells me something else interesting; her husband is one of the new Indian middle class with a work ethic to match. He works until 9.30 every night and half a day on Saturday. I ask when they have time together, and she says, “After he gets home.” And their son? “After his father gets home,” she says. The child, apparently, goes to bed around midnight. I've heard other mothers in Gudjarat say this and certainly everywhere I've been, whether to a wedding, public do or private family dinner, there have been kids and babies of all ages racketing around until all hours. I think of my own children when little, in bed by half past seven, up early to go to kinder, of how regimented our lives are, of how having children racing around late at night would drive me nuts. The kids I saw in Gudjarat seem to have more freedom and less fear than kids in Australia do. Ahmenabad is a city of five million people, but many of the vast populous live in societies, compounds or polls; clusters of houses or flats that generally share a courtyard, a temple, a tree or two. Often, but not always, the residents share a religion, a caste or a profession. Several of the Christian families I visit live in predominantly Hindu societies. In the evenings, the kids spill into these areas and there is always someone looking out for them. There are grandparents, servants, aunts and uncles, older cousins. It’s a very fluid arrangement. I think about parents in Melbourne who won’t let their children walk to the local school for fear of traffic, of abduction.
It’s not just the children who benefit from this system. On another overnight train trip, the only people in my compartment are a young Gyan couple from Calcutta, also touring on holiday. They look very Westernised, in smart jeans and T-shirts, trendy runners and slimline specs. It takes us about five minutes to strike up a conversation. I'd guess they were honeymooners, but it turns out they’ve been married for two months. “Let me guess, you had a love marriage, right?” I say with a smile and they chorus, “How did you know?”. It’s obvious, but I'm at a loss to explain quite how. The newly-married arranged marriage couples I've seen have had a shy glow about them. These two are more like a young Western couple, teasing and demonstrative, snuggling up momentarily, giggling, playing cards. She looks so comfortable in her tight jeans, but as we talk, she tells me she almost always wears a sari. They are more traditional than they look. They met at college and so they had some initial difficulties with their families accepting their desire to marry, but now it’s all fine. They live with his family, four generations, 20 people in all, in Calcutta. Their house is next to a giant temple where the grannies and aunties go every day. First, they take bath and then they go to the temple to pray. These young people go weekly.
“Tell us something about Australia,” they say. I tell them about the beaches, the camping and bushwalking that makes me love living there, the dullness of the cities compared to those in India, the lack of religion in most people’s lives. They want to know the name of our president, our currency, the cost of living, whether we are a democracy or Soviet. They find it hard to believe that when we get married, often before, we leave our parents’ house. Then she asks a big question, “But who looks after your old people then?”. I'm ashamed at the answer. What am I to tell them? That we put them away?
Back in Melbourne, a friend who’s been researching this topic tells me, “It’s not so bad; only six per cent of old people live in elderly accommodation,” he says, and I'm reassured. But it’s still different, the whole attiude to old people, to children. In India, they're not a nuisance, an issue, a problem, a political hot potato, people who need care; they're just part of the family.
I know I run the risk of romanticising all things Indian, including the way families organise, simply because I love the place. I know there is a dark side to the extended family system. Everyone knows about the appalling treatment some parents-in-law mete out to their son’s new wife, of hideous so-called accidental burnings, of suspicious so-called suicides. Doubtless these things occur. All I'm saying is that often the system works and to assume, as most Westerns seem to, that arranged marriages and extended families are not as happy as the way we do things here is a prejudice that’s hard to hang onto once you spend a bit of time with families in India.
At the end of my 36‑hour train trip, I say a fond farewell to the Gudjarati family after we’ve taken each other’s photos and swapped addresses. But I have some trouble finding the friend who’s come to meet me. I notice the family, who’ve already been met, are hovering. First, they offer me a mobile phone to call my friend, then they help me with my luggage to where she’s waiting, then they see me to her car and the younger man helps me load my heavy suitcase into the boot. In India, it’s a jungle out there, and it’s full of family.
