Excerpted from Chosen Ground: The Clara Motwani Saga by Goolbai Gunasekera

One thing I can say about life with my parents is that it was never dull. One parent was a school Principal and the other a Professor, and their united efforts ensured that every shining moment of the day was gainfully employed by their two daughters in learning something. This fact alone made for activity, if not for thrills or excitement.Father had a thing about dinner time conversation.

“Food digests better when we talk of soothing subjects,” he would decree, launching into a debate with Mother about the state of America’s foreign affairs. Mother, being American, and having lived out of the USA from the time of her marriage, was always up to date on what American Presidents were doing. America was the ultimate to her in just about everything, and it was a constant joy to her irreverent family to needle her on the subject whenever possible. She had a low tolerance for criticism of her motherland.

Su and I took sides indiscriminately, and a lively evening was had by all. I don’t know what all this argument did to our digestions, but obviously we flourished. Eventually my sister and I privately decided that the time had come to infuse dinner time chats with topics more to our liking. Accordingly, one night, Su led off.

“I saw a cute boy at the Barnes Place junction today,” she said brightly.

Our parents looked at her blankly. It hadn’t occurred to them that we’d ever noticed such unlikely beings as boys. We were aged thirteen and sixteen respectively, but such were the norms of the times in which we were raised.

Father slapped the table.

“Not of general interest,” he roared. “Now if Su had seen a comet passing overhead — that would be of general interest.”

“Honestly, Daddy,” I said, backing up my sibling, “our dinner conversations are so literary. Why can’t we relax?”

“I’m relaxed,” boomed Father. “Aren’t you relaxed?” he asked Mother across the table. “And what’s your problem in relaxing?”

This last was to me. Father had just read the latest Time on the Vietnam war, and was itching to get going on the subject.

“What would you two like to talk about?” Mother asked diplomatically.

Father looked frustrated, and began to fidget. Now, I’d reached the age of discretion, and hadn’t the slightest intention of revealing to my parents that Dearly Beloved (then Dearly to be Beloved) and I were having what my friends grandly termed an ‘affaire’, but which in reality was just a series of romantic phone calls usually made when everyone was out of the house. I simply smiled and let my sister carry on. She did.

“I want to know,” demanded Su, forthright to the point of lunacy, “if that cute boy I mentioned earlier can come and visit me at home. To chat about books and things,” she added hastily, seeing Father’s face begin to darken.

Mother and I watched apprehensively as his whole body seemed to swell with indignation. Mixing of the sexes was not yet allowed in the Sri Lanka of that time — and even less in sleepy Arazi, his home town, from where he had drawn his ideas on boy/girl relationships.

“Are you actually telling me you have spoken to this young ….” he paused, searching for suitable words, “this young despoiler of innocent girls, this depraved Romeo, this unethical whippersnapper, this……He was well launched.Su was not easily intimidated.

“What are you carrying on like that for?” she asked in honest bewilderment. “All my friends talk to boys at the Barnes Place corner. They cycle with us to school and then they go on to Royal … and stop kicking me, ” she added impatiently, to me.

It will be remembered that, unlike me, Su was a Bridgeteen. Following Mother’s educational theories that sisters should not attend the same school, we had been separated — though, frankly, I feel Mother might have been more concerned for the well-being of the schools rather than for the welfare of her two daughters. The vision of Su and her friends cycling up to the gates of St Bridget’s Convent in convoy, with the young stars of Royal College in attendance, quite shattered my parents.

“It’s boarding school for you, Miss,” Father roared at an indignant Su. “And don’t think I don’t mean it.”

At this point he recalled last month’s telephone bill and gave me a suspicious glare, to which I returned a perfectly bland look.

Following this incident, our parents paid Reverend Mother Superior of St. Bridget’s a visit, and if Father had had his way, one of the nuns would have been permanently stationed at an upstairs window with a telescope trained on all roads leading to the school, to ensure the future and continuing purity of the Convent’s teenage cyclists. Hearing of this exchange betwixt authority and her parents, Su groaned.

“Good grief,” she lamented. “The nuns are sleuths and bloodhounds at the best of times. They’ve got eyes at the back of their heads.”

Actually things did not turn out half as badly as she feared. One of the nuns was an American, like Mother, and she did not view the whole episode with undue alarm. She wigged Su in school.

“Enjoyed your ride to school today, my dear?” she would ask Su, when she passed in the corridor. Su would smile weakly.

“Honestly,” she fumed to me, “to think a damn dinner conversation would lead to all this. Father can carry on about world affairs all he likes. I’m not going to say one word at meal times to anyone about anything.”

Father ignored her sulks, and Su kept her vow of silence for a week. Our sire carried on his soliloquy on topics of his choosing, but the salt of his conversational meal was lacking. Without the thrust and parry of my sister’s witty questions and cheeky opinions, he found dinner time pretty damn dull. Finally, he addressed himself gruffly to his younger offspring:

“Come now, Miss Grumpy, I’ve forgiven you.”

Truth to tell, Su, who loved talking, was finding her self-imposed silence unexpectedly hard to cope with. Matters returned to normal, but Su being Su, this happy state did not long continue.

One month to the day after the previous disaster she upset the dinner equilibrium all over again.

“I want to know,” she demanded of Father, “when I can learn to ballroom dance properly.”

Mother and I froze in our seats, and watched Father turn that familiar shade of puce. He opened and shut his mouth several times.

“At thirteen?” he said in a strangled voice. It was more a statement than a question.

“At thirteen?” he bellowed again, finding his usual tonal timbre, and she wants to dance with other equally silly 13-year-olds, I suppose?”

I sat looking demure, my halo shining brightly in contrast with what I thought was Su’s less than scintillating performance. But life is so unfair. A fortnight later, my cheeky younger sister joined Frank Harrison’s School of Dancing, and went on to win the odd medal here and there too. I was speechlessly envious.

“The thing is,” she told me, “the thing is to ask Father for the impossible. Then he settles for what you really want.”

Considering Father’s views on friendship between teens of opposite sexes, he was surprisingly non-vocal when it came to marriage. Both he and Mother realized the impracticability of arranging marriages for us in India.But one story needs be told.

One day Father received an agitated letter from a wealthy Sindhi merchant who had been his playmate in the village of Arazi. The merchant’s only son (the apple of his eye) was now practicing medicine in the USA, and was refusing to marry a Sindhi girl, claiming that he was too ‘westernized’ to settle down in India with an Indian wife. He wanted to marry an American colleague – also a doctor.

“Just think, Kewal, only my foolish son would think that an American would like India,” lamented the merchant, quite forgetting that Kewal’s own wife felt quite at home in Asia.

It transpired that the wayward son would consider marrying an Indian girl if she were educated and ‘westernized’. His distraught father suddenly remembered that his boyhood friend had an American wife and also two half-American daughters. He assumed that at least one daughter must be of marriageable age, hence the letter to Father asking permission for his son to meet one of them.

Father summoned me. His success with Mother over his attempts at arranging marriages for us had so far been minimal. She had washed her hands of the whole affair, thinking Father must really be out of his mind to be doing something so uncharacteristic. Father just could not get away from Arazi influences at times. In any case, she had a pretty shrewd idea how I would react.

Clearing his throat and looking at a point over my head, Father said gruffly:

“Er, would you like to meet a nice young man when you go to University in Bombay?”

I could hardly believe my ears.

“What?”

“A doctor is looking for a wife.”

Truly, Father’s personal persuasive skills were nil. “So?”

“Well … er … would you like to meet him?”

The chance of paying Father back was too good to miss. “Daddy! Are you arranging for me to speak to a BOY?”

“Well, he is a mature and well-qualified individual. Not the sort I see hanging around near post-boxes, that your sister seems to find so exciting.”

“Daddy, are you SURE? He might have only one thing on his mind.”

(One of Father’s pet phrases at this time was: “Young men have only one thing on their minds, and that one thing is not repeatable.”)

Father knew he had to accept the wigging. He accepted our pretended shock with good grace, and told me it was entirely up to me.

In point of fact I did meet the young man in question. He took me out to dinner when I was at university in Bombay, but both of us had other romances going and marriage between us was not an option. However he has always been a convenient peg on which to hang a winning argument with my husband. During any disagreement I can always say:

“And to think I gave up a doctor for you!”

Father wrote to his friend. According to Mother, he gave his usual excuse.

“Who am I, a mere father, to know what goes on in the heads of women. Let your son marry his American. He will probably be very happy. After all – I am.”

Riot over the diet

Father’s long lecture tours distanced him from his growing family for much of the time. He was thus spared the sight and company of squealing babies, which in his eyes was all to the good. Father never learnt to carry an infant. “Squirming little creatures,” was his comment on all new borns.

Not given to panegyrics, he viewed his two daughters with a judicial eye. He seemed to regard any successes of ours as accidental and unexpected. Fortunately, Mother was the opposite. My sister Su and I grew up in an alien land, but not once did we feel anything but totally Sri Lankan. For this we had our parents to thank, for we were brought up as Sri Lankans first, and Asian/Americans as an afterthought.

Our school friends had parents who had fallen into the traditional roles of courtship and marriage. Our own parents, on the other hand, had fallen into a quite unique category. We never tired of hearing the tale. “So tell us, Daddy,” Su would say, “Tell us the story of how you proposed?”

Father loved the narrative. “What do you mean, ‘propose’?” he would ask. “Your Mother saw this superbly romantic-looking Indian and I hadn’t a chance in hell. I was at the altar before I knew it.”

Mother would sigh resignedly. She knew, and we both knew too, that the reality had been very different.

Father was 28 and Mother just 18 when they got engaged. At 19 Mother was married, and half way through her degree in Languages and Music at the University of Iowa. Just after their marriage, Father transferred from Yale in order to be near her. When the financial debacle of the Wall Street crash wiped out Father’s American bank account, it meant that our parents could not afford to live together on campus since married quarters were expensive.

Accordingly they simply pretended they were single. When Mother was awarded her degree, Father insisted that she do a Master’s in Education. “The British will go,” he predicted, “and India’s schools and colleges will need qualified Principals.”

Mother thereupon enrolled in Professor Ensign’s class and began her thesis. Professor Ensign was an avuncular type of person, and had given Father quite a lot of added correction work by way of helping him earn extra income. One morning, he called Father aside. “Kewal,” he began, “I have a young girl from Kentucky in my class who is interested in the East. I think you should meet her and tell her about India.”

Father agreed, of course, and found himself being introduced to Mother. They shook hands gravely, trying not to meet each other’s eyes. To the end of his days, Professor Ensign thought he had played Cupid. Father never enlightened him, and the story of his matchmaking success enlivened the good Professor’s dinner table for many moons after that.

Mother took me to see Professor Ensign when I was four years old, as she was back in America on furlough. He patted my head, and gave me a photograph of himself with Mother on one side of him and Father on the other. It was a picture I treasured for many years but alas, cannot trace at this moment.

“You wouldn’t be here if not for me,” he is supposed to have said to me. Mother smiled her gentle smile. “Very true,” she said, telling one of the few untruths she ever uttered.

One wonders how a bond was forged between a youngAmerican girl and an already mature Indian Doctor of Sociology. What similarities existed that resulted in this unusual yet successful partnership? Su and I would endlessly discuss the matter. Both of us expected to marry in Sri Lanka or India (which we did), and both of us wondered what it would be like if we fell in love with an American.

“You won’t have the chance,” Father told us grimly once, when Su had been foolish enough to voice her views on matrimony. “Perish the thought. You’ll marry here, and like it.”

So what was the glue that held the bond between our parents firm? Firstly, both were Theosophists. My American grandmother was so much into Theosophy that she even influenced Mother to become a vegetarian at 17. Father had been a vegetarian from birth and through Jamshed was an ardent Theosophist himself, so it does seem as though similar food habits and similar religious beliefs formed that first strong link between them. Secondly, they were both highly educated. A third factor was the difference in age between them: Father did not find it difficult to mould his young wife into his ways of thinking.

He found Su and me, his two daughters, far more of a challenge than he liked. “Where has your Mother’s gentleness gone?” he would demand, glaring at Su’s rebellious face. On principle Su objected to everything. “I’m going to eat meat the minute I marry,” she would declare. Father would blench.

“And I’ll drink, too,” she would add. He would go even paler.

“We’ve begotten a changeling,” Father would tell Mother, who would smile and tell him to bear in mind that adolescence was generally a trying time. “If those two young ingrates want to make graveyards of their stomachs, who am I, a mere Father, to stop them?” he would say plaintively, hoping Su would overhear him. “And if liquor addles their brains, it doesn’t matter. They are addled already. Curdled would be a better description,” he would add.

Father’s aversion to meat and liquor certainly led us into some strange situations. Travelling together in America had Su and me cringing in our seats at restaurants. “The steak is excellent, sir,” the waiter would say, handing Father the menu. Father felt called upon to inform the entire restaurant, of his dietary preferences.

“Not a piece of meat has ever passed my lips,” he would declare in ringing tones. “And I don’t intend to start now.”

“Perhaps a nice Dover sole, then?” the waiter would say soothingly. Father’s voice would rise several notes. “And what, pray, is the difference?” he would ask the unfortunate waiter. “They are both flesh of living creatures, are they not? Nasty bloody business, all this meat guzzling.”

Diners at other tables began to lose their appetites. Father was in full spate. “Just order, dear,” Mother would say tactfully and, truth to tell, the manager of the restaurant was by now ready to give us all a free meal just to get Father out of there. Everyone settled for omelettes and salad. Fortunately no one had yet heard of the cholesterol scare, and we must have eaten enough eggs to start a poultry farm upon our return home. Father did not think eggs violated any Brahmin laws of ethics or dietetics.

His attitude to liquor was even worse. He had dinner one night with Mr. and Mrs. Argus Tressider, American diplomats in Colombo in the 1950s. A week later, Nancy Tressider met Father again and he complimented her on her dessert.

“Oh, you liked my brandy souffle, did you?” she asked innocently, not realizing that she was virtually hitting Father in the solar plexus. He went pale, and his stomach churned. He collected Mother, and hightailed it out of there so fast she had hardly any time to make her excuses to her hostess. He went home and was sick for twenty-four hours.

“I’m poisoned, poisoned,” he groaned hollowly every few minutes. “My entire system has been polluted.” He went on a water diet of detoxification. He was a psychological mess. Nancy rang up the next day to find out how Father was getting along after his hasty exit the previous night. Mother told her the truth. “But Clara, my dear,” Nancy said, “I only used brandy flavouring for the pudding.”

Father faced our gales of glee with fortitude. He admitted shamefacedly that it was a case of mind over matter, but when the day eventually came that Su married an officer of the Indian Army and did take the occasional glass of wine, Father was genuinely upset. “Your pure bodies,” he would lament. “What a great, great pity.” I never had the courage to admit that I did likewise. “Poppycock,” Su would mutter.

But now that I am a grandmother myself, and face dietary and health problems as do we all, I wonder: did Father have a point?