My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future

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The women's living room in my childhood home had a single piece of furniture-a huge rosewood swing with four long chains that were anchored into the ceiling when my grandfather built the house, on a leafy road in Madras, India, in 1939.

 

That swing, with its gentle glide back and forth in the South Indian heat, set the stage for a million stories. My mother, her sisters, and her cousins-wearing simple saris in fuchsia, blue, or yellow-rocked on it in the late afternoon with cups of sweet, milky coffee, their bare feet stretched to the floor to keep it moving. They planned meals, compared their children's grades, and pored over Indian horoscopes to find suitable matches for their daughters or the other young people in their extensive family networks. They discussed politics, food, local gossip, clothes, religion, music, and books. They were loud, talked over one another, and moved the conversation along.

 

From my earliest days, I played on the swing with my older sister, Chandrika, and my younger brother, Nandu. We swayed and sang our school songs: "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," "The Woodpecker Song," "My Grandfather's Clock," or the Beatles, Cliff Richard, or Beach Boys tunes we'd heard on the radio: "Eight Days a Week," "Bachelor Boy," "Barbara Ann." We snoozed; we tussled. We read British children's novels by Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, and Frank Richards. We fell onto the shiny red-tiled floor and scrambled back on.

 

Ours was the big, airy house where a dozen cousins would gather for festivals and holidays. The swing was a set piece for elaborate plays we wrote and performed, based on anything that caught our fancy. Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles gathered to watch, holding bits of torn newspaper with the words one ticket scrawled on them. Our relatives felt free to critique our shows or to start chatting or simply walk away. My childhood was not a world of "Great job!" It was more like "That was so-so" or "Is this the best you can do?" We were accustomed to honesty, not false encouragement.

 

The reviews didn't matter on those busy, happy days. We felt important. We were in motion, laughing and carrying on to our next game. We played hide-and-seek, we climbed trees, and picked the mangoes and guavas that grew in the garden surrounding the house. We ate on the floor, sitting cross-legged in a circle, with our mothers in the center ladling sambar sadam and thayir sadam-lentil stew and curds mixed with rice-from clay tureens and dishing out Indian pickles onto banana leaves that served as plates.

 

In the evenings when the cousins were visiting, the swing was dismantled-the great, shiny-wood plank unhitched from the silver-colored chains and carried to the back porch to be stored overnight. Then we'd line up in the same space to sleep, boys and girls in a row on a large, colorful mat, each with our own pillow and cotton sheet. Sometimes, we'd be under a mosquito net. If the power was on, a fan turned lazily overhead, pretending to break the heat when the overnight temperature was 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29.5 degrees Celsius). We'd sprinkle water on the floor around us, hoping its evaporation would cool the place.

 

Like many houses in India at the time, Lakshmi Nilayam, as our house was named, also had a men's living room-a vast hall with big square windows directly off the entry portico, where it was easy to keep an eye on who came and went.

 

My paternal grandfather, a retired district judge, had used all his savings to design and construct this grand, two-story residence, with its terrace and balconies. But he spent all his time in the men's living room, reading newspapers and books and lounging in a large easy chair with a canvas seat. He slept on a carved-wood divan with deep-blue upholstery.

 

He warmly welcomed visitors, who almost always dropped by unannounced. The men would gather on the room's two large sofas and talk about world affairs, local politics, or current issues. They had strong points of view about what government or companies should be doing to help citizens. They spoke in Tamil or in English, often alternating between the two. Children came and went-hanging out, reading, or working on homework. I never saw a woman sit in that room in front of my grandfather, whom I called Thatha. My mother was always in and out of the room, serving coffee and snacks to visitors or tidying up.

 

The Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Dictionary, both bound in burgundy leather, lay on a wooden side table. Thatha once had my sister and me read Nicholas Nickleby, the almost one-thousand-page novel by Charles Dickens. Every few chapters he'd take the book, poi...