Anyone who knows the Anglo-Indian community — to which I belong — is aware that our lifestyle is highlighted by laidbackness. We have been dealt a rich hand in that commodity. In spades, to be honest. We love a life of dance and are connoisseurs of good food. Anglo-Indian cuisine is an entity in itself.
Our women might actually take offence at the accusation of being laidback and they’d be justified for, in growing up in a railway colony, I have seen them hard at work in the kitchens and then hard at work in offices, typing up memos and monthly reports for their directors. Our women love to dance and do so with a splendid sense of rhythm.
Our men, on the other hand, may read the laidback tag and go slightly red around the ears, for in growing up in the aforementioned railway colony, I have also observed how our manly ‘descendants of Adam’ spend an entire day. First we awake, escort the children to school, watching their slight frames disappear into the classroom. Job One, done! Then back home quickly to escort the wife to the bus stop, see her once-slender form merge with other forms in a crowded bus, flash a quick wave goodbye. Job Two, over! Then, confronted by the boredom of the looming hours, something has to be planned to stop time from hanging pendulously on the hands. What better than a game of cards on the verandah. A few games of rummy.
Within minutes, other hubbies of similar ‘time-beating’ disposition arrive, packets of cigarettes and matchboxes in hand. And in this way, time goes swiftly by in a haze of smoke. By 3.30pm, it’s time to put the deck away, clear the air, and go get the kids. When that is done, head for the bus stop, sit on the wall, smoke a few more cigarettes and await the bus that brings the hard-working wife home.
These are sweeping generalisations, of course. My community has its working-their-b****-off men, too, although their ilk used to be a bit like spotting snow in springtime. Many of these moved out and abroad where they discovered hard work could bring rewards and in this way made very different and successful lives for themselves. It stopped us from further gender-stereotyping. Successful young Anglo-Indian men living abroad, like a special species of fish, became profitable ‘catches’.
Matchmaking mothers and aunts back in the homeland turned themselves into skilled tacticians, as they plotted with Machiavellian subtlety a daughter’s future overseas. I can recall one case where Mrs X had a daughter who was raised under an exhaustively shady maternal umbrella. The offspring, being what used to be euphemistically called ‘homely’ — thanks to a paucity of life’s largesse in looks — was in danger of ending her days a spinster. That is, until a match-making campaign got under way to marry her off to Y, residing in a foreign land. Y, to be fair, was having trouble lining up a foreign girl and, in that way, he became what back home is called the classic bakra, a lamb ripe for the kill. A rich bakra, mind you, with a steady job (good over time), and a house with many lonely rooms waiting to be filled with the sound of pitter-pattering feet and good home cooking.
His one failing, according to Mrs X, who moaned the failure of her grand design for many years later, was that this excellent specimen pursued a belief different from theirs. He was, he said, a rationalist. That, to Mrs X, was as good as holding out a chalice of poisoned hemlock. Exit Socrates from the scene. The homely daughter ended her days single, teaching English (unescorted to and from the bus stop). I’m sure at some stage she would have happened upon the lines that say, “It’s not belief that makes anyone a worthy person, it’s behaviour that does.”
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
