Waitress and Student Before the Feminist Era

Tables for Ladies

The picture is from my Metropolitan Museum of Art desk calendar, a painting by Edward Hopper, detail from Tables for Ladies, oil on canvas, 1930. The note in the calendar for the painting —

“Tables for Ladies” was once familiar signage beckoning unescorted women to dine without fear of harassment or of being mistaken for fallen women. Certainly a sign of changing times as women began working outside the home … …”

This was a generation earlier than mine but the situation for women had improved only a little. By the late 1940s, a young middle-class woman was ordinarily expected to work outside the home but resign her job after she married. Too independent an attitude and she was labeled a loose woman.

The restaurant in the painting is very like one near my university campus in the 1940s and ’50s. It was the Chocolate Shop, small and stylish, serving university personnel, visitors to the campus and local business people. I went in to meet my girlfriend who worked there and to look around, but I could afford neither to eat and drink nor to work in The Chocolate Shop. It was not a place for me. I waited tables in a large restaurant with a bar and late night hours, depending upon tips to support myself, pay tuition and buy books. Chocolate Shop customers came for a light lunch, coffee and cakes, for tea, to sit in the mahogany wood booths and linger in the pleasant, gentile atmosphere. My friend worked for two hours, three afternoons a week for her spending money, and probably from the Protestant ethic that work and being prudent with money is what one does. She was from the town, living at home rather than on campus in a girl’s dorm or renting a room off-campus, as I did. Her father was a professor at the university and their house was lovely, decorated by her mother in quiet good taste. They were the first upper middle class family I knew and spent time with in their home. I sat for hours in her father’s book-lined study, engaged in conversation with him while my friend and her mother chatted in the kitchen and moved around slowly in the dining room, setting the table with china and glassware inherited from the mother’s family.

The Chocolate Shop hired both boys and girls to wait tables, called boys and girls rather than young men and young women because that was the vocabulary of the time for undergraduate students. I asked my friend about her pay. She told me and mentioned as an aside that boys were paid more per hour than were the girls. When I protested that this was unfair she said, “No, they work harder than we do.” I made it a point after that to watch the student wait staff when I was in the Shop and failed to see the boys working harder than the girls. Without questioning its truth, the assumption was made that a man’s, or boy’s, work was the more valuable and worthy.

The Chocolate Shop closed while I was a graduate student and Teaching Assistant. The furnishings were sold at an auction. The mirrors along the walls were particularly sought after and purchased by people who knew quality. With its closing one of the few remaining symbols of an earlier academic community lifestyle disappeared. The attitudes toward women in the workplace took somewhat longer to change.

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In search of Ravi’s past — the surahi lamps

Small brass Indian surahi

Surahi from Lucknow

Ordinary things and small events often set me to thinking about Ravi and the questions I would ask him if he were here. Today it was having new shades made for table lamps that date for us from 1970 and our apartment in Ankara. Ravi brought the lamps home with him one afternoon, purchased, and undoubtedly bargained for, in a small workshop (long since gone) on an unpaved path between our street and Tunalihilmi, the main shopping street. He surprised me. Usually I selected and bought our furniture and anything else that equipped and decorated our home, with him barely bothering to even comment on what I was doing. These four lamps were entirely different from anything I had ever seen before but they were well proportioned and attractive, so I had shades made for them and placed them on the sofa’s end tables and elsewhere in the apartment. They are pictured here. Decades later, when we moved back to the States, I had the lamps rewired and refurbished; they had become an essential part of our household furniture. Ravi never explained why he had bought them and it never occurred to me to ask.

The lamps are fashioned from tall antique water pitchers, two in copper and two in bronze, each decorated with nicely engraved Arabic letters and symbols, each approximately 20 inches, or 52 cm, high. In English, the word for this type of pitcher is ewer, Middle English from the Old French eauier. From my etymological dictionary: a pitcher used for bringing water for washing the hands, later a bedroom water jug. The servant who brought the ewer to the table and poured the water for persons there was called the ewerer. In our home, we use the Hindi word surahi for Indian and Turkish made ewers and have a favorite one we fill with water and set on the table at mealtime, a gracefully shaped surahi, about 25 cm high, covered with an engraved and delicately colored floral design. Although I find this strange, I think our surahi is made of stainless steel; a magnet clings to it and it never tarnishes.

Why did Ravi buy the lamps? It occurred to me they may have reminded him of surahis he knew from his childhood in the Benares house. I thought perhaps the family depended upon a servant to bring a surahi and a bowl to the table before and after the meal. I asked Ravi’s brother. He knew nothing of such a practice. He said they went to a sink to wash their hands, which is consistent with the various family homes in India I knew over the decades. Most had a small sink in the dining room. When we ate with our fingers, no fork or spoon, we washed our hands in the sink before eating and again after the meal. Still, in the 1930s, in a traditional city like Benares and in other homes where he visited as a child, Ravi could have seen such surahis and even washed his hands with a servant or family member pouring the water for him. I failed to ask him. I will never know.

Having begun this search, I find the surahi/ewer for washing hands (and long ago for washing feet, too) fascinating to think and learn about. For millennia a large water pitcher was an essential item in ordinary life, something every household would own or try to own, yet they are now so unfamiliar that an explanation is required before discussing them. Think of the changes brought about in our social relationships by the introduction of modern plumbing. Traditionally, if a family member or a social equal poured the water for another to wash his/her hands (or feet), it was an act of caring or as a favor. If the person pouring were a ewerer, a servant, or a subordinate, s/he could be socially invisible and the service would be a statement to both parties of their status relationship. Water piped into homes and public buildings turned washing hands in public from an interaction involving two persons, one giving and the other receiving a service, into a socially detached, impersonal act. I wonder what message was communicated in the past to a child when the ewerer was almost invisible to him/her. In Somalia, I once received the water over my hands from a friend and I remember it as an act of kindness.

Everywhere and in every time, people find a way to decorate and make graceful even the most humble objects of daily use. For the elite and for gift-giving, ordinary objects can be turned into works of art. The surahi as a work of art evolved earliest in Persia. During the time of the Crusades, from the 11th into the 13th centuries, European knights returning from Jerusalem and the Near East brought surahis from those cultures home with them, transforming for Europeans the design of the ewer.

7th century Irani surahi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This surahi demonstrates a continuation of Parthian and Sasanian forms during the early Islamic period in Iran. The lobed forms represent mountains and the vertical lines surmounted by budlike shapes are probably plants. Its overall composition and motifs demonstrate the transition from a figural style to a growing taste for rhythmic repeating patterns. The handle is shaped like an elongated cat peering at the heads of two birds depicted on the rim of the vessel, as though about to pounce. I love the cat.

14th century Egyptian surahi Metropolitan Museum of Art

Holding the Egyptian surahi by its rounded handle, a servant would have poured water into a large matching basin while his master washed his hands in the stream of water flowing from the long spout. The dedicatory inscription on the surahi places it in the reign of Sultan al Nasir Muhammad (1310–41).

A poem inscribed on a surahi from Afganistan in the Tiflis Museum, Georgia, describes the novelty and value of beautiful surahis:
‘My beautiful ewer, pleasant and elegant,
In the world of today who can find the like?
Everyone who sees it says ‘It is very beautiful’.
No one has found its twin because there are no others like it.
Glance at the ewer, a spirit comes to life out of it,
And this is living water that flows from it.
Each stream which flows from it into the hand
Gives each hour new pleasure.
Glance at the ewer which everyone praises;
It is worthy to be of service to such an honoured person as you.
Everyone seeing how moisture flows from it
Is able to say nothing which is not appropriate to it.
This ewer is for water and they make it in Herat.
In what other century can they make the like of it?
Seven heavenly bodies, however proud they may be,
Are protection for the one who works so.
Let kindness come down on the one who makes such a ewer,
Who wastes gold and silver and so decorates it.
Let happiness come to him if he gives the ewer to a friend.
Let trouble come if he surrenders it to an enemy.’

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The Benares house — Part Two

The Benares Ghats

Not all of Ravi’s memories were clear or consistent, but I wanted to hear as many as possible before they slipped away forever. I turned to matters of everyday goods and services for the family. I had seen in Turkey and in India that many services were brought to the house rather than the mother/wife going out to shop for them.

I asked Ravi about such matters. He said that Kabuliwallhahs, men from Kabul, came regularly from Afganistan, walking through the streets, selling dried fruits and nuts, and looking for work. Their guard, the chokidar for the house and compound, bigger and taller than any other man in the vicinity, was a Kabuliwallah. (here for a picture of a Kabuliwalla) Chinese men came on bicycles to the house, carrying silk goods on their backs. They stopped at the gate and a servant told Didai, “Maimshab, the Chinaman has come.” “All right, let him in.” They bargained, in broken English, and she bought shirts, pillowcases and embroidered shawls, all made in China and brought across the mountains to the plains. The light, soft silk fabric was a luxury for the family. Following Gandhi’s call to boycott British cotton goods and support village craftsman by wearing clothes made from khadi, the local cotton cloth, Papaji had taken to wearing a cotton kurta, the traditional Indian shirt, with white cotton trousers, even to the office. To this symbolic vestment of the Independence movement, he added the Gandhi cap. Ravi thought Papaji also wore silk kurtas, made by a special tailor rather than by one of the usual tailors who came to the house.

A happy occasion for the children was the periodic visit by the man who kept their cotton mattresses comfortable. After he finished his work they would all sleep better, at least for a while. The mattress man sat on the veranda, surrounded by empty envelopes of cotton cloth and piles of crushed cotton fibers. With his bow and string he fluffed the cotton stuffing, sending clouds of white specks flying. They called him the Dum Dum Dumiya because of the sound the taut string made as he worked.

Other workers came to the compound. An important person, most likely invisible to the children, was the woman who cleaned the toilets with her broom and the water she hauled to the task. Ravi said she was the wife of the man who cleaned the area. I assume, given the lack of municipal services and a general lack of interest I noticed elsewhere in maintaining public areas, that by “the area” he meant the compound. The couple would have been from an outcaste community that does this sort of work. Men from a caste that dealt with snakes, particularly cobras, came when a snake was seen or sensed. They lured the snake into a basket and took it away.

The compound garden was large. There were fruit trees, mango, guava, papaya, a type of citrus fruit and perhaps others Ravi did not mention. He remembered the gardener living in the compound and taking the produce as part of his pay. He said four houses, meant as servant quarters, were situated behind the house but I rather doubt that. He also remembered a garage. In 1936 Papaji bought a new Ford V8 from Calcutta. It was a major purchase. Few men at that time could afford such a luxury. Ravi spoke of a chauffeur but this was the first I had heard of it. I have the impression from a family letter that Papaji drove the car himself, but it is nearly impossible now to know for certain who drove and how the car was maintained. No one I knew in the extended family talked about individual servants or household staff. They talked, and even wrote in letters, about the availability and cost of servants in various parts of the country but not about any particular servant. (How culture shapes the way we see different categories of people!) Still, a chauffeur would be remembered, like the chokidar and the teenage boy who served them, because he was different. Most likely, Ravi was mixing memories. Uncles whom he regularly visited were high level civil servants in the central government bureaucracy, and as part of their remuneration they were supplied with cars and the chauffeurs to drive and maintain the cars.

Ravi remembered a shrine in the compound, made of stone and about three feet high. He and the other children played near the shrine and it figured in ceremonies for Diwali and other holidays. Papaji’s mother, Bao, lived with them and she was a devout Hindu, but Papaji and Didai did not keep the rituals. Diwali, the holiday when women line the house with small lights kept burning in tiny oil lamps, is so lovely a ceremony that I cannot believe they would not keep it.

Vendors of fruits and vegetable, including oranges, mangos and apples from Nagpur in the far north, went through the streets, calling out what they had to sell and Didai went or sent a servant to the gate to buy what the family needed for the day. The matai walla, the man who sold sweets, was well remembered. Ravi especially liked the rasgullas, made from milk. For special occasions a cook came to the house to make jaleibis, thin rings of wheat flour dough deep-fried then soaked in sugar syrup. To please the children, Didai occasionally called in a Muslim cook to prepare a heavily seasoned goat curry. For the children, also, Didai prevailed upon Papaji to buy an oven in which she could bake a European style cake, and he brought one, a state-of-the-art model, back from his travels to the big city. It consisted of a large cast iron vessel with a deep cast iron lid. She heated the vessel by setting it on a charcoal fire and placing burning charcoal on top. Having no temperature gauge whatsoever, she learned through trail and error how to control the oven and produce cakes that delighted all the family, even their grandmother, a practicing Hindu and vegetarian, who would not touch most foreign food.

Surely Didai went to the markets near the ghats for cloth and saris. Benarasi saris are famous and gorgeous beyond describing. In a visit to Benares in 1977 Ravi and I spent an afternoon walking through the streets near the ghats, being taken in tow by a charming boy, maybe ten years old, who wanted, I suppose, to sell us something. Or maybe he was just curious. He had a musical instrument with him, which caught Ravi’s attention. After some time talking with him we went to the workshop where his father was working at a loom. Apparently, the boy was Muslim. At that time this fact had no meaning for me. Ravi moved us on to the silk market, an area partitioned off from the crowded, messy, dirty city streets. The silk market was organized, orderly and clean; I can still see images of it, in Technicolor. I remember the white walls of the merchants’ alcoves and being transfixed as one bolt after another of luscious silk cloth was rolled out on the white floor. It was a paradise of colors beyond my imagination.

Didai’s other shopping in the city had consequence for my own shopping. When she went to buy pots and pans and household containers made of copper and brass, she took Ravi, her oldest son, along to help and, perhaps, just to have a male presence with her. He hated it. He hated the long examination of every item, the haggling over price and the time away from his own pursuits. Hence, in Ankara, when I found the traditional copper bowls and pans attractive he reverted to his childhood pique and insisted I not buy them. When we walked by such a stall in a marketplace, he hurried me on. He refused to go into the old part of Ankara, to Ulus, where the market for these goods still operated. A decade later, when visiting friends in Ankara, I went alone to Ulus and defiantly bought any number of antiques in copper and bronze — a soup bowl, a small milk pail, and on and on. By then he had forgotten his original reaction and accepted my purchases as good additions to our collection of memorabilia.

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Ravi’s childhood home in Benares — Part One

Camel cart, Sukkur, Pakistan (photo credit: Christie Getman-Wells)

In August 2007, before Alzheimer’s completely eradicated his memory, Ravi showed me a photograph in the Wall Street Journal of a camel cart somewhere on the ancient Silk Road and began telling me about camel carts from his childhood in Benares in the late 1930s. The cart in the photo was a simple structure, hardly more than a platform balanced on a two-wheeled, rubber-tired axle. Two long poles, one on either side of the platform, were tied in the front ends to a rope descending from between the camel’s humps. Another rope reached from the camel’s nose back to the platform cart, possibly to a boy sitting on the side of the cart and to a person not visible in the photo. The cart was loaded with sacks. A colorful cloth covered the camel’s humps and his hindquarters.

Ravi said, “This is like people on the Silk Road coming from Rajasthan, on camels.  We would see them on the roads and when they went by we kids would applaud them.  To an 8 or 9 year old this was exciting. They were on their way to the markets.”  Actually, the camels were on the Grand Trunk Road, here not the Silk Road.

I asked him if vendors came to the gate for Didai to buy things. Didai was the name the children used for their mother, a baby-talk version of Didi, meaning eldest sister. Their mother had been Didi to her many siblings and she so fully embodied the role as a woman assuming responsible for others that it become more her name than a title. They called their father Papaji, Papa plus the respectful suffix ji.

My questioning Ravi about his beloved childhood house continued, but at this point I wanted a picture of the house. He could not manage that, so I asked his brother, Ajit, for a description. I knew the house was large and set in a garden within a walled compound and remembered small things Ravi had spoken of over the years but needed a framework for the details he had given me.

Ajit said the house was three stories high, surrounded on three sides by a veranda, deep and some ten feet high. The living room, with a sofa, armchairs, side tables, dining table and chairs, and the kitchen were on the first floor. Long before Ajit gave me his memories of the house, I had talked with Ravi about plumbing in that era and from those discussions and other houses I know, I see the kitchen opening to the back of the house and water piped in for cooking and bathing. Nearby, outside, would be two neat, always impeccably clean, toilet cabinets. I think this would have been the laundry area also.

The third floor of the house was for sleeping. The bedrooms were there, opening onto a long balcony. On hot summer nights they took their charpoys and cotton-filled mattresses to the balcony and slept in the open air.  (The charpoy is a narrow wood frame and rope bed.)

Ajit’s description of the second floor surprised me. I had assumed that their house would have originally been a British colonial home but Ajit thought not. He said the ceiling for the living room was two stories high because the second floor was open in its center. He first said the second floor had been his mother’s but modified that by saying women went there when men came to visit with Papaji. From the details he gave me, I picture the second floor as a four-sided balcony around the opening and edged by a high metal louvered railing, constructed in a way that would accommodate a traditional Hindu or Muslim concept of women being hidden from all men other than those of the immediate family. A woman standing behind the railing could look down and see what was happening on the floor below but anyone, assuming a man, looking up would not be able to see her.

Ravi’s was a modern and unusually progressive family living in a thoroughly traditional Benares, a national center for Hinduism. Papaji had been a student in the Benares Hindu University, a major center for intellectuals in the Indian independence movement and was returning as manager in a business firm. Given his high status and new affluence, he was able to rent this grand house that had been designed for the traditional Benares elite. I believe, because of the location of the house, that the family for whom it was built was more likely to have been Hindu rather than Muslim.

I will gradually fill in details about the house and the gardens. Next, however, I will continue with Ravi’s memories of Didai and vendors who came to the gate. Those of Chinese men coming on bicycles, carrying silk goods on their backs, were particularly vivid.

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Altzheimer’s in a cross-cultural marriage

I wrote this in 2009, when Ravi and I were both 79 years old and a year before he passed away —

Ravi once told me that no matter what happened between us he could never leave me because his history resides in my memory. It’s true that I know him better than does anyone else anywhere but as his Altzheimer’s progresses he drifts away from me and ever more deeply into a part of his history I can only imagine. Our marriage of fifty-six years has disappeared. What remains with him and what I live with every day are traits and expectations he acquired as a child, decades before we met and in a place, the city of Benares, far from, and very different from, my own childhood.

Ravi has lost all but his earliest memories, and even those are vague. He does not recognize friends, either in person or in photographs. He knows his mother and father when he sees a photo of them but rarely says anything about them. He did tell me recently, as he was looking at a photograph of his father sitting at a table in a formal meeting with other Indian men, that Papaji died and he must write him a letter. Sometimes, but not often, when he is looking at photos of his brothers and sisters and is told their names, he will say he remembers them but I have to remind him the next time we talk about the family. When he hears me speak of Arun, our son, or sees his photo, I explain again where Arun lives and why he no longer lives with us. Ravi keeps a baby and a boyhood photo of him in a favorite old wallet. Our daughter, Manisha, is in the house nearly every day. I cannot know if Ravi understands that she is his daughter; he does, however, want her near him and he expects her to obey him. He is pleasant with Aziz, the boy, now grown, who came home with us from Mogadiscio and once again lives with us, and he keeps track of whether Aziz is in the house or has gone out. Friends who come to visit are forgotten as soon as they leave.

And how does Ravi remember me? Apparently, I am for him a number of different women, or kinds of women, from his past and he changes his perception of me from one encounter to another. He correctly identifies me when going through the photographs he keeps with him on the table and in drawers and files. He knows I am his wife, particularly when we are at the dinner table together and, maybe, at night when I come to bed. Mostly, however, during the day he sees me as a servant woman, a woman without a name. I no longer let it bother me. He sometimes tells his servant woman he wants to leave this place and go to his wife. When he sees me with Manisha I am her mother. At other times I am his mother. Once, after studying the photo of a woman praying on a ghat of the River Ganges, he thought of his grandmother and spoke to me as if I were she. When I am helping him dress or tucking him into bed, I am his personal servant. Sometimes he tells me that “a lady” had been in another room with him and he asks me where she has gone.

And from what and where do all my identities derive? Undoubtedly from Ravi’s childhood in Benares, where he lived with his father and mother and brothers and sisters in a fine colonial house set in a large compound. With English as his language for the past sixty years, he undoubtedly has lost an awareness that the language of the Benares home was Hindi mixed with English. Both parents had been schooled through university in English, so they moved easily between the two languages and several other Indian languages, plus providing tutoring in French for Ravi. The family had acquired British ways, such as the parents sitting together for dinner at a dining table. Papaji dressed in the British style, including wearing a suit to the office. The house was wired for electricity. They had lighting at night, a radio, a phonograph, and a true luxury in the Indian summer: an electric fan. Ravi fusses over our fans, having me turn them on and off, off and on. Papaji brought home The Times of India and read it to Ravi until Ravi, even as a child, began himself reading obsessively about the Independence movement and government and politics.

From America, Life magazine and Popular Mechanics came into the house, to be read, reread, studied and passed around. Ravi today sits at a table, hour after hour, in a ritual of pouring over newspapers and magazines he can read word by word but not comprehend. In Benares he listened each evening with his father to the BBC short-wave news broadcast. Now he tries to hear the evening news on television but insists they are deliberately speaking a foreign language so he cannot understand them.

I never met Ravi’s mother. A few years after he and I married she died, post-surgery in a Bombay hospital. Her name was Sushila but everyone knew her as Didai. In the Indian family system, at least for Ravi’s extended family, the oldest son and oldest daughter have titles, as have the parents. There is Father, Mother, Dada and Didi. Dada and Didi are second father and mother to the younger children. They are expected to assume nearly parental responsibility for their younger siblings and, in return, to receive deference and respect from them. Ravi’s mother was Didi to her brothers and sisters. The role was so basic in the family that she carried the title all her life and her own children used a baby form of it, Didai.

I try to imagine Didai as mother. From stories Ravi has told me and from having lived in India, I have some idea of how she ran her household. She managed and directed a fair number of servants, both men and women, who worked at the endless tasks required to maintain a middle-class home in a time and place with no household appliances. Laundry was sent out to a man, the dhobiwala, who washed it in the river and ironed it with a charcoal heated iron. Food preparation was basic. For example, wheat was bought in the market, brought home for sorting out small stones and bugs and dirt, then taken to a mill for grounding. Ravi told me recently that Papaji once found his mother sitting on the kitchen floor with the small household mill between her legs, one hand moving the top stone in a circle over the bottom stone and the other feeding in grains of wheat, and he gently scolded her, saying we no longer make our flour at home. (That was the end of the memory. It was a flash and he could not recall more of it.) Cooking was over wood fires. One woman, maybe two, helped Didai cook and make chapattis. Another servant, a lower caste woman, came in after everyone had eaten to wash the dishes and cookware. She would use ashes from the cooking fire to clean the metal pots.

As I picture the child Ravi in the Benares house, I see two or three lower class, lower caste women speaking Hindi with Didai. They are cleaning, helping with the new baby, picking up after the children, working in the kitchen, running errands, being on call as needed. Recently, I asked the second brother (Ravi is Dada, the first born) about his memories of Benares. He told me about Papaji and Didai eating together and the children eating separately, most likely sitting on the floor, as people still do in rural areas. He told stories about a teenage servant, Ramsingh, whom the boys adored. When I asked him about the women servants in the house he said there weren’t any. The next day he corrected himself. The servants were there, indeed, but virtually invisible to him.

I understand how Ravi could confuse me with the servant women. In his earliest memories they behaved much as I do now; he sees me as he saw them, continually moving from one place to another, cooking, cleaning, fussing. And, being of the family in such a household, he enjoyed a privilege that comes with status: he need not move from where he sat unless and until he was ready to do so because a servant could always be called to bring him whatever it was that he wanted or do for him what he would do if he felt like rising from his chair. Now I am that servant. He sits in his chair and tells me he needs a glass of water, take away a dish, turn on the light, open or close the door, do something about the TV, bring him a magazine from another table. He has no awareness of what I may be doing at that moment; that I am being interrupted is not his concern. I wonder if this is the Altzheimer’s operating or a lack of concern for the servant’s privacy and autonomy. If he cannot understand what I say, which is fairly often, he scolds me for not knowing the English language. He does speak politely to me, at least as long as I do as he wishes. If I do not respond according to his expectations his voice becomes harsh, most unpleasant, and he has on occasion reminded me that he pays my wage and can deny me the space on the floor where I sleep at night. He uses his cane to hit out at Manisha and me and has thrown water in my face. Lately we have had fewer of these outbursts and less of the violence, most likely because I’ve learned to accept and to hide my annoyance, to control my anger, but also, I suspect, because I’ve acquired one of the tricks a powerless person uses. I ignore him for a while, then turn sweet and compliant and let him calm down and forget, as he usually does.

Ramsingh, a boy from the village, was the servant who cared for Ravi and the boys and watched over them day and night. Ramsingh dressed Ravi, tied his shoelaces, fed him, in later years took him on a bicycle to the Montessori school. Ravi accepts that I will help him dress; he even expects me to dress him. I have become Ramsingh. That works out all right, except when Ravi turns nasty, as one can with a servant. He immediately accepted the commercial paper underpants when I brought them to him, taught himself how to change them and lets me take away the ones he soiled. He obviously feels humiliated but now less hostile when I bathe him. I am learning to manage and to deflect his anger.

Sometimes Ravi sees me as his mother but that is not new. Even before the dementia he sometimes woke suddenly from sleep and called me Didai. When we were first married he teased me by catching my skirt and pretending to wipe his hands on it, or even a runny nose, as he had done with his mother’s sari.

For what sort of person and of mothering am I the current substitute? Each description of Didai I heard from family began with her being a sweet person. A friend of the family told me Didai resembled her younger daughter, whom I knew as a girl and who was a beauty. (She died of a fallopian tube pregnancy in London.) Without being told by anyone, I understood something important about Didai, knew it from having lived in tropical countries and kept house in one: she was a remarkably resourceful mother. In an era before antibiotics and other medical advances she raised all her children to adulthood; she nursed each child through one illness after another, including tuberculosis, meningitis and amoebic dysentery.

Didai managed a house that was filled with children. There were seven of her own plus nieces and nephews brought to Didi’s big house by both the extended families. Family visits in traditional India were long and leisurely. Ravi loves to watch children. He asks me often where the youngsters are, why they aren’t in the house. He may be thinking about our children when they were small or images from his own childhood may be floating through his mind. Didai was sweet but she may have been strict. Ravi once told me that when he misbehaved she would tell Ramsingh to climb the neem tree and bring down an especially supple small branch for her to use. She probably did little more than wave it threateningly at the rambunctious boys. If she had actually punished them I would have heard about it as another family story.

A regular and favorite visitor to the Benares house was one of the cousins, Kamla, a girl two years older than Ravi. He remembered her for her big projects. She taught the children to act in plays she had invented and, after much practice, they performed for the adults as their audience. Many decades later, when she and I had become friends, Kamla told me that Didai was fun to be with, that she played games with the children and was always cheerful. Ravi loved telling me the story about an adventure Didai organized when Papaji was away for a few weeks. One morning she packed a picnic basket and had Ramsingh bring two rickshaws to take the children and him and her to the train station. She bought tickets. They boarded the train. They rode to the next stop. There they descended and walked into the countryside to a pleasant shady place where they spread a cloth to sit on and feast. They played or napped away the afternoon and toward sunset picked up their things, trundled back to the station, returned to their own train station and to home.

What sort of mothering did Ravi experience as a child? Undoubtedly, Didai was a loving mother but she gave birth again when Ravi was barely a year old, and then had, in quick succession, three more sons and two daughters. Over the years Ravi told me far more about Papaji than about Didai. He talked occasionally about his grandmother praying and going to the ghats and telling stories to the children. In sum, I imagine Ravi as a bright child growing up enveloped in love and acceptance and support from a large, highly educated and fairly affluent family. He became a self-confident, handsome, attractive adult, thoroughly charming and supremely bien dans sa peau. He was king of the hill.

How, then, do I relate to this elderly man who still looks and sounds like my husband? How do I handle my exasperation and the sadness? Caring for him is like caring for a child with a short attention span who throws temper tantrums when he does not get his way. Unlike a child, though, he cannot learn and I cannot discipline him. What do I do, for example, when he gets out of bed in the middle of the night, turns on all the lights, shaves, rummages around in the closet and tells me he has to dress for work? First, I go the kitchen and fix his favorite snack of sweet yogurt and pineapple. He may be awake because he is hungry. After that, I do not confront him with reality. Even before Altzheimer’s he could not accept the blunt, direct style that is American. He is, after all, Indian. When we were first married he talked often about nonviolence; he is accustomed to indirection. I could call it subtle manipulation. My best strategy for getting back to sleep myself is not to argue with him but to suggest in as gentle a voice as I can manage that he will best be ready for work in the morning if he goes to sleep now. He usually allows me to tuck him into bed, as Didai or Ramsingh would have done. The likelihood that we can sleep late the next morning comforts me.

I try, through patience, affection and non-confrontation, to allow for those occasional interludes when the Altzheimer’s briefly recedes and Ravi’s true self and his playful wit breaks through, if only for a moment.

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