My Uncle Mervyn (An Excerpt from my memoir, I Lift up my Eyes to the Hills)

I am writing a memoir of my Indian Catholic Childhood, I Lift up my Eyes. I have written about my grandmother, Small Nana, and my Uncle Eustace: The Maharaja

                                                              Uncle Mervyn

 Uncle Mervyn, larger each year, physically resembled the Air India Maharaja.  His big, round beaming face had a polished sheen; his large, lustrous, slightly squinted eyes sparkled at his own sardonic mutterings; he was always at home, comfy in his trademark T-shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts, shrouded in the nimbus of the “self-employed.”    

51 Chimbai Road: The front door, spirals of wrought iron over wood with flaking paint, opened onto a foyer where, behind those screens with which Indians, like Japanese, create new rooms, Uncle Mervyn, a self-employed stock-broker, worked. And “worked” was not entirely an overstatement, for, sporadically, though the day, little old Catholic ladies in their immutable Bandra shapeless flowery dresses, visited with anxious portfolios inherited from fathers, bachelor brothers, or dead husbands. The post, the postman, objects of sad, strained aquiline eyes for their dividend cheques were tenuous life-lines--everything hinged on the prompt passage of their dividends through the chancy arteries of the post.  Bandra’s Boggart took the shape of bags of post floating on monsoon flooded streets, washed out from alley refuse heaps into which they’d been dumped on bored and lazy days.     

A commute down the corridor, work from home, set your own hours—glamorous, alluring lures.  Once a month, however, Mervyn, scrubbed and glowing in his dazzling starched terrycot shirt and pants, a strand of long hair pulled over his balding head; his huge, hazel eyes as bulging with suppressed excitement as his briefcase was with paperwork to be filed in person, and in triplicate--got ready for his tram ride to the Stock Exchange at Bombay, while his mother and sister clucked admonition around him. 

Though Bandra was Bombay to us, to my grandparents, inveterate homebodies, the commute from the safe suburb to Bombay, den of iniquity, nest of vipers, sepulcher of the righteous, great Gomorrah was nasty, fraught, and rare, dreaded in inverse proportion to its frequency: goondas, accidents, murders, muggings.

 “But Nana, everyone doesn’t get murdered, robbed or kidnapped,” I reasoned, reasonably.  “Why should we?”  “Why shouldn’t you?” they asked, their bleak law of probability. 

And the fact that my father was pick-pocketed—three times—when he went to Bombay, and that we, invariably, got ourselves lost, and once, in our haste to catch the subway, jumped into a first class compartment with a second class ticket, and were heavily fined—unreceipted—did not increase her confidence in us, or in the monster city.

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      When Mervyn’s siblings mocked his early yearning to become a priest, his secret celebration of improvised masses with missal, bell, candles, censer, and liturgical Latin, he gravitated towards the most common default romance: money, which many make mechanically, obsessively, compulsively, as if to compensate for abandoned dreams. 

Mervyn’s idols were almost Biblical: money and food.  As steaming savory mirages drifted into Mervyn’s memory, he dialed one of his genteel neighborhood friends with more time than money.  At lunch, for a small fee, his fantasies lay incarnated before us through the conjurations of Edith, a serious, middle-aged lady, with a neat shoulder-length perm, cat’s eyes glasses and tight-sashed floral dresses: the Anglo-Indian cuisine we thought of as English, but which I have never encountered in England (or anywhere else!): “potato chops”—mashed potato croquettes, fried in egg and bread-crumbs, stuffed with spicy minced beef; or “pan rolls,” crepes with a minced meat filling, fried golden with bread crumb bristles, an East-West fusion for our mildly Westernized palates.  Or sometimes, sarpatel, archetypal Mangalorean delicacy, chunks of pork beneath inches of fat and chewy, rubbery rind, simmered in a sauce of spices, wine and blood.

Mervyn rarely drank water, instead drinking Mangola, expensive, sweetened bottled mango juice, by the crate. When the neighborhood’s illiterate Koli fisher-families sent their sons to the house for help in getting a job or decoding their bank passbook, he’d drawl, “Fetch me a crate of Mangola,” his voice full-bodied, luscious, ripe-fruity, and slip an extra fiver into their hands, noblesse oblige.  “The lakhpati!” my aunt Joyce exclaimed. “He behaves like a lakhpati. Give me what you give them; I’ll be a lakhpati too.” (A lakh, a hundred thousand rupees--like a crore, ten million--is a uniquely Indian unit, necessary in an inflationary economy. For all Joyce’s teasing, Mervyn, who never worked a regular job, died with many of them.)

Over lunch, my father and Uncle Mervyn twirled crystal Maharaja-engraved champagne goblets of Mangola, and talked about money.  I listened—stocks, bonds, dividends. Money, money, money, there’s a romance to it. I felt its excitement as I sat listening: double your money in seven years at ten percent, or five years at fifteen percent. I did mental calculations, marveling in the miracle of compound interest, hearing the tick-tock of money being fruitful, implacably increasing and multiplying. 

Oh, I’d become a millionaire off the abundance encoded in creation for the diligent and imaginative—encrypted in a single tomato seed (plant, plants: farm); an egg (a chicken, eggs: a chicken empire).  “I know what, Ma.  I’ll have a fudge stall at school; you cook the fudge, and I’ll….”  “Your head I will!”  Should I become a millionaire? But, always, I’d back off from this ambition, heady in its wild mathematics—but, so what?  For what?  Oh, I’d be a millionaire too, I decided, airily.  All things are possible: childhood’s birthright.

Mervyn’s magic: He’d suddenly appear with a gigantic brown paper bag from which, with  the panache of a magician, he produced chocolate—Krisp, Five Star, Gems, Caramello, Bournville, Cadbury’s Raisin, or Fruit and Nut, which, beaming with the pleasure of magnanimity, he bestowed on us, voila, responding to my little sister’s delirious  delight—“Wow, Uncle Mervyn!”—with an almost eternal “There’s more, baby doll!” until finally, almost incredibly, he came to the last loaf, the last fish, and even our gluttonous eyes realized, without sadness, that there was no more.

Or, very sweetly for a life-long bachelor, he’d take us to Binny’s to choose fabric, and then to a tailor, to have clothes made for us. And how we took his kindness for granted—with the limitations of hearts that have not yet lived or suffered.

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Mervyn’s three idols: food, money and the news.  As the roosters crowed and the muezzins chanted, Mervyn’s radio’s purred as he monitored the world with The Blitz, The Bombay Herald, The Times of India and the morning coffee, equally potent addictions. Bribery, corruption, politicians and other crooks, and the unnerving rise to power of the Shiv Sena who wanted Bombay renamed Mumbai, for heaven’s sake, and a Hindustan for Hindus-- as if those rooted in the land through race, and immemorial residence should belong any less to it because of their faith.

And after the griefs of the world unfurled, Mervyn masterminded lavish breakfasts, the meal he was in charge of, at least during our visits. From the neighborhood’s only cold storage, the Koli boys fetched, wrapped in white grease-proof paper, the relatively rare luxury meats of my childhood: ham, bacon, sausages, salami, luncheon meat. These were served with “Nana’s scrambled eggs,” the only thing she personally cooked, fried rich golden in ghee, with onion, coriander and mint. Eustace surveyed this gastronomic indulgence coolly, while he ate, or rather drank, standing up, his unvarying breakfast—two raw beaten eggs, which I found impossible to swallow despite my great admiration of his jauntiness.  

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All morning, in his office cluttered with cherished typewriters, and an expanding universe of shortwave radios, Mervyn twiddled knobs with fingers as compulsive as those bewitched by Rubik’s cube, extracting flickering stations, the B. B. C; the Voice of America, and, most of all, jazzy Radio Ceylon so that he knew the lyrics of ABBA, Cliff Richards, or Simon and Garfunkel as well as the coolest girls at school. And in the naked night, I saw/Ten thousand people, maybe more. /People talking without speaking, /People hearing without listening, /People writing songs that voices never share/ And no one dare/Disturb the sound of silence. 

And now and again: scoop!  He knew, before anyone else, of the rescue of Israeli hostages in ninety minutes at Entebbe, and, closer to home, late one evening, he heard of the 757 which crashed on the beach three minutes away, and, of course, we scrambled over slippery algae-covered rocks and fishing nets spread out to dry, arriving at the scene with the rescue workers, and behind the ropes that cordoned off the treacherous rocks and the sea from the curious and the greedy, watched them haul in the wrecked suitcases and bodies and the plucky rubber doll that bobbed above the waves, with other fragments of dreams.

Goals

Completion Date—September 1^st, 2013

Start Date—August 27^th, 2012

Word Count Goal-120,000

Words per day Goal—400

Progress

Day 9—3398 words (Oops, 202 words behind goal).