Family Memoir: Writing Lives

During my time at the University of Leeds, I studied a module titled ‘Telling Lives’. Our professor, Dr Jay Prosser, was in the midst of writing his family memoir, as he took us through the various forms of the genre. In the end, we were tasked with writing an extract of our own family memoir. This is mine.

Water and Oil

‘When it comes to identity, names matter.’

Afua Hirsch

Jeevan came from India, from two villages in the Punjab. From her grandmother being carried into her arranged marriage. Now, she only exists outside of India, with the colonisers. She is a stranger, but home runs, diluted, through her veins. She speaks the languages, Hindi and Punjabi (everyone speaks Hindi because of Bollywood), she understands the culture. She can use magic words to talk to her grandparents. She speaks in tongues. She knows the warmth, the smells, the colours of India. With exotic eyes she can see the faraway land.

Georgina was born here, is from here. Her English grandparents met the normal way; they went dancing, married in a church. Her name was her grandad’s, the last of his living presence. She calls her grandparents names like grandpa or pa and grandma or granny, or something like that, because she knows them and can go round to theirs for a cup of tea. Georgina has roast dinners on Sundays and ignorant, bordering on racist, family members on Facebook. Everyone can pronounce her name. She can point to the house her granddad was born in. She belongs to this land.

* * *

In the misty haze of childhood memories, I recall learning to spell my name and what it meant. Walking home from primary school I decided I liked ‘Jeevan’ for its six letters. I liked even numbers. Running after Muma in the supermarket, I learned that ‘Georgina’ came from my paternal grandfather, George. In year 7 History, I discovered that ‘Hammond’ came from France in 1066 and roughly meant ‘home’. Jeevan Georgina Hammond. A funny sounding name. Foreign plonked in front of, what is now considered, English. I used to joke that I was half the coloniser and half the colonised.

Once, when I was younger and drying the dishes my Muma washed, she told me her parents did not speak to her when she married my dad. I used the tea-towel to dry a tray that had had oil on it. Muma said Nani and Nana disowned her. Indian tradition, she continued, dictates the order of the worst people to marry. Worst to least worst: a Muslim, a Black person, a white person. The tea-towel mixed the water and remaining oil on the tray, creating a dirty, greasy remnant. She said my parents had three weddings. Barely anyone attended the first so they had a second. The second was in two parts, an English ceremony and an Indian ceremony. Most of Muma’s family didn’t attend the first. The second was years later, when more people were talking to her. When I was born, Nani snuck me visits. Eventually, Nana started talking to us again, but we never went to their house like my cousins. Nani and Nana did not talk to my muma for ten years. I put the tea-towel in the washing machine; I didn’t want the mixture to contaminate the other dishes.

* * *

Jeevan

Nani and Nana come for tea sometimes. We know they are coming because they ring half an hour before they arrive. Then ensues the rush to tidy the house and dress appropriately, because they are older and traditional and that’s what you do. In the old days, before the divorce, Dad might be sent to the shop to buy biscuits if the house was barren. This was particularly exciting for me and my sister. Cue the silver Volkswagen Golf and the familiar, rhythmic tap of Nana’s walking stick. The bell rings. I can’t speak Hindi or Punjabi. Muma has taught me enough to get by but it isn’t much. I greet my grandparents with ‘tusi thika?’, ‘are you okay?’. When I am asked, I reply ‘haan ji me thika’, ‘yes I am okay’. It reminds me that Shaym paaji calls me a ‘fake Indian’. I say the words methodically, as sounds I have memorised, not meanings I know.

I am on tea duty but I first ask, ‘pani pina?’, ‘drink water?’. My skills are limited and cumbersome, it must sound funny to my grandparents. We sit in the front room, the room with the photos. Photos of Nani and Nana, us as children, Elsie and George. Nani calls Muma ‘Narni’, which means little girl. She always has. Muma says it's ironic that she is ‘now 50 and still called little girl’. Nani couldn’t pronounce Suchitra, a name Nana gave her, so called her Narni and now everyone does. Muma’s name was Suchitra Devi Bagha. Suchitra means ‘pretty picture’ and Devi means ‘goddess’. I always found it interesting that Indian names meant something. They can hide themselves from people outside the culture, save their truths for those who understand. Indian names are not just pretty sounding words, they have a duality.

They are specific. Terms such as ‘masi’ (aunt on your mother’s side) indicate the gender of a relation, whose side they are on and whether they are blood related or married-in. These terms, these specifics, don’t exist in the English language. They are secret; privileged knowledge. We call our cousins ‘paaji’, the name for an elder brother, and ‘didi’, elder sister. Terms only we know, affectionate and respectful. If I ever heard a stranger use them, it was like they were talking to me. My white camouflage, however, has meant I could never look into their eyes and share that ‘flicker of recognition’ (Hirsch).

Nani and Nana pronounce my name properly. ‘Jeevan, school thika?’. Jeevan sounds like gee-vun and drops from Nani’s mouth in a trochee. I love hearing her say my name; the thick North Indian accent and affectionately questioning tone. It feels like I am authentically Indian; my name was meant to be said in Nani’s voice. ‘Jeevan’ means ‘life’ in Hindi and Punjabi. When I was born, Nani told Muma that Jeevan was traditionally a boy’s name, Muma wasn’t aware but it didn’t affect the decision. My name carries the weight of India, of things I cannot understand. Faraway things like Nani being carried round the marital fire. She was ‘around 12’ when she was married. The marriage was matched, he was older - but ‘she did not live with him until she was of age’. She was carried because she was asleep, she was tired. I always imagined the scene. In my head, it is late at night. I can’t see anything around the fire, just darkness. Orange against black. And to the left is Nani, silent, in the arms of a stranger. As a white child I was scared by the story. I felt Nani was deprived of choice, physically taken into her marriage by someone else. I was glad this would not be me. I was glad that no one had to know the alien things my family did. Georgina’s grandparents married in a church but Jeevan’s should be kept a secret.

Looking at her now, in my middle class house in London, against the dark backdrop of the peacock wallpaper from John Lewis, sat on the grey plush sofa, tea and saucer in hand, I cannot believe how different our lives have been. I have never even been to India.

It is a sunny day. We stand and talk about Dad’s vegetable patch in the front garden. Nani asks, in broken English, what he is growing. She looks at him intently as he overindulgently explains every row, meticulous and methodical. Nani has green fingers and gives him aged advice. Of course not directly, but through the medium of Muma. She talks, we listen. Muma is the only one who understands, transforming the mystery words. On a sunny day Nani can “talk” to dad for a while. He may have some excess fruit or veg which he gives her and she takes happily; ‘thank you Steve’, with her heavy accent. Dad might reply with the little Punjabi he knows, ‘shukriya’, which also means thank you.

* * *

Georgina

We sit in the Loch Fyne restaurant by the quay in Ipswich, Suffolk. Dad points across the road, ‘that house there, that is where your grandfather was born’. George Hammond. It’s eerie, sitting in this chain restaurant, across the road from the place my never-met grandfather came into the world. I’ll never go in that house, it doesn’t belong to us anymore. I feel no real connection to it. We don’t live in Suffolk, we visit. We bring our spectrum of colours, white to brown, and our hard-to-pronounce names. Dad and Muma agree that George would have loved me, would have spoilt me. Secretly and ashamedly, I feel distant from this man. My middle name, Georgina, is one of the last living pieces of George. Dad explains how his family uses and reuses names over our starter of Whitebait - a family favourite. His middle name, Spencer, came from his uncle. My sister’s ‘May’ came from his mum, Elsie May. I come from two parents with their own secret-meaning names.

Sitting in this restaurant in Suffolk, I am brown. Muma sticks out like a sore thumb, Mala May is confusing with her brown skin and curly hair, which she actually probably got from Dad. Across from my parents I can see their differences. I recall a story from when Muma went to meet Elsie. Elsie was delighted, she said, because now she would have ‘little pickaninny babies’. From what I know, she wasn’t racist. She was of a different time and ignorant in the way one would expect her to be. But it hurt to know that my middle name came from a family who said offensive terms and didn’t understand. That isn’t to say I have never been grateful for Georgina. Afua Hirsch wrote, ‘I tried, and failed, to change my name to Caroline, hoping that might erase the alien in me. It was not enough’. Strangely, I did this exact same thing. In primary school I went through a phase of telling people my first name was actually Georgina, that the school ‘had accidentally put it as my middle name on the register’. George had left me the gift of camouflage. I could choose to be white, to be Georgina, when it suited and when being Indian was weird. Accepting my whiteness used to cost my Indianness.

But as we stroll along the quayside after dinner, Dad tells me about the man I never met and I realise he is part of me. Not a camouflage and not an uncomfortable opposite. He misses him. You can feel it in the pauses, the smiles, the looking down. There’s this whole world that existed before me and only he knows about it. We are walking through the graveyard of his father’s life. The place he grew up, the cobbler’s he swept the floor for scraps in. Stories and places bring George to life and genuine affection for my middle name. 

* * *

Hammond

Dad’s family were the original immigrants. The surname ‘Hammond’ came from ‘Hamon’, ‘an Old French personal name brought to England after the Norman Conquest in 1066’. Both halves of me travelled here from somewhere else, but one arrived earlier and was better at blending in.

Hammond ties us together. Hammond is our shared identity, me, Muma, Dad and Mala. Our little four might be separated now, but our surname symbolises my parent’s once-union and Mala and I are living evidence of it. Hammond defies all that lay in its way to bring together, in impossible proximity, two halves of the world. I was not sure what I wanted from this memoir when I set out. My initial attempts presented two different people. They were confused, because, so was I. As hard as it has been for people to accept me, it has been even harder for myself.

I know now, water and oil do not mix on their own. To combine them, an emulsifier is added. An emulsifier is a molecule which attaches to both the oil and water molecules. It bonds them together through itself.

* * *

Bibliography:

‘Hammond History, Family Crest & Coat of Arms’ in House of Names (2020) (<https://www.houseofnames.com/hammond-family-crest#:~:text=The%20name%20Hammond%20originated%20with,the%20Norman%20Conquest%20in%201066> [last accessed 8.12.20].

Hirsch, Aufa, Brit(ish) (2018) <https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Brit_ish/RCqtDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1> [accessed 3.1.21].

Hong Kingston, Maxine, Woman Warrior (London: Picador, 2015).