Clara Heath meets Kewal Motwani in Kentucky

Excerpted from Goolbai Gunasekera’s Chosen Ground first published in 2006

(Continued from last week)

In Louisville, Kentucky, my mother, Clara Heath, was growing up meanwhile in what might be considered an unusually protected atmosphere for the average American child of her time. Her ambitious Southern reared mother was a kind of early 20th century Steel Magnolia, and intended that her daughters should have the finest education obtainable in the State of Kentucky.

Catholic schools in Louisville were believed to provide a better-than current education for girls, and though my poor grandfather was strongly against sending his two girls away (for one thing the family was not of the Catholic faith, and for another, he would miss them) what my grandmother said went!

Accordingly the two girls (eleven months apart, and treated virtually as twins) went to Presentation Academy in Louisville as boarders in a nun-run Catholic school.I wear Mother’s class ring to this very day. Boarding schools are not as common in the USA as they are in Britain and my grandmother’s decision to board her two daughters was unusual. Going to an American boarding school was the best thing that could have happened to Clara: without intending any such thing, my grandmother, Eva, was preparing her for a life in a more laid back country.

Mother loved the calm, unhurried life of the Convent, where her curricula included Latin, French and a smattering of Spanish. The gentle nuns were very much to her liking. Known only to God and the Fates, Mother was being well trained for her eventual career as Principal of a conservative Buddhist school in Ceylon. From the nuns at Presentation, Mother acquired a genuine love of study, a stern moral code, a strict sense of discipline and a lifelong abhorrence of a lady ever showing her knees.

When she became Principal of Visakha Vidyalaya in Colombo, one of the first things on her agenda was to make sure that hemlines were worn half way down the calf. Visakhians learnt, to their surprise, that no lady ever crossed her legs except at the ankle. Since the Queen of England was doing likewise on every Pathe Newsreel, they assumed that Mother knew what she was talking about.

Shortly after taking over the Principalship of Visakha, Mother was electrified by the newspaper picture of a girl from Bishop’s College (the secondary school to which I eventually went myself) taking a running jump over a high pole. Mother had a spasm at this ‘unladylike’ photograph which was, according to less biased accounts, an extremely modest one.

Nonetheless, Mother’s convent training had her banning athletics at Visakha and it was only after she left the school that Visakhians began winning honours in this line. Tennis, netball and table tennis were games that were acceptable to her Victorian code. Needless to say, while the girls of the fashionable missionary Schools wore `divided skirts’, Mother’s little Visakhians donned Greek robes and did Eurhythmics.

They were also encouraged to study Home Science — a subject introduced for the very first time into the curriculum of Ceylon’s schools. All this gave Visakhians a certain cachet. At last Buddhist girls’ education under Mother, and other school principals who had been trained in the West (such as Mrs. Hilda Kularatne in Panadura and Mrs. Doreen Wickremasinghe in Matara), began to give the older missionary schools a run for their money. Conservative Buddhist parents were well pleased with their young Principal from America — so highly qualified, so eminently tradition-minded, so totally sympathetic to the national aspirations of the Buddhist majority.

But more about Visakha later. As a schoolgirl herself, Mother’s life was delightfully serene and quite uneventful. She was a fine musician and took a Degree in music as well as Languages and Education. Her sister, my aunt Arline, was far more feisty, practical and pushy than the dreamy Clara. This polarization of personalities meant they got on very well together, although it also meant that Arline did all the housework while Mother drifted off to practise the piano for two to three hours every evening.

“Really,” Arline would explode, “Clara does NOTHING around the house, does she!”

Grandma Eva did not believe in household democracy. Each daughter did whatever she was good at doing, and Arline was a superlative cook and housekeeper. So gentle, so very appreciative was Clara each morning when she was handed perfectly laundered stockings and immaculately ironed clothes that Arline had so efficiently organized for her, that any words of protest from her sister died still-born.

Apparently Mother would get up feeling bright and perky, having completed all her homework the previous evening, to say nothing of those three hours of piano practice and say to her sister,

“Are my stockings on the bed or in my drawer, Arline?”

With a resigned air Arline would produce them neatly folded and ready to wear.

“My dear,” Auntie Arline said to me on one of my trips to the USA to see my American grandparents, “there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those for whom someone is ALWAYS on hand to smooth things out, and there are those like you and me who have to do the humdrum work themselves. I leave you to work out to which group your dear Mother belongs.”

“Didn’t you ever have an American boyfriend at any time?” we would ask Mother in Auntie Arline’s presence. Mother would look vague and Arline would snort:

“Of course she had lots of admirers, but your Mother simply never got the message.”

Apparently one smitten young man would drop by ostensibly to practice the violin while Mother played the piano accompaniment. Grandma would have milk and cookies ready for the couple to enjoy

at the end of their labours. Mother gave the poor young swain no chance. The minute the last note had been played she shut the piano, shook hands with her fellow musician in the accepted convent-taught manner and said ‘Goodnight!’

“And another romance,” Auntie would continue, while Mother looked apprehensive, “was that young Professor who kept offering her a lift home from University. Your mother – ” and Auntie accented the word – “took many a detour so that their paths did not cross.”

The Motwanis in Bandarawela

My sister and I screamed.

“I do wish you wouldn’t repeat these highly exaggerated tales, Arline,” Mother would tell Arline in exasperation.

“Well, what happened when the dear Professor phoned, please tell?”

“I really can’t remember,” said Mother.

But of course, Mother remembered very well her first meeting with her future husband … and their eventual marriage illustrates that truth can often be more romantic than fiction. The tale as told by Mother was factual and lacked Father’s teasing sidelines.Sir Jamshed Mehra had met my American grandmother at a Theosophical conference in the USA. Learning that Mrs Heath had two teenage daughters at home, he suggested that one of them might like to write to his young ward who was just finishing his B.A and was probably going on to England for postgraduate study.

My Aunt Arline was not in the slightest bit interested in Theosophy, so the task of writing to a young Indian ten years her senior fell to Mother. The correspondence flourished although, given Mother’s convent training, those letters must have been models of decorous writing. Su and I have never been given so much as a glance at them, although Father kept them stored away in the go-downs he owned in Karachi. Until the Partition of India, those go-downs gave Father a comfortable income situated, as they were, near the docks.

When Father decided to register at Yale (having hated Oxford) the correspondence speeded up and my grandmother realized that this lonely young Indian, so far from home, would be spending a summer vacation all on his own. Returning to India was out of the question since those were not days of convenient air travel. Accordingly, she invited him to spend the summer in their home. She probably regretted doing so for Father fell instantly in love with the 17-year-old girl to whom he had been writing.

Their romance was complicated by the fact that Mother lived in Kentucky and an Asian, however fair his skin might be, was practically a Black to her relatives who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line. To say that her aunts, uncles and cousins were unhappy would be an understatement. They were aghast.

This unlikely union, strangely enough, did not encounter opposition from my grandparents. They had met many Indians and did not share in the feelings of horror that so many of their friends experienced when they were told that Clara was marrying a non-Caucasian and one from a barbaric Asian nation at that.

My grandmother spent many irate hours explaining to her near and dear that the culture and civilization of India was superior by far to any in the West. When Father heard the family views he laughed as he usually did whenever he encountered ignorance of the East.

When Mother went to say goodbye to the nuns of her old school she took Father with her. They were quite charmed by him but Reverend Mother’s last words to Clara were a heartfelt: “I shall pray for you my dear.”

When Mother was packing to leave her home in Kentucky for India she stood helplessly by while Father sorted out the clothes she would need for the tropics, ruthlessly discarding winter apparel. Mother looked expectantly at her sister, who resignedly set about packing what she hoped would be the last bag she ever packed for Clara. In point of fact, she was to do it whenever Mother visited the USA on later occasions.

“I can’t think WHAT you are going to do aboard that ship,” Arline told Mother worriedly.

Mother’s response was predictable. “Oh, I’ll get the steward or someone to help,” she said vaguely.

Arline tch tched, and continued worrying. But she stopped this useless exercise after Mother’s happy letters home told her that Father was a whiz at getting a mountain of clothes into a tiny, tiny space. Later on two Sinhalese maids, Nimal and Cathleen, swam into Mother’s life. They took full charge of all household affairs — even to eventually regulating the day-to-day problem of looking after the physical needs of Clara’s two daughters. Cathleen remained with us all her life to become, not a maid but a friend.

She worked with us for 62 years — 30 of them in the USA, where (after bringing us up) she went to look after our Grandmother Eva. Auntie Arline was in the American Foreign Service. She never married, and so when Grandmother died Cathleen simply stayed on with Auntie Arline as a highly efficient maid. Cathleen also got to globe-trot with my aunt who was an inveterate travel bug. Whenever Auntie got a posting abroad Cathleen kept house for her in exotic places like Amman, Jaipur and South America.

Auntie Arline died in 2004, just after Khulsum (my daughter) and I had visited her in Arizona where she had retired. Cathleen died a few months later, following her return to Sri Lanka.

(To be continued)