'FINISHING SCHOOL' WITH GRAN!

‘FINISHING SCHOOL’ WITH GRAN

 by Jacqueline Colaco

     It was the month of January, 1965. I had just completed my ISC exams and looked forward to a six month sojourn before joining college. In true schoolgirl fashion and with drooling envy, we had all been enamoured by novels of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer which described the high society women of their time, who were sent to ‘Finishing Schools’, when they ‘came of age’! Our Finishing Schools by contrast, during these months, were ‘around the corner’ ones in the shape of dingy one room enterprises that taught shorthand and typing, sewing and tailoring or whatever else caught one’s fancy. Not to say there was much else to choose, as is the case today. Now, the variety on offer is endless if you have the money -  infotech, media, bartending, adventure and sport, personality development, gymns and spas, music and dance, and other event hosting courses to name a very few! And of course exam preparation courses by the score are a must, which were unheard of in our day. If you went for tuition then, you were labeled a ‘dull’ one. If you don’t now, you are considered to be ‘missing out’!

    For us though, our other skills, especially cooking and girlie stuff such as embroidery/knitting/crocheting and the like, were mostly learned at home - on the job, so to say! Sewing machines were actually put to use. So also (more out of fascination, I must admit!), did I learn to use the traditional Mangalorean ‘vaan’, a granite grinding stone used for preparing masalas (mixed spices). So also, an ‘adaalo’, which was a long wooden stool with a sharp curved knife attached at one end. Squatting legs astride, one cleaned and cut fish or meat. Similarly was one attached with an oval shaped serated knife to scrape a half coconut. For relaxation we would spend time with or cycle around with friends, read, listen to the ‘wind up’ HMV gramophone, or attend piano lessons. Otherwise we’d get immersed in a personal hobby or two. Indoor games were found in plenty at home. So also did most homes like ours have a piano, maybe a violin too, and we learned to sing and dance and enjoy the good old classics at family parties. Guitars were just about making their appearance on the local scene, and these were carried along on picnics. To own a Record Changer/Tape Recorder those days, meant that you either had foreign connections or that you were rich! Most of us made do with the good old radio. Radio Ceylon’s Binaca Hit Parade was one of our favourite radio stations, and we vied to collect the little bracelet charms that came with every tube of Binaca toothpaste. I don’t think Television had made its entry into India by then.

However back to my story…

     On the 6^th of January1965 I went to spend a week at my grandparents home – the magical ‘Oorgaum House’ on Grant Road, Bangalore now renamed Vittal Mallya Road. No sooner was I installed, when Granny Rose sent me off to buy a notebook from S.R.Grant & Co., located opposite the Bowring Institute. Gran promptly put my new possession into action by inscribing my name and the date on the first page, with the title‘Cookery Book’. On the next page, she made me copy ‘Tips on Efficiency’ and on the next, ‘How to be a Lady’. Her tip to ‘clear clutter as you go’ is most effective and one I still try to follow in every task. Then began the absorbingly interesting process of the

actual writing of recipes - some by her and some dictated to me, or copied from one of her books. I still have this recipe book and it is one of my treasures. It contains recipes from far and wide, written in the hand of a variety of people whose particular culinary offering pleased my palate. My own mother Matilda, eldest of Gran’s seventeen children, dashed off quite a few ‘Tilly specials’ in this same book, to equip me, her baby daughter,

when I left home in 1984, to live for the first time on my own, in New York City. My recipe book contains some legendary Mangalorean recipes like Cecil Bai’s ‘Bafat Powder’ and   ‘Indaz of Fish’ by Miss Angela Pinto – classified as ‘excellent’ by Gran! These special notings are to be found alongside the recipe titles! And so on and so forth…

     Whatever recipes I have tried, one will find traces of some ingredient on the page, mostly butter or flour - by far the easier ones! Incidentally, I lost a few pages of the book along the way, to the infant inventiveness of my then around three year old nephew.  One morning I chanced upon him deeply absorbed in it; no not like the ‘wonderkids’ of today who may be quite capable of planning the noon menu – unfortunately it was not so! Instead, little Kittu was earnestly engaged in pulling out some pages and cheerily putting them into flight over the balcony, proclaiming, “I making aeroplanes, Aunty Jackie”! Well, probably some Bombay peanut vendor later sold channa in those discarded pages - and hopefully a curious buyer would have got hold of one of Gran’s priceless recipes…

     In the mid eighties when I was coming back on vacation from NY, a doctor aunt requested me to carry bottles of ‘baby food’ for Gran who was then around 95. How I’d have loved to pamper her palate with a dish from ‘our’ recipe book, but it was not to be. I still however look lovingly at this treasure of mine and remember this grand lady, my Granny Rose. She, despite being grandmother to 64 grandchildren, yet made the time and a special place to devote to each one of us. For me, it was this one week of a ‘Finishing School’ at her hands that I could never have found elsewhere, where I learned from her own practical example ‘How to be a Lady’!