The Nuances And Nitty-Gritties Of Being Neighbourly

6:05 pm : I am walking in our front garden, free in the evening, on a week day, after many months, as the academic year comes to a close in India and I start winding up my classes online. Our dog and our upstairs neighbour's dog, both run circles around me. (Literally and figuratively!) Just a few minutes ago I had asked my husband to go out to the mall and buy some milk. (Unlike India, there's no friendly neighbourhood grocer here, it's the mall for everything!) We need our fresh packets of milk since I cannot bear to use long life milk and unfortunately, there is no daily delivery of milk in this area, unlike where we lived earlier. My son has accompanied my husband, happy as usual, to push doing his homework by another thirty minutes...
6:15 pm : I notice a thin spiral of smoke curling up from the bungalow which is around 200 metres  across the road from ours. The thick hedge around their house obscures everything else. "The house cannot be on fire, can it?" I half jokingly ask myself. I stop at our gate and stare for a few seconds. The smoke is white and in the cold, crisp, clear Nairobi air, has formed a whitish haze over the top of the house. "No, it's just a garden bonfire," I tell myself. It is Thursday the 15th, the Ides of March and there had been a very rainy start to the day, with buckets of water pouring down from the heavens almost all night and all day long, the reason why I hadn't been able to go to buy the milk myself. So I obviously come to the conclusion that some one had decided to light a fire to beat the cold.
6:30 pm : I decide to head into the house, savouring my free evening, planning to read for a bit before I need to start making dinner. Both the dogs follow me inside. Ours jumps into her basket in our bedroom but the upstairs dog refuses to settle down. She keeps touching me with her wet nose and going out of the bedroom. Soon ours jumps out of the basket too and follows her. Both the dogs now prance in and out of the room. I find it hard to get back to reading my book. I begin to wonder why the two are so restless.
6:54 pm : Our night guard gives me a missed call, the signal that he is at the gate and we should open it. I go out with both the dogs rushing ahead. There is no one at the gate. How strange!
6:59 pm : Hardly had I entered the house, when there's a missed call again. I'm at the gate in a minute and this time, he is there too. " The house opposite is on fire,that's where I had gone," he says.
I find it hard to believe but when I look beyond him, I can see the evidence with my own eyes..The first call is made to my husband, to ask him and my son to rush back home because I can well see that soon the road is going to be blocked with fire trucks and other vehicles. By this time I can see the fiery orange flames blazing up towards a rapidly darkening sky and thick grey-black smoke is beginning to vend it's way towards our house, the direction in which  the wind is blowing. I quickly message my upstairs neighbours who are out with their little baby to give them a heads up of the situation and to ask them to stay away with the baby because by this time the smoke is pouring thick and fast and babies have such delicate lungs...
Then I ask for the Kenya emergency numbers on the school moms group. Lesson no 1 of the evening, keep the general emergency numbers handy, not just those of your own private security provider. A friend provides the number , it's 999, and I make the call. It is answered rather promptly and the dispatcher tells me they are aware of the fire at our location and engines have been dispatched to the site already. Simultaneously, I can hear the loud wails of the sirens coming closer and closer and soon the cacophony is right up our street. My heart skips a beat because until now I had only seen fire engines rushing down roads towards some unknown fire somewhere and made way for them, but never this close to home...

From our front gate:the orange blaze, the thick plumes of smoke, the jets of water hitting the flames.

By this time my son and husband are back, and my son tells me the house belongs to an American family whose children go to the same school as him, and he knows the boy who is just a year senior to him.. I knew new tenants had moved in a couple of months ago but I had NO clue who they were. The perils of modern living, forget about love thy neighbour, we do not even know who he/ she is...Lesson no 2 of the evening : Make an effort to get to know who lives around you.
My son will rush in to help where angels fear to tread...We spend five minutes arguing in our garden, his point being he needs to go see what he can do for his friend and mine being that since we weren't sure of the source of the fire (and we know everyone got out safely), and there could be explosions in case the kitchen area is engulfed, he should wait for a while. Finally I agree to let him go with my husband and the security guard and I, being the cautious Capricorn that I am, follow only a few minutes later. My son has found his friend in the melee of fire engines, police cars and security vehicles of different companies and has managed to convey to him that our house is open and they are welcome to come there. I convey the same message on the school group so that it can reach the affected family, since I do not know them personally and to my son's friend too, who we find perched on the footpath on our side of the road, against the backdrop of the steady hum of water pumps from fire trucks which are throwing an unwavering stream of water over the flames . As we head back home, my son's succinct words are, "Mom last night he was at home, feeling cozy in his house, listening to the heavy rain pattering on the roof, today he is sitting on the footpath outside his burning house...Lesson number 3 of the evening : Here today, gone tomorrow...life can be and often is completely unpredictable...So expect the unexpected, cliched but true.
I also bump into the guards from our private security service and I tell them to pick up cups of tea and biscuits from our house once they can leave the site. They are so genuinely grateful for this small gesture and drop in a few hours later, once the fire site has been secured to keep away scavengers and others.
By this time offers of help are pouring in from many Moms on the school group and the Indian origin Moms group and I promise to convey all the messages once I get to meet the family myself. By now we know that the bedroom where the fire started in completely burnt and the remaining three bedrooms on that floor are smoked out and uninhabitable. The ground floor, by God's grace and timely intervention by the fire department, is practically untouched.The family has moved to another friend's house and have found shelter for the night.
Next morning I drop in into the house to see if there's any way in which we can help. I can still see smoke emanating from one side of the roof. The term 'smouldering embers' suddenly comes to life..The husband and wife are back in the house and going through the cupboards of the smoked out rooms. I introduce myself and offer to help. They are truly brave people and smile cheerfully, even as they explain to me that they need help in washing out the clothes from cupboards and the sheets from the beds in the smoked out rooms. I eagerly carry home three large garbage bags of smoky clothes, some even with scorch marks on them. It brings home to me what a narrow escape the family had and what thin ice we all walk on just by living our day to day lives.. Also their house help confirms that the smoke I had first seen had, indeed, been a garden bonfire lit by her husband and the fire in the house broke out a short while later, due to an electrical short circuit. I am very relived because I had been berating myself over the fact that I should have gone over to investigate that first smoke I had seen...

                                                          Smoked out master bedroom

                                               The older boy's room , where it all started.

                                                               The roof was burnt to cinders....

My house help and I run the clothes in three lots through our machine  and spinner, with extra detergent and baking soda to remove that charred smell, and since the upstairs neighbours have offered help too, their house help runs the clothes through their drier ( I refuse to operate other people's electronic items!) because in this rainy Nairobi weather clothes are taking a long while to dry naturally... I am able to deliver nearly a hundred washed clothes very soon and am glad at least now the family has some fresh clothes to wear. Three more bags are carried off the next day by three other Moms from our school group and I can see firsthand how 'many hands truly make work lighter.'
The following Thursday, exactly a week after the fire, volunteers are invited for Clean Up Day at our neighbours' house. A group of us, some from the school community, others from their church,  assemble at 8:30 am and get to work to empty out the things from three remaining bedrooms and to see what can be salvaged and what needs to be discarded. Their son has lost every material thing he owned and his twin sister's room was affected very badly too and it is heartbreaking to see piles of scorched books, memory books, school texts, memories from their kindergarten years reduced to a half burnt pile.
Their five year old's room is almost untouched but badly smoked out and it is here that I work with a group of other ladies. Wiping out brightly coloured story books, taking out Lego pieces, filling bags with soft toys, pulling out tiny clothes (now permeated with smoke), the little normal things that make up life, that has now been suddenly interrupted...
The family thanked us repeatedly and profusely and as we snacked on croissants and brownies and sipped the coffee and tea  that they had organized for volunteers, as we stared at each other's sooty hands, smudged faces and sniffed at our smoky hair, a warm feeling engulfed me. If neighbours don't help each other, who will?
Living as expatriates in a foreign land today and earlier as army families in far flung cities, with no family close by, it was our neighbours who stood us in good stead, no matter what the occasion or the situation. And we remain in touch with so many of them even today. Being neighbourly has many nuances and nitty-gritties, from helping out with forgotten keys to being invited for meals after coming back from a holiday, to sending each other delicacies on festive days and birthdays, to keeping a watch over their houses when you know they are away, to pretending you never heard the spat, to providing comfort for grieving families...Sadly, it is an art that is now rapidly being forgotten.

            Forty two  soft toys I washed drying on our lawn with our dog being strictly told  "Paws off!"

 Running the smoked out soft toys through our machine and restoring them to a pristine condition again brought me solace. It was the one bright spot in a day of going through and mostly tossing out smoked or charred or water damaged items. It is hard to see a house literally going up in flames...but I know it is MUCH MUCH harder when it's your own home. We are so glad no one was hurt and my daughter's first question over the phone when I told her ? " Did the pets get out in time?" Yes, Coco their Dacshund is fine!

P.S : All the photos of the house were clicked by me with the affected family's permission and I also took permission to post them here. Be considerate of thy neighbour! 

From Padmavati To Padman: The Indian Woman's 'Pacey' Progress into the 21st Century!

For those among us who follow Bollywood, the saga of the magnum opus 'Padmaavat', based on the life a of a Hindu Queen of the 13th century, who preferred death by jumping into the fire to dishonour at the hands of the Muslim invaders, has been engraved into our memories, better than our history text books ever could! All thanks to the protests that marked the release of the film by members of the community the late Queen had married into, citing reasons that the movie was an insult to that particular warrior community. While this was far from the truth, as was proved once the movie was allowed to be released, it did result in the postponing of the release of another very socially relevant Bollywood movie, Padman. So from heated discussions about whether 13th century Jauhar (mass self immolation) should have been shown in the movie, it was fast forward to the 21st century and the much more pressing and pertinent problem of the lack of access to feminine hygiene products for a vast majority of Indian women.
Padman, which finally released last month, deals with the forbidden 'P' world of the rather convoluted Indian culture. It actually tackles this natural phenomenon, I refuse to call it a problem, head on. It is a movie based on the life of India's Padman, Mr.Arunachalam Muruganantham. Mr. A belonged to a  lower middle class South Indian family and after he got married in 1998, came face to face with 'Women's Issues', (which had been carefully hidden from him by his mother and sisters until then), when he saw his wife smuggling a filthy rag into the bathroom, to use during her time of the month. She refused to allow him to buy her a packet of sanitary pads, candidly pointing out the economic challenges of this monthly exercise in a household of three menstruating women. And thus began Mr.A's obsession to create a low cost, but highly effective sanitary napkin for women who could not afford to make multinationals any richer than they already are...The rest is history and though labelled a fanatic and a pervert by family and friends alike, he did eventually succeed in his mission and went on to be awarded one of India's highest civilian honours, the Padma Shri, besides winning many prestigious awards for his innovation. He also figured in the Times magazine list for the top 100 most influential people in the world in 2014. The best part of his story is that he chose to sell prototypes of his low cost pad making machine only to women in rural India, thus ensuring that they became economically independent, while simultaneously giving other women a chance to have access to cheap but highly effective pads.
So why the hue and cry over a biological process? Why was he called demented just because he showed an interest in tackling the very relevant challenge that women face as a result of poor menstrual hygiene and exposure to disease? As his own wife puts it, in a dialogue that speaks volumes of the attitude of the majority of rural Indian women, "I'd rather die of disease, than of shame. Please don't mention these things again and especially not in public!" The movie eloquently brings out the general attitude against menstruation in India, with Mr.A's brother in law categorically wondering how he could have been awarded for inventing such a dirty thing, the pad making machine!
For those of us who have been brought up in modern homes in India's vibrant cities, it is very hard to imagine what those from more orthodox urban homes, or rural women or those who live in the urban slums, go through. We, after all, are economically well off, very well educated, as are our parents. We know what a period is all about... So what does it matter to us? And when Proctor and Gamble came to India in the early nineties, post the liberalization of our economy, it truly liberated women who could afford to shell out big bucks for a fancy packet of 'Whisper', as 'Always' is called in India. (See even the name they chose speaks volume of the collective Indian inability to discuss periods!)  The tag line 'No More Stains' suddenly became relevant to pads as well as washing powders, both of which were aggressively marketed by these global companies. They hooked us for the rest of our reproductive lives by showing us videos (pre Power Point days folks!)  to make us feel special, as girls on the brink of womanhood. They distributed samples in our elite schools, knowing our parents had the wherewithal to buy them for us the following month. In retrospect, I wonder if our rural counterparts got the same privileged treatment? As thirteen and fourteen year olds, we honestly did not know nor care, and I doubt most of us had even thought about it. We led insular lives then...We always had access to pads that magically appeared in our cupboards every month, until we got married or moved out for further studies or work, after which we had to buy them ourselves. Big deal! This point is very well brought out by a well educated lady brought up in a metro, who ends up helping Mr. A in the movie. When he asks her for feedback about his pad, she is completely puzzled and says,"A pad is a pad, it's like any other", which were the very words he had been desperately craving to hear, after he started on his tough quest, which had resulted in multiple failed attempts.
I got a small glimpse into the world of a woman who does not have immediate and unrestricted  access to menstrual hygiene products, shortly after I moved to Russia, after I got married, more than two decades ago. Russia, in the mid and late nineties, was still grappling with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cold war effect. Their industries had collapsed, the economy was in ruins, American imports were still not allowed and they had to depend upon imports from Europe or the Middle East and Turkey to stock their shelves. I had a month's stock with me but then what? I did not know Russian then and hardly anybody in South Russia where we were based, spoke English. I had no idea which shops to visit because there were no supermarkets like there were in Moscow and I could not spot any pharmacies, as many enterprises were still under government control. Finally, I had to tell my husband, who had to tell his English language interpreter, who took me to the open air market, where Russia's new breed of business men and women used to set up stalls with goods they had flown in with from neighbouring Non Soviet countries! She had to even tell me which brand to buy because remember Proctor  and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson, the only brands I knew and was familiar with, are both American companies and so were conspicuous by their absence... Embarrassing to say the least, but it did give me an insight into what a large number of Indian women go through, month after month....
The aftermath of the movie was a slew of young girls holding sanitary napkins and clicking selfies, under the hashtag PadmanChallenge. While this does generate some awareness among the younger generation and creates a momentary thrill, I believe a better and more long lasting way would be to donate a packet every month to your house help's daughter in India (or Kenya!). Just put it on your list! It does not have to be the most expensive or terribly fancy brand that you use yourself, but it should be adequate enough to serve the purpose because remember, sanitary napkins still remain out of reach for a vast majority of women who live below the poverty line in India and, I assume, Africa. I haven't done this myself yet, but I guess it is never too late to start.
Coincidentally, the weekend Padman released in Nairobi, was also the time my fourteen year old son was looking for an Arts and Entertainment topic for his Headline News presentation in his 8th grade Social Studies class. I suggested using either Padmavaat or Padman, as both threw up socially relevant issues with regard to women, via the medium of entertainment. Kudos to the American system of education, that he chose Padman, as he had watched the movie with my husband the previous Sunday. In the course of his research, he came across the fact that Padman had been banned by India's largest neighbour on the grounds of going against their traditions and culture and because it dealt with a topic that was taboo in that country! So he showed the trailer in his class to a bunch of thirteen and fourteen year old boys and girls and used it to point out that a culture and social taboos that allowed a woman to die because of lack of access to hygiene products definitely needed looking into.. He said such movies make people aware of important issues and they should be promoted, not suppressed! This was followed by an intense discussion among all the class mates. They liked his choice of news and there were no sniggers or giggles in class. His spiritual learning was that God created Men and Women equal and both should take care of each other! (I know this because I found his research paper when I was clearing up the clutter on his desk.)
And that for me, as a mother, a wife and an Indian woman, is my progress into the 21st century... If those of us who have sons, can bring them up to be empathetic, sympathetic and aware of the needs of people around them, I would confidently say, on this International Women's Day, we have made pacey progress, ladies!

                                             That's the original date of release! P.C : The Net.