ABSTRACT
April 1994: As I breakfast in our apartment in The Hague, I can hear my mother (who has come on a three-month visit from Kerala in southern India to help out) croon in the Malayalam language to my infant daughter, Anisa: ‘Wake up, little one, roll up your sleeves and get on with a woman’s morning work. Sweep the dead leaves from the garden, draw water from the well, steam rice flour and coconut for breakfast
In the bleak light of an early spring morning in The Netherlands, her words carry me far away to sunny, green Kerala. The world that my mother evokes is that of her childhood more than sixty years ago. In her present home in Kerala, water comes from a tap, and riceflour and coconut are steamed over a gas fire and not on the traditional hearth. These amenities have now been installed in the turn-of-the-century house where she grew up. My hope that Anisa will get to know this and other family houses well, symbolizes my desire that she should be well connected to her Kerala roots even if she grows up in Europe.
