It’s two months since curfew came down on us, cutting us off from the all you can eat buffet tables and the succulent Wagyu marbled beef platters and all the flavoursome foods of the life we had got used to. Was it actually real? It seems like a dream, now. A haze of drizzle and fondant and glaze.
At speed, but experienced slowly, like time lapse photography, the casual grocery impulse buys of early February have become the craved high end luxuries of late March.
I had believed what I was told: that the middle class was growing, and that urban elite Colombo had plenty of money to spend, and money and time to burn on grills and rotisseries and pies and patisseries. But how quickly austerity came in, riding shotgun with the fear of Death and rumors of this terrible, non-discriminating disease. No amount of wealth could immunize anyone from it.
Even a store-cupboard full of authentic Italian pasta sauce in lovely glass bottles, and a fridge full of Scottish smoked salmon and mild white English cheddar cheese would only delay the inevitable, as imports were cancelled.
People started growing their own garden vegetables in pots, and baking their own bread. Indigenous medicinal plants and herbs were praised, and Facebook posts became focused on conserving what we had, and extracting the most value out of every ingredient.
Nothing Exceeds Like Excess
Did we really need to have so much, and so often? As our bodies waxed fat, did our souls shrink thin? Are we all better off, actually, for an indefinite period of intermittent fasting? I am not talking here of those who never have enough to eat.
I was surprised to see the queues at the superstores, and the empty shelves. I don’t think our generation has experienced the fear of actual hunger before. Even the most disciplined person has been conscious of their privilege. By acknowledging it, and the inequity that underlies it, they pay the social tax that enables them to go on attending the round of banquets and feasts that constituted life in the Capital. Rich people have further to fall. Their elevation makes them vulnerable.
But I think if you have so much that you lose count, and the sense of each individual item becomes indistinct, over time you don’t feel the true worth and the luxury of having things. Bit by bit, Eke Eke Eke. It is pleasing that a phrase for metaphorically making something last as long as you can, ‘one by one by one’, is visually similar in English.
The Branston Pickle Miser
There’s a fine line between prudence and miserliness, stocking up and hoarding. I have heard a wealthy man complain at his own table that his wife’s guests were eating too much of his favourite Branston Pickle, and spreading too much clover honey on their morning toast. This was because he lived far away from his beloved England, and Fortnums did not deliver hampers full of Gentlemen’s Relish to his home, and rare commodities rise sharply in value. You could see him measuring the amounts with his eye, and finding the smallest teaspoons to put beside the jars of the precious delicacies.
He had been dirt poor as a boy, he said: a scholarship kid at a cathedral school. And he grudged people’s wish to make him share because he knew how hard it was to create a personal hoard, and build a sanctuary, crisis-proof. He opens the store cupboard sometimes and just looks at the bottles, and touches their coin-shaped lids.
A person sharing her experiences on Zoom recently said that, for the first time since she set up her own house, she is doing her own marketing, receiving her staples direct from the trucks that deliver fresh vegetables on the road; and she weighs each item in her hands, and knows the selling price of each, down to the smallest measure. She has never felt so grounded.
Self Made = Sovereignty
I too have been breaking new ground, in the new earth. My shellac manicure started to split and flake off weeks ago, as I dig in the garden to plant seeds for vegetables, in pots and in the small garden beds. My friends’ hair is growing grey they say - and I think they look lovelier this way. We speak to each other in our pyjamas in a way we have never done before.
I never knew until now that you can grow whole pineapples in pots, by planting their spiky tops; or spinach by planting their white stalks in the earth. The store cupboard becomes less important when there are living things striving for life and expression in the garden, with their bright energy and stubbornness and momentum for joy. The slow natural progress sets a schedule of its own, and we adjust to it. The sun pours on us all: seeds and stalks and stems and human beings, each morning, and then the clouds come in and the rain falls every afternoon. There is harmony slowly building from the slowly earthing roots of our abruptly interrupted former life.
We have left it very late, I know, but - even now - it feels like Time itself is on our side, and we have a wealth of it.
