Anecdotes of an Accidental Occidental Gareth Macready   © Copyright 2023 by Gareth Macready

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Bangalore sounds like Bangaluru. Bombai could be confused with Mumbai. How Chennai changed to Madras and back was a mystery. Those were the sorts of thoughts I had while walking the streets of Chennai, on the way to get titanium posts in my mouth. It was cheaper getting ten teeth fixed in India than three in Australia, even factoring travel and accommodation.

My mother’s mother was born in Bangalore around 1910. My brother reckoned she said someone in our family was born of an Indian maid and a colonial British bureaucrat. Our mother’s father was a sergeant in the British Army, in Bangalore, when they met. Later, he became the sergeant at the Bombay Police Station during WWII.

Our mother was born in Bombay. The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registrar burnt to the ground. So, we can’t prove we’re part Indian, and when Mum came to Australia, she had no birth certificate. It was different time. The White Australia Policy was still in effect, so not saying anyone was of Indian extraction would have prudent at the time.

Stories Mum and our grandparents told fascinated me. Maybe they’ll interest you too.

In the Indian rope trick, a man plays a reed pipe, a rope ascends from a basket, a boy climbs the rope and disappears. The man climbs, swings a machete and body parts fall into the basket. The man descends and plays the pipe. The rope descends into the basket and the boy steps out of the basket alive. Mum claimed to have seen it in public, not sure if it was mass hypnosis. Who cares? It’s an interesting story.

Grandpa’s job at the police station meant they lived above the station. Grandma told me, a British soldier tried to chat Mum up at the bottom of the stairs. Grandma yelled, “Leave her alone. She’s only ten years old.” Mum was an early developer.

Mum remembered Australian soldiers dragging wallers from their seats on garries and racing them down the main street. She stood with Grandpa on the balcony above the station watching them hurtle past, hurling empty beer bottles through the windows of the department store across the road.

Mum asked, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”

He said, “What are you, an idiot?”

Once, I asked Grandpa if people in India were different from us, and he said, “They’re like anyone anywhere else in the world. You tell them to shoot people and they shoot.”

He said he put Mahatma Gandhi in the jail cell at the police station. If he hadn’t, the Indian radicals would have killed Ghandi. On behalf of Grandpa, India, you’re welcome.

Mum said, in the streets people would wave her away saying, “Quit India.” Like, as if a young girl anywhere has any control over where she’s born and raised. My grandparents sent her to boarding school in Australia after Indian radicals stopped her school bus, turned it on its side and set it on fire.

The girls at school called her, “The Indian Princess.” Apparently, it wasn’t a meant as a compliment. Xenophobia is not confined to one race of people.

After my parents passed, I received an inheritance and went to Chennai to get new teeth. Waiting for my gums to heal, I wasn’t allowed solid food. Wandering around on my fourth day of bananas and yoghurt, a McDonald’s beckoned. I knew where I’d go when I was allowed to eat properly. Yes!

Cows wandered around freely. Poor people panhandled. Police slept in cars during the day. I wondered: What would Grandpa say?

I saw a man on a demolition site, in a loin cloth and turban, and no footwear. He stood on top of a brick wall, halfway up the second floor, bending down, hitting a brick off, taking a sideways step, hitting another brick off... OH&S regulations are apparently not as strict in India as Australia.

A family rode by on a motorbike. The father sat astride the seat, with a child in front of him, the wife sat side-saddle behind him, a child on her lap, and another child stood on the parcel rack behind the mother holding her shoulders. No helmets, the children were barefoot, and the parents wore sandals.

I read a news story about a Moslem man killed by Hindus who saw him carrying a bag of red meat. It turned out the meat was lamb though, not beef. All these items were grist for the mill.

For thirty years, I made people laugh for a living. The first seven were in Australia, during which I met and married a Japanese girl. She gave birth to our two boys, then we went and lived in Japan, where I did shows in Japanese for twenty-three years.

I found a comedy club in Chennai and got to do five minutes in the open mike. On the way there in the cab, I knew we were entering an affluent area because footpaths lined the roads. The streets near the dental clinic had only dirt edges.

It was a restaurant serving rump steak. I had new teeth, and I was doing stand-up in English in India. I was in heaven.

I started with two minutes of my already extant routines which I thought would be universally funny. It worked, and I got brave. “I got new teeth and went to McDonalds after they healed. No all-beef patties? I’m like: There are cows in the street. Give me a knife. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

They laughed. “I’m glad you’re laughing. I was worried I’d get murdered for that joke.”

They laughed again. “Especially since I read the news about the Moslem with the bag of lamb.”

They laughed again, and I finished with two minutes of more stuff that I thought was universally funny. Afterwards, the producer asked me to do some more shows. I couldn’t because I had a plane to catch. But it felt good to be invited.

That was that. Nice story to tell, some edgy comedy about interreligious relations. Well done me.

Sneha Suhas, from Bangalore, was in that show and told me her sister lives in Brisbane, where I live. Cool coincidence. We became Facebook Friends.

Months later, I’m back in Brisbane, running comedy shows and she turned up with her sister. So, I got her to get up and do five minutes. The audience loved her.

It’s truly a weird and wonderful world.

*****

The variety of jobs I’ve had in my life include, truck driver for film & TV, shuttle bus driver, nursery hand, admin assistant, courier, taxi driver, catering assistant, stores clerk, assistant research officer, cashier, call centre operator, carpenter’s assistant, phone consultant, labourer, landscape gardening assistant, doorman, full-contact karate instructor and a gag writer for Radio B105, Brisbane’s No. 1 radio breakfast crew at the time. In 1984 I was enrolled in honours mathematics at the University of Queensland but halfway through the year I went to Sydney and began doing stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store. I got involved with a Japanese lady along the way, got married, had kids, and went to live in Japan.

In Japan, for twenty-three years, I made a living mainly performing a variety comedy show with juggling, magic and jokes in Japanese, but I also hand-built and operated a studio/theatre, advised the biggest comedy company in the country, in collaboration with Osaka City Council on the city’s inaugural Performance Festival, taught improvisation at the biggest comedy school in Japan, and was awarded the KEY TO THE CITY by the Osaka City Council.

Since returning to Brisbane, I decided to learn to write stories for publication. I have three stories now, all set within a universe I created, which add up to around twenty-five thousand words.