Knitting

When I was younger, my mom used to tell me stories of her convent school education in Andhra: nuns who taught her knitting, sewing and crochet, how to set a table (at 10am, for lunch at 1pm), about how she got yelled at for taking help from her mother to finish some sewing project (handkerchief... her mom helped her with the corners), about how crazy those nuns, in general, were, and so on.

But one thing those nuns seem to have drilled into mom is a liking for knitting, sewing, embroidering, tatting, quilting, crocheting and all other activities womanly. Give mom a piece of thread or yarn and she'll start fiddling with it and then a few hours later, have produced some kind of thing from it. The usefulness of the thing is not very apparent, although it is usually quite pretty. It usually is a work in progress that stays as a work in progress for years, if not decades, because she'd have either lost interest in it, or forgotten where she put it.

Mom, being an inveterate and indefatigable teacher, decided that her daughter should learn some of these skills from her. Hence, during my early teens, I learned some bits of crocheting, some bits of embroidery (holler if you ever need a Lazy Daisy design on something!), some bits of sewing (we both went for sewing classes, where we learned to make baby clothes and mom learned how to cut and stitch that everlasting mystery, the saree blouse). What has been retained after all these years in my sieve-like brain, is knitting.

The reason I could never quite discard knitting as being too boring or repetitive was because of a book: one of those Agatha Christie novels set in Baghdad (was it"They came to Baghdad" or "They came to Mesopotamia"?), wherein the heroine, after having escaped narrow death in the desert, is rescued by a dashing young archeologist. They have tea and something in the conversation reminds our heroine about Madame Defarge. Supposedly Madame Defarge knitted the names of those killed by the other Madame (La Guillotine, simpleton!) into a scarf. Our heroine believes that she could do the same... and she says, "yes, I see how it could be done...knit knit, purl purl and there! A secret list which no one would ever know about!" Needless to say, that is the key discovery which saves her life and those of her comrades, and not just that, but saves earth from anarchy.

And for years, in fact, for more than one and a half decades, the ONLY reason why I never forgot how to knit was because I thought I too should be able to make a secret list of names (what names, but? Instead, maybe equations to help me in my exams? But what kid wears a knitted scarf in the sweltering heat of a Chennai/Bangalore/Pune examination hall?). I studied the instructions given by Christie, scrutinized every word of it and still couldn't figure out how the heck one would be able to knit in letters and names without the whole world figuring it out. Later, I examined "A Tale of Two Cities" to find any mention of Madame Defarge knitting the names into scarves, and though I found plenty of references of her knitting, I couldn't find anything that said that she knitted secret lists. So intent was I on searching for knitting references that I didn't read the rest of the book and had to make up answers, for the English exam, from the abridged comic version that my dad had bought me years ago.

Anyway, now that mom and I are spending so much time in each others' company (after a really long time, actually. Most of our time earlier was spent in a)arguing b) her cooking for me when I studied for various exams or c) my scolding her for going to the grocery shop so much), and since we have a joint project (to get house ready for baby) and since I seem to have grown up enough to not snarl and snap when my story book reading is interrupted (wow...that is a big step in the right direction), we seem to have come up with a huge variety of things to do and make. Needless to say, that involves sewing (her favorite) and knitting (my kind-of-favorite). Since she knows way more knitting than I do anyway, and has more patience, she finishes my well-begun-but-half-done projects and fixes all the mistakes I make along the way.

After attempts at baby booties (check this out: http://cyberseams.com/article/105035/all_things_knitting/knitted_baby_booties_size_newborn_to_six_months.html
They even have a video! Isn't that the greatest?!), I have moved on to scarves (http://cyberseams.com/article/105605/all_things_knitting/knitting_a_scarf_pattern_that_has_yarn_overs.html)

I feel awfully accomplished and maternal.

I wonder how mom feels.

:p