If acknowledgements at the beginning or end of a book are something you usually gloss over, it needs to be said that for Lennie George Abraham’s debut memoir, you may want to turn back the pages and read them all over again so you could whisper your personal gratitude to that guardian angel who discovered the writer. If it weren’t for Anjali Manoj, who founded an online community for women in Thiruvananthapuram called Her Trivandrum, Lennie may never have realised how good a writer she is, and the book – It’s just life! Why get your knickers in a twist? – may not have come out, even at this stage in her life. A 70-something retired dentist with a wicked sense of humour and an empty nest for a home, Lennie found she had a lot of time at hand and began to write witty long posts every so often on the Facebook group. The posts began gathering a following and several pleas came to Lennie to compile a book with those and more.
“No one had told me I could write,” Lennie says when I ask what took her so long to get these words, or any words for that matter, out in public when she has such a way with them. Just look at the title – It’s just life! Why get your knickers in a twist? That is Lennie if you can sum her up in 10 words.
She currently lives in an apartment building in Thiruvananthapuram with her husband Abraham, but in her younger days, Lennie did a lot of shuttling between countries. Born to parents from Kerala (she inherited her funny bone from her father, she says) settled in Malaysia, Lennie grew up knowing more English, Malay, and Tamil than Malayalam. Her parents decided to pack her off to India to bring her closer to her roots, but a few years in a boarding school in Bengaluru had anglicised her even more than if she were in England (Lennie’s words). So she was sent straight to Kerala (‘Malayalification of Moi’), began wearing a sari as a teenager – the costume of the true blue Malayali woman of the 60s and 70s – and once her dentistry studies were finished, sailed back to Malaysia.
There was some more 'back-and-forth'ing between Malaysia and Kerala, until a marriage happened and Lennie entered a third country, Kuwait. She quickly became a super mother of three and worked, until the war brought her to Thiruvananthapuram.
No, I didn’t just spoil the book for you — the compulsion to summarise her sojourns comes from the awe of having read the many, many adventures of LGA, as she likes to shorten her name online.
Nothing is given away either, simply because it can’t be, not in anyone else’s words. It is Lennie’s language that gets you, you know, it is more the ‘how’ of it than the ‘what’. How she writes, how she makes everything so uplifting that you can’t help getting lifted yourself and finding yourself floating in mid-air. The heck with gravity.
The reason the book becomes dear to you is also that you get to know the many ‘downs’ in her life, that she doesn't let you linger on, but quickly covers up with a witty afterthought or anecdote. And that only makes you linger more, dig out the many hurts and feel them yourself.
The taunts you face as a girl for the way you look, the lack of choice young women had at a certain time in matters as personal as what to learn; what to do for a living; if, when, or whom to marry – these are not topics Lennie dwells on, but it hits you as she skimps over the topics and makes a joke of everything. The only discernible comment she lets out is “no one asked me”: it is my marriage but no one asked me, it is my education but no one asked me.
“Who doesn't have troubles in life?” Lennie asks. Some choose to drown in them, but she realised that humour was her way of dealing with her troubles, very early in life. “I make the difficulties bearable by looking at the lighter side of things. It helps me survive. I make jokes out of my sadness,” she says.
That doesn’t mean this is a sad book, it is anything but! Only that just as it can throw you off your couch laughing till your sides hurt, it can unexpectedly move you to tears.
Relationships – even as she introduces her three children in the very first pages as her “rascals” – are clearly everything for Lennie. The conventional mother, the tolerant father, the darling young sister (and this is a really special bond), the quirky husband, and most of all the children, whom you get to know as The Boy, Elder, and Younger. It is with many sighs of relief that you realise that the humour gene has passed on to the next generation. Their exchanges are too precious, especially between the Boy and Lennie. Even Abraham, who is mostly called the husband, comes with a dose of humour and you have to thank the stars for Lennie’s was an arranged marriage.
Here is a sample of how she’d turned the scenario of meeting a stranger and agreeing to marry him into a joke. “Uncle jumped out of the clinic like he had been bitten in his butt. Nurse followed like her butt was on fire. I didn’t know what it was about getting me hitched that made monkeys out of these people.”
Or when she has to take the first international call from her husband who left for Kuwait soon after marriage, with a good part of the village present to hear the conversation. This was a time when only the local post office had a telephone and the postmaster answered every call. “Frantically he started waving his hands and legs in my direction, and a number of the on-lookers followed suit, waving and gesticulating along with him. The whole thing looked like some sort of awkward flamingo dance.”
Even as you laugh and cry with Lennie, you have to admire the spirit of this writer, this attitude towards life that can tide over anything that comes her way, not because it showed strength, but because it followed the simplest reasoning: you are stuck with it (or as she’d say, got your knickers in a twist), you might as well get the best out of it.