Two Lives in a memory warp. Being the story of the Mankar couple who lived and died at 233 Khetwadi Main Road as remembered by their son.

Is there such a thing as the “perfect memoir”? Search me. That nothing of that ilk has probably ever been extant dawned on me only when I started thinking about writing one about my parents, Aai (c. 1897 - 1962) and Baba (c. 1880 - 1965). Unfortunately, much too late in my life did I come to realize that their lives were worth being scrutinized with curiosity and recorded with love and understanding by their son.

Reader warned. Doing it has been far from simple, though. Their past before my birth had been more or less a closed book to me. I had never tried to steal even a glimpse of it. So I had to make do with half-remembered hearsay and third-party “testimony” heard or overheard on various occasions and filed away for future use, as it were. Being human makes my memory as fallible and untrustworthy as the next person’s. Also, all along, I have been accustomed to view life through the prism of accumulated prejudices and assumptions acquired over the decades. Much as I may try to shed them, I can never be sure they aren’t there at a given moment. So what you will read here is the story of Mr Waman Keshavji Mankar, Esq., and his lawfully wedded spouse, Laxmibai (née Manak Ajinkya), the original Mankar couple of 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/1fcggIG – as far as I could assemble the mosaic of lost time though undoubtedly not without flaws. Readers will also have to pardon me for sounding embittered and deeply resentful when I refer to some of the people featuring in the tale and their vile deeds. That is how I feel about what happened. Hypocrisy and I never had even a nodding acquaintance. That’s a fact plain and simple − neither hubris nor a boast. 

Name decodified. Before we go any further, I have a theory about the origin of our family name although I cannot lay a claim to the expertise of an etymologist or a polyglot. The “Man” (or the phonetic “Maan”) part of the word “Mankar”, I dare say, might have come from the Marathi word “Maan” (= status, privilege, right) used in a community-centric context. The surname “Mankar” might have thus alluded to a clan who had status in the community and enjoyed certain privileges owing to it. W.E. Gladstone Solomon, art historian, though, had a slightly different take on the surname mentioned in his study, The Charm of Indian Art; “Mankar”, he averred, signified “the noble one”. http://tinyurl.com/3fnunj Fair enough.

Sad but true. There were at least three occasions when I saw and/or heard my father crying. The first one was sometime in 1944 or 1945 when I was 8 or 9 years old lying in bed in the dead of night and trying not to hear his stifled sobs. The incidence is described at http://bit.ly/1rHygza. The trigger was my sister’s avowal to marry a Muslim colleague apparently and her consequent and sudden disappearance from 233 Khetwadi Main Road one Saturday afternoon. (Later, her elder daughter revealed that her mother had in fact been spurned by her alleged boy friend.) The second time I saw Baba sobbing was when he came home after work one sad evening in 1962 and learned that Aai, his by-then estranged wife, had succumbed to her lingering ailment (leukemia) in the Bombay Hospital. The third occasion in 1965 – a short while before his death − was described to me by Ujwal. Baba, as was his wont, was entertaining his elder grandson. Ashu was perched precariously on the edge of the dining table and laughing his head off at his grandfather’s antics as he enacted a funny tale. While thus occupied, he fell off and crashed to the floor. He was a bit stunned but otherwise quite okay while Baba had by then freaked out and was sobbing uncontrollably. It took all of Ujwal’s persuasive skill to calm him down and convince him that all was well. He had great rapport with Ashu and Abhi, then toddlers, as well as their mother. He used to rock his grandsons on his haunches and sing to them ditties of his own making, much to their unmitigated delight. http://bit.ly/1mWMagg He was also responsible, after Aai’s death, for freeing Ujwal from her self-imposed dress code of wearing only sarees in deference to Aai’s wishes. He told her to wear what she felt comfortable in while working and in daily living.

Equanimity personified. My reason to start this memoir with the sad memories was to highlight the fact that Baba’s everyday essential mental state (sthayi bhava) was one of equanimity. He must have come to this mental plateau over time, I gather, dealing with the many problems life kept hurling at him. In my childhood, I don’t remember Baba ever raising his voice at any of us. Even his infrequent reprimands and admonitions for my childish transgressions were administered in a gentle, slightly pained tone of voice. This is perhaps why he was unable to discipline his wayward daughter well in time. At times, a raised voice gets better results than a raised palm. He chose to raise neither.

Details, details, details. When he breathed his last in 1965, a little after I had joined Clarion-McCann http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ, Baba was 85 by his own reckoning, give or take. So, it is my conjecture that he must have been born circa 1880. That’s 7 years before Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) was built and 17 years before the first automobile reached the Indian shores (barely three years after its invention in the US of A). I don’t know anything about Baba’s father except his name (Keshavji). Keshav is one of Lord Vishnu’s names, occurring at the 23^rd and 648^th rank in Vishnu Sahastranama (the thousand names of Vishnu recited in his praise), by the way. The Mankar family, hearsay informed me, lived in Navi Wadi, a then predominantly Pathare Prabhu precinct in South Bombay, http://bit.ly/1oG4HJn in near-indigent circumstances. Navi Wadi is also where the Mankar Family deity, Maheshwari, resides.

The way the Prabhus dressed, worked, thought and lived. In Chapter 6 of Madame Helena Patrovna Blavatsky's From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan (1879-80) http://tinyurl.com/5l3zb7, she wrote about how the then current generation of the Pathare Prabhus was living "by their pens", which is to say "occupying all the small Government posts in the Bombay Presidency, and so being dangerous rivals of the Bengali Babus since the time of British rule. In Bombay, the Patan clerks reach the considerable figure of five thousand. Their complexion is darker than the complexion of Konkan Brahmans, but they are handsomer and brighter." In Mary Fainsod Katzenstein’s Ethnicity and Equality (Cornell University Press, New York, 1979, p.44), she cites Edwardes’ especial reference in The Gazetteer of Bombay (Vol. I, p.168) to the fact that “although up to about 1870, the dress of the Prabhus was considered model attire, the once wealthy Prabhu families soon began to desert their large Bombay residences for more simple, economical flats”. She also points out that in those days the Pathare Prabhus occupied “key administrative and clerical positions in Bombay under the British”.

Here’s what Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar wrote in Annihilation of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi (Navayana, 2014, p.252) about the Pathare Prabhu's abandoning their custom of widows remarrying (i.e., moving from a progressive to a regressive stance): "At one time the Pathare Prabhus had widow remarriage as a custom of their caste. This custom of widow remarriage was later on looked upon as a mark of social inferiority by some members of the caste, especially because it was contrary to the custom prevalent among the Brahmins. With the object of raising status of their community some Pathare Prabhus sought to stop this practice of widow remarriage that was prevalent in their caste. The community was divided into two camps, one for and the other against the innovation. The Peshwas took the side of those in favour of widow remarriage and thus virtually prohibited the Pathare Prabhus from following the ways of the Brahmins."

The one somewhat eccentric trait of the Pathare Prabhus mentioned by W E Gladstone Solomon http://tinyurl.com/3fnunj (p.49), the composing and singing of epithalamiums during the marriage ceremony, is something I can personally vouch for. Written in flowery and hagiographic Marathi, I have heard them over the decades at several weddings, even fairly recent ones, sung to the tune of the mangalashtakas (mantras solemnizing the nuptials).

Among the many talented Pathare Prabhus of those days was Bhujangrao Mankar who was thought of as Sir Isaac Pitman’s Indian reincarnation in his role as the “father” of Marathi and Gujarati shorthand. By the way, the writer of one of the earlier Marathi sangeet natak (musical play), Naladamayanti (1879), was a Pathare Prabhu, Sokar Bapuji Trilokekar (1835-1908). http://bit.ly/149Oaci Also, the second lead pair in the popular musical stage hit, Sangeet Sanshaya Kallol (= a pandemonium of suspicion), premiered c.1916, was named Phalgunrao and Kritika Trilokekar, apparently a Pathare Prabhu couple.  

  

Baba’s struggles continued. Baba managed to somehow complete his higher education probably with help from well-wishers and scholarships. He passed both his Master of Arts as well as Bachelor of Laws examinations. Then, true to his predilection as a deep-dyed Pathare Prabhu, he entered into the service of the Government of Bombay Presidency as a Public Prosecutor. He retired from his post of Presidency Magistrate, Girgaum Police Court, situated very close to 233 Khetwadi Main Road, sometime in 1936. (Later, in the 1950s, he once again worked for the Government as the Coroner of Bombay.)

Married to Manak. Along the way, at the age of 37 or so, he married Aai, then 20, probably in 1917. They had their first offspring in 1918, Malini, a daughter. The last of their progeny was me born eighteen years later. In between, there was a son who did not survive. Had he managed to do so, chances are I would not be around to tell you this tale. (According to what Ujwal was told by her mother, Aai wanted her obstetrician friend to terminate her last pregnancy but was dissuaded from taking the drastic step.)

Self-evolved. Aai belonged to the Ajinkya family residing on the ground floor of the house opposite the Roxy Cinema where I was born. http://bit.ly/1yBaVUz My four distinct childhood memories about this spacious ground-floor flat are: (1) a wooden swing the exact replica of the one we had in our 233 Khetwadi Main Road residence; (2) a living room practically bereft of books; (3) a Bombay Gas connection for cooking fuel (coal gas that used to be manufactured till the late seventies/early eighties in a Parel plant) in the kitchen just like the one Ujwal’s parents had; and (4) a faint odour of residual decay wafting around the back of the house. You can read whatever little I know about Aai’s family here: http://bit.ly/1uhm2Ol Aai’s elder brother brought her up. I remember him as a fair and handsome man with well-maintained salt-and-pepper mustaches. He seemed to live well after having retired from the French Bank at the end of a long and lucrative career. I remember him giving Aai a gold guinea coin one bhai dooj. I used to visit him mostly in Aai’s company but on a couple of occasions even Baba’s. (I don’t remember Baba ever calling on Aai’s other brother who lived with his family at Gamdevi.) Aai had, I heard her tell, matriculated from the Kamalabai Girls’ School in Nowroji Street where Ujwal’s mother http://bit.ly/1sQ0v0F was her classmate. Aai was small-built. One of my earliest infantile memories of her is being patted and cooed to sleep while I furiously sucked at my lower lip and kneaded a black wart situated at a respectful distance to the left of her belly button. I can vouch for the fact that, throughout my childhood, I watched her cultivating of her own volition an interest in reading light literary fiction in Marathi as well as in watching quality plays. She used to subscribe to three leading monthlies published in Marathi: Kirloskar, Stree and Manohar and avidly read them cover to cover. I also remember accompanying her in April 1943 or 1944 to a ten-night open-air festival of Marathi plays. It took place on the sea-facing ground parallel to the BBCI (now Western) Railway tracks between the Grand Medical College and Islam Gymkhanas on Marine Drive – a once-in-a-lifetime event staged by the Marathi Sahitya Sangh with a view to revive the Marathi theatre. http://bit.ly/1rI3959 Aai also used to take me to Marathi plays staged in nearby theatres. You wouldn’t be wrong in concluding that she was a patron of the arts, albeit on a very modest scale. Maybe, it was due to her culturally-charged Pathare Prabhu genes, who knows? I must confess, however, that she played a big role in nurturing my love for reading and the fine arts in general by setting an example. I used to be a major contributor to a hand-written (hasta likhit) magazine in Marathi produced by the sixth and seventh grade students in my first school. http://bit.ly/1rZD4zY Her daughter did not share her passion for the arts and literature unfortunately. Her reading was confined to the popular English glossies she borrowed from a circulating library with a home delivery service. Besides this, she was an ardent Hindi movie addict regularly watching the banal romantic fare on offer without fail at the various neighbourhood cinema halls and buying the musical discs. She also had a formidable collection of Hindi movie program bills and song books that used to be sold in the movie halls of the time – worth a fortune in the memorabilia market today by the way. Unfortunately, it got lost owing to neglect and lack of foresight. 

The Mankars do well for themselves. Aai’s maiden name “Manak” (or “Manik”) is the Marathi word for ruby, a much-coveted precious stone coloured pink to blood-red. (Ujwal’s mother, Aai’s close friend and confidante, kept addressing her by that name even in later life.) After marriage she was, according to the custom re-christened “Laxmi” after the Hindu Goddess of Prosperity and Wealth. She seemed to live up to her new name as she entered Baba’s life. He prospered in Government service and made enough money and more to support his cousins and nephews and nieces, all part of his extended family. Also, following his Pathare Prabhu predilection once again, he built a house for his family in Prabhu Nagar, Khar, a Western suburb just beyond Bandra served by the BBCI (now Western) Railways, where a lot of Pathare Prabhus were already shifting. My guess is that he must have done it with his own savings because I doubt if bank loans for housing were then offered as freely and avidly as at present. All this must have added to his stature both in his professional and personal life. As usual, life had to add an ironical twist in the story. Baba was named after Waman, the fifth reincarnation of Lord Vishnu, a diminutive hero with a generous heart who vanquished King Bali, the ruler of the three worlds. http://bit.ly/1xNCVmJ and http://bit.ly/ZLWKwH In fact, he stood tall at 5’-8” or so. No doubt, the commonality between him and his fabled namesake was only in deeds. 

Enemy within. Unfortunately though not unexpectedly, there lurked among Baba’s near and dear relatives – the very ones he had sheltered munificently − a bunch of wily demons akin to the rakshasas from his namesake’s universe. A maternal uncle and his family laid a squatter’s claim to his Khar bunglow because he had allowed them to reside there. The sentimental fool that he was, Baba chose to let go of the property quietly instead of proving ownership in a court of law. (Come to think of it, although law was his profession, I had heard him on several occasions advising people to shun the courts and the lawyers.) He, however, broke off all ties with that branch of his family except for a distant cousin of his (Sunder Nayak, nicknamed Kanikaka) who worked for the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (now HSBC) and who, along with his wife (known to me only as “Kaku” = aunty), was devoted to both Aai and Baba. In fact, so close was the couple to my parents that the weddings of two of their three daughters took place at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. What’s more, when my cousin Suresh, the son of Kanikaka and Kaku, chose to marry a non-Prabhu girl, my parents sided with his parents who were staunchly against the marriage in spite of the fact that they were very fond of and close to their nephew (he called Baba "bhaukaka" which literally means "bother uncle" and Aai, "Kakibai") and broad-minded enough to realize that the days of scrupulously staying within the caste boundaries were numbered at least in the urban areas.  

The wards’ fate. In Aai and Baba’s charge and under their care, besides their own daughter, were two of Baba’s nieces, Nalini and Sarojani, who respectfully addressed them with the honorifics ‘Kakibai’ and ‘Kakaji’. Both of them, as far as my recollection goes, were treated by my parents as daughters of the family on a par with the real daughter – although the latter saw the situation in a different light and took every opportunity to display her displeasure. Of the two wards, Nalini was the more gifted academically. She completed her graduation from the Elphinstone College along with her cousin who too excelled in academics. Unfortunately, Nalini was married off in 1939 or thereabouts to a Rationing Office employee – much below her intellectual stature − and ended up as a forlorn housewife. Even after sixty years of a futile existence, her mind had lost none of its original sharpness, though. In a get-together in the mid-nineties at Ashu’s in-laws, we were astonished to hear her conversing fluently in French with a youngster from France who happened to be one of the invitees. Nalini, I think, was also a trained dilruba player though I don’t remember ever hearing her playing it. Her less talented and plain-looking sibling, Sarojani, took lessons in singing and sewing but did not seem to have got anywhere in either field. She was married to a decent enough though far from successful man at the same time as her sister.

Down with the Khetwadi Mankars. Hindsight tells me that the real tragedy of Nalini was that she was married off willy-nilly into a large joint family headed by a matriarch with five sons living on the Antop Hill, Wadala. Nalini’s husband was the youngest of the brood. The wife of the second eldest son, a moderately successful lawyer by profession, was the eldest daughter of Aai’s elder brother residing opposite the Roxy Cinema (please see above). (The Elder Ajinkya’s progeny comprised one son and two daughters.) This worthy – the great pretender that she was – professed profound love and affection for Aai in her presence while secretly envying her good fortune and good life and, more particularly, the success of her husband and, in consequence, despising her and the Mankar family in the bargain and being always on the lookout for a chance to “fix” the accursed lot. She was not alone in this pursuit. Her own husband, her sister (much better educated than her but her match, stride for stride, as far as skullduggery went) and the latter’s solicitor husband – a doppelganger of Justice Strauss from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events saga in terms of his deeds and thoughts − as well as Aai’s own younger sister and the wife and the elder son of Aai’s second brother (actually third, I think – the second one, an Indian Army physician, having migrated to England during World War I) were all a part of the secret down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique. The scenario happened to be no less sudsy than the convoluted soaps currently doing the rounds in assorted Indian languages on the idiot box.

Self-deluded. My poor, innocent, trusting Aai played into the hands of the villains without fail on several occasions, the only exception being her firm and unshakable resolve to have Ujwal as her daughter-in-law. In Nalini’s case, she deluded herself into believing that her niece would protect her own ward in the virtual snake pit she was being shoved into – relying on her blind faith in people on her own maternal side (= maaher in Marathi; mahike in Hindi). As the saying goes, there’s no delusion more lethal than self-delusion. My mother must have realized later on that she had made a grave mistake in Nalini’s case. Yet, she repeated it toward the end of her life. The elder son of her third brother had been caught red-handed in the commission of graft at the Airport in the late fifties. Again deluding herself into believing in his innocence when his propensity to take bribe was more or less an open secret – the big bunglow he had built in West Bandra was cited by many as a pointer to his not-so-clean hands – she insisted that Baba should “save” him through his many “connections”. He, being the way he was, flatly refused. One thing led to another and they drifted apart, stopped talking to each other. This wall of silence remained in place right till her death in 1962. The down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique had drawn blood twice over!

Two weddings, a nagging worry and a misadventure. But that was far away in the future. Coming back to the aftermath of the weddings of the two wards of Aai and Baba, they were relieved to have done their duty in loco parentis, i.e., as foster parents, by arranging what they considered as a suitable match for each of the duo in (I guess) 1941 when I had just turned five and we were then living on the first floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road. The lavish weddings were held in the spacious hall on the ground floor of Vanita Vishram School next door to 233 Khetwadi Main Road and the reception in the garden behind it. The school, by the way, is still very much there doing its job although there are no more weddings held on the premises, as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, frenzied, near frenetic efforts were afoot to find a suitable boy for the daughter of the house. After all, she was not growing any younger with each passing day. Alas, all to no avail. She had by then taken up a job in the newly opened Rationing Office situated in the Jinnah Hall next to the Grant Road Bridge within walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road. This is where she found her “true love” in the Hindi film style and I have already described at the beginning of this piece what happened then. To keep herself occupied after her misadventure, Malini had learned Hindi and Urdu and started doing honorary social service by tutoring women in a women’s organization in the vicinity. It was only in 1949 that a match was finally arranged for the Princess. Prince Charming happened to be no other than a Lower Division Clerk in the Income Tax Department who happened to reside quite close by. A harmless enough person who fancied himself as an artist; he used to make miniature statuettes out of clay and paint them quite beautifully. He was also an amateur inventor in his own right. I remember being impressed with his system of closing the front door from the outside with the use of nothing but a piece of strong string. (To get the door to open later, though, you had to ring the doorbell.) Malini had fared maybe a notch better in the marriage stakes than Nalini, the more talented cousin she despised and whose husband was not as gifted.

Pooja, priests and a guru. Were Aai and Baba seeking their respective paths to salvation in their own way? Aai had always been a god-fearing person given to daily prayer, weekly pooja by the family priest on Mondays, fasting during the month of Shravan, special offerings to Lord Shiva such as maharudra with eleven Brahmins presiding if so advised by the family priest or her astrologer, a visit to a dozen Rama temples on the Ramnavmi day and so forth. After her daughter’s “narrow escape from a fate worse than death” (as she put it), she had acquired a guru residing in a quaint sea-facing flat on the road along the coast leading up to the Banganga and then on to the Malabar Hills garden. And who do you think had led this guileless woman up this particular garden path? No surprises there. It was someone from the fix-The-Mankars clique: her younger sister-in-law whom she adored as a notable member of her maternal family.

Marx, Radical Humanism, Bhakti. While all this was happening, my father had taken to reading, along with his client briefs and legal reference volumes (he had several shelves full of these tomes stacked in his makeshift home office under a shed on the front terrace of the third-floor flat – where we had shifted by then − at 233 Khetwadi Main Road because his criminal law practice was thriving, thank you), MN Roy’s books about radical humanism, books about communist thought and leaders and biographies of the saints in the bhakti tradition in Marathi (Tukaram, Namdeo, Muktabai, Chokha Mela, Janabai and the like). He had also started to chant aloud Kabir’s doha, Tukaram’s abhang and Ramdas’s Manache Shloka in his leisure time. By the time India became free, he had become a near ardent fan of Nehru tracking his idol’s doings faithfully through The Times of India reportage every morning. (Did his reading leftist literature have anything to do with it? By the way, I have a sneaking suspicion that, when his idol shuffled off his mortal coil on 27 May 1964, Baba shed a tear privately.) By contrast, I saw Aai mildly excited during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. By the time, it ended with the formation of the new state in 1960, her health had started failing and her interest had all but tapered off. Aai and Baba’s first grandchild, Shubhada, was born in 1950, by the way, the second following ten years later.

Real affliction, “false” physician. During most part of his active life as a government servant and as a successful lawyer, Baba had been a victim of a strange malady for which no doctor found either the right name or an effective treatment. From time to time, he would wake up in the morning with a rash of hives all over his upper torso and arms and a shooting pain mainly in his arms which made him cry out and confined him to bed for a couple of days. The cretin of a family physician under whose care he had put himself during the forties and the early part of the fifties (that simpering abomination called himself either Dharadhar or Dhurandhar – he too was a Pathare Prabhu, an unwelcome appendage hailing from Baba’s early life in Navi Wadi, alas! − and lurked in a first floor flat in the building on the corner of Burroughs Lane off Girgaum Road, if memory serves) christened the condition “urticaria” and ordered his patient first to eschew eggs, flesh and fish in his daily diet and then to get all his teeth pulled out. Nothing worked. As he aged, however, the condition and the joke of a doctor gradually waned out of his life. For as long as I knew him, Baba had also suffered from hernia for which he used a support belt made by N Powell & Company (Opera House).

Honour? What honour? As the forties gave way to the fifties, my father was offered out of the blue the post of Coroner of Bombay. Without giving a thought to the likelihood that it would be an avoidable disruption in his fledgling but thriving career as a widely sought-out criminal lawyer, he accepted with alacrity what he thought of as an “honour”. (Those were the days when honour scored over everything else in most people’s calculations.) Honour it certainly was along with a puny honorarium which made a serious dent in Baba’s already unsound and untenable finances. There was another unexpected setback, too. In a no-holds-barred judgment on one of the cases he had to administer, the new but politically inept Coroner of Bombay passed strictures on the admission procedure of accident victims then prevalent in Sir Harkisondas Narottamdas Hospital. The Hospital had by then acquired the ownership of 233 Khetwadi Main Road which more or less abutted their own campus. Baba’s strictures so incensed the Trustees of the Hospital that they vowed to “fix the ghati Coroner once and for all”. Their very first offensive was to shift the hospital’s morgue to the store room at the rear on the ground floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road. This meant that many a funeral procession guest-featuring loudly wailing and chest-pounding hired mourners originated from the front gate of our building.

Kashmir works its magic. I passed my Secondary School Certificate examination in 1952 and enrolled in the Sydenham College for the Bachelor of Commerce course. After appearing for the Intermediate examination in April 1954, I went on a packaged tour of Jammu and Kashmir. There were only two tourists on this tour apart from me: Ujwal and Saroj or “Tamma”, Kanikaka’s youngest daughter and my cousin.  The tour would have been cancelled for lack of sufficient paying customers but for Kanikaka’s intervention with the tour conductor who happened to be his close friend. So the tour happened and so did the closeness between Ujwal and me.

Not IAS, FMC. In 1956, I completed my B. Com. Course and enrolled for a Masters degree in Public Economics by research in the RA Podar College in Matunga. Baba wanted me to join the Indian Administrative Services. So, I sat for the test twice passing the written component both times but flunking the interview. However, I managed to pass in 1959 the Masters with an excellent report from my examiners for my voluminous 654-page research tome and joined the Forward Markets Commission, Government of India. In the meantime, Aai had decided that Ujwal was the wife for her son – in the face of serious and voluble opposition from her own daughter and the down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique. She talked to Baba and he was more than willing. So, in 1959, on Jesus Christ’s birthday, wedding rituals and reception were held at the Laxmi Narayan Temple off Hughes Road.

Down in the dumps. After the uncalled-for interruption in my father’s successful career as a criminal lawyer during his stint as Coroner of Bombay, his practice never recovered to its previous level. (I got a personal glimpse in Baba’s courtroom skills when he defended me in a traffic offence matter. It came about in this fashion. In either 1953 or 1954, having just got my driving license, I was just about a fledgling, somewhat hesitant driver. One morning, I was driving Baba to the High Court at Flora Fountain before going to college. Baba was sitting next to me and our chauffeur was in the back seat. Driving along New Queen’s Road, now Parmanand Marg, just as the family Renault reached the Churchgate junction and was about to take the then free left turn to go to Flora Fountain, there was much shouting heard from the front seat of an unmarked Police vehicle coming from Marine Drive and going our way. The alarm was apparently raised by a top Police functionary – probably the Commissioner or Assistant Commission, I never found out which – who made me pull the Renault to the left of the road and took down all my particulars and confiscated my driving license. Our explanation fell on deaf ears because he was thoroughly convinced that there was no free left turn and that I had broken the law. He threatened to sue me and did carry out the threat. When the case came for hearing, Baba really demolished the officer who was put on the witness stand. The poor fellow was aware of the existence of the free left turn and admitted as much to the Judge who passed strictures about wasting the Court’s valuable time. So, it was actually a walkover. And, it put paid to my life as a notorious law breaker – and also to the free left turn at Churchgate!)

Baba’s finances were in the doldrums by the time I had started earning a measly salary not at all sizeable enough to bridge the yawning chasm that had opened up in the family fortune. Baba used to also do all along a lot of pro bono work − at times even when it was not called for, strictly speaking. He had made a lot of bad investments along the way including a major one in a rundown property in a supposedly residential compound in Vile Parle with a bunglow illegally used as first as a manufactory of and later as a warehouse for medicinal products, a one-storey tenement and three temporary structures. He had thought of it as a source of steady monthly income in his old age. It turned out to be a quite a headache and a drain on his already meagre resources. As a Trustee of Pathare Prabhu Charities, he spent quite a bit of his time and, at several occasions, even money on thankless honorary pursuits. (Perhaps, he saw it in terms of “giving back to the society”. His valuable contribution was never sufficiently appreciated by his community, though.) A chain smoker during most of his middle age, he had quit cigarettes around the same time he turned vegetarian. Every Sunday, though, a group of seven or eight of his bezique-playing friends gathered in the terrace flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. Moreover, once a month, another group – contract bridge players this time – assembled at the same address and was lavishly entertained by the generous host. Baba was always mindful of the comfort and well-being of his family. The 233 Khetwadi Main Road Mankars lived well. We had a car even before I was born. (A maroon-and-black Wolseley Wasp it was till around 1948, then making way for a red Renault that served the family till the early sixties.) Also, we must have been among the first few families in the Khetwadi precinct to own a pressure cooker, a top-of-the-line wireless set and a refrigerator as early as the beginning of the 1950s. Baba also gladly and willingly bought toys and books for me whenever I “wrote him a note” when he left for work. The family (more often than not for the extended family) summered in Matheran and Mahabaleshwar as a rule till almost the mid-fifties. Once, probably in 1941, the Mankars went as far south as Madras in the company of some members of the down-with-the-Mankars goon squad. (In retrospect, I guess the Mankars were aping the goras who used to summer regularly at Simla, Darjeeling, Srinagar and “snooty Ooty”. I distinctly remember travelling with several trunks and canvas bedrolls or “beddings” which one doesn’t see any more on railways platforms or in the brake vans.) Even these minor (and sometimes not so minor) but regular expenses, his thoughtless handouts to all and sundry whiners and supplicants and money spent on the maintenance of the aging family car and the chauffeur played havoc with the Mankar Family’s cash cache. Things came to such a head that when my mother was hospitalized for leukemia more than once in 1961-62, Baba had no other option to tide over the financial crisis except to sell some of the family jewelry.

Nine yards of resolve. When Ujwal resumed her college education at the Sophia immediately after her wedding, she scrupulously followed the dress code for a newly married woman according to her mother-in-law’s wishes. Her astonished and much amused classmates teased her for attending college in a nine-yard saree and ornaments. Peer pressure was no match for her exemplary resolve, though. She also patiently learned to cook Pathare Prabhu cuisine in the special Mankar style. She wasn’t doing it to earn brownie points, by the way. It was in her nature to behave in this fashion especially with people who gave her love and respect as whole-heartedly as Aai and Baba did. So deeply attached had she become to her mother-in-law that she looked after her almost single-handedly throughout her last lingering illness waiting on her hand and foot and attending to all her needs from bathing to feeding with an eagle eye and an alert mind.

The fault lines begin to show. All throughout, Aai and Baba had been a devoted couple, as far as my memory and “inside information” go. I remember them rising to each other’s defence if a third part questioned either’s intentions, motives or actions. If I said a cross word to Aai in his presence, Baba would chide me gently in a pained tone of voice. Isn’t there a saying “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad”? Something similar happened to Aai at the fag end of her life. She insisted that Baba should use his contacts to “shield” her maternal nephew from the dire consequences of the serious misdemeanor he had committed in his place of work. (Please see above.) As a leverage device, she chose the weapon of silence. In other words, she stopped talking to Baba until he was forced to oblige. Unfortunately, he chose to retaliate in like manner. The Cold War was on. It ended with Aai’s death in the Bombay Hospital when only Ujwal was with her and no one else from the close family.

During her last illness, Aai’s own daughter had pleaded her inability to care for her ailing mother or at least help in the process saying she had just delivered her second daughter who took all her time. But this did not prevent her from hounding and harassing Ujwal immediately after Aai’s death when she and her henchwomen, prominent among whom were some members of the anti-Mankar clique, kept visiting her in the afternoons on the pretext of supervising her progress during pregnancy. 

Once, when Ujwal was alone at home in the afternoon with Baba and I out on work and Ujwal’s trusted maid out on an errand, she demanded her share of the family jewels from Ujwal. Ujwal quietly gave her the keys of the cupboard that her father-in-law had recently handed over to her and watched as she plundered at random some of the gold ornaments and silver stuff. The daughter of the house even had the audacity to snatch away the Clyde bicycle that had been gifted to her brother by one of Baba’s friend cum client, a certain Mr Kazarani. Ujwal did not burden her father-in-law with the latest news because she did not want to hurt him. 

The last merry lap with two grandsons. Baba survived Aai by a little under 3 years. In that short spell, he enjoyed what Aai had hoped for but missed by a whisker as it were: playing with the grandsons, singing ditties to them and spoiling them silly. He also made a Last Will and Codicil dividing his property according to his wishes. That it was challenged in the court of law after his death was inevitable. By whom and at whose instigation are open secrets. The irony of it all was that when the bunglow in Khar Baba had built with the sweat of his brow was snatched from him by his own kith and kin, he did not see it fit to file a law suit. As soon as he had left this world, his own kith and kin made sure history repeated itself.

Does every life story come with a built-in moral? I don’t think I can answer the question. Did I learn anything from the lives of my parents? Well, maybe all I relearned was the cliché that bad things keep happening to good people. It’s, I suppose, all a manifestation of what Buddha called samsara: the human condition full of grief (dukkha) and strife, frustration and pain, the result of “attachment, craving and the refusal to accept impermanence”. Life happens in a circular continuum, I guess. It reassures us that even this shall pass. Reality shows on the idiot box and the assorted villains peopling them are not a patch on reality shows and villains in real life, I dare say. At first glance, every life looks like a lost cause. After a bit of thought, one begins to feel not quite so cocksure.

Lamb among wolves.

Reading an excerpt of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Man Booker nominated The Lowland http://nyr.kr/17RVhVo the other day, I remembered a long-lost old friend. His name was Shyam Guha. He was an Art Director in the Calcutta office of Clarion-McCann. http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ I got to know him rather well in the late sixties and early seventies. We became friends working together on ad assignments on most of his fairly frequent visits to the Bombay office.

Shyam was a gem of a human being. He was probably the only innocent and guileless Bengali I came across in Clarion’s Bhadralok mafia during the eleven years, seven months and four days I worked for the agency. He was loved – nay, revered – by all the studio guys although none of us could quite fathom the reasons for him being invited once too often to Bombay because we had a surfeit of Art Directors and Visualizers of our own.

Rumour had it that the guys sent by the head office suits were spooks trained to keep an eye on the locals and report back. None of us believed it of Shyam, though. In fact, we used to look forward to his visits eagerly. I used to rib him about the spooks business and he would take it sportingly. There was definitely some truth in the 007 rumour, though. There definitely were spies from the Bong skies among us. One of them was a suit who chewed the bones as well as the meat of a chicken dish served to him. I can vouch for this trait confidently as he used to come home to dinner at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ at times. The other was a creative guy who would visit us occasionally and spend the whole working day strolling around the office presumably trying to catch snatches of conversation in the corridors and at the water fountain.

As for Shyam and I, sometimes, we would taxi down to the Strand Book Stall during the lunch break for a quick browse. I remember Shyam gifting me a copy of the Marguerite Duras screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour, a Calder & Boyars paperback with the signature black and white cover. Shyam also regaled me with his tales of almost daily after-work tippling at the legendary Calcutta landmark, Olympia Bar http://bit.ly/15YWMfH in the company of his like-minded colleagues.

His other repertoire of stories included those about the Naxalites who then were a recent addition to the Calcutta scenario. Both of us were sympathetic to the cause these urban guerillas were battling for. Shyam did not seem to know any of the Naxals or their families personally. He also had not witnessed any of the street battles. What he was passing on to us was chiefly hearsay although his narratives were always compelling and riveting. Whenever he came home to dinner, this was one topic of conversation Ujwal and I used to look forward to listening.

During his Bombay sojourn, Shyam usually lodged with the Bombay Resident Director, Subrato Sen Gupta, now deceased. The Sen Guptas apparently did not have a spare latch key for the front door of their palatial Neapean Sea Road flat. So Shyam had a curfew to observe whenever he planned an evening out. He had to be back and in bed by 11:00 p.m., the family retiring hour, exactly one hour before the witching hour. This deadline was the theme of our favourite parting shot every time he took our leave hurriedly and distractedly after dinner.

By the time I decided to quit Clarion in 1976, Shyam’s visits to the Bombay office had petered out. We lost touch with each other because both of us were bad letter writers. The “out of sight, out of mind” bug was also probably at work.

I picked up the threads of the Shyam Guha episode once again much, much later. In the late nineties, to be exact. I got acquainted with a Calcuttan on-line because of my column on the Hindustan Times website at that time. Well educated and cultured, she was married to a widely-connected advertising guy. She happened to mention Prasanto Sanyal and other denizens of the Clarion Bhadralok in one of her emails. I promptly asked her if she could get her husband to trace the whereabouts of Shyam. Much to my chagrin, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, her spouse hit a dead end in his pursuit of my will-o’-the-wisp. There was no Shyam to be found. It seemed he had retired from Clarion long ago and moved bag and baggage out of the metropolis for terra incognita.     

     

Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao: what’s the difference?

If my last post (From Sir Winston to Washington Post) seemed to suggest that I had joined the Churchill fan brigade – known more for its unseemly concern with the Great Man’s dentures than with his Imperial and imperious criminality – as a fresh and overenthusiastic recruit, let me clear the air. What I ought to have said in that post was that his Indophobic outburst in the June 1947 debate on the India Independence Bill in the British Parliament sounds prophetic in the prevailing Indian political context. I stand corrected and abashed for my haste. To save face, my only lame-duck – if that! – excuse could be that, in any case, a visionary – even an accidental one – is sighted and anointed only after the event. If Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, Stalin for the Holodomor (“killing by hunger” in Russian) or the Great Famine of Ukraine (1932-33) and Mao for the mammoth number of starvation deaths in the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Churchill needs must shoulder the responsibility for the 2000 a month death toll in the 1942-43 Bengal Famine. In his own words, Indians were “a beastly people with a beastly religion” who “bred like rabbits”. http://ind.pn/UofYOK Ergo, they probably were beyond redemption and not worth saving. What the King Emperor’s First Minister did to worsen the situation in the Bengal Famine was to deny food shipments to India and insist on rice exports from India to shore up the war effort. Churchill’s collaborators in his war crime were: the Japanese occupation of Burma that choked off rice imports to India; an untimely cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that wiped out the winter crop; and a panicky government that confiscated in a knee-jerk reaction all vehicles that used to ferry rice from Burma in order to keep them out of reach of the invaders. The government also started buying food grains on the open market to feed the troops and the war workers, thereby nudging the traders into hoarding the scarce stuff and spawning what came to be known as “the black market”. (I vaguely remember hearing the phrase repeatedly at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for the first time a bit after the Quit India call by Gandhi on 8 August 1942.) In a sense, Churchill was the blackguard who brought the black market to India. 

Wee Bonnie Scotland.

Sir Isaac Pitman and I are old nodding acquaintances. It transpired thus. Smack after the conclusion of my Secondary School Certificate finals in March 1952, I enrolled at the Abhyankar Typing & Shorthand Institute situated bang next to the Rammohan High School at Prarthana Samaj. This much respected institution of that time happened to be within walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road in South Mumbai where the Mankars used to reside at that point in my existential timeline. http://bit.ly/48tnw4. I had joined Abhyankar’s in order to learn touch typing to make up for my atrocious handwriting. The sacrilegious thought of trespassing into the venerated Pitman territory had never crossed my mind. Shorthand used to be all the rage among the young people then, particularly among girls because it was seen as a handy doorway – almost an open sesame − into the job market. The reason why I thought of Sir Isaac now is the late Ms Molly Weir, Miss Bonnie Scotland’s real- life avatar. Till the time I met Molly in print, the only Bonnie Scotland I had heard of was the eponymous Laurel and Hardy comedy http://bit.ly/N4c6ot.  I saw the hilarious movie as a child at the old Metro Cinema, a familiar Dhobi Talao landmark. To cut a long digression short, I picked a copy of Molly Weir’s Trilogy of Scottish Childhood (Diamond Books, London, 1988) at a sale in the Sunderabai Hall fairly recently. The book that I consider as perhaps the best autobiography I’ve ever read cost me a pittance: no more than a measly Rs.50/-. Molly, the bonnie Glasgow lassie, was a self-confessed whiz at Pitman’s shorthand. She toured all over Scotland as the Pitman brand ambassador in order to popularise the training course by giving live speed demos without receiving a single farthing by way of remuneration for her work. One of the most endearing things about Molly’s memoirs is her detailed description of the lengths she and her family would go to just to save a penny or two. That, I guess, gladdened my Third World soul. So also did the description of the way they had to tighten the belt in the World War II rationing regime. Then again, her chitchat about her tramcaur journeys downtown and elsewhere in Glasgow too touched a chord in my memory of things past. http://bit.ly/NjclbB. Molly’s most appealing characteristic as a writer, to my old-school way of thinking, is her self-deprecation, her humility, her modesty, and not the least her reticence in describing certain major events centring on herself. For instance, she describes in telling details the celebration of the wedding of her aunt but glosses over her own wedding with a sentence or two. Similarly, all through her courtship by her beau, she refrains from providing us with the details, even his name. Her autobiography gives ample scope for her humanity, her candour and her wry – at times, droll − sense of humour. It’s refreshing to meet someone who calls a spade a spade, doesn’t have a swollen head and misses no chance to laugh at her own foibles. For the record, Molly started her working life as a steno-typist, took part in amateur dramatics on the side and ultimately made a breakthrough to become a renowned BBC regular as well as an acting professional in British theatre and cinema. I sure would love to read the rest of her autobiography. 

Second thoughts.

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

Gaslight.

When I was growing up at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5baehr gaslights used to light up the streets of South Bombay. A runner with a long pole in his hand would trot from street lamp to street lamp and fire them up one by one. The darkness of the dusk would then gradually yield to the white-yellow glow of the street lamps. I’m talking of the 1940s and maybe even the early 50s, mind you. As dusk approached, the Vanita Vishram Garden behind our house would be filled with twittering birds joyously heralding for almost a quarter of an hour the approach of darkness and time for repose. Some evenings, I used to take my bicycle http://digbig.com/5baenb to the Garden and ride a few leisurely laps around its periphery listening to the soothing chatter of the birds. Those were also the days when tramcars – double as well as single deckers – used to ply on the streets of Bombay from dawn to midnight. http://digbig.com/5baena. The other noteworthy feature of South Bombay life that is no more was the daily washing of the streets at dawn by bullock carts fitted with sprinklers. In those days, by the way, the minimum fare for the yellow top taxicabs was 6 annas (= 38 paise approximately). Those were the days, boys and girls, believe you me.

The lament of the lover boy in Rangoon, circa 1949.

I saw Patanga (= moth) in my early teens at the Imperial Talkies http://digbig.com/5baehq. It was within easy walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road.http://digbig.com/5baehr. I had nary an inkling then what an NRI or an expat was. The terms were not in vogue at that time. It was maybe 30 years too early. The rollicking joke in the movie was around the prediction made at the time of the hero’s birth. The astrologer said that he would be surrounded by droves of cars. (“Iss ke aagey pichey motor gaadi daudegi.") Everyone and his aunt took it to mean he would be a rich man and said: “Bahut khoob!” In the very next shot we saw him in the uniform of a traffic cop directing traffic at a busy junction. Later in the movie, he tried to break into moviedom. That’s when he and his co-star performed the song concerning an Indian expat in Burma. In those days, a lot many Indians used to go to Burma to work in the timber − mainly teakwood – trade. (Remember The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation? http://digbig.com/5bbtcl) It was a well-paying job. Anyway, the movie song sequence within the movie had the lovelorn young man calling from Rangoon his wife in Dehra Dun. An overseas phone call was a big thing then, costing virtually a bomb by the then prevailing standards. Even sending a telegram was not very common. It was considered the harbinger of bad news. History http://digbig.com/5baehd tells us that the Indo-Burma Radio Telephone link was established between Madras and Rangoon in 1936 – the year I was born. In 1949, the Own Your Telephone plan was introduced. Also, the surcharge on trunk telephone calls was raised from 40 to 60% by the Honourable Finance Minister, Shri RK Shanmukham Shetty, in the 1948-49 Central Government Budget. http://digbig.com/5baehf. By the way, the Japanese occupied Burma in March 1942 and China invaded Tibet in 1949. All this is now in the dustbin of history, of course. Coming back to the song it had a prose preamble wherein the caller identified the originating town as Rangoon for the benefit of the Dehra Dun trunk operator and asked to talk to his wife. After that, the proud wife took over to tell us the story of her husband having gone to Rangoon, boasting that he had made the trunk call just to tell her that he missed her terribly. The husband admitted he had made a big blunder by not taking her with him to Burma. He then went into a detailed description of how he was suffering in a mock serious, even somewhat naughty vein. The lyrics in Hindustani can be read here: http://digbig.com/5baehs. The lyric writer was Rajinder Kishan whose greatest claim to fame was the all-time single biggest jackpot pool of Rs.48 lakh he won at the Mahalaxmi Race Course in 1971. http://digbig.com/5baewf.

Give me five.

Frank Sinatra’s fan, I ain’t. I don’t care much for Lata Mangeshkar, either. Give me a Noor Jahan http://digbig.com/4yxxb, a Suraiya, a Geeta Dutt, a Suman Kalyanpur or a Shamshad Begum http://digbig.com/4yxxd any time. But that’s neither here nor there. The story I’m about to tell you is of the very first song in English I remember hearing being played on the family gramaphone http://digbig.com/4yxxe at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://digbig.com/4xyxy. The 78 rpm disc had, if memory serves, a blue or green EMI label. The singer probably was young Sinatra. This was in 1946 when I was just ten. He had apparently recorded what may have well been a cover version of the Gordon ‘Tex’ Beneke hit single Give Me Five Minutes More. Tex was the lead singer of the Glen Miller Band in those days. The song in the blues/jazz genre was originally sung by Phil Brito in a B-grade movie called Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. http://digbig.com/4yxxf. The Tex Beneke hit was on the charts for five weeks at the No.4 spot in the US, it seems. I distinctly remember the refrain of the song:

Give me five minutes more, only five minutes more.
Let me stay, let me stay, in your arms.

P.S.: The reason I went to the trouble of Googling the old song is that I have a strong feeling that there is some happy memory connected to it. Try as I might, though, I cannot fathom what.

The family priest.

At the thread ceremony we attended on Wednesday last http://digbig.com/4ypqy I saw at close quarters the presiding priest. He looked like a benevolent version of the first family priest at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://digbig.com/4xyxy. Our first family priest, hailed from Telangana (now Andhra Pradesh and a hotbed of Maoists and Naxalites), just like the presiding priest at the thread ceremony. My mother http://digbig.com/4yppp used to call him Shambha (Samba?) Bhatji. So he must have been named Shambhu after Lord Shiva. He was quite a jolly fellow, though bald and fierce-looking. I can hear inside my head the refrain of a mantra that used to be chanted at the fairly frequent Laghurudra puja commissioned by my mother. “Padma hastey sugandhe, sugandhe, padma hastey” which has something to do with the floral aroma wafting from lotus hands, I reckon. There used to be several priests chanting the mantra. They were divided into two teams and after one team finished chanting a verse, the other team would take up the refrain and so on and so forth. It was quite an enjoyable performance. Shambha Bhatji stopped coming one fine day and was replaced by his younger brother, Balkrishna Bhatji who used to earlier accompany him from time to time. I remember Balkrishna Bhatji telling me with his eyes closed and after silent chanting of some mantra (I presume) that I would do well in the exam I was about to write. He was later on succeeded by his son Datta Bhatji who and, after him, his son used to also preside at the temple of the Mankar family deity, Maheshwari, in Navi Wadi. http://tinyurl.com/4grxkp. Neither he nor his son is attending the shrine now. I lost track of them a few years back.

PIs and I.

Detective fiction is a genre I've enjoyed all my life. I remember my father buying me a hardbound copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published by John Murray. This happened to be in one of my childhood summers at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xyxy. I was recuperating then from a severe bout of tonsillitis. I used to suffer from this ailment not infrequently at that time and was a frequent user of glycerin acid tannic, "the throat 'paint' of choice". http://digbig.com/4yarg. Sorry for the digression. After devouring the first collection of short stories and getting well, I was hooked on Holmes. I rapidly ploughed through the entire "Canon": 4 novels and 56 short stories written by Sir Arthur Conon Doyle between 1887 and 1927 - a total of 660382 words according to Charles E Lauterbach's calculation in 1960. Holmes had a special appeal for me because, like me, he preferred to sit down and ratiocinate. http://digbig.com/4yaty. I'm not saying my deductive logical ability was a patch on his legendary though fictional one, of course. To continue the story, I made a logical progression to Agatha Christie's inimitable egghead, Hercule Poirot and, thence, to Miss Marple http://digbig.com/4yatm in the last year of school and, later, in college. Ellery Queen, reputedly the American heir to the Holmesian legacy, happened somewhere along the way. I remember being particularly impressed at that time with the way a challenge to the reader used to be thrown towards the end of the earlier EQ novels when the reader was supposed to have been given all the essential clues. I had even read and enjoyed the four Drury Lane novels written by Queen under the Barnby Ross nom de plume. These, I recall, belonged to the locked room mystery sub-genre, a format of which John Dickson Carr was a leading practitioner. For a while around then, I was a steady follower of Mike Shayne, the Miami PI, as well. Then, the focus of my attention shifted to Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. I began to think that thinking on one's feet and wisecracking in a trial court was the height of sophistication. Then I discovered his Donald Lam and Bertha Cool series written under his AA Fair pseudonym and found it far more witty and entertaining. My meeting with The Saint http://digbig.com/4yfre I recall, was fortuitous. I happened to browse through a Saint novel at the shop on Lamington Road http://digbig.com/4ybgc where I used to borrow comics and other reading material when I was in college. I was taken in by the flippant style and tone. I went on a pilgrimage of Saintly reading borrowing all the titles in the circulating library and even buying a few second-hand titles. Another source of my detective literature supply was the JB Petit Institute at Flora Fountain of which my father and I were members. I read quite a bit of Edgar Wallace http://digbig.com/4ybge there, including a book of hilarious short stories about a race course tout. I remember its red binding distinctly but have forgotten its name. I read, if memory serves, almost all Dorothy L Sayers (Lord Wimsey) mysteries and some by Georges Simenon (Maigret is no PI, mind!) and Rex Stout, all borrowed from the Institute as well. Dick Francis came later and became for a while quite an addiction. The Institute also gave me the opportunity to enjoy Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for several years. Although I have not read much of Patricia Highsmith and Nicolas Freeling, I hold them both in high esteem. I must confess that although I read some of Ross MacDonald, he didn't appeal to me much. Neither for that matter did Raymond Chandler who considered himself a mere pulp writer but was the toast of the British literary and intellectual circles including notably JB Priestley, WH Auden, Cyril Connolly and Edith Sitwell. Maybe, I ain't no mystery connoisseur in verity.

Easy way out.

The second instance of my quitting a pursuit after a brief flirtation - the account of the first one is here http://digbig.com/4xyxq - was when I was an enthusiastic philatelist for maybe a couple of years of school. How I started collecting postage stamps escapes me. My best guess is that I must have seen someone's stamp album and jumped to the conclusion that it was the thing to do. My parents used to indulge me probably because I was a boy. I remember I had a hard bound dark green 12" x 9" stamp album about ¾" thick. Each page in it had the name of a country printed on top with a couple of pictures of the more popular stamps issued by it on both sides of it. The portion below was divided into several spaces for stamps indicated by dotted squares. I remember buying the album, along with a shiny pair of tweezers, from one of the philately supply dealers on Hornby Road (now Dadabhai Nowroji Road) http://digbig.com/4xyxs. The shop is probably still there. I also used to buy from the same shop a packet of pre-gummed hinges made of butter paper. One had to simply fold the hinge halfway with the pre-gummed surface outside; lick it; stick one half to the back of the stamp and the other half to the surface of the page where the stamp was supposed to be stuck; and, lo and behold, one of your precious collection was where it belonged. I remember having a lot many India Postage stamps, even old ones retrived from the envelopes of old correspondence. We veteran stamp collectors also used to obtain stamps by barter. I don't quite recall who I used to exchange stamps with. There was a philatelist friend of mine staying in the third of the three identical Arab Houses. http://digbig.com/4xyxy. (I stayed at 233 Khetwadi Main Road in the first Arab House, you see.) He was probably the one through whom I had managed to find some bartering contacts. Also, some of my school friends may also have chipped in with bartering aid. We used to also buy stamps from the shop on Hornby Road I mentioned earlier as well as a shop on Lamington Road which also doubled as a comic book lending library. http://digbig.com/4xyxs. What one had to watch out for was in the stamps you bought to add to your collection was postal cancellation marks on them. That was supposed to prove that they were authentic postal issues - not imitations printed to fool new entrants in the august portals of philately. After wasting a bit of my father's hard-earned money for two or three years, I suddently lost interest in and zest for "the whole bally thing" (to use one of Wooster's eloquent phrases) and quit it as was my wont. [Afterthought: Now that email is the rule rather than the exception, I wonder if stamp collecting is a dying hobby.]

Spymaster.

You never know when and where your past may catch up with you. This morning, The Times of India informed me that (a) secret service folks from Australia, USA, UK and Israel were in Mumbai visiting the places attacked by the terrorists last week; and (b) Nariman House was a target because it was supposed to be a front for Israeli intelligence. In other words, Mossad. The reason it made me think of the past was that, when I was writing my Master of Commerce thesis http://digbig.com/4xxxk and living at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xxxp I was also trying to make a bit of money on the side. For instance, I had done quite a lot of translation into English of dubious literature written in absolutely pathetic Hindi and dealing with sex education. The client was on Hornby Road near Handloom House. I cannot recall who put me in touch with him. Similarly, I had done some work for a publisher of study guides. Somebody had also asked me to try my luck at a travel agency opposite the New Empire Cinema. I think one of the employees there guided me to Kailas on Peddar Road (now Deshmukh Marg). This was in the days when India and Israel were not on too friendly terms. If memory serves, the Consulate and Trade Representative's office had opened in Mumbai in 1953 and was the only consular presence of that country in India. By the way, Israel was born just a year after India got independence, if you recall. Coming back to my story, I was allowed to go up to the office on the fourth or fifth floor after being thoroughly frisked at the entrance on the ground floor. That itself was an unusual experience in those days. I did not get the job although they interviewed me and made me fill up a lengthy application form. So, maybe, I was saved from a fate worse than death of serving Mossad. I'm being facetious, of course. Well, the other recent occasion when my past suddenly caught up with me was when I was reading Bernie Lee's Murder at Musket Beach. The chief protagonist called Tony, a mystery writer and a member of the Tony and Pat Pratt husband-and-wife team, also happens to be a copywriter who flies from Portland, Oregon, for a couple of days of creative work in Hollywood. The description of the meeting with the client and the creative and account service team as well as of the recording session brought back my past in advertising especially when I was in Clarion-McCann. ttp://digbig.com/4xxxn.

Milky ways.

In my childhood at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4, there used to be a milk seller across the street who styled himself as a "dairy". His delivery man or "bhaiyya" as he was addressed in those days climbed up to our third floor terrace flat twice a day carrying on his head a brass vessel with a lid. As soon as the door was opened by my mother or the family retainer, he would plonk down his burden and ladle out the specified quantity of milk using ¼-, ½- or 1-seer brass measures with U-shaped handles. Most afternoons, this would be done under my watchful eye with a bit of accompanying banter addressed mostly to me. The bhaiyya used to call me "baba" and talk in a Bambaiya patois mixing a bit of Hindi and Marathi. I'm talking of the days before I started to go to full-time school, mind you. I had no idea which part of India he hailed from and even if I had known it, I don't think it would have made a whit of a difference to our daily encounter, a pleasant part of my life then. The hisaab (calculation) of the total dues, recorded diligently in a little notebook by my mother, was tallied on the first of every month and promptly paid in cash. There is one rather gruesome image of the dairy that still haunts me. In the pre-Independence riots of 1947, I watched aghast from our terrace window one afternoon the driver of a hack victoria http://digbig.com/4xxcq coming from the 13th lane being stabbed. His body tumbled from the driver's perch on to the gate of the dairy. Later, after the police came and had the body removed, the hired help in the dairy was busy for a long time scrubbing away the blood stains. As time passed, the mode of milk supply to 233 Khetwadi Main Road changed. After Aarey Diary's arrival on the Mumbai scene in the early 50s, milk-selling booths mushroomed all over the city. The nearest one was bang opposite our dairy. A queue of squabbling milk buyers would form there twice a day early morning and just after noon, jostling one another, jockeying for a better place and creating quite a racket as is the wont of us Indians. Our dairy like many of its brethern could not withstand the Aarey onslaught for long . Soon, the family retainer had to stand in the queue at least once a day with the aluminum milk token in hand. The milk used to be supplied in glass bottles with quality differnces (whole, double toned, toned, etc.) indicated by the colour code of the foil crown. Much later, the bottles got replaced by plastic pouches. The milk cooker with a whistling siren entered my life sometime around then. http://digbig.com/4xxcp. As the milk supply improved, the milk token became redundant. You could just walk to any milk booth and walk away with as much milk as you wanted. You could even stand there and sip flavoured milk or lassi with a straw if you so desired. A couple of years back, when Amul, Nestlé and others started selling no-need-to-boil milk in Tetra Pak cartons, I switched to it with alacrity. The bhaiyya is now only a distant memory. So is the milk cooker.

Bad memories.

With all the "oust the outsiders" poison currently vitiating the atmosphere in Mumbai, I'm reminded of two sorry events from my childhood at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4. The first one took place toward the end of World War II. There was strict rationing in force. The rationing administrative office nearest to our house was at Muzzffarabad Hall (aka The People's Jinnah Hall), on the Grant Road Bridge close to Novelty Cinema http://digbig.com/4xwdb, within easy strolling distance from our house. My sister http://digbig.com/4xwdc used to work there. She had learned Urdu in her spare time before taking up the job. She was an ardent movie goer and used to buy and listen to all the latest 78 rpm discs of the hit songs from the movies. With hindsight, it seems likely that she was deeply affected by the passionate love stories she witnessed on the silver screen in the companionable twilight of the movie hall. Those were probably the days when Ratan starring Swarna Lata and featuring the hit song Ankhiyan Milake had just been released. On Saturdays, my sister's office used to close an hour and a half after noon and she would be home by 2 pm. One fateful Saturday afternoon, she did not turn up at her usual arrival time. My mother was frantic with worry. As soon as my father returned home, they had a whispered confab. Phone calls were made and enquiries too all over the city with our relatives and her friends. That night, I was woken up by the weeping of my father and mother. It scared and saddened me no end. I don't recall being particularly saddened by my sister's disappearance, though. This was because, except for surface cordiality, she was not at all fond of me. She must have viewed the late arrival of a male heir on the family scene http://digbig.com/4xwdf when she was already 18 as a threat to her prospects of inheritance. I was in awe of her, even a bit afraid too. Eventually, my sister was traced to my aunt's house in Nowroji Street. She had made this defiant move to declare her intention of marrying a Muslim colleague. I am not aware of what transpired when my parents went to fetch her. In a couple of days, she returned home and resigned her job. Broad-minded as my parents were, the shock of their daughter wanting to marry a Muslim must have been way too much for them to bear. The other sad event occured some time later, maybe in the early fifties. It concerned a cousin of mine from Khar who married a Hindu girl not of our caste. My uncle and, more particularly, my aunt http://digbig.com/4xwdg made it a point to ostracize him from the clan. Although, in their heart of hearts, my parents who were rather fond of the boy, did not want to do it, they had to follow suit. I do not think I was much bothered by all the fuss that was being made. I had never been much concerned with caste and creed right from the beginning. It perturbed me to hear much later that one of my professors in Sydenham College who was also a favourite Marathi author of mine disowned his daughter for marrying a Muslim and went to the extent of taking in her name a purificatory bath that an orthodox Hindu takes after returning home from the crematorium or the burning grounds. In short, he declared to the world that, in his eyes, she was dead and gone. Later on, though, I discovered that malicious rumour mongering had inspired this vicious canard. That, at least, is a good memory to treasure.

Prarthana Samaj.

233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 was within 5 minutes' walk from Prarthana Samaj. I had been told in my childhood that the "prarthana" (prayer) meetings of the Samaj (society/institution) used to be held in the Rammohan High School. It was situated at the eponymous landmark at the corner of Raja Rammohan Marg (then New Charni Road) and VP Road. However, I did not then know who Raja Rammohan Roy, the "father" of Brahmo Samaj (Society of the Worshipers of the Absolute), was. History has portrayed him as the initiator of Hinduism's renaissance in Bengal. This is bolstered by the Daniele Hervieu-Leger's view of religion http://digbig.com/4xqjm as "a social and ideological mechanism for creating and sustaining both an individual and a communal sense of belonging ... [in brief] the mobilization of collective memory.". The weekly discourse-and-prayer meeting of the Brahmos was modelled on the Unitarian Church's sermon-and-prayer meeting. Roy and his close associates, Tarachand Chakravarti and Chandrasekhar Deb, were familiar with the Unitarian practices. Roy's monotheism had a rational as well a moral foundation from his retrieval of the Upnishadas, Brahma Sutras and other ancient Hindu texts (what he referred to as "Vedanta" = end or culmination of all knowledge as a body of work collectively). Roy's Brahmo Samaj was a living monument to his “religious innovativeness”. This spirit spurred him "to reinvent the chain" to fill up the new spaces of belief left bereft by "the decomposition of tradition". ("Traditions are forgotten, but they are also reenvisioned," explains Brian A. Hatcher in Remembering Rammohan: An Essay on the [Re-]emergence of Hinduism.) In our own times, television, the Internet, the cellphone and other modern tools are being used to help this process.

Operation Clean-up.

At 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 when I was a child, the bathroom to the back of the house on the west side used to be reserved only for washing the cooking utensils. That time, coal was used for cooking and heating the bath water. http://digbig.com/4xrss. The coal ash was collected and stored. It was then used for scrubbing the cooking utensils. As my mother used to use grated coconut as well as coconut milk in the many delectable dishes she cooked, at least one coconut was cracked open every day. The fibre off the shell was used as the scrubbing pad or sponge. On the window ledge of the wash room, there used to stand a brass pot filled with ash and topped with a bit of the scrubbing fibre. I keep remembering me watching our family retainer scrubbing the pots and pans over his shoulder and sometimes offering to join him. I was never granted my wish. Little did I realise then that, some day in the far future, I would finally be granted my wish minus the coal ash cleaning powder and the coconut fibre scrubber. Instead, we would graduate up to Vim or Pril and plastic fibre scrub pads. In contrast, I have tumbled downhill from silver tongue cleaners to plastic or stainless steel ones over the same time span. http://digbig.com/4xrsy.

N.

She was my sister's college friend. A fair-skinned Goan Hindu with delicately etched features, she wore her nearly auburn hair trimmed short in a bob and lived with her mother in a huge elegantly furnished apartment on Laburnum Road, off Hughes Road. Even in my child's eyes, she seemed to have a mysteriously wicked air about her. Her disappearance was equally mysterious, sudden and without a trace. But while she was still around, she was probably the best coiffed, the best groomed, the best dressed creature I had ever seen. She had a weakness, I guess, for bouncy georgette and chiffon 6-yard saris in pastel hues. Even in those days, she used to drape the sari quite low off her waist as is all the rage now. Whenever she visited 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4, I used to virtually devour her with my eyes. It didn't seem to bother her much. She chided me about it gently once or twice, though, almost as if it was all a big joke. She was my first childhood crush, I guess. The next one was a dumpy and dark English teacher in the first grade. I adored her for the way she taught me English. She was, I think, largely responsible for instilling the love of the language in me. http://digbig.com/4xqnp. The third one was another teacher, a fair and short damsel with sparkling eyes, who taught me in middle school. Almost every day, I used to watch her avidly from our terrace when she walked to and back from school.

Ten. Far better than Tolkien.

Lord Vishnu sounds like quite a brainy god. Look at the functionally appropriate forms he assumed in his dasavataras or ten reincarnations. In other words, if the task was, say, to bring up a sinking earth from the depths of the ocean, he would promptly become a tusked boar. My first introduction to it was as a child when we used to chant the Dashavatara Aarati to my khelacha (play) Ganapati at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://tinyurl.com/4ywmwm. Lord Vishnu, the Preserver in the Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh Trinity, would arrive among his true believers (bhaktas) having assumed what I described earlier as a "functionally appropriate form" to restore the balance between good and evil, he told Arjun in Bhagvadgita (iv, 7 -8). http://tinyurl.com/3jb5xb. When the asuras stole the Vedas, Vishnu assumed the form of a fish (matsyavatara) to save Manu, the primordal human being, from the Great Flood. In the kurmavatara (Vishnu as tortoise), he carried the sinking Mount Mandara on his back during the churning of the ocean to find the divine nectar, the so-called amrit. Enter Hiranyaka next. This demon misbehaved or sinned so much that the earth was unable to bear the load of his wrongdoings and literally did the sinking act. The ever-alert Preserver immediately put on his tusked boar form (varahaavatara) to prevent the calamity. Another demon king with a similar-sounding name, Hiranyakasipu, his twin brother, terrorised the devotee Pralahada. The Preserver had no option but to assume narasimhavatara (the man-lion form) because the perpetrator of the atrocities had a boon that he could be killed by neither man nor animal. A combo could however do the trick. A part of the boon also was that he could not be killed on land, water or air, in day or night, inside or outside his abode. So, Vishnu placed him on the man-lion's lap (neither land, water or air) at dusk (neither day or night) and at the entrance of the house (neither inside nor outside). The first four distinctly anthropomorphic avataras were in the satya or krita yuga. The next four happened in the treta yuga and the dwapara yuga. http://tinyurl.com/4r9g3e. The fifth avatara was the dwarf son (Vamanavtara) born to Kashyapa, one among the Saptarishis, and Aditi, the daughter of Agni, the Fire God. I wrote about his conquest of the all-powerful King Mahabali here: http://tinyurl.com/4p6btu. Vamana tricked him into surrendering his kingdom comprising heaven, earth and underworld by requesting for a plot of land admeasuring his diminutive three steps to which the generous king readily agreed. Vamana then regained his viraat swaroop (the original gargantuan form) and occupied the entire kingdom. (By the way, Mahabali happened to be the fourth direct descendent of Hiranyakasipu. Please see above.) So far, the Preserver was involved with fighting the demons. The sixth avatara (Parsurama) though, went after the human Kshatriya warriors. And, that too twenty one times. Yes, twenty one. They must have been up to big mischief, to be sure. In the next two episodes of Ten that reputedly took place at the cusp of the treta yuga and the dwapara yuga, Vishnu switched back to looking after the humankind as Rama who got rid of the ten-headed rakshasa, Ravana and Krishna who did likewise to Kamsa. Lord Buddha is most likely the next avatara in which case it occured in the kali yuga. Not everybody agrees with this version, though. They take Balarama, elder brother of Krishna and slayer of several demons in the dwapara yuga, as the holder of that honour. Avatara No. 10 Kalki is likely to come into the world on a magnificent white stallion when the kali yuga is about to end. Some people believe it will happen in 2012 A.D. http://tinyurl.com/47ug4c. His mission statement? Destroy all the mleccha. http://tinyurl.com/3k26td & http://tinyurl.com/46b6lp. Free the world from the clutches of Kali, the very embodiment of strife. Re-establish the perfect dharma. Inaugurate a new time cycle of existence with a brand new satya yuga.