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.

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.

Bad boy.

That I was far from the ideal son to my parents is now apparent to me. In fact, my performance on that score was far below par, nay dismal. I must have been pretty self-absorbed, insensitive and indifferent child. Take my knowledge of my parents' antecedents, for instance. All I know about my father's father is the name, Keshav. From hearsay, I know that his son spent his early life in Navi Wadi http://tinyurl.com/5b97y5. But that's about it. About the parents of my mother http://tinyurl.com/6c2lsy, whose maiden name was Manak Ajinkya, I'm totally blank. Her elder brother who lived opposite Roxy Cinema http://tinyurl.com/4m58jq apparently brought her up and gave her away in marriage. Her second brother, a qualified physician, had migrated to Great Britain probably at around the time of World War I. (This too I came to know much later in life accidentally when my mother asked Manna, my college friend, who was sailing to London for higher studies to try and trace her brother's whereabouts. He could not.) The third brother lived in Gamdevi with his family. Her younger sister, married and with three children, lived in Nowroji Street in her own house http://tinyurl.com/44dzbz close to where I live now. My mother studied in the Kamlabai Girls' School situated in the same street, opposite my aunt's house. It seems she considered aborting me because she was going to have a child pretty late in life http://tinyurl.com/6hfxxx but was persuaded not to do so by her friend and physician. (Just think of the huge opportinity of writing an angst-splattered tale of "The man who almost never was" I've let slip through my fingers!) As I was the only son in the family, I was over-pampered http://tinyurl.com/5pctle. My mother was involved, at almost every Hindu religious feast, with some puja-paath or vrata. She used to recite every now and then Shivalilamrut (Tales of Lord Shiva's Miracles), particularly the 11th Adhyay (chapter). We used to have Laghurudra and Satyanarayan Puja every other month or oftener. On Shravan Mondays and Shivaratri, I used to accompany her to the Shiva Temple at Babulnath. On the Ram Navmi day, we used to visit twelve Shri Ram temples. http://tinyurl.com/5plowr. Vata Savitri, Gauri Pooja, Diwali ... you name it. She used to do it. She also used to go to an astrologer as well as a Guru for a while. I remember there was a lot of fuss and furore when I touched the feet of this Guru on my mother's instructions at my thread ceremony. I did not have any friends to talk of till the end of my high school days. So, I used to accompany my mother wherever she went in the evening. After I started going out with my friends, my mother took my desertion of her in her stride. She was always generous, nay magnanimous, about my trespasses and transgressions. Even in her last illness when she was suffering from blood cancer and died on 28 July 1962 in Bombay Hospital, it was Ujwal (of whom both my parents were very fond) who took care of her. I abdicated my responsibilty as usual, owing probably to a fault line in my character. This pattern of behaviour has been repetitive. I have abdicated my responsibility as husband and as father as well and repeatedly. Remorse has been my companion for quite a while. There comes to mind, however, what Aldous Huxley wrote in his Preface http://tinyurl.com/6ft3yg to the 1946 reprint of Brave New World:

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoiong. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."

So what amends should I be making?

At http://tinyurl.com/68wrzb (Aldous Huxley Recollected An Oral History page 83), Huxley's daughter-in-law/Matthew's wife, Ellen Hovde, recalls how both Aldous and Matthew refused to acknowledge that Maria Huxley, her mother-in-law, was dying of cancer. Maria who had watched over Aldous like a mother hen right from the day they were married found this denial very hard to take. On page 104, Theosophical Society's Sydney Field, a friend of the Huxleys, mentions the oft-quoted account of how Aldous read to his dying wife from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. After Maria's death, Aldous told his sister-in-law, Juliette Huxley, that Elieen Garrett, "a genuine medium", had contacted Maria who told her that she had been helped by what he had done for her in the dying moments. Was that how he made amends to her, I wonder?