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.

Wrong again.

I have been doing things for the wrong reasons all my life.

Take travel, for instance.

I have never been a great traveler. I remember a ditty from my childhood that said something to the effect that travel made a person wise and well-rounded. I don’t think I quite believed it. Still, as a child, I travelled quite a bit and even made myself enjoy it. Or, more accurately, made myself believe that I enjoyed it. Somehow, around that time, I got hold of the notion that important people travelled a lot. And, that they did it mostly by air.

In my Clarion-McCann stint, as a senior writer and later as Creative Controller, I got to travel quite a bit on work and found colleagues envying me for it. This and the fact that a promotion as Creative Director with unlimited travel among other mouth-watering perks was dangled as a bait to prevent me from quitting Clarion-McCann further strengthened my belief in the equation “travel = important persona” and vice versa.

In my Everest days, both as Creative Chief and later Creative Consultant, I got to travel way too much and stay at the best of hotels and found myself to be the target of envy of colleagues.

Later, I flew twice to the US of A to visit Abhi and Ujwal and twice to Sri Lanka on work.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost my zest for travelling and finally, late in life, came to terms with the fact that I was a lousy traveler. I didn’t really enjoy it. Never did. I did not have the stomach for it. Never had. I would rather stay put in South Bombay. I feel safe and out of harm’s reach in SoBo, something I may not feel in Soho.

Sometime in the future, I shall be travelling to the US. I’m not looking forward to it, I’m afraid.

Curl up in bed with a good book.

This morning, Ujwal was desperately looking for old issues of The Reader's Digest. I asked her why. The reason startled me. A Grade 8 student of hers attending an ICSE school had been asked to write a book review. The condition was the book should not be a "classic". Ujwal was trying to help her find a "book digest" that was appropriate to her level and that she could manage to read over the weekend and write a review of. This is unconscionable sadism on the English teacher's part if you ask me. An 8th grader who probably reads only school books, that too under extreme duress as likely as not, and spends her leisure avidly watching the Idiot Box and gossiping about Hritik Roshan and Salman Khan should not be asked to write a book review. To be a book reviewer, you have first to be a book lover and a book reader. When she was here this summer, I listened to Avantika blithely complaining about having to read Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro and the review she had been asked to write in school. When I ribbed her about Ernest being the greatest American writer and a Nobel Prize winner no less, she didn't seem overly impressed. If you must teach a contemporary 8th grader writing skills, please teach her how to write a better SMS, text message and email. If you must make her write reviews, please ask her to review the latest soaps and movies. I could go on and on foaming at my mouth on the subject. Instead, I will direct you to my earlier pearls of wisdom cast here: http://tinyurl.com/4votxp.

P.S.: By the way, for people like me who actually curl up in bed with a good book (my latest is Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates), there is actually such a thing as a book specially printed sideways to make it easily readable in bed. http://www.bedbooks.net/. The only catch is, they have at present in print only "classics", maybe of the lapsed copyright kind.

Gauri comes calling.

When I was a child growing up at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 Gauri Pujan used to be an annual occurrence there. It was all celebrated in the spirit of a married daughter of the house coming, after a long absence, to visit her parents for just a couple of days. It was more a social and family occasion than a religious ritual. No priest officiated on the avaahan (arrival), pujan (worship) and visarjan (departure) days. It was the Lady of the House and other womenfolk who did all the honours. I remember my mother http://tinyurl.com/6592m5 and others like an aunt, a cousin, even Ujwal after our marriage collectively placing and arranging the Gauri idol on a huge teakwood bajot set against the west wall of the passageway that divided our terrace flat in half. They all kept mum while they were doing it for what reason I could never fathom. Gauri's special zari saree was stored in its own black tin trunk. Her ornaments were kept in a brass grill-work oblong container with a lid. In my childhood days, my aunt from Khar and her daughters used to come and stay with us for three days. So I, a lonely child most of the time left to my own devices, had some company for a change. Naturally, I used to look forward to Gauri's annual visit. On the second (pujan) day, in the evening, women guests would arrive for darshan and were given prashad (two saffron- and cardamon-flavoured pedhas wrapped in thin transluscent cellophane specially ordered from Damodar Mithaiwala on Grant Road opposite the Novelty Cinema http://tinyurl.com/6rdcnx) and haldi kunku on the visiting daughter's behalf. It was an almost all-women affair except for a few exceptions made for the immediate family and friends - quite a gala occasion at 233 Khetwadi Main Road as I remember. I was allowed to skip school on that day. For a few years, I even used to have a khelacha (play) Ganapati for ten days. It was a silver idol with its own simhasan (throne) and chhatri (umbrella) and its own set of miniature silver puja paraphernalia all purchased from Mhaskar and Company http://tinyurl.com/5jfwdt on Girgaum Road where my mother shopped regularly and even had a charge account. I remember that, on one occasion, I created a miniature zoo with miniature animals, trees and stuff all from our in-house toy collection. On another occasion, it was a toy train on a ghat with a station on one side and so forth. Our second-floor neighbours, an extended Gujarati family, used to worship two Ganapati idols for 5 days. We used to go there for the evening aarati and also hold our own. Gauri ceased calling at 233 Khetwadi Main Road only after the death of my mother. http://tinyurl.com/6592m5.

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?

Sign of madness.

Ujwal has been telling me that her mother used to say talking to oneself was a first sign of madness. If that were so, I wonder, what about all the Marathi playwrights of yore who used to make their characters talk to themselves or in asides to facilitate plot development? I'm sure this device is used by writers elsewhere even now. I remember in my childhood reading what used to be called natyachhata in Marathi, usually one-page monologues that unfolded a complete story, usually ironical and humouous. In other words, it was a sort of a capsule sitcom. Diwakar (Shankar Kashinath Garge), the pioneer of this dramatic genre, used to work as a clerk in Baroda. Later, he became the headmaster of the Depressed Class Mission's primary school in Pune and, afterwards, worked as a teacher in Pune's well-renowned Nutan Marathi School. http://tinyurl.com/6mo27t. One of his pieces was called Pant Meley, Rao Chadhley (When Pant died, Rao got promoted) told the story of a head clerk's death, the promotion of one of his subordinates to his post and the subsequent change in the latter's attitude and behaviour. In another little masterpiece, Wordsworthche Phulapakharu (Wordsworth's butterfly), the poet's fan waxes eloquent about the little creature's beauty but doesn't hesitate to promptly burn a bug he catches. In Eka Natache Atma Natya (An actor's soliloquy), the protagonist talks about the tragedy of an actor's existence and kills himself by swallowing poison. Similarly, Phatato Patang (A kite gets torn) is the dirge by a tattered kite of which the career ends when it is literally soaring at its zenith. Diwakar was a friend of the poets Keshavasut, Madhav Julian and Yeshwant. I remember studying their poems in school. He was also a member of the well-known poetry circle, Ravi Kiran Mandala. Apparently, Diwakar, a keen student of English poetry, found inspiration for his new genre from Browning's poems. Diwakar was a master of spoken everyday Marathi. There was nothing artificial or stilted about his language. Perhaps, Tukaram's abhanga "Words are the only jewels I possess, words are the only clothes I wear, words are the only food that sustains my life, words are the only wealth I distribute among people" aply describes Diwakar's contribution to literature. (I wrote about Tukaram's abhanga earlier here: http://tinyurl.com/663s3c.)

Purely archival. In anticipation of certain arrivals.

Now that the Mankars from New Jersey are coming to visit us – Aditi will arrive on Saturday, 7 June; Ashu the following Saturday; Avantika and Nandini, Saturday following that – I serendipitously found an old piece I had written about their Kunuchacha on 5 March 2005 in my now defunct Hindustan Times column, QuiteATake.com column. http://tinyurl.com/52cz7o. I thought I would put it here in anticipation of the girls’ arrival. Read on.


Kunal, Avantika's – or Tika's as the "spunky monkey" likes to call herself these days – and Aditi's uncle won the Filmfare Best Director Award for HumTum on Saturday, February 26, 2005. February 26 also happened to be Tika's twelfth birthday. Kunal proved second time lucky on that very day. HumTum was his second directorial venture, you see, after Muzse Shaadi Karogi. We were all rooting for him, of course. He was telling Ashu and Ujwal and his mother Yash just a couple of evenings before the awards night that there was simply no chance of his winning. Maybe, that was his way of mentally preparing for the unknown. Do your best and be ready for the worst.

From what I've seen of him, I've always found him to be a cool, no-nonsense sort of a guy. Ashu was telling me that despite shooting his movies at exotic locations abroad, he never overruns his budget. When he received the Scene of the Year Award, Sonali Bendre mistook him for Kunal Das Gupta. Maybe he looked more a denizen of Bhadra Lok to her than the Mumbai-born Punjab-da-puttar that he is, a Kohli.

This, I reckon, is a symptom of how low profile he is. (For instance, Saturday's Bombay Times covered all the leading contenders but somehow overlooked him.) I'm sure Kunal will go places and – what's even more important – handle success humbly and diplomatically like the cool dude that he is. He has a good sense of humour, which gives him a sense of proportion too. And, he isn't the least bit hypocritical unlike most of Bollywood. Here at movies.dcealumni.com you'll find a bit about Kunal's next project.


P.S.: Kunal’s new movie, Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic, is due for an early release, I understand. He has smartly put an article on Wikipedia already .http://tinyurl.com/4dcojs. I’m sure he will be using all the social networks as well.

LOL. In the good ol' days.

Chi(ntaman) Vi(nayak) Joshi (1892-1963) must have been quite a brilliant man. Televiewers all over India came to know him as the progenitor of Chimanrao. This middle-class protagonist from pre-Independence Maharashtra made his debut on Doordarshan in the late 70s (1977 - 1979) in the epinomous Marathi serial. A week back, I was fortunate enough to pick up seven of Chi Vi's books from the Peoples Book House, Cawasji Patel Street, close to Flora Fountain, at what I thought was a bargain price. Chi Vi was a Professor of Pali and a student of the world-famous Pali scholar and associate of Gandhi, Acharya Dharmanand Kosambi http://ddkosambi.blogspot.com/search/label/Dharmanand%20Kosambi. He had worked for quite a long time in the erstwhile princely state of Baroda. What's impressive about him is that not only did he write excellent humourous prose but also he could cogently explain the theory of humour. In fact, the introduction to his book, Na Maro Pichkari (= Don't splatter me with colour/Don't spew betel juice on me), first published in 1960, is about the types and origin of comedy/humour. What also impressed me about Chi Vi's humour is that it is based on his keen observation of social phenomena and his perceptive commentary on what he has seen and experienced. While reading his Aamchaa Pan Gaon (= We too have a village), which turns the popular simple-honest-villagers-versus-crafty-venal-city-folks paradigm on its head, I was a bit surprised by something he wrote on the topic of cottage or home industries in the village, Harangaon (= Deer Village?). One of them, a hand-operated grinding wheel, was run by Saloobai, a low-caste widow. The time of the narrative was 1941-1943. Mumbai and Pune were then believed to be under the threat of Japanese bombardment. A lot of the residents of these cities had decided to migrate to their villages until the peril passed away. Anyway, Chi Vi wrote that Saloobai's was the only grinding wheel left in the village. I found it a bit odd because I clearly remember that, at home, i.e., at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html, we used to have a grinding wheel in daily use till as late as the mid-50s. That was in Mumbai, a metropolitan city. Given his accurate observation and reportage, though, my guess is he probably was stretching the point a bit. The other thing he mentioned that triggered a wave of nostalgia in me was a shopper at the weekly village bazaar planning to buy a tiny bit of opium for her child. I remember my father once nonchalantly offering me and Ujwal a miniscule black ball wrapped in a translucent tracing paper to help either Ashu or Abhi sleep. That we did not put it to medicinal use is another matter. Apparently, it was an acceptable practice to him. For all I know, I may have been an unknowing opium eater as an infant. Interesting thought, that. Two more things I remember about Chi Vi were two Marathi comedies, Lagna Pahave Karun (= Try getting hitched) (1940) and Sarakari Pahune (= State Guests) (1942) both based on material from his Chimanravache Charhat (= The long-winded tale of Chimanrao), first published in 1932. Both were directed by Master Vinayak http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0898521/ and had the cross-eyed Marathi comedian, Damuanna Malwankar playing Chimanrao and VS Jog as his body-builder cousin, Gundyabhau. I vaguely remember watching them either at Central Cinema near the Girgaum Portugese Church or Roxy Cinema near Royal Opera House.

Armaan: Student of the Month.

Yesterday night, Armaan told Ujwal and me over the phone that he had been selected Student of the Month. Great news, we told him. Congratulations, we said. He is truly a focussed student and, when not distracted by something or the other, he excels himself in school work. Crediting his success to the Mankar genes is a great temptation. I suspect, though, that it may not be the whole truth. (Is anything else for that matter?) Thinking about it this morning took me to my childhood at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. I was a student first at Sirdar High School http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/09/first-day-in-school.html in the 12th Lane, not more than two minutes’ walk from 233 Khetwadi Main Road once you climbed down the three floors. I was never overly eager to go to school, a reluctant scholar at best. I took to English “like duck to water” as the cliché goes. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/english-yes-english-grammar-no.html. In my first school where I spent seven years, I used to stand first most of the time. I also authored most of the content of the handwritten magazine in Marathi for my class. (I remember one issue where I had featured a novella of the swords-and-sorcery genre.) Later, when I enrolled in the Wilson High School also in the same neighbourhood 15 or 20 minutes’ stroll from 233 Khetwadi Main Road, my grades started slipping. This was by no means because I had suddenly grown dumb but because now the pond was larger with many more smarter fish. In my new school too, I was a reluctant scholar, not too keen about studies and not at all keen about games. I was timid, tongue-tied, well-behaved by default. I made very few friends. I remember one more thing that amazes me when I look at the way the kids who come to Ujwal for tuitions study so diligently and ferociously. I did not study all that hard. Ashu and Abhi were unlike me, probably took after Ujwal. They went to a far better school than either of us. They were outgoing and had large circles of friends and did well at studies without missing out on extra-curricular activities. I remember hordes of their pals coming home and Ujwal cooking loads and loads of food which they polished off in a jiffy and asked for more like Oliver Twist. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/12/more-is-happier-maybe-maybe-not.html. This memory comes to you by courtesy of Armaan Sood-Mankar, Student of the Month.

Birthday bumps.

1963, come to think of it, was quite an eventful year. JFK, CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley all exited the world on 22 November. Six months before that simulti-exit, 233 Khetwadi Main Road welcomed Ashutosh among the Mankars. On 25 May, also the birthday of the living Advaita teacher, Ramesh Balsekar, to be exact. A bonny and pink baby, Ashu was an instant darling of all the nurses in the maternity ward on the then top floor at the northwest corner of Sir Harkisondas Narottamdas Hospital which used to be our landlords at the time. (Please read an earlier story about the Hospital here: http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html.) Abhijeet was born 15 months later in the same Hospital. My father, who loved babies, used to sing to both of them and they would fall asleep listening to him on a four-foster ancient bed, a Mankar family heirloom. I remember my father once weeping loudly when Ashu fell off the edge of the dining table where he was perched laughing uproariously at something. He bumped his head and I guess he was so zapped both from the fall and my father’s crying that he forgot to cry himself. I also remember Ujwal, as exemplary a mother and daughter-in-law (she single-handedly nursed my mother through her final illness) as she is a teacher, comforting both of them. Speaking of falls, I also distinctly recall that when Ashu was still an infant, I slipped down the staircase of a holiday place in Pune we went to with Ujwal’s parents with him cradled in my arms. It could have been a major disaster had I not managed to twist and turn, break the stumble and take the fall on my shoulder. Luckily, nobody was the worse for wear. As tiny tots, Ashu and Abhi used to sit on their respective potties, red and crome yellow, and have long chats under Ujwal’s watchful eye. I was the world’s worst father, absentee to boot and more wedded to work, I’m afraid. Even Homer Simpson would come out with flying colours in comparison, I daresay. The Mankars owed their existence and continuance to Ujwal. Another memory is the time when Ashu used my razor to cut himself on the face claiming that he was “shaving, na”. Once around noon, Ujwal got called by the Principal of Cathedral & John Cannon School. When she rushed to her office, she found Ashu sitting on her table quietly sobbing but absorbed in drawing a picture. The front of his white shirt, she noticed, was all covered in blood. He had a gash on his forehead acquired from a fall while playing in the lunch break. The bleeding had stopped thanks to ice compresses but the wound had turned stark white. Come evening, Ujwal ferried him to Dr. Talwalkar, a well-known pediatrician and the father of Ashu’s classmate, Mark. He used to have his rooms on Lamington Road, fifteen minutes from 233 Khetwadi Main Road. He examined the wound, applied some disinfectant and medicine and asked Ujwal to hold the edges tightly together while he slapped a tape on it. No stitches, thank you. The scar gradually faded away with the passing years. As a child, Ashu used to be generous to a fault, wanting to bring home every sobbing kid whose mother was late in fetching him after school. So he and Ujwal would stand vigil until the defaulting mom turned up apologizing profusely. Ashu was also very intense about what he did. Once while, we were holidaying in Matheran, he went with Shantaram who used to stay and study with us to the bazaar. When they failed to return for more than hour, Ujwal was worried. When they finally arrived, Shantaram explained that the delay had been because Ashu insisted on bowing down to every road marker insisting that it was a deity. Ashu would always run out of his stock of pencils before it was supposed to get over and then ask Abhi, the hoarder, for one. Abhi would always rise to the occasion although a bit grudgingly. Nonetheless, they were brothers in arms and would rise to each other’s defence if one of them was being disciplined. Abhi who started staying with his grandmother, Jubie http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/story-of-jubie-as-told-by-tika.html, became interested in cars and motorbikes quite early in life. Once, the fool that I was, I denied him permission to enter into a Mumbai-Pune bicycle race. My self-justification was that I was thinking of his safety. Ashu and Abhi had a large circle of friends. They all used to come home and Ujwal would feed them puri-bhaji or oodles of idli-sambhar. To their and Ujwal’s credit, both Ashu and Abhi passed high school with good grades without tutoring unlike me (I had a tutor throughout my school years). After Cathedral, they managed to get admitted to good colleges – Ashu in St Xavier’s and later in the Pune Univ and Abhi in Rachana Academy of Architecture and later in the Joliet School in Illinois (yes, the very same Joliet, boys and girls, in the closed State Prison of which the first season of Prison Break was shot) – all on their own steam. So, the birthday boy’s day has brought out quite a flood of memories, eh? Well, well, well. Many happy returns, Ashu. The Chinese Astrology book says you’re The Cat while I’m The Rat. Hmmm. Interesting coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

Aditi learns about ‘those days long past’ from Ujwal.

This post too is family lore gleaned from the replies Ujwal gave to her elder grand daughter for her Chicago school project.

Home & Family as a Child

1. Date of Birth: 10 August 1938.

2. Where lived, siblings: As a child, I lived in South Mumbai, Thakurdwar, a predominantly “Marathi” area at that time. No siblings.

3. Growing up, entertainment, books, games, etc.: Growing up wasn’t too bad. But I was lonely. Our games were simple. When it was too hot to play out or it was pouring, we played card games, checkers, carom. Other times, we played robber-and-police, running races and the like on our huge terrace. In the front yard, we played kabaddi (hu-tu-tu) and kho-kho. I read books in Marathi, my mother tongue, as well as comics, Enid Blyton and stories from Shakespeare and abridged versions of his plays in English.

4. Parents, family values/rules, own reaction, how they moulded me, etc.: My father was the Principal of a well-known school. My mother was a general physician who passed her medical examination in 1926 when hardly any women went in for professional training. Her colleagues were British and she the only Indian woman in the group. Discipline and punctuality were very important for my parents (One day she was scolded by her boss for being late for work by three minutes.). Work is worship. Duty is religion. Extending a helping hand to others should be a way of life. Such were the lessons in the art of living I learned from my parents. If my mother called out to me, I had to be in front of her before she finished pronouncing my name. Such was her demand for punctuality. I hated this. I would say, “Wait a second!” and would be angry with what I felt was an unreasonable and too finicky a demand. (In retrospect, though, I feel it has helped me so that I am able to finish my chores faster than most today and have time for other things while my friends are still toiling in the kitchen.) If I said I would be home by 7-30, I jolly well had to make sure it was 7-29 when I rang the doorbell and not 7-31. (I didn’t realise the importance of this rule until I had my own children and I started worrying about their coming home late. I never had to sit down and enumerate the rules to my children. Somehow, they sensed that respect for elders, value of hard work and being a caring-sharing person were important to me.) I belonged to a middle class family. So, spending money just for the sake of spending was a no-no in our house.

School and college

1. School: St. Teresa High School College(s): Sophia (till B.A.); St. Xavier’s College of Education (for B.Ed.)

2. Subjects: (School) English, French, History, Geography, General Science, Math. My favourite subject was English because it opened up a new world to me which otherwise would have remained unknown. (College) English Literature, French. (B.Ed.College) Apart from English and Marathi, I read Sociology and Psychology with special stress on Child Psychology.

3. Dating scene in college: Not a common phenomenon in my college days, though some of the ‘forward’ girls and boys did date with fairly stringent ‘dating protocol’ rigidly enforced by parents.

4. My parent’s view on dating and my reaction: Parents, mine included, generally frowned on dating. I did not dwell on it overmuch as I did not have a special boy friend.

5. My dating: After I started to date the person I eventually married, there was opposition from my mother although she knew his family well. She didn’t mind my marrying him but did not relish my being out with him late. A matinee or early evening movie show was okay: late night show, unthinkable. Although I was forced into telling lies at times, I didn’t resent her attitude as I felt that’s how moms were supposed to behave.

6. Friends’ dating and my feelings: Yes, a couple of my friends dated on the sly. I was not judgmental about their behaviour and even helped them as a friend is supposed to. On the whole, though, we usually moved in mixed groups rather than as couples on their own.

Music

7. Most popular, my choice: The most popular music when I was growing up was from Hindi films. In English teaching schools, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Pat Boone were top of the pop.

8. Impact on youth: Hindi film songs were a great hit with young people. They were sung at parties, picnics, school and college get-togethers. Some of the patriotic songs from films were also believed to have moved young folks into sacrificing their careers in the freedom struggle. With the elite among the youth, rock and roll which had just made a debut too held a certain amount of sway.

Clothing

9. Popular with college kids: In the circles I moved in, skirts and blouses, dresses and, to a small extent, salwar kameez. The hemlines had started to go up gradually.

10. How I dressed: Dresses, skirts and blouses.

11. Views on fashion: I was not very fashion-conscious. I dressed for comfort and what went with my somewhat generous figure.

Ideals

12. Ideals, goals, life-view in youth: Being a good human being was very important to me. Being a caring, sharing person aware of the needs of another human being mattered. I had no academic ambitions. Being a good daughter-in-law, a good wife and a good mother were my goals.

13. View on achievement of goals/ideals: I believe I am a caring, sharing, warm human being but what makes me most happy is how my children have turned out to be: helpful, hard working, sensitive and responsible family men. But I have not achieved my dream of owning a small house of my own by the sea.

Sports

14. Sports popular when I was in college: Cricket was all the rage even then. (Our college had an all-girls’ team – a rarity at that time.) Also popular were table tennis, carom and badminton.

15. What I played: Table tennis.

16. Anything else?: I would have loved to take up riding and swimming. But we didn’t belong to a club, so swimming was out and riding would have been too expensive to learn in Mumbai at that time.

Movies

17. Movies in my youth: Love stories and socials in Hindi with lots of songs. English: Martin and Lewis (comedies); Hitchcock; Doris Day/Gene Kelley (musicals).

18. How often seen: About twice a month.

19. Impact on youth: Hair styles and dresses set the fashion trends. Songs were hummed and hit parades on Radio Ceylon were popular. Not every second collegian wanted to be a Shammi Kapoor or a Dev Anand, though.

20. Favourite movie and why: “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (James Stewert and Doris Day) for Day’s rendering of “Que sera, sera”, apart from the inimitable Hitchcock touch.

Marriage

21. What kind of marriages? Love marriages acceptable: In the society I lived in, most marriages were arranged. Love marriages were acceptable and not uncommon. The trouble usually arose when people married out of their community (caste/sub-caste) or religion.

22. My marriage: Mine was a love match. I knew my husband-to-be for about five years but got engaged just a year before the wedding. I was allowed to go out with him but had a fairly strict ‘curfew’ (reporting home time).

23. Family resistance, own say: No resistance from my family about the person I chose to marry. Yes, I had a say in the matter.

Partition

1. How old: At the time of the War of Independence (1857), I was not born. When India was partitioned, I was nine.

2. Any memories? I remember my mother saying, “I wish you were born in happier times”, probably referring to the vivisection of the country and the violence accompanying it. I also faintly recall going out round the city in a truck to see the illuminated building on 15 August 1947.

3. Personally affected? No personal loss such as what the people in Punjab and Sind who had to leave their homes and migrate to India suffered.

4. Opinions, thoughts, feelings: My mother who had a lot of Muslim patients tried her best to keep on an even keel about them. But there were such strong ‘hate’ vibes in the air that they affected the children like me also. I was too young to really understand how and to whom to mete out the responsibility for the bad happenings all over India: the killings, the looting, the riots, the refugees. As I remember, we were deeply affected by all the talk going around us. Two people emerged as the principal villains: Jinah and Gandhi. (Though today I know that the latter had nothing to do with partition, I can never persuade myself to hail him as ‘Father of the Nation’.)

World War II

1. How old: One year old when it started and seven year old when it ended.

2. Personally affected?: Not really. Except from hearsay around the time the war was nearing its end, I felt that India had unnecessarily been dragged into it and that it was unfair to expect us to fight for Britain when we were fighting her for our independence. Also, vague memories of rationing and shortages again from what I remember my mother or neighbours saying about how it was tough to get this or that.

3. Pearl Harbor?: Too young then to really understand all the implications.

4. Hitler?: I was no fan of his, although I admired a compatriot of mine, Subash Chandra Bose, who fled to Germany hoping to raise a liberation force to free India. Also, I have heard in later life people saying that the Holocaust was a Jewish ‘invention’ perpetuated by Jewish-controlled Western media .

Recipe

1. Family recipe to share: The much celebrated Prawn Green Curry by Ujwal Mankar.

Ingredients:

One fresh coconut 15 medium sized prawns, shelled and de-veined. One small bunch of coriander leaves (cilantro). 2 long green chillies. 6 black pepper beads. 8 cloves of garlic. Juice of one medium sized lime. Salt to taste.

How to make

1. Grate the coconut. 2. Grind ¼ grated coconut along with the coriander leaves, chillies, black pepper and garlic in a mini-mixer to a smooth paste. 3. From the remaining grated coconut (3/4), extract thick juice (‘milk’). 4. Again, from the same coconut, extract thin juice (by adding water). 5. Mix the paste with the thin juice. Add salt. Bring to a slow boil in a wok. Add the prawns. 6. Let it all simmer for 7 to 8 minutes. 7. Add the thick coconut juice (milk), bring it to a quick boil for a minute and remove the wok from the stove. 8. After it cools down a bit, add the lemon juice. IMPORTANT: Never reheat the Prawn Green Curry – even if you have stored the leftovers in the ‘fridge. Serve after thawing thoroughly. NOTE: Fresh coconut may be substituted by tinned coconut extract.

2. Whose? Why special? Anyone else knows? Pass on to whom? This is a family recipe in the true sense because I learned it from my mother and my mother-in-law. It is special because both in its ingredients (coconut milk, coriander leaves – cilantro to you Yankees! and green – not red - chillies mainly) and its taste, you can get a glimpse and a feel of the kind of people we are: warm, hospitable, caring and sharing. No, nobody else knows how to make it. Yes, I would like to pass it to all my daughters: Nandini, Anita, Avantika ('Tika) and you.

The story of 'Jubie'. (As told by 'Tika.)

A bit of family lore – this time about Ujwal’s (Talpade) family side – as recorded in a school essay by Avantika written in New Jersey:

‘Jubie’, my great grandmother, one of the first Indian women to become a doctor, was born in the sixtieth or Diamond Jubilee Year of Victoria as Empress of India. Although named ‘Shakuntala’ after the heroine of Kalidasa, she was fondly called ‘Jubie’ (short for ‘Jubilee’) thanks to the historic year she was born in.

Jubie grew up into a fair, five-foot-nothing girl with dark long hair and grey-green eyes – and fire in her belly. Though born and brought up in a conservative family, she decided to become a medical professional. When her parents learned of her dream, they were stunned into silence. In those days, girls wore nine-yard sarees, covered themselves demurely with shawls and were married off as soon as they finished high school. Only those who couldn’t find a spouse would pursue higher studies.

But our Jubie’s mind was made up and not even the Almighty could change it. Though her family was not too well off, money didn’t turn out to be the hurdle as scholarships were aplenty. The family did not speak to her for a few months after she entered the Grant Medical College. They would keep her food aside and she would have to eat alone. Only by and by they came to terms with the fact that their darling Jubie who had already given up wearing a shawl putting the whole community’s tail up (“How could a girl like her belonging to a decent family expose herself to the eyes of the whole world?”) was indeed going to become a doctor.

In the college too, it wasn’t smooth going in the beginning. The boys used to rag Jubie saying she had opted for medical education because she couldn’t find a husband. But they too finally came to accept her and respect her as one of them. By not bowing down to convention and familial pressure, Jubie also made it possible for her younger sister, Kusum, to follow her in the corridors of the Grant Medical.

In the meanwhile, the Swaraj (independence) movement was in full swing. Young Indians fired with a nationalistic zeal and answering the call of Mother India were giving up their studies in government schools and colleges. Jubie was studying in the Grant Medical College – which was very much a government college. Unlike her own younger brother, Gajendra Rao (‘Gajumama’), who chucked up his medical studies and never became a doctor, Jubie followed the advice of her favourite school teacher (‘Vaidya Sir’) not to quit college “because India would need doctors even after independence” (to quote his advice in short).

Jubie graduated in 1926 and started working in the Haffkine Institute in Parel in Central Mumbai as a research assistant. Originally known as The Plague Research Institute, opened on 10 August, 1899 by the then Governor of Bombay, Lord Sandhurst, with Dr. W. M. Haffkine as its first Director in Chief, to produce the plague vaccine for use all over India, its name was changed in 1930 and later it began to make rabies vaccine and snake bite anti-venom. Staffed mostly by British, Jubie was among the few Indians working there. As her family lived in South Mumbai, she had to commute to work by a tramcar spending the princely sum of two annas every day for travel.

One day, she happened to reach her work late by two minutes and was reprimanded by her British boss for the blunder. Jubie took the reprimand in her stide and promised herself there and then never to be late again. Says my grandmother, Ujwal, her word was her bond all her life.

In those days, there were a lot many little principalities (known as ‘princely states’) where purdah for women in the harem was very much a part of the princely style of living. Naturally, there was a great demand for women physicians who could look after the harem. Jubie, always the enterprising livewire, got appointed as the State Physician and Gynacologist in the state of Saurashrta (literally “a region of one hundred kingdoms”) in Gujarat, about five hundred miles north of Mumbai, her home town.

Working in a princely harem was no bed of roses though Jubie got her salary in silver biscuits. Though she was a very skillful and competent gynaecologist – she presided over the birth of my grandfather, Deepak, in 1936, for instance – she was no politician. In a harem, when a male child was born to a ruler, his brother who wanted to move up in life would want to have the heir nipped in the cradle if you would pardon me a mixed metaphor. And who else was in the best position to do so but the State Physician and Gynaecologist? Golden carrots would be dangled in front of Jubie as a reward for doing the dirty deed. If you did not become a part of the court intrigue, your life could be in grave danger as well. The fact that my great grand ma didn't die a rich woman although at a ripe old age is enough proof that she managed to tell the Satan to get behind her.

Around the end of the 1930s, she returned to her old job at the Haffkine where her old British colleagues welcomed her with open arms. She also started her own private practice as a general physician setting up a clinic in South Mumbai in an area on the borderline of Hindu and Muslim localities. She had patients from both communities and treated them with equal devotion. Those were the days when at the slightest of excuses, trouble would erupt between Hindus and Muslims. When this happened, her patients from both the sides would see her home safe often risking their own lives in the process.

As India’s Independence Day approached, Jubie’s British colleagues decided to leave for home. So enamoured were they of Jubie’s talent and forthrightness, that they offered her a job in London so as not to lose a valuable member of their team. Jubie remembered her favourite teacher’s advice and decided to stay back. Had she done otherwise, maybe I wouldn’t be here telling you her tale.

[Thank you Avantika, Ujwal and ‘Jubie’ for a great story.]