My Indian Childhood

Breaking Tradition My mother told me the story of her family slowly over many years. It emerged somewhat gradually and spontaneously as I grew older and my base of knowledge grew as well. She loved to ponder, think aloud and talk as she went about her daily routine, while I sat reading or working on something in the same room. She would be looking through her wardrobe for a suitable sari for an occasion, carefully tying and draping her sari, sometimes changing her mind and replacing the sari with one more suited to her mood, combing her long hair and fastening it into a neat chignon at the back of her head, looking into and posing before the three long hinged-mirrors on her low dressing table. She would talk as she carried out her household chores, ironing, folding and putting away laundered clean clothes, making the beds, tidying up her dressing-table with the three long mirrors, arranging flowers, picking through raw rice or semolina, shelling peas or stringing green be...

Prothom Pujo Calcutta, mid-fifties.   The house was set back amid trees. I remember large rooms, high thresholds, windows overlooking a quiet street, a little shop selling essentials. A high wide bed, my parents lifting me onto and off. My father and I calling to the shopkeeper whose helper would run across to make immediate deliveries. My father handing me coins to place on the boy’s outstretched palm.  We went often to shops, parks, the zoo. Early one morning, we went farther to a busy place with heaps of bright flowers. My father held me high above the crowd, amid deafening drumbeats and ringing of bells, we saw a goat sacrificed. I sensed consternation on my mother’s face as she turned me away.  Years later, she told me that it had been a trip to Kali Bari. We strolled outside late to look at glittering idols festooned with flowers as people sang and beat on drums. My mother often looked exhausted and my father called me to him whenever I clambered onto her lap...

A Smile for Chacha Nehru The year 1960 began with the Indian Science Congress session taking place in Bombay. I had turned five and started in elementary school soon after my sister was born, the previous year. Juggling the simultaneous and sometimes-conflicting demands of two young children, my family had gradually regained its equilibrium and now our lives were slowly returning to a more predictable pattern. A couple of times a month, my parents would plan a special outing towards the late afternoon or evening in which I was often included. My mother and I sometimes would catch a train downtown to Churchgate Station and walk or ride a cab to wherever we were headed – a movie theatre, a departmental store, a restaurant, someone’s home. A little later, my father would join us there and we would spend the evening doing whatever we had planned. As the sun began setting beyond the waters of the Arabian Sea, casting magnificent golden-orange and purple streaks across the ...

Camel Ride There were many reasons why camels had caught my fancy when I was quite young. I had seen pictures of them in my alphabet and rhyme books (“c for camel” often came to mind). I had seen a couple of them at the Byculla zoo, tossing their big untidy heads impatiently while chewing what seemed to be a perpetual cud. And my paternal grandparents had told me about them. They said that they would see camel-drawn carts in Delhi during their decades-long sojourn there. And, then, they had gone into camel country itself, so to speak, when following his retirement after spending almost four decades of his life in government service, my grandfather took up a two-year appointment as chief financial advisor to the Maharaja of Bikaner in Rajasthan around 1940. My grandparents described what they had seen and heard about an old tradition and celebration, the camel festival, where at the beginning of each year, in mid-winter, camel owners came from all over the Thar desert, bri...