My Foi

My father had two sisters - the older one we called Anandfoi, who lived in Gujarat and who we did not see too often. The younger Madrasfoi we saw at least twice a year, if not more.

She accompanied us on our summer vacations, while winter vacations were always spent at her house. We loved the trips to Madras, and we loved my beautiful aunt even more - she, inheriting all the softness and kindness from her mother, but regrettably none of her steeliness, which could have stood her in good stead in the past. She cried with joy when we arrived and cried with sadness when we left.

With five cousins to play with, a huge house with a garden, a gooseberry tree to climb, idlis for breakfast and dosas for dinner, we had the time of our lives. Evenings were spent on Marina Beach eating raw mangoes covered with salt and lime juice. There was unlimited papad, or papadums, as they were called in the South - papad that didn’t come in a store-bought, cellophaned package, but from under Foi’s hands. She would sit on the floor, her trusted servant Kutiamma next to her, kneading the hard-as-a-rock dough and rolling out hundreds of chili-flaked, paper-thin delights. Running up and snatching gobs of the raw stuff, we would disregard her warnings of a stomachache from eating the uncooked dough, and then enjoy them on the swing.

The yearly trips to Madras always included a side-trip to the Tirupati Temple; a twofold objective achieved by having good fun and building up good karma in the same vacation. In Tirupati, the priests told us that if we shaved our heads and rolled around the temple four times, it would guarantee us being reincarnated in a superior form. This concept, however appealing, usually left us open-mouthed and grossed out at the guileless devotees who did believe it. I would take my karmic chances by coming back in my next life as an ant, and even take the risk of being stepped on, as opposed to being bald in this one, rolling around on floors littered with remnants of prasad, crushed flower petals and dirty water.

I can totally understand how it got to be the richest temple in the world...the capitalist idea of giving people a Front-of-the-Line Pass by paying more money, copyrighting the Ladoo prasad, earning millions for the temple treasury from the hair tonsuring and paying for viewing and participating in various sevas. The crores that these temples spend on covering the gopurams with gold, beggars belief (the Mahalaxmi Temple at Vellore has a gold one worth over $ 120 million). While I realize that they do do charity, you could build a lot more hospitals and schools and feed more of the hungry masses. My humble suggestion would be: Leave the gilding and pay more of it forward, folks!!

While in Madras, my penchant for learning languages ever present, I picked up a few basic words of Tamil: yepdi irke, nalla irke, tanni kunda wa! being the most useful. The most fun was when I was driving. One hand on the wheel, one head out the window, I would yell maniacally: “Korung! Seth ponu?” at jaywalkers, but the warning - asking a monkey if it had a death wish - went unheeded. A good sign that a man was going to dash across the road, was when he would pick up his lungi and tuck it into his waistband. Wenda! and Po! came handy, when telling the vendors, who came by the dozens up to the gate, offering us a variety of items, like fried, circular murrukku and the spicy avakai pickle, all of which we said we didn’t want, and to please go away, our Foi making the best of anything and everything.

In the early 40s, Foi was married and lived in Dadar, a suburb of Bombay. In the apartment next door lived a young girl who she befriended and even took with her on a trip to Baroda. Who was to know the young Geeta Roy would become famous and marry Guru Dutt. Another close family friend was the actress Shashikala, who would call on Foi every time she came for a shooting to Madras and make her take her shopping.

Everyone has a role model in their life. Mine is my Foi. If I could even have half her qualities, I would come out ahead. As I think of her now, I vow that my next trip will include going to Madras to give her an extra special hug. This time it will be me who will cry with joy when I go, and cry with sadness when I leave.