Ayahgate

Having two kids is great, but having three could have been better.

Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda.

Coulda, had I been younger.

Shoulda, because when both kids ganged up against me, it would’ve been nice to have the third one on my side.

Woulda, had I given birth to a nanny surgically appended to the third kid.

As it was, I returned the ayah back to India after my son turned four.

It was wonderful to have had help for four and a half years. There have been advantages and disadvantages, the former outweighing the latter by a few hundred degrees. A good comparison would be owning a Maytag, as opposed to going to the dhobighat to wash my clothes.

My lucky stars kicked in when my daughter was born. Along with a congratulatory silver cup, I got Janiben, an elderly Kutcchi lady, who was my father’s gift to the new mother and a substitute for Zoloft for postpartum depression.

It was a big relief to unload the eight-and-a-half pound baby off the 120-pound mothership. What I didn’t unload was the fanny-pack size of flesh around my middle. And if that didn’t depress me enough, the baby started crying non-stop, every evening, for no discernible reason. Colic is what it was and it started at eight and ended on the dot at eleven, with the kind of precision the Swiss set their watches by.

Anyone who has held a screaming baby for three hours will understand my fervent desire to throw her in the diaper pail. "Open it!” I told my husband as I stood over the plastic bin. “You don’t mean it,” he said. “Watch me”, I answered. (In addition to postpartum depression, I admit there was a touch of insanity.)

And that’s where she would have ended up, were it not for Janiben ... and my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, my sister-in-law, and let’s not forget the doting father. Talk about a support system. Why would I have even wanted the Three Magi when I had five pairs of eager, loving hands to snatch the Divine Infant from (the frazzled, neurotic) mother?

All I did was feed her. The rest was up to my posse.

But six months later everyone was gone - to Bombay, to New York, back to work. I was handed my baby with no instruction manual.

As they say, everyone survives, and so did my baby. I learned the ropes - and even how to bathe her. Long story. The short of it is that I didn’t bathe her for three days, because Janiben wasn’t there. And I didn’t know how. (Surprising how my daughter still holds a grudge against me for this till today.)

But then I got pregnant again.

This time no silver cup, but I did get another ayah - this time from Bangalore. And after her visa was up, I took Sabina back to India and decided to bring Janiben back with me.

Except this time, she came on a visitor visa. As my ‘aunt’. Upon landing at LAX, we were hauled into the Immigration/Interrogation Room. A severe-looking lady-officer in uniform wanted to ask some questions. Sure, I said, but my aunt doesn’t speak English, nor Hindi (wink, wink) and we would need a Gujarati interpreter. A voice boomed over the intercom for a Goo-shaa-rate-ee person, but Gujjus apparently find other professions more lucrative, and no one showed up. Or else they had no idea what a Goo-shaa-rate-ee was.

Ms Stony-Face Officer asked me to translate. Sure, I said agreeably.

“Ask your aunt how long she is here for”. I translated with due diligence, except with a little addition of my own. Ketla vakhat matay avya cho? Beh mahina kaho (Say two months). “Beh mahina”, answered Janiben obediently.

“Ask your aunt why she has come here”. Kem avya cho? Bhana na lagan matay kaho (Say for my nephew’s wedding). “Bhana na lagan matay,” continued Janiben.

And so it went. The officer would have caught on, if she had even heard the answers.

My two-year old son, who had just about enough of the 22-hour flight from India and of the small, stuffy room, was busy shrieking his head off, and throwing a full-on tantrum on the floor, complete with fist-pounding and leg-kicking.

There are few times in my life when I have been prouder of my son. Ok, so maybe when he got straight As all through school, awards in high school, scholarships in college, a Master’s degree and a great job - the last two in the offing, but still...

“Whose baby is this?” the Capo of Immigration came in, furious at the ruckus.

There are many times in my life when I have been reluctant to claim my son. When he lost his credit card, banged up the car, got caught for underage drinking ... But the moment the Capo barked out an order to pick the brat up and get the hell out of the office, we complied and scrammed before I could say Nyah-ni, Nyah-ni to Ms Stony-Face.

We sent Janiben back after two years, and since then, I have been nanny-less. Sure, I miss her baby-sitting skills, but she was also an awesome cook. I miss having garam-garam rotlis - heck, I miss having rotlis, period. (Tortillas are a good enough substitute).

But with a wonderful husband who helped (without asking), and obedient children who did their chores (without nagging), life went on without a hiccup.

My only regret is that it ruined any chances of my career as a politician. Just ask Zoë Baird and Meg Whitman.

The Birthday Parties

Nina and Varsha’s birthdays fell within a week of each other, in January. The whole concept of a birthday party was alien to Ba, never having given one to any of her kids, let alone knowing exactly which day they were born. The question was, who would order the cake, put up decorations, organize the games and get new party dresses?

Enter Shashikala.

Shashikala, a well-known actress and famous for her roles as a vamp in Hindi movies, was a good friend of the family. She would traipse into the house, her two daughters and a trail of perfume in her wake. She took command. Balloons and streamers. Cake and wafers. Party dresses and conical hats. She would organize and arrange, order and direct everyone and everything around her to produce the ultimate kiddie party.

My dad’s only job in all this was to get the projector from Central Camera and order movies of Laurel and Hardy. The reels would come a day before, five or six of them in big silver tin cases. We all sat on the living-room floor in the diwankhana, our pretty, fluffy dressed fanned around us. Friends, family and neighbors, all invited. The younger kids sat on their ayah’s laps, ayahs who hoped their young charges would not cry, resulting in both being expelled from the room.

Vishnu, servant extraordinaire and general factotum, would set up the projector, threading the film, weaving the celluloid through a veritable maze of buttons and clips, winding, twisting, and turning, snapping shut the clips that would hold the film. It would often slither out of the allotted retaining clasp and the projector would start spewing film - celluloid flailing and thrashing around, a snake in the mouth of a mongoose. A disappointing Ohhh! would reverberate through the room, with Vishnu shouting for the lights and patiently starting the whole weaving process again. The lights would be dimmed again and the show would go on.

Nina and Varsha’s show that is.

My birthday fell in September. No party, no presents, no balloons. No Laurel. No Hardy.

No Shashikala.

September was when the cursed Leipzig Trade Fair took place. And it always took place towards the end of September, when Dad had to make the trip to East Germany. Vishnu would get his bags ready, and off he went, my party the last thing on his mind.

It’s not that he didn’t love me; after all, I was his favorite child. This, in itself, was bigger than any dumb parties or presents, I would reason.

One year, the reasoning quotient ran out and I remember throwing a fit. He cancelled the Leipzig trip and I had my party. He never let on what it cost him and gave me my shining moment the September of that year.

Whereas we were always gently discouraged from having friends (cousins being company enough), attending their birthday parties was charitably allowed. Lobo would drive us there and wait patiently outside, socializing with the other waiting drivers. At the really affluent parties, the hostess would send the house servant out with platters of the ubiquitous wafers and cake for them as well.

Even here, I ran out of luck. The birthday parties I got invited to were boring as hell, where everyone sat on the couches in our stiff, scratchy dresses, staring vapidly at one another, till the mother decided we should play some games. We would sit on the floor and play Passing the Pillow and I Wrote a Letter to my Lover.

I kid you not. Seven year-olds singing about writing letters to lovers. I didn’t even know what a kiss was, let alone a lover. These days any four-year old will not only describe it in lurid detail, but also which boy they french-kissed.

The game involved a circle of kids on the floor and one girl skipping behind them, singing “I wrote an letter to my lover, and on the way I dropped it,” and surreptiously dropping a handkerchief (substituting for the lover’s letter) behind one girl.

I am bored out of my mind just describing it.

Of course, Varsha got the good parties. One year her friend took her to the circus (her father owned Eagle Flasks). Another friend invited her on a ship (her father owned a steamship company).

And I skipped and hopped and dropped handkerchiefs, all the while believing I was having the time of my life.

The Holidays

If our daily life was well taken care of, there were still those holidays to bear in mind. How could my Dad have kept his three girls safely entertained for two months of summer and two weeks of Diwali and Christmas, without having the servants threaten to quit and without driving his aging mother into an ashram?

The problem was easily solved by shipping us off to a different spot every year. These were some of the best times of our lives. Each house my dad chose was in a spot conducive to running wild in nearby fields, forests and tea plantations, expending energy and building up voracious appetites.

Often, Anandfoi’s and Madrasfoi’s children would join us, as well as my WhiteHouse ‘cousins’. It was effectively an open invitation to an open house with open arms.

One year he packed everyone in two cars for a tour of South India. ‘Everyone’ was his mother (my Ba), his sister (my Madrasfoi), eight kids (five of hers + three of us), a servant (Vishnu), two dogs (Sweety and Rita), and a manager and his son. I presume he forgot the kitchen sink, or that would have sat in the dickey, together with the gaadlas that I forgot to mention.

When I was about ten, he rented a house in the nearby, pastoral town of Khandala. A huge sprawling bungalow, it sat atop a small hill and had a front yard the size of a small park, which had enough space for a wild bunch of rambunctious kids. A good breakfast in our bellies and off we went, scampering down the slope to the edge of the river, eating jambus from the trees, tongues turning purple and mouths puckering with the sour taste. My Foi recalls how just as residuum of the breakfast mess had been cleared up, we were back, disheveled and dirty, tired and hungry for more food. Never once did we hear a sigh of exasperation, a word of complaint nor signs of displeasure from her; not even felt the back of a hand on a backside, a punishment meted out in other families with abandon in those days.

One afternoon, we had a visitor from the neighboring house. Had I known who the famous visitor was, I woulda (coulda, shoulda) taken a picture with him, plus gotten his autograph for my husband - who thinks the sun rises and sets on the Indian screen with - Dilip Kumar. So he came over for tea and except for my father, none of us kids gave him more than a cursory glance, before we ran off to play. Another afternoon, the actor Agha, on a visit to the same said famous actor, sent his daughter over to play with us. As entertainment, she told us ghost stories and at a momentous part in her horrifying tale-telling, the cow in the adjacent yard gave a loud moo, which sent us screaming into the house in our best Home Alone impression.

Coonoor was where I learned to ride a bike. It was also when I fell into the pond outside the house and the experience of the slimy algae against my skin and the stinky fishies nibbling at my toes is the reason I swim only in severely chlorinated, man-made creations. The memory of the laughter of my siblings and my cousins as I thrashed around is the reason I still hold a grudge ... not to mention that no one lent a helping hand till Vishnu pulled me out.

The vacation in Mussoorie was memorable, special in the way that one of the cousins (I think it was Maya?) got the mumps and then generously proceeded to give it to the rest of the brood. Her mother, Padmabhabhi, turned up to look after us and turned the living room into a dormitory-style ward. For two weeks, we lay in bed, a chip-munked brood of kids, proving the fact that misery loves company.

In 1960, the year before he died, Motakaka took charge of the family vacation. He organized a trip to Delhi and to Kashmir, with: two daughters, two grandkids, a mother, a brother and his three girls.

And a family photographer.

Most people take a camera, but Motakaka was not most people and he took a cameraman along to record the memories for posterity.

Except that the photographer was a serious nature lover, and most that posterity can see in the 8mm film (since transferred to DVD) of that vacation, is hours and hours of idyllic Kashmiri gardens, Dal Lake and exotic flowers, and just a few paltry minutes of the family. The photographer apparently, like most others, was also an avid movie fan. We happened by chance to meet a good friend of Motakaka’s, who was also vacationing with his family. The ‘good friend’ was the famous actor Rajendra Kumar. Subsequent footage reveals the actor playing with his children, playing golf with my father, playing cards with the family and we are rarely seen again, unless as incidental scenery in the background.

The holidays continued well into my twenties ... sometimes with and sometimes without my father.

Without my father, holidays were full of fun. Fun enough not to share details with him nor the photographs. Innocent enough by today’s standards but still, involving disco dancing, late nights and gasp! alcohol.

With my father, the holidays were full of surprises. I once accompanied him to Hong Kong for a three-day trip. With his typical, lackadaisical, ‘God will look after us’ logic, he had not made a hotel reservation, assuming his Hyatt Gold Card would be guarantee enough to secure lodgings of a decent sort for the night. He assumed wrong and one of the biggest conventions ever held in the history of Hong Kong meant even his Hyatt Gold Card was nothing more than a useless piece of plastic.

So, this being the pre-, pre-internet days (in fact pre-computer years), after trudging up and down the streets for a couple of hours, he considered catching the next plane back to Bombay. Totally adverse to the thought of sitting on another seven-hour flight, I convinced him we could just stay in one of the (shudder) Chinese hotels. The room had two beds and a window. It barely had a (dirty) floor and don’t even ask about the minibar. We slept with our clothes on, my father with one eye open and I fell asleep listening to him apologize for the millionth time.

An addendum to the story is that the next day, the Hyatt Gold Card reverted to its fairy godmother status and we were whisked up to the Penthouse Suite. This time we got not only a minibar...but towels as well.