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.