When Harry met Daddy

My father entertained a lot. And not just on weekends. Sometimes three, four times a week.

I rarely bothered to ask who he had invited. It could be someone my dad met at a Rotary meeting, at a party, on a plane or in some country. It could be someone, who knew someone, who knew my dad. Or even someone, who didn’t know someone, who didn’t know my dad. He handed out invitations like one hands out candy at Halloween. Some guests popped in for tea, some came for dinner, others ensconced themselves in the guest room and overstayed their welcome by days, weeks, and yes, even months. Mi casa non es tu casa, I wanted to tell them. I was ready to cross-stitch the saying “Guests are like fish - they stink after three days” and hang it by the front door.

One evening, Dad came home from work and told me to prepare for dinner guests. This time, I did ask who was coming…and all I got was a cryptic ‘The guy who makes those James Bond films’. I was impressed. My dad knew about James Bond!! Being in the film business, you would think he would take in a movie now and again - either Western or Hindi. But no. When ‘Star Wars’ came out, I remember dragging him to see it. He started snoring before the titles even finished – not that I blame him. So sue me, sci-fi shit ain't my scene either.

We were often invited to Hindi film premières. These were (and are) the Big Events of the day. People called on favors, pulled strings and bribed unscrupulously for the much-coveted invitations. This was a chance to see the Bombay glitterati up close and personal. For my dad, it was more of a business commitment than an evening’s entertainment. He would schmooze with the producers and directors, promising to supply them with enough raw stock to complete their film and then leave by intermission.

Meeting Yash Chopra or Gulshan Rai or Dilip Kumar was one thing. Ghar ki murghi dal barabar. But the guy who makes James Bond movies?? Wow! I thought immediately of Albert Broccoli. With a name like, it takes center stage and the co-producer becomes ‘the other guy’.

The other guy was Harry Saltzman, who came with his wife Jacquie. Apparently, Harry’s people had made a few calls to find out who they could contact in India for some help to visit a swami. And they contacted my dad. And the swami they wanted to visit was Sathya Sai Baba.

Jacquie had terminal cancer and with all the treatments and the doctors all over the world, she was not given much time to live. Someone had told the family about this swami in India, who was known to perform miracles and so here they were. Pinning their last hope on this man, they had made the trip to India.

Now when someone like Harry Salzman says ‘Where is Bangalore?’ you don’t give him a map and tell him the next flight is at 7 pm. So my dad accompanied them to South India.

As I recall, my father said the Sathya Sai Baba did one of his famous miracles of producing vibhuti or ash out of thin air. Even as a non-believer, my father was floored. The Sai Baba apparently gave Jacquie a pearl and asked her to put it in a glass of water every night and to drink the water the next morning. I guess it is not up to me to decide whether it was a miracle or the power of faith, but I heard she beat the odds for a long time and eventually succumbed to the big C sometime in late 76 or early 77.

As for the Sai Baba, he has numerous followers all over the world. His organizations support various charitable institutions including free schools and hospitals. However, several corroborative reports also show him to be a charlatan and a fraud. More and more allegations surface as the years go by – sexual abuse and corruption, illegal fund-raising and the best yet, an announcement that he would appear on the moon. Spoiler alert! He didn’t.

My father also learned later that his ‘miracle’ of producing ash was apparently aided by a compressed ash tablet between his fingers.

As for Harry, he reciprocated by inviting us to visit him in England. I was in college and busy studying for my finals, but my sister Varsha gladly took him up on his offer and came back with wonderful stories of being a guest at his estate and dining with Michael Caine and his beautiful new wife Shakira.

Harry’s film “Live and Let Die” was about to be released at the time of her visit and he invited her to the premiere where she was told she would get to sit right next to (Sir) Paul McCartney, who had composed the song. It was a good thing she couldn’t make it. It was hard enough to get her to stop bragging about Michael and Harry, but had she met Paul, for sheer jealousy, I would have changed the title to “Me Live, You Die”.

Cry Baby

I have become a putz. The Poster Child of Weepers.

I cry at everything. A beautiful rose. An awesome sunset. Weddings. Funerals. Peeling onions. A Hallmark commercial. Aw, c’mon. You have to be special kind of hardass not to cry at those. Methinks they are in cahoots with the Kleenex guys.

I cry at sappy endings of mushy movies. Beaches. Ghost. Together. Departures. Tsotsi. Parent Trap. Well, excuuuse me!! if I become maudlin at the sight of a family reconnected. My husband has banned me from watching “An Affair to Remember”. He finds it easier to understand the complex hydraulics of Bernoulli’s Principle rather than the waterworks of the sniffling pulp whimpering on the sofa. Deborah Kerr looks up at Cary Grant with those water-logged eyes and says, “Darling, don’t look at me like that. …I was looking up…It was the nearest thing to heaven…” and the dam gates burst forth.

I soak up other people’s misfortunes and miseries like a sponge and wring it out with waterworks. I feel their pain.

I cry when something bad happens. A pile up on the I 5. A friend gets cancer. Wasabi up my nose. A war. An oil spill (let’s be current here). A dead bee in my pool (Seriously. This is a cry for help).

I cry when something good happens. The 16-year old lost-at-sea sailor found. A homeless guy wins the lottery. A photo of a veteran coming home. Every Mother’s Day/Birthday/Anniversary Card from my kids. Something in my eye, I say. Allergies, I apologize. Please stop with the cards, I tell them. Put Hallmark and Kleenex out of business.

I cry when nothing happens. No chocolate in the pantry. No Jeopardy on TV. No call from my son. He should have reached by now. I am a worrier and a crier. Paranoia disintegrates into Panic Mode, straight to Lachrymal Mode. While I am pulling my hair out and beating my chest hysterically, he calls with an apology. The tears turn to anger. A shouting match ensues. And I wonder why he doesn’t call more often.

My doctor has an answer for this: I am apparently ‘peri-menopausal’.

My family has a solution for this: they google ‘senicide’ and ‘eskimo’ and ‘ice-floe’. But change their mind when I start crying.

My Grandmother

What can one say about Ba, except that she was the epitome of the universal concept of a grandmother?

Her physique - soft and plump; her demeanor - sweet and gentle; both concealing a core of steel and an indomitability that belied the temperate exterior. Raised in the small town of Sarsa in Gujarat, she was married off in her early teens, as was the custom, to the son of a farmer, also a Patel. And as was the custom, my grandfather, Dada, changed her name and Rupa became Suraj – from ‘beautiful’ to the ‘sun’ – radiant in any name and form.

It was wonderful to sit on her bed as a child and listen to her stories; her rudraksha mala moving constantly, failing to skip a single bead. I rarely heard her describe her life in the village as being hard. There were no regrets, no complaints. It was true the wells of Ode were deep, and it chafed her hands raw as she pulled water, and that was that. She knew all the ways to eke out a living Dada’s meager schoolmaster paycheck. To save a matchstick, she would walk to the neighbor’s hut with a piece of scrap paper to get a light for her chulo.

Ba would regale us with the adventures, in the true sense, of life in the village. She once heard screams emanating from the outhouse. Choosing a broken-off branch as a form of self-defense, she rushed out of the hut. Dada stood cowering in a corner, pointing to the snake wending his way towards his bare feet. Calmly bringing the stick down on the snake with resounding force, she then carried it out and went back to the hut to continue rolling out the rotlis for dinner.

When my father contracted small pox, she carried him in her arms, some distance away, to the temple of Shitala Devi, the Goddess of Small Pox. She paid no heed to the naysayers about the chances of curing her son of the deadly and infectious disease. Whether it was her faith in the Devi, or her steely determination that her son would not and could not die, my father carried little else from the infection, but a few pock-marked scars on his face.

We heard about the pilgrimages she took, to faraway holy places. Pilgrimages that took weeks and months, in bullock carts, with real danger imposed on the travelers in the form of dacoits and wild animals. Whether these stories were apocryphal, just to keep our attention and give us that gentle frisson of fear, or whether they were actual accounts, one can only conjecture. I for one would prefer to believe the latter.

We had no cuddly toys to cling to in bed, no warm, fuzzy blankets. Ba was our security blanket. There were times when, even if fabricated, I would cry out, Ba! Sapnu ave che! using a nightmare as an excuse to crawl into her bed and snuggle up against her soft, talcum-smelling warmth. I would find the pallu of her sari and pull it over my head, rendering me invisible to the monsters, which would then hopefully pass over me in search of other six-year olds with no Ba for protection. We would repeat her nightmare-dispelling invocation together…Rajrasik, damyantinasevak, ratuparan, karkotak naag, korumtam, kari nastam! To say the names of the divinities out loud in rapid succession was to dispel the incubus and invite a deep and blissfully divine slumber. Most of the times, I would fall asleep out of the sheer boredom from the monotonous chanting, that had neither meaning, nor as a clear picture as with the proverbial fence-jumping sheep.

She was the rock we clung to, a pillar of moral rectitude. 'You see a pencil on the floor at school, do not touch it! You pick it up, and with it you pick up a piece of desire to keep something that does not belong to you!' Gentle admonitions on concepts of honesty, integrity and courage from someone who had never attended school, leave alone held a book in her hand and based purely on her own experience and the teachings of her elders, passed down through the ages.

Ba never grudged being brought from the village, where she could have lived out her remaining years in the peace and solitude of rural life. Instead, here she was, in a big city, in an apartment, looking after three, young motherless girls - ages 2, 4 and 6; girls, who fought in English, a language totally alien to her. She found it futile to intervene or admonish, not knowing what they were fighting about.

Aliyo! Jhampo ne! English ma su karva jhagdo cho! she would cry out, her open palm repeatedly smacking her forehead. Soon her patience would start running out, and she would fall back on invoking a few gods for the strength to deal with us. Seeing her distress, the fighting would stop and we would run to hug her, burrow ourselves in the folds of her blue sari and beg forgiveness.

With every death in the family, the color of her sari would change. As with the norm, I guess she must have started off with the traditional white for mourning, which changed to a maroon with my mother’s death, then to light blue with Dada’s, and finally in 1961 to black, with the death of her oldest son.

I was sixteen when Ba died. One minute she was asking for more sugar in her lemonade, the next she was gone, the nitroglycerin tablet still in her hand.

“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”

Leonardo da Vinci.

The Persistence of Memory

“There are two things that happen to you as you age. One is that you start losing your memory...and... I forgot the other one”. Email forward.



Salvador Dali seemed to have a handle on memory. He remembers what it was like in the womb - a paradisial period, so vividly clear to him, ‘as though it were yesterday’. (In case you are wondering, he elaborates in detail about his experience in this intra-uterine paradise, which was paradoxically the color of hell, the color of flames, and soft, warm and gluey. There was a bit about floating eggs, but I couldn’t read it as I was busy gagging).

It should come as no surprise that, like most normal or non-Dalian people, I cannot recall these prenatal images, because here I am, someone who cannot even remember what they had for breakfast. Now, I agree that this clichéd thought is apparently shared by anyone over the age of fifty-five – not that this prandial knowledge of is of vital importance to anyone.

Fair enough. But forgetting my son’s name is going to get me a ticket into the Hall of Shame ..and probably short-list me for the Worst Mother in the World award as well.

So here is how it went:

Mise en scène: Luncheon in India given in our honor. Bunch of my friends standing around with drinks in their hands. Son standing by my side. An old friend walks up to us. It seems an introduction is necessary at this point.

Me: Beta, this is Seema Aunty. We went to Elphinstone College together. Seema, this is my son…my son…”

I blink. My brain goes blank. I snap my fingers. I try to focus, to find his name in the flotsam and jetsam of my mental rolodex, which was whirring fast alphabetically.

I wished the earth would swallow me.

My embarrassment at this point was immense, but not as much as the pique my son was displaying on his already reddening face.

“Vivek,” he offered helpfully.

I should have stopped while the going was good. But then I had to add “He is fifteen.”

“SIXTEEN!” yelled my son, now really pissed off.

I looked at him with an ‘Are you sure?’ look.


Later that night, as I crawled into bed, I shamefacedly recounted what had transpired at the lunch. Apart from providing a wonderful sleep, the conjugal bed in our house serves as a confessional booth. It is pretty much a one-sided event, my husband playing the priest, me the sinner. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘sinner’, but definitely a blabber-mouth. Latest transgressions are divulged and forgiven with either a smile, a kiss, an admonition and/or a lecture (sometimes with a snore).

As I admitted how I made a fool of myself or what a fool my memory made of me, I added the bit about his age. My husband looked totally stymied.

“Are you sure? I thought he was fourteen.”

A Trip off the Beaten Path

Ludiya turned out to be an absolute delight, and so was my serendipitous encounter with Rajshree. There is something to be said about spending quality time with someone pulling water from a well, sleeping on a charpai under the stars, eating bajra na rotla and mug ni khitchdee on a floor made of cow-dung patties and washing dishes using mud for soap (where is the Maytag repairman when you need him?).

The bathroom, and once again I use the term ‘bathroom’ loosely… about as loose as the door falling off its hinges. The toilet was your standard hole-in-the-ground kind, a cracked, plastic bucket in lieu of a shower, and offered no soap and no towel. And no, we did not use mud. Fortunately found one of the little hotel soaps in my kit, bless Marriott Suites and my dupatta doubled as a towel.

Being the intrepid sort, I went in first to take a bath. I cautioned Rajshree: the first shriek emanating from the bathroom would be the cold water hitting my body, the second if I saw a spider and the sound of a thud meant I had fainted upon seeing a snake.

The villagers of Ludiya made up for any discomfort and by a long shot. Ravabhai and Koraben were the most hospitable people I have ever had the fortune to stay with. Opening their doors and their hearts they welcomed us into their homes, as did the rest of the extended family. We were shown samples of the ‘bharat kam’ the women did to earn a living. The men, when they were not smoking bidis and lazing under the shade of a tree, made furniture and sold it in the neighboring towns. The women worked relentlessly the whole day.

The children went to the well to get water. While the 12 year olds walked back to the village balancing the heavy ghadas of water on their head with the grace of a model on a runway, Rajshree and I struggled holding one between the two of us. Half the water sloshed to the ground, as we lumbered and panted alongside. So much for ellipticals and lifting weights at the gym.

Using her experience with Teach for India, Rajshree has been back several times since then, expanding on their educational goals, training the teachers on high expectations, motivation, and using creativity and the environment as tools.

A trip to Ludiya, albeit off the beaten track, is a recommendation I can make wholeheartedly.

Bouncing to Bhuj

It just so happens that many of my trips are totally antipodal in nature. One morning I could be touring the slums in Ahmedabad, the same evening eating out of a silver thali at an aunt’s house. I once spent a night in a pay-by-the-hour hotel in Hong Kong (sorry to disappoint, it’s not what you think), and the next in the Hyatt Penthouse suite. One day I had a designer bath towel the size of a bed-sheet, the next no towel at all (I can, however, vouch for the absorbency rate of Charmin). One week I was riding around Dubai in a Maybach with a liveried chauffeur, the next week in Kutcch, traveling in a Volvo.

I use the term 'Volvo' loosely here, but more on that later.

Spur-of-the-moment, impetuous decisions have sometimes left me in a miserable, ‘I think I want to kill myself’ state; others have led me on serendipitous journeys to experience the unknown. While in Ahmedabad on a volunteer assignment last year, I made one of those split, last minute decisions leading to one of the best travel experiences I have known.

Staying at the Manav Sadhna guest house is fun. You just never know who you will meet and where you will end up. In this case, I met Rajshree, a volunteer for Teach for India and I landed up the next day in Kutcch.

Over breakfast, Rajshree suggested that since my trip to Patan had fallen through, why don’t I just accompany her to Bhuj??

And so, placing infinite faith in a girl I had just met the day before, I agreed. I had always wanted to visit the village of Ludiya, or Gandhi nu Gaam as it has been renamed. After the January 2001 earthquake, the NGO of Manav Sadhna rebuilt it as a self-sustainable village. A group of highly-committed volunteers went there and within three months, the villagers were relocated in brand-new bhungas, their traditional mud huts.

While last minute decisions may work in India, last minute train tickets do not. We were left with no alternative, but to take the bus.

Throwing a few things in an overnight bag, we caught an auto-rickshaw to the bus depot. The price of the bus ticket had me worried – $ 8 for an overnight ride? Would we have to push? Would we have to drive? Would we have to sleep on the roof?

It took us a while to locate the office of the famous and reputable Shree Sahajanand Travels, where we were to catch the bus. One person pointed us up the street, another across the street, and the third scratched his head in wonder and had absolutely no clue, his hut of course being adjacent to the bus depot itself. The man at the ticket counter put my fears at rest and assured us a safe and pleasant journey. He pointed to the poster on the wall, touting all the benefits of traveling with them.

I heaved a sigh of relief to note that:

a) the bus was air-conditioned

b) it was a Volvo...

and...
drumroll please!!!

c) it had air-suspension.

The relief was short-lived, as:

a) the air-condition went straight from ninety degrees (F) to sub-zero temperatures within seconds. I spent the night, one minute sweaty and miserable, throwing off my shawl and then groping for it later with frost-bitten fingers. In their defense, they had thoughtfully provided us with a mothball-smelling blanket, having the same feel as a hair-shirt, in addition to having several hairs clinging to it from the previous user.

b) the name Volvo was used with reckless abandon and had no approximation whatsoever to that wonderful product of Swedish ingenuity. As far as safety and reliability, it was about as non-existent as the level of comfort.

c) In all fairness, it did have air-suspension. We were suspended in air for over half the trip. The Gujarat Highway Safety Commission apparently went to town installing breakers…one for every kilometer the whole way to Bhuj. Every time the bus lurched over a breaker or speed bump, I levitated off the seat and then landed…definitely not with the grace of a swan. Upon alighting, I heard noises. Was it the fracturing of my bones or just fragments of the bus as they fell on the road?

Being a fast learner, I soon caught on to the jouncing machinations, hanging on to the berth with the first squeal of the brakes. Slowing down meant we were nearing the speed breaker. While the front wheels rolled over the breaker with a gentle wave, those of us riding on the back wheels were flung about like popcorn.
So while the front wheelers slept in first-class comfort, the back-wheelers hit air-pockets without the aid of seat belts. Hitting a pothole however, turned the whole bus into an egalitarian society and everyone was tossed into the air with equal force, causing me to gloat in schadenfreudian glee.

Mr Raojibhai Patel of Shree Sahajananda Travels would do well to add a caveat to his poster on the wall: The bus ride is not recommended to anyone with wigs, dentures, hearing aids or any equipment not permanently welded to their body.

My Alma Mataji

The fine institution of Walsingham House School was located in the former palace of the Maharaja of Kutch. When His Highness moved out, it really would have behooved him to take his stuffed tiger with him. I am not talking about a plush, cutesy toy. I am talking six-foot (if any bigger) taxidermic trophy. As it was, he left it there, right at the entrance of the school, just before you entered the hallowed halls. As our driver Lobo dropped us off in the morning, I scrambled up the wide stairs, true to my scaredycat nature (no pun intended) keeping my gaze on my black, pointy loafers – the ones my grandmother or Ba as she was known, rightfully insisted were warping our toes.

It stood there, this panthera tigris, with its glassy hypnotic eyes, fangs protruded, mouth open in a frozen, perpetual promise of devouring the next student that walked up the stairs.

Shouldn’t the School Board, (if one did exist in India), have enforced an intimidation statute? “Against the law to display creepy objects to impressionable young students.”

Why would the Maharaja leave this gruesome beast at the entrance? Had he no place in his new palace? Hadn’t he thought about selling it? Not that there would be a huge market for stuffed tigers, but still. These days, it would’ve been a cinch. If you can sell your virginity or your kidney on eBay, selling a tiger would be a breeze.

My sister was in first grade when my father got his first parent-teacher letter. Apparently, she would raise her hand every period and ask to go to the bathroom. A bit suspicious after a few days, the teacher followed her and caught her, hands against the glass, bemused or bewitched, staring the tiger down with her own ferocious, snarling expression. I finally figured out that this is how she had perfected the look she used to scare the living daylights out of me at home.

The schema for getting ready for school operated like a well-oiled machine. The wheels would set in motion starting from the time we got up. The water heater was turned on early in the morning and buckets replenished with hot water after each bath. Ba would check that our servant Vishnu had combed our hair in tightly-woven braids. The braids, or plaits as we called them, stayed in their pristine condition from morn to night, with the help of a lot of coconut oil. We smelled like oleaginous crud, and looked like dorks, but at least we were well coiffed.

A belted, green-checkered uniform was worn over a white shirt, both duly washed, ironed and starched every day. Once a year, the tailor, Purshottam Darzi would arrive at the house, a measuring tape around his neck, pencil stub stuck behind his ear. Yards of green and white checked material would have been bought earlier and lying waiting for him, bound in newspaper and tied with a thin, white thread, which he would cut off with his teeth. He would make sure there was enough material to include a little extra for his own personal use.

A side-bar about the uniforms. When the darzi came, my sisters stood in front of him patiently, turning this way and that, head up, shoulders back, so that the measurements would be just right. What was not just right, is that I was rarely included in this little annual sartorial charade. That’s because, as Hand-Me-Down Hannah, I wore both their uniforms till the hems could not be let out any more.

The maharaj would have small steel boxes or dabbas ready, with a home-made snack, this being the age when pre-packaged, preservative-laden, plastic-bagged junk was mercifully not available.

Vishnu would have already loaded the car with our school bags, which were the square, gray, Air-India bags that my dad got gratis from the airline. He did a lot of business with them, and after a few, really, really good years of business, got upgraded from free school-bags to free international tickets (which I used with great aplomb).

Lobo then drove us to school.

By noon, he was back at school again to take us for Home Lunch. There were three kinds of ‘Lunches’ in school. In pecking order, at the top, was Home Lunch. This was if you were fortunate enough to live within walking distance, or lucky enough to have rich parents (in more ways than one), you went home for lunch in a car. The next strata down was Hot Lunch. This was when your parents could afford to send a servant with a tiffin, but could not afford to send the car. The Hot Lunch people ate together at tables, with their individual nannies or servants standing behind them, serving them food. The bottom rung was the Dry Lunch. Oh! The poor Dry Lunches, who tried to hide their lunch bags from the Hot Lunches, who would look wistfully at the Home Lunches as they drove away. And the Home Lunches would dream one day of being able to bring a Dry Lunch and sit with the lucky students in the basement of the school.