CHAPTER ONE
Another Time, Another place
The air hung thick in the summer heat. In late May, the heat was oppressive. Air-conditioning being something that only Bollywood stars and the wealthy had in their homes, your only recourse was to lie panting, like one of the myriad mongrels roaming the city streets in search of existence. In the early afternoons, under a slowly whirling ceiling fan with its languorous monotone, the only sensible activity worth attempting was to wait for the sun to go lower in the sky and the ocean breeze to set in. The gardens were parched but in the evenings, the seductive scent of jasmine wafted from the garden into the house. Jasmine was good for many things, the strands of flowers strung together, sold in the open air markets alongside the green chilies, fresh vegetables and multi-hued produce. It graced the hair buns of the women or their wrists, an excellent foil to the many odors, pleasant and unpleasant, of a teeming city in the tropics.
The hot season, from mid March to mid June in Bombay was eagerly awaited by a ten year old. Finals were over in late March, offering up two glorious months of freedom. It was freedom from the drudgery of homework, the routine of school and a chance to run wild. It was a chance to visit the homes of his school friends and to savor the various cuisines at their homes and see how others lived. It was a chance to savor the fresh fruits of the season and the various treats offered by the push-cart hawkers moving from place to place. They tempted you with their various offerings and their raucous cries, fresh watermelon juice, sweetened fresh squeezed lime juice, freshly squeezed sugarcane juice spiced with ginger, mango leather, sour tamarind, berries, fried puffed breads filled with spicy water and potatoes and a host of other delights. Their cries and the sounds of children at play melded into the happy symphony of the summer. The hot season was synonymous with the mango season. Raj’s parents usually purchased one or two crates of Alphonso mangoes which sat in a dark corner with layers of straw in between the unripe mangoes. The warmth of the straw and warmth of the season would join hands to ripen them and their heavenly aroma would soon tempt you every time you neared the crates. Anyone who has tasted an Alphonso mango would know that no other fruit comes anywhere close to matching its perfume, its texture, its sweetness and the golden color of its flesh. Anyone who has truly enjoyed eating one would also know that it can be very messy affair. In fact the messier it was, the more enjoyment one derived from it. It was not uncommon to see five year-olds set outside on the doorstep or the verandah with a couple of mangoes, bereft of clothing, so they could enjoy the king of fruit to their heart’s content. This eliminated worries about minor details like permanently staining their clothes a golden yellow. It was a simple matter for the parent to douse them with a bucket of water in the summer heat so that they could be safely admitted back in the house sans the mango juice that would invariably be smeared all over them.
On the last day of finals, as the children poured out of the schools, expressions of joy and delight at the ordeal being over, would be tempered by consternation whether they had done well and what their parents might say at receiving the report cards. Excelling at school was inordinately important, all your elders drumming into you even before you could comprehend such things, that this was your only way to achieve a secure and bright future. At the ripe old age of ten, what did one know or even care what lay in the distant mists of time, what your elders referred to in hushed tones as “your future” ? Raj’s priorities after the final examinations were quite simple, to arrange visits with his friends and to figure out how to obtain enough pocket money for summer treats from the pushcart vendors. This was done by cajoling his parents, praying for the largesse and generosity of assorted aunts and uncles and most practically by selling all the notebooks that had been filled up during the school year to the local rag man who would in turn sell the scrap paper to the pushcart vendors to serve up the treats on. Another priority was to obtain a good supply of pulp-fiction novels and other reading material that was not important to “your future” to keep himself entertained as he lay there in the hot summer afternoons. Enid Blyton would tell him about the adventures of the “Famous Five” and how they spent their summers and how the “Secret Seven” solved mysteries and Richmal Crompton related the adventures of the school boy “William” and the pranks he played. These were classic British children’s authors writing for a British schoolboy or schoolgirl audience. Raj couldn’t relate to much of it but the themes were similar, relief from school work, vacations visiting friends, familiar character types in school, the complainer, the bully and others that make up the pantheon of stereotypes in school. There were also many different descriptions of unfamiliar exotic treats like potted meat, meringue, watercress sandwiches and sticky buns. For this kind of material, Raj traded what he possessed with his friends and joined a lending library.
Books were expensive and television had not yet made its appearance in Bombay. Lack of television meant that windows into other worlds existed only through the movies, radio, magazines and books. It meant that imagination had to take root and flourish. Raj had a friend whose family had a subscription to National Geographic gifted to them by a relative in America. Consequently, he spent a lot of time at this friend’s house. The magazines had the place of honor in the living room, lovingly bound into six month volumes, each volume in my mind being a journey equivalent to no less than Dr. Livingstone’s expeditions in Africa or Lewis and Clark’s expedition across continental North America. They were windows into a world of far away exotic places like California where there were roads eight lanes wide and everybody went to the beach to surf and wore sunglasses pushed up into their hair or other exotic places like New York where according to the Hollywood movies, “wise guys” were waiting to mug you or shoot you around every corner or London, center of the erstwhile British empire, where all the world’s cultures congregated and harmoniously went about their lives and the Queen still had tea and scones at four o’clock in the afternoon. All these places and many more were appealingly showcased on the pages of the bound volumes.
Television arrived in the early 1970s. Raj was transfixed by the technological wonder of having moving images and sound, the domain of movie theaters, in his own home at the turn of a knob. His nanny at the time, who was illiterate, was convinced that there was a person living in the box that would speak when the television was turned on. There was five hours of programming a day, two hours of government propaganda in what passed for the news and three hours of techniques of growing better crops. Free markets and globalization weren’t anything that mattered then, Raj lived in a socialist utopia so everyone viewed what was deemed appropriate for them by the powers that were. They had the only television in the neighborhood. It occupied the center of one wall in the living room which soon acquired the significance of a shrine. It was covered with a handsome dust cover specially stitched for it. This was removed for the five hours that the television was watched and then replaced reverently. When it was on, they raptly watched everything from methods of growing new hybrid varieties of wheat to more efficient application of chemical fertilizer. On Sunday evenings, a Bollywood movie would be broadcast. This was the week’s highlight. All the children in the neighborhood would congregate, finding whatever space was available, on the sofa, on chairs or on the floor. Assorted neighbors and relatives would also drop by. There also people outside peeking in through the open windows drawn to the spectacle like moths to a flame. Looking around the room, Raj realized he didn’t know half the people there. It didn’t really matter, they were all there for an evening of Bollywood melodrama, to laugh at the outrageous antics of the comedians, boo at the skullduggery and villainy of the bad guys and sigh or cry at the angst of the couple in love who always managed to overcome all obstacles and live happily ever after. Often, these movies had a patriotic theme. India was still a young republic; barely two and a half decades had passed since the last British soldiers had embarked on their journey home after nearly two hundred years of the Raj. Vestiges of the Raj existed everywhere in Bombay then. The streets still had names like Elphinstone Road, Sandhurst Road, Curzon Road and there was the Prince of Wales Museum and the Victoria Zoo. Across from the venerable Taj Mahal Hotel in downtown Bombay in the Fort Area, the scene of horrific carnage in 2008, was the reminder of colonial subjugation, the Gateway of India, built to welcome a British monarch to the shores of the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The inculcation of patriotism was really meant for Raj’s generation, born a decade after independence in 1947. His parents and grandparents had lived under the colonial boot and had experienced the indignities of being second class citizens in their own land. His generation had to learn and be reminded of what his parent’s and grandparent’s generation had fought for and accomplished. His heart would swell with pride as he saw Bhagat Singh mounting the gallows bravely, sentenced to death for the crime of assassinating General Dyer, who had been responsible for the massacre of nearly four hundred people at Jallianwalla Bagh at a political rally and at the story of Subhas Chandra Bose who led the Indian National Army against the British in the Second World War. There was also the story of Shivaji who defied the power of the Mogul Empire to liberate the people in Western and Central India from its yoke and the Rani of Jhansi, a warrior queen, who was killed fighting the British on horseback during the Indian mutiny of 1857. These were his heroes and the movies portrayed them in a thrilling fashion. In spite all that, there still existed an admiration for things British and the institutions they had left behind. Many a time, old men reminiscing of times past could be heard bemoaning some of the present day ills and talk of how the trains ran on time during British rule.
Very few Europeans or Americans were seen in Bombay and if they were, they were mostly in the Fort area by the docks, sailors on shore leave or young Americans or Europeans traveling the world, trying to find themselves in the haze of disillusionment during the late sixties and early seventies. Raj didn’t know the difference between Europeans and Americans; they looked the same to him. If they were well dressed, they were referred to as “Europeans”; the younger ones went under the catch-all definition of “hippy” or sometimes just “firangi” or foreigner. Most of the foreigners seen in those days were “hippies”. The legions of suit-clad businessmen heralding the advent of globalization weren’t even figments of anyone’s imagination then. There were also Arabs, who had just started to become wealthy with the boom in oil production in the Persian Gulf. They would come at the end of the summer to watch the monsoon rains arrive, such spectacles being unknown in their own lands, or to find young brides. Raj was quite fascinated with their long flowing robes and head-dresses. If approached, the “Europeans” were quite brusque and unfriendly while the “hippies” were gregarious and willing to share what they had. Thus Raj came to like “hippies”; they were friendly and wanted to talk to everyone. It was sometimes hard to understand what they said because their accented English was unfamiliar to Raj, he was mostly used to the sing-song accents of English that he heard around him. He did listen to the BBC World service and occasionally the Voice of America broadcasts on his father’s old shortwave radio and this made their speech a bit less unintelligible to him.
These were the summer holidays in Bombay for a ten year old. Lazy hot days spent doing mostly nothing. There existed two different faces of Bombay for Raj. One, in his home and in his friend’s homes spent reading books and magazines, or playing games indoors or outdoors or climbing trees, flying kites or playing pranks on his neighbors. The other face was when he took the bus or the train to the downtown Fort Area to go to see Hollywood movies or simply to wander around gawking at the exotic hippies and others from far away places. Fort looked a lot like London, if the crowds and the hawkers on the sidewalks were removed. The architecture was neo-Gothic, several buildings having been designed by Sir Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s father, who was also the dean of the art school at the University of Bombay in the 1800’s. There were also the red painted double-decker buses that careened through the streets, leaning over precariously as they went around the corners. They were as good as any rollercoaster at Disneyland minus the safety belts. It was a real thrill to ride on the second level in the front and make faces at people on the street as the bus pulled away from the bus-stop, secure in the knowledge that they weren’t likely to catch up with the urgency of the bus driver in a hurry to get to the next stop.
Bombay had its own character and always felt different from the rest of India. It was a city that originally comprised of seven islands given by the Portuguese to the English as the dowry of Catherine of Braganza who married Charles II in the 1600s. The Crown leased it to the British East India Company for the sum of one pound a year. Although the area had been populated for thousands of years, evidence of which could be seen in the ancient Buddhist monasteries at Kanheri in the north of the city, the area had failed to develop into something more substantial. The “John Company”, as it was colloquially called, proceeded to found the modern city of Bombay astride one of the best natural harbors of Asia, putting it squarely at one of the major crossroads of trade in Asia. Many a wanderer and adventurer both from within India and without came there to find fame and fortune, first as merchants and much later to Bollywood. Little wonder then that the restless spirit of wanderers past infected Raj.
They lived a somewhat provincial existence. They didn’t know it and didn’t think they did, after all Raj lived in the biggest metropolis in India filled with wonders that the people he met on trains outside the city were awestruck with. They had television, a metro, a museum, a zoo, beaches, an airport, an aquarium, a cricket stadium, three major railway termini, a major port, a nuclear reactor and most importantly we also had Bollywood. The rustic folks from other places thought that the inhabitants of Bombay ran into their Bollywood heroes and heroines everyday and that they knew them on a first name basis. With the impish nature of the ten year old that Raj was, he didn’t say anything to dissuade them from thinking otherwise.
Raj had always had a great curiosity and fascination of the world outside his immediate environs. He was fortunate in that, as a child that his parents who were doctors would take him on their travels in India every winter to a medical conference held in various cities. It was a joy for him to board the long haul trains with destinations like Allahabad, Calcutta, Madras, Trivandrum, Cuttack, Lucknow and others that had an appealing ring to them. He was early on exposed to the joys of sampling sights, sounds, smells and tastes that were quite different than the ones from everyday life. In those days, air travel was a luxury, something only the politicians or the extremely wealthy could afford or if you were lucky enough to have your work pay for it. People dressed up in suits and their best clothes to travel by air even if it was in a rickety Avro turbo-prop that didn’t look like it could get off the tarmac. A big attraction for Raj was going to the airport in Bombay to see one or the other of his parents off on a trip to Europe or America for some conference or other, wide eyed with all the hustle and bustle around him, people coming and going from far away places on the pages of those bound volumes of National Geographic. His mind’s eye conjured up magical visions of the names on the arrival and departure boards. Frankfurt, London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok, Dubai, Cairo and Paris; these places might as well have been in another galaxy as far as he was concerned. Indeed this was the crossroads of the world where he stood and he wondered when he would be able to see and experience the places whose names he read on the arrival and departure boards.
