A tribute to a truly extraordinary person

Dr Nandlal Tolani would have been 94 years old today if he had not breathed his last on 14 August 2017. He was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met and I consider myself very fortunate to have had the chance to work with him.

Pribhdas 'Kaka' Tolani (1893-1988) and his sons, Bombay, c1970s
Gopaldas, Pribhdas, Nandlal, Chandru

Nandlal was born in Sindh in 1924 into a family of wealth and social position. Through the hard work and intelligence of the previous generation, the family’s orchards had grown into an extensive landholding covering hundreds of thousands of acres. A princeling with a large estate he would inherit, Nandlal was also a brilliant student. He graduated from Agriculture College in Sakrand, and pursued his further education at Cornell University, USA. He was on his way home with a Master of Science degree in Agricultural Engineering, equipped to take his place on the family lands, when the impact of Partition started making itself felt. By the time his ship docked in Bombay in early 1948, it was clear that things were changing radically and Sindh would never be the same again.
Nandlal’s father had stayed behind in his home in Larkana – there was no reason for him to leave. However, he was jailed on suspicion of being an Indian spy. After several weeks, he was granted reprieve on condition that he leave Pakistan immediately. So Pribhdas ‘Kaka’ Tolani, a wealthy, prestigious and powerful landlord of Sindh arrived in Bombay as a refugee along with other hundreds of thousands who had been forced out of their homeland.
Members of the family went to work immediately to support themselves. As per the First Five Year Plan of the new Government of India, the focus was on agriculture and Nandlal Tolani, with his Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering, took up a project to build an earthen dam in Kachch. When that was successfully completed, he went on to do a second and, over the years, several more across Gujarat and Maharashtra.
In Bombay, Kaka constructed a building for himself and his family and gradually built more to house other refugees from Sindh who needed comfortable homes. As the years passed, Nandlal’s involvement in the Bombay business grew.
Finding absurd government policies and corrupt government officials difficult to tolerate, Nandlal returned to Cornell to work towards a PhD. This time he had his family, his wife Papu and their young children Rohet and Sujata with him. It was a pleasant interlude, and he wrote his thesis in less than two years, on the subject of how to develop an operational model to choose between a fertilizer plant and an irrigation project in underdeveloped countries. There were strong messages in this thesis for the Government of India, but sadly none were heeded.
Dr Tolani enjoyed life at Cornell and would in later years say that he considered himself more fit for a life in academia than one in business. He would have stayed on to study and teach at Cornell but Kaka wanted him back at home and,  the ever loving and dutiful son, he returned to Bombay.
However, Dr Tolani was determined to move away from construction. After considering many options in which business would be cleaner, he decided on shipping, which in the late 1960s was the Indian industry with the least corruption.
Starting with two ships – bought with savings rather than loans – Tolani Shipping grew gradually and systematically. Dr Tolani had no interest in becoming a great shipping tycoon and competing with other companies for the maximum number of ships. His aim was to create wealth and a comfortable life for himself, his family and his employees. While he achieved this, his company also grew to be highly regarded across the shipping world.
During this time, Dr Tolani systematically divided his time and energy between his work, his philanthropic activities, his leisure pursuits and his family. He started a college of commerce in Andheri East, and grew it into a centre where neighbourhood children, at an impressionable age, would receive a high quality well-rounded education with a strong academic component, the best extra-curricular opportunities and a wholesome moral base. He endowed a chair at his alma mater Cornell University – the Nandlal P Tolani Senior Professorship in International Trade Policy. His lifetime dream was to found an institute in India which provided a quality of education comparable to the education he had received at Cornell, and to do this he developed the Tolani Maritime Institute entirely with his own personal funds: a college of maritime education set in a large and beautiful campus with extensive workshops, library and a campus ship for practical lessons. As he said:

I never wanted to profit from my educational institutes. What I did want was to run professionally-managed organizations. I wanted to do good business and have a healthy bottom line, but always within the ambit of the law. While doing so, I wanted others around me to benefit too. Working with my team, we built a reputation for being decent, principled, and reliable. Today my biggest satisfaction comes from the respect that every member of Tolani Shipping, of Tolani College of Commerce and of Tolani Maritime Institute command, on the basis of this reputation.

Dr Tolani was never interested in wealth and power for the sake of wealth and power. The young Nandlal, a child who loved his grandmother dearly, had promised her that one day he would earn so much that she would have enough money to even fill up the toilet. When the time came that Dr Tolani could have fitted gold taps in his bathrooms, he chose instead the vision and the discipline to use his wealth to truly live life to the fullest. He built a beautiful home, indulged his passion for luxury cars – not with a fleet, but one which he would drive himself and another for his family – and surrounded himself with good friends. In his words:

To me, wealth has given security and some freedom of choice. I have been careful with my spending, and almost always chosen comfort over luxury.
I did use my wealth to indulge my love for bridge and sailing, and to try and attract others to these sports. These are sports that test our mettle, one mentally and the other physically. As such, they help us to engage and develop the faculties we are blessed with as human beings, and thus live life to the fullest.
If there is one lesson of life that I would like to leave my grandchildren, it is the fact that money has little value. Personal satisfaction is far more important than money. For my grandchildren, and for those who come after them, I leave a wish that they may always understand the true priorities of their own lives, and that they may always have the discernment to judge right from wrong. I believe these are the things, rather than money, by which a life may be deemed successful. 

Legacies of Partition

The herbal remedies manuscript

What do people carry with them when they are leaving beloved homes and know them may never return? Ever since I received an invitation to be part of the Remembering Partition event at Godrej Culture Labs, I've been putting stories together asking people I’ve interviewed to contribute to the museum.

A few days ago, I went to visit Madhuri Sheth whom I had interviewed for my book Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland and she gave me a hand-written Sindhi manuscript on herbal remedies which I packed and couriered to the museum. The manuscript was one of the precious belongings of her father, Udharam. Based on what she told me, here is something about it.

Udharam Holaram Gurnani came from a wealthy zamindar family of Old Sukkur, Sindh. To live an independent life, he left home and took up a job with the railways. Posted to different parts of the province, he lived with his wife and children in quarters provided by the railways. Whenever he was transferred to Sukkur, he would be given one of his father’s houses to live in. Udharam had studied only up to the fourth standard, but he had a wide range of interests – from medicine to spirituality and detective stories – and read a lot. He discussed philosophy with his friends, and his children were often included in the discussions.

Hemu Kalani

In August 1947, there were riots in Quetta and trains filled with fleeing women and children passed through Sukkur. Soon, migrants from across the new border started arriving to settle.  The town, once a prosperous place – a major centre of the fight for freedom, where 19-year-old Hemu Kalani had been hanged for his activities during the Quit India movement – changed fast with reports of looting and violence.

Udharam opted for a transfer across the new border. The family arrived in Bombay by ship from Karachi and lived on the docks for one and a half months, waiting for Udharam to be assigned a location.  Other families shared this plight. They cordoned off areas in unused parts of the dock’s warehouses, for themselves and their boxes of belongings. The government was distributing food, but there were no proper sanitary facilities.

When Udharam was issued posting orders for Achnera, a junction between Agra and Mathura, the family moved there but had to live on the platform for another few months, until quarters were allotted.  Even when baby Neelam, the youngest boy of Udharam and Parmeshwari’s nine children, died on the Achnera railway platform, the family continued to take the hardship in its stride, always conscious that there were others who had suffered more.

It was in 1987, when Udharam died, that his daughter Madhuri Sheth (born in June 1935) came across this manuscript, one of the precious belongings carried from Sindh in the boxes that had survived the months on the Bombay docks and the Achnera railway platform along with the family.  Udharam used these remedies along with healthy foods to treat illness in the family.

The secular Sanghi

On this day in 1997, Vishnu Shahani died. His widow, Rita Shahani, would write:

He had not been ill. There was no warning. No intimation. There was no goodbye. When I woke up that morning, he was gone. 

Years later, I worked with Rita to bring out an English translation of the (Sindhi) book she wrote after Vishnu’s death. As we got the book ready for press, Rita died. It was a shock. Her daughter, my dear friend Madhavi Kapur, launched the book a few days later on 23 November 2013, a tribute to both her parents Rita and Vishnu.

Tragically, less than six months ago, we lost Madhavi too. For many of us, the pain of that loss will always remain.  

Madhavi resembled her father Vishnu in many ways, specifically in her strong principles and commitment to social welfare. At the core of Vishnu’s identity was his commitment to Hinduism. Today the Rashtriya Seva Sangh (RSS) is perceived as a fundamentalist organization: inflexible, chauvinistic and with a capacity for violence. Vishnu, a dedicated Sanghi, was open, caring and devoted only to truth and the betterment of humankind. 

While Madhavi’s biggest contribution is in education and she is remembered with love and gratitude by her thousands of pupils, she is also well known for her unwavering stand towards secularism in India. On one occasion, she took a Pune housing society to court because they refused to accept a Muslim neighbour. She won the case, the Muslim family moved in to the building - and very soon they were accepted by their neighbours and integrated.

Thinking about Madhavi today, I wanted to do something that would have made her happy. So I uploaded Rita's book and you can click on Tales from Yerwada Jail to read it if you want. 

Tales from Yerwada Jail

At bedtime every night, Vishnu Shahani’s two young children refuse to sleep until he tells them a story from his time in jail. Vishnu’s stories embody a spirit of adventure, and the youthful excitement of overcoming a powerful and oppressive enemy. He speaks of personal involvement in the Indian freedom struggle, without a trace of complaint against the hardship he faced.
After Vishnu’s death, his widow, Rita, interviews others to get a fuller picture. She finds that the perception of each participant in the family’s history varies slightly. She pieces the versions together, allowing the differing interpretations to coexist.
Time has moved on, and while Indian democracy has survived, memories of the movement for freedom against Imperial rule have receded. The names of Gandhi, Nehru and just a few others, are remembered. Through the story of the Shahani family, this book honours the struggle and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary families in the 1940s.
Tales from Yerwada Jail also tells of the little-known contribution of the Sindhis to Independence, and their struggle to find livelihood and new homes after Partition.

Monsoon Country 2

On a day like this, I feel grateful that I don’t live in Bombay anymore. Fifteen consecutive Bombay monsoons cured me of the concept that rains might be poetic or romantic because in Bombay what the rains represent is the stink of damp clothes, soggy biscuits, fungus on every untended surface, and turds and plastic bags that flap around your ankles as you try to cross a flooding road. (For a longer whine, please read Monsoon country 1)
One of the most striking annual features of those fifteen years of monsoon was a newspaper front-page headline which said, “City limps back to normalcy”. Usually on another day there would be a three-column photograph, an overhead street shot which showed nothing but large black Bombay umbrellas. Though the photograph was doubtless shot fresh every year, it looked like the same photograph. Surely they were the same umbrellas.
What ever happened to those umbrella photographs? I went looking for one a few years ago to illustrate something I wrote about in my book on stories from Sindh but could not find one and felt sorry that I had to send the book off to print without it. Eventually, I came across this on pinterest.
The reason I wanted it for the book was because something my mother told me made me realise that in Sindh in the 1940s, an umbrella was less a household item and more something you saw only in movies and magazines. What could the displaced people of Sindh, who had lost everything they had and arrived with nothing in Bombay, thought and felt when they encountered the relentless torrents of rain and the acres of jostling umbrellas of their new home?

The sari that travelled from India to Pakistan

Picture credit: Mukhtar Husain

On Eid day, I was touched to read this facebook post by my friend Rumana Husain who lives in Karachi. She was dressed in a sari that had travelled quite a long way to get to her – but I had not realised until I saw her photo and read her post how special that made it to her.
In February 2015, my daughter and spent a few days in Kochi as guests of our friend Mathew Anthony. I spoke at a Rotary Club meeting and Veda performed a guitar concert at David Hall, an elegant venue in Fort Kochi. One evening, Mathew took us to Kalyan Silks and we decided to buy a traditional Kerala sari as a souvenir of the trip. Knowing Rumana’s love for saris with different local traditions, I bought one for her too. I took it home and put it in my cupboard, and every few days (and, as time passed, every few weeks) would wonder how I was going to get it across to her. At first I was waiting for a visitor from Pakistan who would agree to carry it for her. As the weeks turned into months, I began thinking of taking it with me when I next visited London and requesting a Pakistani friend there to get it sent across to Rumana.
In April 2016, as I packed for a trip to London, I realised that more than a year had passed since I bought the sari. I stook looking at it and wondered what to do. Karachi wasn’t that far away – how silly could I get! I made a parcel and on 11 April dispatched it to Rumana by Speedpost. The post office clerk said that the parcel would reach in two weeks and I felt happy, anticipating my friend’s surprise and pleasure when she received it.
Two weeks passed and there was no word from her. Then another week, and then another. On 14 May, I telephoned Rumana to wish her Happy Birthday and could not stay silent about the sari any longer. I felt terrible hearing her thank-yous when there was nothing to show for it except the post office document which tracked the very interesting and circuitous journey her sari was on. It just did not make any sense to either of us. I kept thinking cynically that with the parcel having been opened so many times, the sari must have fallen out at some point and wandered off to another owner.
Rumana was visiting her son Adil in Singapore when the sari finally arrived at her home in Karachi on 1 June 2015. It was no longer important that it had taken so long, not even important that Rumana was not going to see it for another few weeks till she got home – the sari had reached! I was relieved. And a few weeks later, very moved to see her post and read what she wrote:

Eid Day! It called for wearing a very special sari. This sari was bought last year by my writer and artist friend Saaz Aggarwal in Kerala (she herself lives in Pune). It has a story, which you might find interesting: Saaz kept waiting for someone to carry it for me to Karachi but failed. Eventually she decided to parcel it. On May 14, my birthday, she called to wish me and asked if I had received the parcel. We were both upset to find that even after two months it had not reached me. She then went on a fact-finding mission of the lost saris of Kerala and Pondicherry (she has sent two) and learnt that the saris have had lives of their own! The parcel journeyed from Pune to Mumbai, then to Kolkata. It came back to Mumbai and then from Pune (or was it Mumbai?) it travelled to Karachi when I was in Singapore! Love this elegant sari, which I only saw on my return after a month. I decided to do some research about it and this is what I have found on the Internet. So come with me to this journey of the Kerala/Kasavu sari!
"Mundum Neriyathum (or its modernized version - Kasavu sari) can be traced back to the third century BC when Shraman tradition was spread all over Kerala. Shramanas followed a simple life style. They used to wear hand woven cotton which is yellowish off-white in colour. The tradition of golden coloured borders (Kasavu) along the Mundum Neriyathum might have been influenced by the Graeco-Roman "Palla" or Palmyrene. The Malabar coast had flourishing overseas trade with the Mediterranean world since antiquity. It should also be noted that traditional clothing of a region is closely associated with the local culture, climate and landscape. Mundum Neriyathum was well adapted to the tropical climate of Kerala. If you notice the traditional clothing all across the subcontinent, you can see that local people tend to wear clothes with colour contrasting to the landscape of that region. For example, the traditional colourful Rajasthani clothing match with the desert landscape of Rajasthan (same as our Tharparkar region); or the radiant traditional dress of Kashmiri women contrasting with the whitish landscape of Kashmir. Likewise, the off-white coloured Mundum Neriyathum contrasts well with the vivid landscape of Kerala." 

Ekta, Rumana, Saaz, Veda outside Rumana's home. Karachi, Feb 2013
Picture credit: Ajay Aggarwal

  

Sindhi Papad

Vikram Doctor curates a very high-quality food podcast. A week or so ago, he called to ask me if I could tell him something about Sindhi papad. I was reluctant because, though I have written a book about Sindhi stories and all, I don’t really know that much. To be honest, I do enjoy my papad, but it is not a tradition from childhood meals or anything like that. I told him I’d try and find out what I could and a few days later told him what I’d found out.
When I listened to the podcast, I must say I was impressed with the depth of Vikram Doctor’s research. At the low end of the spectrum was my own voice – embarrassingly pontificating. There was also one moment in one of the podcast interviews which I felt was unduly facetious. There’s a fairly widespread tendency to mock Sindh and Sindhis and I feel it is necessary to avoid anything low and of that nature.
Papad is certainly a Sindhi staple – that much even I know. But not everyone understands the strength that this simple staple embodies.

Angan of a joint family in Sindh
Watercolour on art paper by Menghraj Talreja (b1924)
Collection of Sanjay and Barbara Mohinani

In the old days in Sindh, papad was made at home. Women and children worked together in the angan, the courtyard, of the family home making the dough and rolling it out and laying it on mats to dry.
After Partition, families splintered, people moved to new homes and took time to settle down. Many enterprising women of families who had suddenly lost everything and had no means of income started making papad and pickle at home and walked from door to door, selling their produce to the better-off Sindhis in the towns and cities where they – equally displaced and confused – had settled, but not settled sufficiently to be making their own papad yet. Papad-making is a tedious and time-consuming process, and very soon more and more families were outsourcing from the displaced women who made it their profession.
Papad is eaten and enjoyed all over India but for the people of Sindh it has always been a staple. Sindhi hospitality is famous – when a Sindhi family is expecting a visitor, the first thing on their minds is what they are going to serve to eat and drink. A guest to a traditional Sindhi home would be greeted with papad and a glass of water, and this would invariably be followed by something more elaborate.  
Nobody seems to know the origins of papad but in a dry and blazing hot province of very little rainfall, in a time before refrigeration and air-conditioning, before even the waters of the bountiful Indus were diverted into a widespread irrigation system, it’s easy enough to imagine the process of evolution by which papad naturally emerged from leftovers in Sindhi kitchens!
The most common Sindhi papad is made with a mixture of urad dal spiced with lots of black pepper. Some people add jeera, hing and other flavours. The stiff dough is rolled out into circles like extra-thin rotis, placed on mats and dried in the sun. The papad is usually roasted on a flame and eaten, but on special occasions it is deep fried.

Goodies on sale outside Kailash Parbat, Mumbai

Sindhis also make wadi, kheecha and kachri which are different kinds of dried ready-to-fry goodies. Wadis are little nuggets of dal ground up and dried in the sun and they can also be added to gravy dishes. Kheecha are also papad, but made with rice or sago. Elderly Sindhi women relish their memories of eating deep-fried miteranji kachri with saeebhaji-khichdi, one of the most popular Sindhi meals. In Sindh, kachri was made from traditional Indian vegetables like bhindi, gawar, karela and padwal, spiced with salt, chilly powder, amchur and other flavours, and dried in the sun. Nowadays, vegetable kachri is rare and the terms kachri and kheecha tend to be interchangeable.
Roasted papad is a must at each meal in a traditional Sindhi family. Even breakfast of loli or alu-mani, or syel mani is always followed by papad. Papad is such a strong habit to many Sindhis that they absolutely must eat it with every single meal.
Among the Sindhi Bhaiband community which has trading outposts in every port across the globe, papad is rolled, dried, packed in the home country and sent out to the men in distant lands. In the early pioneering days of the community, they bootstrapped in faraway countries, enduring hardship and working to earn money for their families at home. They often had cooks who took care of their meals, but papad was rare. As they became prosperous, they could eat whatever they wanted and often arranged for consignments of papad from home.

The Shikarpur boy who built a Rs10K empire

Yesterday, Pune lost one of its stalwarts of industry, PP Chabria. Founder and Chairman of the Finolex Group, Mr Chhabria died at 86 after a brief illness. He was widely known to be gentle, dignified and the personification of humility. He was also a man of extraordinary achievement.
Prahlad Parsram Chhabria was born into a wealthy business family of Karachi, on 12 March 1930. As a child, he spent happy times in his native town of Shikarpur, the love for which he carried to the end of his days. When his father died, he was just twelve years old. Within a short while, the family lost all its money. He was taken out of school and went to work in what turned out to be a series of menial jobs. As a helper in a cloth store, he got used to winding up bales of cloth, sweeping and even washing the shop owner’s lunch utensils. As a cleaner in a truck, he sat next to the Pathan driver and in a few weeks was able to converse with him in fluent Pushtu. After two months working with his brother-in-law in Amritsar, he had picked up Punjabi too. In later years, living in Pune, he invariably chose to address public gatherings in Marathi rather than English or Hindi.
On his way home to Karachi at the end of his stay in Amritsar, travelling alone by train, the young Prahlad woke in the morning to find that a currency note had been stolen from him. Shocked and upset, he had the courage to approach the railway police at the first halt, the tenacity to insist that the co-passenger he suspected be searched, and the remarkable power of memory and observation to prove that the note found was his: to the astonishment of the police constable, this young child knew the number on the note! PP Chhabria was that rare individual whose education ended when he was twelve years old but had the intelligence to learn every aspect of business on the job, and as he became established in business, he was always respected for his prowess in finance, sales, human resources and public relations.
In 1945, at the age of fifteen, PP Chhabria came to live with relatives in Pune working in their home and business to earn his keep. Two years later, the events following Partition caused his mother and brothers to flee from their home in Sindh and join him in Pune. Like many other displaced families, they started a small business of their own. By now he knew the city well and used this knowledge, bringing electrical goods from Bombay and supplying to local shopkeepers. It was this fledgling business that he grew to the Rs10,000 crore Finolex Group, working in close partnership with his younger brother, Kishan, KP Chhabria. In 1954, they established Finolex Cables and in 1981, Finolex Industries.
PP Chhabria was a loving family man, devoted to his wife Mohini and their three children, Aruna, Prakash and Sonali. In August 1981, tragedy struck and they lost Sonali to leukaemia. PP Chhabria had been a talented singer, excelling in the words and melodies of KL Saigal, Pankaj Mullick and others ever since he was a young child. After Sonali died, he stopped singing. His guru, Swami Ram Baba was a great source of strength through the difficult times of his life.
In the years to come, as Finolex grew from strength to strength, and PP Chhabria and his family established the Mukul Madhav Foundation and the Hope Foundation and Research Centre, active in the fields of medical assistance, education and social welfare. He also set up schools and an engineering college in Ratnagiri, always conscious of the lack of education in his own life and committed to providing opportunities to others.
first appeared in Pune Mirror under the heading The Karachi boy who built a Rs10K crore empire on 6 May 2016

Lucknow Diary

Basement bonanza

It was a Sunday afternoon, and most of the Hazratganj shops were closed. Where were we going to get our mulmul chikan kurtas? As we disappointedly discussed the options, a personable young man materialised and beckoned us to follow. In a few minutes, we had entered an underground cavern, a 6000-square-foot wonderland displaying embroidered fabric of every hue and application: not just kurtas but exquisite table linen, curtains, and even embroidered Pashminas. This was not the mid-1980s SEWA revival of chikankari visible in street stalls all over India. The store, Ada, was an exposition of nawabi wares from times bygone, and clearly beyond us. As we tried to slink away, explaining that we didn’t have time to get anything tailored, he protested, “But I can ship it to you in Pune!”
How did he know where we lived? Grinning at our incredulous expressions, he pulled out a copy of the book I’d signed for him after my event the previous day. Vinod Punjabi was not so author-struck that he didn’t laugh at me for having written a book about Sindh without being able to speak the language. I, however, was so flattered that we ended up shopping for double of what we’d intended.

Green room grouse

The Lucknow Literature Carnival, founded by the elegant and visionary Kanak Chauhan, is in its third year and my book on Sindh formed a fairly respectable sideshow. The festival’s Authors’ Lounge was a place to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. We enjoyed Ashok Vajpeyi’s jokes and stories, and were so charmed by Keki Daruwalla that it was impossible to resist buying a copy of his new novel, Ancestral Affairs. It was interesting to learn about Manish Gupta’s online initiative to promote Hindi poetry and see some of its high-quality clips on the festival screens. It was also interesting to be a small-town outsider from the insular world of the opinionated Delhi journalist. “The rural voter is so intelligent!” said one with a faraway look of enchantment in her eyes. “It was the urban youth who voted this government to power,” declared another with authority.

Fading gentility

In Lucknow we found upperclass Hindustani to be the prevailing language – even among the young, cool and motivated volunteers at the Lucknow Literature Festival. However, the city’s elegant old architecture is almost all gone. My husband Ajay had lived here in the late-1970s and looked in vain for familiar landmarks, seeing only flyovers, shopping malls and fancy multi-storeyed condominiums in their place.
The beautiful Imambaras of Lucknow are also in a state of genteel decay, the golden spires on each dome tarnished and unrecognizable for what they were. We left a leisurely exploration of these exquisite monuments for another time, and went instead to meet Lucknow’s iconic bookseller, Ram Advani, who was convalescing at home with a hip fracture.
Listening to Ram’s stories of the past was a pleasure. Active in his Hazratganj bookstore until his fall, Ram has lived in Lucknow since the mid-1920s, when he was a toddler. While he has clearly lost touch with his mother tongue, Sindhi, he was full of praise for his people and the single-minded determination with which they started afresh in Lucknow after Partition. “They sold their products on the streets,” he told us. “They established a reputation for being reliable and for keeping their commitments, and they set standards for local businesspeople. Their businesses have grown into huge, modern concerns and they have become wealthy.”

Chaat city

In this city of culture where shopkeepers attend literature festivals, we were lucky to meet Murlidhar Ahuja and hear one of these stories in the first person. Murli’s father, Dayaldas Ahuja, ran the railway canteen at Sukkur Railway Station in Sindh. A refugee after Partition, he worked as a tea boy in Ajmer Station, eventually taking it over. In 1960 he moved with his family to Lucknow where he ran a dhabha in Charbagh. He invited his elder brother and his sister’s husband to join him and, working eight-hour shifts each, they kept the dhabha open around the clock. This was the origin of the family business, a chain of hotels and restaurants and a bakery industry.
Lucknow is famous for its kababs and biriyanis but vegetarians must make do with chaat. We had some at Murli’s Royal Café, a match to anything that the Aggarwal kitchen can turn out.
But the best vegetarian food in all of Lucknow, and we were privileged to have a meal, is at the home of Urvashi Sahni. There were seven unique dishes, most remarkable of which was a colourful blend of potato and beetroot, flavoured with finely-chopped onion, coriander and green chilly, and spiked with uncooked mustard oil.

Burgeoning girls’ education

Urvashi founded the Study Hall Foundation for girls’ education nearly thirty years ago and her work has transformed the lives of thousands of young women in and around Lucknow. While the Study Hall School initially seeded her other initiatives – a school for underprivileged girls; a special needs school; a centre for learning; a rural school; an Open School centre for children of migrant workers; and an NGO, Didi, that creates employment for the girls’ mothers – outside funding was essential for growth. Urvashi told us that one of her biggest donors is the Kewalramani Foundation.

Extra

With its IT towers and trendy youngsters, typified by the courteous and motivated team of volunteers at the festival, who would say that Lucknow was the capital of a backward state? One morning, however, I peeped into the canteen of the luxurious (but poorly maintained) government guesthouse a friend had arranged accommodation for us in, and saw a dozen or so cocooned bodies sleeping on the floor. Leftover food from the previous day lay uncovered on a platform. Packets of dal, spices, cashewnuts and other items were randomly scattered on a low shelf. Underneath the shelf was a basin heaped with delicious-looking balushahi, and next to it lay a pair of someone’s dirty shoes.
an edited version of this diary first appeared in Outlook magazine issue of 14 March 2016

Karachi bakery, a south-Indian specialty

Sindhis are so well integrated wherever they live that nobody ever thinks they have come from somewhere else. Somehow, this extends to the perception that 'Karachi' is a land of sweetmeats which belongs to India. According to this board we came across at Bangalore airport this morning, Karachi Bakery is a 'South Indian Special'.

Chile Diary

First impressions

Santiago is a city of parks, water-bodies, sculptures, churches, and a marked European influence. The homes I visited were in stylish and comfortable high-rise buildings. However, even those districts of the city in which the underprivileged live are clean and well-maintained, with sturdy buildings constructed to withstand the frequent earthquakes. Europe recedes and Latin America emerges in street upon street of two-storey houses vibrant with graffiti murals. Santiago, with its arty metro railway and giant supermarkets is still a city whose petrol pumps and parking lots have attendants.
With the Andes hovering protectively over Chile, Santiago sits in a valley surrounded by low snow-peaked mountains. It’s a beautiful backdrop – but one which makes it highly polluted. In winter, the city waits anxiously for rain to relieve its smog. The day I was leaving, a pollution crisis was announced. Forty percent of the city’s cars were kept off the roads and schools cancelled sports and physical education classes.

That Sinbad feeling 

I was in Chile with a tight interview schedule, and had studiously avoided learning about sights that I might never see. So when we landed in Iquique, about 1500km north of Santiago, I was astonished and mesmerised by the landscape: sandy hills extending from the Atacama Desert on one side and the beach-lined Pacific on the other.
Since the mid-1970s, Iquique has had a zone for free trade, and Sindhi entrepreneurs were among the first to make use of the opportunity. Now numbering a few hundred, they form a close-knit group of fun-loving cosmopolitan families. I stayed with the gracious Renu Melwani, in what was once Pinochet’s Iquique home.
Driving to the free zone next morning, I passed shacks selling varieties of fish and shellfish. Pelicans and Patagonian sea lions, jostling for the entrails tossed back into the sea, formed another unexpected and delightful sight. Containers from China crowd the Iquique port and the zone stocks merchandise of every kind, including used cars from the US and Japan. Next day we visited Humberstone, a saltpetre mining town abandoned in 1960 when chemical fertilisers phased out saltpetre. The area is also rich in copper and Chile is the world’s largest exporter. Among the pervasive pick-up vans of the mining community it felt good to see Mahindras. The picturesque road through this hilly desert is lined with roadside shrines commemorating loved ones who died on the spot. We also passed sand graffiti sites, aboriginal and contemporary.

Non-veg country

In Iquique, dinner at Miguel’s is a must: it’s a Chinese restaurant with a menu that extends to samosa and loli (traditional Sindhi spicy roti). Another memorable meal was in the resort town of Viña del Mar. A vegetarian alone, rather than grapple with a menu in Spanish, I bought an avocado and ate it on the seafront with a packet of fries from McDonald’s and an occasional benediction of icy water from the Pacific.
Surprisingly, one of Santiago’s popular restaurants, El Naturista, is vegetarian. A century ago, its founder apparently travelled to India, and was influenced by Tagore. We ate Arroz Hortelana, a rice preparation; Papas Salteadas, potato with herbs; and Verduras al Gratin, baked vegetables with cheese. My favourite was the quesillo, Chilean white cheese, and the luscious artichokes native to Chile.
Santiago has good Indian restaurants, and we enjoyed flavoursome meals, with chilly reduced for local tastebuds, at both Saffron and Majestic. The owner of Majestic, Suresh Goklani, came from Ahmedabad to work for a Punta Arenas trading company when he was 20, in the 1970s. Today he owns a hotel, a chain of restaurants in Santiago, and several businesses across Chile.

End of the world

Before the Panama Canal, every ship stopped in Punta Arenas, near the southern tip of South America. As early as 1907, a Sindhi entrepreneur had disembarked and opened a store. Our weekend with the families here was one of Sindhi hospitality, fascinating stories and exquisite vistas – interspersed alternately with benevolent sunshine, stormy rain with Antarctic winds, and beautiful, gentle snow. On the first night, the placid streets of this historic town suddenly erupted with revellers. Chile had defeated traditional rival Bolivia 5-0 in the Copa America.

Earthquake capital 

Everyone in Chile has earthquake stories. I have one too: I slept peacefully and only learnt about it from the Indian ambassador, Debraj Pradhan, a few hours after it took place. We were in his very Indian, light-filled home and I was flying back later that day. He told me that India and its arts and industry are integral to life in Chile, that yoga and classical dance are widely practiced, and that the Sindhi businessmen established for decades, as well as pan-Indian entrants from the new Indian multinationals, are treated with respect and warmth, and lead comfortable lives. Interesting to know this about a country so far from India that if you tried to go any further you would be on your way back.

And, a few more things ... 

It was a writer’s dream, being invited to a book club meeting on the other side of the world in an exotic place called Iquique and finding that some of the women had read a book I’d written and others were reading it.
The view from this balcony, in the house where Pinochet once lived, is coastline on one side and stark desert mountains on the other.


As a young child, I lived in a place from which the closest town was Valparai, Tamil Nadu. It was a special highlight of this visit to spend a few hours in stunningly beautiful Valparaiso, Chile, once one of South America’s major ports and today a UNESCO heritage site. The sea, the heritage buildings near the port, stacks of brightly coloured huts on the hillside - and the most striking street graffitti. Of course I will have to go back for more.
There was an 11-hour transit in Paris on the way home. At the end of the aerobridge leading out of the plane stood three burly, stern-looking policemen primed to catch all the Santiago thieves trying to enter their lovely city. “Where are you going?” one of them barked at me with hatred. “Mumbai,” I replied, surprised. By then, leafing through my passport he had found, to his horror, a Schengen visa that entitled me to enter Spain on 2 July – nearly two weeks later! In renewed anger and disgust he shouted again, “Where are you going?”
Ahhhhh …. India, India!
Parts of this appeared in Outlook magazine in the 17 August 2015 issue.

In Chile, on the Sindhi trail

Punta Arenas, Chile, is one of the southern-most cities in the world. There was a time when every ship crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan or around Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn) halted there. Navigating giant waves, deadly currents, Antarctic blizzards and icebergs, the journeys took months. Arriving at Punta Arenas, the storm-battered, scurvy-ridden sailors would stumble out of their cramped quarters in relief. The town thrived.

View from room window

We flew in more than a hundred years after the Panama Canal had changed things for Punta Arenas. At the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, we bumped into someone from our plane who had stayed over to catch his (once-a-week) flight to the Falkland Islands. Paul, from the South Atlantic Research Institute, told us that there was a post office nearby where Robert Scott, the early Antarctic explorer, had posted letters and packets.
These days too, this historic town is a base for Antarctic expeditions. The less adventurous can catch the tourist boat to a nearby island thickly populated by penguins. Punta Arenas, like much of Chile, nestles between wooded slopes on one side and a lavish seafront on the other. Like other Chilean cities, it has well-maintained public spaces that sport sculptures of different types: traditional European, contemporary and aboriginal. Its cemetery is said to be exceptionally beautiful and historic. We saw none of these, however, having come with the specific purpose of meeting the Sindhi families of this town.

I first saw the name Punta Arenas on a map in a book by the French scholar Claude Markovits, The global world of Indian Merchants 1750-1947 Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama. The map marks places around the world which had branches of trading firms headquartered in Hyderabad, Sindh between 1890 and 1940. I felt surprised and impressed to see that it included about a dozen places in South America. How had Sindhis got so far away from home so long ago? Invited to meals at the homes of the Sindhi families of Punta Arenas to be told their stories, it felt like I was eleven and invited to Harry Potter’s birthday party.
The first evening, Chile was playing arch-rival Bolivia in the Copa America, and I was learning how, one day in 1907, a Sindhi merchant, Harumal, came ashore. As the fascinating story proceeded, raucous cries rang out and vehicles revved loudly on the streets outside. Chile had won, 5-0.
The account of how Harumal opened his first store; how it got handed over to someone else; what happened during the First World War and then the Second; how Partition affected the Sindhis of Punta Arenas, will form part of Sindhi Tapestry, the ‘companion volume’ to my first book, Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland.
So far away from India, and with their home here for more than a hundred years, the Sindhis of Punta Arenas still speak Sindhi and eat Sindhi food. Family attachment is as strong as I would expect in a joint family. Like other diasporic Sindhis, they have an international network: not only family members and business connections. Three household help I saw in the homes of these Chilean Sindhis were from, respectively, Nigeria, Indonesia and Burma. The homes were lavish and decorated like those of fabled Oriental potentates, thick with curios and mirrors and objets d’art. In front of the Hindu temple of Punta Arenas stand three empty pedestals, awaiting statues of Gandhi, Tagore and Mother Theresa which they are preparing and will soon install. On Sunday morning, we attended satsang in the temple, which occupies prime real estate on the seafront. It was a moving service, conducted in both Sindhi and Spanish.
Satsangs are an essential component of life in the Sindhi diaspora, and they tend to have a syncretic character. Like in other Sindhi mandars around the world, many world religions are represented here. It was once an essential characteristic of Sindh that spirituality and the inner life were revered beyond human classification. And then, it became an irony of history that the Hindus of Sindh turned out to hold so much store by their own religion that they were forced into exile from a beloved homeland on account of it.
In 1947, these doughty people lost more than their homeland and their possessions. In their determination to move on and make the best of what they were left with, they lost their past too. In an extreme endorsement of this easily-verified fact, someone in Punta Arenas told me, “I really learnt a lot today. I never even knew that Mohenjodaro was in Sindh!”
Yet another thing that suffered a blow was the Sindhi brand identity. Arriving in Bombay with nothing to call their own, many turned to trading. A number of these Sindhis had professional degrees and had left behind steady, lucrative practices. In a new land, and with the urgency of feeding their families, trading was a way to make a respectable living. Competing as they were with cartels entrenched for decades, and obliged to trade on lower margins to get a foot in the door, they were branded early on as ‘cheats’.
Considered rationally, it does seem likely that an unbiased analysis of a behaviour bell curve of successful Sindhi businessmen would reveal the majority to be hardworking, opportunistic, shrewd (perhaps lucky too, as many of them would stress) – and with a dishonesty rating on par with any random sample of population.
As it happened, the early resentment produced Bollywood caricatures of wealthy and villainous businessmen speaking in thick Sindhi accents, and widespread aphorisms of the “If you meet a Sindhi and a snake, whom should you kill first?” kind. These were things I began to notice when my book inexplicably established me as some kind of authority on the Sindhi diaspora.
In 1947, when the Hindus of Sindh dispersed and sought new homes, many settled in Bombay. However, an early foundation had been established for the diaspora by the pioneering Sindhi entrepreneurial community, the Bhaibands, who had their kothis in the Shahibazar locality of Hyderabad, Sindh. As mapped by Markovits, they had branches all over the world, particularly dense in South East Asia and Africa, and even South America. This gave a base to the displaced ones. Families sent their young sons out to these outposts. They worked hard, deprived themselves, sent money home, and (some sooner than others) started their own businesses which, over the years, grew and grew. Often enough, they were displaced yet again by global politics and economics. In the 1950s, events in Vietnam sent them out to Thailand and Laos. In the 1960s, their stronghold in Indonesia loosened and Hong Kong opened up. In the early 1970s, Africa became hostile. The story went on.
It was something that happened in Chile in the mid-1970s that took today’s Sindhi population there. A government leaning to Communism was violently overthrown by the military dictator Pinochet. The new government began to nurture the Chilean economy with policies formulated by a group of young US-educated economists wryly referred to as the Chicago Boys. One of the initiatives was the Iquique free trade zone. In came the Sindhis.
In Iquique, I stayed with Renu Melwani, in what was once Pinochet’s home in the town he is said to have loved dearly. Bordered on one side by the Pacific Ocean and on the other by a range of low hills extending from the Atacama Desert and running parallel to the Andes, Iquique’s natural advantages include an exceptionally beautiful landscape; a countryside so rich in copper that Chile is the largest exporter in the world; bountiful coastal waters that export seafood delicacies all over the world; a harbour so filled with containers that the free zone is like a mini-China in Chile, stocked with inexpensive products that are sold locally and exported to neighbouring countries by trading companies in the zone.
If the Sindhis I met in Iquique could be used as a base to create a stereotype, then Sindhis are kind and welcoming; cosmopolitan, fun-loving and extremely close-knit. At the Hindu temple in Iquique, the Saturday soup kitchen has volunteers from across the town to cook and take the food out to underprivileged areas of the town. One evening, at a potluck dinner in Renu’s home, I helped myself to an unfamiliar dish and learnt that it was gado-gado, an Indonesian delicacy. Where else but in Chile?
Chile is a beautiful country with great natural beauty. I returned home with the unforgettable scenery of the places and of its all-pervasive public art installations implanted in my mind.
I suppose I will have to admit that I also loved Chile because, for a writer, there is absolutely nothing which compares to travelling half way across the world and finding people there waiting for you with your book in their hand.
parts of this first appeared as A Long Way from Home in Hindustan Times on 2 Aug 2015

Return to a Vanished Homeland

There are times when you climb into the wardrobe, grope around expectantly, and encounter only its impassive, wooden back. And there are times when you peer past the coats … and a chilly breeze hits your cheek! With mounting excitement you gaze through the wintry landscape, and spot that beloved lamppost. It was the same sort of feeling that overwhelmed me when I opened my passport that day in March, and found I’d been granted a Pakistan visa.
There are places in this world that hardly anybody knows about, which even fewer have access to. When you travel there, you come back changed. You have visited a forbidden land; it has left its mark on you. That’s what happened to me.
Until then, Pakistan had been a villainous, danger-strewn place which existed with the purpose of killing Indian soldiers; sometimes beheading them in a dastardly way. Occasional blips revealed a different reality. A Pakistani couple once stayed in our home for a week. We were so alike, it was uncanny. We became friends. They pointed out an oddity we had previously taken for granted: Pune has many Karachi Sweet Marts. Our two cities obviously had a fundamental connection that had never been explored. One day, their adult daughters visited. We got along swimmingly. In the course of enthusiastic conversation, one of them asked me, “You are Hindu? Really? Hindu? I can’t believe it!” She stared into my eyes, and shuddered. It struck me that we had somehow been conditioned to view each other through distorted mirrors.

Some years later, the time came when, after two generations of silence, I began to learn about my blood connection with the horrid enemy country. My mother, Situ Savur (nee Bijlani), told me a little about her childhood in Sindh. I wrote a book, and found myself accepting an invitation to her vanished homeland. The back of the wardrobe gently gave way, and in we stepped.

Reaffirming Pune-Karachi bonds:
Ekta, Saaz and Veda Aggarwal,
Tehseen Agha and her dog Suru
pose with the traders of Zainab Market.

It was Narnia in the rule of the White Witch. In February 2013, as we attended the Karachi Literature Festival for the launch of my book, a bomb killed 200 people in Quetta. There was outrage and fear. People went about their lives silently, bravely, helpless in the clutches of evil over which they had no control.
Under these forces, the quality of creative output we saw, in literature, music, clothing, dining venues, art curating – on brightly coloured lorries – was outstanding. It was heartrending.
Another important thing happened. The warmth and hospitality my family and I received changed our feelings not just towards Pakistan but towards humankind. Leaving was a wrench. The parting pangs were reminiscent of the desolation of early childhood boarding-school homesickness. Perhaps they arose from a cellular memory of my grandparents’ Partition pangs.
A year later, the chasm opened anew. I returned, to attend a seminar organized by the Sindh Madressatul Islam University. With disbelief (and gratification) I had seen my book read and enjoyed by Sindhis around the world, praised by academics and historians. But I was unprepared for the newspaper report referring to me as ‘the Indian scholar Saaz Aggarwal’. The … who? It was like being called ‘Daughter of Eve’.
This trip would be unforgettable in a sad way. Hours after I returned, my mother died. She was 79, had led a good life, and passed on peacefully. It was not a tragedy. But I was unprepared.
Just two years before, she had begun handing over to me the baton of a previously-concealed heritage. Her neglected memories surfaced and, like grimy treasures, glistened with the polish of attention. What we excavated brought me new life realities; new interpretations of myself. The process was therapeutic for her too. She woke from happy dreams of loved ones from olden times, re-established links with cousins, recalled long-lost traditions. I felt devastated that she had abandoned our project (abandoned me) so callously.
Clearing out her house, my brother and I came across something she had written years before, a lovely little anecdote that was missing from my book: my mother’s contribution, from beyond the grave, to the paper, Wherever, which I submitted to the university.

We also found a 1957 document belonging to our father, Ramanand 'Bob' Savur. It was a red hardcover booklet, a historic ‘India-Pakistan Passport’. Supporting correspondence told us how the chasm had opened for him. I remembered the tears that filled his eyes when watching TV coverage of calamitous events in Pakistan.
We knew that he (a south Indian Brahmin who met my mother in college in Bombay) had visited Pakistan as a young man, and that his passport had been misplaced by the police, causing him anxious moments at departure. I knew I would treasure the precious passport, one that belongs in a museum, as long as I lived.
For me, too, leaving Pakistan had been difficult. Both times, complications arising from bureaucratic requirements had caused panic at the border. As I wait for my next Narnia episode, wondering when and how it will happen, I ponder on these minor traumas, dying tremors of the uprooting of a generation from its homeland.

This article first appeared in Hindustan Times on 7 September 2014 

The red India-Pakistan passport

In March 2014, after our mother Situ Savur died, my brother Ravi and I had to clear up her things and empty the house she was living in.

Sorting out her papers, one of the things we came across was a red India-Pakistan passport belonging to our father. It seems as if in those days, special passports were issued for travel between the two newly-separated countries.

Along with the passport was the correspondence which gave us some background: an application had been made on 20 June 1957 and the passport was issued less than a month later, on 16 July 1957. It was valid for one year.

The application for a visa to visit Pakistan is dated 11 July 1957, before the passport was issued. The visa was valid for only Karachi.


In 1956, soon after completing his MSc in Chemistry at National College, Bandra, Bombay (which is where, incidentally, our parents met) our dad, Ramanand Savur, joined Franco Indian, a pharmaceutical company in Bombay. He was twenty-two years old. He was appointed as Statistical Officer, and promoted to Assistant Publicity Manager a few months later. It was in this position that he travelled with his director, M Postel, to Karachi in August 1957, to appoint new agents, distributors and medical representatives. In Karachi, the distributor was Ali Gohar & Co, at an address on Bunder Road.
I knew that my dad had visited Pakistan as a young man. I had heard the awful story of how, as he and his French boss were leaving the country, his passport – this very red India-Pakistan passport! –  given to the police on entry, appeared to have been misplaced by them. My dad was taken into a room full of trunks each of which was overflowing with passports. The kind policeman started looking for his passport, opening one at a time, and putting it aside when it turned out to be someone else’s. This went on and on – it must have felt like hours. Eventually, when my father finally got his passport, he burst into tears of relief.
Sadly, I knew nothing else about this historic visit, not a single thing. Looking at the stamp in the red passport, however, it is clear that my father must have been in Karachi on the occasion of Pakistan’s tenth Independence Day!
What were the celebrations? What did he see and do? How did he feel?
What else did he do in Pakistan?
I wondered whether my dad talked about his forthcoming visit with his future father-in-law, KJ Bijlani, a well-known lawyer of Hyderabad, Sindh who had left his homeland forever with his family and a few belongings, never to look back, ten years before. Surely my father visited some of the dear friends my grandfather left behind when he left Sindh forever? What did they say and do? Was there any way I could find out?
I emailed Sachin Kalbag, who was Editor of Mid-day at the time, and he kindly made space for the story. Then I posted on facebook, tagging all the Pakistani friends who might be able to help. I also sent an email to M Postel, via Anna Pinto of Franco Indian. I never heard back from Franco Indian. The only information I got was from Gul Metlo, a kind Sindhi doctor who lives in London. He wrote saying he had heard that Ali Gohar Shah had been a close friend of a Sindhi Hindu who ran a pharmaceutical shop in Karachi. He would come every evening to visit his friend at the pharmacy. After Partition, the Sindhi Hindu handed over his shop to Ali Gohar Shah to look after, saying that he would come back to Sindh from India after the riots stopped and things returned to normal. This never happened: almost none of the Hindus who left Sindh thinking they would return ever did.
Ali Gohar Shah, who was apparently a typical Sindhi Muslim and Syed with no business background, rose to become a big name in Pakistan’s pharmaceutical industry. It is said that he developed the business from a small shop to wholesale, distribution, manufacturing and a multinational pharmaceutical company as can be seen on http://www.aligohar.com/index.php though apparently he himself moved to Switzerland in the 1970s and settled there.

Saaz and Rumana: Friendship across borders by Chintan Girish Modi

Rumana and I came in touch less than three years ago. We have spent only a few hours in each other’s company. Thinking about the depth of affection I developed for her in this short time, and my gratitude for her generosity and support, I realise how very lucky I am to have found a friend like her.
We connected on facebook. I was writing a book about the Sindhi community of India and looking for sources on the other side of the border, closer to Sindh than I could ever be. Rumana lived in Karachi and, like me, she was a writer and painter. As we got to know each other (virtually), I soon realised that our ideas and our life priorities were similar too. When I wrote to her, she would write back instantly, and every time I asked for advice, she responded with wholehearted generosity. In this matter I hold her as a role model.
Growing up, I must have been influenced by my mother’s emotional scars from Partition (which interrupted and ended her childhood) as well as the all-pervading fear and suspicion of a certain neighbouring enemy country. Setting out to visit Pakistan in February 2013, I felt a bit as if I was going on a trip to the moon: it was a rare and splendid opportunity, but also an expedition that required courage and tremendous fitness. Perhaps I would never return.
It was amazing to find that the intensity of love with which we had been received and surrounded made leaving Pakistan a wrench. To have friends like Rumana and others we bonded with, to know that we may never, ever see them again, was terrible. The parting pangs took me back to the desolation of early childhood boarding-school homesickness. Perhaps they arose from some kind of cellular memory of the Partition pangs my grandparents suffered.
I must say I’m grateful to facebook, one of the rare spaces on this planet where Indians and Pakistanis can mingle and smile and get to know each other and be friends, without the hostility of barbed wire and manipulative negative propaganda, and try to heal the wounds of grief and bloodshed inflicted through sources with ugly political motives.

Blood Group

Saibhaji is one of those ethnic dishes that defines a community. Combining the nutritional riches of spinach, dal, and a basket full of various vegetables, it’s a one-item meal, tedious to prepare but good to taste.
One day I innocently mentioned that I love saibhaji, and the people I was with laughed and called me a wannabe Sindhi. Through the ancient mists of time I remembered how, as a child, my mother would have to threaten violence before I’d be convinced that saibhaji was good for my health.
Those were the days when I was an ethnic minority so rare that there were only two of us, my brother and me. It’s quite common now for young people to have origins in different regions of the country. But the trend was definitively set by my parents, and, as with any pioneer venturing new frontiers of existence, life was cold and lonely.
‘Cold’ and ‘lonely’, in fact, are words that well describe life on a tea plantation, where we lived in those days – although more positive attitudes might offer ‘enveloping magnificence of nature’, and opulent ‘quality-of-life’ (a concept yet to be defined) which were equally attendant.
It’s amusing to dwell on that social context, in which every fresh acquaintance would first inquire ‘what’ we were. In later years this evolved to a pleasant psycho-philosophical past-time resulting in self-defining moments-of-truth, but at the time, there was a sheer backdrop of pain and isolation when I was unable to shelter in any of the community niches of my compatriots.
There was no language into which we could comfortably slip – like pyjamas and slippers after dinner – and natter on with others who spoke the same idiom. It was always English, and English that brought amused smiles (or, worse, grimaces of pain) – on faces that politely turned aside to hide them – to genuine native speakers of the language. When the relatives met, they would most impolitely jabber away to each respective parent in their native tongue, words flung like unfriendly rocks over our heads, yielding but the occasional glimmer of meaning.
At meal times, we would eat what they now call ‘world food’, my mother even boasting in public that frog legs taste quite like chicken, and I bitterly envied all around me, whose staple was the formula Indian Vegetarian Meal (now revered as a coveted genre by all major world airlines).
We were always outsiders – but no one sang Paeans to our Plight or wrote Epics on our Experience. Over time, it became part of my consciousness to be constantly seeking a peer group, permanently striving to fit in: from zodiac sign, to old school tie, to IQ, waist-size and more; an insatiable hunger to find others of a common denominator.
Now, with my fortieth birthday galloping, giddy and relentless, towards me (a horrible cosmic calculation-mistake, I’m convinced), at last I’ve found where I belong. Through an inexplicable chain of events, here I am, deeply embedded in a close-knit group of intelligent, competent and highly ambitious IT professionals. A burgeoning population. Blood group? Simple. It’s C++.
First appeared as ‘Outsider’s place’ in a Times of India Middle 15 Nov 2001

The dream that came true

She was describing a scene from more than fifty years ago. She spoke of familiar alleyways; a huge carved wooden jhoola on which a mother could lie and rock herself and her baby to sleep; a row of wooden box toilets which had to be cleaned out by the sweepers every morning; an entire room of bedding for different seasons – forty-pound rajais for deepest winter, twenty-pound for mere cold weather, thick spun khes and thin cotton sheets for when the burning heat would drive them out to sleep in the courtyard.
I listened, rapt, feeling closer to six years old than thirty-six. “When I close my eyes, I can see those places as clearly as if it was yesterday,” said my mother.
Here was a bedtime story I had never had. Was it the trauma of roots shattered at Partition that had kept her silent all these years? Or maybe she had already learnt that the present is always more important than the past.
I dreamt, one night, that I was seeing my parents off at the airport. Preoccupied and disorganized, I dumped them with an unconcerned goodbye, careless of their comfort. I suddenly came to my senses, too late. They were in the aircraft, strapped into their seats, inaccessible. Washed over with great waves of regret, I longed desperately for a few last moments of happy time together – and knew it could never be.
What a cliché of a dream! That ‘too-late’ feeling overcame me once again with those fragments from the old days in Sindh.
A year later, recently, I came closer to my mother’s childhood home than I had ever been before. It was the temple of Karnimata, in Bikaner, the fascinating choohon ka mandir – a beautiful and intricate white structure, exquisitely maintained, and completely overrun by hordes of temple rats. They laze and explore at will, gorge themselves languidly from sacks of grain and vats of milk at their disposal, nuzzle passersby with indolent affection and constitute a startling wall-to-wall carpet of fuzzy grey.
A loud voice droned on and on in French to a group of tourists. From the listeners’ expressions it was clear that the commentary was absorbing. The squeamish had stayed home. What could the guide find to say so much about this place? Perhaps he was telling the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
A more familiar language blared out at us, as we stopped for a drink at one of the little teashops that line the temple complex, demanding attention. Like a petulant child, the Marathi song went off, and then on again, until we moved across, like puppets, and helplessly purchased a cassette of Rajasthani folk music. How had the canny vendor identified our state of origin? Was it our jeans? Our loud-mouthed brats? My haircut? Our variously-accented Hindi?
The sales strategy impressed me. How multicultural, how international-minded we have become.
Across the border, too, those alleyways, the box toilets and perhaps even the forty-pound rajais are gone forever. Travelling to the past is not possible. Why wait until our parents are strapped into their aircraft seats, lost to us forever? Mother was right. The present is always more important than the past.
First appeared as ‘Present perfect’ in a Times of India Middle on 16 Jun 1999