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

Ganga

So, I was sitting there, watching the river flow by fast

And thinking about my dear friend who so suddenly left this earth

And wondering, “River, where do you come from? Where are you going?”

Expecting something more profound than a geography-test type of answer

Which in a way I did get, because I started thinking of other friends

So many of them, actually – 

So beautiful, so smart, so kind (some even on facebook, actually)

And when life has been cruel, which it often has, so brave. So very brave.

It was Ardha-Kumbh, the crowds were thick, though only half as thick, I suppose.

We sang, stayed in line, made offerings, gave money

Though I would not consider taking a dip or drinking the water

Since it is holy, peaceful and pure but also dirty and polluted (and cold)

Like most places on earth, I suppose.

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

Copper country charm

Looking back, I realise that as the plane hovered and then started its descent into Iquique, I must have been gawking like a fool. All I could see were low desert hills. The landscape was stark and lavishly beautiful, and I was unprepared for such a sight.
As we drove into the town, my host laughed at my expression and told me about a young man he knew who had been transferred to work Iquique. When the plane landed, he had refused to get off, insisting loudly to the airline staff that there had been an awful mistake and there was no way they were going to get him into this godforsaken desert.

Iquique airport: desert hills and a parking lot filled
with pick-up vans used in the local mining industry.
Many of these are Mahindras.

Our taxi took a turn and once more my head spun in delight. The wide Pacific Ocean stretched placidly out on our left, while on the right, low buildings, shacks, containers and the occasional statue were all that obscured the view of the barren grey hills rolling down to meet us as we drove.
Patches of red sand reminded us that this was copper country: Chile is the largest exporter in the world.
As we approached the town, low palm trees began to appear, stacks of containers, low houses and then taller, more formal buildings. Even when the midrange high-rises of Iquique made an appearance, the stunning sandy grey hills continued to form an exquisite backdrop.
Next morning, walking along the curving beach, we passed long stretches of well-maintained playground and gymnasium equipment. Despite the ubiquitous sandy mountains, the lawns, hedges and trees lining the beach indicate that water is abundant. We saw joggers, and families lounging on the beach, though the water was icy cold. A zumba group danced energetically to music which included a Punjabi number. Iquique has a free zone, and many of the trading companies belong to Indians. Amidst ancient and modern churches of the town nestle a mosque and a Hindu temple.

Pelicans and Patagonia sea lions in the very commercial town of Iquique

Driving along the coast, there are prominent reminders that this is one of Chile’s most important ports: navy buildings, customs houses, and, right up to the horizon, container and cargo ships, navy and sailing vessels. Spotting a tall wall with a row of pelicans perched on it, I got off to take photos. Another surprise awaited: in this intensely commercial town, as the fishermen sold their morning catch of fish and shell fish, a crowd of pelicans and Patagonian sea lions jostled for their share of the waste being thrown back into the sea.

Next day, we drove out into the hills towards Humberstone, a saltpetre mining town that had been abandoned in 1960 when chemical fertilisers reduced the demand for saltpetre. Our taxi driver, Raoul, proved to be an excellent tour guide, giving us interesting information about this mining area and pointing out a high-security prison, dog cemeteries, sand art and sand graffiti. Wayside shrines, in memory of loved ones who died on the spot, proliferate. Rain is rare in this area. When it comes, it causes havoc in the town, ruining homes and goods stocked in the warehouses. However, it transforms the desert into a different kind of wonderland with a carpet of colourful flowers and tourists rush to catch the sight.

One reason why Iquique delighted me so profoundly was because I had found Santiago disconcertingly un-exotic. On my first morning in Chile, I looked out of the windows lining the breakfast buffet into the hotel courtyard at pale colours, sparse and elegant design, tall buildings, and slim trees daintily shedding autumn leaves. It reminded me of Sweden. I felt overcome by dismay that I had travelled half way around the world and landed up in place that, though lovely, looked too familiar. When I told my host, he laughed, but added that Chile is generally considered less noisy and vibrant than the stereotype of Latin America.
It was only when I returned to Santiago after the Iquique experience and took a one-day city tour that I began to perceive its individuality. The city is set in a valley and surrounded by a ring of picturesque snow-capped mountains. Unfortunately, this makes it highly polluted, especially in winter when smog keeps getting denser until rain brings relief. Santiago has tall residential buildings, flyovers, an abundance of parks with a lot of greenery, grand statues of Chilean heroes, majestic European architecture, orderly traffic, a 7km tunnel under the river – to say nothing of large shopping malls.

The upmarket feria in Las Condes, Santiago.

However, it is also a city with plenty of stray dogs. Labour is not expensive. Some districts have smaller and more modest houses and, for someone coming from a country of notoriously corrupt and inefficient municipal corporations, the absence of garbage and chaos was soothing. Even the local street feria, the market, was a treat: clean, organized and beautiful with quite a bit of the fruit, vegetables and legumes unfamiliar or not easily available in India.

With Nehru, Gandhi and Tagore in a tranquil Santiago square

Santiago has an Indian population, but not enough to sustain its Indian restaurants. We ate at two: Saffron and Majestic. Both served high-quality, flavoursome Indian food with minor concessions to local taste buds. Chilean food centres around meat, but we did eat at one of Chile’s popular downtown restaurants, El Naturista, which is vegetarian.
When I saw districts with long streets of houses decorated with colourful and striking graffiti, I realised that public art is central to the Chilean persona. I saw this again in Viña del Mar, where the rocks that line the lavish seafront occasionally sport attractive doodles. And nearby Valparaiso, once one of the major ports of South America and today a UNESCO heritage site, is itself a magnificent work of street art. Built on a hillside, the lower part of the town has a number of large, French-looking buildings. As you go up the hill, the scene changes completely. The houses are smaller and crowded together but adorned with flamboyant graphic illustrations.
Bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Atacama Desert to the north and the Andes Mountains on the east, a narrow ribbon on a map, Chile is a country of diversity, natural resources and beauty. Its great geographical sentinels make Chile’s eco-diversity unique and carefully preserved. When you enter, do not risk ticking ‘no’ in the customs form inquiring about plant, dairy, animal import. That little twist of chikki or chocolate lying forgotten in a corner of your bag might get you in trouble. One more friendly piece of advice: not many in this wonderful country speak English so you might want to prepare by learning a few words of greeting, the numbers, phrases like “Excuse me, where’s the bathroom?” and so on.
Chile has many more unique and outstandingly beautiful places than I was able to visit. However, I was fortunate enough to spend a weekend in a third major port, the town of Punta Arenas close to the southern tip of South America. Before the Panama Canal was built, ships ferrying goods and passengers from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast, or carrying supplies out to the Spanish Empire, had a choice of crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific either through the Straits of Magellan or around Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn). Both were hazardous voyages with strong winds, large waves and the occasional Antarctic iceberg, and often took months. Punta Arenas was an important resting and restocking point.
We stayed at Cabo de Hornos, a hotel with sitting rooms and public areas that have a distinct regional character rather than the impersonal feel of most hotel chains. The view from my room window extended from the thickly wooded central square with its monuments, street lamps and benches, over the colourful houses of the town, to low hills capped and streaked with snow. It was not a view that was easy to detach from, but by the lift another treat awaited. Beyond large windows, beyond low roofs, the majestic Pacific displayed its vessels implacably.
We drove past sculpted hedges, an exceptionally beautiful cemetery, more sculptures – traditional, contemporary and aboriginal – enjoying the coastal view on one side and the Antarctic scenery on the other. It was a weekend during which the weather turned from pleasantly warm to stormy rain followed by gentle, beautiful snow.
Punta Arenas has museums and historic walking tours which preserve memories from early whalers and maritime navigation to the heroes of early Antarctic expeditions, Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton and Byrd. We saw none of these; neither did we tour by boat to Isla Magdalena y Marta to gape at the penguins and Patagonian sea lions. Instead, our high point in Punta Arenas was Sunday satsang in the Hindu temple. There were sermons and bhajans, followed by an enchanting arti. Then, because it was International Yoga Day, a Chilean yoga teacher had been invited and we practiced simple asanas for the next half an hour.

Pablo and me: On a bench outside the house of Pablo Neruda in Valparaiso

first appeared in Pune Mirror on 12 Jul 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.

Three-day laugh fest

I remember how much we wept when we left school! The thought of leaving each other forever was unbearably painful. Would it have helped if we could have looked 36 years ahead in time and seen ourselves happily posing together in front of the clock tower, striding up the slope from flag staff, inspecting the Red Fort dormitories that had been our bedrooms for so many years – and even, wonder of wonders, sitting and cheekily sipping tea in the HMs office? Perhaps not; it’s unlikely we could have identified with the glamorous aunties life’s benign transformation had wrought.
There were seven of us. It was not Founders, it was not a planned batch reunion. Some things just fall into place. We had contacted the HM a few days before – imagine, a Lawrence School HM on facebook! – and received a courteous invitation to lunch in the Senior School dining room. We were ecstatic, perhaps also a trifle giddyheaded, and it was like stepping into a wardrobe and suddenly finding yourself in a land as dear and familiar to you as it was peculiar and incomprehensible to others.
What pleased us most was the smiling welcome we got. Teachers, admin staff, students alike treated us like honoured guests. When we expressed a desire for chota buns we were indulged with a tray full, a second serving, and then a large parcel of that rare unmatched delicacy from the past. A teacher escorted us patiently around Girls’ School. Stately Nithya – we were children together, yes, 1977 was a good year – showed us around the archives.
What a surprise to find a friend and fellow OL, Rohan Sabharwal, living in school for a few months to set up a media cell! And what a delight to be mistaken for his batchmate – dear Rohan, abject apologies, but one day you will understand the CT of being thought two decades younger than you are! Yes – all the old slang came back. We were ‘dames’, we went to the ‘beach’, but sadly we never got round to ‘chroming’ on the banks. Time was short so we never ‘sent over’ or ‘chopped’ anyone but really, the tension between the strictly segregated sexes was flagrant – even to us at the far end of the hormonal spectrum.
A visit to school is not just an excursion into nostalgia, it’s also a pilgrimage, an offering of gratitude to the teachers who shaped the way we think and inculcated in us our attention to detail, and our constant striving for knowledge and concrete achievement. (Even the ones who unabashedly brandished their ugly sides at us surely gave us something good though at this moment I can’t think what exactly!) And we sang the old songs again, this time with an awareness of what they meant, and how these powerful words had implanted in us the power and the will to win! It was a 3-day Laugh Fest sincerely recommended to all.
first appeared in The Lawrencian Mar-Apr 2013

Olympic diary, London 2012

with Gagan Narang just before Vijay Kumar's silver medal 

Would we hear the Indian national anthem being played in the Olympic stadium? It was hard to keep that eager thought from our minds as we set out, knowing how lucky we were to be attending this event. Getting tickets had been our test of persistence – the rest of the world wanted them too, and the website, the only source of tickets, was overburdened and unresponsive. It took hundreds of attempts, over a period of several weeks, to get some. Ajay volunteers with the NGO Olympic Gold Quest, set up by Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone to nurture Indian sporting talent, and he had finally managed to get some tickets for events for which the OGQ athletes had qualified. But we did not have one for the first big chance India had, with two of our star shooters, Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang in the lineup.
Standing at the venue, Woolwich Arsenal, with a small paper placard that pleaded, “One ticket needed. Please!” Ajay was most gratified when an elderly Indian gentleman came up and handed him one – and refused to take money for it. “Just go in there and cheer for India!” he said.
Inside was a highly-charged atmosphere, including a large crowd of cheering Indians. When Gagan made it to the finals, and won India’s first medal after some fine shooting by all eight contestants, it was a magical entry into the Olympics. What an explosion of happiness there was in the stadium, with Indians waving their flags and cheering loudly!
Indian sportspeople presently excel in boxing, wrestling, shooting, archery, and badminton. Sadly, our very talented archers did not perform well. Why does this happen? Only the very best in the world qualify for the Olympics and the fact that they are there at all means that their skill and talent is proven. It’s unfortunate that even though in the last twenty years, Indians have moved out, gained confidence and made a mark for themselves in every field, there are certain sections of society that have remained in the third world. That’s what we felt about the archery debacle – a lack of the right sort of nurture, leading to a lack of confidence at the final stage. While we felt sad about this, it was hard not to feel happy at being inside the very special arena where the competition took place, the holiest ground of cricket – Lords!
London is a beautiful city, with its many monuments and sights. For the Olympics, the central part of the city was decorated with flags and mascots. The venues were at suburbs in different corners of the city, and each route was also festive, with signposts and impressive teams of volunteers dressed in the pink chosen as the colour for this Olympics. Since most of the Olympic routes passed through the centre of the city, managing peak hour traffic must have been a major challenge and it was met very well. The Olympic stadium itself was the farthest out of the city, with another two venues on the way, and right at the end an enormous new shopping complex at Westfield. Coming out of the tube station, the crowd was so thick that the ticket barriers were kept raised. One day we heard a volunteer calling out loudly over the public address system, in a tone traditionally reserved for the wholesale vegetable market, “No need to take out your tickets, ladies and gentlemen! And in case you don’t have a ticket, that’s just fine, we don’t mind at all!” We laughed, but couldn’t help wondering what the scene would be like after a few weeks, and whether these huge stores could possibly get the kind of custom they needed to sustain themselves just from the local population.
It wasn’t just the people in England who were out making merry – even the sun was smiling and the clouds and frosty wind stayed away while the games were on. So persuasive was this weather that the British sportspeople couldn’t help but win one gold medal after another and the celebrations across the country rose to a higher level. This run of British gold medals unfortunately cost India one and our star hope, Mary Kom did not make it.
By now everyone knows Mary’s story, her background of poverty; her immense talent and the number of world championships she has won – including two after her twin boys were born; her supportive husband; her sweet, uncomplicated nature and her love for singing! It was so like Mary that, after weeping for an hour, the first thing she did was apologize to the country.
That’s when we realized that, though the Olympics is really about physical excellence, endurance, and commitment – it’s high emotion that stands out most of all. One day we walked from one venue to another on one of the long walkways that had been prepared for the games and as we passed a large screen, the people sitting in front of it burst into loud cheers. Andy Murray had won the tennis gold! And there was Andy on the screen, and what was he doing but weeping!  So many of the British gold medalists wept when they won their medals that the tabloid press decided to give Britain a gold medal for being a nation of the biggest ‘blubbers’. We heard a TV anchor ask Nicole Adams, the woman boxer who beat Mary Kom, “I noticed you were smiling when you won your medal. Most of the others cried when they got theirs. How come you didn’t cry?” Poor Nicole looked guilty and apologized for not weeping at the happiest moment of her life.
People do crazy, inexplicable things. At the Royal Barracks one day, Ajay was thrilled to watch Joydeep Karmarkar reach the finals of the 50m prone. Sadly, he missed the bronze by a whisker. A short while later he bumped into the president of the West Bengal Rifle Association who had decided that he could not possibly watch any more (even though another shooter, Vijay Kumar, was in the finals) since he was so overjoyed at Joydeep’s terrific performance. He proclaimed that if he had his way he would announce a day’s holiday in West Bengal the next day!
One of our low moments was watching the feisty Saina Nehwal get walloped by a Chinese girl. It hurt! Even the memory of the volunteers who saw us waving our flags as we marched up the steps to Wembley Stadium and called out: “Go get them! Beat the Chinese! You can do it!” wasn’t enough to make us feel better. Later Ajay met Gopichand, Saina’s coach, a very soft spoken and polite person. He explained the strategy of the Chinese team, which had three players in the semi-finals. So in the first semi-finals it was China against China, and their stronger player, Wang, had purposely lost so that it would be she who played Saina and give them a better chance at getting all three medals. As it happened, during the match Wang developed a hamstring catch and had to forfeit, giving India our second bronze medal.
Another unforgettable moment was watching the quiet, unassuming Vijay Kumar work his way steadfastly through his event and come out nearly at the top. Every Indian inside the arena, including those in the media section, was jumping up and down and screaming with delight!
We were certainly disappointed that we never heard the Indian national anthem at the Olympics. At the same time, the thrill of seeing our beautiful flag raised a number of times made us come home quite determined that we would be there in Brazil too!
first appeared in Ability magazine OND 2012

Discovering Toronto with Smita

The low red-bricked houses and neatly-marked streets looked familiar, and with dal and alu-bhindi for dinner, how could anyone blame me for thinking that this was just another suburb of London?
My first clue to the contrary was when I tried to get into the driver’s seat – ambitious, considering I can’t drive even back at home – and Smita gently showed me around to the other side. Still, it took a long while of staring at the maple tree outside my window before I could coax out that “Oh wow, I am actually here in Canada!” feeling.
Canada, eclipsed as it is by a bossy neighbour, tends to have an unglamorous branding. And with those supposedly never-ending winters, who in their right mind would go? I myself was only visiting a beloved friend, something we had wanted to do for so long that when it finally happened, it didn’t matter even remotely which country it was.
Years ago I’d read Margaret Atwood’s description in Cat’s Eye, of Toronto as “a world-class city” and I remember thinking, “how wannabe is that!” So when Toronto began to unfold before me, I felt like Columbus discovering a new land.
Toronto is a multi-cultural city and the diversity is such that on a visit to the Royal Ontario Museum we saw children of every imaginable skin colour. Of twenty-five, only about two were white. Canada has welcomed immigrants over centuries, the biggest wave of which arrived in the late 1840s from Ireland, fleeing the Irish Potato Famine and numbering twice the Toronto population of the time.
Over the years, settlers from different European, Asian, African and South American countries carved out sections of the city for themselves. You can browse in the ubiquitous China Town, but also eat spanakopita in cafés next to Greek street signs just as easily as crisp fresh dosais in restaurants with large nameboards in Tamil. With so many different ethnic groups mingling easily, racism is really just interpersonal friction. There are infinite varieties of the English accent, with an Indian who grew up in Kampala speaking a quite different idiom from one who grew up in Trinidad. The immigrants I met were proudly, passionately Canadian, grateful to the country that had given them lives of comfort, opportunity and pleasant stimulation.
It was only in the early years of the Twentieth Century that citizens began to work actively towards the creation of a strong Canadian national identity. One of these was a community of landscape painters that came to be known as The Group of Seven, and Smita introduced me to their work at the National Gallery, later driving me into the country to visit the McMichael Collection, located in the woodland setting that inspired them, and even buying me a beautiful art book representing their work.
Toronto’s vibrant cultural life made me feel that under-hyped Toronto is surely one of the world’s best-kept secrets. Friends took me to the National Ballet of Toronto and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra where the high-quality infrastructure and appreciative audience added to my experience of the performances.
Smita and I had always shared our books, right from the days when we both lived in Bandra and she would drop in to visit on her way back from college nearly every day. I now enjoyed discovering her favourite Canadian authors. Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright is told through letters and narrative and depicts the dramatic lives of two sisters who grew up in small-town Canada. One, a schoolteacher, remains a spinster, while the other becomes a radio star in New York. The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston is told by a young boy whose father has recently died and has the mixture of humour and tragedy characteristic of the Irish writers. No New Land by M.G. Vassanji is a hard-core immigrant story filled with struggle, humiliation, misunderstanding, alienation from offspring, and crisply told.
I knew I was in Toronto when, at the shortlist readings of the Griffin Poetry Prize at the MacMillan Theatre, Margaret Atwood was right behind Smita in the queue for the toilet.
Our weekend visit to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, happened to be on Doors Open, a day on which public buildings welcome visitors. So we dropped by at the Supreme Court, Houses of Parliament, and even the Governor General’s home. Security arrangements were in place but there was no trace of paranoia or hatred. This complete lack of fear was for me the most refreshing aspect of this country, and doubtless a consequence of the thanks-to-big-brother-you-can’t-see-me syndrome. The streets of Ottawa are wide and clean. Coming from a land of teeming millions, there arose within me a very loud question, namely: “Where IS everybody?” which made Smita laugh. Toronto by contrast can get crowded – but I found it a relaxed place with the screaming inner-city adrenalin absent.
On our last day we drove out to Niagara Falls where we enjoyed looking across the gorge and gloating at those standing on the American side, peering over but unable quite to see all that we could. As we headed home, Smita’s formidable, internationally-acknowledged organizational ability had two rainbows arranging themselves over the falls, and we rode into a magnificent pink-and-purple Toronto sunset, Lake Ontario rolling alongside, and the deep-throated Canadian genius Leonard Cohen belting out his soulful ballads all the way home.
parts of this first appeared as Steeped in a maple world in Sunday Mid-day on 6 Sep 2009

Flights of fancy

That day, the entire Indian cricket team was on the same flight, and he had managed to get autographs from the lot. The most difficult to approach had been Azharuddin. It was early in his career, and the now sulky hero stood in a corner of the security lounge, gawky, his nose buried in a book, but clearly unable to concentrate.
Like any wife who revels in needlecraft, I look forward to these tales of his travels, crafting them into legends as the years go by. And Ajay, who scoffs at jet lag as the ponciest affliction ever defined, obliges every time with tales that would draw appreciative nods from Sinbad and Baron Munchausen. Chance encounters in the ether, with the image of serendipitous threads arcing and intersecting in the sky, are enchanting if not exotic.
The early morning flights between metros held the commuter crowd, which would about-face and head home by the late-night return flight. The Madras-Bombay route was thickly populated with film stars. In those days Sridevi was a regular, yawning politely and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and occasionally even the gorgeous Rekha. Delhi-Calcutta, on the other hand, held mostly the smartly suited community of businessmen. Acquaintances would hail each other happily at the check-in counter, and once on board, wait for the breakfast service to conclude before they got up to stretch their legs and congregate in small groups to chat. Arjun Malhotra was a regular on this hop, and Ajay never failed to marvel at the IT giant’s friendly outlook even to one as insignificant as himself. Today, with Arjun’s TechSpan inching towards the Fortune 500, the vision of him bending down artlessly to touch the feet of an elderly acquaintance is a precious one.
And once, Ajay was on the same flight as Indira Gandhi. This is not a story of VIP arrogance and delays – quite the contrary. It was 1978, and Mrs Gandhi was as out-of-power as anyone can be. Who could mistake that fabulous profile, or the limited-edition sari? Yet, everyone pointedly faced away, and chattered around the dignified woman (who stood waiting in line like the other mortals), feigning deepest unconcern. When Mrs Gandhi stood in the coach to the aircraft, holding onto the overhead strap, the other passengers milled around, still painstakingly ignoring her.
Was it the most obnoxious in human nature, gloating sneeringly over a dazzling star that had collapsed into the viscous scum of the gutter? Was it vicious contempt for the excesses of her Emergency? Or was it merely the stereotypical mannerless bumpkin Delhiite? If he had a seat, Ajay would surely have offered it to her. As it was, no one else bothered.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 21 Dec 2001

Tiger chase

At the gate of the Panna tiger reserve, our jeep driver confided that a tiger had killed an antelope and now lurked nearby. Just the previous day, he had driven in some foreign tourists and as the tiger gorged the remains, the tourists feasted their eyes. And two days ago, his jeepload had seen all of four tigers.
Until that point, I’d been sceptical. I grew up in an area replete with wild life. We drove through the nearby sanctuaries dozens of times and I never once saw a tiger in the raw. I had come to the philosophical conclusion that to see a tiger in a jungle, stepping haughtily through the undergrowth, was simply not in my scheme of things. But now there seemed new hope.
We drove through wild tracts of great beauty, ignoring acre upon acre of golden grassland that would have driven Van Gogh’s reapers green, intently scanning its deepest reserves for streaks of stripe. Every rustle in the thicket drew the jeep to a halt. The guide generously pointed out wild boar and sambhar, antelope and spotted deer, mongoose, langur and birds of every kind. We resented the lot, knowing that if they roamed free thus, no tiger lurked nearby. When he indicated a tree with massive claw marks running down its sides, all we could think of was Baloo skipping along, singing about the ‘bear necessities’ and carelessly outwitting Shere Khan.
We stood over the Ken River in a remote tree house restaurant, and it flowed gorgeously blue and shimmering in the morning light, rapids rippling over elegantly configured rocks, and dense thickets encroaching down to the water – but what was the use? There simply wasn’t any tiger, crouched on the banks, sipping of its bounty.
We stopped again at a picnic spot, with what was probably a stunning view of a slate-encircled gorge, and the guide leaned gallantly over the protective fence, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” to the resident echo and I pleaded, “Tiger! Tiger!” in the hope that someone would hear and do something.
Several bumpy hours later, all covered in fine clay-dust, we drove, dejected, towards the exit, musing bitterly that we hadn’t even seen tiger pug marks. (Everyone I know has come home having seen at least pug marks).
And then it happened. I gasped. A dim, majestic shape loomed in the distance, merging subtly with the trees in the forest light. My heart leapt with joy. But then my eyes focussed and it took form. How embarrassed I was to realize that this was only another sambhar. Tall and beautiful, wild and proud it was – but, for god’s sake, it was not a tiger.
From Panna to Pune is but a short syllable away and soon enough we were back in the big safari park in which we live. Dog committees congregate on street corners, yapping canine concerns deep into the night. As we drive along the road, herds of plodding water buffaloes amble, pendulous and ponderous, out in front of the car. It’s true that ‘Buffalo, buffalo, burning bright …’ doesn’t have quite that ring to it – but for the time being it’ll just have to do.
Fewer buffaloes are herded through Pune traffic in 2011 - though the bikers and motorists are just as unsightly and dangerous.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 17 Apr 2001

Black booty

I walked through the door of my house, and nearly fainted at the words I heard blaring over the music system. Before I could wonder if I’d imagined them, there they came again, loud, cheerful and mellifluous: “I want to see your underwear …”
Until that moment two years ago, I had naively and somewhat egoistically imagined the generation gap to be a figment of fevered imaginations which, like Santa and time travel, simply did not exist, and if it did, merely represented the incompetence of my own parents. Even more painful was the fact that none of my children were yet of an age to be interested in anyone else’s underwear. It struck me that tastes in music define a generation as clearly as traits such as hard work, birth control, fondness for hashish or a facility with the newest technologies.
Another reminder of the generation gap came recently at the Black Country Museum in England. The Black Country, immortalised in print and celluloid by British media personality Meera Syal, is so named not for the numerous Indians who inhabit it but for its role in the Industrial Revolution. “Black by day and red by night, unmatched for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe,” the American consul in Birmingham declared in 1868.
The museum is set in a twenty-six-acre site and recreates the living and working conditions of those days. We went down into a coal mine, took a ride on a canal boat, visited ironmongers, sweetshops and apothecaries, saw a silent movie in a shed-like hall, and even had a lesson in a Victorian classroom where the teacher wore a black gown, spoke in a shrill falsetto, and kept a wooden cane at hand.
Much that we saw, including the cinema, buildings, and some products in the shops, were familiar to me from my own childhood. Tea-plantation bungalows and wooden-floored boarding school dormitories in the Nilgiris still retained much of the Victorian era a quarter century ago, and perhaps still do. So when we walked into a shop and one of my teenage daughters pointed at a bacon-slicing machine saying, “That must be the photocopier,” I was startled into a sudden vision of what a different world my children live in. By the time I dared to imagine such a miracle as a photocopier and could believe that I no longer needed to painstakingly write out copies of documents or roll messy carbon papers into the typewriter, I must have been in my twenties. For me the museum had been more about nostalgia than novel experience.
But in the end, the Black Country Museum presented us with an encounter which reassured us that the world is indeed a familiar and cosy sort of place. At the fossil and gift shop, there were beautiful stones for sale. When we told the man we collect stones like these from the ground around our house, he politely asked where we were from. We said, “Pune, India.” He laughed, picked up one of the stones and showed us a label which said that it had been brought here from “Pune, India.” So of course we promised to come back again soon, this time with a big box full of stones.
first appeared as a Times of India Middle on 23 Sep 2000