Samba to the Reckoning
“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
He’s a month away from his 22nd birthday. He stands, perhaps, at the railing of a lower deck of the P&O Steamship Company’s SS Mooltan, overlooking the harbor at Bombay, with sea gulls screeching in formation above. The evening air is slightly smoke-tinged, still warm from the daytime August heat. It’s August 18, 1939, and my father is about to set sail for the Tilbury Docks in the Port of London, where the P&O liners from Asia docked. In less than a month, Europe would be enflamed when the Second World War was declared on September 1, 1939.
I was his age, little younger, a month before my 21st birthday when I landed in New York in 1971. Till recently this didn’t occur to me. I have been thinking about the young man looking westward in 1939 and what he might have thought his life was going to sprinkle in front of him.
Of course, that life, that gaze westward, is braided with my life. Perseverance, risk-taking, generosity, caring for those less fortunate, and the impairments and the kinks, and the shame, and the consequences. We are more alike than not, perhaps, after all. Before I become cosmic dust like him, I want to share what I never did with him and much that will be news to my own sons.
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I’m four, a year before I entered kindergarten. My sister, who was four years older than me was already in an elementary grade and learning maths, which I mistook for mats, some weaving for which I too was destined.
But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. I had learned to read. My mother was my teacher. I could read silently. The downside to that was that she didn’t hear me mispronounce words. So, one day I was very excitedly telling her about is (ees) lands, not knowing that the s was silent. Boy, was I embarrassed. Four years old and mistaking a word in a foreign language and I was embarrassed. That set the tone for the rest of my life!
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I’m six or seven, in what was known as KG III or kindergarten third year. The following year, at age eight, I started Form 1 or elementary school and remained in the same two buildings till I graduated from high school at almost age seventeen. There was a practice in KG III --- we traded things. A water coloring set for a spinning top, some marbles for a red pencil, that sort of thing. I traded a set of colored pencils (no recollection of how many except they came in a box and were considered “expensive”) for an eraser, whose dimensions have vanished from my memory. What has remained is the reaction of my father on hearing about the trade. I happened to use the term “rubber” instead of “eraser.” There ensued much consternation and raised voices between my parents for a period of time and it was on my use of the term, which my father seemed to consider to be apocalyptic. It took me many years to understand the slang word I’d used. Neither of my parents tried to explain any of this to me. I came away thinking the lesson was that I was a bad trader and shouldn’t try anymore.
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A few years later, on my father’s birthday, I bought a paperback biography of the actor Errol Flynn, with my own pocket money, as a present. I was very pleased with myself. My parents went to the movies every Saturday night and a lot of what they saw were Hollywood films in Calcutta’s Art Deco cinema halls ---the Metro, New Empire, The Lighthouse, Elite, Tiger, Regal, Minerva. So, a biography of Errol Flynn made perfect sense to me. When I gave my father his present, and he’d opened it, he was somewhat thin-lipped and glum-faced. There was no effusion of hugs and happiness. Being naturally wary and scared of my father’s volatile personality, I beat a retreat. Days passed and there was no further mention of the present. Finally, I asked my mother what the matter was. What had I done wrong? I don’t remember the words she used but the message was that my father was angry that I’d given him a book about a well-known philanderer, drug abuser and all kinds of gossip about voyeurism in the Hollywood tabloids. None of this was spelled out to me. I simply was told that he was angry that I’d thought he'd like a book about someone as dodgy as Flynn. I wrote a note of apology to my father about a wrong I couldn’t understand at the time. Years later, I realized that inadvertently I’d shoved the door to his mirrored life slightly ajar.
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Driving a car in the India of the late ‘50s and ‘60s was a dream of almost every kid I knew in my class. A few immensely lucky ones were even allowed to sit in the driver’s seat when they were thirteen or fourteen and actually steer a car on empty village roads while a “driver” (read chauffeur) sat nervously in the passenger’s seat. My father loved cars but letting me drive as a young teenager was not something he even dreamt of. I, however, had a plan. Once, when he was out of town, I cajoled my mom to give me the keys and said that I would only play with the gears while the car was stationary. All was going well when I hit the clutch and the gear slipped into position ----the wrong position--- and hiccupped forward and the fenders accordioned against the garage’s brick wall. How I kept my head from exploding is still a mystery. One of my cousins, much older than me, who spent a lot of time at our house and hung with my sister, knew of a body-shop fellow. My mother must have paid for it because I certainly didn’t, and the front-end damage was fixed. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn the hard lesson---that I had to get myself out of jams that I got into.
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Hazing, what was termed “ragging” in India in the late 1960s, was deemed to be a privilege at the university where I landed at seventeen. I hear that now “ragging” is officially not allowed. Perhaps like naked discrimination of Dalits, Muslims, and other minorities? In an Orwellian world, hazing was the price of entrance into whatever exclusive clusters we thought was our destiny. At that time, there were a number of colleges making up the university. Crossing into another’s campus to “rag” a “fresher” was not part of the code, though breached at times, especially for the college that was literally across the road from mine. Those first thirty to sixty days were nerve-wracking as myths and legends abounded. One evening, some fellows who were seniors in my college, grabbed me from my room and said that a “dada” (big man) from a neighboring college wanted to see me. I’d heard the whispered tales of this fellow’s brutality during ragging. Knowing there wasn’t a way out, and being terrified, as I was dragged to a dark corner of the building and the lawn, ostensibly to meet the dada, I let out a banshee-like scream and didn’t stop till I was released from their grips. Not only were they startled but their planned prank (as there was no “dada” lurking in the shadows) had completely evaporated.
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The National Cadet Corps (NCC) was formed in 1948 as the youth cadre of the Indian army. Young people, high school, and university students, were trained (the term is a loose one and depended on the institution and the location during my college days) in marching, drilling, firearms weapons training (that’s a grandiose term for my day, when World War I Enfield rifles were used).
When I entered the university in 1967, NCC training was compulsory for a selected number of hours before graduation. To my astonishment, in 1965, the NCC groups were the second line of defense in the Indo-Pakistan war of that year.
We were issued two sets of shirts, trousers, boots, belt, and a beret. The shirts were too tight, the trousers reached just above my ankles. The spiffiest uniforms belonged to the Navy and the air force cadets
(Photo courtesy of Author. Author is on far left)
I couldn’t take this seriously at all. This was a bureaucratic joke to me. My Hindi professor (another compulsory subject for graduation) was the director of the cadet corps in college. I slept through his early morning classes and failed my first try to pass. I was told to fill the blue exam notebook with Hindi script in my second try, which I did as I wrote about seeing the Taj by moonlight. I passed but to this day, to my regret, I have to use subtitling to watch Hindi movies.
My cavalier attitude toward NCC drilling did catch up with me. I was short of the required number of hours before my final-year graduation.
Today’s NCC, from what I see on social media is the pride of India’s large defense forces with precision marching and men and women in smart uniforms. Especially on 26th of January, Republic Day, which celebrates the establishment of the Indian Constitution and the country’s transition to a republic in 1950. The parade on that day in Delhi is a spectacle to witness.
My reprieve came in the form of a one-time offer. I could wipe out the remaining hours I need of “training” if I volunteered for “crowd-control” at the Republic Day parade. YES! What could be easier?
Except it was Delhi in the winter, when the fog and chill can be 43 degrees Fahrenheit, a bone-chilling freeze in a place with no heating. But I was nineteen and it was an adventure. I boarded a covered military truck with a group of ragtag recruits at 3 a.m. in the morning from the north campus of the university and were disgorged near the spectacular boulevards of central Delhi. I have no recollection of controlling any crowds except to pull metal and wooden barriers this way and that. I kept thinking then that I must remember this. Being at the Republic Day parade for free. Now I have.
Over the span of my life, I’ve read hundreds, thousands, of books. Words that inspired. Words that gave hope; words that taught me a bit more about the universe; words that made me joyful, aroused, unsettled, sorrowful, curious, expectant. Words I dismissed as not worth remembering are some of the words that give me comfort today. Words from Didi, from Ma, from Baba.
One of your best.