Being a small baba in a big world

Image by sharon.schneider via Flickr

I was lucky enough to have an unbelievably privileged life in my childhood and teens and because my mother, as you have probably guessed by now, had some unique views on parenting I saw and did many things that many other children never had the chance to do.


My parents went to Calcutta when I was three and a half and I think one of my earliest memories was the drive from Dum Dum to Ballygunge after a flight of nearly twenty four hours +. Impossible to believe now but we were in Karachi for seven hours while the crew changed. This may be me seeing the past with a fond and nostalgic eye but ... I maintain that I looked out of the window of my fathers little Fiat with eyes of wonder that only a child can have. I didn't see dirt or poverty - I saw Life, rickshaws and bullocks and pi dogs. People moving, colours, the indefinable smell and the heat making the road shimmer like a silver ribbon in front of us.


I was utterly spoiled - I had Mary, my ayah and Joe who was our bearer, part Burmese because his grandmother had come from Burma as an amah to Governor General's wife. I don't which one. Mary just loved me and I adored her and Joe was my best friend. He taught me how to make beds, used to show me 'masmarojan' (don't know, don't ask) which involved magical coins appearing from ears and always being able to find my bear when I lost him. I  must have been absolute nightmare for them; I decided after the first day of school that education was not for me! Told them both I was very ill, just four now but already a drama queen, and if they made me go school I would die and mummy would blame them and they would be very sorry. Of course they didn't send me and when my mother got home they were terrified. I had,  of course, recovered by then. she thought it was funny but made me apologise to both of them and buy them each a present with my pocket money. I had the day off school to do that. And I learned such an important lesson - nobody has the right to make people scared because they feel they have some sort of power - ever!


I think my mother must have been bored, this was pre-Desmond and the mountains and long before she took to racing. She was quite lonely and in 1959 Calcutta still had a very strong hierarchy of memsahibs. Dr. Handel's wife Lisl, my father's employer, took Mum shopping. She was told she was a chota memsahib and could only buy her clothes and or materials  from certain places. Burra memsahibs went elsewhere. Not easy - and she didn't want to go to the British Women's Club: she would say why have I come to India to go there? I didn't like those women in England and they are much worse here.

So we explored- Mum and me, we walked and we went in rickshaws. We paddled through the floods in the monsoon and curled up in the one air conditioned bedroom we had when it was hot. She took me to Kali ghat at 4, to the Jain temple, to the mosque and reluctantly let me go to Sunday School at Bishop's College. I wanted the stickers of the pretty people. When I came home with one that said sinners will be damned Sunday School  became a distant memory. She wanted me to have my own thoughts, ideas and beliefs and she knew that that could only come from experiencing as much as possible of many ways of belief and of living.


Combine that with the fact the Dad was Mother Theresa's doctor for many years and I was taken at 5 to the Kali ghat again but this time to see the nuns working with the dying. I have no vivid memory of this which is odd because it must have been quite traumatic for a child, but then maybe the clear sight of a child saw only the good and did not understand death and dying. When I was older I worked for a time with the children and that was hard, there were too many and they were needed so much love that there simply wasn't time to give them. In my teens I helped out the male Missionaries of Charity, Brother Andrew as close to a saint as any, realising that there was need to something for those who used drugs or drank. And that time has stayed with me always.

So OK that was the character building stuff. Sadly school remained mandatory and it wasn't until I was 13 that I saw a glimmer of light at the American School, AISC. My seventh grade teacher and eighth was Miss Jagtiani - I still don't know her first name but she taught us Bharatnatyam and about Martin Luther King and read to us from an obscure Italian book, 'Don Camillo' which I loved and love to this day. She gave me The Lord of the Rings and, when I finished it, free range of the library to read whatever I wanted. I did: Freud, Aristotle, Plato, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. She would tell us the stories of Krishna and the milkmaids and she could not help but dance as she did and her hair would fall out of its bun and stream down her back as she moved faster and faster and we were there watching the Lord Krishna meet Radha, their love growing. She was absolute magic and I wish I could tell her now - she was the only one ever to reach this underachieving, school hating child.


On Saturday, as I grew older, my parents went to the races at RCTC. I was too young to go so was sent with Mary and George the driver to watch the 1400 metre start. I was 14 before I realised that a horse race was about more than simply riding them out of  a starting gate - OK I am exaggerating but it was a long time! 


After the excitement of seeing jockeys with their (pert) little bottoms in the air Mary and I would go to the pictures. Unfortunately the only English film that was on and a U was the Sound of Music. I saw it 14 times - Mary cracked after 7 and begged not to go again so my  mate Abdul was allowed to accompany me. Abdul's grandfather was a market boy at the New Market. Yes, I know, 60 if he was a day and still a boy! He wanted more for his grandson so Mum said okay he can come and learn to be a bearer. He was two or three years older than me and he was my friend. We would talk for hours about 'fillums' specially when I started to go and watch the Hindi ones. He would sing all the latest songs he had heard  and learned. From knowing him I appreciated the power of film in a country where so many  had so little and so few had so  much. For Abdul it was his escape - for a couple of hours he was Dev Anand, Shashi Kapoor or Amitabh. He got the girl, won the fight and escaped reality. 

I'm going on too much. I feel like Evita, 'have I said too much?'


Don't cry for me; I am lucky. I saw all this but  did not have to live it as Abdul and Old  Buddha (his grandfather) did. I got on a plane  and flew away But I'll tell you this, that little girl driving  in from the airport, knew home when she saw  it and left her heart there forever.