First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood

239 Pages·2003·1.19 MB·English

by  Thrity Umrigar

Table of Contents

Start
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four

First Darling of the Morning
Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood - THRITY UMRIGAR
To JBU, HJU and ETK
With endless love and infinite gratitude
One
I AM OF THAT GENERATION of middle-class, westernized, citified Indian
kids who know the words to Do-Re-Me better than the national anthem. The
Sound of Music is our call to arms and Julie Andrews our Pied Piper. It is 1967
—Hollywood movies always come to India a year or two after their American
release—and the alleys and homes of Bombay are suddenly alive with the sound
of music. No matter that the movie has reached us over a year after it is a hit all
over the Western world. All the piano teachers in Bombay are teaching their
beginner students how to plunk Do-Re-Me until it seems as if every middle-class
Parsi household with a piano emits only one tune.
I am six years old and suffer from an only child’s fantasy of what life with
siblings would be like.The Sound of Music gives flight to that fantasy, provides it
with shape and colour. The laughter, the camaraderie, the teasing, the close-
knittedness of the Von Trapp family ensnares me, forever setting my standard of
what a perfect family should be. The Von Trapps are as light and sunny as my
family is dark; they whistle and sing while the adults in my household are
moody and silent; the children are as shiny and healthy and robust as I am puny
and sickly and awkward. To see those seven children up on that large screen,
standing in descending order of age and height, is to see heaven itself. My heart
bursts with joy and longing; I want to leave my seat and crawl into the screen
and into the warm, welcoming arms of Maria. Take me in, I want to say, give me
some time and I will be as witty and playful and musical as the rest of you.
I have already seen the movie once but now I want to go again. Dad and his
brother Pesi, whom I call Babu, decide that the entire family should go see the
movie together. As always, my reclusive aunt, Mehroo, refuses to accompany us.
‘Come on, Mehroo, it’s a nice, wholesome family movie. You will enjoy it,’ says
my aunt Freny, Babu’s wife, but to no avail. Pappaji, my grandfather, has
recently had a heart attack and Mehroo refuses to leave him home alone even
though he is perfectly mobile.
Mehroo is my dad’s unmarried sister who lives with us. The oldest of my dad’s
two siblings, her childhood ended on the day her mother died. Mehroo was then
eleven. Not only were there two younger brothers to raise (my dad, the youngest,
was only four) but there was a father to protect from the razor’s edge of his own
grief. She took over the family duties as though she had been born for that role.
Her father was a kindly man but he was so wrapped up in his own sorrow that he
failed to notice the sad look come into his daughter’s eyes, a sadness that would
stalk her for the rest of her life. I suppose that from her father’s lasting grief and
devotion to his dead wife, from his endless mourning, Mehroo formed her own
notions of what love should be. And what family became for her was a
profession, a job, a hobby, an avocation. Family was all. Outside of its protective
borders lay the troubled world, full of deceit and deceptions and broken
promises and betrayals. It was an as-tonishingly limited worldview but it made
her irreplaceable within our family structure.
Mehroo’s love for me is legendary throughout the neighbourhood. So are her
eccentricities.
She won’t go to the movies—an amazing feat in a movie-crazy family.
She won’t buy new clothes for herself. If someone in the family buys her
material for a dress, she will save it for years before she will take it to the tailor.
She uses the same comb even after three of its teeth fall out, until my father
finally throws it away in a pique of anger. But she frequently slips money to me
when I leave for school.
She is a vegetarian in a household where chicken and meat, being as expensive
as they are, are treats. If a spoon that’s been in the chicken curry accidentally
touches her potato curry, she will not eat it. And yet, she will cook meat for the
rest of us.
She will eat food cold from the fridge without warming it up, although she will
spend hours in the kitchen cooking for the family.
She refuses to pose for pictures, covering her face with her hands to avoid the
camera. When she is compelled (by me, when I’m older) to be photographed,
she refuses to smile.
Every picture of her shows a serious, unsmiling woman. In some of them, her
lips even curl downward.
She is miserly, cheap, teary, sentimental, thin-skinned, fiercely loyal, eccentric,
indifferent to the world outside her family and devoted to her loved ones.
How do you solve a problem like Mehroo?
My cousin, Roshan, once mutters that if Mehroo was the next door neighbour,
she wouldn’t like her very much. The remark tears me up. I fancy that I
understand Mehroo, in all of her contradictions, better than anyone else; that
somehow I have X-ray vision that allows me access to the innermost chamber of
her warm and soft heart. There is something elemental and primitive about my
love for Mehroo and when I think of her, I think of her in animalistic terms—as
a dog or a horse or a giraffe or a zebra, animals with sorrowful, kind eyes.
Now I decide that the movie situation calls for my brand of lethal, irresistible
charm. ‘Please, Mehroofui, please come,’ I beg her. ‘Just once, please, for my
sake. I love this movie the best of all. You will, too, I promise.’
She shakes her head no, her brown eyes looking at me pleadingly. I sing a few
lines from the movie, hoping to entice her that way. But she will not budge.
Pappaji finally erupts. ‘Ja nee,’ he says. ‘Bachha ne dookhi karech. Making my
little one unhappy like this. Nothing is going to happen to me in one evening.
Treating me as if I’m a six-year-old schoolboy in half pants.’
It works. Mehroo comes and there we are on a Saturday evening, sitting in the
comfortable seats at Regal Cinema, waiting for the red velvet curtain to rise and
for Julie Andrews to burst forth onto the screen in full-throated glory. We sit in a
long row: myself, Mehroo, Roshan and her parents, Freny and Babu, and my
mom and dad. I can barely stay still on my seat because of my excitement. Even
before the curtain has lifted, the magic, the promise ofThe Sound of Music has
come true. Here I am with my own family, all of us looking as close and loving
and happy as the Von Trapp family. For months now, I have had this recurrent
fantasy of my entire family lying together on a big bed, all of us happy and cosy,
and turning to each other for shelter and warmth, as if the bed was a ship tossing
on tumultuous waters. All of us under the same roof, together. This is the closest
I’ve come to duplicating that feeling outside of dreams and my heart throbs with
love and happiness. I feel swollen and large, as if I could elongate my hands to
touch the back of their seats and embrace the long row of family members.
At this moment, I have no prescience of how the currents of life will pull me
away from that idealized dream of family; of how long and far I will travel and
how my travels will put that dream forever out of my reach. No idea then of how
I will unwittingly be yet another loss in my family’s chronicle of losses. There is
nothing in this carefree moment to tell me that I will someday trade love for
freedom, that I will turn my back on Mehroo’s example of self-sacrifice and
devotion to family, and instead choose self-preservation and independence. That
I will build my life and dreams on the back of their sacrifices.
Yes, I will return to them over and over again but it will never be the same. I will
come as a visitor and a tourist, will return with stories to show Mehroo the
stamps on my body from the different places I have travelled but she will not be
impressed. For they will only serve to remind her of what is missing from my
life—the rootedness of home. And Mehroo’s questioning eyes will follow me
and the bewilderment in them will never diminish, will forever be the lump in
my throat.
But before there is all that, there is this heavenly night at Regal Cinema. For this
glorious moment, here we all are at the movies, just like any normal family.
Mehroo’s warm hand is in my lap and when I sneak a peek at her in the dark, she
is smiling. Everybody seems to realize that this is a special occasion, with
Mehroo accompanying us, and I feel the unspoken admiration of all the adults
for having been the catalyst for this outing. During the intermission, Dad is
characteristically generous and comes back loaded with chicken rolls, Sindhi
samosas and bottles of Gold Spot and Coke.
Munching my chicken roll, singing along to the songs as familiar to me as my
name, I am struck by a beam of pure happiness, a drop of golden sun. When
Christopher Plummer sings the line, ‘Bless my homeland forever,’ my hair
stands up, as it always does. When Ralph betrays the Von Trapps in the abbey, I
turn to assure Mehroo, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing bad happens.’ She nods and
squeezes my hand.
For one blissful evening, I am no longer envious of the Von Trapp family. I leave
the theatre that evening, knowing my place in the world. I am a member of a
family that is large and loving and goes to the movies together. I am loved by a
sad-eyed woman who loves me above all else. I am the daughter of a father who
buys everybody Gold Spot and chicken rolls and a mother who held my hand
tight on our way to the movie theatre. I am the reason they are all here, I am the
one who has drawn Mehroo out of the house, I am the one responsible for the
smiles on their faces.
I step out of the theatre and into the world feeling fluid and grand and
irresistible.
Dad has enjoyed the family outing to the movies so much that a few days later,
he suggests a picnic. I am thrilled. I have never been on a family picnic before.
But before he can announce his idea at dinner, mom pulls him into their room for
a quick talk. He emerges a few minutes later and tells me that on second
thoughts, he’d like it if just the three of us—mom, myself and he—went on the
picnic together. I am surprised but am too excited at the prospect to disagree or
complain.
We are to go to Hanging Gardens. We plan the picnic for days, with dad even
promising to skip his usual practice of spending most of Sunday morning and
afternoon at the factory.
Either Babu or dad visit the factory everyday, even on the days the machines
aren’t humming. The ritual is as much a gesture of respect and superstition as it
is demanded by necessity. At home, Mehroo chides me if I accidentally refer to
the business as being closed for the day. ‘The factory is never closed,’ she says.
‘Just say, “We’re not there for one day.”’ But on the day of the picnic, dad leaves
for the factory at eight a.m. and is back home by ten, to pick up me and my
mom. He honks the horn but as always, mom is running late and I lean over the
railing of the balcony to tell him that she needs another half hour. Even from two
floors up, I can sense his irritation. ‘Okay, I’ll come up then,’ he says.
By the time we leave, it’s almost eleven and dad is in a bad mood. ‘How much I
told you yesterday about wanting to leave on time. Now what’s the use of being
out in the noonday sun,’ he mutters. ‘Our skins will be black as coal in an hour.’
Like many light-skinned Parsis, my dad treasures and protects his lemon-
coloured skin as if it is the Kohinoor diamond. While walking, he will
instinctively duck for the shade and when driving with the windows rolled down,
he puts a yellow duster cloth over his right hand as it rests on the window, to
protect it from the sun’s angry rays.
The tension in the car is palpable and instinctively I try to chisel away at it. ‘Ae,
daddy, want to hear a new joke I learned?’ I say, leaning forward from my back
seat. I tell him the one about the porcupine and the peacock and my reward is a
faint smile in the rearview mirror. But his mood is still dark as he glances
frequently at my mother, as if
expecting her to do or say something that will relieve the tension. But my mother
looks resolutely outside the window and it is clear that no apology for tardiness
will be forthcoming.
This calls for more drastic action. I know that nothing improves my father’s
mood as quickly as spending money on his family, so out of the blue I say,
‘Daddy, I want a chocolate.’
Sure enough, he brightens up. ‘Done,’ he says and stops at the next convenience
store we pass. He removes a ten-rupee note from the front pocket of his shirt.
‘Now, go into the store and ask for the kind of chocolate you want,’ he says.
‘Make sure you get the change.’ I walk into the store feeling tall and important,
clutching my ten-rupee note. I stand before a glass cabinet, selecting the
chocolate I want. A salesman hovers overhead. ‘Who are you with, beta?’ he
says. ‘Your mummy-daddy are with you?’
‘My daddy is waiting in the car,’ I say. ‘He sent me in to buy a chocolate. I can
count change,’ I say proudly.
I leave the store with a large Cadbury’s orange chocolate.
Once in the car, I hand my dad the change. He lets me keep the chocolate but the
ruse is up. I don’t really want to eat it at this time. ‘Mummy, I’m not hungry
right now,’ I say. ‘Can you keep this for me?’ My mother gives me a quizzical
look but takes the chocolate from me and tosses it on the dashboard.
We keep driving.