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Authors: M.G. Vassanji
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days would be told long afterwards; exactly what point was being made I could never be sure.
In due time a letter arrived from Pakistan with the “khush khabar” that my uncle and his family were safely in Karachi and had been looked after.
A few weeks after my uncle departed, Gandhi-ji was shot dead in Delhi.
My father had an elder sister, Meera, who had died in childbirth in Junagadh. I never saw my grandfather; I knew that he had been a wrestler in his youth, and remember the portrait of a stocky man seated on a chair, with a white flowing beard and a large smile, hanging in our sitting room. There was another photo of him, taken in the pavilion with my father and the two eminent visitors, Mr. Ross and Professor Ivanow, who stood at the two ends in the foursome, one extremely tall, the other stocky. But it was a faded snapshot and the faces were not clear. Dada died soon after my uncle left. Dadi lived a few more years. She was a thin sharp lady with a peculiar smell, and I remember her pouring hot ghee down my nose when it got blocked; and on Sundays, my head in her lap, my mouth firmly pried open with her fingers, administering the repulsive, grainy, laxative mixture called phuki down my throat.
There was a revolution in Zanzibar and a field marshall called John was warning all capitalists in his country to beware; an American spy-plane pilot called Powers was shot down by the Russians; Nehru was in Lagos; and Ken Barrington had saved the English cricket team in their match against South Africa …
Thus the world according to Raja Singh, and the newspapers and magazines he brought. It seemed so exciting, exotic, and far far away, would I be able even to touch it? In the central courtyard of our home, under the sky, sitting at a table by the light of a small wick lamp (and the moon, if it wasaround), I would pore over the news. All would be quiet. At some point Bapu-ji would leave his library to go to the bedroom, telling me to do the same; or the light in the library would go off, and I knew that he had decided to sleep there tonight among his precious books and the past.
There was a place called Nyasaland, and another called Katanga with plenty of gold, where a civil war had erupted; there was a man called Ben Bella in Algeria, another called Hammarskjöld in the United Nations …
But the news that seemed to shake the world, though not ours at Pirbaag, was the assassination of President Kennedy.
“The headlines were as big when Gandhi-ji was murdered,” Bapu-ji said, having come to stand behind me, and there was a musing, wistful quality in his voice. He read briefly over my shoulder. It was Sunday, we had just eaten.
I turned to look up at him. At this hour his face had lost some of its serenity, his eyes looked shaded. But perhaps it was the lighting here in the dark courtyard; his manner was as controlled as ever.
“Do you think the world war will happen, Bapu-ji?” I anxiously asked before he could quite get started to depart. Anything to detain him, keep my father with me.
He paused, briefly ran a hand over his cropped head, as though contemplating whether I was old enough for his conclusion. Then slowly he nodded: “It surely will, one day.”
“And all will be destroyed—this whole world?”
He nodded.
“Isn't that good then, Bapu, Kali Age will end and the gold Krta Age will return?”
My father gave me his musing look. “While we are human, we have human worries,” he told me.
He ruffled my hair briefly and left for the sanctuary of his library.
The mask. And my mother coming over sympathetically, as I watched him disappear. Sitting across the table, and saying, “Come on, explain to me: who was this Kennedy?”
To which, perking up, changing the subject to one she liked, I asked: “When will you go see
Mughal-e-Azam
?”
And she, half guilty, totally happy: “Ja-ja havé.” Go on now.
She adored the movies like nothing else.
My youth, cont'd. The mystic in his library; and
In due time a letter arrived from Pakistan with the “khush khabar” that my uncle and his family were safely in Karachi and had been looked after.
A few weeks after my uncle departed, Gandhi-ji was shot dead in Delhi.
My father had an elder sister, Meera, who had died in childbirth in Junagadh. I never saw my grandfather; I knew that he had been a wrestler in his youth, and remember the portrait of a stocky man seated on a chair, with a white flowing beard and a large smile, hanging in our sitting room. There was another photo of him, taken in the pavilion with my father and the two eminent visitors, Mr. Ross and Professor Ivanow, who stood at the two ends in the foursome, one extremely tall, the other stocky. But it was a faded snapshot and the faces were not clear. Dada died soon after my uncle left. Dadi lived a few more years. She was a thin sharp lady with a peculiar smell, and I remember her pouring hot ghee down my nose when it got blocked; and on Sundays, my head in her lap, my mouth firmly pried open with her fingers, administering the repulsive, grainy, laxative mixture called phuki down my throat.
There was a revolution in Zanzibar and a field marshall called John was warning all capitalists in his country to beware; an American spy-plane pilot called Powers was shot down by the Russians; Nehru was in Lagos; and Ken Barrington had saved the English cricket team in their match against South Africa …
Thus the world according to Raja Singh, and the newspapers and magazines he brought. It seemed so exciting, exotic, and far far away, would I be able even to touch it? In the central courtyard of our home, under the sky, sitting at a table by the light of a small wick lamp (and the moon, if it wasaround), I would pore over the news. All would be quiet. At some point Bapu-ji would leave his library to go to the bedroom, telling me to do the same; or the light in the library would go off, and I knew that he had decided to sleep there tonight among his precious books and the past.
There was a place called Nyasaland, and another called Katanga with plenty of gold, where a civil war had erupted; there was a man called Ben Bella in Algeria, another called Hammarskjöld in the United Nations …
But the news that seemed to shake the world, though not ours at Pirbaag, was the assassination of President Kennedy.
“The headlines were as big when Gandhi-ji was murdered,” Bapu-ji said, having come to stand behind me, and there was a musing, wistful quality in his voice. He read briefly over my shoulder. It was Sunday, we had just eaten.
I turned to look up at him. At this hour his face had lost some of its serenity, his eyes looked shaded. But perhaps it was the lighting here in the dark courtyard; his manner was as controlled as ever.
“Do you think the world war will happen, Bapu-ji?” I anxiously asked before he could quite get started to depart. Anything to detain him, keep my father with me.
He paused, briefly ran a hand over his cropped head, as though contemplating whether I was old enough for his conclusion. Then slowly he nodded: “It surely will, one day.”
“And all will be destroyed—this whole world?”
He nodded.
“Isn't that good then, Bapu, Kali Age will end and the gold Krta Age will return?”
My father gave me his musing look. “While we are human, we have human worries,” he told me.
He ruffled my hair briefly and left for the sanctuary of his library.
The mask. And my mother coming over sympathetically, as I watched him disappear. Sitting across the table, and saying, “Come on, explain to me: who was this Kennedy?”
To which, perking up, changing the subject to one she liked, I asked: “When will you go see
Mughal-e-Azam
?”
And she, half guilty, totally happy: “Ja-ja havé.” Go on now.
She adored the movies like nothing else.
My youth, cont'd. The mystic in his library; and
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