Follow the link to listen to the podcast of this story by my sister Lekha Warrior...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/02xqHiZgnhEVYTaR21AUMp?si=2hedN4R8R8aBlqhLI-KVOQ
The grey, gloomy, wet and cold weather of London had been terrible for my asthmatic mother. After seeing Mummy suffer for four long years, Daddy decided that it was about time to bring us home and settle down under the glorious Indian Sun.
Daddy once mentioned, when I was still quite young, that I had brought them luck. Till I came along, my dad was posted at army bases, all over the country. My mother had moved back to her maternal home in Kerala after the birth of my older brother, Raj and my parents only met off and on. After I was born, we generally stayed together as a family, first in New Delhi and then in London, where my younger brother arrived. Once Daddy realized that the London weather was unsuitable for my mother’s health, he decided to quit his job and relocate. He had started his family quite late, and was now loathe to live away from us. Scraping together his savings, he managed to buy an inexpensive, 400-square-foot, one-room-kitchen flat in I.C. Colony in Borivali. Bombay City ended at Dadar and even Bandra was considered to lie in the outer suburbs. Everything that lay North of Bandra was the back of beyond.
It was in early April of 1973, on Gudi Padwa or the Hindu New year, that we moved into our own home. We owned one metal trunk, some suitcases and a few utensils. We had no furniture and we sat, ate and slept on the floor. Both my parents were from impoverished backgrounds and chose to spend their money on food rather than frills. So, we always had a lot of food to eat. On a full belly, life is ever joyful and we children felt no sense of deprivation until a few years later when we soon mastered the sorry skill of how to count what we didn’t have against what others possessed.
Ironically, one of my early memories after moving into this new flat was a visit to the local milkman. There were only a few residents and Narayan had to cycle through, what we children thought were thick forests to bring us milk. For us, he was quite the hero. He braved foxes and jackals that we would hear howl every night. Our parents would warn us about these animals and about straying too far from the building on our own. When Daddy asked me to accompany him that afternoon, I happily agreed. Seated on Dad’s cycle, we rode past mango orchards and woods into the mangroves by the creek. All the while, my fertile imagination would see wild eyes and hear ominous sounds emanating from the bushes. Finally, in the middle of nowhere, we stopped. As my dad parked his cycle, I saw in front of me the smallest house ever. Surely, this house belonged to a fairy, an elf or a goblin. No human would live in something so tiny. To my utter disbelief, Narayan emerged through the small door. He invited us in. Daddy bent to enter and I followed suit. The tiny room now filled up with us three. I noticed that my dad could just about stand straight inside. I also noticed that Narayan was a small man compared to my dad. I suddenly could see the real hero. “Don’t worry Narayan,” I said to our host, “Daddy will buy you a nice big house to live in. You will, won’t you, Daddy?”
Narayan laughed. Daddy struggled. He was torn between an adult understanding of his own uncomfortable financial state and not wanting to damage the image he sensed I had of him as a hero, the bigger of the two men, the man who could make all problems go away! He nodded, “I’ll try Mollu.” As we bid Narayan goodbye and returned to our large, luxurious one-room apartment, I rejoiced. Both, in our being wealthy and in the knowledge that we, my dad and I together, were soon surely going to set things right.