by Jerry Pinto
They knew of his bravery and his service to the army. They could not make sense of him. But here was a living link with my grandfather.
‘And did you know about the young man who walked into the factory once and your grandpapa offered him a job?’
I may have been young but I could smell a good story coming.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said and settled down to listen.
‘Well, many years before the war, a young man walked in and asked for work. He was hired although he was Italian and although he seemed a little cocky. He worked for a while and then one day, your grandfather heard a terrible scream, a scream of mortal agony …’
I shivered.
‘The young man had had a disagreement with another worker. He had been working near the furnace of the foundry and he had seized a red-hot metal rod and banged it down on the hand of the other worker. Your grandfather first despatched the injured worker to the hospital. Then he called the Italian to his office. “You are not fit to work in teams,” he told the man as he gave him his marching orders.’
I wondered whether that was the end of the story.
‘Do you know what the name of the Italian was?’
I didn’t know. How could I?
‘Benito Mussolini,’ he said triumphantly.
TWO
FROM FIVE GARDENS TO PARIS
I once showed a friend a picture of my mother. He said, ‘She looks determined.’ She was and I inherited that from her. And so, when at the age of three, I decided that I wanted to go to school, I found my way to school.
We were living at Five Gardens then, a quiet, leafy part of central Bombay. It has not changed much, I am told. In one of the gardens—a maidan really—the good Jesuits had set up an open-air school. I have no idea why they were there, but there were tents and there were students and there were teachers and very soon, there was Leela.
I wandered around until I found what looked like my age group. The priest in charge was slightly bemused.
‘Where have you come from?’
I pointed to my home. When he tried to take me home, I refused to go.
‘I want to go to school,’ I told him.
Perhaps I made a refreshing change from the whining schoolboys with ‘shining morning faces, creeping like snails, unwillingly to school’ but he sat me down in a corner with the youngest students and told me to colour a butterfly and then pin it up somewhere.
‘Hsst,’ said the little boy next to me as I finished my butterfly. We were then supposed to stick them on to a board with drawing pins.
I looked up.
He pointed at his lap. He had opened his shop and what looked to me like a grub was on display. I had no idea what I was looking at but it didn’t look very attractive. Ever interested in raising the general aesthetic standards of the environment, I tried to improve things and stuck my butterfly on it.
With a drawing pin, of course.
When my mother came to collect me, I was sitting with my nose in the corner. It seemed to be evident that I was already in trouble.
‘What has she been doing?’ she asked.
The priest found it difficult to answer.
A year later, I finally went to my first school, Cathedral School in Colaba at the southern tip of the island city of Mumbai. I had a picture of Chopin tucked into the pocket of my pinafore. Chopin was my first love. I loved his music and I wanted to learn to play the piano.
In that I was like my mother. She too had wanted to learn music but her father was having none of it. But my grandmother was more sympathetic and found her a teacher to give her lessons. Since there was no piano in their home, Grand-maman and the driver got together and created a little keyboard out of cardboard so that Maman could practise. She was so good at it that she was chosen to perform at a local festival at Divonne-les-Bains. My grandmother took her husband to it and he was surprised to see his daughter play beautifully. And so she got her piano.
My problem was diffidence. My mother would play the piano and I would watch her and yearn to play and wonder how to tell her that I wanted to play. By this time, we were in Sargent House in Colaba. Beneath us lived Harry Littler, one of the last relicts of the Raj, one of those who stayed on. He was a piano teacher but it was well known that he had no time for four-year-olds.
One day, I was tinkling away when my mother was out and the doorbell rang.
‘Who is playing the piano?’ he demanded gruffly and walked into the room. ‘I know it isn’t Msarthe; I know her playing …’
I sat frozen on the stool.
‘You,’ he said.
Then he turned and left. But the next day, Maman asked me if I wanted to learn the piano for the so very stern Harry Littler was ready to take me on as a pupil.
I wanted desperately to learn to play something for my mother’s birthday. I wanted it to be beautiful for her. So I learnt a simplified piece by Chopin and I played it to her on her birthday when her friends were over. When I finished, they were all trying not to laugh.
“Thank you, chérie,’ she said, with a slight smile. ‘But why would you play a funeral march on my birthday?’
Perhaps I knew even then that there was a strain of sadness, of melancholia, somewhere inside her.
We moved to Paris soon afterwards where I continued to learn ballet with Madame Primakova, a Russian émigrée. My parents encouraged me in my enthusiasms. Neither ever insisted that I should do what they had done. My father, Dr Ramaiah Naidu, was a scientist, a physicist and a radiologist. His world was the world of thought, of nuclear physics. He had worked his way up, running away from home to go to Aurobindo Ghosh’s fledgling ashram in Pondicherry. From there, he went on to Shantiniketan where he taught mathematics for a while until he went to Benares Hindu University for his master’s degree in the sciences. He was offered a scholarship to England, but he turned it down because he wanted no favours from the colonial rulers of India. Instead, he wrote to Madame Curie and was accepted into the Sorbonne where he completed his doctorate.
‘The day of the results,’ he told me, ‘we all went to the university. I got through the press of bodies to the notice board. I looked for my name at the bottom where in India, what we call the “pass classes” would be listed. I wasn’t among them. I looked among those who had passed in the second class. I was still not among them. I looked among those who had secured a first class. No Naidu. My heart was sinking. I had not expected to fail but it seemed … then I got to the top of the list and I found, to my great surprise, that my name led all the rest.’
Later, he is said to have helped establish the foundations of medical physics. He was a post-doctoral fellow of Madame Curie and when she died, he was running her laboratory. Later, he was the first medical physicist at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Bombay, where he installed a radon production facility. He had implemented a similar facility at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Institute in New York. He introduced me to the wonder of the natural world, explaining everything to me without ever being condescending, but I can never remember him even suggesting that I should study science.
My mother was a journalist with Le Petit Democrat Populaire. She mentioned that someone had once thrown a hand grenade into the office.
‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked.
‘I did not have the time to be scared,’ said my mother.
She met my father when she was sent to cover the Second Round Table Conference; he was the head of the Cambridge Students’ Union. If all this sounds like the bare bones of their relationship, it is because I did not ask my parents questions. I felt that would be impertinent of me. What I knew of their lives before me, or before their marriage, has been pieced together from what they chose to tell me.
But as a child, my world was full of interesting people and events. For instance, Sarojini Naidu may have been the ‘nightingale of India’, the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the governor of an Indian state. But to me she was a well-belove
d aunt, so large that she could not fit easily in most of our chairs. She loved her food and Maman filled a huge tiffin box and sent it to her whenever she travelled. One day, when she was living at the Bhulabhai Desai House on the Bhulabhai Desai Road in south Mumbai, she called me to her. She handed me a box of chocolates and a bunch of gladioli from a vase.
‘Now go out to the outhouse and see Mickey Mouse,’ she said.
I had my marching orders and I went to the outhouse. I knocked on the door and was called in. I was still expecting to meet the Disney character; instead, sitting on the bed was Mahatma Gandhi.
‘You are not Mickey Mouse!’ I said.
‘No?’ Gandhiji asked.
‘Your ears are big but they’re not big enough.’
‘Is that all?’ He asked and turned around to put on the side light.
‘And you don’t have a tail.’
He laughed at that and put on the light.
‘So I am not Mickey Mouse,’ Gandhiji said, ‘but who am I?’
‘You are Gandhiji,’ I said.
I put the flowers down and gave him the chocolates. He took them and began to eat them immediately, as happy as a schoolboy with a box of tuck.
‘How do you know who I am?’ He said.
I don’t remember if I had explained or not, but I do remember shouting Gandhiji ki jai even in my two-wheeler pram. Later I had organized a ceremonial burning of solar topis made out of paper as part of my protest against the British Raj. But I do remember his strong arms around me as he hugged me. A few years later, in Geneva, I came home from school one day to find my mother looking pale.
‘Leela,’ she said, ‘something terrible has happened.’ That was the day Gandhiji was assassinated.
We wept together for the loss of the nation but I also wept for the thin man with the warm eyes and the hug that made you feel loved. The political without the personal often seems to me to be barren.
My parents’ ability to allow for difference attracted a wide range of people. They extended this courtesy to me too. They were willing to allow me to choose my path. I cannot ever remember even a suggestion as to what I should do. Their only requirement was that I persevere.
‘Will you see it through?’ Was the only question my father would ask when I announced that I wanted to learn something new. If I said I would it was assumed that I would keep my word. Whether it was the piano or ballet or horse-riding the same question was asked and when I had promised, the necessary arrangements were made. I kept my side of the bargain.
In Paris, Daddy had to go to the hospital where they were going to treat him for artificial blood cancer. He had been exposed to radium. What saved him, he said, was his habit of walking. To oxygenate his blood, he would walk in the high mountains, in the Himalayas and in the Swiss Alps, so that, he said, his blood would be forced to do its work.
We landed in Paris in the summer. Before I was to go to school, he was keen that I see the city. He called his friend, the architect Rosenthal, who knew the city intimately. Together, he and I would walk and walk. We walked up to Montmartre and visited Le Musée de la Vie Romantique, which had a death mask of my beloved Chopin and a cast of his delicate hand and one of George Sand’s arm. We walked the Rive Gauche and stopped at the Café Les Deux Magots, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre discussed existentialism. We walked to Notre Dame and through what had once been the Jewish Ghetto and to Musée Nissim de Camondo, with its impressive collection of Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, created by a family of Jewish bankers ultimately killed in the Holocaust. We walked to the Père Lachaise cemetery where so many of the world’s great men, including J.R.D. Tata and Chopin, lie buried. In those days, there were no maps of the graveyard and we wandered around. I found the painter David’s grave quite by chance and so also the grave of the actress Sarah Bernhardt. (They tell me that the grave most frequented is that of Jim Morrison. O tempora, o mores.) we walked to the islands in the Seine, the oldest parts of the city. We went to the Louvre, again and again because there was so much to see there.
I walked Paris and I learnt that to know a city one must walk its streets.
THREE
OF RACISTS AND OTHER ANIMALS
It was an afternoon of enchantment. The Ecole Communale Publique Suisse let out early on Saturdays and I walked out into the Geneva Street right into the falling snow. It was fresh, white, feathery magic and I wandered down the road, with my seven-year-old nose in the air, watching the snow fall. I had seen snow before. My father had taken me on an eight-hour walk to and from a glacier from Pontresina in the Swiss Alps but there the snow was lying on the ground, grey and without character. This was my first encounter with falling snow. And as I walked, I could tell I was on my way home, for my nose was filled with the familiar scents of the route, the yeasty aroma of fresh bread from the bakery, the sharp scent of fresh flowers at the corner, the heady whiff of chocolate from the chocolatier and next, the sweet smells from the shop of the grocer, my friend …
‘Run, little one, run,’ came a shout. I barely had time to register the voice, that of a senior girl at my school. I turned around and was immediately petrified, the proverbial rabbit in the glare of the headlights. Three louts surrounded me, shouting, ‘Look, it’s the red fish.’
Did I look like a red fish?
‘Let’s kill the red fish.’
Kill?
A canvas bag flashed above my head. I fell to the ground.
‘How many colours do you have on your body?’ One of them shouted.
More kicks followed. More blows. I lost consciousness at one point. Oblivion is merciful. I woke up at home. My mother was there and the doctor. They were looking worried. I remember thinking, they shouldn’t be worried. I’m safe now. I’m safe here.
It was my first encounter with racism. Over the next few days, I couldn’t understand what I had done to upset them so much that they had wanted to hit me with a canvas bag filled with bovver boots. I asked Maman and she tried to explain but her words did not make too much sense.
In retrospect, perhaps I should have seen it coming. Each week, the students would gather in a recreational hall and one of us would be called upon to talk to the others. My teacher, a delicate little thing who would tuck her purple hair into a straw hat with a little straw pompom bobbing on its stalk, once called upon me to talk about the flowers of India.
The next week, she asked if I would speak about the elephant, since that was what most people associated with India. Then there were the festivals of India. Perhaps she was fascinated by India. Perhaps she liked me. Perhaps no one else wanted to speak because the next week, it was again Leela on the cuisine of India.
‘Why does your food stink?’ Someone asked me.
I tried to explain about the spices of India, but even then I was aware that there was one section of the audience that sat stone-faced through my extempore talks.
It was only years later, many years later, that I confronted my demons in London. Hiroji Kubota, the Magnum photographer, was in London and he wanted to shoot the gangs of little boys who had started terrorising the aged in London. Dom was writing the story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Kubota was photographing it. We traced a gang of three, two of them from one family. They were all heart-breakingly young. The brothers were eight and ten, their friend was eleven. And on a rain-drenched afternoon, they agreed to demonstrate their techniques.
‘First we trip ‘em,’ said one, ‘and then we kick ‘em wiv our boots.’
I looked down at their boots. There they were. Almost the same kind of boots. I looked up.
‘We rip the old buggers,’ said his brother. He took a comb from his pocket. It had teeth missing in the middle. He tucked it into one corner of his mouth. ‘We cut ’em here. They squeal like pigs.’
He showed me a large raw potato with a razor blade stuck in it.
‘Or we cut ‘em wiv this.’
When Hiroji was finished, I offered them some sweets.
‘Don’ want no sweets,’ said the leader, ‘but yer could stand us a beer.’
Later, we went to meet their parents who didn’t seem very concerned about what their children were doing. Perhaps the parents of the young men who had attacked me in Geneva didn’t care either. Later, I heard that the family was in distress; the father was missing, the mother, ‘sick with alcohol’ was in and out of odd jobs and the children were growing up without hope and without dreams. And that is a recipe for a lack of imagination. Violence, to me, is a lack of imagination. You cannot be violent to anyone if you can imagine what it would be like to be in that person’s shoes. What those young people in Geneva lacked was also imagination. All they could see was difference and like animals they attacked the different in me, without recognising how much we had in common.
When I recovered, I wanted to go back to school. My father had thought it would be a very good idea for me to go to a public school, where I could mingle with commoner and bourgeois alike. The school authorities were horrified that one of their students should be attacked. They assured Maman that they would take swift action. But they also wondered if I would not be happier in some other less parochial school, a school with a broader base of cosmopolitan students?
My parents had already been planning the move. The attack only accelerated its pace. It was decided that Maman and I would stay in Geneva. Papa would visit on weekends when he could. I went to L’Ecole Rossiaud, a private school for rich Catholic girls where, it was assumed, there would be a greater degree of civilisation and a greater respect for those of other races.
Well, no one attacked me physically but once Abbé Pierre held up Hinduism and India to scorn, it was open season on one Leela Naidu. They surrounded me in the gym, these rich and cosmopolitan Catholic girls, kneeling before me and laughing. They held their sweaty gym shoes up to my nose, asking, ‘Is this the way you pray? Is this what you worship?’
