OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | My Sister, Aunts & Other Relatives: Parsi Tales From A Different Era… | Farrukh Dhondy

“The shadows lengthen as the sun sets,

Nothing sinister,

Not a prediction --

Just the angle of light

But the metaphoric imagination begets

Terror’s sister --

The dark conviction

Foreshadowing the night?”

From Aesop’s Goal, by Bachchoo

You will forgive me, gentle reader, for telling you tales of my sister, who died last week, as each of them has some significance as general stories of a multi-faceted India.

It’s August 1962, and my elder sister Zareen is 20 years old. That morning she is putting on a celebratory sari in front of a mirror, which is part of one flap of the wardrobe door in my aunt’s bedroom. Behind her is the bed of our grand-aunt, Aala Masi.

Aala Masi, my late grandmother’s much-elder sister, is now in her eighties and lives in my aunt’s house in Poona (now Pune), having been brought there owing to infirmities and illness from Bombay (Mumbai), where she spent her life in a “Parsi colony” near Grant Road.

“So, whose wedding is it?” Aala Masi asks Zareen, with her arthritic palm cupped upwards, shaking in a questioning gesture.

“It’s not a wedding, Aala Masi, I’m giving a lecture in college for the Independence Day celebrations,” Zareen replies.

“What’s Independence Day?” Aala Masi asks.

Zareen, now done with her décor, turns to her.

“You know, it’s the day the British left India forever,” she explains.

“What??? The British have gone?” Aala Masi says, with a genuinely shocked expression. “No one told me!”

Yessss!!! 1962! What sort of insulation from the world’s upheavals does a Parsi colony in Mumbai offer its residents?

And then, moving to a little later in our extremely parallel lives -- our father is now Town Engineer in Jamshedpur, and Zareen lives with him and our mum, regularly visits Jamshedpur’s Beldih Club, plays badminton, parties with other members and falls in love with a young Tata Administrative Service candidate called Ramesh Bhasin. She tells my mother of her nascent relationship and of course, in the small town, the gossip spreads and dad gets to hear of it.

He doesn’t approve. He tells Zareen she is not to entertain any relationship with a Punjabi Hindu, and that the family would find a nice Parsi boy for her.

Zareen, who is scheduled to go for a year as one of the girls chosen, out of thousands, to run the Indian Pavilion at the New York World Trade Fair, is not happy and talks to our mother, who suggests that she invite Ramesh and his friend, another Tata trainee, K.C. Mehra, who used to be an actor, to tea.

Zareen does. Ramesh and KC turn up.

My father returns home after work and finds these young men in the sitting room and is introduced to them. They get talking. Ramesh is utterly charming and a couple of hours into tea, dad is entranced and offers them whisky and whatever.

When they leave, my father speaks to Zareen. Yes, he has melted. He will put religious prejudice behind, and if she returns from New York after a year and is still in a relationship with this young man, he will approve of their betrothal.

So, it was said and so it was done -- the tans-religious wedding took place with hearty celebrations. And, if you want to know, it lasted beautifully and her three very mature children came from several points of the globe and spent some of Zareen’s last days with her, as I and our younger sister and her two gorgeous granddaughters did, in Bengaluru.

As the years passed, Ramesh rose through the ranks of the Tata hierarchy to become one of the directors on the board of Tata companies. Zareen, not wanting to be just a housewife, applied for and began work as a clerk or teller in one of the town’s banks. She didn’t aspire to any rank and was just one of the many workers, all of whom were union members and some of them members of the Indian Communist Party.

These allegiances led the staff of the bank to several determinations and industrial actions, including a strike. Of course, all of them knew that Mrs Bhasin was the wife of a director of the Tatas, but she enthusiastically joined in the actions of her colleagues and was even, among some of them, dubbed “Comrade Mrs Bhasin”.

Ramesh and Zareen often visited me in London. I was, when they were once here, a member of the Race Today collective, a political group centred around a radical magazine which fought for the rights of Black and Asian Britons.

It wasn’t a “complaint” outfit and was in every way positive and even fun. Every year the collective, at the end of August, floated its own detachment, marching through the streets of London in costume for West Indian Carnival.”

The year when Zareen and Ramesh visited, the theme of our Carnival contingent was “Forces of Victory”. Zareen and Ramesh joined us wearing mock military uniforms and marching through the streets with thousands of others to the beat of steel bands; our contingent led by a car decked out like a tank, chanting the verses composed by Linton Kwesi Johnson.

I wondered, even then, what the other Tata directors, bosses and their wives would make of Ramesh and Zareen’s “plebeian” (?) involvement -- but did those two give a toss?