Sepia Tales

When I woke up in the morning I saw the family was having a mini conference. My mom looked sheepishly at me. "Did you sleep well?” I nodded numbly. Actually I had gone to bed with a racing heart but then had succumbed to sheer fatigue.  Then my father spoke. “I will come to school with you. I must speak to the Principal. What kind of security do they have that children can be kidnapped right from outside their gates?"  Nooo! My heart cried out. That’s not necessary! Why can’t we let this be? But of course I didn’t say a thing.   The principal was a youngish bespectacled guy and he happened to be in the foreground of the school, in front of a 10-feet-high statue of a welcoming Jesus. He was wearing a white cassock and had a few books in hand.  My father strode up to him. “Father, I need to speak with you."  “Yes?"  My father narrated the entire story to him. “How could you let a child get kidnapped right from outside your gates?"  

I reached home dog tired around 6 pm. Not only had we walked a lot, there was the added weight of guilt and anxiety. My mother was waiting by the door, worried sick. We lived at King’s Circle and I usually came home by 4.30 or so. “Where were you?! Why are you so late?” she screamed at me as I staggered home. “Where have you been? Why are you looking so dead-beat?"  She shook me up. I could see her worry had transformed into fury. I didn’t know what to say. How could I tell her I had walked out of school at lunch and wandered over all the way to Reay Road? No way.  “I asked you something. Why don’t you answer me?!” She was really furious. “I was kidnapped,” I sobbed. She was stunned. “What?!! What did you say? You were kidnapped?! What happened? Tell me what happened!” She held me by my collar and shook me. Her eyes were wide with residual anger and surging anxiety. Now there was no going back. “There was this guy outside the school gate,” I stammered. &q

I was probably eight years old then, studying at St Joseph’s High School at Wadala in Mumbai. It was one of those lazy summer days at school that seemed to drag on and on and on and the entire class seemed enveloped in the thick stupor of boredom.  When the bell rang for the lunch recess, we boys dashed out of the class in a whoosh of relief. After a quick lunch from our three-compartment lunchboxes, we headed for the water fountain. What, no water?! This was crazy! What would we drink? And sure enough, just because there was no water our throats actually felt more parched than ever before! I was with two friends, Yagnesh and Prasad. Yagnesh was a sweet, conservative Gujarati boy and Prasad, well, he was the oldest amongst us, having dropped a year. Prasad was taller than Yagnesh and me, and, though not very bright, he certainly was more confident and street savvy than both of us.   The three musketeers went around the school to see if there was a stray tap we could drink fro

My maternal grandfather spent his entire life in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi. A high caste North Indian Brahmin by birth, he had a peculiar problem: he could read Urdu and Farsi and English but he could not read Hindi! He could speak it, he could understand it but he couldn’t read it. The Devanagri characters simply left him baffled. When we kids would go out with him we would tease him. “Nanaji, read that sign.” He would shrug and say  “Beta, main Hindi nahi padh sakta.”  (Son, I can’t read Hindi.) He could read the Hindi numbers, he could read bus routes, he could read some signs on shops in Dariba or Khari Baoli but if you gave him a Hindi newspaper he would sheepishly return it to you unread. If someone wrote him a letter, he would hand it over to his wife who would read it out to him. But his Urdu was marvellous and his calligraphic Urdu handwriting would have been the envy of an industrious maulvi. He would write his accounts in a parchment paper sewn-notebook, beginning from th