Coming home from India, back to where our hearts belonged

Excerpted from Chosen Ground: the saga of Clara Motwani
by Goolbai Gunasekera

Another famous name connected with Ooty is that of the dancer, Ram Gopal. His sister had married an English canon and their daughter, (the earlier mentioned Joy Mellor), was my classmate at the convent. Ram Gopal came up to visit his sister on one memorable occasion, and Mother was able to have the intricacies of Indian dance made somewhat intelligible to her.

Each holiday season, Father took his family down to Madras to hear the annual Krishnamurti talks. We would stay at the Theosophical Society in Adyar at Leadbeater Chambers – a sort of subsidized hotel for foreign visitors. The menus there were mainly western, and could not have been duller. They were totally inadequate for the Motwani girls’ robust appetites. So Father would take us to Bhojanshalla, the Society’s Indian restaurant, where we sat on the floor and ate off banana leaves. The taste was fantastic and the food (thankfully) plentiful. Totally vegetarian, of course. Both Father and Mother were strict vegetarians and Su and I only tasted meat when we left home to be married.

“Where do they put all that food?” Father would marvel, watching us slurp our curries in the accepted Madrasi way. “They’re bottomless pits – that’s what they are.”

Rukmani Arundale, the lady who made oriental dancing a respectable occupation for women in India, was the wife of a former President of the society and they had remained good friends. Dinners in her home were occasions that I recall with nostalgia. We would sit on her broad veranda, watching the Adyar river flow by. The conversation was always philosophical, and without being aware of it, Su and I absorbed, as if by osmosis, the thoughts and teachings of the world’s great teachers. Theosophists regard all religions as important, and there were always visiting foreigners ready to debate and discuss – with Father around to dispute. Father was at his best in argument. For once in our talkative little lives, we remained silent.

Mother claimed she could not understand half of what was being said. “You get so TECHNICAL,” she would complain to Father as we walked back to Leadbeater Chambers in the moonlight, enjoying the breathtaking view while keeping a wary lookout for snakes. The Adyar Theosophical Society was a beautiful place then, its lovely buildings standing in two hundred acres of parkland. The largest banyan tree in the world was located in its garden, and members of the Society would have tea beneath its spreading roots. Su and I watched and wondered.

Beautiful Rukmani, later India’s Minister of Culture, was a goddess to worship. Years later, after my daughter Khulsum was born, she had dinner with us in Colombo and I treasure a picture of an ageing but still lovely lady, taken with a sleepy, nightie-clad Khulsum.

Those two years in India were happy years but we all wanted to come back to Colombo. Sri Lanka (still known then as Ceylon) was our home. Mother pined for Ceylon and had moments of deep depression. At such times Father felt the weight of her sadness fall on him and knew he had been its unwitting cause. He made up his mind that he would never take Mother from Ceylon again. He would make his headquarters in Colombo whenever he was in between assignments. And so we came home.

The end of World War II wrought drastic changes in our own family life. As a sociologist, Father realized that the Partition of India was inevitable. Vainly he wrote frantic letters to his brothers and sisters in Karachi, advising them to transfer whatever assets they could convert into cash and get the hell out of, what was soon going to be, Pakistan. They could not believe that it would happen.

“How can anyone take this land from me?” Uncle Ladikdas wrote angrily. “You are saying this because you have no land, and you want to deprive me of it too.”

Father was hurt beyond measure. He brooded over his brother’s letter for days. He decided the time had come for one last trip to Arazi, before Partition was officially declared. He took me with him.

In Arazi was my favourite relative — my cousin Ahalyabai who was my age and, thanks to some genetic quirk, my double. We could have been identical twins. If relationships were to be accurately defined, Ahalya was in reality my aunt, the granddaughter of my uncle Muniram. Despite my American blood, Ahalya’s skin was a shade fairer than mine. This was a source of great satisfaction to her. She rarely went out in the sun, while my own activities kept me outdoors a great deal.

This visit to Father’s birthplace was to be our last. I have never returned to Karachi after the Partition of India. Father tried his best to get his Arazi family to recognize the gravity of the looming conflict between Hindus and Muslims. He transferred his books and other movable assets to Madras, but the go-downs he owned in Karachi were eventually compensated for by the Government of India, with a tract of barren land in Jubbulpore. Father never saw the land, and promptly mislaid the deeds.

Go-down rentals and other sources of private income dried up after Partition, and my parents realized that life must change. Both could command high salaries, and Mother constantly told us that the value of a good education was above the price of rubies. “See how useful it is now,” she would tell us. She had been offered the post of Principal of a large school in Gwalior, India, but opted instead to take up an offer from Hindu Ladies’ College in Jaffna. Father was resigned.

“If Karma ordains that your Mother must live in Ceylon, who am I, a mere husband, to thwart the fates!”

Actually Father would have thwarted God himself if anything interfered with his own agenda, but Indian Independence was around the corner and American universities were sending out feelers on the lecture circuit of which Father was a shining light. What with his Indian background and Yale education he was quite a draw. He was now booked on an 18-month tour of United States universities, and it mattered little, therefore, whether the rest of the family was based in Ooty or in Jaffna.

The decision was made, and till the Principal’s house in Jaffna was ready for us we spent a fortnight with Dr. and Mrs. E.M. Wijerama, Mother’s best friends. As I have already said, to Su and me it was coming home. To Mother it was bliss. Except for Father we all felt Sri Lankan, for here was familiarity, here was friendship and here was love. For us, the friends Mother made were closer than family. The Visakhians who knew me as a baby remained my ‘sisters’ all my life.

To this day Beryl de Silva, Bona de Lanerolle, Lakshmi Edirisinghe, Manel Ratnatunga, Agnes Abeysekera and dozens of others have shared my life as though we were blood relatives. Never have I felt alone on this ‘Chosen Ground’. And now that fate had seen fit to scatter the Motwanis of Arazi, Sri Lanka was the home of our hearts.

There is a tragic tale to be .told here. Ahalya, my twin in both personality and appearance, lost her life in one of the last trains to leave Pakistan. It was rumoured that she was dragged out, raped and killed in front of her parents. Father never saw his brothers again. His family was scattered, and he did not even know where to begin looking for them.

“At least they know where to find me,” he would say prosaically, hiding the deep hurt he felt that he had parted so angrily from Uncle Ladikdas who would not heed the counsel of the younger brother he had earlier been so anxious to educate.

Years later, a Motwani family from a bank in Dubai contacted us. Father was by then no longer alive, but I was able to get some news of at least this one family from far away Arazi. There were so few left of the formerly large and united Motwani joint families of Karachi. It was a bitter-sweet meeting.

Each year, for three years after this the young banker would send my mother an expensive white chiffon sari (which I promptly annexed). It was only after the second one arrived that we realized why these lovely white saris were arriving with such regularity.

When Kishin Motwani met us in Colombo, Mother was wearing a white sari. Kishin approvingly commented on this several times saying to me, “Auntie looks lovely in white.” I thought nothing of it at the time. As the saris began coming, it eventually dawned on us that Kishin must have thought Mother was following the time honoured custom of Sindhi widows wearing nothing but white after their husbands had passed away and we realized that he must have been terribly impressed that Mother, an American, would be so traditional minded that she would actually forsake wearing colours. I think Mother wrote each year and thanked him but a long distance relationship is not easy to maintain and we eventually lost touch again.