POOR LITTLE RICH BOY

by Goolbai Gunasekara

Excerpted from Chosen ground

They lie on opposite sides of the world — the village of Arazi in Sind Province of undivided India and the city of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, the Blue Grass State of beautiful women and fast horses. Mother would bristle defensively when Father would tell us girls (his two daughters),

“What they really mean is that Kentucky is filled with fast women and beautiful horses.”

We would shriek appreciatively.

“Did she run really fast to catch you, Daddy?”

“You’ll tell that story once too often,” mother would say repressively. “They’ll believe it after a time.”

Americans do not have the custom of astrological predictions being made at the birth of a child. Certainly, my American grandparents, Edward and Eva Heath, had no reason to suppose that their first born daughter would marry an Indian academic and wander far from her native shores to the palm fringed island of Ceylon, there to become the adored and respected Principal to thousands of Sri Lankan girls to whom she would devote her life in the field of Buddhist education.

“She was perhaps the finest Ambassadress to come out of America to the East,” said USA Ambassador, John Reed in the 1980’s when speaking about mother at a public lecture. But more about her later.

Father’s childhood was unusual enough to make his early life a rattling good story and to prove once and for all that truth is truly stranger than fiction. Born to a village landowner, wealthy enough by rural standards of the time (the end of the 19th century) Kewal was the youngest son of a third wife of the Motwani family in Arazi.

The village was just a few hundred miles out of Karachi (then part of India). Father had nephews who were older than he was. There was a 41-year gap between him and his eldest brother, my uncle Hariram, which says a great deal for the virility of Arazi citizens, particularly that of my grandfather. Caught up in the life of a typical Indian joint family system, my grandfather’s death hardly touched the young boy who had five older brothers, one sister, and dozens of uncles, aunts and cousins all living under one sprawling roof.

Each evening the family gatekeeper in Arazi would call out the 20 or so names of the various offspring of the six or seven families resident in the house, just to make sure they were all safely locked in for the night. Invariably late, my father would try to sneak past Sabu’s giant legs. Sabu would catch him and thrash his little behind till it smarted. Screaming in anger and pain one night, my father thrust his hand in Sabu’s beard and pulled with all his might. Sabu’s roars filled the night. The whole family looked at my father sadly.

“He really is too much,” they told each other, giving him an extra hug for he was so young, so cute and so very articulate. “He hardly ever stopped talking,” Aunt Rochel said. “No wonder he became a Professor. He was practicing from birth.”

My grandfather had died a saddened man when my father was five. The British rulers were extending their railway lines around Indian country villages and a sidetrack cut right through Motwani land. Scrupulously fair, as always, in their dealings with landowners, the British paid a fair compensation to the older Motwani. But to a traditional Indian of that era, money in the bank was a dead asset. He bitterly mourned the fact that all he now had to leave to his baby son — his last and unexpectedly born son – was this: a hoard of cash safely, but uselessly, stashed away in a Karachi bank under the trusteeship of a respected businessman cum banker.

“That land loss killed him,” my uncles would tell me many years later, although, as things turned out, that bank account worked exceedingly well in my father’s favour. There it lay for a long time, collecting interest, but of no value to the agrarian Motwanis. My father’s brothers loved him but they were not about to sacrifice any of their own land for an unexpected new sibling. They kept their acres. Fifty years later their sons wished with all their hearts that some of that banked money had been theirs. ‘Thrown out of Sind by the Partition of India, they lost everything.

Father was eight when his mother died. The news that he was now technically an orphan reached his Parsi trustee, who, with typical Parsi zeal and sense of duty, decided that he should visit his young ward. Accordingly he telegraphed the Motwanis to expect him within the fortnight, travelling by the very train that had played and was going to play so great a part in Kewal’s past and future fortunes.

The telegram threw the Motwanis into a panic. Well-to-do and respected though they were as landlords of the area, they were nonetheless unsophisticated, rural Indians. Mr. Jamshed Mehra would obviously expect to stay the night. Equally obviously, this westernized gentleman would not be comfortable using Indian-style toilets, however dean and well maintained they might be.

Nor would he be enchanted with a highly refreshing village-style well-water bath, in the course of which the aforesaid Sabu, panting with exertion, would draw buckets up from the deep well and pour cold, cold water over the one having the bath. Hot water was not even thought of in the hot Sind desert – but the water was really icy despite the burning sun.

A short hemp rope secured my father to the post of the well whenever it was time for Sabu to bathe him. “If he falls into the well,” Sabu would say, looking hopefully at the heavens, “it is God’s will and will not be my fault. “Ow,ow,ow,” yelled my father, tugging at the rope and dancing under the glacial stream. “Not my fault,” Sabu would reiterate, tightening the knot.

The Parsis were notoriously westernized. They studied abroad, travelled extensively in Europe and hardly considered themselves to be typical representatives of India. Fleeing from religious persecution in Persia around the ninth or 10th centuries, they had retained much of their Persian culture and certainly their old religion of Zoroastrianism. They were trustworthy, reliable, cultured and highly respected by both Indians and British alike. But all this was not much comfort to the Motwanis, who were now faced with the intensely personal problem of how to entertain this august personality from the city.

“He can take us as he finds us,” said Uncle Ladikdas sturdily.

Not everyone shared his eminently practical view. The women of the household embarked on an orgy of cleaning. The already shining brassware took on a golden sheen. The smoothly tiled floors gleamed whitely. The sheets spread on the low charpoy-like bed were of the finest cotton available.

On one of his rare trips to Karachi, grandfather had bought a silver canteen to the great amusement of his daughters-in-law who considered knives and forks unnecessary, impractical and unhygienic. The unused silver was now taken out, washed and loaded back in the velvet-lined box. The box was placed ostentatiously on a nearby Kashmiri stool in full view. Should Mr. Jamshed Mehta so desire, the eating utensils were near at hand. Kewal’s aunts and cousins tried spearing chapattis with a fork.

“Those mad English,” they sighed as the food slithered off their forks onto the floor.

On the day of his guardian’s arrival, Kewal was scrubbed so hard by Sabu that his skin glowed. He was a handsome child and Uncle Gopram would tell my sister and me: “Your father was a scamp. Everyone spoiled him and he got away with far too much.”

Certainly at the time under review, my father got VIP treatment. The whole family basked in the lustre shed by the visiting dignitary from far away Karachi. The village was agog. Father was impossibly cock-a-hoop.

“Poor boy,” his sisters-in-law would say, gazing at him sadly. “No father, no mother and no land.”

No one bothered about that tidy little sum gathering a healthy little interest in a Karachi bank, and growing nicely under Jamshedji’s careful investment.