by Jerry Pinto
When the children wanted to do a play, I told them to go ahead. They would write it, perform it and I would be the audience.
‘But what should we write a play about?’ One of them asked me.
‘Whatever you want,’ I replied.
‘Shivaji the Great,’ said one of the slightly older ones.
‘Certainly,’ I said.
There followed a great deal of discussion and then a deputation came to me.
‘How can we do a play on Shivaji if we haven’t even seen a picture of him?’ Said the leader.
And so the children wrote their own play about the market near the school, putting in the fisherwomen and the noise and the shouting. (Children are always happy if there is a legitimate opportunity to shout.)
I got them magnifying glasses and we went into the garden at Mehta House and studied the flowers and any other biological specimens we could find.
And now three decades later, here I was, in the ‘autumn of my life’ and here was a girl I had taught.
‘I can never forget you,’ she said. ‘I will always remember how you asked us what we dreamed about.’
I remembered. One little girl almost broke my heart when she said, ‘I dream of nimbu paani with ice in it.’
Was it …
‘I am now a telephone operator here, at St. Elizabeth’s,’ she said. ‘I will try and visit you.’
When she left, I was struck by the coincidences that had brought us together. In a way, we had both left traces in the patterns of each other’s lives. Each encounter, I thought, had left something behind in my life. And perhaps I had left something behind too. John Donne’s lines came back as I lay in that hospital bed. ‘No man is an island,’ he had written and then an even more beautiful meditation upon it.
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated … As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all… No man is an island, entire of itself… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee …’
LEELA’S EPILOGUE
I can’t let this book end without giving my thanks to my dear friends, Adil Jusawalla and his wife Veronik, who prodded and propelled me to writing the book I had in mind. I next got the visit of Adil with a candy-striped fat pencil and matching notebook with an order on page one: ‘And now you write.’ I stared at the blank page while I sensed that as I proceeded there would be the floes of my personal life’s sadness, anxiety, anguish that could so easily crush my book of anecdotes, meant to make the reader of different ages, smile, chuckle and laugh, and sometimes feel the sadness of humanity, past and present.
The night of my blank page, I went to sleep. And then I had a dream (forgive me, a vague echo of Dr Martin Luther King). At nearly five in the morning, I had a waking dream with Jerry Pinto on my lips, loud and clear. I sat on my bed and knew why. I always loved his travelogues, with their sense of humour, his descriptions of landscapes and his sharp pithy descriptions in his film reviews and his own sensitive layers in his poems.
The same morning of my dream I phoned him and said: ‘Jerry, could we do a book together?’ He was there very soon. I told him that my book would have nothing to do with my life.
Then I said, ‘It’s only about the funny anecdotes and the sad historic ones I came across.’
Trust Jerry; he returned with his Foreword that I find masterly. And then my first anecdote, chapter one of the book about the six-foot-four Russian. That was a perfect rendition in writing of what I had described orally too; and the other chapters, till Donne’s poem to end the book.
My deepest thanks to Jerry Pinto—you are truly my co-author.
I end my epilogue with a flurry of wishes for the book; that whoever cares to read it may smile, chuckle and laugh and then understand or feel the sadness, the pain of humanity in certain anecdotes in the historical past and the present.
My wishes go first to my daughter Maya and her son, my grandson, Adam. And then to Erwan, my other grandson—he lost his mother, Priya, my other twin, who had a massive heart attack on 8 february 2008.
Then my wishes go to Catherine, my oldest and dearest friend, her husband Dr Peter Kuhn, their two sons, Mathias and Fabien. Mathias has an older little son—Joshua—and he calls me his Indian dolphin grandmother. He (Mathias) now has a baby son, Benoit, and Fabien has a baby daughter.
How can I forget my dearest friend in India, Pamela Chatterjee and her two daughters who now have children of their own?
Then to those who chose to adopt me as their adopted mother: first Niloufer Karwa, my neighbour above me; then Monica Rosca, a brilliant pianist from Poland and great interpreter of Chopin, who also chose to adopt me as her adopted mother.
To all of you I say, ‘adieu’.
Leela Naidu
Mumbai
One grey monsoon morning in July, 2009
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published 2017
Copyright © Jerry Pinto 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Puja Ahuja
ISBN: 978-0-670-99911-8
This digital edition published in 2017.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75254-0
For sale in India and Pakistan only
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.