And Then One Day: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Sardhana before then. It was this very attitude, I guess, which took Shah Mamu to a grisly death not too long after, Chand Mamu to the complete disintegration of property and family reputation, and Agha Mamu into an imaginary shell of his own making, where he dwelt to the end in extreme bitterness, his days of power and charisma a distant memory.
    But in his salad days Agha Mamu who, I suspect, modelled himself on Clark Gable, upstaged his siblings completely. He was the third of (at a rough count) twenty children Naushaba Begum bore, of whom eleven survived, which means she must have done precious little but bear children for close to thirty years. Though there was almost a quarter-century of difference in age between him and the other two, it had more to do with the confidence quotient actually, as was visible one evening when Agha Mamu, who had arrived a few days later than the others, and Chand Mamu were seated side by side on modha chairs in the courtyard of Habib Manzil, with all us adoring children sitting around. Shah Mamu seldom appeared when Agha Mamu was holding forth as he was now, his arms expansively spread on the armrest; and never before had I seen Chand Mamu look so small, though he in fact possessed a remarkable personality himself. Ratna in fact ranks him among the most heart-stoppingly handsome men she has ever seen, but that evening this man who so far had lit up the gathering with his presence was almost unrecognizable, sitting with arms stuck meekly to his sides inside the armrests. This I suppose was my very first lesson in acting.
    Before we’d know it, however, March would be upon us, and it would be time to return to school. Shirt and trouser cuffs were rearranged; toiletries, one new pair of shoes, and a few new clothes each were acquired, along with many instructions about looking after them and studying harder this year, ‘as now you are in Class—.’ Parting hugs from Ammi, prayers blown over our heads, a perfunctory peck from Baba and then the return journey overnight to Delhi, joining up with the ‘Delhi party’, meeting friends, swapping news, warm toast in the refreshment room if we were lucky, then upwards on to Bareli and thence to Kathgodam and Nainital. Back to the twin towers and the strap, the cold fried eggs at breakfast and Brother Burke’s knuckles rapping on your unsuspecting head. BUT a wondrous new store of movies as well. Titles of movies to be shown through the year would be published in the school diary at beginning of term, and I salivated copiously reading the list. I wasn’t particularly happy in that school, it was for the movies I wanted to return every year, and as I got older and grew away from both parents, I couldn’t wait for vacations to end, because home was no longer the happy, carefree place I wished it could remain. I was no longer a child, I was told, and disapproval abounded. It became worse than school could possibly be. I suppose I could live with the disapproval of the teachers. I cared not a whit for them, and even after all these years I have to struggle a bit to suppress the aggrieved feeling that, in all my years there, not one teacher in that school ever made the slightest attempt to reach out to me. But I suppose that’s what I was sent there for, to learn to live by myself. And I guess I did.
    My class teacher in Classes 4 and 5, after the pretty Miss Brendish and the kindly Miss D’Silva, who wore rimless glasses like my mother, was Miss Winnie Perry. If you were to ask any junior student of fifties Sem about Miss Perry it’s an even bet she still figures in his nightmares. I drove her to despair, she always said, but she never gave up on me. If I hadn’t been so petrified of figures and of her I might have become the world’s greatest mathematician, considering the time Ma Perry spent on me. She would gleefully play along with our whispered suspicions that she went home on a broomstick, and when in really severe mode she used the