I must have been about 12 years old and lived in an idealized world of my imagination. This idealized world was peopled by characters from the Enid Blyton books: the wonderful school boy tales of Billy Bunter; and the derring do of Biggles and the members of his Squadron! This world of the white man that I had idolized through books came abruptly to an end with an incident at the Gateway of India in Bombay.

My Father always took me on Sundays and holidays to different parts of Bombay – we went mainly by BEST buses, else trams and occasionally suburban trains. On one of these Sunday rambles, we were at the Gateway of India and watching the small boats which were lined-up alongside the steps of the embankment. At one of these spots, I noticed a foreigner who I guessed was a Britisher either staying at the Taj or the nearby Yacht Club, all togged up in tropical dress including khaki shorts and a tee-shirt. I saw this red faced man screaming at a young hapless Indian lad who was trying but failing to moor his boat alongside the steps. And clearly across the water I could hear him holler “you stupid Indian bastard!” This shocked me greatly and at that moment I realized that this white man had a colonial hangover and had no qualms in berating a brown kid for a minor mistake!

This traumatic incident at the Gateway was a Gandhi and Pietermaritzburg moment for me, which made a deep impact and opened my eyes to the prevalence of racial inequalities and racial discrimination in the world. By now I had developed the habit of reading the daily newspaper regularly in-depth. I soon discovered that in South Africa there was state sponsored segregation called Apartheid, where the Coloureds were separated from the Whites whether at play or at work. I read about names like Mandela who was imprisoned because of his fight against Apartheid, and I also learnt about the cricketing ban because of which India refused to play Test Cricket with the Springboks.

Again from the newspapers, I got to know about the Civil Rights movement in the US, and of Dr Martin Luther King where he was spearheading this movement and had a dream of setting his people free. And of the dreaded Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists. Nearer home, I discovered in our own city of Bombay there was a Club that did not admit Indians but was exclusively for whites – the Breach Candy Club and Swimming Pool! It was astonishing that even after 20 years of Independence there could exist in our own Country an institution which discriminated on the basis of colour.

This first glimpse of racism angered me to a point where I decided at the young age of 12 that never would I migrate to another country come what may and I have kept this promise for the last 55 years or so – even as we shall see in my memoirs when many times I could have solved problems by simply agreeing to migrate overseas. But I did not!

Life in the Colony was good but suddenly there were two deaths – one, a pure accident and the other a cold blooded murder. The accidental death happened, when my friend Murali’s servant was washing the windows of his flat with soap; and apparently lost his grip on the window sill, and fell to his death four storeys below. The other death was a terrible family tragedy, where a certain Mr Karkhanis murdered his family, locked up his flat and later committed suicide on the suburban railway track. Decomposed bodies were discovered due to the foul smell emanating from the flat, nearly three days after the murder was committed.

Apart from these two deaths that cast a gloomy spell over the denizens of the colony for a while, life in the colony continued and soon normalcy was restored. In retrospect, life in those distant days was far simpler and free from many of the contemporary distractions of present day living. For example many of our homes did not have telephones and home entertainment was restricted to the radio as the era of television had not yet dawned. Home and kitchen appliances including fridges and washing machines, that we take for granted today, were very rare.

I remember my grandmother grinding away with the mortar and pestle preparing the masala and the dhobi coming home to take our weekly laundry!

The milk man would come to our doorstep and deliver milk in the traditional fashion. It was only much later that we were able to buy bottled milk, which was made available against a milk card issued by the Aarey Milk Diary. All the snacks and pickles that we consumed were made at home by my grandmother and mother and never ever bought from shops. Pickles were made seasonally and stored in large ceramic jars and sweets and savouries were prepared keeping in mind the various festivals. In our home coconut oil was used as the cooking medium, but later on, this was discontinued due to a health scare that coconut oil was bad for the heart!

By now I helped in doing many of the household chores – I particularly liked taking care of the idols in our puja room! I made sure the copper and brass and silver idols were kept clean and shiny. I also helped in the morning and evening pujas, including dressing the idols with sandal wood paste and flowers. Apart from this, I accompanied my grandmother to the Colony Store every month to buy the groceries and rations; to help her lug the heavy bags back to our flat!

I am a bibliophile and at times my obsessive-compulsive desire to collect and hoard books verges on bibliomania. As a child, I was extremely possessive of my books and made sure they were securely kept in a locked wooden cupboard – my childhood friend Anjum used to tease and threaten me, by threatening to fold the pages and tamper with my books!

After reading and collecting of books, my next magnificent obsession was Train Travel – I had been undertaking train journeys with my parents from the age of 6; and was endlessly fascinated with trains, especially steam engines. In our old house in Krishna Sadan, I had written out all the names of suburban stations from Churchgate to Virar on the walls of our toilet – I could recite these names from memory and in the right sequence!

I would study the Bradshaw book, that contained train timings and the names of the various stations and I could also identify various steam engines like the WP and WG models which were used to haul Mail and Express trains in those days.

I loved the AH Wheeler and Higginbothams railway book stalls which were found at all major junctions and important stations. Similarly there were railway caterers like Spencers and Brandons, which in those days provided refreshments to the 1^st class passengers.

And now my next obsession – I was totally mesmerized by the boarding school books of Enid Blyton and Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter series. The boarding school life was what I craved to experience including the tuck shops, school boy uniforms with the cap, teachers like Mr Quelch with their mortar boards, latin conjugations and the rest of it. This extreme obsession made me look up various boarding schools in India and abroad – I recall getting a glossy brochure from a Swiss School in St Gallen but alas I soon realized that my Father could never afford to send me to any of these schools. But the seed was nevertheless quietly germinating within me and later as we progress with my memoir, we will see how this particular desire would be fulfilled and how this in turn would affect my life and spirituality.

I look back now with wry amusement at some of my magnificent obsessions of the past – of course some of them still reside within me even today! Reading and collecting books was a major obsession – it remains so even today. Visits to the Strand Book Stall was a regular ritual. Walking further down Pherozeshah Mehta Road, I soon discovered Smokers Corner, and its delightful owner – Suleman Botawala. He was a landlord and owned many of the buildings in the Fort Area but personally he was a very humble, down-to-earth personality who was gregarious and loved to talk about books. His books were reasonably priced, and I remember buying books from Smokers Corner for many years.

Along Dadabhai Naoroji Road was another spacious book shop that I frequented – DB Taraporevala and Sons, where I spent many an hour browsing through their large collections. My interest in Cricket and Table Tennis led me to a specialty book store in the Dadar/Portuguese Church area called Marine Sports which stocked books on every conceivable sport in the world. I really enjoyed the smell of books, the feel of the paper and I usually read every page. This included the name of the Publisher and the Printer – names like Hodder & Stoughton, Andre Deutsch, Michael Joseph, Blackie & Son, McMillan & Sons and Printers like Hazell Watson & Viney with their Printing Presses in places like Aylesbury, Bucks and Seven Oaks, Kent!

Reading and dreaming about England and London and also the British Colonial Raj in India gave me great pleasure. To bolster this, I spent endless hours chatting with my maverick grand uncle Shinapmam, who lived through that era. He would tell me about his Darjeeling days (where he was a manager of a cinema hall in Kurseong) including tales of British Tea Planters. Another favourite person of mine was the retired railway civil engineer K Madhava Rao, who had just built himself a sturdy house, post retirement, on the leafy Bhaudaji Road in Matunga, the little Madras of Bombay. Though an engineer by profession, he was truly a Renaissance Man who read widely, and had an extensive home library in his house. He was a pucca brown sahib with an immaculate, crisp BBC accent who regaled me with many a tale of British India and the Indian Railways.

Quintessential English brands were my next passion and obsession. By now import restrictions were coming into force in India and I hankered after British Brands like Vinolia White Rose Soap, Huntley and Palmers biscuits, and Sloan’s Liniment. I read somewhere about Dundee Cake and I sent my Father and Sister Chitra all over Bombay to locate it for me – more of my magnificent obsessions in the next blog!

My love for books and reading began in the early 60s – I vividly recall persuading my Father to buy the 11 volume Newnes Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia, which was available on monthly installments from the long established Standard Literature Company of Calcutta. It was a pleasure to dip into the red coloured volumes of this encyclopedia and especially experience the pictorial cutouts of aero planes, steam engines etc. Possessing books and collecting them became a passion from this time – I possess a copy of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe in mint condition, to this day!

The first of the Enid Blyton books that I read was the Secret Seven Series after which I quickly graduated to The Famous Five. The Tales of Julian, Dick, Anne & Georgina (George) and their dog Timmy were absolutely delightful and enthralling – I remember devouring the entire series during my summer holidays. Another wonderful series was the Five Find – Outers which included Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip & Bets and their dog Buster and of course not forgetting the village policeman, the comical P.C. Goon!

Then my taste shifted to the books where boarding schools were featured – first of this was the Malory Towers series again by Enid Blyton, which was set against the backdrop of a girl’s boarding school. After this, I discovered the Billy Bunter Series by Frank Richards and the hilarious goings – on in the Greyfriars School. In this series I met funny characters like Billy Bunter and an Indian prince by the name of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh popularly known as Inky because of his dark complexation, Harry Wharton and Frank Nugent. And of course not forgetting Mr Quelch with his mortar board, the Form Master of the Remove.

My next fictional hero was Squadron Leader Bigglesworth popularly known as Biggles of the 266 Squardon. The Biggles stories were penned by Captain W.E. Johns and were set both during the First World War as well as the Second World War. During the Great War Biggles flew the Sopwith Camels and later during the Second World War, he saw action during the Battle of Britain. Biggles had interesting teammates including characters like Algy and the monocle-wearing Lord Bertie.

With no distractions like today of television, social media and the internet, the main preoccupation was to read voraciously – when I ran out of my school library books, I managed to convince my neighbor, Sushil Joseph to lend me books from his school library and finally during the summer holidays, I discovered a circulating library near my home called Ganesh Book Stall at Tardeo which was a good 30 minutes walking distance from my home!

As I mentioned earlier in this memoir, our visits to Ganeshpuri and Swami Nityanand’s Ashram became less, but suddenly one day we got the news that Swami Nityanand had passed away and attained Samadhi. This news devastated my Mother as she had great faith in the Swamiji and his passing away left a deep spiritual void in her. After the Samadhi, we did visit Ganeshpuri but it didn’t have the same feel and became increasingly commercial. After the Samadhi, his devotees increased exponentially, and you got to see the late Swamiji’s photograph in many of the Udupi restaurants in Bombay because he had a large following amongst the Shetty community and the Kannada/Tulu speaking folks.

With her spiritual anchor gone, my Mother immersed herself in reading books of different religions. My Father helped her by buying books as well as talking about Amma’s interest in diverse religions, to his friends and colleagues. One of his friends was Mr Rohekar – he was a Bene Israeli of the Jewish faith and he was a Reader of the Torah in Bombay’s oldest Jewish Synagogue in the Masjid Bunder area. When Mr Rohekar heard my Mother’s interest, he presented my Father with a set of Jewish prayer books which my Father happily gave to Amma – these books had both Hebrew and English versions and were prayers about various festivals and holy days. So soon to our surprise my Mother started observing these Jewish festivals including the Jewish Sabbath which extended from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset! We all therefore came to know the names of Jewish festivals like the Passover, Hanukah and Purim which otherwise would have been Greek and Latin to us!

In a parallel development my Father had Christian colleagues at the Bank and they recommended books like “The Limitation of Christ” by Thomas Kempis which my Father then dutifully bought and presented to my Mother. I also recall going along with my Father to the Sodality House near the Byculla Bridge where we met an Italian Roman Catholic priest who gave us another book on The Life of Christ. So soon Amma was getting exposed to both the Old Testament through her Jewish readings and to the New Testament through the various books on Christianity and Christ which my Father was busy bringing home!

As we powered into the 1960s, I have many global and local events deeply etched in my memory. I was ready to go to school early one morning, when I heard over the radio that John F Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. JFK with his charisma, was the poster boy of all times and many remember clearly where they were or what they were doing at the moment when JFK was shot. The Panshet Dam disaster was another local event that I remember distinctly and recall seeing Poona being flooded and many lives lost.

Then there was the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s greats, freedom fighter and world statesman.

Around this time as my interest in cricket deepened, I would spend hours listening to the running cricket commentary broadcast over All India Radio by Bobby Taleyarkhan, Vijay Merchant and Vizzy, the Maharaja of Vizianagaram! Those were truly joyous days of classic test cricket with Anandji Dossa, the statistician pulling out cricketing numbers whenever Vijay Merchant asked him.

When I look back, I find that certain movies had a great impact on me – one of them was My Fair Lady. It was a great musical and I loved seeing Rex Harrison playing Professor Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. My love of book collecting started when I saw the well-appointed library of Professor Higgins, and beheld all those beautifully bound books stacked up to the ceiling of his study. My obsession with London too began with this movie, when I saw Covent Garden, Soho Square and Wimpole Street where Professor Higgins resided. Both these passions still remain very much with me – books and London and it all began with My Fair Lady.

My love of London was so great that I spent hours walking around the Ballard Estate area in Fort, Bombay because the gothic buildings in this area made me imagine I was in London. Similarly, I joined the JN Petit at Flora Fountain because this Library had quaint Dickensian Parsi characters who manned the library, and the Reading Room there reminded me of the Gentlemen’s Clubs of London.

Coupled with my passion for London, I was also very curious to know about foreigners and the white man. I had only read about them in books and seen them in English movies, somehow I had not met any white people in real life. Of course in the Jesuit Schools that I studied, there were some Spanish Fathers but apart from them, there was no interaction with people other than Indians. This particular passion of getting to know foreigners also deeply impacted my life and my interests in the future, as we shall see later.

My younger brother, Devdutt suffered from a handicap from his birth – a congenital dislocation of his right arm which in turn affected him psychologically throughout his life. Because of Devdutt’s handicap, my Parents put him in a junior school which was just across the street from where we lived – the Seventh-day Adventist Church School! My Sister Chitra was also admitted to this school and both of them went together – it was just a few minutes walking distance from our Colony.

Being away from Krishna Sadan and Mahim, our trips to Ganeshpuri and Vajreshwari became less frequent as distance separated us from the Shenai Family, who still went every Thursday to Ganeshpuri. But now that we were closer to my uncle’s place, the beloved Dr A.P. Pai, we made frequent visits to their home at Kanji Mansion in the Prathana Samaj area of Girgaon. My favourite grand uncle Shinapmam, the maverick bachelor also lived with the Pai Family, and it was hence doubly interesting for me to spend time talking to him about the British Raj days.

One day, whilst playing cricket at our Colony ground I met Richard Samuel. Richie, as we called him, did not live in the Colony but stayed close by, and his father worked as a Literature Evangelist or Colporteur with the Publishing House owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Richie and I became close friends and as we shall see later, he was pivotal in changing my life’s trajectory including my introduction to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Our Colony had a very cosmopolitan population and our friends consisted of people of all faiths including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and also a Jewish family. The Moses family and their son Jacky who lived across in the adjacent building were Bene Israelis. I remember seeing them have their Sabbath meal including recitation of prayers every Friday evening – this is how I came to know about the Jewish Sabbath!

When we left Mahim, my Father had transferred the tenancy of our Krishna Sadan flat to his cousin Ganpat Rao who now lived there with his wife. I liked Ganpatmam, as we called him because he was a very good conversationalist, though soft spoken – he had a very successful career with Ion Exchange Ltd which was into water treatment and helped build it along with its Founder, Mr Ranganathan into one of India’s leading Companies in water management.

Whenever I got the opportunity, I traveled all over Bombay with my Father, mostly sitting on the top deck of the BEST buses. By the age of 12, I knew the city so well that I volunteered to show Bombay to my visiting relatives coming from South India. It was around this age that I first visited Strand Book Stall in the Fort area of Bombay, which was run by the great book lover and book seller, the late Mr Shanbag. After browsing in the book shop, my Father would walk me around to the Bristol Grill which was a restaurant that served excellent food in a very spacious setting!

We had a lovely playground in our Colony and from our flat on the 4^th floor, I had an excellent view of this ground, where every evening cricket was being played. I looked longingly each evening from my bedroom window, at all the kids playing cricket, albeit with a tennis ball. Unfortunately, my Mother was over protective and she initially refused permission for me to go down and play. Being even in those days a very strong minded personality, I finally had my way and my Mother reluctantly allowed me to play cricket. I had learnt the game by just looking out of my bedroom window and finally when I went on to the pitch, I got into the thick of the game quite easily.

Once I was allowed to play cricket, I soon discovered that there was a YMCA around the corner where I could play table tennis. I persuaded my Father to get me membership at the Y, and soon armed with a Barna table tennis bat, I was off to the YMCA in the evenings. Victor Barna was a table tennis legend and the hard table tennis bat was named after him. I recall with great pleasure, my evenings at the YMCA where after a rigorous table tennis match, we had fresh lemonade to drink along with some spicy bhajias. I also met at the YMCA – Rafiq Ellias who has remained a good friend till now. Rafiq became my style icon and role model, but more about Rafiq later in the narrative.

Another lifelong friend that I made, was from my School ANZAS. When I was in the 3^rd Standard, one evening we missed the school bus and we were wondering how to go home. At that time I met my fellow student Anjum Samel who happened to live in the RBI Colony, and also travelled in the same bus. Both of us decided to walk home – it took us about 45 minutes and during this long walk I got to know Anjum well, and this marked the start of our friendship. Anjum lived in the adjoining building and soon I started visiting him and his family regularly – Anjum is another person who will crop up regularly in this Memoir.

Life in the Colony continued – we had a very popular medical officer who attended to the needs of the Colony residents, Dr YG Benkar – a very down to earth man, whom the residents adored and literally worshipped! We had a wonderful Club House with an ultra modern underground badminton court, where celebrities of those days like Nandu Natekar came and regularly played. There were also Whist Drives and Christmas parties conducted for the residents, and finally we had the 10 day Ganesh Festival; where a special Pandal was erected. During the festival, apart from regular pujas, every night there was variety entertainment for the Colony residents including plays, skits and a full blown musical orchestra. In short, there was never a boring day, and we the Colony residents lived life to the hilt.

And so in the summer of 1959, we moved from Krishna Sadan in Mahim to our new Home in the Reserve Bank Colony at Bombay Central. We shifted to the newly built M building and occupied flat no 576 on the 4^th floor of the building – with a panoramic view of the Colony. Our Colony was strategically located on Club Road, where the famous Byculla Club was earlier situated; flanking the Colony was the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and further up the YMCA with its extensive playgrounds. On the main road as you entered Club Road was the newly-built air conditioned and opulent Maratha Mandir – I recall the movie running at that time was Paigham starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala.

We entered our new Home with a Puja conducted by our family Konkani priest – I can still smell the aroma of the incense burnt during the ritual, and taste the celebratory lunch that followed. For us children it was a thrill going up and down in the elevator and to watch from my bedroom window, the expansive colony grounds where every evening cricket was played and in the monsoon, football too. Just outside the gate of our colony was the Aarey milk booth where one could buy bottled milk – both toned and full strength.

In June of 1959, I was admitted to the 2^nd Standard of the Antonio De Souza High School, a venerable Catholic School founded in 1825 in the posh area of Byculla in the vicinity of which was the famous Byculla Club now alas extinct. There was a test which I had to undergo before my admission was secured but the test was a breeze! We had a school bus from our colony which transported kids to this school – the bus was owned by the Martis Family and Mr Martis used to come faithfully every month in his Morris Car to collect the bus charges. Later on when he died, Mrs Martis took on the Business and co-incidentally many years later when I joined another school, their son Brian became my classmate, but more about that later.

Antonio De Souza High School was also called Anzas and we had a very large playing field and adjoining to this field was the majestic Gloria Church built in the English Gothic Revival architectural style sometime in 1911. Anzas was a boys school and our sister school for girls was the Gloria Convent. So the school bus for the colony carried both boys and girls to our respective schools – I will never forget the incident where four Gloria Convent girls travelling in the bus targeted me and mercilessly teased me till I was almost in tears!