[烛光生存狂]-命定四星

1.1 Skinned Our Hearts and Skinned Our Knees

The earliest fuzzy memory I have, as against those recounted over the years at family gatherings, is of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, when my father, who was in the Indian Air Force, was posted at the Air Force Station, Maharajpur. I must have been about four or five then. We had come there from Bolarum, Secunderabad, but my memories of Bolarum are more from the telling. Of how we used to sleep outdoors during the summer months, the escapades of my elder brother, Nitin, and how he would sneak into a nearby talkies with me in tow, where he had befriended the doorkeeper. My little world comprised my father, Mukund Shridhar Naravane, mother Sudha (née Parasnis), sister Poonam and brother Nitin. My sister was six years older and my brother was four years older than me, so I was very much the bachcha of the family.

My parents had a ‘love marriage,, which was pretty avant- garde for those times. My grandfather on the paternal side, Shridhar Govind Naravane, had been a civil engineer, mostly serving in the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh. After retirement, Babuji, as he was affectionately called, had settled into a nice little bungalow on 6th lane, Prabhat Road, a leafy, tree-lined avenue in Pune. He used to live alone with a trusted man Friday, my grandmother having passed when my father was quite young. On the maternal side, my grandfather, Shripad Ramachandra Parasnis, had been a senior and respected professor at Fergusson College, Pune, and a founder member of the Deccan Education Society, until his career was cut short due to an accident with, of all things, an Army truck of the National Defence Academy, which would in time become my alma mater and I, the Army Chief. What irony. My grandfather and grandmother Shalini (née Deshpande) used to stay at Karve Road, Pune, near Nal Stop, so called because there used to be a public water tap (nal) there. Though they were our grandparents, all of us cousins, for some unknown reason, used to call them Ai and Dada.

My distinct memory of Gwalior was of going to school, or it must have been pre-school, in a cycle rickshaw that had a wire- mesh cage, with a door at the rear. Two such rickshaws would come to our house, in the officers’ residential area, to cart all of us children off to school. On one occasion, I had got into one of the rickshaws and my brother in another, and not wanting to be separated, I tried to get out, but just then the rickshaw- wallah accidentally slammed the door shut on my hand. There was much confusion and wailing and I had to be rushed to the infirmary, but thankfully no damage was done, and I did get a day off from school. I also vaguely remember a row of houses along a dusty street. My sister and brother, being a few years older, would be getting into all kinds of mischief, with me as their unwitting accomplice. Whenever they used to get scolded for various acts of naughtiness, I used to innocently wander off, as if I had had no part to play. One day though, my father sternly called me back, ‘Manya, young lad, where do you think you are going? Come back here!.’ And so, I stood shoulder to shoulder with my siblings. The age of innocence was over.

One day, my father came back with exciting news. He had been selected for a foreign assignment, as the assistant air attaché to our embassy in Paris, France. In the same breath, he also told us to keep this news to ourselves until it was officially declared, as there could be many a slip between the cup and the lip. This is something I too followed throughout my career— not breathing a word of my likely postings or speculating about them until the orders were issued in black and white. However, there were no slip-ups, and sometime in late October 1965, we embarked on the liner Guglielmo Marconi, named after the famous Italian inventor of wireless telegraphy, outbound from Bombay to Genoa, Italy. These small titbits added greatly to my general knowledge, something that would come in very handy in later years. On board the ship, we would explore its many passageways, going from one deck to another, often getting lost in the bargain. For all our meals, we had to go to the central dining area and were served by coat-tailed waiters. There was much excitement when for a few days, the shooting of a Bollywood film took place on board. I don’t remember the name, but Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand were part of the cast. We were on board for about a week or so, sailing via the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea, with port calls at Aden and Napoli, before disembarking at Genoa. Then we took an overnight train to Paris, where we arrived by mid-November.

We were initially put up in a hotel before moving into our allotted flat at 4 Rue Faraday (another scientist), in the 17th Arrondissement (Sector) of Paris, just off the Boulevard Pereire. It was a comfortable flat on the fourth floor, to the right on exiting the lift, and that’s how the flat was referred to— ‘quatrième droite’ or ‘fourth right’. In those days, there was no concept of international schools, so we had to go to whichever was the local district school. My sister and brother went off to the secondary girls’ and boys’ schools, the boys’ school being at 16, Rue Laugier, where I would join about a year later. But till then, I had to go to the primary school which was somewhere on the Bd Pereire, within walking distance of the house. Those initial days were quite difficult for me. For a young boy, not yet six, who was not even willing to go in a different rickshaw to school, going alone to a strange school in a foreign land with zero knowledge of French, was quite distressing. I have vivid memories of those early days, of not being able to communicate at all—not even being able to request permission to go to the washroom. I remember one occasion when another boy had ‘borrowed’ my pencil sharpener, and I could not convey that to the teacher. This strange set of circumstances forced us, and I say us because I’m sure my siblings would have had the same problem, to learn the language super quick. Necessity is the mother of invention, but necessity is equally the mother of learning. It was a matter of survival in a foreign land.

I cannot now say exactly when, but within a few short months, we were speaking French like the French. The credit for that should go to my parents because one of the first things they did was buy a TV and encourage us to watch it. The programmes were all in French, subtitles unheard of, and we learnt by watching, picking up the language, the nuances and the accent. We soon even started to come first in class. I became confident enough to start walking to and from school by myself, even during the winters, in my anorak and balaclava. My father filmed me once on his cine camera, walking home most nonchalantly from school in the snow. This experience made me quite independent from an early age.

We were in France for three years, from November 1965 to November 1968. During each of the summer holidays, which were in July–August, we used to go on a trip somewhere or the other. One of the earliest trips was to London, where my father’s batchmate, Squadron Leader Aggarwal, was the assistant air attaché, his counterpart so to speak. Crossing the English Channel by ferry, which was a roll-on roll-off type, was an exciting and novel experience. On the return leg, we had stopped at the Cherbourg Peninsula, the site of the Normandy landings, my father being a military history buff. In London, we stayed with the Aggarwals, who had two children, Pradeep and Kavita, who were of the same age as my brother and me, so we got along famously. So famously in fact, that when they came over on a reciprocal visit to Paris, Pradeep and Kavita did not want to go for any sightseeing but just wanted to stay at home and play. Later, our fathers were posted in Delhi at about the same time and we used to stayin Dhaula Kuan. So we remained in touch then and off and on over the years, till even now. Some might even remember Kavita; she was the scorer-cum-time- keeper on the first-ever TV quiz show on Doordarshan, hosted by Siddhartha Basu, called ‘Quiz Time’.

Another year we went Northwards through Europe and the ‘Low Countries’ all the way to Boliden, Sweden, where my uncle, Papi Mama resided. Papi Mama had studied in the UK, married a Finnish lady, Helena, and he had permanently settled in Sweden, although he retained his Indian citizenship. We had great fun there, playing with our cousins Iravati, Ravindra and Amalendu. They could not speak any French nor could we speak Swedish, but somehow, we still managed to get along. I remember that once during that stay, I woke up with the sun shining brightly outside and jumped out of bed thinking I had overslept only to find everyone else fast asleep. I wandered about the house, finally waking my mother up, who told me to go back to sleep, as it was still the middle of the night. That was my introduction to geography and the phenomena of the ‘midnight sun, when close to the Arctic Circle. Another fact that I clearly remember is the long, straight stretches of the highway—AutoRoute—and my father telling me that it was made by design so that in an emergency it could be used as an airstrip. That was in the late 1960s; we would do the same in India some four decades later.

In the third year, we went down south to Italy, stopping at Florence, Rome and Venice, via Nice and the French Riviera. We saw all the masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, not to forget the Trevi Fountain, where I tossed a coin into the water and silently mouthed, ‘I wish I . . .,, a wish which was to come true. My father dragged us from museum to museum exclaiming, ‘This is world famous . . . that is world famous,, till quite exasperated, I plaintively responded, ‘Daddy, can we see something that is not world famous?, At one such museum, I was so exhausted that I dozed off on an ornate chair and a few visitors thought I was part of the exhibit until I was rescued by my mother. My mother used to have a tough time keeping all of us together and fed at regular intervals. I do wonder how much time she got to see all these wonders, while always on the lookout for the three of us. At Venice, we had the obligatory gondola ride, just as a shikara ride is mandatory for anyone visiting Srinagar, and saw all the other sites made famous in the mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. And, of course, the first taste of pizza, while sitting at a roadside trattoria. On the way back, it was through Switzerland and Austria, catching the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside. In Switzerland, I got my first watch—a Fortis, automatic with date—which I used till I bought an HMT Quartz in 1983 from the unit-run canteen, which I still wear today, forty years later. We did the stretch from Vienna to Paris in our Fiat car, a distance of almost a thousand kilometres in less than a day, so good were the autoroutes even in those days, touching 100 kmph quite easily. That car remained with us till the late 1990s for almost thirty years as it came back with us to India. It was a good thing too, because once, on the Chandigarh-Ambala highway, we met with an accident when a bus side-swiped us and the car went tumbling. There were no seat belts or airbags in those days, yet all of us crawled out without even a scratch. Providence.

These travels and the experiences we had shaped my personality in different ways. We got to know of different cultures and languages, accepting and enjoying this diversity. In later years, the concept of ‘Unity in Diversity’ was so much easier to comprehend, considering each state in India too has its own customs, traditions, language and cuisine. Equally, the value of fine workmanship, whether a watch or car or exquisite pieces of art. Many years later, in one of the school lessons, there was a chapter on Michelangelo, with his quote, ‘Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.’ I could appreciate that sentiment, having seen those masterpieces first-hand. It also made me familiar with many different places and names, so that in later years, when I would come across them, it all sounded familiar. This was particularly true in my reading of military history because, in my mind’s eye, I could visualize the terrain and weather being referred to. Travel is education, provided one keeps an open mind.

Soon it was time to return to India. In 1967, Israel and Egypt fought a six-day war. There was an Israeli family in our building who we had befriended, and I used to go to their house to play with their son. The father had to go back to Israel when the war broke out and, of course, the mother was worried. I don’t remember any of their names, except that we were quite good friends. The upshot of this was that the Suez Canal had been closed by Egypt (and remained closed till 1975), and so we had to come back by air. That was my first experience of air travel and ofAir India. My best friend in Paris was Michel Tavard, and I wrote to him on the Air India postcard but it never got sent. I still have that postcard, and that is perhaps why I still remember his name. I wonder where all my French friends are now and what became of them. Que sera sera.

On our return to India, my father was posted at the Base Repair Depot in Chandigarh. We children though, were admitted as boarders to schools in Pune, our hometown. My sister went to Saint Mary’s Girls School, and my brother and I to Bishop’s Boys School. Now it was time for reverse adjustment, which was even more difficult. In France, we were ‘Indiens’, in Bishop’s, we were known as ‘Frenchie’. When we had gone to France, I was still in pre-school, on my return, I was in the 4th Standard. In France, we had learnt and spoken only French outside our home, and Marathi among ourselves for day-to-day stuff. But we had no formal learning in the language. On my return to India, I knew no English at all and only a smattering of Marathi. So, once again, I found myself in a similar position of not being able to communicate with my teachers or classmates. It goes to my parents’ credit though, that they had anticipated this situation. Towards the fag end of our stay in Paris, they engaged a tutor to teach us Hindi; in my case, starting from ‘ka, kha, ga’. Since the medium of instruction at Bishop’s was English, I soon became proficient in English and it became my primary language, while Hindi remained a weak spot. In all this changing of schools, education systems and countries, I was lucky not to lose a year.

I had a great time at Bishop’s. I was in Arnold House, which at that time was the champion house, and I remember participating in the cross-country run at the Racecourse! Every Saturday, we used to get some pocket money, Rs 2 for my brother, and Rs 1.50 for me. That was quite adequate for small treats: an ice lolly was 15 paise and a cream roll 20 paise. There were different hostels for different age groups and Iwas in Simba Hostel, just across the road and adjoining the playground. It was here that I was introduced to cricket, as in France we used to play only football. Hostel life also made one more independent and self-sufficient—making your own bed, looking after your personal hygiene, studies and homework; there was no one to mother you. Once a week, we had to compulsorily write a letter home, to let our parents know of our well-being. This was a chore most of us just wanted to get over with, so that we could go out and play. My letters home were quite perfunctory, ‘My Dear Mummy and Daddy’, I would start, ‘How are you? I am well’, and end with, ‘More in my next, love Manoj.’ There was never ‘more’ ever, except perhaps on one occasion when my brother and I had had a fight and I thought he might ‘sneak’ to my parents. That week’s letter had an additional sentence, ‘Don’t believe whatever Nitin says.’ The schoolmasters used to carry a wooden paddle about the size of a table tennis bat, called a ‘flat’. For any misdemeanour, we would be called to the front of the class, asked to bend down and receive ‘six of the best’ on our posterior. I too got my share of‘sixes’, usually for not doing my homework. This was a very harrowing experience and it is a good thing that corporal punishment has been banned by law. During the weekend, we were allowed togo overnight to our local guardians, in our case, our grandparents Ai-Dada. Sadly, Babuji had passed away when we were in France, so we did not get to see him again. We looked forward to those weekend stays for we would be spoilt silly. I would help my grandfather in the daily prayers; taking down the idols from the dev-ghar, placing them in a copper thali, bathing the various gods, before reverentially putting them back and adorning them with fresh flowers that Dada had plucked from the garden early in the morning, and a ‘tika’ with freshly ground sandalwood paste. We would then chant the prayer together, ‘. . . Manojavam Marutatulyavegam . . .’, referring to Lord Hanuman, chief of the vanara sena, which for some reason, was the part I liked most. During the day, we used to play with our friends, many of them day scholars in the same school. There was a huge mango tree in the adjacent vacant plot, which was our favourite hangout. Playing pithu (seven stones) was another favourite pastime. I used to be quite unhappy when the weekend drew to a close, especially since the first period on Monday used to be Hindi. Playing with our schoolmates over the weekends gave us an idea—why can’t we be day scholars too? The next year, we did just that and were much happier, though it did mean commuting daily in the Pune Municipal Transport bus from Nal stop to Deccan Gymkhana, and then from Deccan Gymkhana to Camp, the to-and-fro fare being a grand sum of 30 paise. That interlude did not last long though, as my father got posted to Delhi.

By then, my sister had joined Fergusson College to study— what else—French. By the time we returned from France, my sister was already in the last year of school, so it was natural that she would go in for a language course in college and make it her career. She taught French in many schools and colleges, including the prestigious National Defence Academy (though after my time), before finally joining the French Department of Fergusson College itself, going on to become the head of the department. So, in Delhi, it was just my brother and I who joined the Air Force Central School (AFCS), Subroto Park, Delhi Cantonment. It is now called The Air Force School (TAFS) but remains at the same location, just behind the Air Force Auditorium, within what has now become a sprawling Air Force complex. I joined there in the 6th Standard and remained till the 9th, and that’s the longest I was in any school. Altogether, I would see some six or seven schools in eleven years of schooling, which is par for the course for most service kids, a fact that made us more adaptable and flexible, with an ability to make friends any and everywhere.

While in Delhi, we first lived in Safdarjung Enclave, then in Vasant Vihar in civil hired accommodation, before moving to 3 Service Officers (SO) Flats at Chanakyapuri, and finally to 82, Dhaula Kuan, Part 1 or DK-1 as it was more commonly known. Vasant Vihar was the furthest colony in those days, with all wilderness beyond what is today Vasant Kunj. Yashwant Place and Chanakya Theatre were the talk of the town. Dhaula Kuan, the premium officers’ colony, was allotted only to Lieutenant Colonels or Colonels. My best friend during those school days was Raju Pendse. His full name was Vidyadhar Vasudev Pendse, but he liked to be called Raju. His father was in Union Carbide and he, along with his parents and sisters Suhas and Shaila, a year senior and in the same school, used to stay in E 9/8 Vasant Vihar. Just to give you an idea of how new that colony still was, we could walk to each other’s houses in more or less a straight line, through all the vacant plots in between. Raju also liked cricket and we were both part of the school cricket team, with Raju and I even making the cut for the senior team while still juniors. Cycling was another passion and we used to ride—doubles—on my bicycle through all the dirt tracks and rocky areas behind Vasant Vihar. My brother and his friends, who were all senior to me in school, used to tease me mercilessly about my having a crush on Shaila. True or not, Shaila did send me a nice crystal piece as a present when I got married, which we have even now, forty years later. Raju and I remained friends even after we moved to SO Flats in 1972, often having sleepovers, and even after I moved out of Delhi. We are in contact even now, thanks mainly to WhatsApp.

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