Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Bombay
Getting Russel Gets a Walker and Visiting St. Stanislaus School and St. Peter's Church
Namaste from Bombay!
I have changed my routine slightly as it is now getting warmer and humidity levels are higher. It is far better that I get out earlier in the morning for my walk so that I return before it gets too oppressive.
Accordingly, I awoke at 5.30 and began reading, responding to email and sending out some of my own. At 7.00 pm, I washed, brewed a cup of coffee and sat on one of the stools that I picked up from my Dad's place which is now in my balcony. The air was fresh, green and very cool. I enjoyed my coffee while reading The Only Story by Julian Barnes in my balcony on my iPad. Little by little, my place feels lived in.
I then left my studio and walked briskly to Jogger's Park where I spent the next 45 minutes. It is amazing how exhilarated I feel by this morning exercise. Today I listened to Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits. The tang of salt air as it rises from the Arabian Sea even when the tide is out is such a great companion as I watch what other folks do in the park. Some do yoga, complete with yoga mats spread on the grass. Others sit facing the sea in solitary meditation. Others congregate with friends--males and females separately--and start the day with a healthy gossip session. There are fast walkers, there are joggers and this morning, there was actually a cockerel on the Jogging Track!
I got home and jumped into the shower. Then I sat down to eat my breakfast as I was starving. I realized that birschersmuesli tastes just fabulous cold! And something cold was what I needed after my body became so heated from all that exercise. While eating, I watched Escape to the Continent. This time? Lisbon in Portugal. This shows brings back such warm memories for me of all these parts in Europe in which I have rambled at such leisure through the years.
Chained to my Computer:
And then I began working... and I worked and worked and worked. I finalized my plenary address for the Hyderabad conference on 'Translation' by finishing up all end notes, annotations and citations. I also finalized the Powerpoint Presentation I will be making there to accompany my talk. Next, having received an invitation to present a paper at a conference in Calcutta in December, I reviewed the Call for Papers and began to draft an abstract. I will be presenting on fictional representations of Anglo-Indian women in the Victorian Age with reference to migrant transnational labor. This will be based on the research I had done in the British Library in London in 2016 and a modification on the paper I had presented at the University of Edinburgh (which is soon to be published in an anthology of essays on 'Gender and Immigration'). Drafting the abstract took most of the morning, but I was satisfied with the end result.
I also followed up through email on the meetings I need to arrange at St. Xavier's so that I can begin my research on my Fulbright project. I am also waiting for Russel's leg to be set in the fiberglass cast before I resume my work in downtown Bombay.
Lunch, A Nap, Some More Work:
I stopped for lunch at 12. 30 pm (a repeat of my tiffin from yesterday) and watched the rest of Escape to the Continent. I then read some more of my novel before I felt sleepy enough to take my usual 20 minute power nap. When I awoke, I began working on my computer again.
At this point Dad called me to tell me that the physiotherapist Lenita who is working on Russel's movements now says that she needs a walker. Dad told me where I could get one--at St. Peter's Church, where they hire out these medical accessories for a small deposit. Dad asked if I would help out by going there and getting a walker for Russel. I told him I would be glad to help out.
Hence, at 4.00 pm, I stopped working to have a pot of tea with biscuits and the walnut cake I had bought from Venus. It was very mediocre but tasted better when jazzed up with a spread of peanut butter and Nutella and some more chopped walnuts that I added. I do miss really good fudgy chocolate cake when I am anywhere outside the US.
I also make arrangements to meet with a classmate to pay a condolence visit to our friend Nilu whose sister Shahnaz's Memorial Service I had attended last week. My classmate Iris said she would come along. We were in the midst of making WhatsApp plans, when I heard from another classmate, Beulah. I was delighted to find out that after spending about 15 years in Saudi Arabia, Beulah and her husband are back in Bombay for good. Although they do live a ways from Bandra, they are in the same city and I will have occasion to meet her. I invited Beulah to join Iris and myself and she told me she'd be glad to if she could organize a getaway from her place for the evening. It is amazing how good it feels to reconnect with these former classmates with whom I shared such fabulous times in our younger days.
At St. Stanislaus' School and St. Peter's Church--Getting Russel a Walker:
By 5.15 pm, I left my place for the walk to Hill Road and St. Peter's Church. It was while I was rambling along these tree-lined avenues that form the bylanes of Bandra that I was sharply reminded of my time living in Oxford. While there too, I used to walk everywhere. I absolutely adore small university towns and Bandra feels like one--except that instead of Gothic colleges, it is filled with Catholic schools. As you stroll from one lane to the next, you pass by Catholic schools galore with their old Victorian and Edwardian-designed buildings and their sprawling sports grounds in which youngsters are always at play. I passed by St. Andrew's Boys School and then St. Joseph's Girls School before I entered the gates of St. Peter's Church and St. Stanislaus' Boys School.
And how great it felt to be steeped in academia of the high school variety! The school building is rich in my own family's history for my Dad graduated from St. Stanislaus' School. He had arrived at age nine from Mangalore where he was born, following the death of his father. His family relocated to Bombay where he was raised by his eldest brother Ben who was already of working age. His sisters were placed as boarders at nearby St. Joseph's School while Dad was placed in St. Stanislaus'. From a very young age, he told me that he stood out. For one thing, thanks to the coaching he had received from his brother Ben, he already knew the Latin Mass and all the Latin prayers by heart. Hence, he became the youngest altar boy at St. Stanislaus' and the only one who already knew the entire Latin Mass. He told me that, in those days (the 1930's), the Mass was said entirely in Latin by a priest who faced the tabernacle and 'backed' the congregation. All the altar boys were required to stand at the foot of the altar responding to the Latin prayers.
Once a week, on Sundays, Dad told me that he would be required to serve Mass at St. Joseph's School for the nuns of the convent and and the female boarders. He said that he really looked forward to this Mass as it was always followed by a princely breakfast! Dad, whose family was not well endowed (especially following the untimely death of his father), was a third-class boarder at St. Stanislaus'--he always said now awful the food was and how difficult he found it to swallow anything! In fact, the Jesuit priests used to think that he was making a sacrifice by not eating and would urge him to do so. "How could I tell them that the food was so awful that it just would not go down?" he said to me, recently. Hence, his anticipation of those delicious and generous breakfasts provided by the good nuns.
So there was I--looking upon this building that was a home to my father during this childhood and teenage years. It absolutely brought a lump to my throat in the same way that visiting St. Josephs School in Agripada had done, in January this year, when I had gone there with Dad and my cousins Blossom and Zita, to walk in the footsteps of my mother who had been a boarder there herself. How different my own school days (as a day scholar at St. Agnes' High School in Byculla) were compared with those of my parents!
But I did not linger long in quiet reflection as I had a mission to accomplish. I found the room in which the items to be rented out are kept--all sorts of medical equipment from wheelchairs and potty chairs to walkers and air mattresses. I met a man called Cajji (short for Cajetan) who told me that the person in charge was one Russel D'Souza--how coincidental! For that is exactly the name of my brother who needed a walker! Cajji gave me Russel's number and told me to call him to find out when he would be back. Russel was lovely on the phone--he asked me to return at 6. 15 pm.
This gave me the opportunity to spend some time inside the church. I do not remember when I had last stepped into St. Peter's Church. It had to have been decades ago. I was amazed at how lovely it was. Even though it was dark (as Mass was not until 7.00 pm), there was enough late evening light for me to appreciate its marvelous structural features. Unlike most Bombay churches, this one is double-galleried--like the Congregational churches in the US. Furthermore, the ceiling is highly decorative with massive plaster of Paris rondels embedded into it. But for the fact that they were painted a dusty rose and were not gilded, I could have been in the interior of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London's Trafalgar Square. The altar is being refurbished at the moment and was behind scaffolding. I can imagine how great this church would look with the electric lights switched on. Outside, the church is clad in sand stone and embellished with the usual iconography of Jesuit churches world-wide: The IHS emblem, St. Peter's Keys to Heaven, for instance. It has double domes and a lovely marble statue of Church at the front. While there has been a church on this spot since 1852, the present church building dates from 1938--so my Dad was probably a student here while the building was under construction! He is intrinsically entwined with the building's history. What an architectural gem! And right here in my own backyard. I was stunned.
Truly Bandra has these astoundingly old churches that are so beautiful that I could spend a whole day just going from one to the other. What an astonishing heritage the Portuguese and Spaniard missionaries have left in Bombay!
After spending some time in silent prayer, I returned to find Russel D'Souza. He had reached his office and was graciousness itself as he handed me a brand-new walker for the princely deposit of Rs. 500 (less than $10!) He had me sign a form and then, next thing I knew, I was walking out of there with a walker in my hand. I hopped into a rickshaw that I found most conveniently right outside the church and off I went to Dad's place where I deposited it. I also visited with Russel for just a few minutes before Dad and I left for the 7.00 Mass at our own lovely Portuguese Church of St. Anne's perched high up on verdant Pali Hill, one of the poshest areas of Bombay with the wealthiest congregation in the city.
Mass and a Sick Visit from Fr. Savio:
Mass was said by Fr. Savio who then visited with us at its conclusion. He told us that he was interested in accompanying Dad back to his place so that he could visit with Russel. We appreciated the fact that despite his hectic schedule, he made the time to see Russel. Shortage of priests in Bombay is causing curates to be extremely overworked. They sit up late into the night finishing up paper work and other ministerial duties.
Russel was delighted to see Fr. Savio who said a very moving prayer from the heart over him and sprinkled him with holy water. It was a short but very meaningful visit.
Dad then busied himself heating Russel's dinner as I left to get back home. He gave me a container of drumstick curry which he said that neither he nor Russel like. Since I enjoy it, I was quite happy to have it. The drumstick curry, a pan roll and beans with potatoes formed my dinner which I enjoyed while watching Tunnel on my Ipad (downloaded from my local Fairfield Library through the Hoopla app). I love Clemence Poesy ever since I saw her in the TV version of Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong opposite a very young and very unknown Eddie Redmayne.
Conclusion of The Only Story:
Before bed, I finished reading The Only Story by Julian Barnes and felt deeply disturbed by the ending. As expected Susan, the female protagonist of the story, sinks deeper into alcoholism as the years go by until the young Paul can no longer look after her and 'returns' her to her daughter Martha. He abandons his potentially successful career as a lawyer to take a job working for a cheese company and sampling its wares at local fairs. Years later, after he has spent many decades overseas, he returns to England and has a brief visit with Susan. She had degenerated to the point of non-recognition of those around her. At the end of the novel, she is committed to an institution for the insane where Paul--still single, still nursing his enormous love for the much-older woman--goes to meet her. She does not recognize him at all. He leaves with the realization that he has finally become completely indifferent to her and that he is no longer able to stir up any feelings for her at all.
The book is an entire treatise on love, on its many ramifications and on the different kinds of impact it can have on each individual. An extremely sad book but written with mastery over craftsmanship in the stream-of-consciousness style that only a veteran like Julian Barnes (or Ian McEwan or Martin Amis) could muster.
I went to bed thinking of all the things I will need to finish tomorrow as my work marches on.
Until tomorrow...
No comments:
Post a Comment