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My dad and I reach Nariman Point and he finds a
small spot into which he confidently backs the car. This is one of
the rare occasions when we have not stopped on our way to pick up a
chicken roll or a tandoori chicken to eat in the car while we stare
at the water. I am old enough to realize that my father is a
spendthrift and that this habit causes problems at home.

Mehroo often bemoans the fact that there is not
even enough money at home to pay the butcher, who keeps a daily tab.
Dad promises her household expenses as soon as he receives a certain
cheque. If Mehroo complains to Babu, he will tell her to speak to my
dad. But then Babu approachs his wife, Freny, who is the only family
member who has a job outside of the family business. Usually, Freny
will help out.

Regardless of his financial situation, my father
finds it hard to refuse me anything. Often, as we head for the
seaside, I see him remove the last notes from his pocket to buy me a
treat. But I am too old now to be able to enjoy the treat without
realizing its cost to the other family members.

Tonight, unhappy that I've refused his
offers to buy me dinner, he coaxes me to buy something from the
various seaside vendors who approach our car. I refuse and begin to
lecture him about the value of saving money, in much the same way
that I have heard Mehroo do. He listens silently.

‘Daddy,' I say. ‘Save just two
rupees a day. Remember that piggy bank I bought you for your
birthday? It was so you could save a little bit everyday. Please. Two
rupees only. That's what the nuns at school also say—doesn't
matter how much you save, just save a little.'

He shakes his head then. ‘No, Thritu, don't
ask me for that.

I'm not the kind of man who can save a
little-little everyday.

When I save, it will be phaat!—all in one
stroke.'

T
HE BELL RINGS, SIGNALLING IT'S time
for composition class—my favourite class of the day. My
classroom teacher, Miss D'Silva, walks in with today's
assignment. Just last week Miss D'Silva had read my essay out
loud to the whole class. I had sat in my seat, my head bobbing with
pride while Miss D'Silva drew the class's attention to
certain lines in my essay.

She was particularly enamoured by the one that
read, ‘Mr Brown stood in the middle of the room disguised as
Santa Claus.' My teacher claimed that that sentence revealed a
sophistication beyond my years. ‘This is the result of reading
voraciously,' she said and then asked if we knew what voracious
meant. All heads turned to look at me but my hand stayed where it was
on top of my desk and I kept my eyes cast downward, afraid to reveal
that I had no idea what the word meant and hoping that everyone would
mistake my downcast gaze for modesty.

But now it is time to shine again. I am ungainly,
unathletic, uncoordinated, lousy at math and mediocre at almost
everything else. Writing is one of the few areas where I am
indisputably good and so I look forward to the two hours of
composition class each week the way most kids look forward to
chocolate. Before Miss D'Silva has finished writing today's
topic on the blackboard I am already holding my pencil tightly in my
hand, raring to go. But just before the lead in my pencil kisses the
blank white sheet of paper in front of me, Miss D'Silva says
something that turns my world upside down.

And for heaven's sake give them real names,
that is, Indian names, not names like Mr Jones and Mr Henderson.'

I freeze. My mind goes blank. The pencil in my
hands, so charged with possibility a minute ago, suddenly feels limp
and heavy. For the first time in my young life, I am experiencing
something akin to writer's block. I have no idea how to create
characters who look and talk in ways other than the ones in the books
I have grown up reading. I try to give my characters an Indian name,
but all I can think of is Colin and Jack and Susan. I try to imagine
what an Indian character might look like but I don't know how
to create someone who doesn't have curly red hair or straight,
sandy-brown hair. As for making up a character who talks the way we
do—who says,

‘yaar' and ‘men' instead
of ‘I say, old chap' and ‘Jolly good, old man'—I
don't have a clue where to start. Until now, my characters have
eaten scones and blueberry tarts instead of chutney sandwiches and
bhel puri, and to make that culinary and cultural leap seems
impossible and daunting and upsetting of the world order.

For even more than I am the child of my parents, I
am the child of Enid Blyton.

Like all my peers, I have grown up reading Enid
Blyton's books, memorized entire passages from them, escaped in
them.

I have solved mysteries with the Secret Seven, I
have had great adventures with the Famous Five. I have outwitted
bumbling British Bobbies with the Five Find-Outers. I have travelled
to boarding school with the girls at Malory Towers as they've
snuck into each other's dorm rooms for midnight snacks and
tromps through the British countryside. I have had crushes on both,
the silent, curly-haired Colin and the extrovertish tomboy Georgina.
I have lived vicariously in the world of secret pass-words and
fraternal clubs, in the world of childhood camaraderie and adventure
and mystery.

I have shed hot tears yearning for a golden
spaniel like Scamper, who is Peter's dog in the Secret Seven.

My obsession with Enid Blyton started a few years
ago. Up to that point I was reading the Archie and Richie Rich comic
books that my cousin Roshan brought home from Jaffer's Lending
Library. But one day, my aunt Freny came home with a Secret Seven
book and told me she thought I was old enough to read real books now.
I was petrified. I was convinced that I was not old enough to read
novels, that I needed to stick to books with pictures as well as
words. ‘Just try it,' Freny said.

‘If you don't like it, I'll take
it back.' And so, with great trepidation, I flipped open the
book. And found to my great surprise that the words were no more
difficult than what I was used to. And that I was lost in the book by
page four. And that reading a full story was infinitely more
satisfying than reading a comic book. I finished the book the next
evening and begged for more. That Saturday, Freny took me to Jaffer's
and got me my own membership. And so, at a humble lending library in
the middle of a busy Bombay street, my love affair with books began.

Indeed, I have lived so intensely in the fictional
world of small-town England, that I know more about this world than
the hot, crowded, equatorial city of dark-haired men and women that I
dwell in. Nothing that I am reading either at school or at home
reflects this world. At home, I read one Enid Blyton novel a day. In
my English-medium school, Hindi is taught like a foreign language. My
literature textbooks carry poems by Wordsworth and stories by
Dickens. Nothing by an Indian writer. Except occasional passages from
one of the Hindu epics, either the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. But
these seem like ancient history and after all, both narratives are
mythologies and it is hard to see how to adapt these tales with their
inflated, dramatic language, to my own life. In some ways, the
adventures of

Enid Blyton's blue-eyed, freckled young
heroes in pastoral England seem more relevant to my life than the
pursuits of the Mahabharata's dark-skinned heroes who may look
like me but whose world of chariots and archery and old-world
chivalry means nothing to a city kid growing up in the Bombay of the
early 1970s.

My teacher seems oblivious to the semantic
earthquake she has set off in my life with her words. But for the
first time in my life, I am sweating a story, staring into space as I
chew on my pencil, making a few feeble starts and then erasing them
with my scented eraser, the one with the picture of Fred Flintstone
on it. I rack my brains to think of some male Indian names. Raj? Ram?
Even to my young ears, they sound prosaic and dull. I look around the
room. Many of the girls in this class are Catholic with names like
Susan and Brenda and Carol, so they're no help. As for the ones
who're not Catholic, I'm suddenly confused about who has
an ‘Indian' name and who doesn't. After all,
haven't I heard my family say that my name is a Persian one?
Does that qualify as Indian? Is a ‘real' Indian name only
a Hindu name?

That evening, at home, I want to ask my mother
these questions but am at a loss as to how to frame them. And this
leaves me feeling inadequate and uneasy. For the first time in my
life, I realize that writing is not the easy, almost absent-minded
outpouring of emotions that I had always thought it was. That there's
more to writing than making up a birthday poem you know your mother
will like. Miss D'Silva's words have unleashed something
even though I don't know what to call that something. But I
dimly recognize that writing is—can be—a complicated and
important thing. And that it is tied to other things, things like
culture and nationality and history and where you live. This is a
brand-new thought: that all writing is not the same and that where
you live can define who you are and so change the way you write. I am
both excited and confused by how a simple

request to change the physical description of our
characters is taking me down a new path, making me think about things
that I had never thought of before. But I'm also achingly aware
of how inadequate my thinking is, how, after a while, my brain simply
stops skipping down this new path because I do not have the tools
with which to navigate it. And in a flash, I understand something
new: That just as reading and writing are linked, so are questions
and answers. You have to know how to phrase a question in order to
get the right answer. This insight dazzles me and I flip it around in
my mind the rest of the evening.

Dad and Mehroo come home from the factory that
night and I can tell he is in a good mood.

Over dinner, he tells us a story. ‘I got
shouted at the factory by the kamdar today,' he says with a
grin. ‘All of it was Mehroo's fault.'

The kamdar was a tall, grey-bearded,
distinguished-looking Muslim who had been my dad's foreman for
years. Always dressed in a white kurta-pyjama that stayed spotlessly
clean even while my dad's starched white shirts came home
covered with grease and sawdust, the kamdar was a soft-spoken but
stern-faced man who never hesitated to speak his mind before my
father, whom he treated like a brilliant but not very worldly younger
brother. Mostly, my father was amused by his foreman's
treatment of him. Occasionally, he would mutter about the kamdar
getting too big for his breeches and forgetting who was boss. But he
also appreciated the fierce, almost familial loyalty the foreman
showed toward the business. The kamdar ran the workshop with a kind
of patriarchal, proprietary air.

He referred to the factory in terms that made you
believe that it was his grandfather who had started it. It was he who
scolded and kept an eye on the younger, unworldly workers who had
left their Northern villages and moved to Bombay and had ended up at
my father's factory. The timber market in which the factory was
located became more than a place of employment for these men; it
became home. They slept under the stars on their narrow rope cots;
they cooked their aromatic evening meals on tiny kerosene stoves that
glowed in the dying light of the day; they bathed outside the factory
before my dad showed up in the morning; they procured water for
drinking and toiletries from God knows where.

The kamdar was especially fond of Mehroo. He kept
a pa-ternal, protective eye on her because she was the only woman who
showed up to work daily in a place that was exclusively male. Most of
the timber merchants in the market were old-fashioned Muslims, who
went home to wives who covered their faces in purdah when they left
their homes. As the only female—and single, to boot—Mehroo
should have been the object of much gossip and derision but she
wasn't. The flip side of Muslim conservatism is a kind of
quintessentially Indian chivalry and respect toward women. Perhaps it
was some notion of gallantry that sheltered her. Or perhaps it was
the openly protective stance both of her brothers took toward her
that deflected any attempt at flirting or innuendo. Certainly, Mehroo
herself, with her serious face, her obvious devotion to her two
brothers, her doggedness and hard work, did not invite any sexual
advances. Anyway, by the time I was old enough to be awed at the fact
that my domestic, mild aunt was a pioneer when it came to
infiltrating an all-male industry, Mehroo had been my father's
business partner for so long that most of the other merchants had
long since accepted her.

My dad was still grinning. ‘Saala, what
curses that kamdar was directing at me. All because of your
Mehroofui.'

‘What happened?'

The kamdar had stood outside the door of my dad's
air-conditioned office and eavesdropped on my father yelling at my
aunt. ‘New clothes,' he heard my dad yell. He leaned
closer to the door to hear more snippets of their conversation,

‘Nice, expensive clothes…Spending
money,' he heard my dad say. ‘Please, Burjor,' he
heard my aunt reply. ‘This time, just forgive me. Just ignore
it…'

The kamdar was livid. He paced on the dirt floor
until my father left his office. Then, he lit into him. ‘Burjor
seth, God forgive you for what I heard today,' he cried. ‘All
these years I am working for you and never thought this day would
come.