It was no longer possible to keep Abba in the closet. He had started writing lyrics for films and one day a friend of mine said that her father had read my father’s name in the newspaper. That did it! I owned him up at once! Of all the forty children in my class, only my father’s name had appeared in the newspaper! I perceived his being ‘different’ as a virtue for the first time. I need no longer feel apologetic about his wearing a kurta-pyjama! In fact, I even brought out the black doll he had bought me. I didn’t want it when he first gave it to me. I wanted a blonde doll with blue eyes, like all the others had in my class. But he explained, in that quiet gentle way of his, that black was beautiful too and I must learn to be proud of my doll. It didn’t make sense to my seven-year-old mind but I had accepted him as ‘weird’ in any case and so I quietly hid the doll. Three years later, I pulled it out as proof that I was a ‘different’ daughter of a ‘different’ father! In fact, I now displayed it with such newfound confidence that instead of being sniggered at by my classmates, I became an object of envy. That was the first lesson he taught me, of turning what is perceived as a disadvantage into a scoring point.

When I opened my eyes to the world, the first colour I saw was red. Till I was nine years old we lived at Red Flag Hall, a commune-like flat of the Communist Party of India (CPI). A huge red flag used to greet visitors at the entrance. It was only later that I realized red was the colour of the worker, of revolution. Each comrade’s family had just one room; the bathroom and lavatory was common. Being party members had redefined the husband–wife relationship of the whole group. Most wives were working and it became the responsibility of whichever parent was at home to look after the child. My mother was touring quite a lot with Prithvi Theatre and in her absence Abba would feed, bathe and look after both my brother Baba and me, as a matter of course.