that took me near those rooms, and, looked into from

the wrong lenses, gave me the strange satisfaction

of feeling farther away than I really was.

I knew our country was poor, but mainly as a

sombre abstraction. Having said that, our wealth

was make-believe—perquisites (perks) made up

for the ceiling on high income under Indira Gandhi.

My father had no savings—he’d lost everything

with partition; the take-home pay, after tax,

was small. The only way to get rich was not to pay

taxes, almost impossible to do when you had

one of the best jobs available in a British-owned company.

But the perquisites gave us the trappings of affluence

if not affluence itself. A chauffeur-driven car,

first an Ambassador, then a “foreign” car,

a poor relation of the Managing Director’s Pontiac—

an Austin that tried to keep us happy, and often

stopped for no reason on Marine Drive. It was

often pushed into motion by passersby. Domiciled

in India, its habits had become Indian. Still,

it was a foreign car (the word “foreign” had,

for the urban upper middle class,

as much a shameless magic as it might have had

a malign resonance to a nationalist or to

a Little Englander); commensurate with my father’s

position. Years later, a Mercedes-Benz,

regal in those years of austerity, took us

everywhere. Wherever we went in it, we were

saluted. These cars—our cars—of varying

degrees of majesty, were not our own. (When my father

retired, he bought a secondhand Ambassador

at a concession from the company. The new

Managing Director’s son had practised on it

and perfected his driving skills, permanently

affecting its engine. The chauffeur who’d driven

the Mercedes-Benz, a fair, round-faced, moustached,

uxurious Hindi-speaking man, forever dropping

his wife’s name in his conversations, wept when he bid us

farewell. An age had ended for him.

He had a new employer now. A better job—

and yet these illogical tears.) That Austin

used to be parked outside the old building on

Cumballa Hill, near the Parsi General

Hospital. It was from here I went to school,

going down the road past the Allah Beli café

where drivers ate biryani for lunch—always plotting

how not to go to school, because I hated it,

hated the hymns in the morning, the P.E. classes,

physics and mathematics; plotting, feigning fever

and malingering in order to stay at home.

The fifteen or so minutes I had in the car

before I reached school near Mahatma Gandhi Road,

going past, every morning, Marine Drive, before turning

either into the road that ran past Parsi

Dairy Farm, and the Fire Temple, then right

again towards Metro Cinema, or farther on,

turning left at Churchgate, moving towards

the traffic lights before Flora Fountain—those fifteen

minutes I spent in apprehension and prayer.

It was Christ I prayed to, to save me from

the imminent danger of P.E. classes.