Vir Sanghvi [Sanghvi - A Rude Life

I am always astonished by people who can remember their childhoods with remarkable clarity. Almost everything I know about my early years comes from conversations I had with my parents in later years.

My mother came from a rich mill-owning family in Ahmedabad. They owned several textile mills and at one stage, in the 1950s, they were in the same league as the Sarabhais and other top industrial families in Ahmedabad. I always thought of her parents as being relatively progressive because they let her go to America on her own, in the mid-1940s, to study at the University of Michigan. She made a success of her studies but once confessed to mewith a certain amount of bitternessthat the reason her parents had agreed to let her go abroad for studies was because they thought she was dark.

In those days, she said, fair girls were married off early while dark girls were told to study hard because they couldnt be expected to find rich husbands.

My father came from a middle-class family in Rajkot. Or, more correctly, they would have been middle class if my grandfather had not had thirteen children from two wives (he wasnt a bigamist; his first wife died young). No middle-class person can stay middle class for very long with those many children, so lower middle class may be a more accurate description.

Certainly, my father was left pretty much on his own, which may or may not have been a good thing because he took to reading Das Kapital and assorted lefty treatises. He travelled all over India ending up in Bombay where he went to Elphinstone College. He did very well academically and then (in my view) threw it all away by becoming a full-time worker of the Communist Party of India (CPI).

I later asked him why he gave up all hope of a proper career by working in a CPI cell and often remaining underground because the CPI was illegal. (Well, its official policy was to overthrow the legally elected government of India.)

His response was simply that he cared about India. Along with many young people of his generation, he worried that post-independence India would be colonized once again by our own fat cats and that the poor would just get poorer. In those days, the CPI was considered to be the idealists option and there was a certain glamour attached to being a theoretical revolutionary.

My mother later told me that he had been like that for much of his life. (They first met in Ahmedabad, where my father was visiting, even before he went to college in Bombay.) Her first memory of him, she recalled, was of a charming and deeply charismatic boy who knew that he was always the brightest person in the room. He brought everyone he spoke to around to his view. But he never seriously entertained the possibility that he might be wrong or that he was throwing his future away.

My father was enough in love with the cause to ignore my mothers obvious adoration of him and to marry a fellow party worker. They had hardly been married when the police picked him up and put him in jail along with scores of other CPI activists. He said afterwards that the jail part wasnt so bad but he was less-than-delighted to be visited in prison by his bride along with a party comrade.

Was he doing okay, they asked.

He said he was fine.

Oh good, they said, because we have something to tell you.

My father realized that the conversation was not headed to a happy place.

We have fallen in love, the comrade said. My fathers wife added:

And I am going to have his baby!

The communist party did not believe in private property but this, my father later said, seemed to be taking things too far.

Divorce papers were drawn up and by the time my father was released (after eleven months in jail), he was ready to look for something new.

He had an added motive. The CPI threw him out for some ideological deviation and in a manner that he had come to expect, the commissar who drew up the chargesheet against him was his own younger brother.

At this stage, my mother re-appeared in his life. My father had been friends with her cousins and she told him that she had been in love with him since they were teenagers. Her parents hated him, of course. Not only was he from a lowly middle-class family from Rajkot but he was a communist, the sort of chap who wanted to take all their money away.

To the dismay of my mothers family, her cousins also became communists. (One of them gave away property that would be worth hundreds of crores today to the party.) They blamed my father for that (probably accurately) and regarded him as a malign influence on their family.

Once my father was free of everythingjail, his now ex-wife and the partymy mother decided that she would tell her parents to take a flying leap and marry him. She was thirty-one and not prepared to wait.

This was easier said than done.

My father had brains but no money. He persuaded R.K. Karanjia, editor of a left-leaning weekly tabloid called Blitz, to give him a foreign affairs column (though my father had never been abroad). But that was not going to be enough. So, while he looked for something else to do, my mother, who always had a slightly secretive streak, hatched a plan.

By then, she was living in Mumbai and earning her own money as an industrial psychologist. (I still dont know what that is but it was the subject of her American degree.) She stayed in a very nice three-bedroom apartment in Churchgate, bought for her by her father.

Her plan was as follows. The United Nations was being set up in Paris in 1951. My father would persuade Blitz to send him to cover it. She, herself, would take a ship to France. They would meet in Paris and would get married as soon as possible. Apparently, my father was a little taken aback by the audacity of the scheme. But my mother had lived in America for four years (as a student), had travelled there by ship and assured him that she knew her way around abroad.

It worked, despite a few hiccups. She booked her ticket, helped my father get a passport and sent him on ahead. In the manner of some rom-com movie, her father found out that she was leaving and rushed men to the docks to stop her. As it happens in the movies, they arrived just as the ship was sailing away, too late to prevent her departure.

My grandfather was incandescent with rage. But all he could do in those days was send a telegram which would be delivered to her when the ship next docked.

When the boat stopped in Suez, the telegram was waiting. If you marry Ramesh, it said, I will shoot you! It was signed by my grandfather. My mother ignored the cable and kept going. I asked her later if the tone had frightened her.

Aww no, she replied dismissively. My father was one vanya sheth. If he ever even saw a gun, he would have been so scared that he would have run away. Ha.

This was a very disrespectful attitude. But it was entirely accurate and valid.

My father picked up my mother at the docks in Paris and they set about planning their wedding. At that moment, my mother suddenly decided to be awkward. She wanted a traditional Indian wedding, she said, with a sacred fire and