As a bystander to the unravelling of his parents’ marriage, Zareer Masani was witness to the doomed union between the founder of the pro-free market Swatantra Party Minoo Masani and Congress loyalist Shakuntala Srivastava — a tale which he recreates in his tragic and unsparing memoir And All Is Said, Memoir of A Home Divided. For readers who are more used to celebrity hagiographies replete with sentimentality, Masani’s memoir is unusually candid for an Indian political family.

Answering the door at his flat in the sea-facing Breach Candy area in Mumbai, Masani, who bears an uncanny resemblance to politician and commentator Arun Shourie, leads the way to a sofa across a coffee table and calls out to “Ramu” for tea.

In the elegant, rent-controlled flat which he inherited from his father, who on one occasion used it as a bargaining chip to convince his son to persuade his mother to agree to a divorce, Masani, 65, is a patient raconteur.

His mother Shakuntala fell in love and married his father Minoo (Minocher), who was 15 years her senior. He was a freedom fighter and a contemporary of Gandhi and Nehru, who ran the gamut of all political allegiances, from the leftist Congress Socialist Party to the pro-West Swatantra Party. In his 41 years in electoral politics, he lost only once, during his opposition to Mrs Indira Gandhi, when she swept to power on the Garibi Hatao plank in 1971. Minoo felt betrayed when his wife and son supported Mrs Gandhi during that bitter election. “If my mother had not joined the Congress, the marriage could have survived,” admits Masani.

But the Congress happened much later. It was his birth that Masani feels divided the house. As the tea arrives, Masani says his father never wanted to have children, certainly not a second one after he was born. His parents vehemently disagreed over raising young Zareer: she was overindulgent, he was Spartan. “They were happiest on their own,” says Masani, recounting a time when his parents went off on their own to Brazil where Minoo was ambassador.

Masani and Shakuntala — who was his third wife — had their affairs and infidelities, and eventually they got embroiled in a 17-year-old struggle for divorce: he doggedly pursuing a formal break to remarry for a fourth time, she resisting.

The memoir captures the human condition against the backroom politics that underwrote nation building. But it is the family drama that is riveting. From the lonely little boy whose childhood is shortlived as he participates in his parents’ marital tensions to the homosexual young man who flees prim Bombay for Oxford, to the critical biographer of Mrs Gandhi in the aftermath of the Emergency and, finally, to the overwhelmed caretaker of his hallucinating mother and the more affectionate son of his father, the tautly sketched And All Is Said is, to borrow from Yeats, a terrible beauty born.

Masani himself describes the book as an attempt to give his mother “some of the tragic dignity she never quite achieved in life”. His first draft a few years ago was “more for myself”, drawn from his parents’ letters and fragments of memoir which his mother had written. Later, he blanched the manuscript off what was “unnecessarily hurtful or offensive to other people”.

“But right till the last minute I was wondering if my uncle who is 93, and whose wife figures in it (my mother’s sister), would think it is too personal. In fact, he has enjoyed it and had no problem with it. So I worried unnecessarily,” says the author who has a prominent British accent.

“I felt I had to be honest,” says Masani. “It was quite a sad story in some ways. I would not have done it in their lifetime, no way, but in the long run they wouldn’t have minded it as part of a historical record.”

Minoo and Shakuntala belonged to not just different communities. Unlike most Parsis, the Masanis were not pleasure-loving, but austere and even puritanical. “As a young boy I once asked my paternal grandmother why she wore no jewellery or makeup like my naniji did, and she replied, ‘Because these are the chains by which men lead women.’”

His maternal grandfather, Sir J.P. Srivastava, was a wealthy Viceregal Councillor, an arch enemy of the Congress and the nationalists, and a passionate believer in the education of his five daughters who all went to university.

Infidelities also led to the marriage of his parents cracking up. “It certainly started more with my father who had a rather roving eye. My mother would feel humiliated and she would retaliate by having her own circle of male admirers,” says Masani.

Among his mother’s suitors was J.R.D. Tata. “The relationship might have developed but he was a good friend of my father’s. His wife was also very fragile and a bit on the brink of insanity. A divorce would just completely destroy her,” he says. During the end of his parents’ protracted divorce, which his mother resisted, Tata tried to broker a final resolution for both his friends, which Shakuntala scuttled.

“I completely took my mother’s side and was indignant about my father’s infidelities,” avers Masani. Was everything out in the open, then? “No, nothing was open, it was always covert, but you would hear gossip about either parents with so-and-so,” he relates. He always assumed his mother’s alliances were platonic and didn’t feel threatened by them. “Instead, I was spoilt by them, particularly Kishore Uncle (Kishore Chand, a Punjabi American trained-dentist, who later married an American woman). At a time when I had no relation with my father, he was like the father I had always dreamed of having,” says Masani.

Still, it seems as if his mother clung to the marriage — not because she dreaded a divorce but perhaps because she still loved him? “Certainly, she discovered it herself most at the point when he wanted a divorce. I think towards the end of her life she regretted not having stuck out the marriage,” replies Masani.

Could they have reconciled? “If she hadn’t joined the Congress, there would have been no question of it, yes.”

Although they were friends in the 1930s and 40s, Minoo became quite hostile towards Jawaharlal Nehru later on. “When he died, his attitude was good riddance. He respected Indira more, he felt she had guts, unlike Nehru who was spineless in his approach to the Russian and the Chinese.”

His mother’s intense fascination with Indira Gandhi was admittedly stoked by her son. “The main motivation came from me. I convinced her that Indira was serious about socialism. She swallowed all that and became a convert genuinely.”

Mother and son joined the Congress partly as a rebellion against Minoo. “At that point Indira responded very warmly, hinting there may be a Cabinet post for my mother,” he reveals.

But the Emergency changed Masani’s views about Indira Gandhi. After his damning Indira Gandhi: A Biography was published in 1976, Shakuntala worried about a backlash against both her son and herself. Did Masani meet her after the book appeared? “I would not have wanted to meet her nor would she have wanted to meet me,” he ripostes amidst audible birdsong as dusk deepens. They met when he was writing the book. “I was quite a supporter then. But she could never take criticism and she could never be pleasant to anyone who had criticised her.”

The Indira phase, from 1970-75, was the only point at which Masani and Minoo’s politics dramatically diverged. However, they drew closer personally, when Minoo was deeply supportive of Masani’s English partner David who fell ill and had to have an emergency operation in Bombay.

Again, Masani is unusually candid about his sexuality, in print as well as in person. Although homosexuality was not openly discussed in Bombay four decades ago, his mother was instantly supportive when she was told that Masani was gay. “Why didn’t you tell me yourself,” she asked.

However, Minoo never asked questions which would cause embarrassment. “He was always very affectionate to my long-term partner at that time. He didn’t like to talk about personal matters anyway.”

Currently working on a biography of Lord Macaulay who introduced English education in India, Masani sees India “reaching a kind of federal balance”. He would like to see a liberal secular party in power, something like the Swatantra Party was. “Or like what the Congress was when it wasn’t dominated by a rather mafia-like dynasty. Where does one turn if you are like me and don’t like the BJP?”

The conversation turns to a remark made by his mother about the newly married Sonia Gandhi. “She said, ‘I can’t believe what a dim girl she is and she comes from a working-class background’. For my mother, if Sonia had been intelligent and working-class she would have passed the test. But being dim and working-class has obviously not inhibited her from becoming a neta in India,” he titters.

Minoo died in 1998. He was 92. Masani’s mother, a year later. “I loved my mother. I can’t honestly say I loved my father. I now feel affection for him, as opposed to dislike and hostility which I did as a child,” acknowledges Masani.

Between sips of tea, one asks where he feels most at home. “Well, between London and Bombay, particularly in this flat,” he responds, saying he plans to return here permanently and do up the place. His father’s fourth wife lives in the flat too. “She is in the next room,” Masani says, but is reluctant to be in the public eye. “Of course, she has read the book and given me her blessing to publish it but I would like to keep her out of this,” he stresses.

Currently single, Masani admits to a somewhat solitary existence. “I am not one who has lots of friends, five or six, counting both in London and India. There is undoubtedly an emotional vacuum, times when I feel lonely. Particularly, after both my parents went. But you have to cope.”