The book Looking for the Rainbow is about the time I spent with my father, from 1942 to 1944. These aren’t the only two years that I spent with my father, but they are the most memorable, in that, you see, just he and I were together in Delhi at a time when World War II was on and he was serving in the Royal Air Force.
My parents had separated a couple of years before and I was now with my father. My mother was marrying again, so obviously I wasn’t very keen to go and live with a stepfather.
I had just been taken out of a school in the hills, so I didn’t go to school for a year or two! I was very happy to get out of boarding. I, in fact, learnt much more at home with my father than in school, so that when I did go to another school in Shimla, instead of being held back, I got a double promotion. Well, I am not recommending at all children should miss a year of school, but sometimes it might actually be beneficial.
A COMPANIONSHIP
In Delhi, my father would go on duty in the mornings. The evenings would be spent with me, and also the weekends. He would often take me to the pictures, to bookshops, or even to old monuments and tell me the stories behind them. So it was a companionship… that is the word that best describes it. And when he fell ill and had to go to hospital, I was actually on my own for a couple of weeks. So, in a way, I learnt also to manage on my own.
He was a very keen stamp collector. In the evenings we would sit together at the dining table and I would help him sort his stamps, and rearrange them. He had an album for each country, so we would discuss their stamps. He had catalogues, he would order stamps from abroad… he had a very good collection. Sadly, most of it disappeared when he died.
My father was born in a small place called Shahjahanpur in north India, in the military camp. His father was a soldier. Later my father became a tutor and started this small school in the Jamnagar palace for their princes and princesses, where I studied too, for my first six years.
After our time in Delhi, he had to put me in boarding school... and I have described that in the book as well. And then he died suddenly, in Calcutta, in 1944.
A TENDER FATHER
In the introduction, I have written, “Not many fathers are capable of tenderness towards their children. They are usually too busy ‘earning a living for the family’— or that’s the excuse!”
Fathers are off to work, or their minds are on various problems connected with their jobs and they are sometimes inclined to brush off their children’s enquiries, and don’t give them as much time as they should. This is from my own observations of other people’s fathers. So, very often, when the boy or girl is small, they are more or less a mother’s child… the father is somehow very much in the background. Of course this goes back historically, doesn’t it?
I was just reading today the biography of a child growing up in 17th century England who never saw his father! So traditionally fathers have not been very close to their children and it would be wonderful if they could be closer. And I give my father as an example of someone who gave so much of his time to me.
CALCUTTA GRANNY
My father is buried in the Bhowanipore War Cemetery in Calcutta. Last winter, when I was there, I visited his grave again.
At the end of that year (1944), I was looking forward to going to Calcutta, where he was then living, with his mother, Calcutta Granny. I was looking forward because in his last letter to me, he talked about New Market, and the bookshops and the things we could do when I came home. That letter was written in September 1944 and two or three weeks later he died. I then went to my mother and stepfather in Dehradun. My father was 46 when he died. I was 10. So I tried to preserve that period and write this story as a tribute to him. It’s something I felt I had to do, for a long time.
As told to Samhita Chakraborty
Looking for the Rainbow: My years with Daddy
is published by Puffin, with illustrations by Mihir Joglekar, Rs 250
CONTEST ALERT
My favourite childhood memory with my father is.... Complete the sentence within 50 words and send it to t2onsunday@abp.in. Three of Team t2’s favourite entries will be published in t2, and win a signed copy of Ruskin Bond’s Looking for the Rainbow.
