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Lines on a map often seem to carry such certainty.
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On one side of a line, we are told, is one country.
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On the other side is another.
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Border controls and armies exist to stop any bleeding from one side to the other.
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And yet, people are fluid.
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I may belong as much to one place as to another.
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People from another land may sing my songs and eat my food, even if they don't share
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Those in my own land, when we trace our past, we find it doesn't know lines on a map.
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If you think of the world in terms of nation-states, India and Pakistan are two distinct entities.
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If you think of the world in terms of cultures and people and languages and food and clothes
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and the affectionate terms that grandmothers have for their little babies, those borders
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Take Sindhis, for example, they've been around from before nation-states, and who knows,
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they might outlive this possibly transitory concept.
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You can plant a flag on a hilltop, but you cannot divide a river quite so easily.
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My guest today is the splendidly spirited Saaz Agarwal, an artist, a writer, a publisher,
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and to many, the keeper of this Hindi flame.
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Born Saaz Bijlani, she did a masters in mathematics, became a journalist and a writer, and then
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wrote a series of books about the past and present of Sindh.
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We got together a few weeks ago for this episode and discussed her own rich life, the history
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and culture of Sindh, and themes such as memory, identity, assimilation, loss, rootedness.
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Even if you're not Sindhi, you'll find this a fascinating conversation.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
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The course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know about
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the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Saaz, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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It's lovely to be here.
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We've known each other for must be a decade and a half, though I kind of forget how we
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Um, it was probably something to do with writing your book, you know, I seem to remember being
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part of a book launch that you did in Pune.
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Yeah, that must be 2009.
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Yeah, a really long time ago.
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And I would of course have been familiar with your byline and your work well before that,
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because you've been writing columns and so on for so many years.
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So tell me a little bit more about you.
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Like one of the things I've realized when I've spoken with people on the show who have
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been friends, who I've known for a long, long time, is actually I realized while recording
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with them that I didn't know them at all.
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Because when you're just friends and when you're hanging out, there's a lot of stuff
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you don't talk about and that you don't ask each other and that, you know, can make you
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look at them in a different way.
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So let's go right back to your sort of to your childhood, you know, where were you born?
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I was actually born in Bombay, but was probably was here only very, very briefly, maybe two
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My father was a tea planter in the Neil Greece.
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And I was my parents' first child, so my mother came to have me in Bombay.
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And it's funny because less than two years later, when she had her next baby, which was
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my brother, she just decided not to come to Bombay and she had the baby at home in the
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guest bedroom of the manager's bungalow on High Forest Estate.
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And that was quite a brave thing for her to do.
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But yeah, so I grew up on the tea plantations and went to boarding school when I was five
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because it was, you know, when you live in a place like that, that's that's what there's
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no schools within walking distance.
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And yeah, actually, that was very defining for me because of years between when I was
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five and seven, I was in a boarding school and was not a very pleasant experience.
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But it was quite a hostile environment and I was very unhappy and my parents took me
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out from there and my dad got a transfer to a place where we could then commute to school
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in Ooty, which was an hour's journey from the estate that he joined.
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So what what kind of kid were you and, you know, what was it like, you know, those early
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years where, you know, you didn't grow up in a big city with things all around you and,
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you know, yeah, so we would visit Bombay once a year where my grandparents lived and we'd
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spend, you know, about three, four weeks with them every year in the summer in, I'm sorry,
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in December, when the schools in those days had a long break and it was very cold where
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we lived, extremely cold.
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So it was nice to get away from that.
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And it was lovely being in Bombay in those days.
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So in those days, Kaffirade had not even come up yet.
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It was just rubble and we'd walk by the on the promenade.
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And so those are the memories I have of Bombay.
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But on the estates, life is very lonely, you know, you live you and there's nobody except
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And we lived this very, I mean, you know, when I think back, it's a little bit embarrassing
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to say this, but it was a very opulent lifestyle.
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So we were not wealthy, you know, but we lived a really lavish lifestyle.
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First of all, the nature aspect where it's so beautiful everywhere you look, acres and
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acres of green, you know, the tea bushes, blue sky and nobody, nothing, it's at night,
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you see the whole Milky Way.
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It was just so beautiful.
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And the second is the luxurious home, you know, huge rooms, huge, like large houses,
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big gardens with lawns in front and flowers, vegetable gardens, and no housework at all
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because there was a huge staff to take care of everything.
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And my mother was famous with her brothers for being, for doing all her cooking by just
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So, but it was extremely lonely and I think when I was young, so I changed my boarding
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school, those two years completely changed me.
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They kind of traumatized me and made me a different person.
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It took me many, many years to come back.
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I don't think I ever came back to what I was when I was young, which was very lively.
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And I've been told by people who knew me then that I was quite boisterous and, you know,
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always wanted my own way and things like that, which I actually don't think that's the kind
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of person I turned into.
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But yeah, those two years were very difficult and like, you know, they kind of marked me.
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I was always with depression and, you know, not quite, not all there until, I mean, I
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slept with the light on, I couldn't sleep, I had night fears and I slept with the light
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on until I was about 25 years old or maybe, yeah, when I had a baby and then, you know,
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I kind of became a little more stable.
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But then again, when I saw, you know, I had those first two years, which were, you know,
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it was like being in an institution, I mean, you know, like totally uncared for and living
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in a place where people don't really want to and going home during the holidays and
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then screaming and yelling and having to be peeled off my mother when I was being put
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After that, for two years, my brother and I were day scholars commuting to a school
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in Ooty and then after that we went to the proper, you know, the boarding school that
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I, we spent the rest of our schooling in, which there as well, I wasn't that well adjusted,
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but I think that I'm so lucky to have been to a school like that because the quality
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of education was so good and we had really good teachers, we had no pressure of academics
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You know, it was entirely about being a well-rounded person, learning many different things, understanding
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the world, setting standards for yourself and of course some of those things came from
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my parents as well because they were that kind of people and that's probably why they
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wanted us to go to that kind of school and the other thing is also such a big network
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because you know, for us, my brother and me, at least for me in particular, we don't really
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have like those, you know, bonds with cousins and I mean, the bonds with our school friends
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are very, very strong so we, it's like my community.
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One thing that I often wonder about when it comes to people who have sort of, you know,
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grown up in either smaller towns or in earlier times, both of which are true of you and to
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some extent of me, is that the rhythm of life is very different, the rhythm is really slow.
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Like, you know, for you to grow up where you did, you know, would be so different from
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if you were a young person today in Bombay where everything can be much more frenetic
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in terms of the things you do and I don't just mean the difference you'd have between
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cities but also the difference that has been created by technology today, like a young
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person today growing up, you'd always have a smartphone with you, you'd have a million
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things to do in there, you can check Instagram, you can go down YouTube rabbit holes, get
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addicted to Twitter, all of that.
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The rhythm is fully different.
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Do you feel that, you know, growing up as you did, perhaps away from the big hectic
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cities got you sort of used to a slower kind of rhythm which might be something that is
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useful to you today itself or as part of your life today as well?
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That's such a lovely question.
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I know that when we were young, it was indeed a very much slower, relaxed life.
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I mean, days would pass just doing the same thing and, you know, just relaxing, reading,
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drinking tea, going for walks, you know.
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I don't live that kind of life at all now.
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I haven't lived that kind of life for a really long time because I am always doing something
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and always making something, always working on something.
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I don't know what it is.
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It may seem like I'm ambitious, but honestly, I like doing things and it's not that I all,
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I want, yeah, I want to do things and complete them and hang them on the wall.
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But it's not that important for me to have them seen by everybody.
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You know, for me, that making the thing is really important, like, you know, apart from
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writing books, I do, I make crochet blankets, you know, and things like that.
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So about the pace of life, I think when I came to Bombay to study in college, although
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I had, I was familiar with Bombay, it wasn't totally unfamiliar.
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It was still a huge culture shock because in those days, this was in the late 1970s,
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there was no green in Bombay at all.
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I mean, the greening of Bombay started around then, late 70s, early 80s, I think.
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There was nothing, you know, and so that time I was just two days to realize that this was
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What did impact me was the crowd and the noise and the fact that nobody had any manners,
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you know, because that we were not used to.
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So, you know, you get into the bus and it's like, hey, put it up, put it up.
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So that took a bit of time getting used to.
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But then after a few years, it was my, my world.
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And I just remember this funny thing when I talk about the bus, I remember getting into
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very crowded buses and pushing my way in and stuff and looking at the front of the bus
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and thinking, oh, I would like to get in from there.
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And I remember this because they had a sign up saying you can enter the bus if, if you're
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old or if you're disabled or if you're pregnant.
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So I do remember this when I was pregnant, I, I only did it once, but you know, the bus
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So I walked down to the front and I must have run around to the front and hopped in and
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the driver was like, what's up?
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So I was like, I'm pregnant or, you know, I, I don't think I knew how to say my
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I must have just like, I don't know, I wasn't showing, you know, so I may have pointed
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I don't know what to say.
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Raised his eyebrows and let me in.
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And then somebody else came running up behind me and he's like, so it was like, so funny.
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Everything is, you know, so ludicrous comparison.
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And that's one of the things that really I carry with me everywhere that, you know, you,
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we take ourselves so seriously.
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You know, when you sit in an AC room and you're, you know, whatever you do, you think that's
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But actually real life is out there.
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You know, when the bus driver says, what happened to you?
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What was the reply you got?
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I was just so embarrassed.
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I just lunked in and sat down.
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No, he, he asked the other guy behind me, I don't remember.
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And he probably didn't know.
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I mean, he's a Matadi guy from Marbles or whatever.
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And he probably just got off the bus.
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You should say that Bombay wasn't green at all in those days, because the impression
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that like one stereotype of cities is that cities were fine until people came.
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And then they messed it up and they became concrete jungles and all of that.
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But the thing is, there can be a movement in this other direction.
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Like I really love cities, right?
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Because I think that one, of course, there is a fact that they, you know, you get dense
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So just as a greater variety of everything, more opportunity, more art, more music, more
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food, everything is just way better.
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And cities in that sense are kind of, you know, so vibrant.
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What is your feeling about cities?
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Because you went to City Girl to start with.
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But I know I lived in Bombay for 15 years.
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And I'm okay saying Bombay because that's what it was until I left.
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I can say that I came to Mumbai yesterday, but I know that I just felt so much a part
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of it and I never thought I'd leave ever.
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And I totally relate to what you're saying.
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There's so much of richness and, you know, you walk on the streets, you see wonderful
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things, you meet people who are interesting all the time.
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Anyone you meet is likely to be a person of depth.
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And, you know, the way things work in Bombay, which is that things really work.
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I mean, I don't think they happen in other places.
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You know, you get your milk every day at the same time.
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I mean, we gave the Dabba Wala Six Sigma.
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Everybody in Bombay deserves Six Sigma because everything gets done and it's so complex.
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So that's something that I love about Bombay.
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And, you know, it's something that I don't know whether I always had this thing of being
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action oriented, being goal oriented, being kind of immune to hardships.
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Maybe I already did because that's something that you get from boarding school also.
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But it's a very, very Bombay thing.
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And you know, there's theatre, there's music, as you said, and in Bombay, of course, you
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have the sea, you can just stand.
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I love doing this and I do it whenever I get a chance.
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Now you just walk on Marine Drive and you look at the tide going out and coming in and
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there's so many people.
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But I wouldn't live in Bombay ever.
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I prefer a much quieter life.
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And the main thing is I like to have a lot of space around me, which you can't when you
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I just feel I love space.
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I mean, yeah, I'm not saying that I can't do without it, obviously, but I enjoy it so
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much and that it really means a lot to me to have a lot of space around me.
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And I think in Bombay, that's not possible.
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Because for me, that's the only thing that I have against, yeah, even the climate and
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it's a bit grimy and everything gets dirty, things rust, you can't leave your biscuits
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out for more than 10 minutes before this gets soggy.
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So I like living in Pune.
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No, what you said about, you know, how the milk arrives at your doorstep every day at
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the same time reminds me of this famous hypothetical question asked by the great French essayist
#
The show, by the way, is named after an essay Bastia wrote in the mid 19th century called
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That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen.
#
And so the question asked by Bastia was who feeds Paris?
#
And the answer was that you don't need a central planner to feed Paris, that people have wants,
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other people want to fulfill their wants in this win-win game that, you know, all commerce
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is and therefore everything just runs like clockwork without there being a planner.
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This is what economists would also call spontaneous order.
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And that's sort of one of the glorious things about cities.
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Let's sort of get back to your life.
#
You mentioned that in this other school that you went to, you had good teachers.
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Do any memorable teachers come to mind?
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Well, we had a maths teacher, she was also my house mistress.
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And she was Mrs. Balakrishnan.
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So she was, you know, she loved to cook.
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And her son, I think, she was a widow.
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She was widowed very young and, you know, she joined the boarding school, partly to
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be independent and to ensure that her son had the best education and he was already,
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I think, in college by then.
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So she would cook for us every now and then.
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She would feel like cooking.
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And then she would say, yeah, okay, whoever's hungry, come and eat.
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She would do things like that.
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And boarding school, you know, makes you hungry, hungry all the time.
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You finish your meal and then you're looking for food.
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So that was something special about her.
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And the other thing is that she was our maths teacher for a couple of years.
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And I was, I think, quite alert in my maths.
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So I did quite well in her class.
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I remember Headmaster, who I used to write when we were in school.
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I used to write for the school magazine.
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And then I remember, you know, that encouragement actually made me think that I was a writer.
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I mean, when we had visitors, when he had visitors, he would call me across and say,
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introduce me as a writer.
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So that really made me feel that I am a writer even when I was a child.
#
So at this point in time, when you were in school, what was sort of your self-image of
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yourself in terms of what you wanted to do later on?
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Like you did maths later on, of course, and the teacher you mentioned who you liked was
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So I'm wondering if the two were kind of related.
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It might have been, you know, but she was also somebody who did a lot of maths enrichment
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We would have, you know, maths practicals where we should do stuff with paper and string
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So I later realised as a maths teacher myself that it's very linked to your emotions.
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Learning maths is very linked to your emotions.
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And, you know, if you have a teacher who has no patience with you, you are never going
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Maths needs to be taught in an environment of friendliness, cordiality and affection
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The other thing about maths is it's cumulative.
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You know, it's not like you're studying geography or history where you can do different topics
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You can't do that with maths.
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You can never get to trigonometry if you haven't got your decimals and fractions right.
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So if you lose one step, it's finished.
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You're just never going to get further.
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So that's one thing I realised as a maths teacher.
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My first job actually was a lecturer in mathematics at Ruprel College in Bombay.
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And I had this experience when I came to Bombay to college.
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So I finished, I was the final year of the 11th standard.
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We finished CBSE 11th and after that it became 10 plus 2.
#
So when I came to Bombay, I had to, I couldn't join the 12th standard because, you know,
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there you're still in the previous level where you have to study the language and that was
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So they had a provision for CBSE students to join the degree straight away.
#
Because what I remember is coming into class for the first time and even for the first
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few weeks, everybody was so depressed.
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Everybody was so uninterested in what was being taught.
#
And it was like really difficult and it was only much later that I realised that everybody
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was there doing the first year BSc, they had wanted to get into a professional course.
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And I was at Jai Hind College, which was very difficult to get into.
#
So they were students who had finished their 12th standard Jai Hind College and didn't
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make it to a professional course.
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And that's why they were doing their FYBSC and they just come and slump on their seats
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and not listen and go back.
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So it was not, so I had some of that again when I became a teacher at Rupert College
#
where they were again FYBSC and of course it gets better in SY and TY you get the ones
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I love teaching that TY class.
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I had students who, we were very fond of each other.
#
And for those who don't know FY, SY, TY are first year, second year, third year.
#
I guess you had these two parallel things that you like to write, which is just something
#
But what did you think of a career for yourself or did you think of a path for yourself?
#
So, you know, you asked me this also about my impression of myself and what I thought
#
And in school, I actually didn't have any plans for myself.
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And I suppose, you know, for my mother, she was a housewife and she didn't really do much.
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You know, she was just, she didn't, she wasn't busy all the time.
#
So I probably saw myself as having that kind of life.
#
I mean, I'm saying that now at that time, I don't know what I would have said.
#
I might have said, I want to be a firefighter or a brain surgeon or something, because,
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you know, I didn't really have any plans.
#
And I did write and I knew that I'll always be writing, though, when I went to college,
#
it was so difficult for me to adjust and, you know, a person, a hillbilly person who
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doesn't know much suddenly thrust into Bombay where there's so much going on.
#
It takes time to get used to that.
#
And I actually didn't write for a while.
#
I didn't write for actually quite a long time.
#
I wrote something for my college magazine once, but after that, it was years before
#
I started writing again.
#
And I actually started writing again because I needed a way to earn money.
#
And that's because I, you know, I knew I'm going to be a single parent and I can't do
#
that unless I have an income.
#
And I wasn't sure where I was going to stay and all that.
#
But yeah, that's when I started writing and sending off stuff to be published in the hope
#
that I would have an income.
#
And it's actually quite funny because it's not really a good way to have a steady income
#
And those days were really, I'm sure it's very difficult even now, but it was extremely
#
But I was very, very persistent.
#
And along the way, I think one of the things I'm really lucky about is having an unusual
#
name, so, you know, your byline scene.
#
And I was actually offered a job by the Times, which I wasn't qualified for.
#
I would never have applied for because I didn't think I could do it.
#
And in fact, it happened because I received a telegram one day from the editor's office
#
saying the editor wants to see you.
#
And I was like, oh my God, what did I do?
#
I thought it's like being summoned to the headmaster's office.
#
I was really spooked out.
#
Yeah, this was back then.
#
This would have been what, 1989?
#
And I was staying in a place.
#
I was staying in a little rescue home.
#
A friend of mine gave me her, she convinced her husband to give me their apartment.
#
They had like, they invested in an apartment and they gave it to me for six months until
#
So I received a telegram there and it was really scary.
#
So I phoned the Times office from the public phone outside and they said that the editor's
#
gone to Pune and he'd be back on Monday.
#
I said, I've received this telegram that he wants to see me.
#
He says, okay, come and see him.
#
So I went on Monday and that was Daryl, Daryl Dimonte.
#
And he's such a nice guy.
#
But he saw me and was like, what do you want?
#
And I said, you sent me a telegram.
#
Because he was like that.
#
So when he remembered, he said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, these dancers people, they
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are looking for someone and will you join?
#
It was quite funny because I said, no, I can't.
#
I've got a child who's like three years old and I can't leave her alone.
#
Don't you have anyone you can leave her with?
#
Isn't there anybody you can leave her with?
#
I said, no, there isn't.
#
Doesn't she go to school?
#
I said, yeah, actually she just started going to school.
#
Then come while she's at school, we'll give you flexi time.
#
So and in those days, flexi time was just not known even.
#
I mean, it was a new word everywhere in the world.
#
But I was really lucky because I said yes.
#
And you know, that's how I joined the Times.
#
And once you join the Times, then you're a real person, right?
#
What was the math journey like before that?
#
Like, what made you study math?
#
Were you serious about it or were you good at it?
#
Honestly, I mean, you know, that is the truth.
#
I was good at school maths.
#
And even and then when I was in college, I was not in a good space to be really enjoying
#
Later on, when I was at the university, I again, I had a professor, Professor Chawate,
#
who is still my Facebook friend, who, you know, we did.
#
You know, I had a good professor.
#
I love the subject and that's how it should be.
#
But it wasn't something that, in fact, you know, I had this.
#
After I've completed my, my masters, I was staying in during those two years at the university.
#
I was staying in the Bhavan's College hostel.
#
And that's because at the university, there was no hostel yet.
#
The university campus was new and they didn't have a women's hostel.
#
So this was quite far, it was a bit of commute, but they had a working women's hostel in
#
And so I moved in there and I had a roommate there who Amita, her name was, we became very
#
So then, you know, when you have a really good friend and you're actually living with
#
that person, then your life becomes comfortable.
#
It becomes tolerable and you enjoy, you know, like we used to go out for, I'm sure those
#
places are still there.
#
We'd go and have dinner out, you know, one of those places near the hostel every day
#
because the hostel mess was rubbish.
#
But she was going, she'd come from the UK, her parents had moved to Gujarat.
#
They had come back to the native village and she found it very difficult to adapt, you
#
know, like when they came back, she must have been 17, 18 years old.
#
So she was staying in Bombay and working, but she convinced her dad that she was going
#
back to live with her uncle in the UK.
#
And so after my, my dad was very kind.
#
He agreed that he'd give me money to go and travel with her.
#
We traveled in Europe for three months.
#
So both of us, that was like a big life experience.
#
She of course had lived in other countries before, but for me, I had only lived in India.
#
Traveling abroad was very difficult in those days, not like now where it is quite easy.
#
And my dad was, he was like, see, now you're finishing your education.
#
You will be working and I don't have to support you anymore.
#
So, and this will be the cream on your education.
#
I think he said this will be the icing.
#
So and it was actually because we went off, I went off on my own and we stayed in England
#
with her uncle for a few weeks and then we did the U-rail thing in Europe.
#
So this is what, 1982 and we went, we spent seven weeks traveling in Europe and it was
#
It was just wonderful because we saw so much, we learned so much.
#
We weren't, we were backpacking, but we weren't staying in youth hostels everywhere because
#
you know how we Indians have friends and family everywhere.
#
So and especially at that time, at that time when you didn't have money to, you couldn't
#
afford it, you know, so you had to be staying in a place where you didn't have to pay much.
#
So in my dad was just talking to somebody who asked him, how's your daughter or how
#
are your kids and he said, oh, my daughter is going to Europe and he said, oh, I have
#
So this friend in Paris came and picked us up at the station.
#
In the south of France, we stayed with her sister and the north of France, we stayed
#
with her mother and so on in every other place, like whether it was Germany, Switzerland,
#
in Italy and in Holland, we made our own arrangements.
#
But in Denmark, I stayed with my dentist's neighbor's daughter.
#
We got exposed to traveling alone.
#
We got exposed to different kinds of food.
#
And you just change as a person, right?
#
You realize that I can do things on my own.
#
And then when I came back, I went to collect my degree certificate at the university and
#
Dr. Chawate, who I was telling you about, my graph theory teacher, she asked me what
#
you're going to do now.
#
And I said, I don't know.
#
She said, okay, they have a leave vacancy at Rupert College.
#
And so that's how I got that job.
#
I was there for three years.
#
And then I quit when I was expecting a baby.
#
So that was how the whole maths things happened.
#
But before that, I would always have people coming to me for help or I think I was the
#
tuition teacher of most of my cousins and some neighbors and stuff.
#
And then later on, when I was staying on my own, and, you know, working at the Times,
#
I ran the Saturday group where kids would come and we'd do maths enrichment like what
#
Mrs. Balakrishnan taught us.
#
And she actually, I inherited a bunch of books from her.
#
So I made stuff, you know, worksheets and experiments and things like that, which I
#
did with my kids also later.
#
And you know, I still have these friends of my kids who I'm very, very fond of who remember
#
They were my kids, of course, for them, I don't think it was great fun.
#
But, you know, I have these two friends, my kids' friends, lovely, lovely people who
#
still remember the maths experiments that we did during the summer holidays.
#
But that's all over now.
#
I've become completely, I can't remember where it's left or right brain, but whatever
#
the other side is, where you are just creative and you go with the flow and, you know, you
#
I mean, I can still remember strings of numbers, but I don't bother.
#
And do you think that, and this is really possibly a question about two things which,
#
you know, might be dually connected.
#
So there may not be causation going one way, but both ways.
#
Did studying math the way you did?
#
Change the way you think about stuff, or was it the case that you were the kind of person
#
who thought about stuff in a particular systematic way and therefore math came easily to you?
#
Actually, that's a question that I sometimes ask myself, but I'm not sure.
#
And it is true that I think very systematically.
#
I'm not sure which came first.
#
I think it might be influenced by maths.
#
I do, and I find it easy.
#
Like, it helps me a lot in my writing, you know, putting, separating different ideas.
#
And there is definitely a maths influence.
#
I don't know which came first.
#
And the other question is also about a sort of a two-way connection about teaching and
#
the empathy that it demands.
#
And equally, you would imagine that if someone is naturally empathetic, they'll be better
#
But also teaching can teach you to look at each individual more carefully.
#
Like, I think what we tend to do in our lives is that most people for us are a see your
#
faces or they are instrumental to us for particular purposes.
#
But both teaching and writing, in a sense, force you to look at individuals as individuals.
#
You know, as a teacher, you've got to figure out, okay, why is she having trouble with
#
binomials or whatever the case might be, and you try to kind of figure that out.
#
And as a writer also, you know, if you're writing about somebody, you just look at them
#
completely differently from what you would otherwise, right?
#
So actually, you know, it's so interesting that you say this.
#
I hadn't thought about that.
#
But I'm not sure whether it's empathy.
#
But I know that one of the things that I do now, and I've done it for a really long time,
#
not just these last 10 years when I've been working on Sindhi stories and being an oral
#
historian, but listening to people when they tell me about whatever they want to tell me
#
that I'm writing about.
#
And I think there's something, I don't know what it is that happens.
#
People speak, you know, the way that I'm talking to you, absolutely opening up, people do that.
#
So I don't know what it is that gives some people the gift that when you're listening,
#
the other person just tells them everything.
#
And I don't know whether it's a skill that helped me as a teacher.
#
I know that I had a lot of kids who really liked me a lot.
#
But I don't think there were any kids who didn't like me.
#
I'm not sure whether I was able to do what you're saying.
#
I mean, I wish I should have.
#
I don't remember, you know, looking at each person separately.
#
But when it comes to an interview, yes, absolutely, I mean, I'm not there at all, you know, it's
#
just that person and letting them be who they are.
#
And is that a learned skill?
#
Because when I even listen to the really early episodes of the show, or when I think back
#
on how I just talk to people through my life, and typically, what most of us do, and I notice
#
this more and more in others, now that I've, you know, thought much more about conversation,
#
is that most people aren't really listening, listening, right?
#
It's even Covey once said that we listen to respond, not to understand.
#
So most people, when they listen, they're not completely absenting themselves from the
#
scene and just listening and taking in what is there.
#
They'll be listening with ego in there.
#
Maybe they're just looking for that moment when they can interject with their wisdom
#
and their views and their whatever.
#
So was there a sense of a conscious thinking about the craft, either when as a journalist
#
or when you were, you know, writing with people, or later on when you started doing oral histories?
#
Is there an intentionality to how you do what you do?
#
Actually, you know, I don't think it's a process of learning.
#
But I do think that you improve with practice.
#
And I definitely think that you do improve with practice.
#
And this thing of interjecting, I know I do it, I know I used to do it a lot more than
#
And, you know, one should really wait until, but then sometimes somebody says something
#
and you have to respond.
#
I mean, you don't have to, but you do respond.
#
And then later on, when I'm listening to recording, I say, oh, I missed that, you know.
#
So that still happens to me.
#
But I can remember really early when I was still, I still just joined the Times and what
#
I was doing for the Times at that time is we were launching Ascent.
#
So I was launching Ascent for the Times.
#
So in those days, we had the appointments ads inside the newspapers.
#
It was towards the end of the paper.
#
And somebody got the idea and it was an idea, it was not an original idea.
#
It was being done in the UK, I think, where you had a pullout for the ads.
#
And what I had to do was fill half a page of the first page with articles from industry
#
and get people to write based on their experience.
#
So it was really wonderful because people were talking about things that they really
#
They were talking about something that you'd learned at college.
#
It was their experiences and they were sharing their learnings.
#
So for me, it was a huge, it was a new field.
#
The only thing that I brought to it was listening to people when they spoke.
#
Sometimes they would write and send in stuff.
#
But a lot of times that I was helping them to write it.
#
And I remember this one sitting with somebody who was the HR head at Cadbury's.
#
And we were talking and he was telling me stuff and then he started crying.
#
He hit an emotion and I didn't, I mean, you know, I waited and just kind of, but that's
#
when I realized that when you listen to people, they might react in a way they wouldn't do
#
So it's a privilege, you know, you can't, I mean, you have to really respect that and
#
be kind to them or whatever, or just, you know, not kind sounds like patronizing.
#
That's not the way I meant it.
#
But yeah, so then I think that that incident never left me because I realized it's something
#
that you have to do carefully.
#
And what is it about, and this is something, of course, I've noticed as well that people
#
really open up that you might imagine in our everyday interactions, there is always a
#
There's always a certain degree of reserve that is there.
#
But once you get into that, a certain groove, people really open up in the good places.
#
And I've also, you know, had the privilege of people trusting me enough to open up in
#
And, and, and that's kind of happened a lot.
#
And I wonder about why that is that if it is so easy and often so rewarding to open
#
up and to open yourself up to others opening up, but why we don't do more of that because
#
most of the time we pretty much wear a mask through our everyday lives where we are not
#
saying what we think we are hiding our emotions and so on and so forth.
#
But when you have a particular setting, when I'm having a conversation with someone for
#
the show, when you're doing your oral history or whatever, it just tumbles out, right?
#
Yeah, you're making yourself more vulnerable.
#
Of course, I also, I find it, you know, like my, what I do apart from the Sindhi work,
#
I work with people to help them write their memoirs.
#
And that is the biggest, I mean, you know, I love those projects because they, you know,
#
people talk to you and they do what you're saying.
#
It's not just like two hours or four hours or six hours.
#
It's like days together where they talk about everything that's ever happened to them in
#
their lives and then you interview other people also to get cues on what you can get out of
#
them or you look at that period of history that they went through where lots of stuff
#
So then, you know, again, that brings out more stuff.
#
And I feel that for somebody who's doing that, I mean, all the people that I've worked with,
#
they found that process so fulfilling, you know, because you're going through your, like
#
taking sense of what has happened to you right through your life, very, very therapeutic.
#
And then, you know, you come to these relationship issues that you had and even those, you're
#
able to surmount those many times, not always, of course.
#
So why we don't do it, yeah, that's a good question.
#
I think maybe people don't realize how powerful and how effective it is, how useful it is.
#
I also feel as somebody who has used a professional psychotherapist ever since I started, I became
#
financially independent.
#
I knew that I need to work on my mental health.
#
And I did that ever since I was like 22 or something.
#
And I know from that experience that very often you find people who are really not good,
#
you know, they are really, really not good, they're just not good.
#
Either they exploit you in one way or the other, or they medicate you.
#
I never stopped trying though, you know, I kept doing it.
#
And I still have someone in Pune who I see, I mean, it's been a long time, we had one
#
session during the lockdown, but she, I've been with her for about 10 years or maybe
#
more now and she's so good.
#
But yeah, you don't find people who, and ultimately when you think about it, when you're with
#
a therapist, it's actually you who are doing all the work.
#
You just need somebody who listens the right way, you don't really need anything else.
#
So yeah, I think since you asked why we don't do it, I think that's my answer, that it's
#
You know, carrying on from that thought, could it be the case that like one lament I have
#
about many people and even myself at times is that there's not enough self-reflection.
#
Most people don't reflect enough on themselves.
#
And I think what the act of, say, going into therapy with someone you trust or just talking
#
or having friends with whom you can have these kinds of conversations, what it does is that
#
it forces you to self-reflect even if you're talking about your life to somebody else.
#
Just that act of laying it all out there forces you to look at it in a different way and can
#
help you see things that would otherwise have been unseen to you, right?
#
And in a sense, it's like the act of memory is also an act of reconstructing the self.
#
Like earlier you mentioned that when you look back at your childhood, you can now looking
#
back say that, oh, she just wanted to, you know, just chill, be in the groove, be like
#
But you said that you wouldn't, you can't think now what she would have wanted then.
#
So in a sense, that person is gone.
#
In a sense, what is left in your memory is your reconstruction of that person from your
#
mature vantage point and all of that.
#
But that person is gone.
#
And I'm sure just looking back at that person can make you a better person today, if that
#
I totally agree with you.
#
I mean, this is one of the aims of therapy, right?
#
Is to reconcile yourself with who you were right through all the ups and downs of your
#
I also feel that when I'm working with someone on their memoirs, this is exactly what happens.
#
This is exactly what happens.
#
They go through every phase of their life, connected with who they are now, feel good
#
about each part of, you know, even the things that happened that were bad, how well they
#
faced those times or the mistakes they made.
#
Sometimes, you know, it's so nice when you have somebody who has been ashamed of something
#
all their lives because it was a mistake or because people made fun of them.
#
And they realize, hey, like it wasn't such a big deal, you know, I mean, those kinds
#
And they are just fantastic.
#
They're just like, we all should do that.
#
We all should go through all the disappointments of our lives and put them in context and,
#
you know, and then you see them more like jewels in your existence rather than something
#
to hide or be ashamed of.
#
So let's double click a little bit on this ghost writing stuff.
#
You've ghostwritten a bunch of books.
#
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.
#
When I started the first book I did for someone, this was way back in 2005, a friend of mine
#
in Pune, she said, I want to meet you, there's something I want to talk to you about.
#
And I went to see her and she said, you know, my father-in-law is turning 80 and we want
#
And I said, yeah, I mean, you pay me and I'll do it.
#
Because at that time, having an income was extremely important to me.
#
You know, this is the thing, this is actually my story, most of my creativity and all these
#
projects have emerged from economic need, you know, I started writing that way when
#
I was, how old was I, 20, 29 or something like that.
#
So yeah, so I, now we work together and she's like a wise woman.
#
So she would record his stories and come and we'd sit together and we'd listen to him and
#
we'd talk about what he was saying and she would have stuff to add because she knew him
#
She'd been married into the family and living in the same home since she was like 18 years
#
So then we wrote the book.
#
I wrote it, of course, the words were mine, but you know, the material was coming from
#
her and from his interviews.
#
And there was this thing where the book is written by so-and-so person and it's in his
#
And I'm proud of that, it's in his voice.
#
And I did that because that's my skill.
#
I can speak, I can listen to somebody and I can speak in his voice and that's something
#
that I could do even when I was a kid, you know, so that's my core skill.
#
So here, you know, it was a wonderful thing that happened by coincidence, I was able to
#
monetize my core skill.
#
But then there comes that little bit of, you know, you've been a ghostwriter and that's
#
something which is not a good thing.
#
I remember this, I was, so this is the way people look at it, right?
#
I don't look at it like that.
#
So I would say I'm a ghostwriter and with a straight face without really, it's, you
#
know, people's reactions are like, they sneer.
#
Even if it's somebody who can't write two sentences themselves, they would still sneer
#
because you're a ghostwriter.
#
I remember this when my first synth book was picked up by Oxford University Press and they
#
wanted a few lines about myself.
#
I said, I mean, I don't remember exactly what I sent them, but the word ghostwriter was
#
there and they found that really so objectionable, they didn't want to use that word at all.
#
And that's when I realized that, you know, it's like saying I'm a bootlegger with pride,
#
So I actually, what I do is I work with people to help them write their memoirs, you know,
#
So I mean, you want to call it ghostwriting, that's okay with me, but I know that what
#
I'm doing is something which requires a high degree of skill, it requires a lot of patience,
#
it requires being able to understand not just what happened in that person's life, but also
#
use that person's words to relate so that when somebody is reading that book, they're
#
with that guy or with that person, him or her, and they only know at the end of the
#
book or when, you know, whatever, that it was actually written by someone else.
#
But back then when I was still feeling a little defensive, maybe I am still a little defensive
#
about it because, you know, I've given you such a long explanation.
#
But what I wanted to say is that you look at the autobiography of a Malcolm X, for example.
#
Now who wrote the autobiography of Malcolm X?
#
There you are, you know that.
#
So it was Alex Haley who wrote it.
#
Now would you call Alex Haley a ghostwriter?
#
Yeah, I suppose you would.
#
I mean, you know, I like to compare myself with Alex Haley.
#
Yeah, and the great sportswriter Rohit Brijnath wrote Abhinav Bindra's book, for example.
#
Ghost writing is an honorable tradition.
#
I've done a little bit of it back in the day when I, you know, used to work for Visnisha
#
Cricket before we bought Cricket 4, even after I was in Cricket 4 where there were ex-cricketers
#
who wrote columns for us and it was my job to, you know, speak to them every after every
#
day's play and get their views down and try to kind of recreate it.
#
And what I imagine you are doing in that sense is, again, it's that act of listening, opening
#
yourself up, keeping yourself out of the story, just taking in everything they tell you and
#
also looking at another person at that kind of depth, with the kind of depth with which
#
you'd perhaps only know your own family members, if that.
#
No, family members may not open themselves up to you that much.
#
I mean, if it's your partner, yeah, maybe you know that person really well.
#
But I don't think I would open myself up that much to my parents.
#
And I mean, I'd be grateful if my children open themselves, whenever they do open themselves
#
But I don't expect them to do that to that extent unless they really want to.
#
I mean, you know, then that's a gift, but yeah.
#
So yeah, it's a different kind of equation when somebody's, and it's often becomes a
#
lifelong relationship, but sometimes it just ends right there, you know, because they don't
#
That's fine, which is also okay.
#
But I have had some people who would remember you and they, you know, they stay in touch
#
because you delve their depths and connected with them and showed them stuff.
#
You used words which they value so much because they really represent them the way that they
#
want to be represented, the way they see themselves.
#
So that does become a solid relationship.
#
It has been for some of my people I've worked with.
#
I'm interested in that is that they value the words that you use, because I guess they
#
may not have been able to put it that way without naming a person.
#
Can you give an example?
#
No, I'll give you a person of an extraordinary, I'll give you an example with the name of
#
somebody who was a brilliant intellectual, and that was Dr. N. P. Tolani.
#
He went, he came from a family of zamindars, so they had huge land holding in the north
#
of Sindh, and he went to study at Cornell.
#
He was studying agricultural engineering, so that, you know, that would be good for
#
And when he came back, it was 1947 and partition took place.
#
So he landed in Bombay and he stayed on in Bombay and his parents were still in Larkana.
#
And he went to visit and everything was different because people had left.
#
His father did not want to leave, but in the end he was forced to leave because he was
#
put in prison under the pretext of being an Indian spy.
#
And he was in jail and his eldest son was the sessions judge in Sakkar, where he was
#
in jail, but nobody could do anything.
#
The only thing is that the prison guards knew that when the judge visits, he touches this
#
prisoner's feet, so we have to look after him well.
#
Eventually, after several months by which he, you know, this rich middle-aged man in
#
prison, he was a skeleton, he was allowed to leave if he left Pakistan and never returned
#
So it was obviously because of his land he was asked to leave.
#
Now Nandilal, he had come back with this degree.
#
He didn't have any lands to go to.
#
He started building earthen dams for the government of India in Maharashtra and Gujarat, living
#
And he did that and he did it for several years.
#
And then he, so he was this amazing guy, I mean, he's the most amazing person I ever
#
met in my life, ever had the good fortune to work with.
#
His father was doing building, so you know, a lot of Sindhis, they had nothing, right?
#
And there was a housing crisis.
#
So the housing board came up, new housing, Bombay housing board.
#
And there was a chairman who, he left his high paying corporate job in Ahmedabad and
#
came and joined as honorary chairman.
#
And I don't know the facts because I haven't looked at the papers, but I would assume that
#
he had something to do with setting up loans and stuff.
#
So his father, Nandilal's father, Pribhdas Tolani, he started building buildings in Bombay.
#
And he, Nandilal got into this as well and he didn't enjoy it at all because of the
#
So he left to go to Cornell to do his PhD.
#
And he completed his PhD in a year and a half and he would have probably, I forget, I think
#
it was 14 months, a record at Cornell, which was his alma mater.
#
He studied at Cornell for his master's as well.
#
So his father wanted him back, so he came back.
#
He would have liked to live a life of academia, but he came back, his father wanted him back
#
and he started a shipping company.
#
So where I'm coming to is that, now here's a person, he used to sail himself.
#
He was a bridge player.
#
So he was somebody who lived life to the full.
#
He was using his mind, he was using his body, he was making a lot of money and he was doing
#
He started the Toilani College of Commerce, which is in Andheri East and later on he also
#
started Toilani Maritime Institution, which is in Talegam, it's one of the best recognized
#
maritime institutions in the world.
#
When his daughter asked me to work with him on his memoirs, he was blind.
#
So I had to listen to him and I wrote down stuff.
#
He just loved what I wrote so much.
#
And that is something that means so much to me because he would, and especially we did
#
because Sujata also, that's his daughter, she also worked very closely with me, deciding
#
the structure of the book and various things, giving me the photographs.
#
And one thing I noticed that he would talk about is that people call me lucky and I didn't
#
like that because it wasn't luck.
#
I was working, I was using my brains, I was doing this and then you're calling me lucky.
#
It sounds like insulting.
#
So at the end of the book, I wrote this thing for him, which he had told me in different
#
ways and at different times about, I forget what the chapter is called, but it starts
#
off by saying, yes, I've been really lucky, I was so lucky to be born into this family
#
and all the things that happened to him and explaining that it's not just luck.
#
And that he used to keep making her read to him because it kind of reflected what he'd
#
said and what he wanted to be remembered for.
#
So that's what, and he's not somebody who couldn't find the words himself.
#
He was like an intellectual himself and very articulate, but yeah, that was me ghost writing,
#
one of my hero moments in ghost writing.
#
And do you feel this process changed you as well, like was it also rewarding for you?
#
So yeah, it has been very rewarding for me in many ways because most of the people I've
#
worked with, they have been wealthy enough to pay my fee and they have been captains
#
of industry, which means that they started most of them with nothing and they built up
#
And through them, I became intimately acquainted with the industrial history of India.
#
So that's something that really helped me, gave me a grounding in that field.
#
How else did it help me as a person?
#
I think so one of the things that really has helped me is working with so many Sindhi people
#
who lost everything and then started again.
#
So that has helped me as a person to know that no problem is insurmountable, that bad
#
things happen and you just have to keep going and new things will happen and then you'll
#
have to deal with them, whatever they are.
#
So I think that's one of the biggest changes.
#
So many people, everybody who I've interviewed, they lost everything.
#
And then they kept going.
#
So that whole thing, and I think I already had that in me because I had already by the
#
time I came to this point where I was interviewing them, I'd already been through quite a lot
#
of rough times in life.
#
And I was already that kind of person who would say, okay, fine, what do I do next?
#
But I think this really supported me and even the small things, like for example, the buy
#
Because obviously I rely on my house help, I completely rely on them.
#
I can't be productive unless I have somebody else doing most of my domestic work for me.
#
So it sounds like really, what's the word?
#
I don't want to say it sounds like I'm too privileged or something, but maybe it's about
#
understanding my priorities and knowing that if I didn't have somebody doing all this,
#
somebody really smart who I can rely on and who does things my way, I can't do what I
#
So even when the buy leaves, yeah, okay, fine, I have to look for someone else.
#
Let's see who turns up.
#
Let's see how well I can train them.
#
So it's just a more of, okay, let's get on with it rather than, oh no.
#
I mean, this is David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage.
#
You are good at writing.
#
You might also be good at doing housework, but it's a better use of your time if you...
#
I'm very good at doing.
#
I mean, I'm not good at cleaning, but I'm really good at, I mean, I can cook so fast.
#
I can really cook up a meal and because I had a big family and, you know, a lot of times
#
Does your mathematical brain also, is it part of the way that you cook?
#
I am so rigid, you know, when I have to do 10 things, I know which one to do first to
#
save time and effort and I'll have a sequence and if anyone gets in my way, then it's really
#
I've worked very hard not to be annoyed with people who are less efficient.
#
Final question about ghost writing, how much time does each of these memoirs take you?
#
It doesn't take too long.
#
Probably two, the interviews will be over two or three months and then depending on
#
how many people they want in the book.
#
Now I'd like to interview important people other than the person themselves because they'll
#
tell me things I can ask them, ask the subject and which they may not remember.
#
So the people close to them and their family and their work, their friends.
#
So it depends on how many I have access to.
#
I think less than a year to get the whole thing done.
#
Now we did one recently, which I started I think in February and in fact, Veda did the
#
design for that and she did the fab design.
#
We hit for his birthday on the 27th of July and was really cutting it fine.
#
But we did it and really came out well.
#
Veda for the sake of the listeners being of course your daughter.
#
She is not, I mean, she never went to Parsons Design School or anything, which is very talented
#
and yeah, I'm lucky that she gives her time to my projects on and off.
#
And also a trained classical guitarist.
#
Oh yeah, there's that as well.
#
She studied computer science and then she decided not to be a software developer.
#
And then she got a job with Pune Mirror, that Pune Mirror was just starting Pune, so she
#
was part of their startup team.
#
And then she worked in marketing communications for a few, three years in Pune Mirror, three
#
So I'm giving you Veda's CV as well in case you want to give her a job.
#
And then yeah, all the while she was studying classical guitar and became a very big thing
#
for her because she took over the classical guitar festival in Calcutta and ran it very
#
successfully for quite a long time and enjoyed it a lot.
#
And she's a yoga teacher now in case anyone wants to do online yoga with Veda.
#
If there's a link for that, I'll put that in the show notes as well.
#
When I was a kid, I remember reading about a link between music, math and chess.
#
And I was a chess player, of course, at that time.
#
So I don't know if you play chess, but is there a link between music and math, you think?
#
I am not a musician, despite my name, despite, you know, having a musical offspring, but
#
But yeah, in Veda's case, definitely, you know, she also had the maths talent.
#
And I think, and I love chess.
#
I'm not very good because I don't play that much.
#
And most of the time when I play, I don't concentrate.
#
I mean, these are just excuses.
#
I'm actually a lousy player, but I love the game.
#
And I totally agree that there's a connection.
#
I mean, you know, music, I remember reading this for the first time in a Mallory Towers
#
They had this somebody who was really good at both maths and music.
#
I knew I'm not good at music, but yeah, there's probably a connection.
#
So let's sort of go back to your sort of writing career.
#
You were, you know, you taught math for a while.
#
So how did you get drawn towards, you know, going beyond writing as a recreational thing
#
to actually, you know, writing, writing for a living?
#
I started, I knew I had to earn a living, right?
#
So I started writing because that was a thing I could do at home when the child is sleeping.
#
And so I started doing that.
#
And then again, when you're writing from home, it's always going to be, oh, well, this is
#
what my dog and me did, you know?
#
So it's not going to be something about world affairs or anything like that.
#
But it started like that.
#
It started with the Times of India Middles, which was the most exciting thing because,
#
you know, it's something that everybody, in those days, the Times of India was a real
#
The edit page was real.
#
And you could not get into the middle unless the quality of what you'd written was excellent.
#
And they paid 500 rupees, which really meant a lot to me because my budget was 2000 rupees
#
per month, including the rent.
#
And you know, so that was all I had to do was one middle a week and I was through.
#
Of course, it didn't quite work like that.
#
But yeah, I was very focused on earning through writing.
#
And I, you know, when you're focused like that, you get opportunities.
#
I was working for the Times of writing for other newspapers, sometimes using my mother's
#
name or a made up byline or something like that.
#
So I did that for the income.
#
And then after a few years, I think I was with the Times for three years.
#
And that's when I got married and moved to Pune.
#
I tried doing the commute.
#
I would just come in on a Monday and go back on a Tuesday.
#
So I was working in the office to make the pages, basically.
#
The other stuff could be done through occasional meetings, through the telephone and things
#
So it worked for a few months.
#
And then I just realized for various reasons, this is not such a good idea.
#
So I had three kids, they were young.
#
Five, six, seven, something like that.
#
And you know, here I am a maths tuition teacher myself and my kids are not doing that well
#
So I just kind of left and became maths tuition teacher all over again.
#
But I was still writing and I was so lucky to get a column with the Sunday midday.
#
That was like, you know, now I can die happy moment for me.
#
And I had a column with Sunday midday for a really long time after that.
#
And again, it was something that I could do without leaving the house.
#
The first column I had was, it was called in a manner of speaking.
#
And that was about language.
#
It was about words, the way words are used and, you know, looking at different situations.
#
It was so useful for me to have been able to think like that for a few years, because
#
now in the work which I'm doing, which is in the space of partition, words are so important.
#
You know, when you hear people saying, I came to India, and everybody says that.
#
And actually, they were already in India.
#
People say I came to India, actually, you were in India, you came to the new India,
#
you came to the truncated India.
#
It's like you, you did, of course, come to a new place.
#
But it's like you were an outsider, you know, it's that feeling of being an outsider.
#
And you weren't really Indian and came to India, you know, things like that, and many
#
So back in the day, when you would do your columns, you know, that's pre internet, that's
#
It wasn't, actually, this was in the early in 93, I think.
#
No, wait, it was 94 December, when I started with the Sunday Midday.
#
And so, yeah, we I used to send in my stuff by email, email in my stuff.
#
But it sort of in terms of getting your ideas, research, there was no Wikipedia back then.
#
I used to read books, I used to buy books, and, you know, I stalked people read the newspapers
#
Yeah, you know, when you're writing about language and contemporary language, partly,
#
it's what you see and hear around you, you know, if you're and I was working in a software
#
So you know, people use language differently there.
#
So I can write a column on that.
#
Yeah, then I mean, you know, if you're an MBA, you use certain words.
#
So yeah, I mean, you know, different communities use words differently.
#
And would you have noticed this stuff anyway, as a natural course of things, or does the
#
fact that you're writing this column suddenly open your ears to this new layer?
#
I think I would have noticed anyway, but I wouldn't have made such a big thing out of
#
it because, you know, I'm sure like even you would write if you were, you know, when even
#
though you're not writing a column on language, you are noticing it when people speak like
#
I mean, for a lot of us for whom language is so important, and who can change their
#
way of speaking when they're talking to different people, we always notice right, even if you're
#
not conscious of it, like, I have a feeling you do this to whoever you're speaking to
#
you speak to them using the words that they speak when they use when they speak to you.
#
So in a way, you have noticed, even if you're not writing about it.
#
Yeah, but it's subconscious.
#
One doesn't think about it.
#
So you know, if someone is speaking to me in Hindi, I'll also speak to them in Hindi
#
and it will kind of be like that.
#
And sometimes you also notice the different ways in which people treat language, like
#
I did a recent episode with the Dalit scholar Chandrabhan Prasad, who makes it a point in
#
all his interviews to speak only in English.
#
And you know, so before we recorded, we were just chatting away in Hindi and, you know,
#
But the moment we started English, and of course, I knew why and I kind of respected
#
And the reason for that, and this is something he's written about as well, is that a caste
#
is so ingrained in language, the kind of words that we use, not just the casual cast slurs
#
that come up in everyday English language, like arre, ye to bhangi hai, or chori chamari
#
karta hai, and all of that, not just in those ways where people use caste terms casually.
#
But even in like the point he keeps making is that, you know, he hates Hindi because
#
in Hindi, you know, somebody will say pranaam.
#
And that is an act of, you know, bowing your head down, whereas in English it is good morning,
#
good morning, there's that equality.
#
And listening to Chandrabhanji, you know, explain all this sort of made me think differently
#
about this stuff as well, because we don't often look closely enough at language.
#
I've done an episode with Shreena Bhattacharya called The Loneliness of the Indian Woman.
#
She's written a great book about just that.
#
And her point, one point she made was that when women talk about getting married, they
#
say meri shaadi ho rahi hai.
#
You know, they don't say mai shaadi kar rahi hoon, so it is that passive thing, something
#
is happening to me, marriage is happening, meri shaadi ho rahi hai.
#
Oh, that's really interesting.
#
And this is stuff that it was your bread and butter to notice, so...
#
But yeah, as you said, it came to me naturally, because I would notice anyway, and I still
#
And yeah, I think I'm quite conscious of using words in a certain way so that people get
#
a certain impression of who I am.
#
And what are the other sort of other kind of columns you wrote?
#
Earlier you mentioned...
#
I had a lot of columns.
#
So for Pune Papers, I had, presumptuous enough, actually, features editor was Vinita Deshmukh
#
And she asked me, she had dinner at my place one day, and she got me to do a kukri column
#
And then that turned into a column about child rearing.
#
And when I think about it now, that was so awfully presumptuous of me, because honestly,
#
what do I know about child rearing, you know, I mean, what does anyone ever know about child
#
But you had reared children.
#
I was in the process of rearing them.
#
And I was enjoying it a lot.
#
I mean, I really had a good time.
#
I think I probably enjoyed it a lot more than they did.
#
But yeah, so I did that.
#
Then I had a column with the Maharashtra Herald, also for about three years, where I could
#
write anything I wanted.
#
I could just write about like I was saying, you know, last week, me and my dog did this
#
Although I'm saying dog, I'm not a dog person.
#
We had dogs when we were children, but I'm just not a dog person, unfortunately.
#
I had a really good time.
#
Now when I look at those, I'm very vain, Amit.
#
I can't tell you how vain I am.
#
And they help me, you know, when I read something I've written in the past, like if I'm stuck
#
and you know, if I do assignments, right, somebody asks me, will you write this?
#
So then the words don't come.
#
Then I go back to something I've written in the past, which I admired after it appeared.
#
And then I read it again, and then the words flow.
#
You know, so my Maharashtra Herald columns, which obviously hardly anyone ever read, I
#
read them a lot because they were really good.
#
And then I did, I did for Sunday, midday, but I was their books guy for a long time.
#
And that was like a real plum of an assignment because that was when the Jaipur Festival
#
So you know, we'd get flown down and put up and we'd have access to all the authors and
#
you could interview whoever you wanted and you attended all the events.
#
Oh, that was really, really special.
#
One of the things I did for Sunday, midday, again, something I'm so, so proud of is I,
#
for several weeks, I don't know how they let me do that.
#
They would give me like a whole page, sometimes even two pages, where I was parodying another
#
So I did obviously P.G. Woodhouse when Bertie Wooster came to Bombay, what was his name?
#
His name was Bhatti Baba.
#
He had a male servant called Jeevan.
#
And yeah, that, I mean, it was only about like how much Philza paid, 1500, 2000 words,
#
but it was a full, lovely P.G. Woodhouse story.
#
And then I did Who is Bill Bryson and I did obviously Bridget Jones and yeah, I did like
#
about 10 or 12 of those, which I am very, very pleased with myself for having done.
#
You also did a column you mentioned earlier about, you know, where you wrote about what
#
happened a hundred years back today.
#
So that was not something I wrote.
#
The Times of India has archives and that was one of the extra money assignments I did back
#
in my first, those three years I did in the Times when I was freelancing.
#
And Darrell knew that, you know, I'm looking for a raise all the time.
#
And he said, do you want to do this?
#
So every day we used to have, my brief was find something in the past that resonates
#
So I would just go in and read the old newspapers and pull out something from there.
#
And it was amazing about how, as I was telling you, you know, people were complaining about
#
traffic in Bombay in the 19th century.
#
And of course, at that time it was more probably about, I mean, more about the horse carts
#
and the poo on the streets or whatever, but you know, floods and pollution, all the things
#
that we talk about were happening a hundred years ago.
#
And even advertisements were very, very interesting to see.
#
The only problem was that Times, I don't know now, now I think they're all online, but they
#
had everything on microfilm.
#
And microfilm, I am not good with motion.
#
So you know, like I used to get seasick after a while and that was, yeah, I did that for
#
Yeah, that sounds quite fascinating and something that I have sort of thought about doing as
#
At one point I thought I'll sort of have a podcast where every day I talk about something
#
that happened that day in the past, but not in a this day, that year kind of boring banal
#
way, but kind of dig a little deeper.
#
And you know, maybe someday.
#
I'm struck by what you said about how you enjoy reading old pieces by yourself.
#
And in my case, it's really just the opposite.
#
And in fact, most writers I know will often lament how whenever we read something from
#
our past, we cringe so much.
#
I'm not saying I don't have pieces that I cringe at.
#
Especially my first Sunday midday column, when I read those, like parts of them, parts
#
of it will be good, but parts of it will be cringe, cringe, cringe.
#
And then I think I developed like some kind of sophistication fairly soon after that because
#
I don't cringe at a lot of stuff.
#
And those parody ones, I don't know whether I'm just, you know, wearing my rose tinted
#
glasses or what, but I think they're pretty okay.
#
And how did your writing style, when you look back on it, how did it evolve and what was
#
your thinking at the time as it evolved about sort of the craft of it?
#
Because a lot of your writing would be in service of something or the other.
#
You're telling someone's story or whatever is not meant to be noticed, but some of it,
#
it would be okay to be self-indulgent, like in the columns and all of that.
#
So what was your thinking about the craft through all of this time?
#
It's nice to be asked that.
#
I think when I started, I was like kind of parading the glory of the words, but I don't
#
think that's true anymore.
#
I like to get the message across very simply.
#
You know, that's my focus.
#
I have a message and I want to convey it.
#
I want to use words that will be very simple so that anyone can read them and understand
#
But I also want to use words which have a certain weight, which anyone will read and
#
And that's, I think, the focus.
#
I mean, I don't want to use too many words.
#
If I use a word just for fun, sometimes, I mean, sometimes, you know, something special
#
I may or may not allow myself to keep it because it may be just taking away from the message
#
or it may be just frivolous, but yeah, it's okay.
#
Sometimes I allow myself to do that because that's who I am, so it's okay.
#
So you know, before we go into a break, I just want to also ask you to double-click
#
on something that you mentioned a couple of minutes back about how much you enjoy child
#
rearing, whether or not your kids might have.
#
So that's not something I actually hear so much from mothers, you know, a lot of the
#
traditional literature about it is how it's so much worse than we expected and it's just
#
Yeah, I also hear that.
#
And I feel, you know, I also used, I remember other mothers saying, oh no, the summer holidays
#
are coming, I don't know what I'm going to do.
#
So I guess I'm just this end to cutlet kind of person.
#
So whatever I get to do, I just like to enjoy doing it.
#
And I did that with my kids and I really had a good time.
#
So we used to, I used to do things like we'd watch movies together.
#
We'd watch all the, you know, in those days, what was it like My Fair Lady and The King
#
and I and you know, Disney movies of those days, Snow White and all that.
#
It was like a compulsory Saturday after lunch because during the week, it was school.
#
And there wasn't, while they were at school, I could write.
#
In the evenings, there would be homework.
#
And of course, we live in a really nice place where they can go out and play and you know,
#
there were other kids and stuff.
#
And I enjoyed doing things with them, making things along with them.
#
They were so good at art.
#
I mean, my son is just amazing.
#
When he was a child, I mean, it's an inherited skill because his dad was also an artist before
#
he was hit on the head by his art teacher, which is a separate story.
#
His grandfather is an artist.
#
He worked in the Delhi Cloth Mills as a designer.
#
So he has that gene and all of them, I mean, we would do art stuff together, which is how
#
I had the guts to realize that anyone can do it.
#
And I started doing it myself, but much later when they had stopped doing it.
#
And then, you know, it was just a lot of fun.
#
I never, ever felt, so I was putting aside who I am actually at that time.
#
I know recently I sat down and thought about who would I have been if I didn't have children.
#
I realized I would have been probably the same kind of person that I am now, but I would
#
have been probably far more ahead in my career in many ways.
#
I would have had a different career.
#
I would definitely not have been doing the Sindhi documentation.
#
I would have been an interpreter of Russian and that would have been my life.
#
I don't know where I'd have been living and who my family would have been.
#
But yeah, I did study Russian briefly and I did a few assignments and it was extremely
#
My language skill is not that good, but because I'm able to communicate and of course the
#
language skill would have improved.
#
But that communication, obviously, I mean, I used to hear from others that that client
#
of yours is still asking for you 10 years later.
#
So you know, that's obviously very flattering.
#
I can't speak any Russian.
#
I can say Dobryutra and Tasvidanya, but that's about it.
#
How do you say the seen and the unseen in Russian?
#
So that's actually a fascinating question I wish I'd asked you, but you asked yourself
#
that, you know, how would that counterfactual about had you not been a mother, what would
#
So again, I think I needed to have a family basically because I was emotionally, you know,
#
when I was very, very young, I realized how important a family is, you know, because I
#
was in boarding school, which was actually not a happy place for an institution.
#
And that's why I invested so much in my, in my family.
#
And I also feel, you know, sometimes when people talk about what was your, what's your
#
biggest achievement been, I'm going to ask myself that question again, if you don't mind,
#
which is it's again, like I'm really showing off.
#
My biggest achievements were a that when the school bus came in, I was always there.
#
And I was always cheerful and always had something happy to say and do and whatever.
#
And you know, cheer up somebody who's not that happy or listen to whatever had happened
#
during the day and all that.
#
And the second one is that I was there with my parents with both of them the last years
#
And I was there with both of them when they died.
#
I mean, I was there at the moment of death received the final blessing.
#
I mean, there's nothing in this world that can compare with that.
#
So I think I'm the luckiest person to have had that.
#
I mean, it's something that everybody doesn't get.
#
And I think I'm extremely, extremely fortunate.
#
That's been the best thing that ever happened to me.
#
And when you mentioned, you know, always smiling when you're dropping your kids off at the
#
school bus and all of that.
#
And it strikes me that through much of our lives, when other people are involved, there's
#
the effort of maintaining a persona that this is how you must appear to your kids because
#
they'll feel this way extra layer.
#
This is how, you know, you must appear to your husband, perhaps, or, you know, every
#
relationship that we have can often involve the construction of a persona and you're maintaining
#
it and there's a lot of effort there.
#
Plus, on a separate track, you know, we will often go through lives with the anxiety of
#
how do we fit into this world or how do we belong or what do other people think of us
#
So through your life, what was the process of kind of becoming comfortable in your own
#
Because, you know, sitting across you right now, it just feels that you are comfortable
#
You're like chill, right?
#
So how did you get here?
#
So before I answer that, I want to tell you, I'm not, I was not always smiling with my
#
There were a lot of times when I was yelling and tearing my hair.
#
You're just saying this because you know they might listen.
#
Well, I doubt any of them would really bother if you want to know the truth.
#
So the truth is, I don't know how they saw me, but I do remember once when we did some
#
kind of a process thing where you have to define yourself as either blue or orange or
#
green or something, and each of those colors means something else.
#
And in my mind, I'm a blue and I remember two of my kids saw me as an orange, which
#
meant very methodical, very particular, you know, which I actually don't think I am, you
#
But then obviously I was that for them because I was getting them to do things in a certain
#
way and, you know, bringing, coming from boarding school discipline, obviously that must have
#
been part of my, I don't know, actually, I need to sit down, talk to them and find out
#
You know, now we are at a stage when we can talk to each other without too much of emotional
#
We can ask, I mean, I can ask them and they'll tell me, I think.
#
Blue is like somebody who's, you know, like who's surrounded by lovely things and who's
#
So getting into my skin, I think it is something that keeps improving, you know, I don't know
#
when it started, but I know that I even between last week and this week, I'm more comfortable
#
So I don't, I know, like there are, there were times when I was comfortable in my skin,
#
but there was still a lot of difference between the way I would talk to somebody who I was
#
trying to impress and I would talk to somebody who I just want to get some work done from.
#
Now it's not like that, I talk to everybody exactly the same way because I don't care.
#
No, that that's refreshing because I think many people don't, I mean, I think the first
#
step to becoming comfortable in your own skin is just self-awareness where you're sort of,
#
you know, you're not just doing things, you're kind of aware of why you're doing them and
#
And not many people have even that and it feels to me that it's a really difficult process
#
because you know, you can be pretending to yourself even when you think you're not.
#
So you're so right, Amit, because I think we are pretending to ourselves all the time
#
and if we don't acknowledge that we're never going to move forward.
#
And as for being comfortable in your skin, I think the reason why I was, I did feel that
#
therapy and various other things were important is to get to that point.
#
And I know that the day I say, yes, I'm there, that's the day that I'll have to start all
#
over again, because you have to know it's not it's like saying, my house is clean.
#
Yeah, your house is clean because you cleaned it yesterday, you know, it's not something
#
that because the world keeps giving you things and when you're like, if you're in my position
#
where people read your byline and then you meet someone say, oh, are you that one?
#
You know, you can you you just become a bit more vain and more arrogant and you know,
#
you don't want to do that.
#
So you have to be on guard all the time.
#
And I think for me, the biggest help has been Vipashna.
#
Tell me a bit more about that.
#
I mean, in what ways has it helped you?
#
See, I'll tell you the whole story, how it started and everything I learned, I heard
#
about it through actually one of my most early therapists, which would have been in the eighties
#
only mid eighties, and when I heard about it, I knew this is my thing, but I couldn't
#
do it until I kept it was always on my mind.
#
Whenever anyone spoke about it, I would listen.
#
And then when you have three kids and all, come on, you can't push off for 11 days.
#
So I was waiting when my son was the youngest when he was in the 12th and he entered the
#
I looked at the Vipashna.
#
They're very organized.
#
It actually came out of Burma, it started in India, and now it's all over the world.
#
And they publish their schedules online.
#
I think it's vipashna.org.
#
So when my son entered the 12th, I looked at the calendar and I could see all the dates
#
when they had the courses.
#
And I wanted to do it at Igaatpuri, which is the biggest center.
#
And then, you know, you don't want to do it when there's somebody's birthday or an anniversary
#
or some Diwali, this, that.
#
So I picked the dates in August that year.
#
And when they opened the booking, I booked on the first date and I made it.
#
I got, went and did it.
#
And it did have an impact on me, but now, and that was 18 years ago.
#
So I know that when I did it at that time, I was resisting so much.
#
I was just resisting, resisting.
#
I had this thing in my mind, which a lot of us have, which is that I'm so smart.
#
You have nothing to teach me, you know.
#
And that's the biggest trap anybody who is smart has, you know, until you realize that
#
you're not actually all that smart, please, you know, you've got everything to learn.
#
So I didn't, I got a lot out of it because that was the year I started painting and I
#
had my first show that year.
#
So the first thing I'll tell you about the impact of Vipashna is it helps you to unleash
#
Second thing I realized when I did it recently, and it happened to me the last couple of
#
times I've done it, is that so you're supposed to be meditating and it's a guided meditation
#
and it's really very gentle and beautiful and it's really so, so simple and it's so,
#
it's just about acknowledging reality, nothing else.
#
It's just about acknowledging reality.
#
That is what that meditation is.
#
You look at yourself, you look at your body, what are the sensations you have on your body?
#
Don't do anything else.
#
What I realized is that, so when you're doing that, obviously your mind wanders and your
#
mind is here and there and a lot of times I would be cooking food and arguing with somebody.
#
This time when I did it, it was all about creative ideas and the creative ideas are
#
the most distracting because when you're having an argument with somebody and you realize,
#
hey, I'm in this course, I should be meditating, you bring yourself back.
#
But when you have a creative idea, you're so grateful to your brain for giving you that
#
idea that you don't want to cut it short, you know.
#
So that is one of the things that happened.
#
But apart from that, I think it made me more, a little bit calmer, less, and that's what
#
one of my children said to me that now, you know, after I did the first time she said,
#
like, you seem to be calmer.
#
So I don't think I was a very, very tempestuous person ever, but yeah, probably that was true
#
because she's very perceptive.
#
I also feel that this business about being comfortable in your skin, it helps you a lot
#
with that because it's about acknowledging reality.
#
So yeah, okay, this is what I am, this is who I am, and it's fine, whatever.
#
I did Vipashana once in Nighatpuri, perhaps 18 years ago, who knows, who knows, it might
#
even have been the same one and it was torture, it was torture, it was torture.
#
But I mean, I completely value, I completely get the value of mindfulness and, you know,
#
at some point, we'll hopefully get back to mindfulness, meditation.
#
Tell me a little bit about the art that you do because one of the things that you did
#
very kindly when you came here is you got some of your work and you said, please keep
#
this and that will, you know, leave the space open for me to create more of these and so
#
thank you for those gifts.
#
But that gets me to wondering that is then for you, the point of doing the art that you
#
do all about the process?
#
It is not about a thing I've created because you're perfectly happy even to give them
#
away or, you know, not see much of it again.
#
So is it all about the process of what it does to you to create that?
#
Is that because for a lot of people, the point would be the art itself?
#
No, for me, the point is the art itself because I get ideas.
#
And then I want to see them implemented and I want to hang them on the wall.
#
But I am just too prolific.
#
I have to give away my stuff.
#
That's a lovely answer.
#
Let's go in for a quick commercial break and you can take me on a guided tour of Sindh
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com Thank you.
#
Welcome back to the Seenandee Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Saaz Agarwal and before the break we spoke all about your life and
#
where you got to the point where you rediscovered Sindh in a way.
#
So tell me, through all these growing up years and all of that, did you feel Sindhi?
#
No, I didn't feel Sindhi.
#
I didn't feel connected to being Sindhi.
#
I knew very well that my mother was Sindhi because she would always say she was so proud
#
But there was nothing really Sindhi about our home.
#
We lived far away from any Sindhi family or any family, even my dad's side, no, we didn't
#
We had a very cosmopolitan kind of upbringing and also being Sindhi was not very glamorous.
#
I mean, it's not something that you wanted to be in those days at least.
#
Yeah, and funnily enough, my grandparents and they were very different from the stereotypes
#
But so, you know, I mean, we were very accepting of them as they were.
#
They were really lovely people.
#
But I've somehow even never thought of them as Sindhis, though they spoke Sindhi to each
#
And of course, there was Sindhi food at home.
#
One of your books where you speak about how your mother first started speaking about her
#
childhood, you write, quote,
#
My mother never spoke about her childhood.
#
I never noticed that she didn't.
#
Which child imagines a mother as anything but a mother?
#
Stop quote, which is such a sort of a lovely sentence with many layers to it.
#
So through your life, what's that journey been like where you begin to sort of look
#
at your parents as something other than the role that they play in your life, your parents,
#
your grandparents, whatever for you, did that start coming alive through their stories of
#
the past, which was, of course, you know, tied up with sin and tied up with partition
#
and so on and so forth?
#
So I think seeing my mother as a person, it probably was when she was much older.
#
It wasn't really about her Sindhi identity.
#
But when I realized because my father was ill, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's when
#
he was only 50 years old.
#
And I think about 10 years later, that he was not extremely disabled, but he was disabled,
#
And one day I suddenly realized my mother's 60 herself, you know, and can't be that easy
#
And that's when I realized that she's a person, you know, it's so, otherwise I always really
#
took her for granted and, you know, resented so many things about her and all that.
#
But being Sindhi, that was something that happened much, much later.
#
And now when I think about it, it happened at one point, it was a turning point when
#
the sin story started unfolding and it became to me very, very fascinating.
#
But then when I look back, there were so many other things that had already laid the ground
#
for it, which gave me an advantage.
#
So it started with after my dad passed away.
#
Now it wasn't that my dad was keeping her away from her Sindhi identity by any means,
#
because he would talk about being Sindhi, he knew a few Sindhi words and, you know,
#
they knew very clearly they were from different places, but there was nothing about blocking
#
the other one's identity out at all.
#
And after he died, she was suddenly after a long, long time without, she'd been looking
#
after him for a really long time.
#
That was kind of the thing that she did all day long.
#
Maybe that wasn't there, and also because she's, I didn't want her to feel like unwanted.
#
So I started taking her, traveling with her and a lot of resistance, but she would come
#
along and then come back and tell everyone what a lovely time she had.
#
And then I told her that, you know, let's work, let's do this together.
#
I write books for everyone.
#
I mean, I write for all kinds of people.
#
Why don't you and I do this thing, which we'll do for the family, and just about what was
#
your life like in Sindh before partition, during partition, after partition.
#
And nobody in the family knows anything about it.
#
So you just talk to me, tell me about it, and we'll get photos, we'll put together whatever.
#
None of us actually had photos, but I knew that if we ask around, her cousins might have.
#
And I thought we can put something together for the family.
#
So that's how it started.
#
And the thing is that she very spottingly started coming and sitting in front of me
#
And she remembered things that I just couldn't imagine.
#
I found them fascinating.
#
And then I realized this is too big a story.
#
And I have to do more than just one person's story.
#
So a couple of broad questions that I kind of want to double click on.
#
I recorded an episode with the historian and economist Chinmay Tumbe, who wrote a book
#
called India Moving about internal migrations.
#
And one of the big DILs in that book for me was his point that most internal migration
#
in India happens because of marriage, because a woman gets married and she goes away to
#
wherever her husband's village is or wherever her husband is working and all of that.
#
And it strikes me that in a sense, there is a migration that women make even if they don't
#
shift to another physical location, even if they don't shift geography, they are shifting
#
in a sense to another sense of self or another identity, which is bound within that marriage
#
and within that notion or whatever.
#
So in your case, you pointed out that your dad never sort of constrained her from being
#
Sindhi or, you know, that side of her identity.
#
But nevertheless, it seems that she herself in some way would not have found a way to
#
kind of express that or whatever.
#
And then perhaps through her conversations with you, that's happening.
#
What did you, what were these like for her before I talk about what these were like for
#
What were these like for her?
#
What was what like for her?
#
The memory, the going back.
#
So first of all, you know, since you were saying about how for both of them, the thing
#
is that they were living in a third place, right?
#
They were starting, they were, they had created their own lives and there were the constraints
#
of the environment which they were in.
#
So my dad worked for a tea plantation company, which was Scottish.
#
It was, he was one of the earliest Indian managers.
#
So the whole tradition was a very colonial kind of setup.
#
You know, the homes were built by the British for themselves and the staff was trained to
#
cook their kind of food and to, you know, serve the colonial masters.
#
So you know, they had to kind of fit into that mold.
#
They actually did not have a language in common except English because, you know, my father
#
spoke all the South Indian languages and his own, his language was Konkani.
#
And my mom didn't know any of them.
#
She learned some Tamil, very, very rudimentary Tamil, which was the language of the state
#
So it was largely English, not even, they were neither of them were, I mean, my dad's
#
Hindi was not bad though he was from the South.
#
I mean, you know, they were both not like really good Hindi speakers.
#
And for me, you know, that's always something which I've considered a lack that my Hindi
#
is very poor because I grew up in the South.
#
But for her recapturing her memories, again, I realized after some weeks of, you know,
#
working in that space, that it was very healing for her.
#
You know, she was talking about things that she'd left behind.
#
One of the things she told me is that when I close my eyes, I can still see those places.
#
And I found that really moving.
#
I heard that same phrase from others also.
#
And honestly, I've said this before.
#
But for me, I've done so many interviews with people who describe things to me that
#
I also when I close my eyes, I can see those places, you know.
#
So I also feel as if I've seen them though I never actually have.
#
She was 13 when partition took place, but there were certain details which she was able
#
to recount, which I was absolutely very impressed by because she had never spoken about them.
#
And there were things like she remembered the foods, she remembered certain, she remembered
#
some of my grandfather's high profile cases.
#
And the things she told me about those cases made me wonder about the history of Sindh.
#
And they made me very curious.
#
And I realized it's very, very interesting and we don't know and we should know.
#
Like when she described the way she grew up and the family structure and it was so different
#
from what they had after partition because they were separated from the extended family.
#
And there were certain people who they were very, very, very close to, who they hardly
#
ever saw again after that.
#
Very different from what we grew up as.
#
I mean, you know, my brother and I because it was only four of us and we'd be with the
#
grandparents for a few weeks and then all the aunts and uncles would also come.
#
There was no Sindh really there behind that at all because nobody was thinking about it.
#
I know one of my uncles, he would ask my grandfather, you know, he was born in February 1948.
#
So they were already in Bombay at that time.
#
And when he grew up, he would ask his dad to tell him about Sindh and his father would
#
say, no, there's nothing to tell, it's all over.
#
Really I thought that, you know, people didn't want to talk about it because it was too painful.
#
Now I feel that, you know, it's so hard to talk about it because it's so big and it's
#
There's so much to tell, where will you start?
#
And I've had that experience of, you know, moving in and the first book I wrote, it was
#
almost everything was told to me by my mom or the people I interviewed.
#
You know, when I was reading stuff, I would pull out things to use in the book, which
#
were either, which would support or go against what was written in the book.
#
So it was just to show a different point of view or, you know, to give some kind of context.
#
Apart from that, as time went on, I realized there was so much more and it keeps unfolding.
#
New things keep coming up and I feel that I haven't got there yet.
#
You know, even though it's been 10 years and though honestly, I mean, I would love to keep
#
interviewing people, but I've realized it's so much of heterogeneity, there's so many
#
different things, it's, where will you start really?
#
You know, if you're somebody who's come from there and you've lost it and you can't explain
#
it to somebody who doesn't know what it was.
#
You speak about your mother's memory and one of the memories I was struck by was of her
#
sister Bina, where she wrote, she died, she wrote in the book, quote, when Bina was a
#
year old, she got smallpox and died soon after on 31st March, 1947.
#
Even now when I close my eyes, I can see her face, a stop code and I'm struck by the memory
#
of the date that she remembers a precise date.
#
That is something which I just couldn't get over.
#
I mean, she was somebody whose mind was supporting her right till the end in that way.
#
And the fact that nobody ever would have on the third, she may have been remembering,
#
okay, today is 31st of March, this is the day my sister died.
#
Nobody ever spoke of it.
#
And similarly, she said to me that we arrived in Bombay and it was the 14th of November.
#
I mean, those things were just extraordinary to me.
#
Who remembers a date like that?
#
I mean, why would you remember the date?
#
And it also tells you that there's an interior life there which no one has a clue of.
#
Like you said, no one would have known that on 31st March, she might be feeling a little
#
And it's also that interesting thing of how your memory of someone can often be frozen
#
to what they were like the last time you saw them, which in the case of the sister would
#
have been one year old, who had she lived would of course have 70, 80, 90, but you remember
#
In the case of a relative who's died, for example, you could remember them as an old
#
person, even though you might have spent your whole life with them and seen them much younger
#
So it's just, you know, the way that the memories formed and the things that you sort of choose
#
to remember is really interesting.
#
And what was this process like for you to see this side of your mother where she's,
#
you know, all these layers are there, she's remembering these dates, she's missing people
#
who are no more, all of this rich life which you were never aware of and which most kids
#
would probably not know about their parents.
#
You know, how did that affect the relationship?
#
First of all, it was that, I mean, for me, she was somebody I was interviewing, you know,
#
it was somebody whose story I was listening to.
#
And I wasn't really looking at her as my mother at that point, I was just like being very
#
conscious of somebody who's telling me things and some an elderly person who had a life
#
that they've never spoken about before and it's all suddenly, you know, becoming clear
#
that it's still alive inside them.
#
And I feel now that because she died soon after, she died about two years after that.
#
So you know, it was again one of these things like when I think about it, I mean, this might
#
sound a bit naive, but I just feel that, you know, it happened at that time, you know,
#
the things that happened, they were like these stepping stones which got me to a point where
#
Like, you know, if you start with the fact that I can talk to people and interview them
#
and listen to them and write down what they're saying.
#
And then, you know, be for example, that I lived with my Sindhi grandparents for three
#
years, even though I never thought about them as Sindhi, they were speaking to each other
#
And my grandfather was talking to me in English and my grandmother was talking to me in Hindi,
#
but they were talking to each other in Sindhi.
#
And it's not like they were having long, long conversations with each other, but I still,
#
because of that, I can understand Sindhi, you know, so that is a bit of an asset.
#
It's not a huge asset because it also makes me a bit of a fake Sindhi because I don't
#
And I don't even call myself, I don't call myself a Sindhi.
#
Some people don't like that sometimes, you know, because people, when I'm writing about
#
them and I'm really writing about them with so much of regard, so much of appreciation,
#
so they don't like it when I say I'm not a Sindhi.
#
How can I say I'm Sindhi?
#
Because I don't know the language.
#
Okay, I can understand the language because I lived with my Sindhi grandparents.
#
Then I studied at Jai Hind College, which was really weird.
#
I mean, I should have been at Xavier's, my dad should have insisted.
#
I said, you know, I heard my, in school, my headmaster saying Jai Hind College is really
#
It's the best college in Bombay these days.
#
And I was like, okay, fine, I want to go to Jai Hind College.
#
And then we had this thing which I told you about where I was in the 11th standard and
#
we had to move to CBSC.
#
My grandfather went and talked to, he took me along and we went to meet Principal Khub
#
Now, obviously, they must have known each other or they must have been from the same
#
social circle or whatever back in Sindh.
#
So he asked for an appointment and he got an appointment and I went with him.
#
You know, this is something that happened to me when I was very vulnerable, very, when
#
I was like 15 years old, right, and didn't know what was going on.
#
But now it comes to me with so much clarity.
#
I was sitting next to my grandfather and this, you know, horny old, not that old also, but
#
very stern and very powerful person in a white suit was sitting in front of us across the
#
big table and he started talking to me in Sindhi.
#
And I was like, excuse me, you know, roll my eyes or whatever, like a teenager would
#
And my grandfather was so apologetic.
#
He was so ashamed of himself, not ashamed of me, but he was like, see, this is what we've
#
And they exchanged that look between them.
#
And I got admission in Jai Hind College and it was very boring, you know, I was like a
#
science in Jain college in those days.
#
I don't know what it's like now, but it was like not that great three years towards the
#
I had my made friends and but so that was a stepping stone.
#
And then what else could I call a stepping stone?
#
I mean, the fact that, as I said, as a writer, you know, I, and then this whole thing of
#
two years, less than two years with my mum telling me about Sindh, which amazingly she
#
remembered so many details about.
#
So you know, we were talking about reading what you wrote and cringing, because when
#
I wrote that book, I didn't know anything.
#
And then I started reading, thinking, listening all the time, like not all the time, but a
#
lot of the time, speaking about Sindh, reading about Sindh, listening, interviewing people.
#
And after a few years, when I had to think about reprinting that book, I knew I should
#
read it, and I'm sure I'm going to find a lot of bloopers in it, because, you know,
#
I didn't know anything when I started, I must have said all kinds of naive and stupid things.
#
So then I read the whole thing and again, I was really shocked because, yeah, they may
#
have been naive, but they were not stupid.
#
There was nothing that really struck a wrong note.
#
How could that have happened?
#
I really didn't know anything.
#
It was just the base of what my mum gave me.
#
You know, so that's the backstory of that.
#
That book was written when I didn't know anything.
#
Even today, people are still doing it for book club discussions.
#
And you know, like recently I asked three people, I sent them the link to my website,
#
blackandwhitefountain.com, and I said, listen, I'm coming to see you guys soon.
#
And which one of my books would you like?
#
And all three of them replied Sindh stories from a vanished homeland, though there are
#
lots of other books which are also quite fascinating.
#
I don't know, maybe the website promotes it the most or what.
#
But yeah, it's still alive after 10 years.
#
So that's quite gratifying.
#
One of the things I enjoyed about the book is that the voices sound so authentic.
#
I mean, you know, that it's, you've sort of been true to the voices in the book, your
#
mother's voice and all the other Sindhi voices in there.
#
And I'm also struck by the word in the title, vanished, which I think one of your foreign
#
publishers said, let's not call it vanished, and you called it lost.
#
So the university press in Pakistan, they did not want to use the word vanished.
#
What I understood is that Sindhi people in Pakistan, that is the majority community,
#
which did not obviously leave Pakistan, that was their country.
#
They also have had a raw deal after Pakistan, after partition, and they have felt colonized.
#
They have felt, you know, rejected and made fun of, and they are very sensitive.
#
And they lost their middle class.
#
So they miss their Hindus.
#
And there wasn't that much of a conflict between the Hindus and Muslims of Sindhi, like were
#
For them, it was their language, their culture, their, you know, common beliefs.
#
So they said, we can't use the word vanished or we'll be in trouble because they will say,
#
no, we haven't vanished, we are here.
#
And I'm thinking to myself, well, you're going to call it lost, how is that going to
#
They called it, sorry, from a lost homeland, which maybe is not as dramatic as vanished.
#
I didn't like that because I think vanished is what I wanted to say.
#
And that was a very strong sense I got while interviewing my mother that, and I mentioned
#
that in the book about how she tells me the name of the villages that, she said, my father's
#
village was Kherodero and our family is married within these five villages.
#
And she was giving me the names of the villages and she named four of them and she couldn't
#
remember the name of the fifth.
#
And she said, I'll tell you, I know I'll come to me.
#
But while she was talking, I Googled and you know, there was a whole list of names that
#
came up and I started saying them out to her.
#
And she was looking at me with this expression on the face, like, how would you know this?
#
You know, and I'm thinking like, you know, you look on a map and you'll see the name of a place.
#
And that's when I realized that there's no map.
#
You know, you are 13 years old, you've left this place that it was all you ever knew.
#
Everybody's talking about something else you want.
#
You know, you're never going to see.
#
So, you know, you're never going to have any contact with it.
#
That's why I use the word vanished, which I think is what happened with them.
#
So I want to double click on that word.
#
Now I have a bunch of Sindhi friends who I've never thought of as Sindhi friends, right?
#
It's in retrospect that I'm looking at the Bhatias and the Melvani's and thinking, hey,
#
but these are Sindhi friends.
#
But not only have I never got a sense of Sindhi-ness from them, but I'm not even sure how much
#
Sindhi-ness they ever felt themselves, right?
#
And so my question is sort of that in modern times, you know, what is this Sindhi-ness?
#
Because when I look at other-nesses, just to coin a word there, when I look at Bengali-ness
#
or Punjabi-ness or whatever, there is a land, there is Punjab, there is Bengal, there is
#
a language, you know, Punjabi and Bengali, there is a literature, there is, you know,
#
so many distinctive, there are even stereotypes, but that, of course, the Sindhis still have.
#
But when you sort of think about Sindhis, you know, you've spoken in your writings
#
about how so many people lose touch with the language.
#
You may hear your grandparents speaking the language to each other.
#
But do young Sindhis today communicate in Sindhi?
#
No, because you have so many other languages that you need to know to get ahead in the
#
world, the language of the local place where you are, perhaps English, because that's
#
your global sort of language to get ahead, and so on and so forth.
#
So is that something that is vanishing or has vanished that whatever being Sindhi meant,
#
Well, also, partly, I think it's happened with everybody because of the way the world
#
has changed, because of cosmopolitanization and media and, you know, it is true for everybody.
#
But you do find a lot, and of course, because of the mixed marriages where people don't
#
know each other's language, the language the other person grew up hearing at home.
#
So those are the most common reasons for it to happen.
#
But for most people, there's still a place they can go back to where that language is
#
spoken, where they can connect with it.
#
And Sindhis definitely don't have that.
#
Indian Sindhis don't have that.
#
If you are lucky enough, as I was, to visit, it's a tremendous experience.
#
I mean, for me, which is something that came to me when I was giving an interview while
#
in Sindh, it was after having, you know, connected with people, experiencing something that I
#
hadn't imagined, first of all, being in a room full of people who speak exactly like
#
I mean, come on, you know, that was something and the same quality of affection, of wanting
#
to make sure that you've eaten enough, you know, giving kharchi to your children.
#
So I said it was like looking into the mirror for the first time, because that's what it
#
And that's gone, right?
#
Like, it's one of, it's a very rare Narnia kind of experience.
#
I think identity is like a very complex thing in any case.
#
I think now, you know, because see the partition, the migrant generation did not realize, right,
#
that it was something to hold on to.
#
They didn't realize what a precious thing was being lost.
#
So they let it go because they had other priorities.
#
The next generation similarly, now the generation, like maybe the fourth generation, they want
#
They want to reconnect and they're doing it.
#
Many of them are looking back and trying to find out.
#
And you know, one thing which, like, I feel a little uncomfortable about is that people
#
whining about, oh, they suffered so much.
#
Now, come on, suffered so much is not such a big deal, yeah, because life is full of
#
I mean, you know, Buddha told us that long back, right?
#
So suffering is not the point.
#
The point is how did you cope with it?
#
And that is something which I feel we need to salute.
#
The way they did it as one.
#
And you know, as I said, it's a very heterogeneous community.
#
They do everything differently and they're always quarreling and everybody wants to be
#
And you know, there's a lot of that.
#
These are, again, I'm being, you know, using stereotypes, which is not fair.
#
But I mean, you know, I'm saying this because I want to say that when it came to partition,
#
First of all, they left without looking back.
#
Second, they landed where they were and they got going.
#
Those are the things that we need to salute them for.
#
Then after that, there was this loss, which happened in a natural, in an organic way,
#
like when the parents were talking to each other, they would talk to the children in
#
another language, which, like I realized recently, they had to do because who's going to explain
#
They're not going to understand, right?
#
Let them get the context of where we are now.
#
It's interesting how you speak about how they all left and they all kind of came to terms
#
And there's this fascinating little bit in your book where you speak about the survey
#
that was carried out in the late 1940s by a psychologist called V. K. Kuthurkar to understand
#
stereotype notions that Pune people held about non-Maharashtrian groups.
#
And the survey was also distributed to Sindhi people who were not keen to take part, but
#
And one of those comments read as follows, and this is by a Sindhi in that time, those
#
who are interested in collecting these statistics should know that we are no more divided in
#
sections like Muslims, Sindhis, Punjabis, Bengalis, et cetera, as contemplated by them.
#
Let them understand that we are Indians only.
#
And as an Indian, I apply all the good adjectives to all my countrymen and let the remaining
#
adjectives be applied to those who are interested in dividing us again by such methods."
#
And is this part of a necessary process where it's partly perhaps being in denial of what
#
just happened and it's partly something that you feel necessary to assimilate in this country
#
and you have left your home and you've come here, in that sense, coming to India, like
#
the phrase you mentioned earlier, they have come to India.
#
And where is this feeling coming from that the past is past and we have to make it vanish
#
Yeah, the two options that you gave are definitely valid, but my sense is that it came from something
#
a little older, which goes back to the freedom movement and which is something which was
#
very, very strong across the country at that time.
#
And it was very, very strong in Sindh.
#
And there was a lot of resistance to the British, huge, so many, I mean, I have a lot of stories
#
of the things that people did and not just the men, the women and the children also.
#
And I think that feeling, whatever he was expressing, when I read it, that's what it
#
meant to me, that he's talking about what he felt when India was becoming independent.
#
And that's the way, that's what should have been retained.
#
And if it wasn't retained, there were too many reasons for it not being retained.
#
But it's such a lovely thing.
#
I would not really be cynical and think that, or even, you know, whatever, I would not really
#
think it was because they were assimilating or I think it was because that's what they
#
If you look at the number of Sindhi businesses which have, which were started soon after
#
partition, which have the words like Jai Hind and national and, you know, things like that,
#
it tells you that that's what they still had in their minds, you know, that they, that's
#
Is a flip side to that, the fact that they were sort of almost pushed into such nationalism
#
by being forced to leave?
#
I think they had that before, before independence.
#
I think that that was the spirit of the fight for independence.
#
So just as, you know, you spoke about the vanished Sindh, is a flip side of that the
#
rediscovery of it, because in a sense, if that Sindh had vanished for your mother and
#
people of her generation, it was rediscovered by you in a manner of speaking and perhaps
#
Yeah, there were a few others, there were like some of us and some obviously who started
#
before me, who started these major excavations and it's still going on and it's extremely
#
complicated because, you know, you come up with something and you don't know exactly
#
what it means and you have a certain context in which you have to interpret it and then
#
something else comes up and it unsettles what you thought at first and you know, it's this
#
archaeological process, right?
#
And it is still carrying on and it gets more and more complicated as you go along because
#
times keep changing and that's why, you know, like I read this somewhere and I put it into
#
the starting quote of something I wrote some, like a few weeks ago about how hard it is
#
to restore a lost legacy.
#
It's by Hartley, a British novelist whose novels I never read, but I came across this
#
quote which says, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
#
You know, from today's contexts, you see things and you take certain things for granted and
#
unless you're really alert, you won't know that that's not the way it was back then.
#
Everything was different.
#
Everything was different.
#
When you talk about travelling in a train, the trains were different.
#
You talk about drinking water at a railway station.
#
In Sindh, in the 1940s, they served water separately, different water for Muslims and
#
different water for Hindus.
#
So you know, things like that, you just have to keep collecting those pieces and then put
#
them together, which is, as you said, rediscovering the vanished.
#
Again, there will be parts of it which is assumption, there'll be parts of it which
#
is influenced by your own political beliefs or, you know, I am actually very conscious.
#
I don't know whether I should say this, but it's the truth, so why not actually?
#
I feel conscious of the fact that when I write in a way, it's propaganda.
#
And I feel, you know, I'm not somebody with a proper liberal arts, humanities kind of
#
education, but I've had certain experiences which have conveyed such huge lessons to me,
#
like this thing that happened to me when I went to Russia for the first time, and I wasn't
#
There was a group of us who were taken as guests of the Russian government, about 12
#
or 13 of us from different parts of India.
#
And they used to do this every couple of years, that they would invite people who were either
#
working for one of their institutes or, you know, students who'd done well, which is how
#
And they took us, we had to just get to Delhi, and then they flew us to Tashkent, we had
#
a few days there, that time that was the USSR, so Tashkent and Samarkand, and then Moscow.
#
And it was so exciting to be in Moscow and, you know, being able to communicate in a very
#
broken way with people.
#
But the experience that I had was being so shocked that there were no spies anywhere.
#
Because for us, as people who grew up with the influence of the American media, Russian
#
And no matter what you were reading, I'm not just talking about time in life, I'm talking
#
about James Hadley Chase and Frederick Forsyth, and even Mad Magazine, anything you read.
#
If it was Russian, it was a spy.
#
And here I was in Russia, there were no spies, I mean, there were people.
#
How do you know there were no spies?
#
Everybody could have been a spy.
#
You know, you have to be wearing that shuffled coat and all.
#
No, but what I meant to say is that they were ordinary people, there was no secret service
#
They were just like people, and you know, somebody will like send you flowers, and you're
#
sitting and having lunch, and somebody will send you a bottle of champagne, and say, oh,
#
you're from India, and they'll start singing me.
#
And I met really innocent people, you know, really like somebody who, she said she'd seen
#
the movie Disco Dancer 41 times, and she wanted to marry Meethun Chakravarti.
#
And she asked me if I'd carry a letter back to India for him, and I carried the letter.
#
I don't know whether he ever replied to her, but I did make sure that he got the letter.
#
How did you make sure he got the letter?
#
I had a friend who lived in the same building, so she dropped it off at his place, in Bandra.
#
Okay, I didn't expect this story to kind of blend up with the letter to Meethun Chakravarti
#
by a Russian at Marraving.
#
So basically, you know, that's something which made me realize what propaganda is.
#
Just keep saying something, you know, nicely to people, and eventually, you got them.
#
Why did you refer to your own writing as propaganda?
#
So I might be being a little harsh, you know, but I am telling the stories that I hear.
#
So it's, you know, I'm not writing about, okay, let's look at the bell curve.
#
Let's look at the characteristic of human behavior, and, you know, where do you see,
#
when you talk about Sindhi, which are the things that you're talking about?
#
You're talking about, if you're being kind, you're talking about being hardworking, and
#
you're talking about being entrepreneurial, you're talking about being innovative, maybe,
#
maybe not innovative even.
#
But if you're not, then you're talking about being shrewd, you're talking about being exploitative.
#
So if I'm only talking, if I'm leaving out the exploitation stories, and I'm only telling
#
you about stories where, I mean, these are completely true stories, I'm not trusting
#
I'm just telling you stuff that actually happened.
#
I don't know, Amitabh, I mean, you know, I'm not, like I said, it's a bell curve, but I'm
#
giving you these stories.
#
And I want, I want things that haven't been told before to come out.
#
And I have a, you know, for a proper sense of what actually happened, there's so much
#
stuff that's still not known.
#
So I look at sort of movements of revival in India, and I can see what, say, Rekhta
#
is doing for Urdu slash Hindustani, or there is, you know, a recent guest on the show in
#
a single, he has a site called Stage, which provides OTT content in dialects like Haryanvi
#
and Rajasani, and which is really interesting because that is fighting against a social
#
impulse to homogenize, you know, urbanization, going to cities, homogenization.
#
That's what you typically imagine, you know, is a movement in modern times, and therefore
#
you think, hey, dialects are going to disappear and so on.
#
But what Vinay is doing with Stage, movement in the opposite direction, where there's a
#
massive industry built, and people who grow up speaking those dialects now don't feel
#
ashamed of themselves, you know, they feel empowered.
#
In a similar sense, I wonder if, you know, there is perhaps, you know, the possibility
#
of some kind of Sindhi revivalism in that sense, like, do you see it happening?
#
Would it even be desirable if it were to happen, like, is there value in it?
#
So, you know, I do feel that in the past there were attempts made, but probably the methods
#
of communication were not that effective, you know, and also, like, I remember this
#
one time when I visited my, my mum and I, and another one of her brothers, went to visit
#
a younger brother, I mean, so there were four of us, my mum and two of her brothers, and
#
the one whose home we were in, he just came back, and he said, yeah, I told my friends
#
that I have to go because my sister and my niece are coming from Pune, and my niece has
#
just written a book about Sindhis.
#
And they said, oh, is it a funny book?
#
So my mum and the other one, the other brother, my uncle, both of them were so annoyed.
#
What do you mean funny?
#
And he said, yeah, what can I do?
#
That's the way they think.
#
So he was just pulling their leg because he knew what was going to happen, right?
#
And they were both like, but I'm proud to be Sindhi.
#
I mean, you know, it's very sweet.
#
But if you go around telling people, I'm proud to be Sindhi, they'll be like, okay, good
#
for you, you know, instead of that, if you tell them some stories about actual facts,
#
they can really move you because they're true, and they were amazing.
#
So that's what I'm doing.
#
And yeah, I don't know, I suppose there's a revival, but there's a revival of some other
#
things also, which I don't want to be a part of that, you know, which is taking you into
#
being fanatic about your religion or anything like that, you know, I don't think that's
#
I know that one of the things my mum told me about which I would never have known, none
#
of us would ever have known, she said when the trouble started after partition, it was
#
fairly okay before there was not that there wasn't trouble before, but after when things
#
started getting uncomfortable, there was a lot of anxiety and they knew that something
#
was going on and they had to leave.
#
She said the first thing we did was we tore down these big, we had these huge, big pictures.
#
As soon as you entered our house, we had these two huge, big pictures and we tore them, pulled
#
them out, tore them out of their frames and tore them up.
#
Shivaji and Maharana Pratap Singh.
#
So you know, they definitely had an influence, so these were not Sindhi heroes.
#
These were heroes that were necessary according to them for the Hindus to feel that they were,
#
you know, they had a certain valor or whatever and they came from RSS.
#
They came from the RSS which had entered Sindh in the 40s and which was, there were Shakhas
#
all over and my mum and her and two of her brothers, I mean, the others were younger
#
so they weren't part of it, but they would go to the Shakha and it was a social thing
#
It's not like they were taught you have to kill everybody or you have to, you know, be
#
a, I mean, they were not taught as far as I can tell.
#
They were not taught to do anything bad.
#
They were told, this is what they've told me, that we were taught to be proud of ourselves
#
and if you're ever attacked, you should know how to defend yourself.
#
And these are our great heroes.
#
So I don't want to be like, you know, if you're talking about revival, again, you go back
#
to, you can go back to Mohenjo-Daro because there is a connection there geographically
#
and also in terms of things like trade, you know, the trade was happening back then and
#
they were like really very, very, very skilled at, you know, they knew what they had, which
#
somebody else wanted a thousand miles away.
#
So that's something which the Sindhis always did and they still do.
#
I did an episode with Amardeep Singh a couple of years back and he's a scholar who's retraced
#
the path of Guru Nanak through the subcontinent.
#
And one of the TILs that I had while, you know, reading his books and recording with
#
him is that there was something that you can call Nanak Panti, which was much broader than
#
Sikhism, that Nanak was actually worshipped all over the South Asia and even beyond by
#
people who weren't Sikhs and the example he gave is from Sindh and that's an example
#
you give as well when, you know, your mother speaks about how the only religious picture
#
they had in their home was of Guru Nanak and, you know, their prayers every morning were
#
the Sukhmani and the Jap Sahib from the Guru Granth Sahib and so on.
#
And so there's a lot about this Nanak Panti there.
#
There are parts where you've also spoken about how you are happily taking influences from
#
Islam as well, like you interviewed a lady called Aruna Jetwani and she's got a story
#
about how when they were coming through Partition, one she distinctly remembers the dresses she
#
wore, which is again an incredible memory, but, you know, they had a black tin trunk
#
with them and when they came to the railway station in Hyderabad, and this is of course
#
Hyderabad-Sindh, it was crowded and everybody who was travelling by that train had been robbed
#
and all their belongings were taken and all of that and a tall, hefty Pathan came and
#
opened this trunk and there was a photograph there of Syed Malik, who was a Muslim Peer
#
So he just offered a prayer, closed the trunk and made sure that nobody looted anything
#
You know, when I'm reading about before that period, before the RSS came in, from the accounts
#
in your books, one gets a sense that it's very dynamic, it's very syncretic, you know,
#
Nanak Panti is a big thing, Nanak is a big thing and you'll have Muslim Peers show up
#
in this kind of way as well and you'll have Hindu influences as well.
#
It's a beautiful mix of beautiful khichri and, you know, which seems, you know, far
#
removed from the polarizing impulses of modern times.
#
So tell me a little bit about what sense you got of that from speaking to, you know, people
#
of that generation and then later you of course studied the history of that, of, you know,
#
all the way from Mohenjo-Daro onwards.
#
I haven't studied actually all that much, but I'll just tell you the thing that I remembered
#
my grandfather saying, which I, you know, was that in Sindh there was no difference
#
between Hindus and Muslims.
#
Now when I was like in college and I heard him say that, I just assumed that he's saying
#
that because he was a liberal thinker and, you know, maybe that's what he was.
#
Then later on now I realized that he was saying it because that's the way it was and they
#
did have common beliefs, they did have common places of worship.
#
And yeah, many Hindu families had Muslim peers who they totally believed in, who, from whom
#
they got their spiritual comfort and they still have, they still, some of them still
#
do, they still, they are still in Bombay today.
#
Of course their following is much reduced, but they still have, like I know somebody
#
who has the Gaddi of a Muslim peer in Kalaba and then there was somebody in Sayan, there's
#
somebody in Ghatkopar and so many of them actually brought their, you know, they brought
#
the Gaddi with them, then they set up all over again and those were not necessarily
#
Muslim, but they were, you know, actually I'm so confused about it.
#
They were probably Sufi, most of them probably were.
#
When it comes to Nanak, I really think that that was the majority, I think so, that's
#
Now again, it could be warped data because I'm talking about the people who I've interviewed
#
and there are so many more that I have and there are huge pockets that I haven't touched
#
But Julelal was definitely, you know, a figure, a mythological figure in Sindh, much revered,
#
became an icon of Sindhism after partition, not, was not, you know, because there's no
#
other community that has a Julelal.
#
I think, yeah, maybe in Rajasthan, there are, you know, there are communities who would
#
also revere Julelal, but Julelal was brought out after partition by Ram Panjwani, who was
#
a professor of Sindhi at Jain college and he used to travel after partition.
#
On his own money, he would travel to the camps just to sing and, you know, cheer up people
#
and it was such a lovely thing, right, and he would sing about it.
#
I heard this from Mohan Gehani, who's a poet, and he told me that he would sing, he would
#
play the matka and he would sing Jule Julelal, Julelal, Julelal, and everybody would be clapping
#
and then it just became a huge thing.
#
They were Nanak Panthis, almost everybody, including my mom, as you said.
#
She also said, if you remember, that after partition, all that stopped, nobody bothered
#
to tell us you have to say it first before you have breakfast because, you know, they
#
So funny thing that I have come across while interviewing people and it's happened so often
#
that it makes me laugh.
#
They'll say, no, no, we were not Sikh, we were Hindu, okay, who did you, whose followings
#
I mean, whose teachings did you follow?
#
Guru Nanak and the other gurus.
#
So then you are a Sikh, no, no, no, we are Hindus.
#
So just like couple of weeks ago, I was interviewing someone who is 97 and who is very sharp still,
#
and he said to me that Guru Nanak is for Punjabis.
#
I don't know why we Sindhis were following him.
#
So actually, it's again this whole polarization, political thing which has, and Sindhis still
#
will have a Guru Nanak picture, they will still have, I mean, when my mom died, I would
#
I'd have done the normal like Brahman ceremony, which we did for my dad.
#
But I knew that when she, because she just told me about all this.
#
So we did her Marka at the Gurdwara in Pune, I wouldn't have known, but I think it's really
#
important because that was one of the things that happened to me, I realized that this
#
was actually who she was.
#
I mean, we hadn't talked about it for a long time, but maybe it wasn't, and she wasn't
#
really a religious person, she's totally not into any kind of mumbo jumbo, whatever, which
#
is a nice thing, one of the nice things I inherited from her.
#
So we would have done something else, and then we went to Gurdwara instead.
#
Yeah, so I think the times have changed.
#
I don't know whether we'll ever go back to that, where what you are really looking for
#
is higher spiritual values, you're looking for what is good and rich in life.
#
And it doesn't matter which source it's coming from, so long as it's a good and pious source.
#
And that's the way it was in Sindh.
#
To my reading, and if you look at what there are poets of Sindh, the kind of philosophy,
#
they all say this, I mean, if you look at what you have from Kabir or what you have
#
from Tukaram, it's very similar, isn't it, where you're talking about humanity and you're
#
talking about, it doesn't really matter what the source is, it's about who you are and
#
what your life journey is.
#
And I think that's the way it was in Sindh.
#
Yeah, I mean, I found, you know, after my episode with Amardeep, I just found Nanak
#
so close to Kabir in so many ways, you know, as much of a, you know, freewheeling mistake
#
as a founder of a religion as people tend to.
#
So here's a thought about identities.
#
Now, we, of course, contain multitudes, right?
#
So there are many aspects to us, and we can choose which of them to bring to the forefront
#
or which of them to think of as our primary identity.
#
And it seems to me that there might well have been a situation, say, in a particular point
#
of time, in a particular place, maybe if you're a Sindhi in, say, 1910, that Sindhi is a primary
#
identity and the religion per se is not that big a deal and therefore you let other influences
#
in and you are not dogmatic or hardcore about whatever religion you're supposedly born into
#
and they all meld into one another.
#
And one of the things in these modern globalized times is that, one, I think these modern globalized
#
times are great, by far net positive, but one of the unintended effects is that some
#
of these other smaller identities can get diluted down, like for a Sindhi person that
#
could be her Sindhiness.
#
And therefore, if you want something to hold on to, to feel that you're part of a community
#
or to feel rooted, you might have nothing left apart from your religion.
#
I mean, that might be the strongest locus of identity that then remains.
#
That could be one way in which we are different from those times, that the religious part
#
of it becomes stronger and therefore more tribalistic and more dogmatic and all of those
#
And you know, those other aspects get diluted.
#
So I'm just kind of thinking aloud.
#
This has been sparked by what you were saying.
#
Yeah, I agree with you there, of course, you know, because if you go to Sindh, you'll still
#
find that people there, for them, being Sindhi is more defining identity than being a Muslim
#
or a Hindu, although, yeah, there is also a movement where the Hindus are using conversion
#
of minor girls as a political tool to gain asylum outside.
#
And so that's, again, you know, coming into a very material definition.
#
When it comes to identity, I think the most important thing is language.
#
I think, you know, language is what really binds people.
#
And here with Sindhis, very few young Sindhis actually know the language.
#
And many can understand, a huge number can understand, but have never tried to speak.
#
I can say, I was about to say for many of us, I did say that I don't consider myself
#
a Sindhi, but I know that like every other Sindhi in India or in other parts of the world,
#
except Sindh, you don't hear Sindhi spoken on the street.
#
You only hear Sindhi spoken in homes.
#
You hear Sindhi spoken by people you know well, okay?
#
That's your connection with the language.
#
You can understand it to an extent.
#
You can't understand the literary words and, you know, if anybody doesn't want you to understand,
#
they'll know how to speak so that you won't.
#
But that feeling, when you hear the language and you feel at home, wherever you hear that
#
language, you're going to feel the same, right?
#
And that is something very powerful.
#
That's why I'm including myself in that.
#
Even though I said I'm not a Sindhi, when I hear the language spoken, I feel comfortable.
#
There's a level of feeling, yeah, okay, these are my people, you know?
#
So coming back to your question about identity, I wanted to tell you about this book I did
#
during the lockdown, where I got this idea of getting others to write.
#
And I just wanted to have this collection of work on the Sindhi identity by people who,
#
different kinds of people.
#
So I approached a lot of different people.
#
And of course, some of them are very well known in the field of Sindhi studies.
#
I was lucky to get pretty much everyone who is well known in that field.
#
But I also asked a lot of other people who are doing different things, like, you know,
#
artists and writers, young people, not, I meant photographers and business people.
#
A lot of business people wrote, different ages, different countries.
#
And then I put it together, and it really makes a good read.
#
It's called Sindhi Tapestry, Reflections, I've forgotten what this, that's really silly.
#
It's Reflections on the Sindhi Identity, I think.
#
And it gives you, you know, by the time you read it, you understood so much about what
#
Sindhi people went through during partition and what happened, what was left of them.
#
And yeah, the transformation which you mentioned of the identity from being a Sindhi to being
#
a Hindu who has to leave and then to being an outsider who has to conform and integrate
#
and leave everything behind.
#
And some of the most common themes we had in that book were, of course, the loss of
#
language, the regret at the loss of the language.
#
And there was, of course, this whole thing of adapting, of bravery, of moving ahead.
#
There was this thing of being amenable to ideas from different sources, accepting them.
#
There was this thing about facing prejudice, about, I don't know how many, at least three
#
or four of them wrote about the Sindhi and the snake.
#
You know, the Sindhi and the snake is a big one.
#
If you see a Sindhi and a snake, who should you kill?
#
Actually, you know, I told this once to Rudy Heredia, professor at St. David's College.
#
And he was like, yeah, but in India, all our communities do that.
#
When I was young, it used to be if you see a Brahmin and a snake.
#
So, you know, I think the Sindhis hung on to that snake thing for longer.
#
And one of them, Nandu Asrani, who is a hereditary Shikarpuri businessman.
#
Now, Shikarpuri is this place in the north of Sindh.
#
And they were on that camel trade, which came from Far East and went across to the Middle
#
They were trading on that.
#
And then eventually, so he's fought, I don't know, I mean, he has the stories of four generations
#
before him, which is fabulous.
#
He's full of he, you know, he's very grounded in his family's history.
#
And he's also a businessman who has a lot of fun doing moving from one business to another
#
and enjoys what he's doing.
#
So those guys, they also started money trade because, you know, that bandit mountain glacier
#
route wasn't that easy to carry money.
#
So you leave your money like this hundi thing, right?
#
You give your money to somebody who you can trust and they give you a little slip of paper
#
and you can cash it anywhere in that same route.
#
So he said, we are not like snakes, we are like spiders.
#
That was his analogy, which was really nice.
#
Yeah, that's lovely building webs everywhere.
#
And you know, as far as that whole question of who should you kill first, snake or sindhi?
#
I have a good friend, Ajay Shah, who would actually argue that the correct answer is
#
it depends, because you see, here's the thing, I'll tell you why.
#
And my answer is nothing to do with sindhis, but everything to do with snakes.
#
Because according to Ajay, and I'll ask him to elaborate upon it sometime, some snakes,
#
I think you mentioned cobras and the crates are good snakes, right?
#
They are very compatible with human beings, they don't mess with humans, they will not
#
attack you unless you attack them first and so on and so forth.
#
But some snakes, like the Russell Viper, if I remember correctly, are scoundrels, right?
#
He basically said that the Russell Vipers are to reptiles what seagulls are to birds.
#
Now you will at this point say what is wrong with seagulls.
#
The thing is when seagulls attack their prey, they first zoom in and they plug the eyes
#
So even when they attack humans once in a while, which is rare, but it can happen at
#
sea, they'll first zoom in and plug the eye out, because that's the optimal place to attack
#
and then they're just going to win easily.
#
So I used to think that crows are good birds, pigeons are bad birds, but it turns out that
#
seagulls are the worst birds of all and Russell Vipers.
#
But yeah, but I mean, if you see a Sindhi and a snake, you don't have to kill any of
#
Yeah, well, you know, Sindhi and the Viper doesn't have the same kind of ring to it.
#
That's true, and you don't have to kill any of them.
#
And in your tapestries book, the language thing keeps coming up, like Atul Khatri, the
#
comedian at one point mentions that the Sindhi organizations get upset when he says he won't
#
perform in Sindhi, you know, so it's it's almost like you can't.
#
So actually, that's another thing.
#
There's this new initiative which has recently been started by Aruna Madnani, who runs the
#
Sindhi Culture Foundation out of Bangalore.
#
And she's been working on this for a really long time.
#
And she interviews experts on various different aspects of Sindh, and those talks have just
#
been launched in a project which she's called Doorway to Sindh.
#
And it's fabulous because she's talked to so many people and they are very pleasant
#
conversations which unveil, they just reveal so much, so much, so much, because the people
#
who are talking are very knowledgeable about their their field.
#
And you know, if you listen to that, you get into it.
#
Like when I said something to you about Mohenjo Daro, it was something that I had learned
#
from Aruna's Doorway to Sindh, where she had these two experts talking.
#
And you know, you think that Mohenjo Daro was five thousand years ago.
#
How can there be a common bloodline, you know, between them and now?
#
And you know, you can listen like whoever wants to listen to Doorway to Sindh should
#
because it's pretty good.
#
And they've just started.
#
They just launched recently.
#
So she's got six episodes up in the air and there are plenty more to come and each one
#
I think will be of a very good quality.
#
So tell me your question again, I got off onto the doorway to Sindh, which is something
#
Yeah, no, there was no question.
#
You were saying about tapestry and the language thing.
#
And then we said there was something else also.
#
We talked about the snakes and about the resilience.
#
So in tapestry, yeah, people from the armed forces, I mean, you know, it was just this
#
big collection of people.
#
And I think the threads come through quite well with that.
#
So give me a sense, like talking about Sindh for a while, let's talk about Sindh for a
#
bit and take kind of a longer perspective than anecdote can kind of give us.
#
And that's something you've done in your book as well, where you've spoken about both
#
the history of Sindh all the way from Mohenjo-Daro onwards and the first coming of Islam, which
#
was really the first coming of Islam in the subcontinent and how they coexisted and colonization
#
But what interests me also is geography.
#
You know, it's often said that geography is destiny in a manner of speaking.
#
And you've written about how, you know, Sindh was therefore almost sort of destined to be
#
a distinct geographical territory by just the mountains around it, by the river Indus
#
flowing through it and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
So I think it was like this little enclosed space which had ample of time to develop its
#
That's the sense that I got.
#
At the same time, it was on a kind of crossroads.
#
So anybody entering would pretty much go through Sindh.
#
So there were a lot of cultural influences which came from Greece and Persia and Central
#
I mean, when you think about it, Karachi to Hindabad was a half an hour train journey.
#
You know, you can't imagine that, right?
#
I might be mistaken about half an hour, but it was not very far away.
#
I mean, I was telling you, you know, about the person who was the chairman who came after
#
partition as the chairman of the newly instituted Bombay Housing Board.
#
That was Sahaj Ram Gidwani, who was from Amal family of Sindh.
#
They owned land, but two of them went to Oxford to study.
#
And he was the tutor to Vikram and Gautam Sarabhai.
#
And he worked with Sarabhai, I don't know which one, at their mills.
#
And he was a chairman of the company while, just before he quit to go and be, he was ahead
#
I don't know what they called it, but he was the number one there before he went to join
#
And it was kind of between Karachi and Hindabad.
#
It was just like, you know, I mean, I don't know whether it was Bombay, Pune, probably
#
It was according to Google is 601 kilometers.
#
Yeah, so that's not half an hour for sure, but it's not far.
#
Yeah, but it's 601 is such a weird number, because why not 600, why not 599?
#
It's like they've probably just taken the railway stations or something.
#
Or the GPO, probably just outside the railway station.
#
So 600, that would be how far, a few hours.
#
I mean, I don't think you can assume bullet train.
#
So assume a train at maybe like a 100 K an hour at six hours, right?
#
Calcutta was also a very, very close connection to Sindh, Bengal.
#
And I have read accounts of where it says it was a seven day journey.
#
So it was in my head that it was a seven day journey until somebody told me that they were
#
first studied at Shanti Niketan and they would go and it was two nights on the train.
#
So it was obviously by then the railways had speeded up.
#
It was of course a seven day journey when Hiranand Advani went and he was the Mukhi's
#
son and he kind of went incognito because he had been reading about the Brahmo Samaj
#
and he went, Keshav Mukherjee, and he went to Calcutta to meet him and become his student.
#
And he came back so full of what he'd learned, which was how religions should all treat everybody
#
equally and women should be treated equally.
#
And he started this huge women's education movement, which took off in Sindh.
#
I mean, among the Hindus, at least it was a big thing.
#
And there was such a strong connection with Bengal, they were such big fans of Tagore.
#
They had, there was this M.U. Malkani who had translated, a young man at that time,
#
he translated Tagore's poems and he acted, they acted in them and Tagore himself came.
#
I have a photo of Tagore in the home of, who lived, he lived with, I mean, he stayed with
#
the Dealdas family who had businesses and then they performed the play for him.
#
And I mean, lovely descriptions of all that.
#
But one doesn't think of Sindhis as being cultural, in that sense, of being open to
#
I mean, these are facts, it's nice to, if young Sindhis understand this about themselves
#
Yeah, in fact, you mentioned the Brahmo Samaj link elsewhere.
#
You talk about sort of the role of women in Sindhi society.
#
And at one point, you write quote, I discussed an early draft of this book with Madhavi Kapoor
#
and one of the things she said was missing were certain aspects of the role of women
#
In the Sindhi families we had known, the women had assumed a privileged position.
#
As girls they were pampered, as wives given a decision making authority unusual in Indian
#
Women held the money, Madhavi pointed out.
#
The men would just hand over everything to them.
#
They participated in financial decisions and they owned property, not just in name.
#
In many families, girls and women were fussed over, they must never walk barefoot, must
#
never bow to touch another's feet as a show of respect.
#
They must never ever carry anything heavy.
#
What was the reason for this determined causeting?
#
Could it be the influence of the Brahmo Samaj and its focus on women's empowerment?
#
Yeah, and what also kind of struck me earlier is that in many other ways, like just from
#
your grandparents life, your great grandparents life itself, it seems in other ways to be
#
a backward society, like all of India, like all of the subcontinent.
#
For example, your great grandparents got married when they were 12 and 11 respectively, I think
#
he was a couple of months short of his 12th birthday.
#
You know, so you look at something like that and you kind of realize how far we've come
#
and how backward those times were.
#
But at the same time, you know, you speak about Sindhi women having sort of living much
#
more empowered lives than women elsewhere in the subcontinent do even today, right?
#
Even today, I think by and large, it's fair to say of South Asia that women are kind of
#
treated as second class citizens and it's, you know, outside of elite pockets, it's
#
kind of pretty horrendous.
#
And the Brahmo Samaj would be a relatively recent thing going back maybe a hundred years.
#
But apart from that, do you think that geographical sense that, you know, people came and went,
#
people invaded sometimes, people traded, there was a lot of trade, but otherwise it was corseted
#
off and, you know, as a region and didn't intermingle so much.
#
Do you think that that was a protection against, you know, extremism of some kind, if I'm sort
#
I mean, it is very confusing.
#
It's impossible to actually know the truth of this because I haven't seen anything which
#
can lead me to answer that because, you know, I'm talking about the Hindu women.
#
And I read this thing written by Zahida Rehman, who is a Sindhi writer.
#
And she said that in Hyderabad in the 1940s, it was the height of misogyny.
#
Now I know that's not true for the people that I know.
#
I can give you hundreds of examples.
#
And I mean hundreds, not just a dozen, you know, not just the elite families.
#
How many women in the 1930s, because they were bright students, were sent to Delhi to
#
study at Lady Harding College and live in the hostel there in the 30s and 40s, when, as
#
you said, in the rest of India, they weren't allowed to cross the road.
#
I mean, women of their social economic background.
#
Then I have stories, like I was telling you my story, which I'm so proud of that I went
#
to Europe when I was 20.
#
I have a story from Sindh in the early 40s, there was this group of Sindhi girls who was
#
taken by some European nanny, not nanny, she must have been like a teacher.
#
And they traveled all over Europe and they got their photos taken in Barcelona and wearing
#
saris and I haven't, you know, clipping with that.
#
They were ticket collectors.
#
That tells you a lot about the society, right?
#
Where a man will show you his ticket, you know, it's impossible, right?
#
If you even today, will you, will they show their ticket to a woman in UP or Bihar?
#
So I don't know, it's very, very difficult to know.
#
Because if you're talking about the geographical isolation and you're talking about someone
#
saying it was the height of misogyny, I don't know whether it was an exaggeration or whether
#
the Muslim women were definitely not given those privileges.
#
But yeah, I realized only recently, I used to feel that I'm very privileged because my
#
I realized only recently my mother didn't care.
#
I mean, she was who she was, you know, which is better than being a feminist, right?
#
You just like, you're who you are and you're okay with that.
#
And you know, someone gets in your way, you shout at them.
#
I mean, it's the same as being a feminist.
#
I know, I know, I was just being facetious, but yeah, it is actually what it is, you know,
#
without the label and you use the label and again, then you get these little, you know,
#
you have to be strident, you have to do this and that, you're a real feminist without a
#
Tell me also about, like one of the things that strikes me as interesting about Sindh
#
is the dynamic of Muslims and Hindus there, which seems quite different from the rest
#
of the subcontinent as it were.
#
Actually, you know, I think everywhere people were friendly with their neighbors and the,
#
you know, it wasn't such a big deal until I don't know whether you really can blame
#
Of course, they made a big difference by doing divide and rule and by, you know, things like
#
in Sindh, what happened is when the British came in, you have to fill a census form, right?
#
Meaning what you are, and you're told to say you're a Hindu or a Muslim, actually you're
#
You fill Hindu, so you've become a Hindu, you know, and they ask you, what is your caste?
#
Now, most of them who I, I mean, you know, the people who I've interviewed, they are
#
Okay, they are not, they go around saying we don't have any caste, we have a few Brahmins
#
and they have no power over us, they just do our rituals for us, we sometimes laugh
#
We have Jnani, we have Jnani, which is a young girl, the woman, the girl of the house, she
#
is much more powerful than any Brahmin in a puja.
#
So they would be asked, what's your caste?
#
And they would write Lohana, nobody knew till today, there are so many different ideas
#
about what Lohana may be or may not be.
#
So I think there was a lot of cordiality between these communities everywhere.
#
And in Sindh in particular, because the language was the same, because the problem was if there
#
was a difference, it was a socio-economic difference, the Hindus were, if they were
#
traders, they were, they had the money, and then they were lending money.
#
And by lending money, they were getting richer and richer, and they were eventually getting
#
the land from the landowners who were borrowing money from them.
#
And this became quite rampant in British times when the taxes were so high that the landowners
#
weren't earning enough to pay those taxes, they had to borrow from the Hindu moneylenders
#
to pay those taxes, and eventually the land was taken over by those moneylenders.
#
So A, that was one difference.
#
Then the second difference was the difference of education, because the Hindus just leapt
#
on to the new school and college, the schooling, the education which the British brought in,
#
because they could see that this is going to take you somewhere, it's going to give
#
you a job and you're going to do well and you'll be part of the whole, you know, I'm
#
So that again, I think what I've understood is that the leaders of the community did not
#
want their children, they wanted the madrasa learning where they would learn Arabic and
#
they would stay within the faith.
#
So I think that was the difference.
#
And as a result, you had Muslims working on the farms, and many of the farms were owned
#
Of course, most of the farms were owned by the vaderos, the Sindhi landlords, but you
#
know, they were also all worked on by Muslims.
#
The craftsmen were Muslims, those who sold their craft and who sold them internationally,
#
So those were actually social differences and economic differences.
#
It wasn't really a tussle between the religion.
#
Clothes were the same, they wore the same clothes.
#
The women didn't cover their heads as fanatically as, yeah, there were times when they'd go
#
out and I've heard of this thing called akri where you cover everything except your eye.
#
But it was not that common.
#
Yeah, and in fact, it's interesting how much clothes can reveal like there was this interesting
#
para where and I think this is in your mother's voice where I'll just quote this out quote
#
where she says, daddy was westernized, perhaps influenced by the judges, who were mostly
#
It was a time in our country when many educated people took up western ways.
#
You could tell that a man was educated if he was wearing trousers.
#
In Sindh, men and women traditionally wore pajamas with kurtas.
#
It was the patans who wore salwars.
#
We wore churidars only to feel snug and warm in the cold weather.
#
My grandmother wore one when she was ill.
#
In our family, the boys wore shorts and trousers and the girls wore western style dresses.
#
Many slept in their day clothes, but we wore night suits.
#
And this reminded me of how when Chandrabhan Prasad ji was on the show recently, he always
#
wears a suit and he always wears a suit because to him being a Dalit, Indian clothes carry
#
so many layers of the past within them that wearing a suit is his way of breaking free
#
out of that and just kind of asserting that one of the things I found fascinating in this
#
goes with this stereotype of the jugaru sindhi, the sindhi who can manage anywhere, is how
#
you speak about how they not only assimilate very well even when Mohammed bin Qasim invades
#
in the 8th century CE and that's perhaps the advent of Islam into the subcontinent as it
#
were, but they also over time become, as you point out, by the 18th century, the administrative
#
That before that, the bhaibans have become international traders.
#
And here you say, quote, in the 18th century, after centuries of Muslim rule, it was the
#
Hindus who formed the administrative backbone of Sindh.
#
The rulers were Muslim, but the amils of Sindh were revenue collectors making financial decisions
#
within the court, and it was the bhaibans who controlled the economy outside.
#
In this scenario, it's hard to see the Hindus of Sindh as having been an oppressed minority
#
in a Muslim-dominated region.
#
While they demonstrated unmistakably Islamic influences in their daily life, it is likely
#
that many of these choices had been made from positions of privilege, perhaps with a view
#
to maintaining these positions, stop quote.
#
Did you feel that there was a danger in your first book, not later, but in your first book
#
about the banished Sindh as it were, did you feel there was a danger that because you were
#
talking to some of the relatively privileged people of the time, that you would only see
#
perhaps one part of the story, that you would, you know, hear women's stories where women
#
were, you know, having, were well-off and with many servants, yeah, like at one point
#
in your family, you speak about this house, I think in Jacobabad, this grand bungalow
#
one of the grand uncles had, which was a grand bungalow, but no electricity.
#
So in the evening, yeah, you would have pankhas with, you know, manual laborers sort of moving
#
the pankha so that the people of the family can get some breeze.
#
And we don't speak of those laborers and we don't, in this book, they were Muslims, right?
#
So is, is that a distinction also to be drawn because they were also Sindhi, but Muslim
#
So that was the division, right?
#
Mostly they were either Muslim Sindhis or they were Hindus from other parts of Sindh.
#
And it's something which I only discovered very recently at a conference in Paris a few
#
I think about four years ago where they have this, every, they used to do it every year
#
and South Asians, it's a conference of South Asians, it comes from all over the world.
#
It's amazing how South Asians are in every country.
#
There were three papers on the Dalits of Sindh and they use the word Dalits.
#
So, you know, long after partition, when the Hindus have gone, there are huge populations
#
of Dalits in Sindh, which is just fascinating.
#
You know, it just tells you that these are the invisible people and they're still tilling
#
the farms and, you know, they're leading lives of peasantry.
#
And yeah, some of them have come out, they've got educated, they are in the mainstream,
#
they are working at the administrative service of the government.
#
They may not be, you know, they can't, like, for example, I have a friend who's one of
#
them and he sends me photos occasionally and I'm not allowed to use his name, you know,
#
because I'm enemy country, right?
#
And he works for the government.
#
So his photos will be carried without an acknowledgement.
#
I mean, and I don't know, it's again something like I was telling you that every now and
#
then I learn something completely new and or I have a new insight, which is different
#
from what we were talking about just now.
#
But since I remember it, I'll tell you, which is that the history disappeared.
#
And recent history, especially like in Sindh, for example, there is most of the cities were
#
actually built by the Hindus.
#
Yeah, Hyderabad was built by the king, but who selected the site, who built the foo,
#
you know, oversaw the building of the fort, who laid the roads and, you know, decided
#
who was going to live there.
#
That was the Hindu Amal, Gidumal who did that.
#
So every city has the story of the Hindus having built it.
#
And today, I again, this is a conference in Pakistan.
#
It was online during the lockdown, I attend this conference, wonderful conference where
#
one of the things I saw and I wrote about this somewhere, I can't remember the details,
#
but I know I can access it at any point because I've written about it.
#
This researcher who is so pro understanding the recent history, she is calling, and it's
#
a common phrase, I've heard it used elsewhere also.
#
These houses of Sindh, which were built in the 1940s, it's called Hindu architecture.
#
Now these are mansions which the wealthy merchants of Sindh built, they were trading overseas,
#
they were making lots of money, it was all coming back into Sindh, they were investing
#
in the civic infrastructure of Karachi, Hyderabad, Shikarpur and the other places where they
#
were, mostly it was Hyderabad.
#
And they were building homes for themselves, like you see Lachu Lodge 1940, finished Lachu
#
Five years later, Lachu is out, I mean, his lodge is still there.
#
But now it's being called Hindu architecture.
#
The funny thing is that I have seen exactly the same architecture in downtown Cairo, same
#
structures, same balconies, the same kind of frills on the buildings, because they were
#
using the same architects, they had their businesses in Cairo and Aden and wherever,
#
and those houses were being built and they might be of the same vintage.
#
I'm assuming that they are of the same vintage, built by the same people.
#
But yeah, we were talking about the different social hierarchies in place, Hindus, Muslims
#
and did that in any way, sort of, by circumstance, many of the stories you told were of the sort
#
of the privileged Hindu upper class.
#
In fact, that's one of the objections.
#
When they reviewed Sindhi Tapestry in dawn, it got a rave review, but that was the point
#
which the reviewer said that I want to read the stories of those who did not succeed.
#
And I thought that maybe there aren't that many, you know, because the reason I'm thinking
#
like this is because everywhere you go, you find well-off Sindhis, you don't see, and
#
you know, we did, I did know Sindhis when I was younger, who lived in like Gopal mansion,
#
for example, lots and lots of people, Gopal mansion is this place near Bandra station.
#
And it's a little up from a chawl, not much, but you know, very, very simple.
#
All those people now own bungalows and they own like three apartments each in Pali area,
#
you know, there's nobody, you know, so everybody's moved up.
#
And everyone who came from partition, like they were studying in Sindhi schools, or they
#
were living in the camps, they've all moved up.
#
And those areas are occupied by migrants from other states or from the underprivileged of
#
Where are the ones who are not that well off?
#
I mean, yeah, I think if I go to Pimpri and really walk around, I might find, I'll find
#
some who haven't succeeded that well in business, of course, but they won't be representative.
#
They'll be like the other end of the bell curve.
#
And I love the phrase Hindu trader.
#
And the only reason I love it is Hindu architecture, Hindu architecture, Hindu trader, before that
#
you'd said Hindu trader.
#
And the reason I love the phrase is because one of the most resonant phrases in literature
#
for me is Hindu trader sandwich, which comes from Hemingway short story, The Good Lion.
#
It's about a lion who likes Hindu trader sandwiches.
#
So Hindu traders have been around for, they've been all over.
#
Hindu traders are famous indeed when they're not making buildings in Cairo, they are providing
#
sandwich filling for good lions.
#
Just thinking of social hierarchies, I'm struck by what you said that who built those cities?
#
It might have been a Muslim ruler who commissioned them, but it was sort of Hindus and the Ameels
#
But then if you go one layer deeper, who built them, built them, who carried the stones?
#
They were definitely the Muslims.
#
Then you'll come to Muslims, you'll come to Harijans.
#
One of the interesting bits in your book is where you quote a Harijan talking about why
#
he stayed back and saying, quote, who would murder a Harijan?
#
We were not afraid of conversion either.
#
Who would try to convert us?
#
Muslims did not do the sweepers jobs.
#
I was not worried at all and nothing changed for us.
#
And this was shortly after you mentioned that how after partition, the toilets of all these
#
cities were overflowing and there was so much dirt because the Hindus had left, which is
#
So they were definitely Hindus of the lower caste.
#
But what I've been told is that they were not Sindhi, which I don't know.
#
If they lived in Sindh, why were they not Sindhi?
#
They had their own language and their own culture is what I was given to understand.
#
But now that I think about this and knowing that, yeah, Sindh is full of Dalits even today,
#
And Dalits of Sindh may not be actually speaking the same Sindhi that people of Hyderabad and
#
They probably speak their own Sindhi, their own dialect.
#
This whole thing is so complicated.
#
And of course, you know, I have a friend, she runs an NGO in Kheirodero, which is my
#
And it's also her Nana's village.
#
So that created a bond between us immediately.
#
And I asked her, does anybody remember the Bijlani's in Kheirodero?
#
So she went around asking, nobody remembered, but she said, yeah, we have a Hindu family.
#
And I was like, wow, who are they?
#
She said, I don't know.
#
Like they're a bit different.
#
I don't know what they are exactly, but they want us to build a temple for them.
#
Since we are building toilets and schools and all, they've asked us to build a temple
#
They've come from upcountry and they've settled in Kheirodero.
#
And yeah, and maybe that is what has truly vanished, because you can still, I mean, you
#
are there to write about the history of Sindh, of, you know, your people, as it were.
#
But there is something there, like if they spoke a different language, what was it?
#
Where did that come from?
#
What, you know, what was their history, like post-partition is also fascinating, but not
#
within the remit of what you're doing, of course.
#
No, no, there is so much work to be done and it is being done by so many people.
#
Like I said, there are scholars who were presenting papers about the Dalits.
#
So these are questions for them.
#
And what you also point out is like when I read in your book about the history of Sindh
#
through all these centuries, right?
#
And it's largely a story of assimilation with the massive rupture of partition.
#
But what happens after partition is that you talk about how Sindhis are viewed today in
#
Pakistan by Mohajis, for example, who have occupied Sindh and you write, quote, mistrust
#
and stereotyping between two ethnic communities is not unusual in a society.
#
But the intellectual class is usually less contaminated.
#
Here I've noticed that a section of Mohajis, including some intellectuals, looked down
#
upon the Sindhis as uncultured and undeserving, primarily farmhands and landlords.
#
There was resentment at the job reservations Bhutto introduced.
#
After partition, ethnic nationalities had been suppressed.
#
Mohajis were powerful in bureaucracy, Punjabis in the army, Bhutto came to power soon after
#
Bangladesh was created and ethnic identity assumed huge proportions, top quote.
#
And Bhutto, of course, being a Sindhi himself, right?
#
Yeah, Bhutto is a Sindhi, the family is from Larkana.
#
So in India, if we look at the story of Sindhis, it's largely a benign story.
#
There are stereotypes of Sindhis being opportunistic or whatever, or sometimes loud and crass and
#
you detailed many of them out.
#
But the community has really worked hard, gotten ahead, been enterprising, all of that.
#
By and large, it's a benign positive journey that Sindhis have made through India.
#
What's happened in Pakistan though?
#
So I think the first big blow was something which was called One Unit in 1950, where they
#
said that now we are one country, we have one language, and they brought in Urdu.
#
And of course, that was the first step towards the creation of Bangladesh, right?
#
Because you can't imagine all of Bengal speaking Urdu, I mean, absolute rubbish, but that happened
#
in Sindh because the Sindhi people are much more mild and they were, as I said, they were
#
not in positions of power because the people within the positions of power left and they
#
were replaced by outsiders who didn't understand this.
#
And so they actually got colonized.
#
That was the first thing that happened.
#
They were not able to ever really restore their dignity to an extent because they were
#
looked down on and they were said, oh, you're only, they were told you're only fit to drive
#
a camel cart and stuff like that.
#
And I think it didn't help that some of the landowners were not cultured really, they
#
were not educated, they just had a lot of money.
#
And that's the same in many places where there are people who own land and they don't realize
#
that they are just living off these poor people, they're getting a lot of money and they're
#
not sharing any of it and it's a really horrible thing to do.
#
So that is part of what happened and they really miss, even when we went, which was
#
how many years after partition, I mean, 65 plus something, more than 65 years because
#
I wrote the book 65 years after, soon after that we went to launch that book at the Karachi
#
And there people were saying, why did you leave and I'm like, no, I didn't leave, I
#
don't know anything about this place and why don't you come back?
#
Which is so sweet, but it's not something that anybody would want to do.
#
People might want to go back to visit the home that they once lived in.
#
My mom never came, she didn't want to, when we were going, I wanted her so badly to come,
#
but she completely refused.
#
And she said, no, they threw us out, why should I go?
#
And I remember people when I said that my mother says she's not coming because they
#
threw us out, why should I go?
#
And I remember Irfan Ali, who I'm still in touch with, we met on Facebook and he said,
#
please tell her we are very, very sorry, all of us are, please tell her to accept our apologies
#
and we really want her to come so that we can show her how very sorry we are.
#
You know, we got messages like that.
#
So there's that huge outpouring of love and sadness, guilt, you know, I think they talk
#
more about the suffering of the Hindus than the Hindus talk about, because the Hindus
#
are like, okay, we went through a bad time, it got over, we moved on.
#
But they, you know, feel that they still talk about it, which I don't really like that much.
#
But you know, I appreciate that they still acknowledge it and they feel bad about it.
#
When I traveled to Pakistan in 2006, I was covering the cricket tour there and one of
#
the things that sort of struck me and I knew it at an intellectual level, but I had to
#
go there to experience it, is that we're basically the same people, right?
#
Lahore is just so much like Delhi, Lahore is much more in common with Delhi than say, Delhi
#
has with Chennai, for example, I mean, that could be two foreign countries, Karachi with
#
I mean, these are cliches, but I really felt it when I actually went there and the warmth
#
In fact, sometimes I think that today we would not be, I'm not sure a reciprocal warmth would
#
necessarily be there, which is truly tragic, but the warmth, again, it'll sound like cliches
#
where shopkeepers don't take your money and all of that, it's kind of all of that.
#
In your interactions with people from across the border, including other Sindhis, do you
#
get that sense too, that fine, Pakistan was a huge rupture, but what has divided us is
#
the politics is sort of the different leaderships and their imperatives and incentives and even
#
those just happened at that particular point in time.
#
If independence happens a few months later, Jinnah is dead, the whole position could be
#
If it happens earlier, things could be different.
#
It just kind of happened like that.
#
But given that people talk about the partition of Punjab or the partition of Bengal, but
#
Sindhis went through a painful rupture as well and today you can meet them across the
#
border and you spoke about that in general, the sentiment there is so positive that is
#
regretful that people had to leave and there is, of course, some resentment here, but you
#
still feel that connection with your homeland.
#
So do you think there is something to that?
#
Because more and more as time goes by, I find that lines on a map are kind of becoming irrelevant
#
in this globalized world.
#
It would be so nice if that was true.
#
And I did say when I last left on my second and final visit to Sindh, that I'll never
#
go back until the borders open.
#
And I'm not trying to say that I'm speaking for Akhanda Bharat or anything like that.
#
I was wondering, SARS is going where with this, where?
#
Yeah, what I meant to say is that, you know, if I can drive across the border and just
#
flash my passport, you know, like you do when you're traveling in Europe, I mean, you don't
#
even have to flash your passport, just drive through, you pay the toll and you pass through.
#
Which is what it kind of was for a decade and a half after.
#
It may not have been that much.
#
Like my dad went back in, when I say back, he went for the first time, he's traveled
#
to Sindh, he traveled to Karachi and he was, it was in 1957, so he was, and I saw the papers
#
after my mom died, we were cleaning up her stuff, we found this passport, red color passport,
#
which says India Pakistan passport.
#
And it was my dad's and this was before he became a tea planter.
#
He was working for a pharmaceutical company in Bombay and his boss, a French pharmaceutical
#
company and his boss loved him and he took him to Pakistan on a business development
#
So he had to have that passport and he had to leave it because he was an Indian, he had
#
to leave the passport with the police at the immigration.
#
And when he came back, he had to collect the passport to be able to leave and they couldn't
#
So I don't know how many hours it took, they took him into a room which had, it was full
#
of trunks and the trunks were all open and the trunks were full of passports.
#
So the passport had to be found.
#
It was in one of those trunks and eventually they found it and they gave it to him and
#
This is what he used to tell us.
#
And I read, so I found the papers, I realized that he had had to apply and you know how
#
he went and he must have been there on the 10th Independence Day.
#
I never got a chance to ask him what that was like, which is too bad.
#
But it wasn't just walking across the border.
#
You know, you did need a passport.
#
You did, you could have lost your passport because, you know, they wanted to show you
#
that they were the boss at least for a while at that point.
#
So it was, it became much harder with the wars and then of course after the war of 72
#
there was just this big steel wall which nobody could ever penetrate.
#
But right from the beginning the problem was not just passing back and forth, even information.
#
You didn't know what was happening.
#
So that's why, you know, again it became vanished because there was just nothing coming through.
#
I don't think the border was ever completely easy.
#
So you hear of people who would go and come back because they would sneak across, they
#
knew the points where nobody was watching and now of course that's not possible anymore.
#
Yeah, and you know, before this, when we took our break, we also had a lunch, so we actually
#
took a break and we were chatting about how this should be in OTT and my suggestion was
#
that, you know, this could be a great web series with three overlapping storylines of
#
modern Sindhi family or Sindhi family in the 40s before partition and some old timers in
#
the family back in, you know, different times.
#
And I'm just thinking if that OTT is ever made, you know, season one, episode one should
#
begin with that shot of a room full of steel trunks, all of them open and all full of these
#
red India-Pakistan passports, what a tremendous, you know, what a lovely shot.
#
Can I ask you a question which, it feels intrusive, so you don't have to answer it if you don't
#
My father had died last year and we sold off his house and while we were getting rid of
#
it, I had to go through all the things, right, most of which we had to chuck away, some of
#
which one kept and going through things accumulated over decades is almost like seeing a life
#
In haphazard ways and different ways and you mentioned you found this passport when you
#
were going through your mother's sins, do you feel comfortable talking about what else
#
you found and what did that sort of evoke in you?
#
You mean the precious things that she'd kept, right, they had kept right through their moves,
#
so they lived on a tea estate and they could there keep everything they wanted, they had
#
a lot of stuff, then they moved to Bangalore where they lived in a much smaller place after
#
my dad, his Parkinson's became too much for them to, for him to continue.
#
Actually he could have still worked, he could have still continued with his job but he didn't
#
want and he had stopped driving, he could have continued to work but he didn't want
#
people to see him deteriorating, so anyway they moved to Bangalore which is smaller,
#
so must have chucked off lots of stuff.
#
Then they came to live with us which was on like a huge campaign to bring them, so then
#
also they must have thrown away a lot of stuff, so what they kept would have been what really
#
meant a lot to them and one of the things I remember now which is so lovely is a collection
#
of salary slips that my mother earned and that was for a very short time, I don't remember
#
how long but there's this bunch of salary slips, now she was somebody, my parents met
#
in college in Bombay, they were at National College and National College is a huge and
#
lovely Sindhi story which I love telling and it was only along the way I started telling
#
that story out of sheer passion for this guy, you know the story and how this man Kundanani,
#
he was a professor at National College in Hyderabad, Sindh.
#
At the college my grandfather studied at and I'm sure my uncle Kanna must have also studied
#
there and my mum would have studied there if she had, I mean she was only 13 when they
#
left, that wasn't necessary and when partition took place, at that time most of the students
#
and most of the teachers were Hindus, so after partition anyway during the travels like everything
#
was closed and finally sometime in, I don't remember the date but I think probably November
#
something 1947 or maybe even later, college opened, hardly anyone came, things were just
#
going to seed and he decided now I have to go and I'm going to take my college with me,
#
so he packed up some laboratory equipment and he packed up some books and he took them
#
with a peon, Dayaram, whose name I found on the National College website, went to Hyderabad
#
station and they tried, when they wanted to, they asked him what's inside the trunks and
#
he said it's treasure, so they opened it and they saw books and they said huh and they,
#
you know he got into the train and he came to Bombay and he was staying like most families
#
with many others in a small place, very crowded, person who told me this was a young boy at
#
that time and he said that Kundanani used to sit down every Sunday and write a stack
#
of postcards, every Sunday he would write a stack of postcards and he was sending them
#
to his former colleagues at National College and they were all over in Ajmer and Bhopal
#
and Pune and blah blah blah and he was telling them I'm going to build a college and you
#
will soon have your place back and you know you may be working in your uncle's shop or
#
you may be giving tuitions or you may be frying tikkis or whatever but you will get your professor
#
job back and he built National College in Bombay with a lot of, I mean it's a story
#
of entrepreneurship and whatever whatever and that's where my parents met, so it's
#
a big deal, I mean you know I realised along the way, I was telling the story and it's
#
a fab story but it's a story which is essential to me also because you know I wouldn't have
#
been there if there wasn't any National College.
#
So then they both did their masters in chemistry and my father got this job with a pharmaceutical
#
company and my mother was teaching at National College, she started off as a demonstrator
#
in the chem lab so she would have continued there and being you know the bossy person
#
that she is, she would have pretty soon been the head of the chemistry department and lived
#
happily ever after as I suppose heads of chemistry departments do but then she became a planter's
#
wife and she couldn't work.
#
There was a time when in my school they needed a science teacher and the headmaster asked
#
her will you do it and she came, she worked there for two months or something, I don't
#
remember how long, may have been longer, it might have been longer because there are people
#
who still remember her from my brother's class and the class younger than her and they remember
#
her like as a really wonderful person which used to make me wonder are they talking about
#
the same person who I knew but anyway, anyway, so you know that thing of the salary slips,
#
I was so touched, she obviously like it really meant a lot to her, yeah.
#
I can't remember if there was anything much else but whatever there was, I didn't throw
#
it, I mean I have a little museum, my office is a little museum which has things here and
#
I have some things from Sindh which is almost unbelievable, I don't know how it happened,
#
I have like there's a small little silver thing with a stick and it's got my mum's name
#
written underneath Situ, it's a surma, I don't know we never used it, we were never, my grandmother
#
was never allowed to put surma in eyes because according to my mum it has antimony in it,
#
that's what happens when you study chemistry right, you know what goes into surma and then
#
I have this pot, it's a brass pot, I've forgotten what it's called in Sindhi but that's very
#
precious it came from Sindh, I have one bowl which I remember eating from, I mean you know
#
I don't know how my mum kept it, it was in my grandparents place, our food was eaten
#
on plates and this bowl like a wide katori in which you had your, it's like a katori
#
but a broad one made of bell metal, so I guess my mum just kept it because she was like me,
#
somebody who believed in museums and yeah I think that's about it, maybe one or two
#
other little things like there's this fan she was given when she got married which was
#
Fascinating you know I'll leave it to listeners to discover you know all your books, you know
#
one of the most fascinating parts of the first book when I was reading about the history
#
was also the whole saga around Pir Pagaroh right, all those kind of decades he had such
#
a massive following, then the boy in the box controversy, then the minor role that people
#
in your family had in the legal battles that he fought and it's just fascinating and that
#
would make for really the you know the most juicy episodes of the OTT which you will hopefully
#
soon be a consultant for, fingers crossed, but I want to kind of go back to your sort
#
of personal journey of writing these books, so you've spoken to your mother, you've gotten
#
these stories, at first I guess you thought you'll just write her story down.
#
Yes, it was going to be her story for our family, then I realized that's there's too
#
much to tell, I was extremely lucky to you know just completely by coincidence keep meeting
#
people who provided a completely different representative experience and that's what
#
made that stories from a vanished homeland a kind of complete book because there were
#
so many different voices with different stories, I was also very lucky to be introduced to
#
Nandita Bhavnani who's a scholar and she had a huge collection of books on Sindh, so I
#
didn't have to go looking anywhere, she just gave me everything I wanted and I could read
#
stuff from her library which I was really lucky, so that was the most important part
#
of this journey that I had access to those books, otherwise where would one get them
#
you know, it has to be you don't get them, we don't have a department or departments of South Asian studies right,
#
I mean we don't have department of Sindh studies anywhere in this country and then after that
#
I had some again extremely lucky break, somebody read my book in Chile, Santiago, Sindhi family,
#
a young man who had recently become interested in, he was in his 30s at that time, 32 I think
#
or maybe slightly older and he got the book on Amazon, he found it on Amazon and then
#
he wrote in to my publisher's ID saying that where can I get more copies of this lovely
#
book because if you're a Sindhi and hi Sanjay in case you're listening to this, hope you
#
don't mind my saying it, he didn't want to pay the Amazon price and obviously would prefer
#
to get it direct from the publisher, so yeah we made touch and we got along extremely well
#
and he came to Pune because he had family there and we met and I met him and his cousins
#
and they were young and so vibrant, so articulate, all of them so highly educated, is that how
#
you think of a Sindhi person, they are absolutely typical of the diaspora.
#
They would actually be likely to fit the description because they do tend to already be the wealthiest
#
like I think one of your guests pointed out, Sindhis are everywhere first, like if an Indian
#
has landed up somewhere you can bet it's a Sindhi, so which is also a stereotype but
#
They were there in the pots and then from the pots they went inland but yeah, so he
#
then, they said we want to do a family history and I thought that they being who they are,
#
they will write pieces and I'll mentor them to structure a new book but at some point
#
they commissioned me, Sanjay commissioned me to write the book and so that was a huge
#
It was one of the big steps in the journey because it exposed me to the diaspora.
#
I read everything I could about the diaspora, plus I travelled within the diaspora and I
#
met people and when I went to Chile to interview him, his dad and his dad's sister who was
#
visiting and another sister who lived also lived in Chile, they were so amazing.
#
They took me to two other places in Chile where there were other clusters of Sindhis
#
to get a sense of what life was like in the diaspora so far from, I mean Sindh of course
#
but from Pune where many of them have homes and yeah, I could interview like in Puntarenas
#
which is not too far from the South Pole, I interviewed this gentleman whose dad had
#
first come to Sindh, to Puntarenas in 1907.
#
So you know that historical link and so that was another big step in this where I, you
#
know, then after that I did a module for Sahapedia on the Sindharkis based on what I'd learnt
#
while writing this family story.
#
The other big thing that happened during this because they also took me to Haridwar where
#
we sat with their family priest and I, you know, went through all the records and came
#
so I could do the family tree dating back to the early 19th century.
#
And then came the Amil book which was also, it was a commission from the Khudabadi Amil
#
Panchayat of Bombay and that was also suggested to them by Nandita Bhavnani, I mean she told
#
them why don't you ask her, she'll do it.
#
And that was the next step, it was a lot of work because I interviewed a lot of people
#
for that book, a huge number of people, I don't even know how many but I know there
#
were at least 150, there might have been more.
#
Those solid interviews like 2-3 hours and getting to the bottom of that person's life.
#
And after that, yeah, then after that I've been invited to speak at conferences and yeah
#
of course the culmination of the whole thing is Losing Home which is the book that I've
#
just done and it is right in the process of being released.
#
And I've been fortunate enough to get an early physical copy and it's quite beautiful and
#
I'll recommend it to everyone.
#
Question that comes to mind from what you mentioned about your friend Sanjay from Chile,
#
is it the case that the diaspora, diaspora Sindhis actually when they care about their
#
Sindhiness work harder to hold on to it because it's in greater risk, like if you're a Sindhi
#
in India, you know aspects of your Sindhiness will kind of be around in the food and you'll
#
hear your parents speak and you won't feel that urgency that this is vanishing, I have
#
But with the diaspora, will there, is there, do you sense a greater urgency?
#
Not with Sanjay because he's an intellectual and with Sanjay his parents spoke to each
#
other in Sindhi, not that they didn't, they cook all kinds of food.
#
I mean his dad grew up in Indonesia and Indonesian food is his favourite so they cook Indonesian
#
a lot but of course Sindhi food is a staple in their home because his mum grew up in Pune
#
and they are very much a Sindhi speaking family, although they are so international in every
#
way because they can live anywhere, they have family everywhere, you know.
#
So that is something really, really, I consider myself extremely fortunate to know them and
#
have been part of putting their family story together.
#
But there are places where you find this, not in their family, but you do find some
#
clusters where rituals are important and those rituals may not exactly be rituals that came
#
from Sindh because Ganpati immersion is a big thing now in the diaspora and I recently
#
learnt that in Karachi there was Ganpati immersion but that was done by the Marashans of Karachi,
#
You know they did have it but it wasn't part of the Hindu-Sindhi culture.
#
Hindu-Sindhis got it from Bombay, Pune wherever they lived and they became a part of those
#
societies and Ganpati is very big amongst Sindhis now but it wasn't in Sindh.
#
I mean definitely you still see the pictures of Ganesh Ji in Hindu places of worship in
#
Sindh, not that it wasn't there but not the way it is, you know, where we have a festival.
#
Festival has grown all over India also.
#
I think I heard that they have these processions even in Chennai now.
#
I don't think I'm mistaken about that, I think it's true.
#
Poor Chennai, which kind of indicates what I feel about them.
#
Tell me about also then, you know, you've been writing all these books.
#
Tell me also how and when and why you decided to get into publishing and being a publisher
#
That's such an easy answer.
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It's because when my mum was telling me her story, she said that, and then, so you know
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they were on the ship and that was their first bit of culture shock where they saw these
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puris which were, oh my god, why are these puris so small, you know, everything is different.
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So then they were in the ship, everybody's anxious, nobody knows what's going to happen.
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And they arrive in Bombay after two days, two nights on the ship and they can see Bombay,
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but they can't get off because the ship is not allowed to dock.
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And they're told that you have to spend another night and then one more night and they don't
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know what's going to happen to them because are they going to send us back?
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Are they going to send us somewhere else?
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You know, what is going to happen to us?
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Anyway, they arrived in Bombay and she says to me, it was the 14th of November.
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And I was like, oh my god.
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And I think we were probably in July at that point.
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I said, let's do this and we'll have a big bash on the 14th of November and we will invite
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all these cousins who were so close to her who I don't even know, I've never met.
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Some of their names are familiar, but I never met them.
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And that's how it happened that I put that book out, but I also sent it to OUPP in Karachi
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and they accepted it for publication.
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So yeah, it was again, you know, like from this thing of being a ghostwriter, what do
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you expect from a ghostwriter, Amit, obviously she has to publish her own books, you know.
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So I did and it came, it worked out fine because once Oxford University Press publishes your
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book, the libraries around the world accept it.
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So that book is in Princeton and Harvard and SOAS and Oxford and Cambridge and blah, blah,
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Wherever there is a department of South Asian studies, they had access to the book and some
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of them must have got it.
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The places I mentioned, I know have it because I get messages on and off from people who
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are doing their PhD or whatever.
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Then Amal Book is also there, Tapestry is also there in some of the universities.
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And so Black and White Fountain, which is the name of my publishing concern, is also
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in the library system, yeah.
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So I guess the books spoke for themselves and yeah, I have a problem actually.
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It's a very big problem.
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I know how to bring out really lovely books.
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And I became very, very, you know, right from the first book, I was making the pages myself.
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I was very, very happy that I could decide where the picture goes and how big the caption
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is and which lines should go next to which lines.
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You know, that's really important to me and I still do my pages myself.
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What was the problem you mentioned?
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The problem is that I don't know how to sell.
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So I can't sell and I can't do everything, obviously, I mean, you know, and now, I mean,
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there was a time when I could do quite a lot, but now I'm not bothered.
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I couldn't be bothered.
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I think somebody else should sell the books and I don't know how because books are not
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And so now I feel I won't do any more books.
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I'll just like blog and Instagram and, you know, just put out stuff.
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And that's good enough.
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And for the listeners, I'll inform you that Saaz gifted me three of these books just now
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and they're pretty immaculate.
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I mean, I bought earlier ones on Kindle, but these are pretty immaculate.
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So if there is someone, if any listener feels that, you know, she can help Saaz get in touch
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with her, you know, take it over.
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So those three books, which I gave you were the books that I've published by other people
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and which are to do with partition, the Cindy experience of partition, not by me.
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So that's something that I did.
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And Losing Home, which is by me, is the 10th book in that series.
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I got this idea that I'll do something for children.
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And when I started implementing the idea, I knew the first thing I need is good quality
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And I found somebody completely by chance, the first person who was recommended to me
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turned out to be perfect for the job.
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And you know, I just sent him, I got his number and I sent him a WhatsApp message.
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And I just said, I started working on this book, which is about the Cindy experience
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And I'm looking for somebody who will do illustrations, which are historically authentic and who is
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good at drawing faces because I want everybody who's in the book, all the people to be seen
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and recognized whether they are from family photos or whether they are political personalities.
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So yeah, I mean, he immediately responded with so much enthusiasm.
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And then we actually got started with the illustrations before I started writing.
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And we had like four or five fabulous illustrations out before I started writing and they were
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And I just couldn't believe it.
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And I still feel how lucky I am, his name is Shubhadeep Mukherjee.
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And he is from Shanti Niketan.
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And then he has his master's from Baroda.
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And then he worked, he works in Bombay and he's worked in senior levels in the corporate
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world in advertising and in films.
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And now he's kind of doing whatever he wants to do.
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And I'm so lucky that he's doing spoke with me because I mean, I was giving him a full
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brief and then I changed my mind or I think of something new.
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And even though the book, the illustrations are so complex and with so much detail, he
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just never has a problem in changing them, which I think is amazing.
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I just think that, you know, we spoke earlier about my journey and how I started writing
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And I think this is his finding Shubhadeep has been really a very important part of it
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because we've come to this book, which what I wanted to do with this book when I say children,
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I don't really mean little kids because I don't, I realize that I can't write for little
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I'm talking about anyone who can understand, I mean, you know, the Harry Potter generation,
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people like nine years, 10 years old, that's fine.
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And this book has all the messages that I want to pass on, you know, all the messages
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that I want to pass on to the future generations.
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And it's a collection of stories, partly family stories and historical.
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And this is the spectrum of the Sindhi experience, and that's what the book is about.
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And finding, I mean, the title wasn't that easy, but we came up with losing home, finding
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home, which seems to work.
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And so Shubhadeep and I met once, just once we met in Bombay and he said to me, you know,
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anyone who does a book like this will want a center spread.
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So I was like, oh, what do I do, should I put a map or what?
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I mean, you know, or should I, I don't know.
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So then suddenly I remember this photo, which is from 1916.
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It's a visit that Gandhi made to Sindh and he's sitting in the middle of a crowd.
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And there are lots of people next to him are the most important people, but there are all
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kinds of people and the women and children are sitting in front and those women and children
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are obviously the families of the very important people sitting next to Gandhi.
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So I decided let's put that in the center.
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And there was so much symbolism to it because, you know, you have Gandhi in the center.
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And then I said, okay, I told Shubh, let's have Gandhi right in the center so that he
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is actually there are, you know, Gandhi's on both pages, there's a partition metaphor
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And of course, Gandhi is on both sides.
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So that was what we have.
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And I'm very, very excited about this book because it carries, there's so much in it.
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It's only 112 pages of which I think about 40% is pictures, Shubh's illustrations, of
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course, but we also have some archival photos, which shows how people are very old photos.
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I mean, they're so old that nobody knows exactly who these people are.
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Unfortunately, we don't know the names of most of the people in them, but you can see
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You can see their caps and their footwear and, you know, what they're wearing and how
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they're seated and all that, which I think tells you a lot about if you're, you know,
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if you're interested in history or if you're interested in your own family, if you're a
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Sindhi, so where you came from.
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And also, you know, there's so many stories which are related like from the illustrations,
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like we were just saying, I couldn't put everything into the book.
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So I have the illustrations to keep talking about various other things that I also want
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Yeah, and I have to say that while the book isn't out yet, you've been kind enough to,
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you know, give me a proof copy and I love the center spread.
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There's even a young LK Adwani in there along with various other Sindhis and Gandhi split
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in the middle, almost like Toba Tek Singh, as it were, Toba Tek Gandhi.
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So we're still struggling with that.
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I hope to have it printed and ready very soon and it's actually already showing for pre-order
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So I just have to get my act together and make sure that it's out before and yeah.
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And by the way, I have a title for season one episode one.
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I mean, I don't know what the show will be called, but I have a title for season one
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It was the 14th of November.
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I don't know how we're going to work with that because it's Chacha Nehru's birthday.
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Yeah, I mean, is that why they made the ship wait?
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Because they wanted it to land on his birthday.
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Couldn't put anything past them, but it works well for losing home because it's a children's
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So, you know, we thought of launching that also around children's day.
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I mean, it will be out way before that, but we are planning to do this launch in Delhi
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at the India International Center and Achal Malhotra is going to be there.
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So we're going to be talking about various things.
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I had an episode with her.
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I'm really lucky that she's agreed to do this.
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Amazing people keeping the past alive, which I feel is so important.
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I may not have felt that 25 years ago, but it just feels so important in moderating and
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tempering and informing the present moment.
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So final bunch of questions, and one is that, you know, while you are a oral historian,
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you know, you mentioned these long interviews which last three, four hours, two, three hours,
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And just as an audio person, I wish these audio files themselves were sort of archived
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somewhere and you can just hear their own voices.
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And have you thought of that?
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In fact, 1947 partition archive asked me if I would give them one.
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And I'm so happy because then they'll be accessible.
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So there's some admin stuff we have to do.
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A, we have to get, I have to get their formats of permissions and stuff.
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And B, I have to go through the process of, because like I said, I don't know how many
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I mean, they're just there.
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I need to just, you know, date them and put some keywords and the name, you know, the
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year of the date, birth of date and birth of death of the person interviewed and all
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I mean, it'll take me a few weeks to do.
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And once I'm probably going to do it, hopefully it'll get done for the end of 2022.
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My penultimate question, if there are young Sindhis listening to this who are thinking
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that, hey, we are young Sindhis, but we are not young Sindhi Sindhis in the sense that,
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you know, that connection isn't there and all of that.
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And now they're curious and they want to find out more.
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And of course they'll buy your books.
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But besides that, you know, what would you, what would you tell them?
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Look for family stories is one thing and try and document them and, you know, keep them,
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record them for the future.
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A second thing I'd say is just be a little careful of what you get on WhatsApp because
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some of it is not really accurate and it's misleading.
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I'd recommend All Way to Sindh, which I mentioned earlier, which is a collection of conversations
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with experts, Aruna Madnani, and she's picked a lot of people who know staff and it's really
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There are some books, there's a lot of writing happening.
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There's some, you know, there's some fiction, like you saw that with the one, one of the
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books I gave you, which is called Beyond the Rainbow by Murali Melwani.
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And Murali is a really good writer and what he's done is he, he calls this book, A Gift
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of My Travels, where he sees things and, you know, they stay in his mind and then he weaves
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And they are based in the diaspora and they are so, so lifelike.
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People from the diaspora, they recognize these characters and the situation.
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So it's not just a collection of short stories, it's also a little business manual, you know,
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which tells you how Sindhis sell and what they sell and what, how they shouldn't do
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things and, you know, the kind of habits some people have, which they shouldn't have and
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I mean, I think there are, there are good books and there are now so many blogs and
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they're like, it's a huge, it's a growing number.
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Every day I see some new Sindhi handle on Instagram, because whoever, whoever's interested
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in spreading the word is using online methods.
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So my final question for you, which is sort of a traditional final question for all guests
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who pass through these lands of the seen and the unseen, which is for me and my listeners
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recommend books, music, films, which mean a lot to you.
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So they don't have to do anything to do with, they don't have to have anything to do with
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Sindh, but just books you love, films you love, music you love.
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Now I'm not at all, I mean, this has not been on my mind, so let me think.
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The books that I love the most, I, when I was young, I used to read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut.
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I feel, I just loved his work.
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It was, you know, every word would make me happy.
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Every sentence would make me happy, not every word.
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And who else can I say?
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I have, you know, back in the day when I was in college in my first, in the first years
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of my working life, there were these secondhand book stalls in Fountain.
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I don't think there's there anymore.
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If they're there, those books are not there.
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But whatever books they had, they were the books of the authors of that time.
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And everyone I knew had read those books.
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And you know, there was Philip Roth and there was, I guess, Thomas Hardy was there because
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it was a textbook series.
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I'm not that much of a Hardy fan.
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It's a little bit long winded and tedious, but who else, Douglas Adams, Leslie Thomas,
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I love P.G. Woodhouse, Makes You Laugh Aloud.
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And when it comes to I'm not good with movies, I love watching, but I don't remember.
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I watch with like 50% attention and enjoy them a lot, entertaining.
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But I don't remember the names and I don't remember the actors and stuff.
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So I'll put you on the spot, supposing that OTT is made and there are two characters who
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are you, because different timelines, there's an 18-year-old Saz and there's a 55-year-old
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You know, who would you like to play you?
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18 years old, let's see, I'm not very good with actors, but I can describe the 18-year-old
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Oh, God, that's so hard.
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Give me some actors names and you know, I think I know somebody who had loved to play
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me and that's Amrita Rao, who I really like her a lot.
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She just happens to be my cousin's daughter.
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But in terms of personality, different from me, because I was completely wacky when I
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And she's such a lovely, stable person.
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So let's go with Amrita, if she'll agree.
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And what about the one who?
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Who could do it better than me?
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So Saz, thank you so much for your time today.
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I really enjoyed listening to your questions and trying to answer them.
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I don't even know what I said, because you make the environment so comfortable and so
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relaxed that I was just talking without thinking and I hope I didn't make a fool of myself.
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This was fantastic, though I don't know what your daughter Veda will think about all the
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes
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Saz doesn't seem to active on social media, which is why she's so incredibly productive.
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But you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
