Annikki went to her Seventh Day Adventist Church in Byculla.
I had about an hour to spare. I decided to visit the grave of my elder sister, Nalini, something I had not been to see since the gravestone was laid there in early 1961.
My taxi driver found the cemetery after asking around a bit. The cemetery office was well managed and run. The office was open. The officers quickly found the location of Nalini's grave on paper. But when the guy took me out, could not find the grave.
We returned to the office to recheck. First, he told me that probably the plot may have been purchased, suggesting that someone else may have been buried over her grave. Then he said that no tombstone had been laid.
I assured him that I was there when she was buried and also I had been there when the tombstone was laid.
He then handed me over to another cemetery worker,. This gentleman took me to another part of the cemetery - just 10 metres from the office. At first, he too could not locate the grave. But suddenly, I recognised the large tombstone my parents had laid for their daughter, my sister.
As I stood in silence, something that had never struck me before, hit me right between the eyes - Nalini had been just 23 when she had died, not even in the prime of her adult life.
I wept at this thought as I had always considered Nalini as my elder sister, the mature one, the old one. And she had always been that to me.
To think that here was I, at an age of 66, looking down at my sister's grave some 49 years after her passing. It was a shock to me just to think she had been just 23 years old when she had left us.
I remember much talk in our home that she would soon be too old to get married. The rush had been on to find her a husband.
And what tragedy had followed.
As the marble grave was raised, almost to knee height on a granite slab, it was not dirty of filthy like many around it at ground level. I thanked my parents for their foresight, something which had not been given by my siblings when they planned the graves of my parents.
Is it a life of coincidences?
Yesterday, I had an email from someone in the USA asking whether I could recall an M. Varghese who had studied and finished from Bishop Cotton’s School in Bangalore in 1956. As I had left when I had completed the IVth Standard in 1953, I did not recall that name.
I replied to the gentleman that maybe he could contact Aditya Sondhi, the school historian (in my eyes), or my cousin, Anand Matthan, who had finished school in 1955. Or, maybe he was thinking of my cousin Varghese Matthan, who would have completed school in 1956 had he not left to join Madras Christian College School in 1952.
In passing, I asked the Old Cottonian whether he was any relation to the fabulous cricketer of that time who used to play for the school. I had watched him many a time, sitting on the stone parapet around the school ground, plucking and eating the fresh bamboo sprouts that lined the first eleven pitch.
I quickly had a reply from him, thanking me for my efforts and that Aditya had provided him with loads of material. Further, he was indeed the cricketer that I was thinking about. And his father had been a friend of my father.
Further, he added, that was I not the same person who lived opposite St. Joseph's College Hostel and who had a quiet shy sister, Nalini, who, obviously had been the heartthrob for many of the St. Josephites - and he listed a few of them to me.
He was thinking that as he had lived just around the corner from where I had, maybe we had played tennis ball cricket together. We did have a team but I do not recall this outstanding young cricketer of our time sharing the field with the likes of me and our rag-a-muffin cricketing friends!
In passing he paid me a nice compliment which I will treasure. He wrote:
You are a Renaissance type of an individual ( passion, vision, empathy & creativity ) & continue your quest of keeping us informed.
Sadly, I am not a blogger about Cottonians as I was there too short a time to write about for 10 to 15 years nostalgically. I do wish there was someone doing just that!
It is indeed a very small world . As I am having a bit of a discussion on Facebook with some Home Educationists, I wondered how all this would fit in with their thinking of isolating the children from the real world of childhood, daily interaction with many tens of children, and the most important cry of our Mumbai School "School First, House Next, Self Last".
But that is another subject that maybe I will take up later.
Suffice to say that when I returned back to the Guest House, my thoughts were on my sister, a shy pretty girl, married at the age of 22 (because many thought otherwise she would be too old to get married), childbirth at 23 and followed by her tragic demise 15 days later of tetanus. Thoughts kept flooding back to my mind and I wondered what a difference life would have been if she had been around.
Finally, in passing, as nostalgia is on my mind. I thought I would share with you a photograph of my family dating back to the early 1980s.
Much water has passed under this bridge!
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