Hullo Saeed,
This is a very personal reaction to your book  to Ammi.  I read the novel at the start of this year. It is now almost November and, of the many details in it, there are just a cluster of impressions that remain with me. Instead I have gained by thinking of the book through distance and perspective. Am left holding, so to speak,  an  uncut diamond in my hand: weighty, mysterious, rough to the touch, soft to the touch, warm then cold, graphic but elusive,......at times with vivid descriptions, at times filled with silences and stillness beyond words, ..An object that remains just as it was, delightfully and perhaps deliberately uneven, I think, because  embellishments such as smooth,, polished, calculated  seem to be elements foreign to a letter written from the heart, from Saeed to his Ammi.

 Although many details have been lost in my memory with time, the ambience of the book surfaces often and easily whenever I want to recall. This is perhaps due to the fact that I could identify with so much in the book. Many incidents took place in the city I still love and which in my childhood and till my early youth retained its pluralistic, harmonious, unique style. The letter was written by someone around my age, someone who belonged to a minority community as I did, who went to an elite school like I did, very English, and suffered as well because of a sense of rootlessness. Where the journey was different, I managed to envy, become irritated, amused , disagreeing here and there, or thumping the novelist on the back in assent: the whole gamut of emotions came into play. Occasionally, I even allowed myself a feeling of triumph as I seemed to have the edge over the novelist in certain situations. In other words I was challenged at every point to become" a creatve reader" to borrow a term from Emerson. I had to take a position almost constantly and especially when the novel turned from episodic to educative.

( Hope what I have written makes some sense. More follows tomorrow. Duty calls now .) Carol I wondered why the details in the book that remained with me for so long were almost always the ones that I knew about well before reading your letter. The latter was frequently an assertion of what I knew already through Talat (we had worked together in the same premises, she for the Aryan Path and I for the P.E.N.) One had to take one look at the way Talat carried herself to realise she must have a mother who emphasised elegance and deportment, a fact mentioned in your book.

I knew long ago about Fereira (Fonseca, in the book) Mansion and its  little inmates, (the abundance of pets, I mean). Ramesh (copy of Richard Burton then), was courting Talat at the time and you and Jennifer were getting closer. So I already knew how delightfully cosmopolitan the Mirza's were . Talat  told me right  then that your wonderful Ammi used to be going to the Gurudhwar to hear the Granth Sahib, a fact (chuckle, chuckle) I seemed to have been acquainted with even before you were .....  She also told me that your mother was very handy in the house. My mother was too and her little tool box, also discovered by us.
well after she had died, must have been identical to the one your mother had! My mother could fix almost anything even the sewing machine, just like yours! And she had the kind of business acumen your mother seems also to have had My father was academic, well versed in Chaucer, Shakespeare and the French writers, but not in any of the Indian languages except for Konkani which derived from Portuguese and Marathi. So I was especially grateful for belonging to a pluralistic society like Mumbai. We had many treasured Muslim friends with whom my parents used to go to the races at Mahalaxmi almost every Sunday. Parsi customers and friends who invited us for Navjotes and weddings, Hindu friends who often sent us sweets and with whom we celebrated Diwali and Holi,etc., and with whom  my parents played bridge regularly. I stayed with a rather special Punjabi family in 1960 for three months as my parents were abroad on a cruise. And there I discovered yoga. Later on I joined a course in Santa Cruise. The yoga and Budhist way of life is what appeals most to me now, and in which I feel most comfortable, the other side of dogmas and forced commandments. None of our friends tried to impose their beliefs on us. That was just not an issue. We just shared at a human level..  Back to details connected with Ammi, one you may not know about: Talat used to feed me almost every day with the toasted sandwiches she had brought from home, and she would tell me how fastidious your mother was regarding cleanliness, dipping all vegetables into potassium permagenate. Little did we know that so many of the other details would appear  in book format later! !!!

So as you see  I have  taken  the beautiful rough diamond in my hand again and your musings of that time flow into  my own past, a take off for reminiscences of Mumbai and my own family situation and certain memorable events undimmed with age. My Hindi and Maths teacher was definitely different to your Hindi teacher. Mine was a freedom fighter. He was my very first experience of someone who loved India. My father had also spun with Gandhi and loved the symbolism, but more from the standpoint of a brown Englishman, I think, asking for fair play. Here though was "Sir" Ramanlal, who let us keep our books closed throughout the year except for three months before the final exams. Instead, most of the time he taught us about life and philosophy and told us amazing stories, curbing our exuberance when necessary. But above all there was  a universal skill he helped me to acquire, the skill of solving riders. My Euclid was rather dog-eared in those days. I found great exhilaration in being encouraged to draw constructions and solve and solve and solve until we all said Q.E.D. an ability in other life happenings that scarcely came easily to me.. The first time "Sir" entered our classroom, we must have all looked like little brown English girls in uniforms, ties , blazers and all. So he placed his chappals on the desk until we were mesmerised by them and, needless to say, he was wearing a Nehru cap and a spotless white dhothi. Years later, we visited Panchgani when I had finished school. There he was sitting on a charpoy in the centre of the bazaar, in the very same outfit,  an advert for high thinking and plain living.

Will finish tomorrow with the third letter. Time to do some yoga and let the sandman in. Carol

Hullo Saeed, Mira is watching a film, so I have some time to write again.

It was easy to tell that the book was written by a film maker. I could imagine everything happening before my eyes, because apart from the sense of immediacy, I felt while reading it, the scenes were graphic. I could fill in colour, space and movement easily. I kept thinking : this family saga would make a great film!!!

So I followed the opening debate,  in which the three eng.lit. students were engaged, with tremendous excitement and tension, exulting in the punch lines and wit and then the concluding triumph. I envied them thoroughly for being able, additionally, to wax eloquent in oriental literature. My own love for eng.literature,, which I studied, has stood me in good stead over the years, enabling me often to bring microcosm to macrocosm , thus letting my own difficulties heal in the culture of the wider world, but this has always been a western world. My access to Indian culture has been through history and yoga, but never through a thoroughly learnt language or literature. I have often found this frustrating. The Sufis, esp. Nasruddin have been family reading frequently and the very first book I bought with my own pocket money was Tales of the Dervishes.

The wonderful story of how your parents met each other was stunning. I was thoroughly indignant when the tale ended. I had sat on the rug too and my head swerved from side to side during the discussions as if I was a member of the family avid to know the outcome. Muslims are brilliant weavers, I believe that it is okay to generalise in this particular instance. They weave tales in words and pictures, in wood when they carve furniture, in ghazals when they sing, in marble when they build the Taj and in embroidery when they do bead work and send out brides to marry, accompanied with  the complicated weaving prints on hennaed hands. Our children were brought up on stories from Persia, Arabia and Anatolia. along with Grimms etc. As we read to them we enjoyed ourselves  immensely. And so   I was also one of the neighbours at Fonseca mansions, following the outcome  of your parents wooing and revelling in the gossip.This sense of being in the scene itself occurred often as I was reading your book. One instance among many is when you were describing the Turkish bazaar and their one upmanship style, insisting that everything there was better than in Europe. That was really funny. I love Turkish people and when I want to flee from staid Germany, I visit the turkish shops. In any case I always buy my fresh coriander from them, a vital ingredient and blessing in my life, Because where in Europe can you get better herbs or more valuable lively chit chat?
Those times of  silence in the book were times when I also felt devastated. The Hindu Muslim riots in Mumbai, the Babri Masjid, the attacks in Mumbai, the lost scientists after centuries of research and discovery left me speechless as well. Speechless and furious,I felt as if my wholesome world was being ripped apart.Which is why I am glad  that your silence was also coupled with reverence when standing in front of the statue in Cordorba, or in front of Rumi's grave, healing experiences.
Your book helped me to wrap up and let go of the first half of my life spent in India. My first thirty three years. In December I will have completed thirty three years in Germany. Amazing years in every aspect. I wish I had your talent to write a book about those years. It is strange perhaps, but in the last analysis, my thoughts in connection with the book are to do with being glad we are on this planet at the same time. I have always learnt much from Jennifer and your book taught me a lot as well. You both seem to have been aware politically and sociologically well before most people of our age. In comparison I was hopelessly directionless..

Saeed, I am waiting eagerly to read your next book. I am thoroughly glad it is being written if only for the simple reason that it might contribute to changing western smugness. I heard on the BBC recently that as students in England began hearing about those times they have been looking at their oriental colleagues with some more respect in their eyes.

 Writing this was fun.  Thanks,

With warmest regards,

Carol