“Don’t bother too much about it.” I said as long as they are not hanging their dirty underwear.” Kasthis are another thing. Somehow they don’t ever look dirty. The pattern and the quality of weave takes care of it all.

I had several other calls from other friendly neighbours. “Someone is using your plot as a pathway for his bullock cart.” they said. “You must do something about it” .”

I called my brother in Chennai, who spends a lot of time in San Mathias having built a house on his property on the hill overlooking the Mandovi river.

“You must build a wall,” he said . “I will ask the guy who did the work for me. Solid stone wall with a nice iron gate. It will cost you just over a lakh, but worth it in the long run.”

What “long run” is he talking about I said to myself. With me batting on 83 and with my children, very sensibly showing no interest in ancestral property ?. How do I attach the ownership papers to the hearse that is carrying my not so immortal remains to the cemetery in Bandra? Or maybe the nearest incinerator, better known as electric crematorium?

It is not the cost, nor the attachment of the property papers to the hearse, but the fact that I just hate walls is what that makes me hesitate to venture into my brother’s proposed security measure.

As I write this, several walls in Mumbai have killed people. Crushed them to death or maimed them forever.

I was with the Indian Embassy in Paris, watching with horror the building of the wall that separated families and loved ones for 28 years and created martyrs in the cause of freedom that no walls can divide.

I was in Germany when the wall was demolished, surrounded by German friends whom I loved, and who I’m still in touch with, and who will read this piece and shed a few tears for old times sake.

Why am I writing about walls again. Because the latest shocking news is that following the 8 foot wall that surrounds the beautiful Sidddi Vinayaka Temple in the centre of Mumbai another 8 foot wall is being built around the Mantralaya where the offices of all the Ministers of the government of Maharashtra and all the bureaucrats are housed.

All it takes for this to happen is to discover a car that is carrying some RDX and bomb-making equipment, allegedly planted by the only people who benefit from building walls, namely the builders and the guys who sign the contract for the walls to be built for a certain percentage.

The pace of a course has been set by the filthy rich people in this city, including builders themselves who, not satisfied with surrounding themselves with gun toting security personnel, have also started to build walls around their homes. These are the same people who demand openness and transparency from the government., The same people who build walls between themselves and their employees and truly believe they can resolve the problem by shifting their offices and manufacturing units to another State, where dissent is dealt with gunfire.

Development will soon be concentrated on exporting do-it-yourself kits in building walls

But enough of anger. I need to pause and attempt to convert the anger against walls to constructive reflection.

Is there something really in a wall that makes me dislike them, or like Robert Frost “is there something in ME that does not like a wall”.

After all, a wall is something made of brick and stone and mortar. The wall will tell you if you can speak to it that it has a useful purpose. It has nothing against me in person. Walls can be made of barbed wire or bamboo or a whole lot of other things.

Its main purpose is to separate, to divide. Did I not during my corporate life, love the idea of a separate office and did not those who worked with me love the idea of separate cubicles? We all did. Privacy is such an important and personal thing.

The problem is with me. The problem is with my upbringing, with my value system and all my experiences that makes me love open spaces. Not just around me, but within me and in my relationships with other people.

Maybe I can share with my readers, part of a poem I once wrote about a passionate relationship during the time of the Berlin Wall

“We have our walls
The walls that we have built
With the barbed wire of our minds
The walls of self-invented guilt
The electronic fence of right and wrong
WE are the walls. We are
Grown ups in a children’s game … and
Our walls are worse.
They so separate our souls
That climbing over the top
We might destroy ourselves.
Because we lack the guts
Of common sluts
Our walls unclimbed, remain!”

Frankly I can’t tell a C minor from a John Major, one time Prime Minister of England. I don’t even possess a sound system in the house. But believe it or not, there is always a tune humming in my head.

Some lovely woman living in Toronto recently sent me a video that had the music of John Denver on it together with the lyrics.
As I write this, the music and the lyrics

“Come fill up my senses
Like a night in the forest,
Like a mountain in spring time,
Like a walk in the rain”

surround me with warmth and love which unknowingly I suppose gets transferred to what I’m writing.

I don’t know about loving, but I certainly like our Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, the first CM in a long while, who comes across as being open, humble and clean.

My heart went out to him the other day in the midst of the horrific Mumbai blasts when I almost heard him cry “where have all my good officers gone”?

Music once again invades my mind and I hear Joan Baez strumming her guitar and singing the Pete Seeger perennial

“Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone
Long time ago?
Gone to graveyards everyone.
When will they ever learn
When will they e-e-ever learn”?

I believe lots of people in Mumbai including myself are in a position to give our chief Minister appropriate information to his question “where have all my good officers gone”

Many of them have retired long ago. The Kanetkars, the Ribeiros, the Mendonsas, the Sahneys the Somans and so many others whose advice, if sought for, and implemented would help the CM a great deal.

Very many of them, men of competence and integrity are posted in places of punishment. Unknown an unheard of districts in Maharashtra where they are forced to live without their families and send their children to boarding schools because they are not willing to sacrifice their souls for thirty pieces of silver.

Let me tell our chief Minister that this dirty, filthy, dangerously unhealthy, almost unmanaged and life threatening city, has hundreds of really good people. I meet them every day and I get from them a daily dose of inspiration and the resolve to carry on my daily life with a smile.

An incredibly compassionate colleague of mine for 20 years, at the Corporation where I worked, has sacrificed all her time and energy and the use of her talents to look after her aging mother.

A regal, good looking woman in her 60s has given up her own needs both sociological, psychological and physical to care for her 65 year old mentally and physically challenged brother

Together with her brother, who never complains and always wears an angelic smile, they are both a source of great inspiration

You want to find a “good” place where serenity, faith and laughter refresh you like a sudden shower? Come to Shanti Avenda, the home for terminally ill cancer patients.

Say hello to my friend Christina. Warm and chubby like a large teddy bear, her beautiful black eyes lighting up a place where there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

She laughs at my silliest jokes, and when I sit at the side of her bed and massage her feet, as I used to do for my late wife, she sighs, gobbles slices of mango, juice running down her dress, and says “I am blessed to have moments like this”

I say to her husband who attends to her night and day “Dean, you too are blessed to be given an opportunity to serve a loved one. I have walked that road not long ago. Not everyone gets such an opportunity”

Yes, dear chief Minister, the city is full of “good” people, unfortunately, not many of them in the Police Force. And those who are there have been shunted to Training Institutes, Naxalite areas and other punishment areas where their goodness will be squeezed dry out of them sooner or later.

You are reputed to be a good man. Can you make your goodness, your openness, your rectitude become inspiring and infectious like the good people I listed earlier?

Can you tell your Congress bosses that the chief Minister will no longer continue to be a fund collector for the party?

You will either be sacked or good people will rally around you like they have done around Anna Hazare. Good luck and may the good Lord be with you.

I guess I’m hallucinating. How many people have the good fortune to be able to do so?

Hallucinate, I mean.

Despite all the efforts of the marketing wizards in the country I have not become addicted, like millions of others, to designated days for everything under the sun from Valentine’s Day to Doomsday.

But I love my mother dearly, always have. Maybe I never told her so or may be never enough.

All these many years I have written so many eulogies for people I have loved and people I have known and respected. Strangely it never occurred to me to write something for my very dear and beloved mother.

I believe I thought it was not necessary. I believe she did not live with such expectations. I believe that because she loved so dearly, so sensitively, so unconditionally it never occurred to her that there was such a thing as “reciprocity”. She just kept on loving. Not just her near and dear ones, but the whole world, as it were.

I guess I first met her in the warm, cosy, friendly and very chaotic place called “The Eugene Maternity Home” appropriately located in Love Lane at Byculla, Bombay. Actually in the delivery room, a slimy, placenta covered joyous encounter of mother and son.

When out of curiosity I drove recently to Byculla and parked in front of the Maternity Home it looked like a heritage site with some guy pointing to it and saying “You know this is the Maternity Home where Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro met his mother on 10 May 1929″

“You are right” I said “I was there a month earlier” and I and quickly drove off before he asked me “and who are you buddy?”

We called her “Mae”. The seven of us. She lost the first one after child birth. And I took over as the eldest of the brood.

We were children of an incompatible marriage. My father was 6 foot something, a towering intellectual with an equally towering temper

My mother was 5 foot nothing, patient, soft-spoken and gentle as a dove.

When I knew her, she only spoke Portuguese and of course the Salcete version of Konkani spoken in the southern region of Goa, and she spoke both languages very well.

I love you Mae. Always did and always will. An 82 year old son stretching out a skinny hand to touch your chubby cheeks that made you look younger than the seven children you had.

I can imagine you now, up there, taking care of the Lord’s house with its many rooms like the bungalow in Dharwad with a “quarto de disordes” (a room for disorder) cleverly designed from the prying eyes of visitors, a room to chuck unwashed and unwanted things; a room desperately required for a wife and mother who needed a shift system of night vigils to care for children who took turns to be desperately ill on the eve of every exam.

I love you Mae and the yogic manner you dealt with the minor tantrums of your children and the major tantrums of your husband.

Remember the time Pae returned from college and screamed because lunch was not on the table?

Typically, he had forgotten that he had already had his lunch before he left for college. But you didn’t say a word and lunch was served once again.

Remember the time we were all sitting down for dinner and we were about to say “grace” and a rooster from our backyard flew into the room and quietly perched itself on Pae’s agnostic head and he wasn’t even aware of it?

Deftly you signaled to us, to control ourselves and keep saying the grace till the rooster finding nothing interesting on Pae’s head flew back to its resting place.

We rushed Into our rooms holding our stomachs and bursting with laughter and when we returned you sat as if nothing had happened and Pae was already tackling his favourite custard pudding.

I love you Mae for the values you inculcated in us, for leading us always close to Jesus by your uncompromising witness. Your daily uphill trek for morning Mass, your sometimes annoying insistence on our saying the rosary at sunset, and above all, the manner in which you looked after the hundreds of Pae’s students with food when they were hungry and money for bus rides to their native homes for the holidays. For your boundless charity that made the entire town call you “Mummy”

And when I saw the incumbent Municipal Commissioner’s name in the list of scamsters, one name came to my mind. The name of the late JB D’Souza the most outstanding bureaucrat I have ever known in my lifetime.

JB D’Souza was more popularly known as Bains. When Morarji Desai Introduced Prohibition and required citizens to possess a permit to drink alcohol only on medical grounds, JB D’Souza, IAS officer, applied for a permit rightly claiming it was his Constitutional right.

From a ringside seat I watched the battle between two upright people one whose preference for urine over beer made him earn the wrath of thousands of people despite his many splendoured virtues. The other for whom the Constitution of India was so sacrosanct that he followed it despite the knowledge that he would have a heavy personal price to pay. Which he did. And when he had endured punishment postings to godforsaken places, he finally won the case and was given a permit by a court of law. He was a teetotaler

You cannot keep a good man down and so Bains went on from strength to strength bringing prestige to the positions he held. General Manager of BEST, Chief Secretary of the State Government and, most importantly, as a Municipal Commissioner who never handed out goodies to his kith and kin, leave alone his buddies like me.

What a fall there has been, my countrymen, in the last two decades, and as Mark Anthony would have said, “You and I and all of us fell down and bloody treason flourished over us”

Bloody treason did not automatically flourish. We allowed the high and mighty who have sworn before the Constitution to work for the public interest, to commit treason before our own very eyes as we dropped our miserable votes into the ballot box, looked the other way when the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the corporate honchos who control our politicians trampled our Constitution under their dirty feet.

It has required the “prima donna” of Indian politics to suddenly tell us that the space for morality in our public life is shrinking.

I think it is our duty as citizens to inform her that right through, the already too long tenure of her Party, that space has shrunk beyond recognition and it is shocking and sad that, she of all persons, has discovered it so late.

Yet it is never too late. The ordinary citizens resilience and optimism and hope is always discovering little islands of probity, propriety and integrity where unknown “am admi” bureaucrats, Armed Forces personnel, politicians and businessmen are upholding the values of the Constitution of India and are prepared to pay a heavy price for doing so.

I discovered this in my own family. When my wife bought a small plot in the beautiful village of Gorai and could not get the plot transferred to her name in the land records for 15 years because she was unwilling to grease the palms of the “talati”.

Eventually a friend of mine who owns a couple of restaurants bought the plot, and the cottage that gave my family years and years of quiet time, and had no problem in transferring the property to his name after the usual formalities of stamp duty payment and the registration of the sale deed.

I have also discovered with joy that Louis one of my younger brothers an IAS officer, did commendable work wherever he was posted, stood up to seniors as well as his political bosses, was also municipal Commissioner of Chennai as well is the Milk Commissioner who revolutionized the entire “cow coming to the household entrance” Tamilian system, to install vending machines that delivered milk in tetra packs.

After a stint with “Habitat” in Kenya he ended his career as Secretary of a Ministry in New Delhi where he took a bus to work and did not own a car when he retired to settle down in Chennai.

I also remember two women bureaucrats, Aruna Roy and Kiran Bedi, islands of propriety, probity and integrity that made them able to endure political harassment and injustice and to be able to quit when they could take it no more.

And finally a reluctant bureaucrat who was pulled out of academic life, by BG Kher the greatly respected Education Minister of Bombay, to head the Education Department and who, among many other things, had complete control of the examination system In the State.

None other than my own and only Father. During that short stint of bureaucratic work my brother Francis had appeared for the Matriculation examination.

Sometime before the results were declared we had a visitor. I remember sitting with my father listening to some classical music. I opened the door and a shabby looking man with shifty eyes came in and touched my father’s feet and said that he was a moderator for the examinations and had kept an eye on Francis’ examination results.

He told us that Francis had failed in Maths. He gave my father a piece of paper with a telephone number on it and said to him “this is the number of the teacher who corrected your son’s paper. All he expects from you is a telephone call and he will ensure that your son will get the adequate marks”

My father who was six feet tall, got up slowly from the sofa, walked deliberately towards the visitor, picked him up by the collar and threw him out of the house with the words “if my son deserves to fail, let him fail”

Francis failed but he retired as the Director of the Tata Management Training Centre in Pune and, before he passed away last year, was recognised as an internationally renowned dream therapist.

I am proud that in the midst of nation consuming scum my family like hundreds of other Indian Families lived in islands of probity, propriety and unchallengeable integrity.

What I cannot understand in all this debate about scamsters at the highest levels of our nation, why the Prime Minister known for his honesty remains totally and completely silent.

Some joker said to me that very few people know that the PM was orally challenged..

I feel that pain now, right here as I write

My mother saved Francis for long years with her prayers especially during his courageous and life threatening march to liberate Goa.

My Dad saved him and made him strong by not allowing “grace marks” to condone his academic failure although he was Under Secretary Education at the time Francis appeared for his Matriculation exam.

Ada, my sister saved him by harnessing all the power of her faith and converting it into beautifully candid and frank letters that she alone could write.

Armida my youngest sister who was Dean of Sion Hospital  saved him by her warm and competent presence in his every illness, big or small.

Louis, Ignatius and Lenny my brothers were there for him materially some rare times, siblingly most of the time.

And I the eldest, the “morgado” the loved one of the family?

Let me take you to a time when as kids we found ourselves playing on the edge of the river at “Vitagem”, a pier off the Mandovi river in our ancestral island village in Goa.

 We had come to watch the arrival of the “gazolina”, the deisel engine driven boat that made its daily trip to Panjim and back.

Francis dared the river as he dared everything in life that were obstacles to his road less traveled on his journey of self discovery.

He dared and he slipped and he fell into the swirling waters of the Mandovi. As he was being carried away I grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled him ashore.

Many years later, differences of opinion led to a slanging match between Francis and me which was never resolved and ended quickly when my mother started the family rosary earlier than usual.

He asked me later, very seriously, whether I had ever regretted saving his life, denying the great Goan river its genuine victim?

How could I? Could I deny the family, the community and the nation he so loved, years and years of stellar and unaccountable contribution?

Could I let a mere river take him away when the waters of the Arabian sea were inadequate to embrace him and  the mountains of the Sayadiri range could not prevent him from planting the Indian flag on the soil of Portugese governed Goa ?

Francis was and will always remain an enigma. His towering scholarship was at times so childlike. His brilliance was often misunderstood for stubbornness and for inflexibility by pygmy brothers like me who found him uncompromising in his goals and yet gentle when he tried hard to “suffer fools gladly”

Could I have been able to deny his community and his beloved mother land a maverick genius who gave a new meaning and purpose to sensitivity training and the holistic development of people?

A dreamer of his own complex dreams and a ruthless and uncanny interpreter of the dreams of hundreds of disciples who grew tall and strong and hoped in their great love for him that his “guruship” would never end

They were right. His reluctant guruship will never end.

As we watch in utter amazement, two yellow butterflies settle on two sides of his bier. I hear one say “What manner of men are these who see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower?”

“I will tell you” says the other butterfly.

“The poet Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy wrote about them”

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

But I still walk the Bandra waterfront. Carter Road, Bandstand and the Joggers Park, come rain or shine. But now I walk slowly, deliberately preserving by breath as well as my footfalls as if the treasure God has gifted to me for “caretaking” might suddenly disappear.

And I walk early in the morning or late at night insensitive to lovers sculpted in their own personalized embraces, oblivious to sleeping watchmen, stray dogs and a rare “expat” walking his “German Shepherd” with the right implements for collecting his doggie’s poo.

“Why can’t the other pet owners do likewise?” he asks

“Because”, I say sadly and softly to myself, “we locals walk our dogs but do not walk our talk.”

As he goes out of sight I hear a gentle voice calling me. “You and I need to talk” the voice says. I sit down on the promenade’s retaining wall and look towards the sea. The voice seems to come from the crest of each rising and falling wave.

I am a great conversationalist. Mostly one way. I talk. Others hopefully listen. But the voice I hear now has a ring of urgency. I decide to listen.

“Okay” I say “talk, I am listening”

“Do you see the 18 hole golf course with the English style Club House on the hill ? It was called the Danda Green” I turn to look behind me and see nothing but hideous doors and windows jutting out of masses of concrete structures. I shake my head in dismay.

“That was the time” says the voice “when I had the privilege and complete freedom to wash these shores, foray deep into the uncluttered land dotted with pretty little bungalows with large gardens and orchards that were rented for as little as Rs.30 a month”.

“I have read and heard about how really beautiful Bandra was” I reply, “wrapped around by the glorious blanket of your clean and transparent waters. They tell me people walked to what is the Mahim Causeway to take the ferry to the city”

“That was the real Bandra to celebrate about. Not the one you are celebrating this fortnight” the voice says. Now no longer quiet and gentle but shrill.

“Walk down from The old fort , past Bandstand , Joggers park and down to Carter Road and find a stretch of sand where you can lie down and talk to me leisurely as your previous generations did not long ago”.

“I see couples sitting on the rocks” I say “but I cannot find a stretch of sand even to sit down”.

I hear a roar from the voice and a crash of waves.” The beach has disappeared; sand has been carted away in a million trucks. Mangroves have been destroyed as a result. The cottages have gone. Tall ugly buildings have replaced them”. The voice is getting angry.

I hang my head in shame. We need to stop mocking the sea, I say to myself. I am suddenly afraid. Another day, another time the sea will reclaim the land that was once her own. And our grand children will no longer be safe on the water front.

I try to find a piece of beach to sit down and wet my feet. Through the skeletons of the mangroves festooned with plastic bags and other indefinable waste I spot a stretch of beach. I creep through the mangroves and sit on the sand.

“I have found a tiny spot of beach to sit on and talk to you at leisure” I say to the voice from the sea

“There is much we can share” says the sea.

“After the Tsunami some years ago”, I say, “I am afraid to run carefree into your warm and wet embrace as I used to once in Gorai and Goa. Even the tip of your tongue caressing my feet as I sit here scares me”

“No more Tsunamis please.” I beg “Thousands died and were rendered homeless that 26th December 2004”

“Homeless?” The sea screams back at me. Have you city folks ever given thought to my homelessness? For centuries my playing fields have been dredged. Hundreds of shacks and massive hotels have plundered my territory and made me a prisoner in the home God gifted to me at the time of Creation. The nurseries and cradles of my fish have been desecrated by the destruction of mangroves. You have driven away myriads of birds that once dipped their silken wings upon my breast.”

“God gave you the planet in caretaking. In your greed and arrogance you have ambitions to become the planet’s owner.”

“Don’t take this personally.” The voice continues “I appreciate you for the time you were beaten up trying to stop sand from being taken away from the Gorai beach. I appreciate your friends who are working so hard to save open spaces in Bandra.

“Do not worry about me. Time will heal my wounds. I have powers to heal myself and to rejuvenate. There will come a time when I will reclaim my territory. It will be a time of my choosing. I will select those whom I will destroy and those whom I will save. The Old Testament will be revisited and Celebrate Bandra‘s Space ship will replace Noah’s Ark”

“Tell your grand children and your friend’s grandchildren to come and play on the endless beaches and my wholesome, transparent waters and really celebrate the awakening of a new dawn”

They make for BMC forgotten temporary, very temporary housing for millions of homeless people who are merely a statistic for the powers that govern the city and a passing landscape for the well heeled people like you and me.

There is one such pipe, now frayed at its circumference near the road across where I live. In its benevolent radius, protected from rain and sun, lives a woman who could walk the ramp even in the ragged “saree” and “choli” that she washes under a garden tap or over a leaking pipe in the neighborhood.

She is dark, just the shade I like in women, large, sad eyes, small firm breasts a determined jaw and she walks in the sensuous manner village women walk when they carry pots on their heads.

Amazing I thought for a woman who lived back bent in a cylindrical home.

“We should sponsor a fashion show under the auspices of our Residents Association for these really beautiful, homeless women” I said to the old girl.

She gave me a look dirtier than a garbage dump, took my spectacles off my nose, wiped them clean and said with a smile “age has not dimmed your weakness for village women”

What could I say? After all I am a boy from a village in Goa.

Her name was Namrata and she lived with Govind her five year old son. Her husband had been killed the previous Christmas in their village. She worked on the construction site of a hotel that been recently demolished by terrorists.

When his mother was away Govind played with a wooden doll which he carried all the time like some thing precious, keeping it hidden in his pocket when he played road side cricket with neighboring children from the hutments.

I stopped by the cylinder one day on my way to buy fish at the Chimbai fishing village. Must have been Namrata’s day off, I thought foolishly.
“No” she said. “Govind was not feeling well. The burn scars on his face and hand were itching and bothering him”. She spoke broken Hindi and even some broken English as if, once upon a time, she had studied in a convent school.

Govind sat up. He showed me the toy he was clutching to his breast. It was made of wood. Baby Jesus he said simply. A baby face on a fat body, carved by a carpenter whose tools needed sharpening. It had been burnt on one side like the doll I had seen when I visited the Best Bakery in Gujarat during the 2002 carnage.

“I see you watching me from your window” she said. “I am a writer and I am always curious and looking for a story” I said “especially since I see you and your little boy in Church sometimes”.

“We are Christians” she said. “Converts from my grandfather’s time”. There was joy in her voice and it echoed in the Hume pipe that was her temporary home.

“I am from Kandhamal in Orissa .We lived on the edge of a beautiful forest full of wild birds, butterflies and animals. Last Christmas when the fanatics came they killed my husband and burnt down our house. We hid in the forest for months and then the refugee camp and recently Mumbai.

We are secure here but we miss Kandhamal. We are going back this Christmas.

“Baby Jesus will protect us” said Govind

In Dharwad, in Karnataka, where we lived for many years, I went to school in a “tonga” with four pretty looking Saraswat girls who lived in the house next door. It was a bit of a squeeze, with three of them sitting behind and one of them, Prema Sirur sitting next to me in front with a sweat-exuding “tongawalla” who mercilessly whipped the emaciated horse.

At that time and age I did not enjoy being squeezed between the “tongawalla” and a pretty Saraswat girl. So a few months later, I decided to go to school on a borrowed bicycle.

It was an enjoyable experience being in control, feeling the freshness of the wind in my face and able to show off with the old stunt “Hey guys, look no hands.”

It took me many years to own my own bicycle. I bought it with the first salary from my summer holiday job as a Rationing Inspector. It was a “Raleigh” a famous name in bicycles in those days.

It took me places and it took me faster than the “tongas” and it was romantic. Innumerable are the women who took a ride on the cycle bar including my pint-sized mother who agreed to be dropped for Mass as the tongawallas were celebrating “Id”

She said it was the first and last time. Not so the girls from my college who were thrilled as the bicycle tore down the slope from the college past the All India Radio Station towards Kelgeri lake and, despite the sudden braking or perhaps because of it, never volunteered to sit behind on the butt-snapping carrier.

In the meanwhile I enjoyed the jasmine scented ride as the tresses of my bar-riders flew into my face.

The bicycle was I believe the precursor of the Lambretta scooter that drove Roman couples to ecstasy on wheels. The wheel was reinvented one more time.

On one of my vacations to Dharwad from the Indian Air Force I met the Police Superintendent of Dharwad district. He invited me to play for the Police Hockey team which I enjoyed, and we became really close friends.

One day I had to visit an old classmate from Hubli, 12 miles away. Half an hour by the local train. Wanting to impress her I asked my friend if I could borrow his car. Turning down offers of his constables taking me to Hubli in a jeep, I agreed that a constable would ride with me as I drove the Police Superintendent’s Ambassador car.

On the way back from Hubli a cow suddenly crossed the road. In my panic to avoid the cow I drove to the extreme end of the road and hit a cyclist. An old farmer wearing a dhoti. By the time I had brought the car to a stop the cycle looked like an “avant garde” sculpture by Salvador Dali.

Luckily the cyclist had not been run over. As I got down I witnessed a scene I will never forget in my life. The policeman had jumped out of my car and was beating the cyclist to pulp.

I intervened, and was happy to discover that the only injuries to the cyclist were from the blows of the policeman’s “lathi”.

We took the old farmer for some First Aid treatment and I gave him money to buy a new cycle much against the wishes of the policeman whose mantra was that no body should have the gumption to come in front of his Saheb’s car.

A few years ago when I moved to the suburbs of Bandra and saw friends of all ages, including elderly nuns and pregnant mothers, cycling away to wherever they were going and I overcame my allergy to bicycles and my fear of policemen who were integrating themselves into our Citizen’s movements.

In fact only a month ago my grandchildren who have picked up cycling skills on their vacations in Goa wanted to go bike riding in Bandra.
I took them to a shop not far from where we live and bought them a brand new shiny blue bike and have grown ten years younger seeing their tresses blowing in the wind as they ride the curves in our local park.

And now Bangalore and Ahmedabad. And bicycles with bombs becoming the permanent and most repulsive face of terror.