It took less than a fraction of a second for us to make the choice. And before anyone could say “ooh la la”’ we packed our bags and headed for Paris.

In the many pieces I have written I have always avoided writing about some very difficult and ugly situations I had to deal with.

Now with crusader Anna Hazare encouraging ordinary people to expose corruption it is time to write about my tryst with the demon, in of all places, the Indian Embassy in Paris, specifically in the office of the Air Attache.

For the Indian Air force, France was a favoured son. The Ouragan (or Toofani), the Mystere fighter aircraft were our strength. More aircraft and above all a continuous supply of spare parts kept us in daily contact with Marcel D’assault and other providers.

There were three of us. My Boss the Air Attache, a Group Captain, another officer from the Accounts Dept who did not have diplomatic status and me as the Asst. Air Attache.

Types of corruption

Of the Soul. My boss wanted me to send my wife to “help”. at his weekly cocktail parties where he had an opportunity to inflate his entertainment bills. My wife saw no problem in helping the Boss’ wife.

When I went to pick her up I discovered that she was confined to the kitchen and not permitted to join the guests. My colleague had no problem with it. Sychophancy was his major strength

I told my Boss my wife would not be available as “kitchen help”. That started a very vengeful relationship.

To make matters worse I told my colleague that selling highly discounted petrol coupons and duty free liquor to friends from the aviation industry was both shameful and corrupt.

I could have become a whistler blower but that was an unfamiliar terminology in 1959, so I became “persona non grata”.

I was so used to standing up for my values and beliefs and facing the music and converting it as an opportunity to dance that Thecla and I, both good dancers continued to have a great time making a large number of friends with our fluency in spoken French. Some of these still communicate with us and have come and stayed with us in Goa

We were also enjoying making our first baby. Christophe’s god parents are French.Christianne and Bernard Wacquet. (Have sent you a pic)

From “personna non grata” I became an enemy with whom it was necessary to sleep with. I received an invitaton to join the “ten percent club of two”

When I declined I was told I would be repatriated to India in disgrace.

The then Ambassador was a wimp, an ex INA member and colleague of Subash Chandra Bose and was surely tempted by the ten percent on every consignment
despatched to India. I missed joining the millionare’s club but could sleep like a baby every night.

More excitement. A confidential report reached Air Headquarters saying “Squadron Leader George Menezes has become an alcoholic and should be sent back to India.”

See how the Lord works.

The report arrived at the desk of Air Vice Marshal Erlich Pinto, Head of Personnel. An old family friend, his first concern was my health, specially my liver. He wrote to the new Ambassador , the great Nawab Ali Yavar Jung.

Air headquarters was told of my sterling qualities and the Ambassador added that George is almost a teetotaler.

Enquires were conducted with military efficiency and the next Embassy fubction
found us bidding a not so tearful farewell to my Boss who was being repatriated.

Years later someone asked a question about my boss’s assets in Paris and he was “cashiered” out of service in disgrace.

But I’m aware that there are some things one can never plan. Such things jump out of nowhere and hit you straight in the face.

For instance the death of my wife Thecla in the last weeks of 2009.

And the marriage of my daughter Anjali two months later to Sven Kelling a German research scholar at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

I could not attend the wedding. The passing on of a lovely girl to whom I was married for 53 glorious years, left me totally broken in mind and body.

But I had promised my daughter, who arrived with the good news of her engagement and met her mother just before she passed into unconsciousness, that I would visit her in the summer months.

Prompted by the Lord and with the help of my close family members I went on a five month regime of medication, proper diet, a swim followed by a walk every evening, and I was able to put the broken pieces together and recover sufficiently to make the journey to Cambridge.

I’ve been to Cambridge before with Thecla for a quick lunch at the home of my godchild, Cheryl Maclauglin, a warm, always welcoming still beautiful and cheerful mother of five lovely children.

But then Cambridge is never the same no matter how many times you visit it. To each person at a particular moment it is an experience that is all consuming.

This visit had a specific goal. To visit my newly married daughter. To get to know my son-in-law better more informally and over a longer period than I had known him on his quick visit to India at a time of my grieving.

More than anything else I would be meeting my daughter’s in-laws whom I had known only from the wedding photographs.

What actually happened was that I not only got to know my daughter’s new family but I got to respect them and to love them.

They are beautiful people, Sven, Reiner and Eveline, a combination of toughness and compassion having lived on the eastern side of the Berlin wall for many years.

But the family was just a part of my Cambridge experience; although the most important part.

The other part was a dream come true. A nostalgic heart throbbing journey back to the classrooms of my college in Karnatak College, Dharwad where I studied English literature under some fine professors including an eminent and exceptional one, who was my father.

Let us step out of my daughter’s house. It is what the French would call a “cul de sac”, a road without an exit at one end. It is broad enough for the owners to walk and to park their cars and their bicycles outside their doors.

For a moment I thought the owners recognize their houses by the color of their doors. Almost each door has a different color. None of them bizarre. I did not understand why they have doors since they are mostly open and the neighbors who seem to be bonded together stand out and talk to each other and sometimes plan, in good weather, to put out some tables and have a barbecue or a potluck dinner.

For a moment I was reminded of neighborhood families gathered together on the Goan “balcao”

This time round however my daughter organized an “open house” where I had the chance to meet all my old friends and most of my relatives, character and get to know the neighbors.

Tony from Portugal was delighted to find someone with whom he could talk Portuguese. Alex the osteopath was equally delighted to meet someone whose conversation was not about back problems.

Maurizo an Italian who is a hilarious guy to have as a guest with his fake heavy black framed unnumbered glasses who came with his Indian wife “Sweet” and a kilo of hot “bhajias” and three lovely boisterous mind-bending and furniture bending sons with enormous appetites.

The shy Carol Wood, who does readings at a weekly literary affair, walking distance from my daughter’s house, read an extremely funny poem to me about her “Wine flu” and Joan, a darling of a woman spoke about her work of organizing jazz concerts. An inspiring therapy for her cancer.

You can walk to the entrance of the road and be greeted by a variety of shops and restaurants. And if you require something urgently Sven will get onto his skateboard or bicycle and bring it to you in a jiffy.

From almost every residential area you can walk in any direction and within five minutes of walking you always hit the green areas of the town. Lush meadows and parks and scholarly looking buildings merging with the surroundings with a gracious gentle river meandering like an absent-minded Cambridge professor everywhere, but in particular, in the direction of the internationally famous hamlet of Grantchester.

“There, du lieber Gott.

“in the rich earth, a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers blessed by the suns of home”

That is the corner of the field that Rupert Brooke wanted to remember in the memorable poem “The Soldier”, the Orchard Tea Garden where he spent his days in Cambridge half naked surrounded by the most beautiful and the most talented people I have encountered in my tryst with English literature.

Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, EM Forster, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell and Augustus John the artist and painter who lived in a gypsy caravan in Grantchester Meadows with his two wives and 10 naked children.

So we let history and philosophy and culture and literature consume us as we sat around the wooden table and drank some very English tea and looked at the Church clock standing there as always and as Rupert Brooke frozen at 10 to 3 and asked “is there some honey still for tea?”

And Anjali asked me why I had tears in my eyes and I said I think of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath both brilliant poets and writers, a little mad, who killed themselves one by drowning in the river in front of us, and the other in the gas oven in her home.

And I thought of simple farmers near the home who have committed suicide in their hundreds and I thought of people who always have a corner in their hearts for the place of their birth no matter where they live.

Like my friend Trevor Pimenta a big chubby man with a large ring in his ear and swims with me in the Club pool. I like this guy because he is comfortable with his chubbiness, just loves Goa and is married to a beautiful woman with a complexion like Colombian coffee.

He said to me the other day “I’m going to be 40 in a couple of years, and George, all I want to do is to go back to my roots in Goa, sit back and listen to music, catch up with my reading and enjoy my fish curry and rice. I do not want a corner in the foreign field of Mumbai and pretend it is Goa”

“Amen” I said.

Writers experiencing loss and unbearable grief.

I am haunted by a hundred questions. Is it too early to write this? Is it too late?

Should I write about it at all? Should I share with my readers something that is so

private and personal ? The triumphant return of my old girl to a place of eternal

peace and serenity in the midst of the silence of green pastures; broken only by the

sound of running brooks?

I know only one thing with certainty. I must write or I will die!

Are you listening to me, my loved one?

In your passing on, God gave me two precious gifts. The gift of “never

living in denial” and the gift “of always remembering all that is good and beautiful

in other people”

Hey. come to think of it, you must have asked the Lord to transfer your gift to me.

You knew I would need it. You had that great ability to anticipate the needs of

others and to do something about it.

I walk through the rooms of this beautiful house like a tenant. Everything we have,

we owned jointly. Today you own the house by your absence. How we fought over

every purchase we made. The Rajastani dowry chest that became a bar, the carved

ivory figure of Jesus on the cross that you loved so much, the “dwarpas,” wooden

sentinels of temples that became our lamp stands. I touch them in passing and

each time the memory makes me “whole”, knowing always, that the beauty of our

home was never ever in its contents but your magical, caring, effervescent and

truly spiritual presence.

I remember a line I wrote for you in my newspaper column on our 50th Wedding

Anniversary. It was a description of seeing you standing in a motley group of young

Goans at the Saligao Ball.

”She stood there in her yellow dress, a wild flower growing astonishingly in a field

of cacti, bramble bush and wilted shrubs”

You had grace and presence which always stood out as, I remember, it did on

India’s Republic day function in the year 1961.

We were standing at the entrance of the Indian Embassy in Paris welcoming our

guests. Our Ambassador Nawab Ali Yavar Jung and ten of us, wives included, who

served as diplomats. You, my dear, stood out for more reasons than one. Not only

for the grace with which you spoke fluent French but also because you were the

only one dressed in an elegantly draped sari. The other wives were all non Indians.

The guests literally swooned over you.

I remember our first date. Blue Air Force uniform with gold stripes on my sleeve I

rode up on my motor bike to the YWCA where you were studying to be an

Executive Secretary.

We went to Leopold Café. We have had many explosive situations in our lives but

that was years and years before 26/11. In 1956 Leopold Cafe provided privacy for

young lovers. Not targets for terrorists.

It had those little cabins with half swinging doors like bikinis hiding the essential. If

you recall, we only talked and joked and laughed and every time you laughed the

waiter came rushing in with a dirty towel on his shoulder as if in response to the

ringing of some distant temple bell. Such was your magic.

Alas, when the bill for “falooda” and “khara” biscuits arrived I found I was short of

money. We stopped laughing and you quietly paid the bill as you have done during

most of our married life.

On our way back home my jaded motor-cycle stopped dead thrice and you had to

push it to get it going. When it stopped a fourth time you turned round and said”

Is this what I am going to do all my life?” “Yes” I replied “will you marry me?”

You jumped in the air like a ballet dancer and started to scream. The crowd

gathered on the pavement soon realized what was happening and cheerfully pushed

the bike right up to the door of your house and waved us a fond farewell.

If today I live “fully alive” reborn on beautiful memories of you, it is because all

those whose lives you touched, hundreds of them who overflowed on to the roads

at your funeral service, remember you with joy.

Let me tell you about something unexpected that happened the other day. A kindly

Bishop came to visit me. Anjali our daughter who had come down from London for

a whole month was still around.

“I was a contemporary of your mother” he said to Anjali. “She was the most

beautiful girl who came to the Mahim Gymkhana. We Mahim boys competed for her

attention and were very upset when we heard that she was getting married to

much older guy from Dharwad”.

“Dad was 27 and Mama was 20”, Anjali said authoritatively”

“Would you really mind if I saw the Wedding album?” the Bishop said sounding like

a helpful yet curious Income Tax officer on a verification visit.

For the next half an hour he was still looking at the pictures his face full of joy on

discovering that the lovely girl from his gang had married a dashing young officer in

a blue and gold uniform of the Indian Air Force, never mind his “unda-gunda” accent.

“What a nice gold crown Mama is wearing” said Anjali. I was about to open my

foolish mouth and tell her it was made of cardboard, but better counsel prevailed.

I realized that as usual you would have liked to keep your simplicity and austerity

to yourself.

People whom I do not even know wrote how you traveled with them from Chembur

to Victoria Terminus. Some one wrote that you had gifted her a German sewing

machine and two French copper-base pans which she is still using in the USA.

Colleagues from your office wrote that if you happened not to turn up for work,

there was no noise of laughter in the office.

As I read slowly, one by one, the eulogies piled up on my desk, I realize how many

people of all walks of life loved you dearly.

Did I do you justice, old girl? In my proverbial inadequacy, did I care for you enough ?

God help me. It is far too late to ask.

Invariably they start with “Chaos reigns…..”

Chaos reigns in the on-line admissions to college.

Only a year ago, students had, despite all its defects, a pretty stable system in which students were free to apply to colleges of their choice, submit themselves to cut-off percentages and reservations of different types depending on the colleges and get quick responses on which college they would get admission. Either their first choice, second choice or whatever.

The important thing is that they all knew where they would be admitted and the colleges started their classes on the due date.

My son got admission to St Xaviers in the first list. My daughter who wanted to study French for her BA did not get admission to the same college because French was not taught at the SSC level at her boarding school in Panchgani.

I was, at that time, post retirement, Associate Director of Xavier’s Institute of Management and a word from me would have resulted in a waiver of the requirement which, ironically, I had obtained for a friend’s daughter the previous year in similar circumstances.

My daughter Anjali went to Elphintsone College, did extremely well in French and went on to obtain French citizenship.
But she never forgave for not putting in a word to get admission to a college of her choice. In this piece I ask for her forgiveness. She is an open and understanding person. She will understand.

Today the academic year will never start. Thousands have no college to go to. Hundreds of colleges are woefully short of students. The mess is complete. It takes one Education Minister to paralyse an entire system and not be accountable for the chaos. He will be back next year having learnt no lessons.

Chaos reigns in dealing with the swine-flu pandemic. It took four solid weeks for the Health Minister and his Ministry to react to the information that we had our first swine-flu patient. And when they did all hell broke loose. First t Minister had to apologize for insensitive remarks about the death of our first casualty. Then our irresponsible media ensured that their ability to generate panic had not diminished since the 26/11 terrorism coverage.

In the midst of a life threatening situation we had to witness with shame our business community fleecing our panic stricken citizens either by the well known hoarding technique with the result that face masks were either not available or sold at astronomical prices.

At Government run hospitals doctors handling swine-flu cases were not supplied with masks and the crucial Tami-flu drug was in short supply or not available due to distribution goof ups or was being stolen by loaders of our national airline.

I write this on the day we our celebrating the 62nd anniversary of India’s independence.

The Road that I live on since 1993 is a noisy road. When I bought the flats the road was so quiet that I could not believe my luck. Only later did I realize that there was no traffic on the road because the road was closed at one end for several weeks for repairs.

Today on Independence Day people living on the Road have assembled in large numbers to hoist the national colours. In the compound of the building in which we live.

The Road Association, ALM 102 (Advanced Locality Management) works very hard to keep our area green, clean, secure and safe.

If the road is in top class condition with the whole long road being paved with paver blocks and the footpaths also done similarly. All from the funds of our elected representatives.

We have a wonderful relationship with our Corporator, MLA, our MP and the Municipal Corporation and the Police.

The Flag hoisting is the highlight of our activities bringing diverse people together to confirm our secularism and our pride in being Indian.

Chaos did not reign. But it “rained”. A show drizzle preventing the lighting of the traditional lamp and delaying the hearty breakfast we share on such occasions.

Chaos did not reign because citizens understand good management of their organisations the value of cooperative interventions in civic, social and political life. Because citizens rise above a level the governments seem to find impossible to do.