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My first memory of my cousin Sherna Gandhy, who is exactly seven months younger than me, is overwhelming excitement and love. I remember trying to grab her and kiss her in her ayah (maid) Marceline’s arms, shouting "Kaka baby (daughter of uncle)!” She pushed me off by biting me, leaving her teeth marks ringed round my arm. It defined the basis of our future relationship — my enthusiasm and her prudence and caution which held us in good stead in all our years of growing up.

Rockdale, a few houses down the road from us, was the home of my aunt and uncle who had this amazing terrace and garden overlooking the seashore in Bandra. Every child who lived in that vicinity has a memory of how exhilarating that compound of Rockdale was! It held a magnetic attraction for all the friends of Sherna and her brother Cyrus, especially as Rati kaki (paternal aunt) was an exceptionally welcoming hostess who loved children and instructed us in all our homework. She was a great cook and food was another draw to keep me away from home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quite apart from playtime, Sherna and I shared a common passion for books and devoured novels. Like everyone else in our generation in India it started with English children’s writer Enid Blyton and then graduated to Greek mythology laced with English novelist Georgette Heyer. We were obsessed by the Brontë sisters and their novels, especially Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. As we got older we graduated to Russian literature and I remember one long, lazy summer holiday in Matheran, a hill station near Bombay, reading Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while the monkeys crashed about on the corrugated roof above and ignoring calls for meals, the dramas being more appealing, with each one of us grabbing the novel the other had just finished. Our grandmother couldn’t understand the attraction, being an outdoorsy person herself, how we could be so absorbed by a strange Russian author!

For six weeks in the summer and four weeks in December our paternal grandmother Roshan whisked us off, sans parents, to Woodlands, a beautiful sprawling bungalow she had inherited in Matheran. For Sherna, Cyrus and myself, close as we were in age, this represented paradise. To be away from the eagle eye of parents, in an isolated spot where there were no paved roads, only horses where you went on rides; monkeys that grabbed your food and you chased with hand-made catties; played endless games with a brood of the maali’s (gardener) children, it was something close to nirvana. There were countless opportunities to be unsupervised, especially when my grandmother had her afternoon nap. Out we rushed into the forest, and it was in those moments that I think that Sherna’s moral compass and great deal of good sense had an opportunity to mature, as her brother Cyrus and I were pretty reckless. Being the eldest, I would urge them on to run away somewhere — like characters out of the Famous Five — but it was always Sherna who would hold us back and despite all my attempts to berate her she would not budge and somehow make us feel we were being very foolish.

Sherna and I learnt our navjote prayers together, traipsing to the agiary with our grandmother to learn them by rote. We were both very keen to show off  our prowess, reciting in what appeared to be an unintelligible language (Avestan). The priest had specifically warned us to follow his instructions when to start reciting, but he forgot to give the signal at navjote time. My grandmother, increasingly frustrated during the ceremony watching us silent like dummies, jumped up shouting, "Muao, bhanoni (idiots, start praying).” Sherna was particularly mortified by the chastisement, being the obedient girl, and we were both highly indignant at what appeared to be our shared early experience of injustice.

Being academically a year my junior, Sherna followed me to every school I attended from St Joseph’s Convent in Bandra, to Bombay International School, which was the great experimental school of the 1960s — with new theories regarding education. I must say my aunt took a great leap of faith in sending Sherna there because there was no guarantee, unlike today, of its academic standing. However, Sherna and I needed to be together and that pattern continued with Elphinstone College in Bombay where we both studied English literature. In college the indomitable Homai Shroff, who was head of the English department, dismissed me as a student not to be taken seriously as I gadded off on a European tour with family, missing a month of university. Shroff saw great potential in Sherna and was actually known to have warned her not to hang out too much with her errant cousin! Not that Sherna took any notice! She followed me eventually to the United Kingdom (UK) where she did another English degree at the University of Manchester. It was one of our happiest times there — as my cousins Sherna and Cyrus reduced the homesickness which was ever present in those early years in the UK.

Those strong bonds forged as children stood us in good stead when I moved permanently to the UK. Sherna returned to India after her degree and developed her career as a journalist while I worked in television and film. I remember she helped me immeasurably at a point after I had finished a degree in media studies in London and didn’t know in quite which direction to go. She was working then for The Illustrated Weekly of India and encouraged me to write up my college dissertation as an article for that publication, giving me hints on how to make dry facts about the growth of Indian cinema halls in the UK a bit more of a mirch masala (dramatic) story. Her subbing skills were legendary even then. When she was at Eve’s Weekly she commissioned me to write an article on the recently engaged Princess Diana. I loathed the Royal family and all its trappings, but she coaxed me into writing an alternative to the gushing tributes, just because she saw the potential for a good cover story.

Luckily, I visited India every year to maintain links with her, but in the intervening times we would write incredibly long and detailed letters to each other, which I treasure now in the age of instant communication. Farewell dear heart — which is imprinted forever like those teeth marks!