The Chemistry of Belonging: Stories of Inheritance and Upbringing

Chapter 1

INTRODUCING AMMA AND PAPA

One Sunday morning, when I was about ten years old, I had a big fight with my mother. My voice got louder and louder till she decided she had had enough. A very smart woman, my mother refused to engage in an argument with me.
“Go see your father,” she said.
I stomped out and found my father (who we called Papa; not the traditional pitaji, not the western daddy because my mother liked the sound of it) getting ready to go somewhere.
“Amma won’t listen to me,” I huffed.
“You know better than to fuss so early in the morning,” Papa said.
He finished tying his shoelaces, looked up and gave me his full attention. “What is going on?”
“Amma wants me to put oil in my hair, but I am not going to. She says oil is good for me, but I know it’s not.”
“Why do you say oil is not good for you?”
“Oil blocks the pores and should not be used on the skin.” I did not mention that girls my age who considered themselves in vogue were dispensing with traditional Indian customs like oiling hair. It was in my interest to withhold information my father would deem trifling.
“Well, you are right,” my father said. He paused a dramatic pause and then added, “But your mother is right too.”
“How is that possible? She says oil is good, and I’m saying oil is bad. How can we both be right?”
“Sunday is hair-wash day, so you must have just washed your hair. Yes?”
“Yes, I washed it, but I won’t put oil in it, and Amma says I must. That is why we were arguing. It’s not my fault that she is so old-fashioned.”
“Is your hair still wet?” Papa asked.
I removed the towel from my head and nodded.
“So, she is right. Rubbing oil into your scalp won’t block the pores because oil and water mix to form an emulsion. The oil-water emulsion penetrates the three protective layers that form the skin. So, oil nourishes the hair follicles for stronger, softer hair.”
He donned a thoughtful look. “Maybe it will nourish your brain, too,” he said. Then he smiled his beatific smile.
I was even more miffed.
My father relaxed back in the chair and put me out of my misery.
“But you are right, too. You know why?”
He had my full attention now.
“Oil is thicker than water. By itself, oil forms a film on the skin. If you rub oil on dry skin, it only goes through the first layer, and hence, it can block some pores. So, you see, you are right, too.”
“The devil is in the details. It is good to ask questions,” Papa added as he gave me an encouraging smile.
Papa, a boys-high-school chemistry teacher, had experience answering questions. Amma taught Hindi literature, one of a handful of experts in her field, to college-age women, so never needed to explain herself.
What I did not know then—and came to understand over time—was that no matter what the argument, Papa would have supported Amma. They were a team. Looking back, that lesson in chemistry was my first lesson in teamwork. Second, it was a lesson in resolving a disagreement in a manner that kept the peace. When faced with a contrarian (person or viewpoint), I envisage my father’s unflappable demeanor; I remind myself to listen, ask questions, seek added information, be it science, ethics, or politics. There are pros and cons to everything. Keep talking to create chemistry.
I oiled my hair with coconut oil that day like Amma had told me to. Seventy years later, I still do. Oiling is good for the body, too. After showering, towel dry lightly and massage it on damp skin for a petal-soft feel.

Chapter 2

KAILASH OF DEHRADUN

In a remote part of India lies a valley of great enchantment. Dehradun, a small town in the valley, is my father’s birthplace. He was named Kailash after the Himalayan peak where Shiva hails from.
The mighty Himalayas—the loftiest mountain range of all—guard the valley’s northern boundaries. The lush green Shivalik Hills, 6900 ft. high, offer fortification in the south while allowing welcome passage to monsoon clouds that make it verdant. To the weary traveler, the river Yamuna offers a gentle passage from the west. For the adventurer, on the eastern front, there is a tumultuous route via two tributaries of the Ganges—the rivers Tons and Song.
In Skanda Purana, one of the oldest records known to man, it is written that this area is a part of Kedarkhand, the abode of Lord Shiva, destroyer of evil, enabler of creation. And indeed, growing up, to celebrate the festival of Shivaratri, I remember trekking to a hidden cave, a shrine where Shiva rested after swallowing poison churned up by the oceans and held it in his throat, thus creating the world. Hence, the valley is considered blessed.
King Rama came here to atone for killing his wife’s abductor, Ravana, in the war he waged to rescue her. Haridwar (doorway to God), the city on the banks of the Ganges where the river meets the plains, is one of the holiest in Northern India, attracting pilgrims and tourists alike. The Fab Four music group, the Beatles, made the area known to the western world when they wrote haunting music in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, a suburb of Haridwar.
Emperor Ashoka, of the Mauryan dynasty, circa 300BCE, spread Buddhism in India, and his thirty-three edicts were carved into cave walls, monoliths, and iron pillars that have not rusted yet. One such chattan, rock-face, with the original Pali script still readable, exists in a village called Kalsi. The first time I saw it, I must have been about five years old.
In the mid-1400s, Guru Ram Rai, son of the seventh Sikh guru, sought shelter in this valley to escape punitive measures on non-Muslims imposed by Aurangzeb, the last Mughal ruler of India. People of all faiths kept his location
a secret, and his encampment, Dera, in the valley, Doon, gave rise to a new town: Dehradun. Today, a flag is raised during an annual festival, and people of all faiths gather here to celebrate this victory. The flag hoisting festival, Jhanda Mela, is one of my fondest memories of growing up in Dehradun.
In 1867, the British, at the height of their colonial power, stumbled upon this remote valley and annexed it by cutting off the water supplies and declaring war against the rulers who were of Gurkha descent. The Municipality of Dehradun, due to its abundant forests, fertile soil, cool climate, and strategic position as a gateway to the Himalayan border outposts, became a favored settlement for the British Indian Military.
By 1900, with the advent of the railways, Dehradun became a hub for economic activity. Soon, Christian missionaries followed to spread their faith as the only path to God—a concept quite contrary to people of different persuasions settled there—but encountered no violence or disdain. People of all faiths were welcomed here. Learned people, like Swami Vivekananda, established an ashram in Dehradun.
Along with missionaries came mercenaries, more military, and also young British families. Farmlands, tea gardens, and limestone quarries gave way to cantonments, havelis, and bazaars. Catholics set up English-medium high schools in the valley and adjoining hills. The Prince of Wales Royal Military College (now RIMC) taught a military curriculum to transform Indian boys into officers fit for the British Indian Army. Later, in 1932, The Indian Military Academy (IMA), the officer training unit of the Indian Army, added to the urbanization of the valley. Dehradun came to be identified as the school town of India.
The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) was established in Dehradun in 1956. It is India’s largest government-owned oil and gas explorer and producer, and it generated an influx of highly educated people into Dehradun. They came from all different states of India, bringing with them their language, their food, their religious ethos. From the school town of India, Dehradun became the education and research town of India.
This enchanted valley, its heritage and its chemistry, is the land of my ancestors. They were farmers and traders, growing rice and wheat in this fertile valley, which imbues its residents with thousands of years of wisdom and makes them rich with a legacy of tolerance and inclusiveness. With the passage of time, my father’s ancestors branched into other professions; engineers and doctors were in demand by the British. My paternal grandfather, Bishamber Das, became a Civil Engineer. He built canals in the state of Punjab and elsewhere and travelled to the far away project sites as required by his profession. For the family to have a stable home, he built a house in Dehradun. Thus, my father was born in Dehradun. Dehradun is where I was raised. Dehradun is where I took my firstborn when she was one year old.
My father drove our family the forty hilly kilometers from Dehradun to the holy city of Haridwar in his black Fiat for the traditional dip in the river Ganges. We walked barefoot to the ghat. It was a frosty December morning. Bare-chested, dressed in a thin undergarment, my father directed my husband, similarly dressed, to hold the infant and step into the river. So as not to be swallowed by the swift frothy current, they gripped a weighty iron chain which was anchored in a cement block on the steps of the ghat with one hand.
My husband clasped the naked infant with the other, stepped into the freezing water, and for a split second, plunged till the river was above his head and the baby completely submerged. My father recited blessings in Sanskrit. My mother and I offered marigold petals as a prayer. Then, the infant blessed and purified by the holy water, my father drove us back home.

Chapter 3

LALLI OF ALLAHABAD

On the day my mother was born, Girdhari Lal Agarwal, my maternal grandfather, legendary advocate of Allahabad High Court, ordered large wicker-weave baskets called tokras, packed with pakwans, sweet mithai and savory namkeens, from his favorite halwai shop. These were delivered to his clients, his colleagues, and to every resident of Georgetown—an Allahabad neighborhood built in 1901—famous for its wide avenues lined with pipal trees, jasmine-scented parks, and large porticoed bungalows occupied by wealthy Indians and a few British—with the message, ‘I am blessed with a daughter.’
Awed, perhaps envious, some asked, “He must mean granddaughter. Isn’t he too old for this?” Others opined, “At his age, he should be embarrassed.” I imagine such a rejoinder pleased my grandfather.
Girdhari Lal also sent lavish gifts to his employees, cobblers, tailors, vegetable vendors, flower sellers, and random hawkers lining the famed mandi central bazaar in Allahabad. I imagine they, too, were bemused. “Such extravagance. And for a daughter? Doesn’t he already have eight or nine girls?”
My mother was the youngest child in a close-knit family of eight girls and two boys. In 1924, when she was born, Girdhari Lal was at the peak of his career, successful, respected, and one of the wealthiest lawyers practicing in Allahabad High Court. His business was civil law, and most of his cases involved settling land disputes between the Indian royals, either amongst themselves or with the British colonial government. At that time, the highest legal authority in India was the High Court, the Supreme Court for India being safely ensconced in faraway London.

To the Europeans, Allahabad remained lesser known. They romanticized Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata), which headquartered the British East India Company.
New Delhi became the capital of the Raj, where they built a parliament house, gaining fame for architectural expertise (though its design was copied from a building in a southern empire of India that ruled for one thousand years and created immense wealth). Bombay (renamed Mumbai) was the Crown’s favorite because of its merchant community and a valuable harbor, which served as the gateway to the lucrative opium trade to China.
This lack of European attention became a blessing for Allahabad and possibly the reason for its leap to prominence in free India. Without a significant British influence but with a historical footprint dating back to Vedic times, Allahabad flourished and developed its own fine-tuned spirit that housed the Congress National Party. Seven of India’s fifteen Prime Ministers have connections to Allahabad. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, was from Allahabad. His daughter, India’s first woman Prime Minister, the leader who defied President Nixon and his bullying, grew up in Allahabad. Their home was located not far from my grandfather’s house.
In 2018, seventy-odd years after India gained independence, Allahabad was renamed Prayagraj based on its historical name. It is one of the oldest living cities in the world, and this continuity of inhabitance makes it a marvelous mix of ancient and modern. Indian texts dating back to the Vedic age, thousands of years ago, mention Prayagraj as a center of education. It was also a pilgrimage because the rivers Ganges and Yamuna meet there. In ancient India, science, arts, ethics, philosophy were integrated, so cities were built in geographies where Nature held supreme. Besides the practical reasons of the availability of water and transport, it created a chemistry of harmony in society. Allahabad is still one of the holiest places for Hindus. Allahabad University, founded in 1887, is where my mother attended college. It is the fourth oldest university in modern India.

Art, music, and literature flourished in Allahabad to create a culture that absorbed influences from migration and invasion. Over the ages, several empires and dynasties controlled this region of Northern India called Doab. It became a part of the Mauryan and Gupta empires of the east and the Kushan empire of the west before becoming part of the Kannauj empire around the first century AD. In his memoirs in India, Huien Tsang, the Chinese Buddhist monk and chronicler who traveled through India during Harshvardhan’s reign (A.D. 607–647), writes that he visited the city of Prayagraj (or Prayag) in A.D. 643.
A Mughal king, understanding its strategic position as the gateway to the northwest, built a stronghold here and named the city Allahabad, the abode of Allah. King Akbar established a fort on the shores of the river Ganges and brought peace to the region. His chief financial officer was a brilliant Hindu. On a trip to India in 2023, I discovered a connection to this gentleman. We stayed in a heritage hotel, a haveli that had been restored to its former glory. This building had once been the city home of Akbar’s Hindu bookkeeper. Akbar also deeded a village called Jhusi to the family. One of my mother’s sisters was called Jhusi-wali-jij. She had married a descendant of the brilliant man.
By then, the family finances had dwindled, but they kept their social standing as an ethical and learned family. That is probably why my grandfather agreed to the alliance. I met this mausi’s daughter in Dehradun during the summer holidays. She was beautiful, lending credibility to my mother’s claim that all her sisters were beautiful.
The East India Company, attracted here for the same reasons as the Mughals, established a garrison here and called it Fort Allahabad. They kept the name given by the Mughal King to help with their bookkeeping for collecting taxes. Akbar (with the help of my ancestor, I assume) had a rigorous tally of the people living in the area. The British maintained the geographic demarcations set up by the Mughals to levy taxes from this wealthy agrarian region, and the Company, a sovereign power, provided detailed reports to the Crown.
During British occupation, this once wealthy region became impoverished. This led to Allahabad citizenry being highly active in the 1857 rebellion against the ruling East India Company. Many Indian lives were lost. The Crown’s concern was the blow to its image.
So, the Crown abolished the EIC-implemented courts, including the Supreme Court, and set up a new judicial system in India. The genesis of the Allahabad High Court can be traced back to the Indian High Court Act, 1861—a law that marked the unification of the Indian judicial system under the patronage of the Crown.
The Bombay High Court, the Madras High Court, and the Calcutta High Court were the first three high courts that were established. Allahabad High Court was the fourth to be set up. With the stroke of Victoria’s pen through a supplementary Letters Patent in 1866, its seat was in Agra originally and it was then called the High Court of Judicature for the North-Western Provinces. They changed the seat of the High Court from Agra to Allahabad and renamed it “the High Court of Judicature” a few years later.
With cunning legalese, unlike the East India Company, the Crown did not establish a Supreme Court in India. This meant that if a legal matter could not be settled in a High Court, such as a land dispute with the Crown, Indian lawyers were forced to undertake a lengthy voyage at great personal expense to London. Most Indians could not afford the travel. The British authorities imposed extra legal obligations on Indian lawyers taking a case to the Supreme Court.

My grandfather settled his cases in Allahabad High Court. Except one time. My mother didn’t tell me details of the case he took to London. She described how he took a cook and valet, a team of lawyers, and how he looked so grand in a whole new wardrobe. She didn’t tell us why my grandfather lost the case or why he returned a troubled man—I have pieced that together from stories told by my uncles and aunts.
Once, I asked my mother if her birth was really an accident and why her father remained unembarrassed despite his advanced age. Characteristically, she sidestepped any likelihood of sexual activity in parents, by saying in Hindi, “Woh to hamesha thhahaka maar ke hansthe thhe,” which roughly translates to ‘he always laughed loudly about everything.’
She would further elaborate. ‘Like a child, blood pumping, red-faced—he laughed with his whole body. I used to start laughing too, even when I did not understand why he laughed.’ She said her father doted on her precisely because she was a surprise, born ten years after his last child. So much so that he took her everywhere with him from the time she was a toddler. Inappropriate places like the court, his office, even the teeming Allahabad train station when one time he went to receive a maharajah who sought his legal services.
“He called me Lalli. Chal mere saath Lalli. Come with me, Lalli. Just come. Don’t ask too many questions.”
Lalli means radiance. My mother was the radiance in my grandfather’s eye. Her formal name was Prakash Vati. Prakash means luminescence.