Ranganath, 15 November 2001.
As you know, Maya was born on 17 March 1951. I was eight-and-a-half years old at that point. We were living in a rented apartment in a mansion named Gulshan Villa in Oomer Park on Warden Road in Bombay. However, my earliest memory of Maya is from a few days later, at her naming ceremony.
Everyone was allowed to give her a mi
ddle name, to be whispered in her ear. I was told that I could give her a name, but that it should start with a “ka” sound. I named her “cake”. Perhaps this had something to do with the excellence of her baking in later years.
The next year, we moved into the Municipal Commissioner’s Bungalow on Carmichael Road, a huge, sprawling house with a large garden, and with malis, dhobi, watchmen, and a driver. While we lived there, Maya grew from being one year old to being six. I can remember, early in our stay there, watching her getting an oil bath from my mother, and from my grandmother Lakshmi, who also stayed with us much of the time, and told us bedtime stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Maya was exceedingly pretty, and I was very proud of her. This is when the photo was taken of her in which she is sitting on a sofa, with a sweet smile playing on her face. She loved playing make-believe games with all the servants’ kids, organizing dances, and so forth. She became fluent in Marathi. I remember, years later, asking her whether she still remembered her Marathi, and being disappointed when she sad no, she had forgotten it, because she didn’t have a chance to use it after she, with my parents, moved to New Delhi in 1957.
While we were living in this fabulous place, Maya started going to school, at the Villa Theresa Convent on Peddar Road. When she was five years old, she came back and sang a song for us that she had learned in school that day. It went as follows: Swallowed a peana, swallowed a peana, swallowed a peana chasno (repeat). Got a pain here, got a pain here, got a pain here chasno (repeat). Cut it open, cut it open, cut it open chasno (repeat). Found the peana, found the peana, found the peana chasno (repeat). We all sang it endlessly together.
She lived in New Delhi from 1957 until the middle of 1973, first going to school at Presentation Convent, and then to college at Indraprastha College. My connection to her become episodic rather than continuous, because I stayed back in Bombay and, later, moved to the USA. However, through 1963, I would go to Delhi for the summer holidays each year, and play hide and seek with Maya and with our dog, Buster, a wonderful golden retriever. One of Maya’s favourite games was after dark for me to hide somewhere in the house, and for her and her friends to come and find me. The fun part was that I would try to frighten the daylights out of them by standing in some dark corner with a flashlight under my chin, hopefully making my face look monstrous while I emitted a low moan. Their shrieks of fright and laughter were delicious.
I also remember going for a walk with Maya and Amma in a park in New Delhi in the winter. Maya must have been seven or eight years old. The day was sunny, the air was cool, and a mist hung on the air. The park was beautiful. As we were strolling, Maya asked us to slow down. When I teased her by asking her whether she was too small to walk with us, she said, “No, but I have to walk faster than you.” I was nonplused by this response until my mother, always wise, said Maya meant she had to take a lot more steps in the same time than we did, which, of course, is “walking faster”. On another occasion, there was a Konkani Association festival in which Maya and a whole bunch of other girls, dressed up in the costumes of different parts of India. She looked very cute. Somewhere, there is a photograph of the whole lot of them standing in a long line and smiling prettily for the photographer.
These are the years in which she developed an interest in drawing. I can remember her endlessly sketching and doodling in notebooks. Some of her interest was in designing women’s clothes in her sketches.
During these years, Maya and my parents and their dogs, first Buster, the Ringo and Rollo, lived first at Alipore Road, then on Willingdon Crescent, and eventually at 5 Race Course Road, which later became Indira Gandhi’s residence and, after her assassination, a museum. Ringo was a cocker spaniel, named by Maya for Ringo Starr of the Beatles, and Rollo was a sweet golden retriever, also named by Maya. Rollo was very sick as a puppy, and had to be looked after by Maya and Mamama, that is, my mother’s mother, Lakshmi. Maya and her grandmother and Rollo shared a bedroom.
In 1967, Maya went on an American Field Service exchange program to South Portland, Maine, where she lived for a year with the Coffin family, and went to high school. The Coffin family consisted of Judge Frank Coffin, who was Chief Justice of the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, his wife Ruth, and their children, Doug, Nancy, Meredith (Merrie), and Susan.
The Coffins lived, and continue to live, in a wonderful, large but cosy house that has multiple staircases and innumerable nooks and crannies, and wonderful bedrooms upstairs that look out over the ocean. Maya’s favorite room was one into which the sunlight came flooding in in the morning. Maya was completely at home there, and the Coffins developed a lifelong friendship with, and a deep affection for her. Maya brought our family and theirs together, and they have stayed together ever since. I know that Frank and Ruth regarded Maya as one of their daughters, so much so that, years later, they made a trip to India to see Maya and her family and her world.
My brother and I were both students at MIT when Maya was with the Coffins and, against AFS rules, which said family should stay away, so that the exchange student would have a fully “American” experience, we visited Maya and the Coffins several times. Maya and Merrie became great friends. Frank had a puckish sense of humour, and I can remember Maya and Merrie putting women’s’ wigs on him to see how he would look. He also had a workshop where he did wood carving, and Maya and Merrie decided to “decorate” it; they plastered the whole ceiling with photographs from magazines and newspapers, creating a giant collage that stayed there for many, many years. Years later, Merrie visited Maya and my parents in Delhi.
Towards the end of Maya’s stay in the USA, on 9 June 1968, Sandy and I got married in North White Plains, just north of New York City. Maya came, along with her American family. She was then just over seventeen years old. She wore a crimson sari, and looked beautiful. Photos from that time show a striking resemblance between her and my daughter Maya at about the same age. The resemblance is not so much of features as “look”, “bearing”, and “vivaciousness”. As you know, my daughter Maya was named after my sister Maya, because my sister was a favorite of mine and of my wife Sandy.
In early 1973, my parents moved from New Delhi to Poona with Rollo (Ringo having died earlier), as did Sandy and Lakshmi and I. We lived in a rented house in Sind Colony, my parents living downstairs, Sandy and Lakshmi and me, upstairs. Maya stayed on at 5 Race Course Road, which my father’s younger brother, Manjappa, had moved into when my parents moved out. When she had finished college in New Delhi, she moved to Poona in May 1973. She also decided, probably with some prodding from my parents, to get married. A program of arranged meetings was set up for her. I was deeply offended, believing that she was being forced into this horrible “parade of the flesh”, and said to her, “You just let me know if you are being forced to do something you don’t want to do, and I will protect you.” She didn’t need my protection. One of the very first people she met was a young guy with whom she said she had immediately developed a rapport, and they had talked for hours on end. She eventually married him. It was clearly love at first sight. If I remember right, they met in July or August, and got married in November of that year, 1973, in Bangalore, on the 15th of November. Maya was “given away” from Meera Pachi’s house. Maya and Amarnath made a wonderful wedding couple, impossibly young and slim and charming; but I suppose all of us are that way at least once in our lives. Or, at least, that is something to be hope for.
Maya and Amarnath lived in a flat in Nandidurg, and started planning and then building their house in Jayamahal. In between, Deepa was born, on their wedding anniversary, something that must have required exceedingly careful planning or a lot of luck. A few days earlier, Anand had been born to Sandy and me, in Poona. When Nandadeep was completed, in 1976, a lot of things happened. Sandy and Lakshmi and Anand and I moved back to the USA from Poona; Maya and Amarnath and Deepa moved into the new house; and my parents and Rollo move from Poona into the downstairs flat at Nanda Deep. The arrangement remained intact as long as my parents were alive, with Maya and her family, but Maya above all, looking after my parents in a devoted and affectionate manner, difficult though that may have been at times.
At this time, the memories begin to be both more recent and more crowded together, as the interaction between my family and Maya’s began to be more frequent, even though we live far apart. I remember an “unbirthday party” arranged by Maya downstairs in what was called the “sand pit”, I think, complete with a cake made of mud, with candles on it. There were birthday parties with all kinds of games. One that I remember was “pin the tail on the donkey”. Except that we didn’t have a donkey; we had a fantastic creature that Maya designed and drew on a large sheet of paper that was stuck to the drawing room door. Since it was Lakshmi’s birthday (she must have been seven or eight), she was allowed to name the creature. She called it an “Upix Dokma”, so we played “pin the tail on the Upix Dokma”. We played treasure hunt games. I remember one in which the last-but-one clue was to lead to me, because I had the final clue on me. The last-but-one was “run with a gun and say ‘aath’”. Bambu, who must have been thirteen or fourteen, made a gun out of his fist, and started running around the house saying, “aath, aath, aath,” until it finally dawned on someone what the clue meant. We split our sides laughing at Bambu. And we played delightful games of “dumb charades”; so simple and so much fun.
Every time we visited, Maya would invite the whole Bangalore clan for dinner and make all my favourite dishes. We have clan photos from these dinners going back over the last two decades, taken on the steps outside the drawing room. On one of our visits, we all went to Amarnath’s parents’ farm at Ripponpet. One afternoon, it was raining, and the four kids were bored. Amarnath’s father devised a game: looking under the innumerable “god calendars” on the walls to see if there was a “tinku”—a house lizard—hiding behind it. Every time we found one, the children would shriek with delight, while the tinku fled to cover behind the next calendar. That, of course, would be the next calendar to be lifted, again to shrieks of delight. It is possible that one grandfather and one tinku kept those four children entranced all afternoon long.
Some time around the middle 1980s, Maya started to do cartooning seriously. I will not tell that story, because you know it well, but I will say that she worked at her profession very hard and very seriously. It shows in the immense development she went through, in terms of content, style, wit, and timelessness. She went from being a “nice” cartoonist to a genius.
Maya and her family made many trips to the United States to visit us and other relatives. Two of my favourite memories are of two trips to Disney World and another to Cape Cod. On the First trip to Disney World, we stayed in a hotel outside the park, and ate immense breakfasts at an International House of Pancakes. On the second trip, we had a whale of a time, staying in a wonderful hotel right in the park, so that the older children could go wandering off by themselves, without an adult, which meant that the adults could snatch a well-needed nap in the afternoon. Maya loved the merry-go-round and the Ferris Wheel and the international pavilions, while the kids loved the roller coaster, known as Space Mountain. We went to a water world amusement park where Amarnath was the only one in our party brave enough to go down an incredibly steep and high water slide. At Cape Cod, we had a more quiet and relaxed time. Maya wrote in our guest book that being there brought back fond memories of her childhood.
There were difficult times, too. Maya was there at my father’s bedside when he died in September 1988 of cancer, in Sandy’s and my bedroom in Belmont. Immediately after the cremation, she and my mother flew back to India, because my mother wanted to be tested for cancer. She tested positive. Deepa told me that she learned from Maya that my mother had suspected that she had cancer, but did not want to say anything about it because she thought my father would not be able to cope with the news. Maya was there, again, at my mother’s bedside as my mother was dying from cancer in 1991. Maya looked after her tirelessly for several months, with help from Sunila and Sumana.
In the late eighties and early nineties, I started coming to India frequently on business, and made a point of visiting Maya and her family each time, even if only for a weekend. Maya was incredibly kind and hospitable, meeting me at the airport if Amarnath could not, asking me what special things I wanted for dinner or breakfast, taking me shopping for Caftans or other gifts, taking me on visits to uncles and aunts, and, best of all, staying up until two or three in the morning to talk philosophy or to gossip about our family. Much of my later (some say late) philosophical development occurred during the course of these late-night conversations with Maya.
You can see, can’t you, that Maya was not just my sister? She was also my friend and philosopher.
Her life’s work was immense, and will live on. What does it consist of?
First, a life lived according to principles and, in later years, founded in deep religious belief. Among these principles was other-centredness, resulting in a constant stream of energy helping others. Another was being self-effacing rather than self-promoting. I think of her favourite song, with the line, “You are the wind beneath my wings” being sung not by her but to her by Amarnath and Deepa and Nandan.
Second, the effort she put into family, both nuclear and extended, and into community, resulting in a very successful husband and two children to be proud of, but also in Maya and Amarnath being viewed as pillars of the community, people you could depend on in times of need. There were countless acts of random kindness and senseless beauty performed by Maya. To give one example, Jaya told me that Maya decided that Vasanth deserved a 60th birthday party, and arranged it, cake, guests, and all. Without Maya, he wouldn’t have had one.
Third, the immense body of her professional work as a cartoonist, amounting to perhaps 4000 cartoons, each one requiring four to five hours of work. She worked with dedication, getting her work done each day but, even or important, improving her technique and biting but never vicious wit year after year until she became, in my opinion, the best cartoonist in India.
And last, what I call “the concept of Maya”—the conceptualization of a person that could be accomplished, kind and generous, gentle and smiling, and never, ever giving up on her principles. I would be in happy indeed if someone were to say that about me at the end of my life.