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| Sunday, December 21, 2003 |
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| Sunday, December 21, 2003 |
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First Darling of the
Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood
From the first page, the reader starts feeling a kind of unspoken sympathy for this sad child caught in a world of adult relationships, and growing up with an ever-widening generation gap. Thrity unfailingly gives full voice to her silent sadness and restlessness of childhood and adolescence. "I am different" is a constant refrain in the memoir. From childhood, Thrity experiences this feeling of being different in all her relationships, be it with her soft-hearted, hypersensitive, caring father; hysterical, harsh, not-so-motherly mother; kind-hearted, and loving spinster aunt Mehroo; cousin sister Roshan, emotional and soft uncle Babu or aunt Freny. Thrity, in describing her own family, sketches the minute details of all incidents and characters, including herself. She voices the stories of other characters, big or small, like Kamla, the housemaid, and Jamal, the factory worker. In doing so, she portrays real characters capable of feelings, emotions, pain, grief, joy, shame and sorrow, which in turn affect her life, too. She is caught between the elite, who are Indian by birth, but are English in taste, opinion, morals and intellect on the one hand, and the education system of the Irish nuns on the other. There is a clash between the two worlds. She relives the experiences of her school days, of being called a ‘mad Parsi’, of betting on threatening a teacher with a knife, of adoring teachers like Greta Duke, Mother Ignatius and of making fun of the likes of Mrs Beatrice D’Mello. She joins political movements in college and remembers being troubled by poverty and y the power that being privileged gave her. At every point in her life, her family’s hold on her and its influence is clearly brought out. She mixes the joyful and sad, small and big, social and personal moments like a good writer, making the story an interesting, entertaining and gripping description of a life that describes many other lives through her own. Thrity constantly moves between talking about her family and self and about the larger issues of politics, education, intoxication with the West, caste system and poverty. Nothing is left untouched, whether it is the nostalgic recollection of childhood or the modern dilemma of existence, alienation, angst and pain. Her father is a constant source of strength, while the soured relations between her parents are a constant source of sorrow. Thrity’s personality is moulded by artists and writers such as Van Gogh, Dali, Turner, Degas, Shaw and Chekov. She dreams of having a perfect mother, whom she strives to search. She gets the motherly affection she yearns for from Mehroo, her aunt, while her biological mother undergoes an identity crisis and turns a tyrant. Thrity’s personality emerges with a strong sense of self, that time and again peeps out amid complaints and corrections by others. This individuality helps her exist on a plane above the others and realise her dream of flying to America in search of a career. It is, to some extent, the story of the self-assertion of a woman. Friendship with Jessie strengthens her hold on herself and life. Thrity’s search for her own Utopia and freedom continues as we go through this book. Thrity also philosophises about the larger issues of life and death when she painfully recalls Babu’s death and its emotional repercussions on all members of the family. He lovingly called Thrity "My first darling of the morning." Thrity uses dream analysis and Freudian psychoanalysis in studying and revealing her own self. Like any modern woman caught between tradition and modernity, Thrity seeks her true self. She confesses to the claustrophobia of living: "I want self-revelation, I want confession, I want therapeutic healing, I want absolution." |
LIFE
is often strange with its paths and passages, and so was Thrity Umrigar’s,
as she recalls in her debut memoir, First Darling of the Morning.
This vivid and picturesque exploration of the childhood of a Parsi girl
growing up in the Bombay of the early 1970s, passing through turmoils
and tribulations of a growing and maturing phase, is not too far away
from many of our own experiences.