8th August 1997

Goolbai Gunasekera’s new book ‘Chosen Ground’ - Part II

Everything’s right in America!

(Continued from last week)

Jamshed Mehta ar- rived... Mayor of Karachi, Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Chairman and Trustee of many businesses, he still had the time to visit this obscure village boy simply out of a sense of duty.

This characteristically Parsi duty - consciousness was the one lesson I learnt from Jamshedji himself who became the only grandfather I ever knew.

He was met at the station by 17 Motwani men of ages ranging from 17 to 70. When he arrived in the house he was conducted to the bedroom with the low charpoy and the gleaming white sheets... but Mr. Mehta was a Prince. In my father’s dazzled vision he was a King.

Simple, unpretentious and gracious he not only opted to sleep on the cool rooftop en famille, but disdained the use of western eating implements. Sitting cross legged on plump floor cushions, he ate heartily, loved the iced water well bath and slept very soundly on thick floor rugs, complimenting the women of the house all the while on their excellent food and superlative housekeeping.

The Motwanis adored him. Kipling surely had him in mind when he wrote of walking with Kings and not losing the common touch.

And what did Jamshedji and Kewal think of each other? Let me just say that after the first long and curious look it was love at once on both sides. Father saw a kindly, cultured Parsi gentleman in whom he instinctively placed his entire trust.

What Jamshed saw in the little 8-year-old boy whose English vocabulary consisted of "Good morning," was a mystery. Kewal probably touched some long buried paternal chord in Jamshed for he had never married and lived with a widowed sister and her daughter.

The next day he asked the assembled older Motwanis if he could take Kewal away to Karachi to be given that highly prized commodity - an English education. He intended to be guardian in fact and not just in absentia.

After much talk from all the men each of whom insisted on being heard, accompanied by wailing and weeping from his sisters-in-law, Father was sent out into the competitive world of Karachi away from the confines of his comfortable and secure village home. It was felt that Father might study law and so become a mouthpiece for every village litigant (on an honorary basis of course) in the not so distant future.

Father now entered what was virtually another planet. From a village home he was transported into what was one of the most beautiful houses of the city. Jamshedji was a very wealthy man. His house was full of western furniture, Venetian mirrors, Czechoslovakian glass ornaments, padded chairs, luxurious carpets and high four poster beds.

It took father over a year to be able to sleep on one of them. He spent his first year in the city rolled up in a sheet by the side of the expensive imported bed in his room. Alas, he overslept one day and was found by Perin, his hostess, who told Jamshed how his young ward was passing the night. Eventually and very gradually Father was ‘modernised’.

Fortunately Father had a formidable brain - a plus point for his proud guardian. Within a year he was speaking English. Within two he topped his class and was enunciating in the polished tones of a high class Parsi family. He eventually graduated from University with top honours and Jamshed decided it was time for him to learn something, of the world.

His brothers thought it was high time he married - but an alliance with a girl from Arazi was out of the question. Father’s market value to would be mothers-in-law was high.(He had an education.) Yet he was caught in a situation Jamshed did not foresee.

The Sindhi community of Karachi was not the highly modern and wealthy community it is today. It was traditional and clannish. Father was a misfit. Vacations spent in Arazi were happy and affectionate but marriage was for life and father’s westernised background was not conducive to a traditional marriage however beautiful the girl may have been.

The Sindhis were, and still are, one of India’s most attractive communities. "Every invading army passed through Sind," Father would say tongue in cheek, "Naturally, they left their mark behind them. Note my Greek profile!" So he now looked westward for postgraduate studies.

In the intervening years betwixt school and College Father had absorbed much of Jamshed’s religious and political leanings. The Siren Song of the Indian Freedom Movement and Mrs. Annie Besant’s charismatic speeches were not calls to be ignored.

Father was enrolled at Oxford and thither he went. For the first time he was intensely homesick. Oxford’s gleaming spires did nothing for him other than depress him mightily. Agitated by Father’s continuing misery Jamshed consulted his Theosophist friends who suggested America might suit the young scholar better.

And so Father enrolled in Yale rather than at Oxford, the "in" College of the time. Thither he went carrying with him a letter of introduction to the Heath family of Louisville - also American Theosophist friends of Jamshed.

Father was a snazzy dresser. He loved using Yardley’s Cologne and to this day, just a whiff of Yardleys sends me back to times when I sat on his lap surrounded by an aura of Cologne. As a postgraduate student of Yale he enjoyed himself greatly.

It was expected that he would be an A grade student but more than this the very smell of America intoxicated him. Coming, as he did, from British India he found the friendliness and the genuine warmth of the Americans one of the most heart warming experiences of his life.

Unused to associating on a day to day basis with Whites, Father took a seat in the cafeteria away from the laughing, talking groups already seated. A young man came over. "Hi," he said. Father stood up. "Oh, don’t bother to stand," said the young man cheerfully, "I just wondered if I might join you."

And so Father had his first meal with a westerner as an equal. To this day he remembers the menu, the conversation, the clothes he wore, the very place he sat at and the name of the young man whom he never saw again. It was the start of a long love affair with America.

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The Healing Cut

Repairing that sac of fat

By Roshan Peiris

Due to a deformity in the abdominal wall consisting of intestines, fat and abdominal organs, the intestines tend to come down. Hernia as this condition is known is more common in women, maybe due to the after effects of child birth, weight gain and not using an abdominal belt.

Dr. Ruwan Fonseka, Registrar of surgery of the Sri Jayewardenepura hospital, without his mask looks as young as an A /level student. He is both a deft and clever surgeon who in twenty-five minutes set to right the intestines of the man on the operating table.

The man under local anesthesia was still, his abdomen covered in sterile cloth and the part to be operated on painted with iodine containing disinfectant.

Starting with the scalpel, the instruments were arranged in order. There were the forceps, the surgical scissors and the needle threaded with black nylon thread.

The abdomen was cut with the scalpel neatly and the skin held on either side with retractors. The white gloved hands of the surgeon raised the hernia after much careful probing. The intestines looked like large bubbles covered with blood. Holding the hernia with his white gloved finger, Dr. Fonseka probed with the diathermy machine working the diathermy probe. It is not a pleasant sight to see fat, subcutaneous tissue and muscle.

Dr. Fonseka probed the hernia sac and then repaired it. There was no cutting. The hernia was put back in place with neat sutures made of black nylon thread. Then again there was no bleeding, bleeding points being controlled with the dyathermy machine.

There was in this case oozing from the abdomen and so a redovac drain was inserted to drain the oozing into a collecting bottle.

Hernia is a simple operation. It takes just twenty five minutes with the sewing back of the skin, as well. Many hesitate to undergo the operation and suffer much discomfort. There is also the possibility that there might be strangulated hernia when the intestines are strangulated.

This operation however, is messy and very dangerous and is listed as a priority operation.

The staff of the theatre are relaxed as the operation is a simple one and in the hands of a able surgeon there isn’t much that can go wrong and as such the man will wake up and find that he has regained his figure with no unseemly sagging abdomen, marring his appearance.

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