Life Back Then

Reginald was born in Lahore before Partition. He writes books on various subjects pertaining to South Asia. A former London journalist, he now lives in Mid Wales with his actor wife Jamila. His latest book is Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the Forgotten Indian Martyrs, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi. A member of the Society of Authors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

I was born in Lahore in 1932 in a Christian family. In the 1930s-1940s, Lahore was really a garden city, and a centre of education and culture.

There was, on the whole, harmony in Lahore. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and the few Christians and Parsis had a good working relationship. On Eid, we went to Muslim families to offer our Greetings. Likewise, we visited Hindu families for Diwali. And we were visited by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs on Christmas Day. I can never forget the way we all celebrated Basant together.

Kite flying was an obsession with all Lahoris. The kite contests (known as पेचे बाज़ी pechae-baazi) were followed with passion. There were professional kite-flyers known as ustads उस्ताद who had their disciples cheering them on. It was all heady stuff.

Reginald was born in Lahore before Partition. He writes books on various subjects pertaining to South Asia. A former London journalist, he now lives in Mid Wales with his actor wife Jamila. His latest book is Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the Forgotten Indian Martyrs, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi. A member of the Society of Authors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

This family saga has been set down after considerable research. The oldest member I have consulted is Joe Massey, my late mother’s youngest cousin. He is now over ninety years old, and lives in Missisuaga, near Toronto. Thankfully, his memory is still very good.

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Great grandfather and his times

My father hailed from a family of Jats of the Mall clan from Gurdaspur. In the 19^th century, about half of the people in Gurdaspur were Muslims\; the rest were Sikhs and Hindus. The Sikh Jats were faithful to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who was a fellow Jat of the Sukerchakia misl (military group) of Gujranwala, which is now in Pakistan.

Reginald was born in Lahore before Partition. He writes books on various subjects pertaining to South Asia. A former London journalist, he now lives in Mid Wales with his actor wife Jamila. His latest book is Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the Forgotten Indian Martyrs, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi. A member of the Society of Authors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ed. Note: Mr. Massey's recorded memoirs of 1947 are available here in the UK National Archives. Another recording is available here.

This family saga has been set down after considerable research. The oldest member I have consulted is Joe Massey, my late mother’s youngest cousin. He is now over ninety years old, and lives in Missisuaga, near Toronto. Thankfully, his memory is still very good.

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Born in 1941, Vinod was brought up and educated in Amritsar. He attended Government Medical College, and subsequently trained as a surgeon at PGI, Chandigarh. He left for USA in 1969, and retired in 2003 as Director of Critical Care Services at a teaching hospital in Michigan. Married with two grown sons, he continues to visit India at least once a year.

Why we ended up in Delhi in January 1948 is not entirely clear to me - I was only six years old then. But I do recall being in old Delhi in an area called Mori Gate.

This was located near the Delhi Railway Station, which is now known as Old Delhi Railway Station. We were living with my aunt Sheila Tai and her husband Taya Diwan Chand. Their son Ramesh, my cousin, also lived there. The house in Mori Gate was owned by an old Muslim gentleman known to us as Maulvi sahib. The narrow street had mostly Muslim inhabitants.

My mother and Sheila Tai were real sisters. Their husbands were half-brothers (sharing a common father, my grandfather), who lived in the paternal joint family home in Amritsar. So, the two sisters had lived together in Amritsar for many years after they got married.

Jamila Massey (nee Chohan) was born in Simla where, before Independence, she went to the famous Auckland House School, established for the daughters of high-ranking British officers. Later, she graduated from King's College, London. She then worked in radio, television, films and in the theatre. She had a role in the well-known BBC radio soap opera The Archers, an Independent TV comedy series Mind Your Language, and the BBC TV soap opera EastEnders.(Her photo shows her as Neelam Kapoor in the EastEnders.) She is now the senior most Asian actress in the United Kingdom. She has collaborated with her writer husband Reginald on three books: The Music of India, The Dances of India, and The Immigrants, a novel.

In life, it is a privilege and honour to meet and work with great artists who are also human beings par excellence.

Harish Malhotra, MD, is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is the past chair of department of psychiatry of Overlook hospital, Summit. He has been practicing psychiatry since 1977. His book Metaphors of Healing is available from Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, including Kindle and Nook\; see below for an excerpt from this book.

In 1955, I was 13 years old, studying in the eighth grade. We lived in Aligarh. 

I had become an expert in taking out things from other's pockets without being noticed. I would pick someone's pocket, and then I would return what I had taken out. I liked to see an expression of surprise and admiration for my expertise from the ‘victims'.

Reginald was born in Lahore before Partition. He writes books on various subjects pertaining to South Asia. A former London journalist, he now lives in Mid Wales with his actor wife Jamila. His latest book is Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the Forgotten Indian Martyrs, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi. A member of the Society of Authors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ved Mehta is a celebrated writer, and a man who overcame severe disability by sheer will power.

Born in Lahore in 1934, at the age of four he was blinded by cerebrospinal meningitis. His father, a doctor, was aware that his son had no future in India since most people in India regarded blindness as a curse, a divine retribution for some great sin or crime committed in a past life.

In 1949, Ved was sent to the Arkansas School for the Blind. From there he went to Pomona College in California, a liberal arts institution with a high reputation. Since few books were then published in Braille he needed a fellow student who could read the text books to him. Fortunately, his friend Eugene Rose volunteered to help. Mehta wrote that his friend's readings were so clear that it seemed as if he was "explaining things".

(Rose later became Father Seraphim Rose, a Russian Orthodox hieromonk and a leading figure of the Orthodox Church in USA.)

Harish Malhotra, MD, is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is the past chair of department of psychiatry of Overlook hospital, Summit. He has been practicing psychiatry since 1977. His book Metaphors of Healing is available from Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, including Kindle and Nook\; see below for an excerpt from this book.

My family lived in Meerut in 1959. I was in ninth grade.

Every year, since the 17th century, Meerut held an annual Nauchandi fair. Whole villages would come from far and wide to attend this event. The town would spend a lot to decorate the place with laces and leaves. People from all over the state would converge, and put up stalls and shops to display their wares. You would see unfamiliar and surprising stuff being sold. For example, there were shops that displayed face masks, beards and wigs, which were not available in town then. I cannot recall any shop in town that sold facemasks, moustaches, and dresses that were used for stage drama.

Harish Malhotra, MD, is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is the past chair of department of psychiatry of Overlook hospital, Summit. He has been practicing psychiatry since 1977. His book Metaphors of Healing is available from Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, including Kindle and Nook\; see below for an excerpt from this book.

In 1955, when I was in the seventh grade, we lived in a town called Aligarh. It was a major town of Uttar Pradesh, seat of Aligarh Muslim University.

As I would step into the bazaar from my home, I would immediately see hawkers with their carts full of fruits. Most of them were selling bananas and guavas. They were the poor man's fruit because people could afford them. Bananas sold for six annas (one rupee = 16 annas) per dozen while guavas sold for four annas per ser (an old measure of weight, about 0.6 kg).

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This is a slightly modified version of article originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.

I have no recollections earlier than our being in the house (in Jessore) above the Chaurasta or the four-way crossroads.

Actually, it is amazing that I remember anything of Chaurasta at all, as I was really a small guy at that time. I was born in July 1934 and I now know that we left our hired house on the Chaurasta in mid – 1937. I should not really expect any memory of that age at all, but I find that in the rearmost recess of my childhood memory, I have a vivid picture of that house and I can recollect clearly my playful days there.

Tapas Sen. 1935. Jessore