Christmas is about caring & sharing

THREE retired head constables invited me to participate in puja to mark Dattatreya Jayanti last week. On arrival at the venue in the Police Lines, I was met by retired and serving cops, who were genuinely pleased that I had come. It was easily the best Christmas gift I could have expected. There is no greater reward than being remembered and loved by the men whom you had at some stage of your career the honour of leading.

That particular temple in the Police Lines had been inaugurated by me in 1982 when I was the city’s Police Commissioner. That fact had escaped my memory. A plaque recording the event had been affixed to the temple wall. The men insisted on photographs being taken in front of the plaque that bore my name.

The country needs many more people who are willing to part with slices of their wealth for those less fortunate than them.

Without a wife to help me deal with the pressure of touching base with family and friends, I am learning to cope with the Xmas season. There is a constant demand for my presence at gatherings planned for the last month of the year. At my age, it is extremely challenging to venture out of the house in the evenings even once a week, but in this season, the demand is for almost every day of the week.

This year will be my 96th Xmas celebration. I have no recollection of the first seven. My father was the Superintendent of Posts in Baroda when I was born in 1929. He was transferred to Poona (now Pune) as Superintendent of the Railway Mail Service in 1930.

In 1964, I was appointed Superintendent of Police, Pune City. A Hindu priest dressed in a saffron robe strode into my office and introduced himself as “someone who knew me when I was two years old”. He said his father had been my father’s head clerk in the postal superintendent’s office. He introduced himself by the name he had adopted after taking his vow of chastity and commitment to a religious discipline.

Thirty years later, on my way to Rajgurunagar from Mumbai by car, I stopped at Lonavala. On learning of my arrival at the wayside restaurant, two or three men working in an ashram run by the same holy man came over to the table where my wife and I were sitting and greeted us. They told me that the baba had taken samadhi. Since the baba had mentioned me to them more than once, they were delighted to meet me.

That meeting remains etched in my memory, as do the baba’s visits to my office in Pune. During one of those visits, he had talked of taking samadhi and I remember trying to dissuade him from doing so. What I regret is that I just cannot remember his name after all these years.

Two Christmases I do remember — one in 1956 and the other in 1989. In 1956, I was the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Nasik division. Deolali was under my jurisdiction. The Artillery Regimental Centre was located there. A young Christian officer named Valladares hitched a ride in my car from Nasik to Mumbai. Both of us were on leave for a week and since our respective parents were from Mumbai, we planned the trip for Xmas.

The young Army officer was from Bandra. I decided to drop him off at his residence. I had never seen a place so brightly illuminated and decorated as I did on that memorable Xmas eve in 1956. Bandra was almost entirely a Christian enclave in the 1950s. Today, it is only partly so, but the Christians of Bandra still continue to display bright lights.

In 1989, I was posted in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. That was the only year I failed to attend Mass in a church on Xmas Day. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had just been deposed. He and his wife Elena were executed by a firing squad that day after a cursory trial. A mini revolution against his dictatorship was at its peak at that time. We could not step out of the ambassador’s residence. We spent the day watching armed men move menacingly on the road outside.

This year, I will celebrate the festival in Mumbai in the traditional manner — go to Mass, greeting priests and the congregation, and having Xmas lunch with the family. Some neighbours and close friends will visit. With them I will share cake and wine.

Around Christmas every year, my friend, Leena Gandhi Tewari, observes an annual day for children from the Vakola slums whom she has literally adopted. In the beginning, she began with girls only, but recently she has been admitting boys to her centre, which she has named after her grandmother. These children of domestic help and drivers and the like are taught classical dancing, acting in plays and other forms of art and culture that helps them gain self-confidence, poise and knowledge. Tutors proficient in subjects taught to them in school are employed by the centre to encourage the girls and boys to excel in scholastics.

The results of her efforts over the years have been a source of great satisfaction to the children as well as their parents and also to Leena, her husband Prashant and the staff they have employed in the venture. Leena has spent not only her own money and her time but also her energy with a single-minded devotion to bettering the standards of living of the needy and the dispossessed. This year, two girls cleared the MBA (Finance) exams, three got through the Bachelor of Management Studies course and two in BAF (Bachelor of Accounting and Finance). Their skills are being developed to enable them to compete in the job market.

The country needs many more Leenas who are willing to part with slices of their wealth for those less fortunate than them. Both my own daughters, now into their sixties, mentor girls entrusted to their care by a Delhi-based NGO, the Udayan Shalini Foundation, which has opened a branch in Mumbai. They spend quality time with the mentees, introducing them to polite society and inculcating in them a feeling of self-confidence and pride in their own worth.

Two Muslim ladies I know, Mumtaz and Shameem, run the Botawala Trust established by their late father. The trust shelters 50 Muslim girls orphaned at a young age. They house the girls in a building constructed on their own property, feed them and generally attend to their emotional needs. The quality of life in Mumbai has improved for these unfortunate children because the city boasts of such compassionate women.