Feisal Alkazi (Courtesy Speaking Tiger)įeisal Alkazi begins his memoir with his enterprising Khoja Muslim grandmother Kulsum and her dedication to giving her children the best education she could, which included whisking them off to England by herself, and then whisking them back by ship, when the Second World War was round the corner. Breezy times, told in a breezy way, the lightness of this extraordinary memoir filled me with a deep sense of envy and longing. This is the mother of all ‘cultured’ childhoods, with arguably the first family of Indian arts soaking in the best of Bombay and then of Delhi as it replaced the former as India’s cultural capital, of witnessing it all first hand. Or that you travel to Italy and Greece with your connoisseur and art-erudite parents soaking in paintings and sculptures by Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, Titian, Botticelli et al and you watch Zeffirelli’s production of Othello in a Roman amphitheatre and The Trojan Woman in Greek at the Epidarus. Imagine a childhood where you spend two years in Chennai as your mother, an expert in western dance, suddenly decides, at 30, to learn Bharatnatynam from the one and only Balasaraswati, or that, at 14, you travel to Baroda and interact with KG Subramanyan and his Baroda gang of Bhupen Khakhar, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Neelima Sheikh, Jyoti Bhatt and others. Imagine growing up in a house where life was one big rehearsal at home, whether at Kulsum Terrace or at the original Meghdoot theatre on the terrace in Warden Road, where MF Husain, Tyeb Mehta and Krishan Khanna regularly dropped in, where international musicians and dancers such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham sashayed in and out, and where poets like Nissim Ezekiel were constant companions.
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This book is such a rich and sumptuous feast that I had to put it aside every few pages so that I could digest all the abundance. But I discovered that his Arab father ensured that, as a child, he only spoke Arabic at home, prayed five times a day, learnt the Quran and its exegesis from a mullah and even accompanied his mother to mushairas in Pune, round about the time that Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand were doing stints in that city too. One doesn’t associate Alkazi with Islam, or Muslims since he seemed to transcend all restrictive identities in his life.
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Still, it surprised me to discover Ebrahim Alkazi lying here, just a few feet away from my very pious father. Luminaries such as the freedom fighter MA Ansari, the writer Qurratul Ain Hyder, Brigadier Usman, the lion of Naushera, former Vice Chancellors, agnostic Sufis, atheistic revolutionaries, all rub shoulders here with believing commoners.
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The Batla house qabristan near Jamia in Delhi is a historic place.