Lost at 15 Found At 50 Read online

  “Lost at 15, Found at 50 has the unique advantage of being based on a life that has seen the author move through a series of exciting opportunities for travel and work and the reader is given a front seat in a ride that is as enriching as it is illuminating.”

  – Professor Rajeev S. Patke,

  Yale-NUS College, Singapore

  “Combining her life-time experiences, journalistic skills and talent for story-telling, Ashwini has brought forth a wonderful book. It should appeal to readers of all ages.”

  – K. Kesavapany, Governor, Singapore International Foundation

  “Lost at 15, Found at 50 is a rollercoaster of a memoir that takes you racing through time and space, starting with India still in its teens, to an icy, post-Khrushchev Moscow, to a Washington under siege, to a Sikkim in turmoil, to Burma, to South Korea. Don’t miss the ride. It will leave you breathless – and asking for more.”

  – Kiran Doshi, author of Jinnah Often Came to Our House

  “Ashwini is a talented story-teller and this book is a wonderful, gripping book, that everyone, especially women, should read. It’s a travelogue, a lesson in history and a life manual all in one. I highly recommend this book.”

  – Ira Trivedi, author and yoga master

  “A personal testimony of wandering through the lanes and bylanes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century history. This is not a history of great world events – that is in the backdrop – but of what it was really like to live through those times.”

  – Sanjeev Sanyal, author and economist

  “Ashwini Devare represents India’s post-midnight generation – born not in the flush of the freedom that arrived on the midnight of August 15, 1947 but within the cohort that appeared between the searing defeat in the China war of 1962 and the massive victory over Pakistan in 1971 that stamped New Delhi’s dominance over the sub-continent. Daughter of a distinguished Indian Foreign Service officer, Ashwini Devare has written a memoir that also tells her father’s story: the Indian external relations journey starting with the nervously uneasy proximity with the Soviet Union, the instinctively warm but ideologically distant United States, hegemonic behaviour in Sikkim and the easy moorings India found in Singapore as the springboard of the contemporaneous Look East/Act East policy.”

  – Ravi Velloor, Associate Editor and Asia columnist, The Straits Times

  “A fresh and lively narrative, suffused with the authenticity of a bright-eyed child growing into adulthood from her front-row seat to world-changing international events. Ashwini Devare’s memoir makes you homesick for places you’ve never set foot, all the while giving you a glance into the often not-so-glamorous life of an Indian diplomat and his family. More than anything, the book demonstrates how seemingly distant political incidents shape the lives of individuals, both natives and those who are temporary guests in a foreign land.”

  – Anne Ostby, author of Pieces of Happiness

  © 2019 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited

  Text © Ashwini Devare

  Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions

  An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

  All rights reserved

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  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Names: Devare, Ashwini.

  Title: Lost at 15, found at 50 : a memoir : travel, trials and tribulations in foreign lands / Ashwini Devare.

  Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, [2019]

  Identifiers: OCN 1052723708 | eISBN 978 981 4841 31 3 Subjects: LCSH: Devare, Ashwini. | Women, East Indian--Travel--Biography.

  Classification: DDC 305.48891411092--dc23

  Printed in Singapore

  In this memoir, names, places and experiences are based on the author’s memories, conversations and recollections. Some of the dialogues, names and scenes have been changed or recreated to protect individual privacy. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For Mom, Dad and Aparna

  Contents

  Behind the Iron Curtain

  Russia 1965–1967

  The Other Side of the Cold War

  USA 1967–1970

  Kingdom of Hope

  Sikkim 1970–1974

  Brown Girl in the Ring

  Switzerland 1976–1979

  Behind the Bamboo Curtain

  Burma 1979–1981

  Feels Like Home

  India 1981–1985

  The Land of the Morning Calm

  South Korea 1986–1989

  Guns and Graffiti

  USA 1990s

  Island in the Rain

  Singapore 2000s

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Telegram from Moscow announcing author’s birth

  Behind the Iron Curtain

  RUSSIA

  1965–1967

  Moscow

  A slender young woman stood at the hospital window, straining her eyes through the sleet that buffeted the street six floors below. My mother clutched me tightly in her arms, her child-like face pinched with fatigue and anxiety, eager eyes searching the sidewalk corner where she knew her husband would be waiting to catch a glimpse of his young wife and newborn.

  Snow fell steadily, casting a silver metallic over the darkening afternoon. Suddenly my mother spotted him in a swirl of snowflakes, huddled in a coat, scarf and a hat, bracing one of the bitterest January days of the year. She waved wildly, her face brightening the minute his outline emerged through the snow.

  “Look, there’s Daddy!” She lifted me higher in the hope that he could see us: two blurry little dots outlined against a frosted steel window. Her eyes filled with tears, worrying about her husband shivering in his coat. He stood there, waving at us for a long while till the darkness swallowed him from sight.

  My life began here, in the heart of Moscow, in a hospital for foreigners, near the grand Kropotkinskaya Station. There was nothing grand about the hospital though; it was stark and spartan, as were most institutions in communist Russia in those days. The austere maternity ward my mother and I were in was devoid of any toys or colours heralding the presence of a newborn; instead it had grey curtains and sheets, metal beds, steel trays and windows with grills. The week I was born coincided with a flu outbreak in the city and to seal off all infections, the hospital authorities immediately slapped draconian quarantine measu
res across all wards, forbidding visitors – even family members – from seeing patients. As a result of this sweeping ban, I did not get to see my father for the first fortnight of my life, except for those rare snatches of him standing on the roadside from our perch high above.

  My birth created quite a stir at the hospital; it was the first time Russian nurses had seen a brown-skinned baby with dark hair. In fact, ‘the girl with black hair’ became a talking point in our ward and nurses from different departments came to peer at me and marvel at my jet-black halo of curls.

  Just twenty years old, my mother was lonely and homesick, and welcomed the diversion. It helped her get through the long dreary days of being the lone Indian in the hospital, the agony of mastitis, and the postpartum depression that was washing over her in big giant waves.

  “No, please, I cannot eat this,” she shook her head at the plate of food the nurse had wheeled into the hospital room. She shut her eyes tightly to hide angry tears; this was the third day in a row she was being offered boiled potatoes and cabbage. Earlier, the nurse had brought in a juicy chicken drumstick which my mother refused, being a strict vegetarian. Fresh vegetables and fruits were in short supply in the streets of communist Moscow and, in any case, no one seemed to comprehend her desperate requests in broken Russian that she was a pure vegetarian, who did not even eat egg. As each day passed, my mother started becoming weaker. The pain of mastitis became unbearable and she stopped producing milk. It was only when a senior nurse noticed the untouched food trays leaving my mother’s room that there was a sudden bustle of activity in our ward and senior staff were notified. The management then reluctantly agreed to my father’s request to send in home-cooked food. From then onwards, every day, a ‘tiffin’ would arrive at the maternity ward, concealing within it the aromas of curry, vegetable and chapati, all of which deliciously boosted my mother’s spirits for the rest of our hospital stay.

  I loved Russian milk, which I drank in copious quantities the first year of my life. My father would go to one of the several ‘milk kitchens’ located near our house and buy small bottles of milk and yogurt, a common source of dairy for children in Moscow back then. My parents often joke about how the Russian milk made me bonny and strong, giving me good immunity in those early months.

  “You never got sick,” my mother told me. “It was definitely the Russian milk!”

  “Ten days after your father and I tied the knot, we were off,” my mother recalled. “The journey to Moscow was like the voyage of Sinbad, full of adventure. It was like going on a treasure hunt.”

  It was a story my sister and I would often curl up on the sofa to listen: my parents’ foreign odyssey just a month after their marriage, which catapulted them from the confines of their small town Pune in India into the heart of communist Russia.

  Defying all the predictions of the family astrologer that she would become a teacher, my mother had rushed to the altar instead, marrying a complete stranger who would whisk her off to the unknown. This stranger was Ravi, a thin, gawky Indian Foreign Service probationer, who had never stepped outside his home state of Maharashtra until he cleared the prestigious all-India Civil Services Examination, which landed him in the capital, Delhi. A year later, Ravi’s life would change dramatically when a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) informed him that his maiden posting had been confirmed. “Young man, you have a month to get going,” the officer told him sternly. “To Moscow.”

  Growing up, my father had always dreamed of faraway, distant lands, despite his small-town upbringing. The oldest of three children, he grew up on the campus of Pune’s Wadia College where my grandfather was a professor. Wadia College was an institution that even back then attracted foreign students from countries as far away as the Middle East and Africa. Their house became a convening ground for intellectuals, students, writers and poets. These early influences would ultimately shape my father’s curiosity about the bigger world that lay beyond the fringes of his hometown.

  The year my father turned fourteen, my grandfather died unexpectedly, devastating his wife and three young children. In a single brutal blow, they were rendered penniless and homeless. They were forced to vacate their modest but comfortable accommodation on campus. Over the years my grandparents had nurtured deep friendships, and people whom they had helped along the way now stepped in, opening their homes to the shattered widow and her children. A trickle of money from the sales of my grandfather’s academic books allowed the family to scrape through the next few years. My father and his sister put their heart and soul into their studies, sensing but not fully processing that education might be the only route for advancing their destinies.

  My father applied to the school of engineering because that was what everyone around him did, but he realised very quickly it wasn’t for him. His passion for political science kept bubbling, till it burst forth with a force that he could no longer ignore. My father had first heard about the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) through a friend. The civil services seemed like a nebula – floating mysteriously in a distant galaxy, out of reach for most ordinary middle-class Indians, many of whom had never heard of the IFS. My father was intrigued. He started to prepare for the Civil Services Examination with feverish gusto, studying engineering by day and political theory by night. The highly selective exam, once cleared, would open doors to the civil services, allowing candidates to choose their preference for the IFS, IAS (Indian Administrative Service) and other central services.

  It could not have been an easy decision for my father; he was, after all, the oldest son. His sister was of marriageable age and his mother fretted about finding her a good family, a prospect that was daunting for a widow with meagre financial means. His brother, the youngest, was only ten and his future lay ahead, uncharted and uncertain. That he would be abandoning his family to vanish into the unknown, weighed heavily on my father’s shoulders. With her characteristic pragmatism, his mother came to his rescue. She did not allow her own doubts to cloud what she predicted was a bigger, brighter canvas for her son. Hence, when it was time for my father to make his selection, he was able to choose the IFS freely, with full blessings from his mother.

  The whirlwind began – beginning with boot camp at the Mussoorie Academy, a mandatory training requirement for all probationers in the civil services where they learned everything from horse riding to foreign languages. The choice of foreign language was decided by the MEA in Delhi and in my father’s case, he was assigned Russian.

  But there was a rather important matter that needed to be taken care of first. Just before he set off to Mussoorie, my father had experienced the first flutter of love. The subject of his fixation was a pretty young woman from the city of Nagpur, whose name had been suggested as an ideal match for my father by a common friend of both families. My paternal grandmother, eager to see her son married off before he left the shores of India, welcomed the solicitation enthusiastically.

  Even though their marriage was ‘arranged’, my mother had already decided this was the man she wanted to marry. She had seen a black and white photograph of my father in a local newspaper that had published the list of IAS / IFS exam toppers – and immediately fallen in love. She saved the photograph and would look at it wistfully ever so often. The young man was not conventionally handsome, his face was thin and rather gaunt. His chin was a bit too pronounced and his demeanour, serious. But underneath that reserve, my mother sensed a man who was sensitive and good-natured. She was drawn to his eyes that looked gentle and kind.

  As was customary in an arranged marriage, my father with half his family in tow arrived at my mother’s house to ‘see the bride’. In accordance with protocol, my mother had to serve all of them tea. She would tell us later how she hated going around with a tray, angry that my father had shown up with his entire family! Was he going to make a decision based on what they said? Did he not have a mind of his own? Yet, she couldn’t be angry with my father for too long. Despite the presence of elders in the r
oom, my parents had eyes only for each other and they knew instantly they would be soulmates.

  The wedding was a hastened affair – a simple ceremony held ten days prior to their departure to Moscow. For the couple that had to juggle two milestones simultaneously – marriage and a foreign posting – it was a frenzied fortnight of shopping for winter clothes, packing and goodbyes.

  The day dawned for Ravi and my mother, Alka, to leave. Dozens of family members, some of whom had travelled overnight by bus, thronged the departure lounge at Bombay’s Santa Cruz Airport. They came armed with food, flowers and affection, wanting to offer their blessings to the newlyweds. The couple stood amidst them, dazed, the blitzkrieg of the last few weeks clearly showing on their pale faces. My mother’s side of the family were perplexed at the speed with which Alka had gone from chasing academic dreams to marrying a man who was taking her off to some faraway land. They eyed him suspiciously; a distant uncle openly wondered whether Ravi was a communist.

  “My aunt Meena, she pressed my hands with so much love, she was not sure she would see me ever again,” recalled my mother. “All my relatives had that look on their faces as if they thought this would be the last time they would see me.”

  Flying was a novelty in those days and the fact that someone in the family was headed off to a ‘phoren’ land, and on an airplane at that, was in itself a wondrous event that created quite a stir among relatives from both sides, many of whom had only heard of Moscow because of Raj Kapoor, the Indian mega star who brought Russia to the Indian public through his famous Bollywood blockbuster hit of the fifties, Awaara.

  “What a commotion there was at the airport!” said my father.

  “People came with bouquets and garlands, I felt like some sort of a politician,” said my mother.

  “We were carrying enormous amounts of luggage,” said my father. “We’d been told nothing was available in Moscow, so everyone brought all kinds of things for us to take along. And of course, your mother was carrying her famous tanpura.” This stringed instrument that accompanied my mother’s singing would journey with her throughout my father’s postings.