First Darling of the Morning: A dear read

First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood by Thrity Umrigar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Barbara recommended this memoir to me and I picked it up even though I am not familiar with the author's works. Usually it's the other way around. But after finishing the memoir, I am even more excited to read her fiction!

The book was marvelous, portraying the daily lives of middle class people of Mumbai in the 70’s from a teenage girl’s perspective. To this day, it’s relatable to middle class people all over the sub-continent.

We belong to a particular class of society and this memoir revisits that truth over and over again.

We are never sure if the men are being polite or overly familiar. So we treat them the way we treat all working-class males—we acknowledge their presence and act as if they don’t exist, in the same gesture.

The teenage girl, Thrity, shares her experience of living in a home where the adults were divided in opinion, sometimes she is the subject of their division .

I like the sense of order and lack of chaos at school.
Here, the adults do not fight with each other every morning and Mother Superior does not storm out of morning assembly, the way dad leaves the house at least once a week.

I resonated with Thrity. I remembered how cadet college was my rescue to escape the painful conversation or rather fighting of my parents every morning I wake up.

For years, I fantasized about killing myself and leaving behind a note that simply said, ‘Let there be peace at home’. I was sure that this was the only way to make the adults end their daily bickering.

From childhood we are fed with so much novelty about parents, everything they do for us is thoughtful and angelic, that children who are bestowed with difficult adults as their parents constantly feel guilty, they wonder what they lack, what they can do to have a happy relationship with their parents. Until their own adulthood, they probably never register that just like any relationship, a parent-child relationship is not made in heaven, at least for some people.

Although I feel lucky, grateful for my parents, especially after coming where I am today, I empathize with my younger self. My relationship with my mother had its own blockers, but I could totally get Thrity, oh how restless she must have been her whole childhood when she was at home with her mother.

Thrity’s mother is a harsh, troubled woman with an excessive burst of emotions that impacts her family and especially her husband and her only child. She is the kind of woman who never leaves a chance to remind her child that she carried her 9 months in her womb. Thrity writes how she cherished her memories of her mother during her illness. And how those moments never sealed permanently when illness faded.

I know that the instant I am better—the day the fever does not spike after sundown, as it usually does; as soon as I can sleep through the night without coughing—all this tenderness and demonstrated affection will vanish, will be pulled away from me like a retractable arm. In fact, that is how I will actually know for sure that I have indeed recovered, by the first harsh word that my mother will say to me.

Slowly Thrity grows a fantasy that the lady in the Ovaltine advertisement—smiling, pretty, softly spoken. She wants her mother to be like her. She craved the affection of her mother and would imagine the Ovaltine lady becoming her mother.

One day, Thrity receives a pet, her first dog. Like many middle class school girl of Bombay, it means the world for her-

I have waited so many years for this dog, have shed so many tears for him while I pleaded and begged for a pet, have seen him in my dreams so often

Thrity and her father had to visit the vet for checking on her pet dog. There Thrity met her Ovaltine lady, her fantasy made flesh. The vet was a cheerful woman who talked with them smiling, giving hope all the time that their dog is gonna be soon okay.

For years, the Ovaltine lady has been my real mother.
This is the Ovaltine woman come to life.

After the meeting, Thrity returned to their car, her father sitting in the driver’s seat. They both sit silent for a while, awed by the graceful behavior of the lady. Thrity noted the emotion of his father-

He looks smitten and lonely and wistful and it takes me a minute to recognize his expression as mirroring my own. It takes me a full minute to realize that my dad and I are hungry for the same things—kindness and love and beauty and grace—and that neither of us had found these things in my mother.

At sixth grade or so, Thrity attends a birthday party of her classmate- a good student girl, also loved by the teachers. The party was organized in that girl’s home—a beautiful household with high ceilings, organized space, a home where nobody was screaming into each other. The way 12 years old Thrity envies that polite spoken, picturesque family of another friend, I could just see myself in the mirror through her words. Like her wanting to be the daughter in the house where she attends a friend’s birthday party, I wanted to choose a different home as a school kid.

Through her chaotic upbringing or other, Thrity becomes a non-average teen-ager.

I am different from these giggling girls at the table. I know this now. There is another world out there, a world where perhaps there’s a corner for misfits like me.

Oh, how I missed you in my childhood, Thrity! I was bored listening to the endless stories of Dil mil gaya, what Ridima, the main actress wore that day, was there a kiss between the hero and heroine or not (I only wished I could watch that bit, it was so rare to catch a kiss on the television screen those days, as Hindi channels were ruled out by my mom).
I was bored listening to the boyfriend stories of my peers at cadet college standing in the sick line (where all girls having their period form a line, excused for morning PT). What was running in my head was- whatever I watched on the Discovery channel back in vacation, Rubik’s cube, sudoku, magic square, and books (No, please not Humayun Ahmed ones).

Thrity meets Jesse, and we meet her too. Jesse charms the kids with her pink jeans. Her stories of books, music records, art pieces—unheard in Bombay school girl circles.

And her straightforwardness—for which Bombay was not ready, maybe not ready now too.

‘Don’t you believe in God?’ I ask, not wanting to hear the answer.
‘No.’ Jesse answered shortly. ‘And I don’t believe in all the Lord Zoroaster this and Jesus Christ that, mumbo-jumbo either.’ I gulp hard. The pink jeans I can defend Jesse for. Not believing in God is a different story.

But the friendship continues. Nothing can break this-

I know that although she is an atheist, Jesse still believes in something large and beautiful. I realize for the first time that it is possible to pray without believing in God, that it is possible to be so in love with the heartbreaking beauty of the world that that alone becomes some kind of a religion.

I recalled my time, when I would wonder hard how people can live without believing in God, and my time, when I too realized like Thrity that someone has to believe in God is thrust upon individuals, religion doesn’t surface in an individual’s mind, like food or sex drive. Religion is bestowed on most of us the time we are born and carried out for a lifetime. So many times I wondered if Mother Teresa would be granted heaven as she is a Christian, who will have no place in Muslim’s heaven. And as I grew up, I realized, it doesn’t make much sense. Every individual has a slightly different thought in their head about religion/spiritualism and my thought can be contradictory to others. But that doesn’t mean my thought wins, or someone else’s thought loses. What matters is- my practice of a thought should not harm others.

Back to the inequalities of the Bombay crowd again. The family goes to Chowpatty to enjoy street food where half-naked children surround them for money. Young women with wild, uncombed hair, with a baby hoisted in one hip asks— ‘Arré, sahib. Child is hungry. No food for two days. Show some heart.’

Some of the bolder ones inch forward and touch us, pull on our sleeves with their dirty fingers and we cringe and take a step back, like in those horror movies when the monster approaches the virginal. Golden-haired damsel in distress.
…
I cannot eat at Chowpatty any more. The contradictions, the inequities that I live with everyday in Bombay, are too much in my face atChowpatty.

Thrity’s family were Parsi, in a neighborhood of Hindu majority. And she went to a Catholic school. Thrity shares an event of her school—her childhood bemusement of knowing how babies are made-

‘Anita’, I said ponderously, ‘One thing I don’t understand about what Sister Ignatius told us. How does the sperm get to the egg from inside all the clothes?’ Anita stared at me for a long moment, delighted at this unexpected gift I had thrown her way. ‘There are no clothes,’ she said finally. ‘People do it naked.’ I laughed. Anita was such a joker. ‘Yah, right.’
…
I turned five shades of white. Being naked before a boy seemed too impossible, too preposterous, too outside the limits of my imagination.

At one age, children start to understand the gap with their parents. Thrity loves his father yet she misses that she can’t gossip about art, books, Bob Dylan with her dad, like she does with Jesse.

And her home is also probably a no match for her taste. It’s a typical home- the living rooms of the middle class apartment, no picture hanging, only calendar hanging, maybe from the bank the adults make transactions.

Someday, I promise to myself, every room in my house will have pictures on the wall.

Thrity notices the maid who worked for them-

When she came to work for us, she was known by the generic name of Ganga, the name that we confer on every servant who works for us. For years we called her Ganga until one day I asked her the revolutionary question: ‘What’s your real name?’
Kamala, she replied and a whole universe opened up before my eyes—a human being with a name and suddenly there were other trails to follow—family, marital status, children, where she lived, where she disappeared to when she left us in the evening

She describes Bombay- The skyscrapers growing up from the armpits of the slums, the hungry children sleeping on the pavement in front of the dazzling jewellery stores… -these bits of her writing sounded like Arundhati Roy, my big big crush. The tone can be different. But both the authors note class boundaries in their writings.

The memoir left so many strokes in me. I have ordered the author's fiction. And I am definitely gonna read Lust for Life and Midnight’s Children- amazing picks she mentioned.

When did I become such a serious adult who writes 15 pages long reviews! Like the introduction of literature novels in our textbook, LOL. But I had to write, and express how I nodded, related to Thrity’s childhood, and admired her young self, even at times when I was the complete opposite of her. I admired how fluently and openly she talked about her childhood, a gray childhood and she didn’t whitewash it!

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