About

A self-written biography always becomes a soliloquy in my opinion, but I suppose I should still give it a go.

I was born in Southern India, in an old British Army cantonment town called Bangalore, once home to the 70th Division, which formed the basis of the enlarged Chindit force* in 1944 (these days the city is more famous as a silicon hub). But growing up, it was all lingering traces of imperial India: the handsomely-crafted old Asiatic bungalows with sprawling tropical gardens at front, the hired help quartered in rear small cottages; the slender, deserted lanes that bound these old neighborhoods together, almost taking one back to Sussex or maybe Surrey. These days, gaudy modern high-rises, apartments and contemporary houses have virtually erased most of the Anglo-Saxon influences. A large portion of the remaining British population which had persisted in the country for four long decades after Indian independence also disappeared — many moving to Australia at the tail end of the ’80s.

But others stayed on, clinging to a fast-vanishing way of life. I happened to exist in this pocket of antiquity. Much of my own upbringing was distinctively British — a proper Jesuit-Catholic private school for most of the younger years with British or Anglo-Indian teachers who spoke a nasal, highly-accented, upper-class English that would have been mine had I had not been wrenched from that fading society. My father’s military radar company had transferred him (and by extension, me) to New York’s Garden City, Long Island, and here I joined a public Middle School.

Until the moment of my arrival in New York, Manhattan, skyscrapers and pizzas, were obtuse concepts that I had only found in books. Suddenly here I was in the midst of this wild, compelling mix of races and accents with a society that felt completely alien. Places have a distinct smell that is especially apparent to a newcomer and New York smelled like coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts. I went to my new school with trepidation. No doubt my new American classmates of suburbia found me quaint especially when I stood up to address the teacher (something of standard practice in Jesuit instruction). Later in high school, Baseball became another hurdle (I had been weaned on Cricket) and so did the strange harassment of all freshmen by seniors in the locker room. In Catholic school it had been us against the teachers, the declared enemy. In New York, it became us against our own, the seniors. I could hardly believe it.

Many a fist fight between us outnumbered greenhorns and spoilt, Porsche-driving upperclassmen was narrowly avoided. On one occasion, a brawl between me and an upperclassman almost came to grips. I can still remember a fellow freshman (a long blonde-haired kid, a skateboarder who dressed counter-culture, like Kurt Cobain) who had become so irate at the treatment we had endured all year that he handed me his belt, yelling for me to use it on one of our worst detractors. I can laugh about it now, but it was deadly serious then, in our juvenile world — a tinderbox of volatile hormones, bewilderment and machismo.

Eventually, in due time, everyone’s tempers were put to rest after we gradually won our respect. I, after playing without a mitt and scoring home runs, which reduced the taunting to grudging pats on the shoulder. Still, I wanted out and after a series of protests with the coaches, transferred to Tennis and Basketball.

In time, my jarring surprise at the New World faded and I became thoroughly American by the end of High School. At this time, my father had been posted back to India and I went with him again, to join an Indian university, to major in computers — a fiasco that left me thoroughly convinced that Western education was superior. Eventually I dropped out. Bitter and convinced that I would remain a college outcast for the rest of my life, I drifted, like some nascent adolescent who had no idea what to do with his life. Coming back to an unfamiliar but in-stasis-like India had taken more out of me than I could’ve realized.

At a graphics firm, I worked on digital art, finishing a major educational resource site for the Malaysian government before quitting, still unsure of who I was or what I was meant to do. Then abruptly it came to me, the means of my future. Although I had been a persistent slacker in High School English I found an inexplicable but exhilarating happiness in writing, and added to this, began to travel, exploring the unfamiliar country of my birth, getting as far as the Himalayas and those indescribable, hauntingly beautiful peaks which can reduce a man to a speck. (To this day, Brad Pitt’s Seven Years in Tibet takes me back, and I can taste another world). In a way, I found my center again.

Two years later, I  returned to the United States (this time to Texas) to college again. After graduating in 2007 in English and Communications, I set about indulging in a series of middling tasks, although this period did witness the production of two novels, one non-fiction book on World War II, two as-of-yet incomplete reference books on the British Armed Forces and a minor collection of short stories. As with any new place on this earth, I initially found Texas to be fascinating — anthropologically. In my experience, every place has its share of the special, the ordinary, and the foul. The polite gentry of the biblical south is no exception. I’ve had not only the pleasure of meeting the most splendid examples of humanity but also, as James Cagney would put it, the dirtiest, “yellow-bellied rats.”

The old west may be dead and gone, but the shadows linger and my long years there turned me into a quasi-Texan, minus all that dreadful, controversial politics and postured bullshit. Maybe it was inevitable that I acquired the art of country living, hiking miles in the empty rolling landscape of Erath County, riding horses (with and without saddle), and considering the state’s liberal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, becoming conversant in firearms.

But that chapter has folded for now, and at this point in time I should stop and refrain from elaborating about anything in the future — lest my hubris at manifest destiny pays me a poor hand. ♣

Here, having just returned from an overnight stay at a friend’s place, unshaved, hair disheveled, staring off into the vacuous distance. I can’t imagine what I must’ve been thinking of but it must have warranted the click of a photo — Stephenville, 2009. (Photo: Beth Cloud)

 

(LEFT) Kids and dogs, perpetually interested in who I am — East Texas, October 2011. (Photo: Jane McEachran) (RIGHT) Relaxing in my hammock outside Bangalore, April 2012. (Photo: Me)

*Note — The Chindits were a force of British, West African, Burmese and Gurkha troops created by the eccentric British army officer, Charles Orde Wingate, to conduct a  guerrilla war against strong Japanese forces in Burma during the Second World War.  Their success, following American victory in far-away Guadalcanal were the first Allied triumphs in the war against Japan — coming at a time when  the Japanese seemed truly invincible.

For more information on some of those men, check my post: The Chindits – In Art